Good afternoon everyone and welcome to this session of the Montgomery County Council. Today we are reviewing state legislation and this is our less formal session that we have on the calendar to go over state legislation. We thought today we would get an update on where we are on the different pieces and then we did have one bill that popped up late on Friday that we were asked to discuss today but for the most part our focus today is just a quick overview on where we are in this part of the legislative session and so I will turn over to you all. Good afternoon Council President Council members Kathleen Gouche with Intergovernmental Relations. Our Director Melny Wenger has a family commitment today, so she's asked me to take the lead off here with our team. So in terms of today, as the Council President indicated, the plan is to provide an informal general update and answer any questions that you may have in each of these areas. In terms of timeline, we're a month from the end of session, four weeks. And today is the courtesy day. This is a date by which committees, if they report their bills to the floor, by today, they are guaranteed a vote in the chamber by the Cross-Award date, which is next Monday. And Cross-Award date is important for everybody who has an interest in a bill because if it doesn't get passed out of the original chamber by that date, next Monday, there's no guarantee that it will be considered in the opposite chamber. It would be assigned to the Rules Committee in the opposite chamber and then require two thers vote to even get it assigned to a standing committee. Most almost all serious bills have had public hearings already. And if a bill is just getting heard this week, it is likely to not be considered very serious. So there are some exceptions to that. An important tax proposal that would impose a sales tax on business to business services came out of the House Rules Committee last House and Senate last week and will be heard in the House on Tuesday. So that will be heard this week. In terms of budget and related tax issues, as you're very well aware, the budget challenges remain overwhelmingly serious. The governor's supplemental budget that he sent to the General Assembly this past week essentially maintain the status quo with what was expected to be $100 million surplus or fiscal 2026. Unfortunately, two days later, the Board of Revenue Estimates came up with its projected right down of 347 million in revenues. So the General Assembly is now dealing with that. We are going to be about two weeks behind a normal budget decision timeline. normally the budget bill would be on the floor of the chamber that's moving it by today. We don't even have subcommittees having made budget decisions. And there's no nonschedule for this week. So no budget decisions in the subcommittee are full committee, no decision scattered for this week, so it will start up again next week. We, of course, I think to continue what Melanie has indicated also in prior weeks, there are ongoing discussions behind the scenes between House of Senate leadership with the idea of still trying to meet the 83rd day deadline for passage of the budget and sending it to the governor. And of course, if they miss that, they would be shooting for Sinai die and as Mel has explained, if they don't pass a budget by Sinai die, there's an automatic extension of the session to deal with budget issues. Capital budget decisions are backed up behind the operating budget. I'll put it operating budget has to be passed before those are handled so they're backed up. Moving, I think I would move into housing Madam President unless you had. Okay. In the housing area, the key, one of the key bills were monitoring as the Governor's Housing for Jobs Act. And Mako, as you know, opposes that bill unless there are very, very significant amendments. There's been no action on that bill, no voting schedules, nobody's session scheduled yet even this week. make it is just continuing strong opposition unless there are very significant amendments working with the governor's office. So no movement on that bill yet. I'm going to defer to Leslie Fry to touch base about the just cause bill. Sure, so the good cause ofiction bill has not moved in the House or the Senate yet. There are rumors I would call them of amendments in the Senate but nothing has been introduced yet. It's not scheduled for a vote so I don't have anything to present to you on that. Just as a reminder, this was a priority of the county this year. So no update, that's okay. OK, thank you Leslie. So the next topic, Madam President, is education. Just keep moving. You're moving, OK. OK, so you get some good news. All right. And then we'll see you later. All right, see you later. So on the education front, a key bill that we've been monitoring is one of the governor's bills that came in essentially as a part of the budget. It's the Maryland Excellence in Maryland's Public Schools Act and it's related to the budget because on the one hand it, as you know, would implement a number of changes to support the state's efforts to retain recruit teachers. And But as you know, it would implement a number of changes to support the state's efforts to retain, recruit teachers, and deal with teacher shortages, teacher training, professional development, etc. But it also included two provisions with short-term and long-term fiscal impacts. The collaborative time