By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Maryland families are getting squeezed from every direction this summer — a property tax bill that taxes the same house twice, a gas tax that climbs on autopilot without a single vote, hundreds of millions in state money propping up a horse racing industry that loses money every year, a sales tax exemption written specifically for data center corporations, and now a special legislative session aimed at redrawing the congressional map so that a fourth of the state’s voters lose their only Republican representative in Washington.
None of these are hidden. All of them are legal. And all of them follow the same pattern: the state finds the money it wants by taking more from the household and asking less of everyone, with the lobbyists to avoid it.
The state finds the money it wants by taking more from the household and asking less of everyone with the lobbyists to avoid it.
Taxed twice on the same house
Every Maryland property owner already pays two separate property taxes on one piece of property — a state rate and a county or municipal rate, billed together but legally distinct, with the state portion primarily funding debt service on general obligation bonds and the local portion funding schools, police, and county services. That’s the baseline. Montgomery County just gave homeowners a preview of how much room there is to raise it further without technically raising “the rate.”
Facing a budget gap, the County Council rejected County Executive Marc Elrich’s proposed 6.3-cent property tax rate increase — and instead voted to eliminate the Income Tax Offset Credit entirely, a credit that had knocked $692 off every owner-occupied homeowner’s bill. More than 190,000 Montgomery County households received that credit. All of them lose it starting with bills issued July 1, 2026. The county’s own numbers show the substitution isn’t neutral: a home assessed at $650,000, the county average, effectively absorbs the equivalent of a 10.6-cent tax hike from the ITOC repeal alone — nearly double what Elrich had proposed and rejected as too aggressive. Commercial properties pay no share of that increase; the council’s plan holds them harmless while billing it entirely to homeowners.
The council can now tell voters it didn’t raise the property tax rate. The bill says otherwise.
One Montgomery County analyst tracking his own tax history since 2012 found his 2026 bill rose 25%, with 63% of that increase directly attributable to the ITOC’s disappearance — a figure that outpaced local inflation by a wide margin over the same period. The council can now tell voters it didn’t raise the property tax rate. The bill says otherwise.
A tax hike that doesn’t need a vote
Maryland’s motor fuel tax doesn’t require the General Assembly to do anything to go up. Under a formula the state adopted in 2013, a portion of the gas tax rises automatically each July, tied to the Consumer Price Index, capped at an 8% annual increase, plus a second component tied to wholesale fuel prices — and by law, the inflation-linked portion can only go up, never down, even in years when inflation cools.
The rate ticked up again on July 1, 2026, to 46.6 cents a gallon on gasoline and 47.45 cents on diesel, on top of the federal 18.4-cent tax. House Minority Whip Jesse Pippy called the mechanism a “fundamental flaw,” noting the tax rises “because of the automatic formulas the Democratic majority pushed through a decade ago” — even in years, like this one, when Marylanders are already straining under other cost increases.
It is, functionally, a tax increase with no one to hold accountable for casting it.
Because the adjustment happens by statutory formula rather than a floor vote, undoing it requires the General Assembly to act — and since the increase takes effect every July while the legislature is typically out of session, the only mechanism available to stop or reverse it midyear is a special session, the same tool being used this August for redistricting, not for tax relief. It is, functionally, a tax increase with no one required to cast a recorded vote for it.
Half a billion dollars on horses that lose money
While homeowners in Montgomery County were losing a $692 credit, the state of Maryland has been spending on a very different scale to save its horse racing industry.
A 2020 law first authorized $375 million in 30-year bonds to rebuild Pimlico and Laurel Park. Since then, the state took ownership of Pimlico outright and purchased the intellectual property rights to the Preakness Stakes itself for $85 million, matching a competing bid from Churchill Downs. The Board of Public Works approved an additional $48.5 million purchase of Laurel Park itself, converting the track into a new training facility after an earlier plan to build on a Carroll County farm the state had already bought for $4.5 million was scrapped as “not viable due to environmental impacts and excessive costs.”
By this year, a legislative audit put the General Assembly’s total commitment to the Pimlico redevelopment and training facility project at $527 million — separate from the Laurel Park and Preakness rights purchases, meaning the state’s combined exposure across all of these deals now runs well above $650 million. The track has not been profitable. Its previous private owner said it lost roughly $10 million a year, even with the Preakness included, and Maryland’s own state treasurer has publicly questioned aloud whether the effort is “just a pipe dream.”
