On May 4, 2026, the Montgomery County Council held a full-day worksession (9:34 a.m.–1:40 p.m., with a recess from 11:55 a.m. to 1:30 p.m.) to review the FY27 Operating Budget and amendments to the FY27-32 Capital Improvements Program (CIP). The Council considered committee recommendations for multiple agencies, took straw votes, adopted collective bargaining agreements, and set a course to close a $152.1 million budget gap after rejecting the County Executive’s proposed property tax increase.
One. Good morning, everyone. Today's May 4th. Welcome to the Montgomery County Council. This week we have a very important week of actions. Today, the County Council will continue the review of the FY27 operating budget and amendments to the FY27-32 capital improvements program. Council committees have been meeting regularly to review each department's budget, and today and the rest of the week, we will review the committee recommendations. I don't know if she is she on. Okay. She is in a conference for the whole week, and she will be joining us virtually. So with that, we're gonna start with the status report of the overview of revenues and expenditures. I'm gonna turn it to staff so they can kick us off. Okay, good morning. Um so the committees have now reviewed all department and agency budgets over the past several weeks, and we've prepared a summary of the committee's recommendations to date. And as a reminder, all committee changes to the uh proposed changes to the FY27 operating budget are tracked against the executive's March 13th recommendation. We'll start with resource changes. So to date, committees have recommended resource changes that would result in a net decrease of 162.4 million dollars in available funds for the FY27 operating budget. This is primarily due to a series of geo committee recommendations on tax rates. The first uh recommendation was to reject the executive's proposed property um tax increase and the executive's proposed income tax increase. The second recommendation was to adopt a new progressive income tax structure, uh which would reduce FY27 resources by 64.9 million dollars to reduce the income tax offset credit in FY27 from $692 to $0 in conjunction with the progressive income tax structure, which increases FY27 resources by 139.7 million, and to apply $50 million in one-time FY27 revenue associated with the recommended property and income tax rates to the capital budget. The next section is reductions, and to date committees have made have recommended a total of 10.3 million dollars in reductions compared to the county executive's budget. And the full list of proposed reductions so far is on page 10 of the staff report. And so if the council, just starting with these two elements, if the council were to uh adopt the resource changes and reductions recommended to date, it will need to find an additional 152.1 million dollars in reductions to approve a balanced budget as shown in the table on the first page at the bottom of the first page of the staff report. Uh on page two of the staff report, we summarize the required reconciliation list items. And the committees have added 214.2 million dollars to the reconciliation list for further consideration per the council president's budget approach. Decisions not to fund items on the reconciliation list will reduce the gap that I just mentioned uh in the table previously. 28.9 million dollars of the total on the reconciliation list is for additions, enhancements, or other proposed cost increases from Montgomery County government, and 5.7 million is from proposed replacement of grant funds with general funds in county government. The biggest chunk of the money on the reconciliation list is 179.6 million dollars from MCPS's uh requested increase in local funding over FY26. We also have um additions that the committees have recommended to be considered as part of the budget, and in total, committees have placed $9.8 million in additions on the reconciliation list. Decisions to fund additions will increase the gap shown in the table because they were not assumed in the executive's proposed budget. Um details on all these different um elements are um included on pages three through twelve of the staff report. And additionally, um the attachments include various budget proposals or memorandums prepared by council members uh for their colleagues' consideration as part of your deliberative process. Thank you. Thank you so much for that uh report. Not new, not good news at all. Um looking at the first page, and I hope everybody can see it and read it. It's on our agendas. Um posted it as the first item. And uh the remaining gap for a balanced budget is 152 million dollars, and I think we need to keep that in mind as we move forward uh this week, where we are gonna have to make some serious reductions. I think uh this is a reminder that this county cannot continue to spend money the way it has been for a while. The needs are huge, yes, but this gap is a wake-up call. And it does require leadership and it requires another way of thinking of how we should be able to run a government in responsible way. Um later today, we're gonna have the vote on the property tax increase. With that said, I think um we all can make the assumption on where that vote is gonna go. We already have a committee recommendation for that one. Um but the fact that we received a budget by the county executive with numbers that don't exist, right? In order to fund this budget, we needed to have a 6.3 cent property tax increase plus an income tax increase that targeted everybody, regardless of how much money they made. And the fact that many of the decisions that we're making or where the money is going, in this case MCPS, we have no authority. And that conversation of having authority has been revealed uh pretty strongly in recent actions that we have made uh as late as last week when we voted on that out the CAP item on the outdoor um athletic fields. We don't have authority to say to NCPS if you should use natural grass or turf at all, yet the county executive inserted that into the whole conversation when he knows we don't have the authority.