J.H. Snider’s oral testimony on HB0151 – County Income Tax – Rate and Income Brackets – Alterations before the House Ways and Means Committee on Jan. 30, 2025. The video can be found here.
Please excuse my voice, which you will be able to understand if you listen carefully.
It’s common when seeking additional funding to add provisions to ensure taxpayer money is spent efficiently.
Along those lines, I propose an amendment that would ensure that the Public Information Act works as intended when used to track public expenditures.
To illustrate my larger point, I will focus on Bluprint, which is widely credited with driving the current push for tax increases.
Employee compensation comprises more than 80% of the cost of most K12 public school budgets. According to Maryland law, information about such compensation is nominally public information. Unfortunately, in practice it has proved not to be.
Consider the position of a school board member who wants to analyze his district’s employee compensation. As I’m sure you know, this is highly sensitive information to request. Despite it being nominally public information, the school board member cannot access it without a majority vote of the school board, which makes it a high-profile issue that will raise eyebrows, as it is widely assumed that anyone who requests such information must be an enemy of public education. Thus, the politically prudent choice is not to ask for this information.
Alternatively, the school board member could file a PIA request. But this request will also raise eyebrows and may lead to an unwanted lobbying campaign directed at him. A prudent school board member will thus likely decide it’s not worth the effort to seek this information, which is bad outcome for taxpayers.
As for the average citizen seeking this information via a PIA request, many roadblocks may be thrown up that make pursuing such request impractical.
The only practical solution to fix this broken system is to proactively publish this information online and in a machine readable format. Individual names need not be published, but the information must be published in disaggregated form so that it is amenable to meaningful analysis.
I do not want to underestimate the political bravery it would require of you to make compensation information meaningfully as opposed to just nominally public. But if you did, I think it would send a strong signal to taxpayers that you are serious about spending their money efficiently.