Governor Wes Moore’s office argues the industry supports 28,000 jobs and $3 billion in economic activity statewide, and defends the investment as revitalizing the surrounding Park Heights neighborhood in Baltimore, not merely subsidizing racing. Even accepting that case at face value, a legislative audit this year found the now-defunct authority overseeing the project failed to formalize a written agreement for a $10 million “working capital advance” and awarded consulting contracts without documented competitive bidding — the same basic financial discipline an ordinary Maryland family is required to exercise on a mortgage a fraction of that size.
A tax break with your name not on it
Maryland doesn’t just spend money directly on favored industries. It also declines to collect money it would otherwise be owed.
Under the Data Center Maryland Sales and Use Tax Exemption Incentive Program, a qualifying data center that invests as little as $2 million and creates five jobs paying 150% of the state minimum wage can receive a full sales and use tax exemption for 10 years — extended to 20 years for investments above $250 million. Maryland residents pay the state’s 6% sales tax on a washing machine, a car, and school supplies. A data center meeting the threshold pays none on its equipment, sometimes for two decades.
Maryland residents pay the state’s 6% sales tax on a washing machine, a car, and school supplies. A data center meeting the threshold pays none on its equipment, sometimes for two decades.
Maryland doesn’t routinely publish what that costs the state — but records obtained through a public information request and cited in legislative testimony this year put the figure at roughly $22 million a year in forgone sales tax revenue since the program began in 2021. That’s a real, documented number, not a projection — and it comes with an accountability wrinkle of its own: Maryland was legally required to publish a tax expenditure report in 2024 disclosing exactly this kind of cost, and didn’t.
Other states offer a preview of where the trend line goes: Virginia’s comparable exemption is now projected to forgo $1.6 billion in tax revenue in fiscal year 2026 alone, up from roughly $136 million just three years earlier, and Georgia found its own data center exemptions running 664% higher than originally projected, at $2.5 billion. Maryland’s own economic policy researchers testified to the General Assembly this year, urging repeal, arguing the exemptions “use up revenue” the state could otherwise collect from “large, profitable corporations” — testimony that, notably, went nowhere.
Fined by camera, funding the budget
Maryland’s speed camera network adds a second layer entirely, one that arrives disguised as safety enforcement rather than taxation. The state’s camera programs generated more than $288 million in gross revenue between FY2014 and FY2018 alone, from 6.3 million tickets, with Montgomery County’s cameras the single most lucrative in the state.
State law requires the net revenue go toward “public safety” — but AAA Mid-Atlantic’s review of how localities actually spend it found jurisdictions funding fingerprint scanners, K-9 units, and body-camera data storage, and Baltimore, in one year, directed $4 million in camera revenue to help balance its Fire Department’s budget.
As of 2026, the flat $40 Maryland ticket became a graduated fine reaching as high as $425 for the fastest violations, and unpaid camera citations can still trigger a hold — Maryland’s own SafeZones program and multiple municipal traffic offices confirm that an unresolved fine can “flag” a driver’s account, blocking vehicle registration renewal at the MVA until every citation is paid in full.
And now, the vote itself
Every mechanism above extracts money from Marylanders without asking permission. The state’s newest move extracts something else: a voice.
Maryland’s Democratic legislative leadership has called a special session for August 3–5 to consider a constitutional amendment intended to clear a legal path toward redrawing the state’s congressional map to an 8-0 Democratic delegation, eliminating the state’s only Republican-held seat. Senate President Bill Ferguson and House Speaker Joseline Peña-Melnyk frame the move as a response to a U.S. Supreme Court decision weakening the Voting Rights Act and as giving voters, not legislators, the final say — the amendment would go to a November ballot referendum rather than taking effect by legislative fiat alone. Governor Moore has publicly and repeatedly pushed for the redraw.
Every mechanism above extracts money from Marylanders without asking permission. The state’s newest move extracts something else: a voice.
