The Montgomery County Council convened on July 21, 2026, starting at 9:30 a.m., for a full-day session that included a public hearing on stormwater bond authorization, legislative session (Day #18) with five bill introductions and five final readings, a district council session, a consent calendar, and afternoon public hearings on the Clarksburg Gateway Sector Plan and a rural village center zoning text amendment. The council also interviewed candidates for the Board of Investment Trustees and the Housing Opportunities Commission.
Legislative Session - Final Readings:
District Council Session:
Interviews (Board of Investment Trustees): Interviewed Joshua Burge (AARP) and Michael Sinoway (Penn State). Both expressed no conflicts and availability. Council will select one representative.
Interviews (Housing Opportunities Commission): Interviewed incumbents Jeffrey Merkowitz and Robert Salomon for reappointment. They discussed affordable housing supply, federal funding constraints, and improved collaboration with county. Councilmember Mink asked about transparency; both affirmed support for regular communication.
Public Hearings (Afternoon):
Good morning, everyone. Today is July 21st already. And we're going to start with our county council session. We will start with General Business. Madam Clerk, I know that there are no announcements today. So next, we're going to move on to the minutes. I need approval for June 30th, 2026 Council session and June 30th, 2026 closed session. They have been shared with the Council. Are there any objections to approving this minutes? Saying none, these minutes are approved. We're going to move on with Agenda Item 1. And it's a public hearing on expedite bill 30-26, bond authorization, and stormwater management. This bill will authorize Montgomery County, Maryland to issue special limited obligation bonds for the purposes of financing the planning, design, acquisition, and construction and maintenance of a stormwater management facilities and other related projects, and for refunding all or part of the outstanding special limited obligations bonds issued for such purposes. Action is scheduled for later in this meeting. As a reminder of our public hearing testimony guidelines, your comments must be limited to issues relevant to the public hearing topic for which you are testifying in at appropriate for a public meeting. Do you hear a tone when your time is up, and we appreciate everyone abiding by their loaded time. Each person has three minutes. So we have Mr. Gordy Brandon, Kenneth Bauer, Marion Ebay, Danila Cheveco. And we will start with uh Gordy Brennan. It's not on. No. Good morning. Gordy Bernie with the Taxpayers League. It looks like the executive is uh playing the Council and Taxpayers for Chunps. And I'll explain why. Uh yeah, I say it looks like, because uh this huge expedited bond proposals just fell from the sky in April after the budget was presented, with a little disclosure for why it's being proposed. I started my career as budget director for the Illinois EPA following years of consulting for government uh and commercial clients and served as internal audit director for Marriott and controller. None of the financing proposals in over 50 years have raised as many fundamental questions as this one does, beginning with why do this in a period of high interest rates? We do know watershed restoration is slow growth, a mature program, since development has slowed dramatically in our county and streams are to be restored are finite. Also, the rain tax is a very tempting cash cow. We have reviewed the fiscal plan published with the program budget before this bond proposal came up. It shows strong cash flows in light of the 7 percent fee increase you approved, and a healthy debt service coverage ratio. Planned restoration projects seem like more of the same over the years with no material financial surprises. The county uses fee revenues to pay debt service on stormwater project bonds and to finance operating expenses. But this 125 million dollar bond proposal is 11 times the current restoration debt service above the three-year standard by the Government Finance Officers Association and uh new debt service would eventually overwhelm rain tax fee revenues. Maybe the reason for the new bond proposal started with this year's budget adjustment, transferring 30 DOT employees who were assigned to the Department of Environmental Protection, that's a whopping 28 percent of their operating budget staff to the DEP capital budget. Why on earth would this happen? Are borrowed DOT staff in restoration operations stream restoration, suddenly planning, design, and supervision specialists for water quality, or does this suggest there are plans afoot to use the capital budget next year to work around structural deficit problems instead of cutting staff? This transfer could violate generally accepted accounting principles for capitalizing expenses and uses bonds to finance operations. Lastly, we were reminded that historical restoration practices don't work. PFAS showed up last month in public announcements, forever chemicals, and found in DEP holding ponds for stormwater runoff from a former county public safety training site. A 2021 DEP Consultant Site report totally ignored PFAS. Equally disturbing is why PFAS was reported by the State, not the county's inspection program. I would suggest you either cut this proposal in half or move forward quickly with an OL study of funding needs for these projects and how they should be prioritized based on scientific evidence of actual local pollution reduction and flood control. Please add a new public reporting requirement for individual public outcomes and expectations in the budget. There's more in our written testimony. Thank you. Thank you so much. Next, Kenneth Bauer.