Baltimore County is at a crossroads. The county will face significant challenges in adequately funding our operating and capital budgets in the near term. While fiscal year 2026 will most likely be manageable, I believe fiscal year 2027 will require difficult decisions on taxes and spending — that is to say, revenue versus capital and operating allocation and deployment.

On the operating front, the county is already one of the lower-paying governments in central Maryland. However, the rise in inflation has only exacerbated the issue, putting more pressure on wages and making it more difficult for the county to compete for scare labor resources. For example, our Baltimore County Police Department has more than 200 vacancies, with several hundred more police expected to retire in the next 18 months.

Wage increases, and the demand for labor, also put added pressure on the overall pension funding status, which is too low at only 59%. This is an unfunded liability. If we want the best teachers, police, firefighters and government workers, we need to make sure they are compensated fairly and competitively versus other government and private sector employers. We also need to monitor and commensurately fund the pension.

Regarding the capital budget, our infrastructure is vast and aging, and, in our long history as a county, we have not always kept up with its maintenance let alone built for the future. As a result, we have a seemingly endless need for capital allocations simply to keep up with immediate obligations, and a lot of this spending will be fueled by borrowing. Major capital projects like the new Dulaney and Towson High Schools, roads, libraries, police and fire stations and many other capital needs are pressing. These pressures make our debt service costs (payments to service the interest and principal on the debt) higher and will soon exceed our current spending affordability guidelines. This is a major inflection point and something that has not happened since the creation of the county’s Spending Affordability Committee.

As the chair of the Spending Affordability Committee for 11 years, I have spent many days and nights poring over the operating and capital budgets. The stark reality is this: Our current tax base is simply not sufficient. The extent of our infrastructure program and the cost of cost-of-living increases and pension obligations dwarf current revenue projections. Our ability to increase taxes is limited by many factors, not the least of which is increased inflation that has made it more difficult for people to make ends meet. And this is not even factoring in inevitable federal and state cuts that will have an outsized impact on our income and property tax assumptions.

Simply put, new and urgent measures need to be considered on how to increase our tax base. Yes, this includes obvious tax increases; but it also includes fast-tracking revitalization of the many older commercial corridors in the county to attract promising new businesses such as artificial intelligence companies and data centers. The result will be potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in direct local revenue from the projects themselves, and even more money in direct and indirect economic benefits to the people of the county (through better jobs, higher wages, greater private investment and so on). Baltimore County needs to grow upwards (literally), while making sure we do not continue to overcrowd nearby schools.

Against this backdrop, and the storm clouds gathering over Baltimore County, it is no accident that Baltimore County’s population has started to decline. If the right decisions are not made in the next two years, this trend will continue if not accelerate and then we will have to reconsider the important assumptions built into our modeling, including with respect to expected revenues. In addition, we may well be in jeopardy of losing our coveted “AAA” bond rating.

The Baltimore County Council cannot simply select a placeholder for our next executive. The council needs to select the best applicant regardless of whether they want to run again two years from now. The decision should be to select the best qualified to lead during difficult times, not what is in the best interest of any particular council member. There is simply too much at stake for short-term politics to win the day over the long-term health of our county. The citizens deserve no less than our best efforts.

Tom Quirk served as District 1 Baltimore County Councilman from 2010-2022. He served as Spending Affordability Committee chairman for 11 years and was council chairman in 2013, 2017 and 2019. Tom is a certified financial planner practitioner and owns and operates a retirement and investment company in Catonsville.