Last Friday the Senate Budget and Tax Committee killed a bill that would require a 4-1 majority vote among the mid-Shore counties in order to obligate all five to fund capital projects at Chesapeake College.
The bill offered by Sen. Richard Colburn, R-Dorchester, failed in committee by a 12-1 vote.
Kent, Talbot and Queen Anne’s voted last June to fund construction of a new Center for Allied Health and Athletics at Chesapeake College in Wye Mills — a facility that will house the college’s nursing and health care programs, which are currently located at the Easton Memorial Hospital.
With three of the five counties voting favorably last summer, Caroline and Dorchester were bound by a 1969 agreement that financially obligates all five counties when a simple majority approves capital projects for the college.
Caroline and Dorchester County leaders voted against funding the center last summer because of fiscal challenges and fears that incurring more debt to fund the project would downgrade their bond ratings.
The unfavorable committee vote last week came after Dorchester County Councilman Rick Price and Caroline County Councilman Larry Porter cited budget woes from teacher-pension shifts, loss of highway user revenues, and a decline of real estate tax revenue.
“We’re obligating our residents and taxpayers to 20 years of payments,” Porter told the committee. “A project should have broad-based support before all of the partner counties can be obligated to finance it. And it should have broad-based support before a county is forced to finance it against their will.”
Porter said the loss of state funding and a decline in property tax revenues has forced Caroline to cut its current operating budget by 18 percent.
He also said the compulsory obligation to fund the Center will put off much needed renovations to Preston Elementary School, which he said has no gymnasium, an undersized library, and overcrowded classrooms.
He said the vote in Caroline against funding the Center was because of the county’s primary responsibility to fund K-12 education.
“The renovation of the Preston Elementary School could not wait,” Porter said. “[But instead] we will be forced to pay for a project we can not afford. We’ll have to break our debt policy, and that is not sound financial management. You can bet the ratings agencies won’t care how we ended up in this position.”
Chesapeake College President Barbara A. Viniar testified against the bill, worried that political reasons rather than fiscal constraints could make a super majority vote unattainable for future projects–long after county budgets have recovered.
“Deals could be struck that would make it too easy to come up with two counties that oppose a project for non-fiscal reasons,” Viniar said. “I’m concerned that the future fiscal realities will be different, but we will still have the consequences of requiring a super majority.”
Viniar said the college was forced to find a new home for the Allied Health programs because the current space at Easton Memorial will soon be unavailable.
“We are building a new center for Allied Health and Nursing because we are about to lose our facility at Easton Memorial Hospital,” Viniar said. “We would have had no place to offer those programs [and] we have 900 students that are either enrolled or are in the pipeline.”
Viniar said the future of economic development on the Eastern Shore rested in the health care professions and that Chesapeake College would provide the necessary career development for medical workers below the level of physician.
“We need the right facility and the time really was now,” Viniar said. “If we had waited and the hospital relocated, we would have no facility.”
The simple majority vote last summer secured $8.5 million from the five counties for the project and triggered a state match of $27 million.
Dorchester and Caroline are each obligated to pay $1.5 million for the facility by 2014. Talbot’s share is $1.7 million, Queen Anne’s will pay the largest share of $2.24 million, and Kent will pay the smallest share of $1 million. Funding obligations vary by a county’s population.
The 3-2 split among the five counties was the first time a vote to fund capital projects at the college wasn’t unanimous, according Kent Commissioner Ron Fithian.
Feeling burned by the vote, the Caroline and Dorchester County Commissioners requested Sen. Richard Colburn and Del. Jay Jacobs introduce bills in their respective chambers to require a super majority.
The measure, if passed, would not have reversed the 3-2 decision last summer, but would have required a 4-1 super majority for future projects.
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