Will Jawando won Montgomery County’s top job with 52,738 votes. The county’s homeowners — and 170,306 unaffiliated voters who never got a ballot — are the ones covering the bill.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Montgomery County’s property tax bills have been landing in mailboxes for two weeks, and homeowners are furious. That story is real, and it’s documented below. But it’s the smaller half of a bigger one: the people writing the checks had almost no say in who’s spending the money.
Will Jawando is now certified as the Democratic nominee for Montgomery County Executive — a job that will oversee a $7.9 billion budget, a 160,000-student school system, and decisions over the next four years about exactly how much more county homeowners pay. He won it with 52,738 votes. Montgomery County has more than a million residents. The math isn’t close: Jawando’s winning total is about 7.7 percent of the county’s registered voters, and a plurality of Democratic primary voters at that — nearly six in ten of them picked someone else.
The primary was the election.
He’ll face Republican Esther Wells in November, but in a county where the Democratic primary outdrew the Republican primary by more than eleven to one, that contest may be a formality. Barring a miracle, and voters waking up, the primary was the election. And in that election, Montgomery County’s second-largest bloc of voters — 170,306 people registered with no party — never got a ballot. That’s more than seventy thousand more people than the county’s entire registered Republican Party (98,946). The GOP, marginal as it is here, at least got a primary. The county’s largest non-Democratic bloc did not.
That’s the government now setting your tax bill.
What The Council Actually Did
For Fiscal Year 2027, the Council — all eleven seats held by Democrats, zero Republicans, a body that answers to a primary electorate a fraction of the county’s population — left the headline property tax rate alone, rejecting County Executive Marc Elrich’s proposed 6.1 percent rate hike. That’s the version of the story the county wants told: no rate increase, nothing to see here.
That’s the version of the story the county wants told: no rate increase, nothing to see here.
Here’s what happened instead. On May 8, in a 6-5 straw vote, the Council reduced the Income Tax Offset Credit — a $692 credit that had applied automatically to roughly three-quarters of county homeowners’ tax bills for years — down to zero. Voting to take that $692 away from homeowners: Council President Natali Fani-González, Vice President Marilyn Balcombe, and Councilmembers Sidney Katz, Kate Stewart, Dawn Luedtke, and Shebra Evans. Two weeks later, the full Council voted 9-2 to lock that change into the final $7.9 billion budget — the same budget that, per reporting on the vote, grows a structural deficit now projected at $293 million for fiscal 2028 by leaning on one-time revenue to cover ongoing costs. The two “no” votes belonged to Luedtke and to Andrew Friedson — the same Friedson who finished second to Jawando in the primary — who objected that the plan spends money that “simply won’t exist” after next June.
The two “no” votes belonged to Luedtke and to Andrew Friedson — the same Friedson who finished second to Jawando in the primary — who objected that the plan spends money that “simply won’t exist” after next June.
Calling the ITOC change “no tax increase” is a distinction without a difference for the roughly 201,000 households who relied on that credit. Every one of them is now paying $692 more, flat, regardless of income or home value, on top of a separate $23-a-month increase most homeowners are already absorbing from rising assessments. The credit isn’t gone forever on paper — the Council could restore it in a future year — but for Levy Year 2026, the bill is the bill, and it’s higher.
Even Elrich, no fiscal conservative, called the move “regressive, hitting homeowners with lower value homes harder, putting the entire burden on homeowners and leaving commercial property owners untouched” — while his own rejected proposal would have raised $164.4 million through a rate increase spread more broadly, against the roughly $137 million the Council’s ITOC maneuver raises squarely off homeowners’ backs. When the county’s own Democratic executive is calling his own party’s Council regressive, that’s worth sitting with.
Councilmember Kate Stewart’s defense — that the credit required an application many homeowners never filed, that renters got nothing from it, and that killing it freed up $8 million for MCPS HVAC and security work — may all be true. It’s also the defense of a Council elected by a sliver of the electorate it governs, spending money the way it wants, regardless of how homeowners feel about it, because there’s no real mechanism to hold it accountable when a general election isn’t competitive.
What Your Neighbors Are Actually Saying
This isn’t an abstraction. Readers responded to our own reporting on this by the dozens, and the pattern is consistent: people who worked their whole lives to own a home in this county are being told, in effect, to leave.
One Shady Grove Village resident put it bluntly: if they owned their house outright, they still couldn’t afford to stay in retirement between taxes and utilities — it would run more than most rents. “Is that the county plan?” they asked. “Push all the sub-$500k a year income ‘poors’ out of the county, so it can be taken over by either millionaires or the impoverished, leaving no middle class?”
