The Charles County Charter Board met last week, discussing salaries along with some uncertain scenarios, including a potential new administrative building, if a new form of county government is approved by voters in November.
Dottery-Butler Washington, vice chair of the charter board, asked Jacob Dyer, the acting director of fiscal and administrative services, “We’ve been hearing a lot of the cost of a new charter. It’s going to put a lot of money on us. Frederick and Cecil County were the two most recent Maryland counties that transitioned to charter… can Charles County government find for us the cost estimate used by both Frederick and Cecil County and extra costs incurred in transition to the adopted charter?”
“We don’t want to reinvent the wheel,” Butler-Washington added, wanting to share with the community roughly how much the transition would cost.
“Each charter is different,” Dyer replied. “I would definitely be leaning on them to see what they learned from their implementation of it, but I do recognize that each charter is different. So Charles County’s charter most likely be unique to Frederick or Cecil.”
Greg Waring, chair of the charter board, used the Feb. 29 conversation to segue into salaries for new positions. Currently, the charter draft provides a $150,000 salary for a county executive. County council members — who would replace county commissioners — would each receive a $52,000 salary, the same as the current commissioners.
The president of the county council would receive a $63,100 salary, according to the current charter draft.
Dyer and Waring agreed that setting those salaries may be the easiest part of the charter, but Waring brought up one of the more unpredictable parts of the charter — staffing needs for the county executive and new county council.
Waring proposed that there may need to be new space considerations, whether it be retrofitting facilities in the Charles government building in downtown La Plata or a building new building altogether.
“One thing I want to be very explicit with county staff is there’s a range of scenarios that can happen once the charter is approved that the charter can’t anticipate,” Waring said. “New elected officials can come in and say, ‘I need X number of staff and budget for it.’ I think we need to be very careful with any fiscal analysis.”
“I don’t think we’re being fair to the public if we only show them the cost difference of elected officials. But we certainly wouldn’t be fair to the public if we assumed a new cost estimate that we’re going to build a brand new executive building and the executive staff is going to be 20 to 30 people. We can’t predict that,” Waring said.
“Honestly, I would look at the size of our county and compare it to Frederick or Cecil, and I recognize Frederick is much larger than us population-wise, so I would look at their county executive office and then say they have one employee per 10,000 people,” Dyer said. “Then I would look at Cecil County, maybe they’re a little smaller than us, so maybe we’re somewhere in the middle.”
“I would be acknowledging that it’s all variable,” Dyer said.
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