May 25

May 25 A People-Centered Budget That Uplifts All Prince Georgians

County Executive Alsobrooks Discusses Approved FY24 Budget

By Angela D. Alsobrooks // Prince George’s County Executive

Today, the Prince George’s County Council passed the fiscal year (FY) 2024 budget. We are proud of the final budget that we submitted to the County Council, which provides important services to residents, gives our County agencies the resources they need to serve our residents, and upholds the values of our community. I want to thank my colleagues on the Council for working closely with us to deliver a budget that improves critical government services while making investments to help grow the commercial tax base long-term, without raising taxes on residents.

Just like jurisdictions across the country, we are still feeling the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and inflation, which impacted our revenues and forced us to make difficult and fiscally responsible decisions. Even though we faced a number of challenges this year, I’m proud that we came together to pass a budget that contains people-centered investments that will uplift all Prince Georgians.

The FY 2024 budget includes nearly $5.4 billion in operating funds, an increase of $318 million or 6.3% over the FY 2023 budget. The General Fund totals $4.5 billion, an increase of $254.3 million or 6.0% over the FY 2023 budget. The largest portion of General Funds, nearly $2.8 billion or 62%, goes directly to the Board of Education for Prince George’s County Public Schools. Over $886 million supports public safety agencies, nearly 20% of General Funds. The remaining 18% of the budget supports the rest of County Government operations.

The FY 2024 budget was tight due to several factors, including new funding obligations mandated by the funding formula under the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future (Kirwan). Kirwan is a transformational program that promises to propel K-12 students in Maryland to the top. We fully support its core tenets of early childhood education, high quality diverse teachers and leaders, a focus on college and career readiness, more resources for students, and greater accountability.

We are proud that this year, once again, we are funding our school system at historic levels with $2.8 billion in funding. The Kirwan funding formula legally mandated that the County spend an additional $88.4 million on education this year, which represented nearly half of all new spending in our County budget. That required us to make careful decisions about how we spent the additional dollars we had remaining.

In addition, we announced earlier this month that income tax revenue projections were $60 million lower than initial projections when I released our FY 2024 proposed budget, which threatened to create a potential revenue shortfall. My team made adjustments to the proposed budget to close the gap, using reserve funds for FY 2024 while also closely reviewing the budget for ways to optimize spending. We were able to avoid a budget shortfall this year without making cuts to government services or raising taxes.

As I said when I released the proposed budget on March 15, ultimately, we need to grow commercial revenues, so we can stop balancing our budget on the backs of homeowners. For too long, we have placed too much of the tax burden on residents, and that burden threatens to increase if we don’t change the way we generate revenue. I’m proud that the FY 2024 budget contains key investments that, over time, will help us shift the tax burden away from residents.