The Board of Carroll County Commissioners held an open session on March 19, 2026, to conduct budget agency hearings from Carroll County Public Schools (CCPS), Carroll Community College (CCC), The ARC, the State’s Attorney’s Office, and the Department of Public Works. The Board also addressed legislative updates, grant applications, equipment purchases, transportation planning, forest conservation mitigation fees, and a subdivision plat recordation request. The session began at 9:00 a.m.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Thursday, March nineteenth, two thousand twenty-six open session for the Board of Carroll County Commissioners. We will begin as we always do with the Pledge of Allegiance and a moment of silent reflection. I pledgedly and to the Republic for which it stands. Justice. $1 million for a technology refresh for devices that are out of warranty. And then of note, originally we had $4 million in for uh the startup of the charter school, but they've let us know that they'll be deferring uh to FY28. So you won't see that $4 million in here. Um lastly, um today we also want to just do a quick five-year uh glance for you so that you can see what we're um forecasting for the next five years. Um for just one moment um on this slide. Uh we'd like to turn our attention to the capital budget. Um first I want to thank the commissioners for providing the direction to include the feasibility study uh for Liberty High School in FY27. Um that action was going to be among our requests. And this feasibility study will make it much easier for us to have the conversation about whether we're going to make the bigger decision to fund the modernization in the near future. Um we really need that feasibility study in order to do that. Um our other request for FY27 capital funding is that you would fund the design costs for the Century High School roof replacement and the Piney Ridge elementary school HVAC renovation. Um this would require to move our priorities with within the existing six-year plan, but not change the six-year plan at all. Um this action recognizes the deferral of the free Freedom Elementary and Sykesville Middle additions in our CIP. And more importantly, it puts us in a position to maximize the available state CIP funding for FY28. Without this action, uh we'd be leaving state funding on the table, which we certainly don't want to do. At this time, I'll turn it over to John. Okay. Good morning. Morning. So this slide addresses the ongoing revenue increase. So there you see the $14 million that the superintendent just uh just outlined. Also, as you know, some of our funding comes from the State. So given what's happening in the General Assembly now, we do anticipate about $6.5 million in additional State revenue to work with. So that brings their projected total revenue in the in the in the request to 20.5 million. And now we're looking at um our known or anticipated expenditures. In some cases, these are known, and in some cases these are anticipated. Um that top lines the big one that includes sort of what we would always refer to as our inflationary impacts, or you might want to say the cost of doing business. Some of that is um is part of that ongoing process, utilities, insurances, et cetera. Uh the rest is employee compensation increases. Um we have five unions, two of those negotiated agreements are settled and ratified, and three are actively being negotiated even as we sit here. Um there is uh on the second line, and this is now becoming a pattern for us, unfortunately. Um that is a carryover into fiscal twenty-seven from the negotiated agreements with two of the unions last year. And so some of our employee groups have negotiated um what we often refer to as an annual interval, or sometimes you might have historically referred that. Heard that referred to as a step increment or a step increase. In last year's uh contracts, we were not able to fund the annual step increase for the full year, and so it was deferred until a certain point in the year so that it would be budget neutral and fiscal 26, but in fiscal twenty-seven, we have to be able to fund that that step for the entire year going forward. Uh Dr. McCabe talked about maintenance and um technology as part of uh the board's one-time or capital funding requests, and so there you can see those two items outlined. There's also separately, but I I guess I've heard you discuss it in watching your meetings. There's also the separate one million dollar request we sent for the um for some assistance with the replacement of the lights at uh Franciscott Key and South Carroll. Uh so here we are with the projected revenue versus the projected expenditures, which leaves a gap of six million. And the plan to to close that six million dollar gap or the request to close that six million dollar gap includes the reduction of the 15 FTE that the superintendent mentioned. We have you know our known enrollment changes this year is minus three uh 436.75 FTE of children. And what we're trying to do is um go back to a pattern that unfortunately we used in in the decade that Superintendent Guthrie was was our superintendent, where we sort of try to maintain our student-teacher ratio based on the declining enrollment, and so that would equate to us reducing 15 teaching FTE to sort of relate to that 436 uh decline in student enrollment. Those would not likely be people being laid off or or terminated. Those would be uh positions that would be eliminated through attrition, retirements, separations, leaves of absence, et cetera.