Yesterday, during the news recap of the podcast, but Paul and I stumbled with some big numbers. First, Paul fumbled a bit with decline in amount of money that the state returns to the county for education. He said that the state contribution had gone from $17 million when Ken Ulman first came into office to $3 million last year. It is actually worse than that. It has gone from $30 million to $3 million. $17 million is the amount that the governor would like HoCo to contribute to funding teacher pensions.
Shortly after that, Paul mentioned the $697 million budget request from the school system and I asked him if he was sure that was right. I asked him if he didn’t mean $67 million. No, he replied, it was $697 million.
Of course he was right. Out of the counties almost billion dollar budget, over 60% goes to the schools.
My bad.
A million here, a million there…
Our guest this week was Marsha McLaughlin, the HoCo Director of Planning and Zoning. As someone who often finds herself in the midst of contentious HoCo loco land use issues, we thought it might be interesting to get to know a little more about her.
For example, did you know she once worked in planning and zoning in the US Virgin Islands?
As she says "They have zoning everywhere."
You can listen to the 60th episode of “and then there’s that…” here.
