There has been a lot of talk recently in some quarters about the State's Maintenance of Effort requirement being unfair to Montgomery County. It's hard to understand what is unfair about the state saying that if they give the county more money for education, they expect the county to spend the money on education and not use it to divert local dollars to other purposes.
It is also difficult to understand how Montgomery County can complain about not getting enough state aid, and then expect the state to waive the local Maintenance of Effort requirement when virtually every other jurisdiction in the state is meeting Maintenance of Effort. If you lived anywhere else in the state, would you want your tax dollars being sent to a county that wasn't meeting their local Maintenance of Effort when your county was?
Some in Montgomery County complain that the county has historically exceeded Maintenance of Effort, so it shouldn't have to meet the requirement now. Yet the data shows that virtually every county in Maryland has exceeded their Maintenance of Effort requirements over the years, and a majority of them have done so at a higher rate than Montgomery County has. The data on this can be found in MCEA's Background Paper on School Funding & Employee Compensation in MCPS (see table 5).
Today, the three unions in MCPS (MCEA, SEIU and MCAAP) sent a joint letter to Governor O'Malley and our state legislative delegation to urge them to avoid making changes to the Maintenance of Effort law that would undermine funding for public education.
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