Prince George’s County Executive Rushern Baker released his budget for fiscal year 2013 despite the uncertainty of a potentially devastating shift of teacher’s pensions from the state to the counties.
“When we looked at this budget, we asked ourselves ‘why not?’” Baker said. “We knew that during the FY 2013 budget process that we would have to look at our government through a different prism. Three words dominated our discussion: vision, focus and results. These words guided our thinking and enabled us to create a framework for our budget.”
The more than $2.65 billion budget, as it stands right now, would be a $6 million increase over last year’s budget.
The majority of funding would go to the county’s education system; $1.6 billion from the operating budget would go to the county’s public schools, $102 million would go to Prince George’s Community College and another $26 million would be allocated for the library system.
Public safety would be the next largest beneficiary; $259 million would go towards the police department, $131 million would go to the fire department and $23 million would go to the county’s Office of Homeland Security. In that funding, the county would be able to hire 150 new police officers and 50 new recruits for the fire department.
There would also be $129 million allocated to the State’s Attorney’s office, the department of corrections and the sheriff’s office.
There would also be a combined $25 million given to Dimensions Healthcare to continue to operate the county’s hospital system and to begin the process of transitioning to a new hospital under the partnership with the state, and University of Maryland Medical System.
The budget also calls for making an investment into economic development. It would provide an additional $11 million to the Economic Development Incentive Fund, $32 million in transportation infrastructure improvements, $5 million to the PGC Economic Development Corporation and another $2 million to begin the redevelopment at Glenarden Apartments.
Another thing this budget does that previous budgets failed to do is give county employees some help. County employees would receive one-time bonuses and would spend the year without any furloughs or layoffs.
Despite Baker’s work, the Maryland General Assembly is still in session and could possibly be hammering out a deal to shift the burden of teacher’s pensions down to the counties. The Senate has already passed the measure and now the House is debating it. The Senate’s plan would phase in the burden over four years and by 2017; the county could be paying $51 million for teacher’s pensions.
We’re realists here, we know the pension shift is coming,” Baker said. Our best avenue and what we’ll be working on over the next two to three weeks is the push back to the county is as least impactful as we can make it and if there are ways to get revenues, let’s get those.
“We don’t have any ways to raise revenues,” he continued. “We’ve got a property tax cap so we’re limited. So am I concerned? Yes.”