issue that we've talked about before, the governor had proposed a four-year pause in implementing mandated collaborative time. That also came along with a cut to our per-people foundation formula, which flowed through to our compensatory ed formula and our English language learners formula. And so it was a significant reduction in state aid from Montgomery County with about 14.4 million. That bill also as it was introduced had a two-year pause on increased funding for community schools. Although they would be funded as expected, this FY26, they would then be level funded for two years while the state paused and evaluated that program and developed best practices and some more guidance. That bill actually came out of the house last week and was amended by the House to delete all the parts of the bill that have fiscal impact. So interestingly, they are allowing a pause. It's allowing a pause, it allowing a pause in mandated collaborative time, implementation, but they are not adjusting the formulas. So the formulas are back to the way they are under current law, as passed by the House. Senate has not yet voted on that bill. I think I'll turn this over to Garrett for some environment and energy updates. Thanks Kathleen. Garrett can show it with the EP. So I'll give you updates on two bills today. The first one is the major solar bill, HB 1036. This is the bill that would remove local land use and taxation authority and essentially allow solar everywhere as long as it conforms to new statewide. Sighting standards. Council voted to oppose this bill, but it looks like it's very likely to pass. So we while vocalizing our opposition are also continuing to try to work very actively to hopefully improve the bill. NAKO was able to sit down with some of the solar companies and environmental reps over the last couple weeks and worked out a series of amendments which look likely to be included in the bill. The most important to there are changes to the livability standards and removing the loss of taxation authority. So the taxation stuff most likely is going to come out of the bill. We think all the things that Mako has been arguing for are good ideas. They don't do anything about local land use authority and they don't do anything to preserve our agricultural lands. So we're continuing to work on that. We're hearing an openness to potentially one additional amendment that would do something to help with ag preservation. So we've offered a number of ideas that would help to steer solar away from our best farmlands or limit how much can go on our best farmlands. One of the concepts that's being discussed most actively right now would be a cap limiting the percentage of any county's agricultural priority preservation area that can be used for solar. And so the question is, what's the cap, right? What's the number? So that's what they're talking about at the moment. We will see where that goes. The other major bill that I want to talk about is HB 49, which covers the state's building energy performance standards law. So you all adopted regulations on BEPS last week, I believe, right? We've been working on this, so the state is meanwhile also, the state has a law and adopted under climate solutions now back in 2022. Established in the state's version of the building energy performance standards program. This year, MDE has put in a short bill, HB 49, that would clarify the Maryland Department of Environment's Authority to implement BEPS at the state level. That's become a vehicle for everybody's ideas about how to improve the states version of BEPS. There are a long list of amendments that are under consideration in the House right now. Most of those have the collective impact of adding flexibility for building owners to be able to comply with the state's version of BEPS. All the same folks saying all the same things that you all have heard for quite a bit over the last year or two. A number of those are gonna, are most likely to be added to the bill. A lot of those ideas are very much inspired by the direction we've gone with adding flexibility to the, to the county's version of BEPS. So the one big unresolved question at the moment is will the state explicitly allow counties to enforce our own version of BEPS? So we've moved ahead with this and we've been encouraged to move ahead with this. But one of the questions on the table is will there be actual amendment language that says counties that implement one implement their own version of BEPS are allowed to do that and building owners would only be subject to that county program and would essentially be able to ignore the state program. There are a couple different competing ideas about how that might work. our program could be grandfathered in as it is. There could be a provision that says any county can approve its own version of BEPS and the Maryland Department of Environment will approve any version that is at least as stringent as the state's version of BEPS. How exactly you compare stringency of the state's program and our program is an open question that no one has proposed a solution to in the law at the moment. So this is a very active conversation. I think it will be for the next three weeks. And I'd say it's 50-50 on whether the state is going to add language that explicitly allows counties to do this or not. They're also in the process of making so many changes to the state's law. They're adding a lot of flexibility. So