Maryland fees and taxes rise as budget deficits loom

Driver learners’ permits and specialty license plates. Permissions to work as a barber, nail technician, plumber or engineer. Vehicle registration, handgun permits and cigarettes.

The cost for those and dozens of other types of licenses or activities regulated by the state of Maryland are ticking up, according to a review by The Baltimore Sun of Maryland regulations and laws passed in the last two years.

Critics are calling the move an overstep that puts a burden on workers and families, while others say is necessary to keep up with rising costs to provide government services.

The changes are often modest: $9.50 more to renew a license to work as an electrician or architect every few years; about $1 more for a gallon of paint.

While some lawmakers are considering broader tax hikes in order to fill multibillion-dollar deficits, the increases so far have rarely targeted consumers directly, and are chiefly focused on a range of professional licenses.

But deficits and tax shifts continue to dominate conversations in Annapolis — and Republicans, wary of where those debates will go, have taken aim at Gov. Wes Moore and his Democratic allies over the fees.

House Minority Leader Jason Buckel, an Allegany County Republican, said he appreciates Moore’s self-imposed “high bar” for raising taxes.

“But you can also wind up with what we’ve seen of hundreds of millions of dollars of nickel-and-diming people,” Buckel said.

Buckel and his Republican colleagues in the Maryland State House this summer released a list of what they considered 338 new or increased taxes and fees since Moore took office in January 2023.

An analysis of the list by The Sun found about 10% of them are new, and just four of those could directly impact consumers.

The rest are increases of existing fees, though many are counted several times for either increases over multiple years or because of nuances in the law that identify multiple different fees for the same license or activity. Some were labeled as increases, but the details of the regulations or laws showed they were actually decreases, were never enacted or were never actually proposing specific fee increases, The Sun found.

Other fees, meanwhile, are entirely missing from the list, like the cannabis taxes and fees that came with the new legal industry last year.

“It doesn’t matter if it's 338 or 372 or 299. There’s just no way to get around the fact that it ultimately adds up to a lot of money and it's almost across the board,” Buckel said.

Kali Schumitz, whose work at the Maryland Center on Economic Policy involves advocating for progressive tax changes, said the list of fees represents “a very normal process” that involves issuing fees for people using specific services and then, when they haven’t gone up in a while, raising more alarm than they maybe otherwise would have.

“You can talk about fees in the general sense and make it sound like a big nefarious thing,” Schumitz said. “But it's a tool for funding public service, and not all fees are the same or have the same impact. I think you have to look at them on a case by case basis.”

Impact on consumers

The few newly created fees that could directly impact larger numbers of consumers are for transportation and paint.

The 2024 law about paint did not set a specific fee; it authorized the ramp-up of a program that could mean anywhere from a few cents to about a $2 increase, per can of paint, for a recycling initiative, according to legislative analysts and the organization that runs the program in other states.

A 75-cent fee on most ridesharing trips, from companies like Uber and Lyft, and a new $100 to $125 annual surcharge for electric vehicle registration are two of the others. The last is an optional $5 sticker for plug-in electric vehicle owners to use high-occupancy vehicle lanes regardless of the number of passengers — an incentive permitted under a 2023 law.

The rest of the direct-to-consumer items on the list are increases to existing fees — like the sales tax on electronic smoking devices jumping from 12% to 20% this year, or handgun permits increasing from $75 to $125 last year. The tobacco-related taxes, including bumping up the $3.75 tax on cigarette packs to $5, are aimed at funding the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future education reform plan.

Vehicle registration costs also increased for the first time in two decades, a move aimed at staving off some of the $3.3 billion in transportation funding cuts that were announced earlier this year. The cuts affect everything from road and sidewalk maintenance to public transit services, and $1.3 billion in additional reductions were announced last week.

The raises depend on the type of vehicle and weight class. Annual costs for medium-sized passenger cars weighing 3,500 pounds, for example, were raised from $50.50 to $80.50 for the fiscal year that started July 1, and will increase to $85.50 next year. That does not include an increase in an additional registration surcharge for EMS services, which increased from $17 to $40.

Other increases through the Maryland Vehicle Administration were some of the only increases initiated by Moore’s administration; the rest started as proposals from legislators or semi-independent licensing boards.

Those included specialty license plate registration from $15 to $20, learners’ permits from $50 to $65, and the reinstatement of a revoked license from $45 to $90 (or $75 to $150 if it was revoked for a drug or alcohol violation).

Moore spokesman Carter Elliott IV said in a statement the governor has produced balanced budgets and made new investments without raising sales tax or personal and corporate income taxes . While not addressing the specific fee increases, he said the administration is continuing to “thoughtfully plan the long-term structural solutions,” including reviewing revenue and state expenses.

Fees to work

The vast majority of fee increases singled out by Republicans are for professions that require licenses to work in Maryland — and they can have little or significant impact depending on the profession.

Pamela Coleman, the director of the Baltimore Beauty and Barber School, said she’s concerned about the increases for cosmetologists and barbers. They ranged from $1 increases on $10 apprentice barber licenses to $19 increases on $150 fees related to salon inspections.

She said it’s confusing to see the hikes at the same time as officials are loosening some of the rules to obtain licenses, which she said will require fewer hours of instruction in some cases.

“It’s like, you’re increasing the price but you’re taking away half of the things they need to maintain the license,” Coleman said.

Meagan Forbes, whose work at the nonprofit law firm Institute for Justice includes research and litigation around state licensing laws, said there’s a recent trend of increasing fees in a way that can disproportionately impact less lucrative professions, like cosmetology.

“Of course, everything’s become more expensive nowadays, but really people should be looking at how to reduce these burdens because it’s so important to make these opportunities for work accessible for people and not to have barriers to entry for people who can't afford to overcome them,” Forbes said.

An Institute for Justice report on occupation licensing between 2017 and 2022 found Maryland was the ninth most-burdensome state when considering the number of lower-income occupations that require licenses, the fees involved, education requirements and more.

About 250 of the items on the Republicans’ latest list are for licenses, though less than half of them are increases on separate, individual licenses across 19 types of occupations.

Some are also for higher-paying or new career paths — like one that focuses on expanded duties for dental assistants.

Under a 2022 law, dental assistants in Maryland will be able to perform a few more procedures on patients, an “opportunity for professional growth” and, likely, higher compensation, said Dr. Charles Doring, a Rockville dentist who’s been in private practice for 37 years.

Nine of the new fees identified by Republicans are to provide or renew certificates for that work, though the regulations have not actually been finalized so the fees have not been set.

Doring said dentist offices that employ the assistants will likely pick up the cost for the new certificate as well as the educational courses needed to acquire it. The goal, he said, is to expedite care and improve patient experience.

“There's a certain excitement about it. They're just chomping at the bit to get the A-OK to really set up teaching institutions to do this,” Doring said.