In today’s Washington Post “Montgomery Extra”, Miranda S. Spivack has an article about political developments regarding the Metropolitan District Tax:

A panel being set up by County Executive Isiah Leggett (D) to examine how to pay for services provided by Montgomery County’s municipalities and the county government is likely to consider a new system of paying for the county’s regional park system.

The regional park system has been losing income in recent years as the cities began annexing property from the county’s unincorporated areas, with County Council permission, and then taxed those residents for city-run parks. The side effect was to decrease the tax base for the county’s Department of Park and Planning.

Residents of the county’s unincorporated areas pay a special tax to help subsidize neighborhood and regional parks run by the county parks department. Montgomery County has a multi-layered system of parks and local government, with some parks run by the cities and others run by the parks agency, which reports to the County Council and is governed by a bi-county commission shared with neighboring Prince George’s County.

Current law bars the county from collecting a parks tax from residents who live inside city boundaries set by 1965. But it allows the county to collect from annexed sections of cities, even though the county has not done that.

Of course, there appears to be no parallel law that allows the cities to tax the county residents for the use of City parks.

Early this month, Montgomery’s House delegation in the General Assembly unanimously approved a bill that would bar the county from collecting a parks tax from city residents. It was sponsored by lawmakers from District 17, which includes Gaithersburg and Rockville, and could affect about 21,000 taxpayers in those cities. The bill is now before the Senate delegation for consideration.

My understanding is that the bill is actually winding its way through multiple levels committees and subcommittees in Annapolis. Assistant City Manager Fred Felton has been instrumental in shepherding the bill through this process.

County Council President Marilyn Praisner doesn’t much like the bill; she’d prefer that everyone just cool off and trust that the County will be reasonable:

“We are saying, ‘Don’t bother now.’ . . . Maybe in the future the Metropolitan District Tax will be the vehicle for whatever we agree to, and we don’t know what that is at this point,” Praisner said. “Nobody is under any risk. We aren’t going to collect the tax now.”

Note that she says “now” — she isn’t saying that the tax won’t be collected in the future. Given the level of difficulty of getting a bill through Annapolis, it isn’t like the cities can just wait and see what the County’s intentions are, and quick get this bill passed if things go badly. To my knowledge, the impetus for this bill came when the County started asking the Cities for a list of properties to which they could apply this tax. Quoting an October 2006 Gazette story by Jaime Ciavarra:

The county’s Department of Finance sent Gaithersburg officials a letter in early September, asking them to provide a list of properties annexed after 1965, when the Maryland General Assembly approved the metropolitan district tax to provide park revenue.

‘‘The theory is, and it’s a logical one, that people who live in King Farm are still going to camp at Little Bennett or go boating at Black Hill and still enjoy all of the resources that these county parks provide,” said Marion Joyce, spokeswoman for the county’s Department of Park and Planning.

Skeptical about how the tax’s revenues would benefit Gaithersburg residents, City Manager David B. Humpton sent a letter to county officials earlier this month questioning the county’s rationale and legal reasoning for the tax and asking for more discussion or a public hearing before such a levy would be implemented.

‘‘The city, obviously, provides its own city parks that I believe many county residents also use. And we don’t tax them for that,” said Mayor Sidney A. Katz.

Dena Levitz also wrote an article on this topic in the Examner about a week ago, mostly reporting MNCPPC’s point of view on the subject.