it's quite possible that our program is already more stringent than where the state program may well land by the end of the session. So this is a bit of a moving target and we'll keep you updated as they make decisions over there. Great. I think Council Vice President, do you want to know how to question? Sure. Or two. Yeah, I was just wondering. I'm sorry. Thank you very much. Just going back on the solar bill, if I heard you correctly and what I'm aware of, as it currently sits, it would totally preimp the bill we passed a few years ago. So with the soil types and all that. It's been a lot of time on that. Okay, as did you. Okay, so just wanted to be clear. So it sounds like, let you respond, you're saying that it would be, there is a slight chance for some preservation in an amendment. But as of now, that does not exist and you'd be able to do solar pretty much anywhere. Which we are told, as of now, counties can be preempted by the state whenever someone wants to build a larger solar project above two megawatts of capacity. So this effectively isn't changing that but codifying it. Unfortunately, what we've heard is that the state intended and is now going to through amendment to lower that to projects above one megawatt. So that would give you what we did. So it will actually reduce our existing authority on projects above one megawatt, which we were not preempted by the state in the between one and 2MW range. But now projects above 1MW would also as long as they conform to the new sighting standards, statewide sighting standards, we would have to approve them administratively. So that was not in the bill as introduced, but apparently is being amended into the bill. We have offered quite a number of ideas on how they could support ag preservation through approaches that take into account soil classification. Let's try to avoid solar on the best farmland. My sense is they're unlikely to have that be the basis of whatever they do here in part because in other parts of the state there where it's a lot flatter, there can be very large areas that are essentially mostly just class one and two soil, and that if they took class one and two soil off the table as a statewide approach, it would just remove too much land from the ability for solar companies to go there and other parts of the state. So there's political hesitance to base it on class one and two soils, the way our ZTA works now. So we're, we're pushing on this, but I'm imagining the amendment that we end up with is a little bit different than the ZTA that we adopt. Just saying it's moving more in a cap direction of anything. Most likely. Thank you. Appreciate it. Oh. Okay. Leslie, I know has a couple of items in the Health and Human Services area and then Sarah has a couple of items in public safety and she'll round up the discussion in the policy areas. Okay, a couple of things I wanted to mention. I'm probably heard that the governor has added some money back to the proposed cuts for the DDA budget. We're storing about 95% of the cuts proposed for the current fiscal year and restoring about 150 million in cuts for next fiscal year, but that leaves about 300 million still out there in cost containment for the DDA budget. I think as far as direct impact to Montgomery County, the geographical rate differential is something that our providers receive and it has come to light that the state would need to do a waiver amendment with CMS in order to change that differential, which would obviously take some time. So I think for your budgetary planning purposes until that waiver is approved by, until and if that waiver is approved by CMS, I don't think that the state could actually eliminate that program. So that's what we're hearing. The other thing I wanted to mention is House Bill 429 Senate Bill 376. This would have been the bill to delegate nursing home inspection authority to counties. Should they request it? The bills haven't moved yet, and importantly, the bill requires MDH to split the cost of doing those inspections with a county who does request that authority. That may be why the bill has not moved this year. It did move out of the Senate last year. So I just wanted to give you an update on those two things. Sir. Hi everyone. A ceremony start with the Office of International Relations. A couple of updates on state bills. The bill that would allow increases in speed camera fines that is modeled after what happened with the work zone fines is making its way through that the Environmental Transportation Motor Vehicles and Transportation Subcommittee of ENT passed it out. It has not been voted on yet in JPR, but and again, just at the subcommittee level in the house, but it does seem to be moving. The fee would go from $40 to $50 for the first offense, and then through depending on how fast you go with different increments. It wasn't a maximum of 425. That was removed to give the judiciary, the judiciary's request on their discretion. So there's no top max on fees, I'm sorry, on fines of over 40 miles per hour and a post, over the post-it speed limit. The next bill would be the bill that we're trying to deal with with reckless and aggressive driving. That bill has been held in the Senate committee and also in the House. There are fiscal concerns that are related to that bill having to do with additional court cost, with increased prosecution. So it has just been held on fiscal issue right now. We continue