Tax Base

GOP leaders offer their own slots bill House Republican leaders yesterday floated an alternative to Gov. Martin O'Malley's slot machine gambling legislation, one they said would more effectively and immediately raise money to stave off the state's impending budget shortfall. Del. Anthony J. O'Donnell, the House minority leader, and Del. Christopher Shank, the minority whip, proposed raising $850 million by issuing six slots licenses that would be awarded through competitive bidding. The winners would have to comply with local rules in building their emporiums, and one location would be allowed per county.

Mahlon Straszheim gives Gov. Martin O'Malley his due. At least he has proposed a plan to deal with the state's fiscal problem instead of just hoping it would go away. "The state's budget deficit problem is real," said the economics professor. "This is not an imagined problem. We face very difficult actions if we are going to balance our books here." In recent weeks, O'Malley rolled out a series of tax proposals designed to raise money to make up for the deficit caused mainly by the promises made to public schools in the Thornton legislation, promises that came without funding.

For months, Baltimore's top Democrats have focused almost exclusively on crime and education in their bids for citywide office. But whoever wins in Tuesday's primary election will face four years of other daunting problems -- including many that have barely registered during the campaign. Bumpy roads and leaky sewers. Persistent pockets of poverty and neighborhoods riddled with abandoned homes. An increasingly clogged transportation system and a regional competition to attract relocating military workers.

For the second time in less than two weeks, all three Carroll County commissioners traveled to Annapolis yesterday to do battle with their own legislative delegation. The commissioners are opposing a bill on property tax reduction that they say could create a $43 million deficit in the county within five years. Criticizing tax relief, particularly in an election year, might be an unpopular stance, but when cuts adversely affect the quality of life in one of the area's fastest-growing counties, officials must take a stand, said Commissioner Dean L. Minnich.

Pointing to the city's improving financial picture, Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley is proposing a $2.32 billion budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1 -- a 6.7 percent increase over current spending that includes raises for all municipal workers and some targeted, though small, enhancements in services. The budget, to be presented publicly to the Board of Estimates today, includes $1.9 billion in operating funds, about a quarter of which goes for public safety, and $424 million for construction.

FROM 1995 to 2000, one in 10 Marylanders lit out for parts elsewhere, according to the Census Bureau. Of them, 10 percent went to sunny, income-tax-free Florida. And of them, almost a third - 14,654 Marylanders who became Floridians, to be exact - were older than 55, a result that shouldn't surprise anybody and certainly doesn't surprise Albert M. Johnston. "There's a big movement south," says Johnston, 81, who as a personnel executive for Maryland defense contractors used to see the migration up-close among new retirees.

COULD YOUR local government seize the home you own solely to transfer it to somebody who promises to pay higher taxes? That might strike you as bizarre, improbable and illegal. After all, the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits takings of private property for public use without just compensation, right? Correct. But what is a "public" use, and who gets to define it? Could it involve, as the Supreme Court heard Feb. 22, a municipal government hypothetically seizing a privately owned Motel 6 and transferring the property to a privately owned Ritz-Carlton hotel development group, simply because the latter would generate higher tax revenues?

LEVITTOWN, N.Y. - More than 50 years ago, World War II veterans and their families swarmed to Long Island for the single-family homes and green lawns of a new, affordable, middle-class dreamland called suburbia. But these days many of their grandchildren can no longer afford to live here. With census figures showing the number of 18- to 34-year-olds on the island down 20 percent between 1990 and 2000, employers worry about a shrinking labor force, politicians fret about a declining tax base and Long Islanders debate how much change they're willing to consider to stanch the population hemorrhage.

The Westminster Common Council is weighing an ordinance that would permit aircraft hangars on county-owned property that falls within city limits - a move that could increase the city's tax base in allowing for the development of additional hangars. Airport hangars are not among the types of buildings allowed in the restricted industrial zone that applies to the Westminster areas around the 26-year-old Carroll County Regional Airport. The city's zoning provision allows for the "manufacture and assembly of aircraft" but not for the storage and repair of the planes, said Gary Horst, who supervises the airport as administrator of the county's Office of Performance Auditing and Special Projects.

A REVOLUTION is under way in Carroll County. A new set of county commissioners, elected in 2002 after a hard-fought campaign against the county's laissez-faire growth stance, has been enacting rules to induce a more sustainable pace of development in the once rural, now booming suburb. The commissioners - Julia Walsh Gouge, Perry L. Jones Jr. and Dean L. Minnich - have passed new plans to protect Carroll's strained water supply, to rebalance its tax base by limiting conversion of industrial land to commercial use, and to deny approvals for homebuilding at earlier stages of school crowding.