Cuts to the Red-Line transportation project, education, and to the number of public employees could be on deck for Baltimore City with Governor-elect Larry Hogan scheduled to submit a budget by Feb. 2. The incoming governor has largely avoided discussing substantive policy or budget plans in public since defeating Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown last November, leaving many in the city with little more than speculation about what Hogan might cut to meet the state’s projected budget shortfall of around $750 million for the next fiscal year.
Charly Carter, executive director for Maryland Working Families, a progressive advocacy organization dealing with issues affecting working-class families, said in November that the easiest way to balance the budget for a self-professed conservative with a small-government mantra like Hogan is to shrink the size of government.
“How many public employees can we cut? I think that’s a concern,” said Carter in an unpublished portion of our interview. “Can we furlough people? Can we just shrink (the government) by hiring freeze? O’Malley froze wages for public employees for four years. They just got a raise. . . . But we might look at that kind of freeze (under Hogan), so I think that we might have to be concerned about that.”
Pay freezes and staff cuts could hit Baltimore City particularly hard, as the state is one of the city’s larger employers, accounting for just over 10 percent of the labor force in 2013, the last year data is available, according to Maryland’s Dept. of Labor, Licensing and Regulation.
In early December, Sen. Joan Carter Conway (D), chair of the Education, Health, and Environmental Affairs Committee, told a gather of ministerial leaders that she did not expect the new governor to do away with the Red-Line transportation project, a light rail transit line running from east to west in lower Baltimore. But as Louis Peck of Bethesda Magazine has pointed out, Maryland’s constitutional organization gives the governor enormous power over the budget when it comes to items like this.
While the proposed Purple-Line connecting Montgomery and Prince George’s County is a more likely target of cuts, without further indication from Hogan himself, it cannot be assumed that the Red-Line project will not be affected.
Education is another area the city may find itself facing cuts as the state looks to balance its books. Baltimore’s 21st Century Schools construction plan has been affected by inflation, Conway said. While Conway seemed confident in the city’s ability to return to the legislature for future funding needs, the current deficit raises the question of whether the governor, or the General Assembly, may try to roll back some of the funding to balance the budget.
School budget financing could also see cuts under Hogan. Bebe Verdery, director of the Education Reform Project for the ACLU MD, told the {AFRO} in November that “under a new administration that has vowed to roll back some taxes, we would have a concern that education could be one place you decide to cut.”
State funding for public schools is largely determined by a formula that can only be changed by the General Assembly, a largely Democratic body likely to resist changes that could seriously impact Baltimore’s public schools. Nonetheless, Verdery said the formula is under review, meaning Hogan could work with the General Assembly to change the formula to squeeze more savings from the state’s education spending.
Discretionary education funding from the state could also be done away by a Hogan budget, said Verdery, and Baltimore’s public schools are not exactly in a position to easily absorb such cuts.