Taxing Authority

Unhappiness over the Carroll County school board's decision to give Superintendent R. Edward Shilling a pay raise this summer has boiled over into an effort to strip the board of some of its powers. Members of Carroll's State House delegation will be discussing whether the board should have its budgetary responsibilities reduced.At issue is the board's accountability. The school board is not seen as a fiscally responsible body. Its decision to enter into a four-year contract with the superintendent with automatic pay increases has come back to haunt it. Teachers, angered they didn't get any cost-of-living increases this year, and citizens, feeling the superintendent is already well compensated, don't believe the board can properly manage its budget.

For the seventh time in recent years, the Anne Arundel County executive has ignored the recommendations of the county's School Board Nominating Convention, resurrecting the question: Why continue this charade?The process clearly doesn't work. The governor, who makes the official appointment, doesn't pay attention to the convention because the executive, who tells the governor whom to appoint, doesn't. As a result, the public has lost confidence in the process. Only a fraction of the 1,300 community groups who once sent delegates did so at the May convention.

RELATIONS BETWEEN Maryland's local governments and its school systems are in a deep trough. County executives view school administrators as spendthrifts who fail to acknowledge the new economic realities. School boards, meanwhile, see their role as the defenders of school children, period. That tension has always been inherent in a state of school systems that don't have their own taxing authority, but rarely has it become so bitter as today.In Howard County, where good schools have flowered alongside suburban growth over the past quarter-century, Executive Charles I. Ecker is threatening to fund the schools even below state-required levels.

THE BOTCHED renovation that has made Randallstown's Deer Park Elementary a sick building stems from a larger problem afflicting school systems throughout Maryland: lack of accountability. School systems here enjoy tremendous freedom from local government, a condition designed to give educators more power than politicians over school-related decisions. This arrangement has merit when it comes to instructional matters. But on fiscal matters, it has led to inefficiency and irresponsibility.Who is answerable to the public for the waste of $1.5 million on the Deer Park project?

IF THERE WAS any doubt about the breakdown in relations between Carroll County's legislative delegation and its commissioners, the General Assembly session that ended this month should sweep them aside.More than a jealous division of authority, there appears to be cynical disrespect. There's no creative tension at work here, but a counterproductive competition that threatens to undermine the already limited influence of the county in Annapolis. Local decisions, or at least the laws to enable those decisions to be made, need the approval of the legislature.

THOMAS TWOMBLY, a member of the Anne Arundel County Board of Education, complains that County Executive John G. Gary's effort to make the school system financially accountable to elected officials is "about power and money and control." It is. It's about giving the elected leaders more authority over where that money goes.The education lobby thinks there's something wrong with that; that school systems should be financial free agents. But they are not free agents because they don't raise their own taxes.

ANNAPOLIS -- House and Senate tax negotiations collapsed today, just when it appeared the General Assembly was about to work out its differences.The sudden reversal again raised the possibility that the state's 1993 budget may not be adopted by Monday's midnight adjournment deadline, which would force the 90-day session to be extended until it is.At the urging of Gov. William Donald Schaefer, tax conferees met last night and seemed on the verge of reaching...

Like the search for the elusive better mouse trap, Anne Arundel County politicians continue to look for a better way to select the school board.For about three decades, a nominating convention has met annually to vote on school board recommendations for the governor, who makes the final choice. But faith in that process has eroded lately because the governor has routinely ignored the convention's wishes and chosen candidates favored by the county executive, and also because conservative religious coalitions have taken over some sessions.

Unhappiness over the Carroll County school board's decision to give Superintendent R. Edward Shilling a pay raise this summer has boiled over into an effort to strip the board of some of its powers. Members of Carroll's State House delegation will be discussing whether the board should have its budgetary responsibilities reduced.At issue is the board's accountability. The school board is not seen as a fiscally responsible body. Its decision to enter into a four-year contract with the superintendent with automatic pay increases has come back to haunt it.Teachers, angered they didn't get any cost-of-living increases this year, and citizens, feeling that the superintendent is already well compensated, don't believe the board can properly manage its budget.

Baltimore County Councilman Donald Mason spearheaded the protest over property taxes in Dundalk that helped sweep him and others into office. He beat a drum against big taxes and bigger government for years. But now he says that if taxes must go up, why not raise the property tax?Come again?Mr. Mason's point -- theoretically at least a good one -- is that in spite of the recession, government hasn't drastically altered its mode of business. Politics and games still reign.On the state level, the governor threatens to chop emergency helicopter pilots or drafts a "doomsday budget," with sacrificial lambs he knows will never be sacrificed.