John Tabori, a member of the county council’s Blue Ribbon Commission, presented the commission’s finding that Prince George’s County faces a $229 million budget deficit by 2023. Tabori made his remarks to about 40 people at a listening session for County Councilmember Todd Turner on February 28 at the Municipal Building.
Turner called the commission’s recommendations to fix the problem “not uncontroversial” when he introduced Tabori to speak. The commission was established to recommend policies to address the county’s structural deficit. Tabori, a former University Park mayor, explained to the session’s attendees that the commission found the budget shortfall, which will begin in 2018 and get progressively larger, is the result of rising expenses and mostly flat revenues for the county since 1978. Tabori and the commission pinpointed 1978 as the year the problems began because that was when the county passed the Tax Reform Initiative (TRIM), making it far more difficult for the county council to raise taxes. Since then, public safety expenditures in particular have risen from 20 percent of expenses in 1978 to 35 percent in 2017, while revenues have not grown at the same rate. “If we’re going to cut [expenses], we’re cutting people,” Tabori said. “And maybe we should, but everybody wants to be safe, so everybody wants more police officers.” Instead of cutting revenues, Tabori’s presentation included an alternate approach to solve the deficit problem: repeal TRIM and raise taxes. “Frankly, what [the commission] found, was the taxing system is not working,” Tabori said. “We need to look at something else.” For more on this topic, click here.