Montgomery Bracing for A Record Shortfall

Brian Edwards, chief of staff for Superintendent Jerry D. Weast, said school officials were reviewing Leggett's request yesterday. "It would be extraordinarily difficult to meet that request," Edwards said. "It's too early to say if there's anything we can do at this point." Ninety percent of the education budget pays for teachers, administrators and other staff.

This year, school officials and parents protested smaller cuts that Leggett had proposed in the last budget cycle, eventually winning concessions.

The projected $400.9 million shortfall is the county's largest ever. But at this time in fiscal 2004, an estimated $303 million deficit represented 10.6 percent of the projected budget.

That year, the council imposed tax increases on income, phone lines and energy and exceeded the charter limit on property taxes.

The council's longtime staff director, Steve Farber, recalled the painstaking process of identifying $25 million in cuts.

"It was no picnic," he said.

For that reason, Leggett and his budget writers wanted to give departments and agencies the flexibility to cut their budgets without council approval for specific trims.

"The creation and review of these plans was a time-consuming task that often created more anxiety in the community than was necessary and forced exemptions and exceptions that frequently frustrated the goal of the plans," he wrote to the council.

But that approach encountered resistance from council members, who control the county's purse strings.

"At some point, the general has to translate into the specific," council member Roger Berliner (D-Potomac-Bethesda) said Monday, after a presentation by Beach. "Are you asking us to approve a target and wash our hands of the specifics?"

By Tuesday, Leggett's budget writers had agreed to involve the council in a line-item review.

Yesterday, the council urged Leggett's budget writers to act quickly to identify trims. The county executive must submit a blueprint of a balanced budget to the council by March 17.

Council member Marc Elrich (D-At Large) encouraged the administration to look for savings in government operations, saying "we can do a better, more efficient job in delivering more services and looking more closely at choices to spend money."

Council member Phil Andrews (D-Gaithersburg-Rockville) said that the pace of spending in the county is unsustainable and that the operating budget has grown by $1 billion since fiscal 2004.