“Federal Disaster Preparedness” was the title that I slapped on last week’s letter after writing it. That theme carried into the subsequent Budget Town Halls. District 4 Councilwoman Julie Hummer noted in her opening remarks last Thursday that federal cuts to the programs that serve our most vulnerable families, and layoffs of our neighbors from federal jobs, would require additional county spending. District 6 Councilwoman Lisa Rodvien said something similar in her closing remarks on Tuesday night.
I’ve been meeting with staff about county preparedness for worst-case scenarios. We have the list of programs that are federally funded and can guess which ones will be cut first. We are hearing from nonprofits that rely on federal support. We don’t yet know how many of our residents work in businesses that depend on federal contracts.
We don’t know which of the tariff promises will be kept, and it’s hard to measure their impact on peoples’ monthly budgets or on the survivability of local businesses. And we don’t know whether Canadian boycotts of US-made goods will expand globally and create an increase in our trade deficit, or whether Canadian booing during the US National Anthem at hockey matches will expand into a costly drop in the lucrative tourism that this region gets from foreign visitors.
Now that Elon Musk and his agents have been granted access to our highly protected government financial systems and databases, the United States Congress is no longer able to enforce its constitutional authority to act as a check and balance on the Presidency. Illegal firings, transaction freezes, and executive orders are moving at a pace that our judicial system can’t match. The Presidency is acting without limits, and proudly dismantling the institutions that Americans spent the last 250 years creating.
Last week, I noted that when we in local government do our disaster planning, we assume that FEMA will back us up with funding and support. President Trump suggested while visiting post-hurricane North Carolina recently that he didn’t like FEMA, and that maybe local governments should be doing that work. When planning for a disaster that is created by the federal government, we must address not only shelter, food, and other basic necessities, but also the funding.
So the planning begins. We need to decide when our Rainy Day Fund gets tapped, when and how we expand shelter capacity, how we increase local food production, and lots of other things that nobody wants to face.
It’s easy to underestimate the harshness in forecasts when things are going well. On Friday, I joined ninety Anne Arundel County Police Officers for an invigorating swim in the Chesapeake Bay at the Polar Bear Plunge, to help raise a record $4.43 million for Special Olympics Maryland.
Economic indicators in the United States show three years of what economists consider “full employment,” an extraordinary 12.7% GDP growth over the last four years, inflation back well below 3%, and a 39% surge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the last 2 years. We also have steeply declining rates of violent crime in both the county and the State of Maryland.
After decades of trying, our county now enjoys triple A bond ratings from all of its agencies and record-high reserves, while keeping our taxes the lowest in central Maryland. We’ve also been able to grow investments in police by 54%, fire by 76%, schools by 35%, and recreation and parks by 36% over the last 6 years. Just this year, a robust 290 new businesses opened their doors in our county. We should be proud.
Yesterday, I heard Governor Moore speak respectfully to Democrats and Republicans in the Maryland General Assembly, calling for unity and partnership across the state.
The day before, I stood with Democratic and Republican members of our County Council to celebrate the opening of our Police Real Time Information Center, and heard our Chief of Police explain how these tools would allow our officers to better protect our communities, reassuring our residents that their privacy and civil liberties would be respected.
Every single day, I attend meetings in which public servants, elected leaders from both parties, and interest groups of every philosophical persuasion work together to solve problems, always playing by the rules that this nation, this state, and this county have worked to establish over many, many years.
It’s not a perfect system, but within it, we are able to make progress. When public servants break the rules, they are prosecuted and sometimes jailed, as were two of the ten Anne Arundel County Executives and many other public servants from Maryland. We as a people demand that our leaders abide by the law, and we take pride in our ability to hold them accountable.
We still have persistent intergenerational poverty, challenging finances for working families, and divisions among our people, but we have a system that is allowing us to make progress.
Our current President won 49.8% of the popular vote in November’s election, but he did not campaign on constitutional amendments to allow him or his agents to ignore the will of the United States Congress, to breach the security of federal databases, to lock federal employees out of their offices, or to violate federal law. But he has done these things already, and they may continue. Their impacts could be devastating to our county. So we must prepare.
Until next week…