Charles County Government presents the Board of Commissioners.

Good evening.

The April 29th, 2026, Charles County Board of Commissioners meeting is now called to order.

Today's session will begin with the Pledge of Allegiance.

And to the Republic for which it stands one.

Thank

you, Commissioners.

We're going to begin this evening's session with a roll call.

Commissioner Bowling.

Present.

Commissioner Coates.

Here.

Commissioner Stewart.

Here.

Commissioner Patterson.

Present.

And Commissioner Collins.

Here.

Thank you.

Commissioners the first item on your agenda is falls under an approval item.

It's an update and request for reintroduction for a change to the proposed bill 202605 Charles County volunteer fire tax credit.

Good evening, Commissioners.

Danielle Mitchell, Acting Deputy County Administrator.

Good evening.

Jake Dyer, uh, Director of Fiscal Administrative Services.

Commissioners, we're here this evening because last week or last Tuesday, um, the Board of Commissioners introduced Bill 202605, which is titled Property Tax Credit for Volunteer Emergency Responders.

You will recall that that bill is for the purpose of increasing the tax credit that's provided to volunteers from $500 to $2,500.

You did introduce that bill and set a public hearing for May 19th, and you did that last week.

Upon further consideration uh amongst staff, it was determined that we actually needed to come back to you with an issue related to the effective date of the bill.

And so the the reason why we're here today is because we want to ensure that this property tax credit increase would be applicable to the 2026 tax bill.

That tax bill actually goes out July 1st.

And so without getting into too much technicalities, basically any piece of legislation that you all pass as normal legislation is effective 45 days after passage.

So assuming that it were to be successful on the night of your public hearing, that puts us past July 3rd.

If you all um choose, and again, that's that's your choice that you you will consider later on, but we want to ensure that if you were to decide at the end of that public hearing to close the record and to approve the bill, we would be able to implement the new tax credit with the 2026 tax bill, which means it would have to be implemented and effective on July 1.

So in order to do that, to effectuate that change, we actually needed to come back to you and ask you to reintroduce the bill.

By reintroducing the bill today, you would do it as emergency legislation, which simply means that we're able to bypass that 45-day effective waiting period, and we could make it effective for July 1.

Currently, if you were to pass it on the evening of the public hearing, May 19th, it wouldn't be effective until July 3rd, and then we're in this sort of um weird purgatory of whether or not we can apply it fully to the July 1 tax bill.

So we'd like to try to avoid that, whether you choose to adopt it or not.

We'd like to ensure that everyone is clear about when it will be effective, which would be July 1 if you were to reintroduce today.

So if if there are no questions, what we're looking for today is a reintroduction of bill 2026-05 as emergency legislation and to affirm the public hearing date of May 19th, 2026.

So do we have any questions from the board?

Otherwise, I can move forward with the actual motion.

Are there any questions?

If they're not, we'll need a motion to reintroduce per proposed bill 2026-05 property tax credit for volunteer emergency responders as emergency legislation.

So moved.

Is there a second?

Second.

It's been moved and properly seconded.

Any further discussion.

I do have something.

I talked to a couple of volunteers about this just so my colleagues understand that the tax um the cap on income is affecting a lot of the volunteers.

They can't get the tax credit because they're over the cap.

I don't think that we need a cap on income.

I think we just need to have the tax credit because at the end of the day, the services provided by the volunteers far exceeds the amount we're spending on a tax credit.

So as we move into the legislative session and legislative proposals, I think it's important to get early to our delegates, so there's no excuse not to remove it because it's going to take our delegates to remove that at the state level.

So I'd like to just put on notice that we need to move that forward and as our discussions about legislative proposals move forward.

I

mean, the only thing I would add is we've dealt with this for the last two or three years.

Putting that on, you know, as an addition, in my opinion, I think you're you're putting in jeopardy something that I believe we could probably move forward with.

Oh, it's not for here.