Patterson town hall dives into budget and economic development

Commissioner Ralph E. Patterson II (D) held a town hall on March 18 with Acting Director of Fiscal and Administrative Services Jacob Dyer to help add additional transparency to where the county is allocating its budget and economic development initiatives.

“The budget process for Charles county really never ends,” Dyer said, starting off the town hall.

Even in the months after submitting the budget, the county works on creating its “budget book” that explains the process and all adopted changes. The fiscal year 2023 budget clocked in at 588 pages.

Dyer said that he and the county have been trying to get citizens more involved in the budget process and that there is currently a survey for citizens to share their budget priorities at the county’s budget “Engage” page .

The survey will close April 2, and Dyer said that he will not be looking at the results until it is closed as to not sway decision-making during the current budget process.

Patterson asked Dyer, “What is our biggest expenditure?”

Dyer offered Patterson and the attendees a dollar model to help explain where money generally goes on an annual basis.

Fifty cents of every dollar supports education and 25 cents goes toward the sheriff’s office, so roughly three quarters of Charles County taxpayer dollars are directed to public safety and education.

Pascale Small, a candidate for the Charles County Board of Education, asked Dyer why education has such a high ask for its budget needs this year.

Dyer explained that the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future, the state’s education reform plan, has raised different costs and expenditures including teacher salaries and the improvement of pre-K programs.

Small asked if the county is making any use of tax revenues generated from the sale of legal cannabis.

Dyer said that because Charles County does have dispensaries, there is revenue that has gone untouched because the county code would need to be changed to use those funds.

State legislation sets a guideline that cannabis tax revenues must go toward underserved communities and not law enforcement, and the revenue cannot go into the general fund.

One attendee mentioned the current state of Indian Head, and asked Dyer if he believed that if the roughly $2 billion of incoming federal funding for the naval support facility there will help increase the economic development of the town.

“Hopefully putting money inside the gate, it’ll trickle outside,” Dyer said.

Dyer reminisced on his parents talking about how Indian Head was “the place to be” in the 1960s. He believed that it would take a while, even with an influx of federal funding for the naval facility, for it to return to where it once was.

“I don’t know when, but it’s coming,” Dyer said, referring to the economic revitalization of Indian Head.