Senate Minority Whip Justin Ready called it what critics call any mid-decade partisan map: an effort “designed to erase” the voice of the roughly one in eight Maryland House districts currently represented by a Republican. Applying the same standard MDBayNews applies to Republican-led states pursuing identical mid-decade redraws elsewhere in the country: a map redrawn specifically to eliminate the opposing party’s only seat is a partisan power consolidation regardless of which party is doing the redrawing, and voters deserve that framing stated plainly rather than laundered through the language of “durable, transparent constitutional frameworks.”
A map redrawn specifically to eliminate the opposing party’s only seat is a partisan power consolidation regardless of which party is doing the redrawing.
Cut twice, for the people with the least room to absorb it
While the state was finding hundreds of millions for horse tracks, it cut funding for Marylanders with developmental disabilities two years running. The Developmental Disabilities Administration absorbed a $164 million cut in fiscal 2026, followed by a $126 million cut for fiscal 2027 — after Governor Moore’s initial budget had proposed $150 million. The cuts reduced access to one-to-one staffing for people in group homes, cut wages for the self-directed care workers that families rely on when no outside provider will take a case, and left community providers owed more than $35 million in uncompensated care for services already delivered.
While the state was finding hundreds of millions for horse tracks, it cut funding for Marylanders with developmental disabilities two years running.
Families who rely on the program to keep a disabled adult child at home rather than in an institution testified in Annapolis for two consecutive years against the reductions. The state ultimately delayed some of the changes this spring, but advocates were clear that the relief was temporary, not a reversal.
What Marylanders don’t get for it
None of the money above buys the infrastructure Marylanders are still waiting on.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge, destroyed in March 2024, was originally projected to reopen by October 2028 at a cost of $1.7–1.9 billion; the current estimate is $4.3–5.2 billion, with some estimates topping $8 billion, with an opening pushed to late 2030, and in April 2026, the state abruptly cut ties with its lead contractor over an unresolved cost dispute, throwing the timeline into fresh uncertainty.
The American Legion Bridge — the only major highway crossing between Montgomery County and Fairfax County, Virginia, and a span Maryland’s own transportation department expects to need replacement by 2030 — has sat without a construction contract since Governor Moore cancelled his predecessor’s public-private financing deal in 2023; more than two years later, the state still hadn’t secured federal funding, while Virginia finished its side of the corresponding lane expansion in 2023.
The Purple Line, connecting Bethesda and New Carrollton, is now projected to cost nearly $9.5 billion — close to $5 billion over its original 2016 budget — and open in late 2027, more than five years behind its original schedule; a March 2025 state comptroller’s report found permitting and legal costs alone, originally budgeted at $6 million, had actually consumed roughly $800 million.
Metro’s Red Line through Montgomery County underwent a full multi-station summer shutdown in 2024 and is in the middle of another one now, running July 6 through September 6, 2026, this time to build the mezzanine connecting to the still-unfinished Purple Line.
And this summer, Marylanders are watching the World Cup unfold in eleven other American cities: Baltimore and Washington’s joint bid, built around a ready-made 71,000-seat stadium in M&T Bank Stadium, was rejected by FIFA in 2022, one of only three times in tournament history a host nation’s capital has been shut out entirely.
A policy fight over who the state answers to
Maryland has also taken a deliberate stance on immigration enforcement that puts it at odds with the federal government. In April 2026, the General Assembly passed emergency legislation — critics have dubbed it the “Maryland Sanctuary State Act” — restricting when local police can detain someone believed to be in the country illegally and turn them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, building on an earlier law limiting formal 287(g) cooperation agreements between local sheriffs and ICE.
The Department of Homeland Security has since listed Maryland among sanctuary jurisdictions nationally, a designation the Trump administration has tied to threats of suspending federal funding — relevant given how much of Maryland’s own infrastructure wish list, from the Key Bridge to the American Legion Bridge, depends on federal dollars.
Republican legislators, including Del. Kathy Szeliga, argued the policy prioritizes noncitizens’ due process over public safety; the White House called on Maryland officials to “work with” ICE “not against them.” Democratic sponsors, including House Speaker Joseline Peña-Melnyk, framed the law as a defense of constitutional rights amid what they characterize as increasingly aggressive federal enforcement tactics.
What the record does not support is a specific dollar figure for how much the policy itself costs Maryland taxpayers.
