Locals Being Held Hostage By Maryland’s Blueprint Legislation

There’s a strange thing going on in our country. It’s something most of us would have never expected or seen coming.

It’s a war on local control. Local control is a concept this country was built on. There’s an old saying that the most effective governance is that which is closest to the people. It makes perfect sense. The closer officials are to the people they serve the better they can hear what their citizens want and need. For the people, if one can talk directly to the person voting on decisions and give an opinion, the more likely it is that the people will feel empowered and important. Officials who see their citizens every day are more respectful of the financial load taxes put on the community. This leads to more satisfaction among the populous. It also keeps officials accountable.

Somehow, the people who run our federal, state, and even some local governments have decided that the will of the people they govern no longer works for them. They want full and total control of the most important aspects of our lives, law enforcement, education, and governance, etc. Of the three, education is the most basic target. To manage this, they take our most important treasure, our children, hostage via Federal and State grants.

When someone is kidnapped and held hostage, the kidnappers rely on the fact that families want their loved ones back. This allows them to extort huge sums of money from families. If the families don’t do as they are told, kidnappers remind them that the result will be catastrophic.

The Federal Government and the State of Maryland are the kidnappers. The citizens are the ones being extorted. The threat is the withdrawal of funding.

As an example, our small county on Maryland’s Eastern Shore has a public school system made up of two high schools, two middle schools, and four elementary schools. The student population is around 4,500 students. This small system, through the Blueprint legislation, will get a total of $50,922,000 State and local money because that is the State mandated amount; the ransom the state requires.

Unfortunately, not every program in the Blueprint legislation fits the needs of our county. So, the local Board of Education requested $1,118,000 over the mandated amount to fund special programs that could benefit our students. The County Council, for the sake of fiscal sanity, gave only $286,000 over the State mandate. In total, the FY 2024 budget will be $7,883,000 ($4,070,000 county, $3,763,000 state) higher than FY23. This will equal a sizeable property tax increase of 4 cents per $100 in property value to citizens, many of whom can’t afford it during this difficult economic time.

Residents of our county ask why the County Council doesn’t tell the State to go pound sand. “Do we really need State money to fund our system? Can’t we educate our children better for less?”

The simple answer is “yes, we could.” All one needs to do is look at the last set of state test scores to know that what we are doing right now is not working and our funding is not making a positive impact.

There’s a second part to that answer, however.

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