to work very closely with the Councilmember Luki has been very, very involved. And we're all working aggressively to try to get this done this year. A third bill that you all had expressed interest in was speed cameras on high injury networkering network roads. There's two paths for this. One is a statewide bill that would cover state roads. Another is a local bill that would cover county and more local roads, county and local roads. The statewide bill seems to be moving, at least on the house side, a bit. We would prefer the local bill because it's more expansive. And there was, we had requested an amendment to the statewide bill just to allow local jurisdictions. It has to be camera programs to be able to keep their speed camera programs there. So we're continuing to work on that. Changing hats and putting on my federal hat. The Congress is working on a short term, well, it's another continuing resolution, as we all know, that would fund the government through the end of September. All airmarks are currently removed in that patch. So we have about $14 million in airmarks that would be gone for fiscal year 25. Assuming they're able to do something with that Friday, our department's at your approval submitted Airmark Project Request for FY26. All this seems fairly loose since Congress hasn't finished FY25, but we were requested to put things in for FY26. So we're all reading the papers and we all know what's going on and that is we don't know what's going on and we'll find out hopefully this week. And that's my report. Thank you all. Council member Mink. Just wanted to note my concern about the nursing home bill. I mean, this is something that we really need and they can avoid the state can avoid those costs by doing what they're supposed to do. So we'd love to think about how we can help escalate and support moving this bill forward, whether that's a council letter. Obviously we can all make our phone calls, etc. But I think it's important for us to show that we are proactively interested in doing what we can to move this. Thank you. We'll take that back and put our heads together. Council member Mink. Thank you. And if you could just let us know who the most strategic people to make phone calls to would be and how we should think about timeline, obviously everything is very crunched right now. But I don't know. I just don't know the label and strategically on the conversations that are happening behind the scenes here. information on that big right. Okay, thank you. We'll do that. Right. All right, I think that's the update, and then we can get information on that would be great. Okay, thank you. We'll do that. All right. I think that's the update and then we can move now to SB 968, the Howard County Patuxen River wildland use of motor vehicles and motorized equipment. Howard County bill 5-25 because I guess it impacts a Montgomery County places. Okay, so yes, this bill, as you can see from the title, went through the Howard County local delegation process, and it does relate to the Patuxent River Wildland and used with motor vehicles and motorized equipment and specifically would allow the Department of Natural Resources to enter into agreement with volunteers who use motor vehicles or motorized equipment to ensure safe and clear and safe access to pass in the wildland. So it was, as you can see, it didn't go through Montgomery County. I believe the Standing Committee, the Senate Education Energy Environment Committee, somehow became aware that Patuxent Wildland is actually located in both Montgomery County and Howard County, and asked for a position statement from the Senate delegation. We were with the Senate delegation last Thursday, and they asked us to find out if the County Executive and County Council supported the bill. The, I can tell you that the testimony from the sponsor in the Howard County delegation indicated that they have a volunteer group in Montgomery County. It's called the Howard County Iron Bridge Hounds. They've been working with DNR to obtain an agreement about helping to clear pass and maintain pass and then determine they needed a change to state law to allow that kind of agreement. I sent this out to our parks department in WSSC to find out if they own any of the property they don't. So there is property in Patuxen, there is property in Montgomery County that is part of the Patuxen River Wildland and that's the bill. Thank you. I don't know if anyone has any questions on that since we were asked. Steve, our opinion, or council member Lukis since this is up here in Neckwood Woods. Do you have any thoughts? It is in my district. I am in favor of doing things that help proactively maintain the trails in the best way possible So if this is what the delegation thinks is the most appropriate method to help get that work done then that's fine And I have heard zero Complaints are oppositions to this. So. Okay. Yeah. So I think you can communicate that. The delegation we talked about it and there's no objection and the council member who represents that district, her viewpoints and we've never heard any objection to it. Okay, thank you. So no formal position per se, but we can convey that. I think, if that's okay with the council member, Lucy, yes, I think that's fine. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Anything else, I think that will do it for us for state ledge. All right, we're done, we're adjourned. Thank you very much.