What the record does not support is a specific dollar figure for how much the policy itself costs Maryland taxpayers: outside advocacy estimates on the “cost” of undocumented immigration to the state range from a widely disputed $1.4 billion figure that includes the public education of U.S.-citizen children, to independent tax-policy research finding undocumented immigrants paid an estimated $779 million into Maryland’s tax base in a single year.
Whatever the framing, the policy stands as a matter of state choice — Maryland is not legally required to assist ICE — made at the same time other budget lines Marylanders touch directly, like disability services, were being cut.
The pattern, run straight
Line these up, and the shape is the same one that shows up nationally, just closer to home.
A homeowner in Wheaton pays the state once and the county again on one house, then loses a $692 credit dressed up as a budget solution instead of a tax hike. A driver pays a gas tax that rises every year without a recorded vote. A data center pays no sales tax for twenty years on the same purchases that a Maryland family pays 6% on every time they buy a car seat or a mattress. A horse racing industry that admits it loses money gets another nine-figure lifeline — on top of the last one, on top of the one before that — while families of Marylanders with developmental disabilities lose ground two budget cycles in a row.
Line these up, and the shape is the same one that shows up nationally, just closer to home.
And for all of it, the state still can’t get a bridge rebuilt on schedule, can’t finish a light rail line within $5 billion of its original budget, can’t keep the Red Line running through a full summer, and never got the World Cup game it spent years courting. Meanwhile, the map itself — the one document that determines whose vote counts as a voice in Washington — is being redrawn specifically to zero out the one district where Maryland Republicans still have a seat at the table, even as the state stakes out a separate, deliberate fight with the federal government whose dollars fund a good share of the infrastructure Marylanders are still waiting on.
Different agencies, different bill lines, same direction: the state finds room in its budget and in its power by taking a little more from the household and asking a little less of everyone positioned to avoid it — and Marylanders are left checking the receipts to see what, exactly, they got for it.
Different agencies, different bill lines, same direction: the state finds room in its budget and in its power by taking a little more from the household and asking a little less of everyone positioned to avoid it.
Sources: This piece draws on Montgomery County government communications and the County Council’s FY27 budget actions regarding the Income Tax Offset Credit; independent tax-history analysis published by Montgomery Perspective; Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation and Comptroller’s office data on the state and county property tax structure; Maryland Comptroller’s office motor fuel tax rate announcements and reporting from Maryland Matters, The BayNet, CBS Baltimore, Fox45 Baltimore, and the Southern Maryland Chronicle on the state’s CPI-indexed gas tax formula, including on-record comment from House Minority Whip Jesse Pippy; reporting from Maryland Matters, The Baltimore Banner, WTOP, and Fox45 Baltimore on the Pimlico redevelopment, Laurel Park purchase, Preakness rights purchase, and the Maryland Thoroughbred Racetrack Operating Authority audit; the Maryland Department of Commerce’s Data Center Maryland Sales and Use Tax Exemption Program documentation, legislative testimony from the Maryland Center on Economic Policy citing a public information request on forgone state revenue, and Good Jobs First’s national data center tax abatement research; AAA Mid-Atlantic’s multi-year analysis of state speed camera revenue, cross-checked against The Washington Post, the Southern Maryland Chronicle, Maryland’s SafeZones program, and municipal traffic enforcement pages; Maryland Matters, the Baltimore Sun, and Maryland Department of Legislative Services budget analyses on Developmental Disabilities Administration funding cuts; Wikipedia, the Maryland Transportation Authority, CBS Baltimore, and Maryland Matters reporting on the Francis Scott Key Bridge rebuild; Maryland Matters, FFXnow, and Wikipedia on the American Legion Bridge; Wikipedia, the Washington Post, and the Daily Record on the Purple Line’s cost and schedule; WMATA service advisories on Red Line closures; Wikipedia, The Baltimore Banner, and CBS Baltimore on the 2026 World Cup host city selection; Maryland Matters, Stateline, PBS NewsHour, and the American Immigration Council on the Community Trust Act and 287(g) restrictions; and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy and the Federation for American Immigration Reform for competing estimates on the fiscal impact of undocumented immigration, alongside Associated Press, CBS Baltimore, WYPR, and Fox45 Baltimore reporting on the August 2026 special legislative session on congressional redistricting. Full citations available on request.
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