The Great Talbot Tax Myth

Talbot County, Maryland. "The Hamptons of the Chesapeake Bay." Home to St. Michael's, Oxford, several scenic rivers and creeks, and many waterfront farmsteads that predate the failed British attempt to extinguish the rebellion in her American colonies. And the patriotic cause of 1776 is relevant in this conversation, fought as it was, in part, over the implications surrounding taxation.

To the delight of many of those waterfront farm owners (and God bless them!), Talbot County has the lowest property tax rate in the state. And it's not just that it's lower than every other county, but just how much lower; compared to some counties, the Talbot rate is fully 50% lower or more.

Much has been made recently by some folks in Queen Anne's County about why that Talbot County tax rate is so low. Those people, who represent interest groups singularly dedicated to increasing development in our county, have taken full-page advertisements out in local papers focusing almost entirely on Talbot County's tax rates. Why would a Queen Anne's County-based interest group spend money on an advertisement that talks so much about Talbot County?

It's a good question. Turns out, the developers in Queen Anne's County really want, no, they NEED you to believe that the reason why Talbot County's taxes are so low is because Talbot County has Big Box retail stores. The ad in question, even goes so far as to ask: "Why are Queen Anne's County taxes so high? Because we don't have Walmart, Staples, [etc]." And why on earth do they need you to believe that a few stores are responsible for Talbot County's ridiculously low tax rates? Because they want you to vote on election day to bring Big Box retail to Queen Anne's County.

Seeing this ad got me thinking about why Talbot's tax rates were so low, so I started to dig around. And what did I find? Well, not surprisingly, having a few Big Box establishments is hardly the reason Talbot's taxes are low; here's the real story:

For years and years, Talbot County has been a 'tax capped' county, which means that in no single year can the county raise property taxes more than 2%. But in each of the last three years, Talbot County has in fact raised their taxes to the limit of the tax cap. In 2012, due to the county's inability to meet its Board of Education funding requirements, the County Commissioners even overrode the county's tax cap to levy an additional tax to make up for the school budget shortfall. These tax increases come even as Talbot County has cut $20 million from its county budget over the past five years.

The real reason Talbot's taxes are so low is because Talbot committed itself, years ago, to keeping its government small, no matter how painful that decision might turn out to be. Discovering just what that means in application is important as we attempt to compare Talbot's apples to Queen Anne's oranges.

In Talbot County, citizens can expect a much longer response time from their emergency services (fire, police and EMS) than we can in Queen Anne's County, where emergency response times are very quick for a rural county and a point of pride for Department of Emergency Services leadership. But call for an ambulance in Trappe, and you might find yourself waiting longer than you might like, indeed longer than you can well afford. Talbot County also pays their sheriff deputies some of the lowest salaries in the state, and of course requires each deputy to cover more ground, with less effect, and all for less money. 

Whether it's EMS, fire, or police, Talbot County spends almost half what Queen Anne's County spends to keep their citizens safe. When I sat on the Queen Anne's County Budget Task Force, no one from the public, and I mean no one, ever so much as breathed a word about cutting the budgets for fire, EMS, or police. 

Also in 2012, Talbot County spent 60% less on their county detention facility than Queen Anne's County did; I wonder if the warden of the Queen Anne's County jail in Centreville could afford a 60% reduction in manpower?

Queen Anne's County spends ten million dollars a year more on education than Talbot does, proof positive that more kids in school equals bigger government budgets and higher taxes. But fewer kids isn't the only reason for the lower cost of education, because while Talbot offers new teachers comparatively high salaries, as teachers gain experience and tenure, they find that their salaries do not keep up with other counties across the state. This means that the longer a teacher works in Talbot County, the less he/she will make comparatively over time. 

In 2012, Queen Anne's County had more than twice the budget for roads maintenance as Talbot County, and any of the five Queen Anne's Commissioners would tell you that is still a woefully inadequate sum. In fact, Queen Anne's County has stopped removing roadkill from the side of the roads, so insufficient is our budget.  Sticking with public works, Talbot spent only 25% of the Queen Anne's County budget for solid waste; and yet people have complained to no end that our county transfer stations are not open frequently enough, imagine if they were closed 75% more of the time than they already are! People would wind up dumping their trash on the roads, but there would be no road maintenance to clean it up.

So as you can see, the case for Talbot's low taxes is quite clear, and it has virtually nothing to do with Big Box retail, or even revenue of any kind. As a very well placed contact in Talbot County told me during the research for this piece, "the impact of Big Box retail on Talbot County's budget and taxes is marginal." To imply that Queen Anne's County, by attempting to attract Big Box development, could somehow replicate Talbot County's tax rates is a baldfaced lie. It is a bastardization of the truth that deserves ridicule, because it seeks to misinform the public for the benefit of a few very interested stakeholders.

What the story of Talbot County actually tells us, is that if we want to have the lowest tax rate in the state, we should kick 10,000 people out, and reduce by nearly half the level of all our government services.

The math just doesn't add up; join me in voting NO on Question B in Queen Anne's County.



