Quoting Council Member John Schlichting:
I’d just like to put this in perspective here, because we’re talking about a $50 million budget. We’ve agreed on everything in that $50 million budget, except for this one $250,000 suggested line item. There are three of us who believe that this $250,000 line item should be in the budget, there are two of us who don’t. And the Mayor is now threatening to veto the budget — the budget — over a $250,000 line item. I just don’t understand the situation.
The video of this meeting is now available on the City’s website. I highly recommend that anyone who is truly interested in the future of Gaithersburg, and Olde Towne in particular, watch this video. There were several items of discussion, most of which were largely uncontroversial. Sadly, the $25 million dollar swimming pool/perpetual money sink was not a topic of controversy or discussion beyond the incidental, at least among the Mayor and Council. As far as they appear to be concerned, a certain, perpetual, annual million-dollar operating loss for a swimming pool is a perfectly acceptable burden for the City, but — according to the Mayor and council members Alster and Edens — without an offsetting revenue source or detailed analysis of how much would be needed to cover unknowable future projects, a one-time $250,000 set-aside for homeownership assistance is simply too much for the taxpayers to bear.
The one thing that, to my mind, seemed abundantly clear was that this really had next to nothing to do with a quarter of a million dollars. The City has bits of money stashed away in all manner of budget line items, including for other uncertain expenses without dedicated funding such as assistance for school playgrounds. Putting money in this homeownership assistance program is not the same thing as spending it, and if it turns out they don’t need the money they can zero out the line item in the future, transferring the money back to the undesignated balance if that’s appropriate. No, this argument was a proxy for something else. Things are changing in the City. It’s getting ever more expensive to run this City, and projects like the swimming pool are causing the budget to burst at the seams. At the same time, the housing stock in the older parts of town are in serious decline, and it’s no longer the case that the City can count on the steady diet of greenfield developments to distract everyone from this fact. There are major battles ahead, with developers, homeowners, taxpayers, business owners, renters, affordable housing advocates and the County all taking up sides. I expect that we ain’t seen nothing yet.