Maryland began this budget year facing a projected $1.4 billion shortfall. Even after the cuts and cost shifts enacted this spring, state analysts project a structural gap of $2.6 billion next year, growing to more than $3.4 billion by 2030. Whoever wins a seat on the Talbot County Council in November will serve their entire term inside that curve. Almost no one is running on it.
So let me be direct. I’m a Democrat. The governor is a Democrat. Both chambers in Annapolis are Democratic. And I’m telling you the state has been balancing its books on Talbot County —and will keep doing it, because the math leaves it nowhere else to go. That isn’t a partisan observation. It’s arithmetic. I’d say the same if every one of those offices were held by Republicans.
Consider what has already happened. Counties now pay 90 percent of the cost of running the State Department of Assessments and Taxation’s assessment and technology operations — an added $21 million a year statewide, for an agency counties neither control nor direct. The teacher retirement supplemental grant, promised in 2012 to nine local governments — four of them our neighbors on the Shore — in exchange for accepting a share of pension costs, was halved last year and eliminated this year. Talbot never received that grant, but the lesson travels: a promise from Annapolis lasts until Annapolis needs the money. And this spring the General Assembly shifted another $39.3 million in teacher, community college, and library pension costs onto counties.
Talbot’s share of that last item is $198,200. I know because it appears in a state legislative briefing, a few lines from a table showing total state aid to Talbot rising about $900,000 this year — a total that counts the state’s own payments into the teacher pension fund as “aid” to us. Nobody in county government puts those numbers side by side for taxpayers. I have proposed that the county issue a one-page receipt each year showing what the penny tax bought. Here is a second page: the invoice — every cost Annapolis has shifted onto this county, itemized in plain English, updated every budget season. You cannot push back on a bill you have never itemized.
Talbot feels this differently than Montgomery County does. Outside the penny tax for schools, our charter caps growth in property-tax revenue at two percent a year. I support that cap. But the cap binds us, not Annapolis. When state obligations grow faster than two percent — and they will — every dollar pushed down comes out of something local: a deputy, a paved road, a classroom. Councilmember Lynn Mielke has made this point throughout her term. She has been right about it.
Complaining about Annapolis is not a strategy. Every county in Maryland resents these cost shifts, and collective resentment has produced almost nothing. Leverage comes from showing up early and in coalition — through the Maryland Association of Counties, and alongside the Mid-Shore counties facing an identical squeeze — during the legislative session, while bills can still be amended. Not afterward, when the invoice arrives.
There is a name for that work: diplomacy. I did it for 32 years, negotiating with governments whose interests differed from ours, sometimes sharply. You rarely get what you want by insisting on it. You get it by understanding what the other side needs, finding the overlap, and arriving before the decision is made. Counties that work that way get phase-ins, carve-outs, and exemptions. Counties that don’t get billed.
Talbot is 38,000 people in a state of more than six million. We will never be heard in Annapolis by volume. We can be heard by craft — by sending someone who has spent a career being heard in rooms where he held few of the cards. Ask every candidate on your ballot what their plan is for the next four years of Maryland’s deficit. Be skeptical of anyone whose answer is only that Annapolis is the problem. And then decide who you want at the table when the next bill is written.
Brian Naranjo of St. Michaels is a retired senior U.S. diplomat and a candidate for Talbot County Council.
One Response
Mr. Naranjo,
Excellent article, very informative and insightful! . It seems you are the only candidate who comprehends fiscal problems facing the county in the future.. I have a strong suspicion. They don’t understand the problems nor will they deal with them.
Thanks for the article. After reading this article and the others you have written I feel very enlightened.. I wish some of the other candidates would shed a little light as you have..