Notes on sources:
-Even with a tax increase in 2012, Queen Anne's County still has the fifth lowest tax rate of any county in the state of Maryland. You can see data for all counties here.      

-People like to talk about the lack of good paying jobs in Queen Anne's County, but as it turns out, Talbot County pays its county employees less across the board, and often much less, than does Queen Anne's. You can see salary data compiled by MACO here.

-You can see the Talbot County budget here.

-and the Queen Anne's County budget here.


 

Growth Deconstructed

Sophism - noun - an argument apparently correct in form but actually invalid; especially : such an argument used to deceive

Sophism is today's word of the day. Interestingly enough, the Greek philosopher Plato is responsible for the modern interpretation of the word: Plato viewed these teachers who took cash payments as greedy, using rhetorical sleight-of-hand and ambiguities of language in order to deceive, or to support fallacious reasoning. That comes from Wikipedia, that high bastion of online academic research. Put in plainer terms, sophists are folks who are willing to say whatever comes to mind in support of an argument they really want to win.

In even plainer terms, sophism is a polite way of saying bull!#$@.

One of the key tenants of sophistry, and of modern politics, is that if you repeat something enough times, people will come to believe it. Here in Queen Anne's County, we have a population of interest groups that actively chant 'growth,' at every possible opportunity. These groups will call for more 'growth' whenever any argument comes up: Have a bad case of arthritis? The county needs more growth! Crops didn't fare too well in the drought? The county needs more growth! The roads are crumbling! We need more growth!

The last one should pluck a particularly humorous chord. Who would ever dream of fixing a problem by making it worse?! Balderdash!

But of those three questions, the third one is the one we should take most seriously, because these interest groups do indeed believe that if the roads are crumbling (and they are), the only reasonable solution is to put more cars on them. Keep that in mind as you head to the polls in the coming weeks.

And this argument applies to more than just roads. The development interests in this county want you to believe that crowded schools just need more students; an over-extended law enforcement agency simply needs more territory to cover. A polluted river just needs more pressure from lawn fertilizer and stormwater runoff.

Perhaps all of this seems overly-simplistic, to be so breezily dismissive of an argument that is made so earnestly by people with enough money and enough skin in the game to buy ads promoting growth as a cure-all for anything and everything that ails the county and her citizens.

The simple fact of the matter is that continuing to repeat that growth, and any kind of growth, is good for the county, is sophistry in its purest form. The success of their argument, in getting you to vote the way they want you to vote, hinges on your believing several things.

1. That the county isn't growing. This is simply false. Since 1980, the population of Queen Anne's County has essentially doubled. The size of the county budget is (despite recent exceptions) on a very upward trend. County revenue is growing. Our emergency services capacity is growing, our schools are growing. In short, look around you. Anyone who has been here any length of time can see very clearly that the County is not stagnating, and is certainly not shrinking. But it is essential that developers make you believe (against all obvious evidence) that the County isn't growing.

2. That growth pays for itself. Every day you wake up in Queen Anne's County, you are participating in a longitudinal study that is virtually proving that growth doesn't pay for itself! That is why the county had to raise taxes in fiscal 2012. The population we have now is insufficient to pay for the services that population currently demands; the idea that more population would somehow nudge us over the tipping point, and somehow create a revenue utopia where each additional person pays taxes but demands no services is ridiculous. Let me say that again, for emphasis: it's ridiculous. Suggesting that we need more growth to pay for the growth we already have, but that the new growth won't have costs of its own is suggesting that we are hamsters on a wheel; hamsters that better never stop running.

3. That somehow more growth in the past would have insulated us from The Great Recession. This is perhaps most frustrating, because there are countless examples of how untrue this statement really is. All around Queen Anne's County, particularly to the west of us, are counties that are chock-full of office complexes, retail strip malls and redundant Big Box establishments. Every single one of those counties felt the impact of The Great Recession as did Queen Anne's County, and most felt it even more acutely. Most of them had deeper unemployment and larger budget deficits than ever faced Queen Anne's County, and have been much slower to recover than Queen Anne's, a process which of course is still ongoing.What's more is that no other economic sector has recovered more quickly, and more robustly, than the rural economy. Agriculture is leading the way towards a national economic recovery, and it just happens to be the county's number one industry. 

4. The future health of the county depends on growth. It is likely that making every possible concession to developers would increase the county budget; you will get no debate from this writer on that point. But with every increase in revenue comes a required increase in expenditures that will often outstrip the revenue, leaving you in the same type of mess you are in now, only deeper. The current population (both commerical and residential) of Queen Anne's County requires a budget of X dollars. The added population will require a budget of X + dollars, but won't contribute all the + necessary to even the ledger; and alas, the pressure for more growth will continue apace, using the same tired arguments.

What the future demands is to find sustainability in budgets, from both a revenue and expenditure standpoint. If we predetermine that any growth is good growth, we will certainly assure that future county budgets will expand at a clip far beyond revenues ability to keep up. If we continue to peg our budgets to assuming that housing values will always increase, and retail sales receipts will always get bigger, then we are doomed to repeat not only the mistakes of the past, but the mistakes we are making even as I write this.