Montgomery County's Planning Board has begun considering new strategies for controlling growth. Taxes are definitely on the agenda:
In a wide-ranging discussion that will continue for several sessions, the board offered little comment about the proposals outlined by its staff in a report of more than 300 pages. But the call for higher taxes appears to mirror recent comments by Planning Board Chairman Royce Hanson, who told a County Council committee last week that drastic measures, such as a major increase in the gasoline tax, might be needed to have a real impact on traffic congestion.Montgomery is already well-known for having the highest transaction costs for acquiring a home of any county in the nation, though I imagine that the new taxes will help cover more of the costs associated with new development. Of course, the home recordation tax would impact not just the sale of new homes but old ones as well.
Among the board staff's proposals are doubling taxes that builders pay to fund schools to $21,000 on a single-family detached home; nearly tripling taxes for transportation to $10,810 on a single-family detached home; and increasing the recordation tax on residential home sales from $6.90 to $10 per $1,000 of home value.
Some may also question whether the county needs to work to control growth when the County has just experienced its slowest population growth in years. On the other hand, they continue to build condos like gangbusters in Bethesda and I imagine that the builders expect someone to buy them, so they current slow in population growth may just be a lull.
