Comparing recessions nearly two decades apart can be dicey, but there are a few things about how Howard County government handled the downturns of 1991 and 2009 that titillate the political imagination.
Republicans often rail against tax increases, but Republican County Executive Charles I. Ecker's first budget of $270.3 million proposed in April, 1991, included a 14-cent increase in the county property tax rate, a 5.6 percent spending cut, plus 40 layoffs. What's more, the two County Council Republicans at the time voted for that budget, and there was no taxpayer backlash. Ecker is proud that his efforts to build a bipartisan consensus to face the crisis did not result in the kind of taxpayer-imposed revenue restraints that have limited government in Anne Arundel and Prince Georges counties, he said recently.
This year, County Executive Ken Ulman did not propose raising tax rates in his $1.4 billion plan. He wants to cut general fund spending by 4 percent and ordered a four-day furlough for most workers outside the school system, while laying off nine people.
What would have been the political reaction at the time if their situations were reversed?
Is it politically harder for a normally tax-averse, austere Republican to raise taxes than for a Democrat?
Is it politically harder for a Democrat to order layoffs, furloughs and withhold cost-of-living pay raises to county employee union members who often support him politically?
Ulman wasn't expressing any opinions recently when asked to gauge the reaction if he had proposed a 14-cent rate increase.
"I don't know," he said. One thing that weighed on his decision, he said, was the knowledge that most people's property tax bills will rise slightly anyway, because of rising state assessments.
What he didn't say is that next year he's hoping to run for re-election, and wouldn't want a tax increase dogging him in the campaign. Still, he's cut some things over the past two years that provide annual savings, like elimination of the government's television studio, the print shop and curbing take-home vehicles.
Ecker's decisions came several years before the conservative Republican revolution of 1994, when the partisan split between the major parties seemed to harden and begin growing wider.
Also, Ecker is no conservative ideologue, but is more of a moderate Republican.
He's a very pragmatic official who engaged both his own party members and the tax critics of the day to help him find a way out of the fiscal morass.
