Reply to Elrich and Friedson confusingly blame each other for underfunding MCPS

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "Elrich and Friedson confusingly blame each other for underfunding MCPS"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]SOURCE: https://moco360.media/2024/05/22/elrich-friedson-butt-heads-over-mcps-funding/

[QUOTE]Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich is criticizing the County Council for “underfunding schools,” even though his proposed fiscal year 2025 county operating budget includes less money for Montgomery County Public Schools than the council’s spending plan.

In a straw vote Thursday, the County Council preliminarily approved a $7.1 billion county operating budget for fiscal year 2025, which includes $26.3 million more for Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) than had been allocated in Elrich’s proposed spending plan.

Elrich’s $7.1 billion budget proposal represents a 4.9% increase from the current fiscal year’s budget. His proposal for the next fiscal year, which starts July 1, includes $3.3 billion for MCPS, funding 98.2% of the county school board’s request. The total school spending showed a $107 million increase over spending in the current fiscal year, but also represented about a $60 million cut in the school board’s funding request, according to board documents.

With the additional proposed money for MCPS, the council’s proposal would fund 99.2% of the school board’s budget request. The council is set to take a final vote on the budget Thursday.

“The school budget’s coming up pretty short. And it didn’t have to be,” Elrich said Tuesday in an interview with MoCo360. “I’m a little baffled about the logic behind some of this.”

In the interview, Elrich said he had always planned to use money from a tax dollar-fueled fund used to pay retirement health benefits to county employees to close the 1.8% gap between what he proposed for MCPS and what the school board requested.

“People are paying a whole lot of money into this fund for nothing,” Elrich said. “That money could have been used to meet the current needs of the school system.”

However, Elrich did not include that funding idea when he introduced his proposed budget on March 14.

Council President Andrew Friedson (D-Dist. 1) told MoCo360 Tuesday that he had never seen a written proposal to use so-called Other Post-Employee Benefit (OPEB) funding and that it was not part of the spending plan or amendments Elrich submitted to the council in March. He first heard of Elrich’s idea when asked by a MoCo360 reporter about it Tuesday.

“It’s hard to take seriously criticism about underfunding education from a county executive who recommended a budget that funded education dramatically less than what the council supported and ultimately has recommended and is poised to approve,” Friedson said.

Friedson dismissed Elrich’s idea as not serious and said the county executive has a “history of robbing the OPEB trust fund.”

“OPEB is not just an abstract conglomeration of four letters. It is the public health benefits that we are obligated from a fiscal standpoint to pay,” Friedson said. “So if the county executive is suggesting that he would fund education on the backs of the health care of educators, retirees and public servants, I think that is a really bad idea.”

When asked if he thought the public were aware of his idea for schools funding, Elrich said he was “not sure it was obvious” because the money wasn’t listed as a budget line item since it would come from an existing fund.[/QUOTE]

I have a headache reading this. Elrich seems more wrong here than Friedson and the Council. If he had a plan for funding the EBP, it was on him to communicate that to the Council and the public. The fact that he feels otherwise makes question his sanity....

It's no wonder MCPS has so much chaos and misdirection going on. Look at how the CE and Council are so clearly disconnected.[/quote]

Elrich is gaslighting for his upcoming campaign.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics