Pittman and Friends Podcast
Welcome to Pittman and Friends, the curiously probing, sometimes awkward, but always revealing conversations between your host, Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman - that’s me - and whatever brave and willing public servant, community leader, or elected official I can find who has something to say that you should hear.
This podcast is provided as a public service of Anne Arundel County Government, so don’t expect me to get all partisan here. This is about the age-old art of government - of, by, and for the people.
Pittman and Friends Podcast
Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is with Budget Officer Chris Trumbauer
Peek behind the curtain of local government finance with County Executive Steuart Pittman and Budget Officer Chris Trumbauer as they reveal how Anne Arundel County achieves fiscal resilience while expanding essential services.
Trumbauer, who initially joined the administration as a Director of Policy and Communications before becoming Budget Officer, brings unique insight into the county's financial strategy. "Budget isn't numbers," he explains. "Budget's about values, budget's about people." This philosophy has guided the county through six budget cycles, creating what Trumbauer calls "a strong fiscal foundation" that protects residents during economic uncertainty.
The conversation illuminates Anne Arundel's remarkable financial achievements: maintaining the lowest tax rates in Central Maryland, securing AAA bond ratings from all three major agencies, and building a $170 million rainy day fund—all while delivering record education funding and absorbing $12 million in costs shifted from the state. Trumbauer reveals the "secret sauce" that makes this possible, including conservative revenue projections and strategic long-term planning.
Most compelling is their discussion of fiscal responsibility as a moral imperative. When economic windfalls came during real estate booms, the county deliberately avoided spending temporary surges on recurring expenses—unlike many jurisdictions that later faced painful deficits. "We fix our roof when it's sunny," Trumbauer notes, explaining how this approach creates resilience against potential storms on the economic horizon.
For anyone interested in how government actually works, this conversation offers a masterclass in responsible governance that balances fiscal discipline with community needs.
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Welcome to Pittman and Friends. The curiously probing, sometimes awkward but always revealing conversations between your host, Anne Arundel County Executive Steuart Pittman - that's me - and whatever brave and willing public servant, community leader, or elected official I can find who has something to say that you should hear. This podcast is provided as a public service of Anne Arundel County, so don't expect me to get all partisan here. This is about the age-old art of government of, by, and for the people. Welcome, everybody. I am here today with a really good friend, a really cool person, the Budget Officer of Anne Arundel County, Chris Trumbauer. Welcome.
Chris Trumbauer:Wow, those things don't normally all sync up, but sure.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Welcome. Hey, you know what, I got to warn y'all that Chris was on an airplane all night, and before that he was in a race in the mountains in California for the weekend, running 100 kilometers, which is about 60 miles. And so if he falls asleep, I'll just keep it going, yeah.
Chris Trumbauer:I'm good, good.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Yeah, you're good.
Chris Trumbauer:Yeah, like, talking about the budget is like adrenaline to me, so it'll be fine. Sure, your listeners are gonna love it.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Chris is normally a very energetic person. He claims he had a really good time doing that. I can't imagine, but anyway. So, budget officer, it's budget season, and I thought it'd be a really good time to sit down with you and talk big picture about what the budget office does. And that seems like a boring topic, but actually, it's not. It's really probably the most important. It's definitely the most important thing that our administration does every year and it's how we're judged. So tell me what the budget office is, how many people, and then we'll talk about what the budget officer is in the charter.
Chris Trumbauer:Okay, so the budget office is nine people, including me, but I don't really do anything. So it's the other eight people that do all the work and they're budget analysts and what they're responsible for is we divide up all the different departments of the county. You know you have like 25, 30 different departments and agencies, and we have to track their budgets throughout the year. But, as you mentioned, right now it's budget season, which is like the one time a year where people pay attention to us, right? So we're putting together your budget for the upcoming fiscal year, and every single department has their own little micro budget that we have to put together, make sure it's balanced, make sure they have the resources that they need.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :It's budget season. You're really kind of past putting together the budget proposal. You're in the process of actually sending it to the printer. I assume.
Chris Trumbauer:Right, at this moment in time, as we're speaking, it's getting the final proof, it's going to the printer. Okay, right, but by the time people hear this, you will have already introduced the budget.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Exactly, and then you'll be in the process of working with the auditor and the council to make it even better, right?
Chris Trumbauer:Yeah, absolutely. They have 45 days to check our work.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Okay, and I will just say that your team is awesome. I remember the very first budget. This was before you were the budget officer, you were part of our administration, but remember that first budget and we celebrated when it passed through.
Chris Trumbauer:The council, are you asking if I remember the karaoke.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :The karaoke at Stan and Joe's.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Yeah, yeah. I didn't know budget, people could sing.
Chris Trumbauer:Well, you know life's full of surprises.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :They didn't know that some of them could sing either. Anyway, it was a whole lot of fun. It's a good team. They work really really hard and really they know. These analysts know county government, um, inside out and they their job is to really engage with the staff in every department, figure out where we can trim, uh, and where we can't, and where we can, uh, where we need to add some some money for some more services. Yeah, well, the other, the other big big part is the revenue projection.
Chris Trumbauer:So you know, just like you have a budget at home and you have to figure out how much your paycheck is and that's what you can spend, right. We have to do that on a much bigger scale, and we have an excellent revenue estimator. It's Hujahasim. He's been here for you know, been with the county for 12 plus years, I think, so he knows what he's doing and he gives us the numbers and you tell us what you want to do and we do a little bit of magic and we figure out a way to make it happen.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Yeah, yeah, or at least you try, and it's an interesting dynamic. We'll get into that. We'll get into the fact that Anne Arundel County really has been incredibly responsible. I would say even before our administration tried to give credit where it's due in the past. But in our administration particularly, which is why we have a pretty darn good budget that people will see this year. But the county charter, which I think is a fascinating document, they really understood how important budgeting and finance was, and the budget officer in our charter is where in the succession.
Chris Trumbauer:You mean, like, if you're out of town or something.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Or die or something like that. Well, certainly we're not going to talk about that. Or go to jail, like two county executives have of the 10.
Chris Trumbauer:Listen, I'm rooting for you.
Chris Trumbauer:I think you're going to be fine, right. But yeah, so the succession is you have a chief administrative officer who, I believe has been on the show. She is the next one, and then if she's unable to fill that role because, like you're both out of town at the same thing, then you know, unfortunately I you know I pick up that role at that point.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :You pick up that role and budget officer John Hammond actually served as county executive, while the council ultimately replaces the county executive when they go to jail in that case. Yeah, yeah, I remember that, so you could be in that position and the reason for that is the budget officer really knows county government.
Chris Trumbauer:n be clear, I do not want to be in that position, so I just like to keep you where you are.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Well um, I will say that, uh, and we'll get into you.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :We should start talking about you a little bit and how you ended up in this job. People don't want to hear that but there were a lot of people who thought that you should run for county executive because you were on the county council and you were highly, highly respected and you actually spent a week, I understand, hanging out at the budget office. I'm not giving any council members ideas right now. Hanging out at the budget office during the process so that you would learn it right.
Chris Trumbauer:Well, I mean, I think that's grown into a little bit of an urban legend. But yeah, so what I used to do because I was on the county council from 2010 to 2018.
Chris Trumbauer:And when budget season comes around, you know I had a job right. I had a 40 plus hour a week job. I would take time off the job so that I could go down and meet with Teresa Sutherland, the auditor, or you know, talk to John Hammond, who was a budget officer at the time, and just try and figure out what's going on, because I knew how important budget was, and I wanted to figure out how it all works. And so I guess I did. And that's why when you had a vacancy at budget officer and you're like let's throw Trumbauer over there even though, to your listeners, I have absolutely zero formal budget or finance training. But I have a lot of experience actually working on budgets, working on Anne Arundel County budgets for my role in the legislative branch. But then when your administration first came on, I was kind of your liaison to the budget office and then, I guess for reasons only known to you, you stuck me over there and I've been there ever since.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Well, if we back up a little bit. So you did not want to run for county executive?
Chris Trumbauer:I did not.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Nobody did.
Chris Trumbauer:Nobody wanted to challenge the incumbent.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Well, there were some people who did, and I ended up being the candidate, I think, because there was nobody else. And I remember preparing for one of my first debates presentations. You role modeled for me how to do it and so, to be perfectly honest, I've always been a little bit intimidated by you, that you're the person who really knows this job, knows how to do this before I did. I think I've caught up, okay, I think I've learned the job.
Chris Trumbauer:Yeah, you're doing great, no question about it.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :But, but so instead, what I did was I asked you to serve in the administration when I got elected.
Chris Trumbauer:Yeah, which I wasn't planning to do.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :No.
Chris Trumbauer:Yeah, he's like I wasn't angling for that.
Chris Trumbauer:You kind of brought me over.
Chris Trumbauer:No, you and Pete Barron. You ganged up on me, yeah.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Yeah, so you were the co-chair of the transition committee.
Chris Trumbauer:That's right.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :With former county executive Janet Owens.
Chris Trumbauer:That's right, yeah.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :And then you had to tell your boss you waited until I got elected, but we were recruiting you the whole time. And then we put you in a position which was poli coms, right.
Chris Trumbauer:Yeah, you asked me to create a position for myself, so I said I wanted to be policy and communication, because they go hand in hand. You can have the best policy in the world, but if you can't explain it to people, it's no good. And if you're a really good explainer but you got nothing to explain, what's the point, right? So I wanted to mix those two together, and it was, it was a pretty wild ride
County Executive Steuart Pittman :So, in other words, you have been at the core of the work that the administration has has done since day one. And, and uh, and then we well, we had John Hammond and he stuck around to help us get through that first budget. But really, Jessica Leys was acting and she ended up over at Rec and Parks, which is where her heart was. And then we hired somebody for a year. Didn't work out all that well and we needed an acting while we did. The idea was to do a recruitment. I think when you first went in, wasn't it going to be temporary?
Chris Trumbauer:Yeah, Matt Power was your CAO at the time and he's like oh, come on, man, just go over there and do it for a while. We'll hire someone, it'll be fine, yeah.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :And, it wasn't just that you were good at it. But you actually said you liked it, right.
Chris Trumbauer:Yeah, I mean it really grew on me because I really liked the budget and, as we said at the beginning, we have just an amazing team of people. That's, that's, they're really great and smart and hard working, and so being a part of that team and getting to run your interference for them and getting to harness their potential and then matching that up with the kind of things that you're trying to do for Anne Arundel County. I mean, that's exciting, because I've we talk about this a lot, but you know budget isn't numbers. I mean it is, but not really, right. Budget's about values, budget's about people, and that's what gets me excited. And so the budget is just a giant jigsaw puzzle putting all the pieces together to achieve what you're trying to do, and that is exciting to me.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :So we got to work together on a budget to me. So we got to work together on a budget and it was for me, it was like I just knew it was right to have a person in that position who really shared my values, and I had no doubt ever about that sharing the values. And so when you told me there was no money to do something I wanted to do, I believed you.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Wow, that's good to know and sometimes you know when it's somebody who doesn't share your values. You know, and we've talked about stories in the past of county executives and budget officers and budget teams where there's a real battle going on all the time and that would be terrible. So we've had a good run. How many budgets have we done together?
Chris Trumbauer:Well, this will be our sixth. Okay, well, I mean, this will be your seventh budget.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :It'll be my seventh.
Chris Trumbauer:I was involved in the first one, but actually being a part of the budget office, I guess this will be my fifth one where I've been your budget officer.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Okay.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Okay, so I will say that. Well, both of us remember the COVID budget. The projections were that the economy was going to kind of tank.
Chris Trumbauer:There would be a recession possibly, and so-.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Well, it would have if the government hadn't poured in billions of dollars. Yeah, yeah, well, and so the government, the federal government, was a partner in that, and I will say that even started under the Trump administration with the CARES.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Act and a lot of that support.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :And then it continued when Biden got elected. But our economy was doing well, so we've had a good run. And then this year, I was very worried that we would not be able to what I often say protect our people from negative impacts of federal cuts and protect our people from what might happen to the economy. To the economy, and a lot of us thought that in this year's budget that there would be. It would be cuts and maybe even tax increases. That's what's been going on at the state level. That's what's been going on at the federal level. You know, major tax increases with tariffs and major cuts everywhere thanks to DOGE and all of that, and it's a scary time. But we've come out with something pretty good, don't you think?
Chris Trumbauer:I mean, I think it's a pretty good budget and, like you said, we were a little anxious that we wouldn't be able to do everything you wanted to do with our existing revenue because of some of the things you mentioned, but we had a couple things going for us. We do have a really strong fiscal foundation because of the last several years of budgeting. We have some of the constructs of our particular county budget are, you know, in our favor. We absorbed a lot of things this year. Right, we absorbed. Uh, the state had their own budget issues and, as one does, they push a little bit of it down to us and so we had to pick that up.
Chris Trumbauer:Um, we've got, uh, definitely.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Yeah, we're talking like 12 million dollars.
Chris Trumbauer:Yeah, about 12, about 12 million, and that's not as a little bit more from that.
Chris Trumbauer:Well, it's about um, nine million, uh, for the for the teacher for the share of teacher pensions. That the's about nine million for the for the teacher for the share of teacher pensions that the state used to pay for and now the counties have to. Same thing, you know, with the community college, and then there's a shift in the county proportion that we pay for Estat, the State Department of Assessments and Taxations, to do their work. And so you add all that together, it's twelve million. So we had to absorb that.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :So, yeah, we were all very worried, not just because it was going on the state level but federal as well, and we're always worried about what we're going to be able to do in the budget. So we do our budget town halls in January, February. You sit with me and we listen in all seven council districts and then you do presentations, and in your presentations you shared some of the projections that we had pretty good recurring revenue, like $105 million over the year before, something like that and then you showed that there wouldn't be much left over for new spending because of increased costs and expected increased costs, spending because of increased costs and expected increased costs. And so tell us how it works, how we get from, you know, from Budget Town Hall to where we are today.
Chris Trumbauer:Sure. So at the Budget Town Hall, which are generally in January, you know, we've got about half a year of data to kind of look so far in the fiscal year and project ahead. We're also doing rough estimates on some of the building blocks of the budget. Like what do we think, you know, the employee pay packages might be? What do we think the contract renewals are going to add up to? What are some other big-picture things that are out there that we know we're going to have to adjust, and we kind of keep a running tab of that. So when we're doing the budget town halls, we don't know exactly how everything's going to end up, but we kind of have a decent feel for how it's going. And what we knew then and what we now know is that the expenditure side, the cost side, was going up for a number of things, and this is a phenomenon going all over the place, right, every government, every household budget. So we needed to figure out a way you know to make that, like you mentioned, was looking pretty good.
Chris Trumbauer:We've got strong revenue. Our big sources are property tax, income tax and recordation and transfer tax, and property tax is solid Income tax. We have a good base. Our projections are going to start slowing in terms of future growth for all the macroeconomic reasons that you mentioned before. And recordation and transfer taxes is the little bit that we get for real estate transactions. That went down precipitously a couple years ago, and it's kind of bounced off the bottom and is starting to come up a little bit. So that's kind of a good news story.
Chris Trumbauer:But all that is to say we've got a pretty solid revenue foundation and it's not growing gangbusters at the moment, but it still looks okay. So what we were messaging at those town halls is county's looking okay. But we're not going to have the same continued amount of growth that we've seen in some of your previous budgets. And that ended up being true. But we're not also in a scenario where we had to make dramatic reductions in the services that people depend on or, you know, start taking away from some of the things that we put money in to help us out in the future.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :And one of the things that we heard in the budget town halls over and over again was that people were worried about the most vulnerable Anne Arundel County residents economically and how they would fare under the Trump administration's threats to cut education, to cut a lot of health and human services, to cut housing money, to cut possibly Medicaid Medicare, and so I heard a strong message that we should really be careful that we continue to protect those folks. So as we got into the um, the requests from departments, we hear from each department. Your staff works with them. First they come up with their departmental budget proposals and and they massage what they've been doing and see what, see if they can make, you know, a few reductions without hurting services. And then the departments often come out with proposals, most of which we know about in advance.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Some of them were talked about at budget town halls. You knew. I knew that there were some things that I felt like we could almost not live without on the health and human services side of things, and so when I was hearing them, I knew we couldn't say yes because we didn't know if we would be able to fund them. So we said we categorized the wants in category one, two, three. When we got to the end, there was a big question about whether we didn't look like we could do it. But then you all are constantly looking at. Things change during the process and you figured out that there was some additional money that we could use to cover some of that stuff. Do you want to tell us what that was?
Chris Trumbauer:Well, sure, I mean, there was a bunch of different secret sauce that we used. For some of the health and human services things. We were able to use some of the other funding streams that the county gets through our opioid restitution fund and things like that where we could take some of the programs they had proposed, and they were compatible with those other funding streams, and so we could do that. We also got some late-breaking favorable news from the state where they put together their personal property estimates, and that had gone up a little bit. So we were able to incorporate that. And then we talked about the idea of there was a, you know, the parking fee that that people paid in this county for you know the last 30 years and hasn't changed, it hadn't gone up as a flat fee. And we thought, well, you know, everything else has gone up a lot and that's not indexed mostly around the airport. Yeah, yeah, the paid parking lots.
Chris Trumbauer:So we did that and we threw a bunch of stuff together because you were pretty loud and clear. Like these are the programs that you need to keep going at this point in time, and so we bent over backwards to find a way to do that, and we wanted to do it.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Well, and then a big one was also the, the value of what we were putting into the OPEB. The retiree health was had done well, because the stock market had done well, right. Right.
Chris Trumbauer:So we have a. We have a fund that helps pay for our retiree health care, and the way that works is, you know, we have a bunch of market investments and when the market does well, that means that there are returns from that that are going into the fund, and so we have to put essentially less cash in to augment that and it doesn't jump up and down really drastically because it does a five-year average of market returns. And it just happened that the latest valuation they did, the new two years that came on board were really great years, and the two years that dropped off the previous sixth and seventh year, were terrible years, and so it brought that market return average up. And so we see that whenever they do the valuation, sometimes it goes up, sometimes it goes down, and so it's standard policy. But when we got that number back from our actuary, that allowed us to free up some of those funds and put them to the other expenditures that you really wanted to do.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :So that seemed fair game and we were able to produce a budget that actually is $52 million over the previous year. For the Board of Education, that's a record. $50 million was the most we'd ever done in the past.
Chris Trumbauer:That doesn't even include the $9 million of teacher pensions we had to absorb too.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Right, right, and we were able to do a lot of the things that had proven to work during the pandemic and then been funded by federal money, that we then were trying to decide whether we should maybe fund them one time, whether we could actually make them recurring.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :So things like the food bank getting $1.5 million, which was what they requested in the budget, but also things like the real-time information center, the police department to add another shift with five new positions and create our new animal services department, Department of Animal Services, to really deliver at our shelter, which hadn't been funded well, as well as in the fire department. And when you look around county government, it wasn't a bad year, not a bad year at all, and so my question is how is it that Anne Arundel County is as resilient as we are? And we were told we were resilient by the three bond rating agencies who we do our presentation and the third year in a row, three AAA bond ratings even in this and they were asking questions about how are we going to deal with a potential recession or potential layoffs of a lot of federal workers. They were really looking at us as maybe vulnerable. So, can you give your thoughts on why we're resilient to economic downturn to some degree, and what it is that you do in the budget office that helps make that so.
Chris Trumbauer:Sure. Well, so we're resilient, as you say, for a couple different reasons, but one of the primary ones is because we've been budgeting conservatively, and an example of that is a few years ago, when real estate value and activity was going way, way up. We had a huge peak. We knew that that wasn't sustainable, so we didn't budget, we didn't spend all that money on recurring costs. Now, as we know, the real estate market went down. Our revenue that was attached to that went down. But we're not here. I'm not freaking out, you're not freaking out because it just went back down to the level we budgeted to and that allowed us to not be in a deficit, right.
Chris Trumbauer:So, if we had spent all that money like we did the county did in, you know, 25 years ago during the Great Recession, and then they were in a big hole, you know we'd be in trouble. We also have about $170 million in our revenue reserve fund which is there for if and when the next Great Recession does come.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :We have grown and grown and grown by getting council bills to authorize a higher revenue reserve.
Chris Trumbauer:That's right. Yes, you and the council have partnered to bring that up now to 8% of the county's general operating revenue.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :And we're fully funding that.
Chris Trumbauer:Yeah.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :So what I've learned is there are all these little gimmicks that get done in various jurisdictions that you can budget irresponsibly or responsibly, and we have chosen the responsible route. And when you look at I don't want to throw it. Well, I can throw the feds under the bus. They create money, they just borrow it right. They don't have to balance their budget really, they just create money and they're continuing to do that. They want a new debt ceiling that's way higher than the one they've got. At the state level. They do balance their budget every year, but they know if a structural deficit is coming, and DLS has been telling them since 2017.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :There's this whole debate over whether you know the current problem is caused by the current governor or whether it is years and years in the making, and to me, looking at those gimmicks, it was years and years in the making.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :No question about it. When you have one-time money like you didn't hire people, therefore, at the end of the year, you have money which happened, you know, during the last administration a lot or you have federal money and you know it's not going to be recurring. When you start spending it on recurring stuff, then you create deficits. So we did not do those things, and I want to thank you for not letting me get away with doing those things. I mean, you never really gave that option, but I think it was always clear that one of the things I wanted to do was be fiscally responsible, and it was always clear that you knew how to do that, and your team knew how to do that. So here we are, but we are facing what some economists, a lot of economists are starting to say might well be an economic downturn, maybe even a recession. So how will that change and how will we deal with that if it comes in Anne Arundel?
Chris Trumbauer:So, that's.
Chris Trumbauer:I mean, that's a loaded question because we don't know when that might be or what it will look like exactly.
Chris Trumbauer:But what I can say is that we've put in that strong foundation to be as prepared as we can, and that includes having the maximum amount of funding in our rainy day fund it can. It includes conservative budgeting so that we're not over leveraged and if we don't quite meet our revenue projections we're not in super deep trouble. We're also protected in some other things, like we have a very generous homestead credit on our property tax rate right. So if you get a new assessment and your home value goes up you know 25, 30% you're only going to pay incrementally 2% a year on that until it catches up. So many people are being taxed at a much lower assessment rate than market value of their house. Now, that's good for them as a homeowner, but for the county that means that even if property values stagnated or went down, we wouldn't lose revenue until it ate up all of that buffer that the Homestead Credit created, and right now it's over $13 billion of value in our county. That we have is that insulation. But we've done a lot of things.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :And I will note that 2% is much lower than some jurisdictions that are. The state allows you to go up to ten percent a year increase. Sure, um and every others are in somewhere between two and ten, but we've chosen to keep it at two.
Chris Trumbauer:Yes, uh, two percent. I think that that's either the lowest or among the lowest of of all the counties, um, but you know, we have a saying in budget world that you know, know, you fix your roof when it's sunny, right? So we've had a good run the last few years and we've been doing things to prepare for the next rainstorm, right, and it's not storming yet. But, as you mentioned, I think we see some clouds on the horizon, and so it's a good thing. We did all those things while we had the ability to do so.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :Well, I want to thank you for all the work that you do and I will note that, in addition to what you do as our budget officer, you are an advisor to the administration on every issue. When we need you, when you have something to say, you're right there. You're on the fourth floor with us.
Chris Trumbauer:Yeah, I'm not bashful.
County Executive Steuart Pittman :And part of the team, yeah yeah. And so the last thing I want to say to anybody who's listening is that you have, I hope, engaged in this process and followed it, and I'm really glad that you do. Because a lot of what's in the budget is reflected in what people have said at town halls. The council now has the budget and they're doing two hearings coming up and I hope you'll engage with that as well, and I hope that you all appreciate that you live in a county that takes spending taxpayers dollars very seriously. What we didn't note was that the tax rates are staying the same in this budget, actually lowered a little bit on the property tax, staying the same on the income tax, and we remain the lowest in the Central Maryland region on both, and we're proud of that. So thank you, Chris. Sure, and if you're watching this with a subscribe button on your screen, please hit it, and you'll get on our list to be notified about who our next guest is and what other cool stuff's going on in Anne Arundel County.