A Great Falls commenter, who’s lived in the region since 1977, said something is amiss with a financial plan that can’t absorb the county’s rate structure after building equity for 15-20 years. A Westleigh resident of 29 years said the property tax bill means she has to consider moving away from a neighborhood she loves. An 89-year-old Aspen Hill resident, in her home for nearly 60 years, said the county eliminating the Homestead Exemption “is how far down this County has gone,” and that she’ll have to leave. Multiple commenters said they’re already planning moves to Delaware or other lower-tax states specifically because of this.
These aren’t cranks. They’re longtime homeowners doing the math and concluding the county doesn’t want them here anymore — and structurally, given who actually gets a vote in the election that decides county policy, they may be right that it doesn’t need to.
Who does Jawando Answers To
Days after the primary, 32BJ SEIU — the largest property service workers’ union in the country, representing janitors, security officers, doormen, and maintenance staff, mostly for private building owners — put out a graphic congratulating Jawando on his win, tying it explicitly to his support for the union’s Worker Displacement law. It’s a fair and accurate endorsement to report: a labor union celebrating a candidate who champions its legislative priorities is politics working as designed. It’s also a preview of whose priorities get access once he’s in office — because the primary electorate that actually decided this race skews toward exactly these kinds of organized, motivated blocs, while the 170,306 unaffiliated homeowners paying the tax bills sat out the only election that mattered.
The Bigger Picture: Maryland Is Already Losing This Fight
Montgomery County’s tax choices aren’t happening in a vacuum — they’re happening in a state that is already bleeding residents over exactly this issue. The Maryland Comptroller’s own October 2025 report found the state has been losing a net average of about 40,000 people a year to states with lower housing costs and more housing, and Comptroller Brooke Lierman herself warned that “this outmigration is a downward drag on our labor market, economic output, and state and local revenues.” From 2010 to 2023, Maryland lost 2.3 million residents to other states, offset only by international migration and births outpacing deaths — meaning the state’s actual homegrown population, the people who grew up here and built lives here, has been shrinking for over a decade.
Every homeowner who packs up because the math stopped working here takes their tax base with them.
The comptroller’s office also found something that should worry anyone still planning to retire in Montgomery County: the outmigrating population is getting younger. Before the pandemic, 63 percent of people leaving Maryland were 55 or older — retirees chasing better weather. Since 2020, that’s flipped: 46 percent of net outmigrants are now under 45, and 12 percent are under 26. Maryland isn’t just losing retirees anymore. It’s losing the young families and workers the state needs to replace them.
Maryland ranks anywhere from the 6th to the 17th most expensive state in the country, depending on the index used, and the state has lost roughly $385 million in tax revenue from outmigration between 2021 and 2024 alone, according to one economist’s estimate cited in state coverage. Every homeowner who packs up for Florida, Delaware, or the Carolinas because the math stopped working here takes their tax base with them — which means the burden gets redistributed onto whoever’s left. Montgomery County choosing this moment to strip $692 off 201,000 homeowners’ bills, funded by a government most of the county never had the chance to vote for, isn’t a footnote to that trend. It’s an accelerant.
A Structural Problem That Predates This Year’s Vote
Montgomery County has set its cap at 10 percent, the state maximum.
There’s a reason Montgomery County homeowners feel this more than their neighbors in other counties, and it has nothing to do with the ITOC fight specifically. Maryland’s Homestead Tax Credit — which caps how much of a rising assessment can actually be taxed in a given year — is set locally, and Montgomery County has set its cap at 10 percent, the state maximum. Anne Arundel caps at 2 percent. Prince George’s caps at 3 percent. Howard and Frederick cap at 5 percent. Montgomery County chose to expose its own homeowners to more assessment-driven tax growth than almost anywhere else in the region — a decision that was already baked in before this year’s ITOC fight, and one the Council has shown no interest in revisiting even as it complains about affordability.
Meanwhile, the same Council members voting to reduce homeowner tax credits are paid $167,172 a year — $183,889 for the Council President — the highest council salary in the region by a wide margin. Howard County pays its councilmembers $80,058. Prince George’s pays $141,548. Frederick pays $35,000. It’s a fair question to ask what residents are getting for the difference — especially residents who never got a ballot in the election that put these particular people in office.
Where The Money Actually Goes
Homeowners footing a larger bill are entitled to ask what else the county is funding while it says it can’t afford to keep the ITOC whole.
Homeowners footing a larger bill are entitled to ask what else the county is funding while it says it can’t afford to keep the ITOC whole. Part of the answer: services specifically for immigrants, regardless of legal status.
The FY27 budget includes $151,610 for the CASA Rapid Response Hotline, which — per Elrich’s own budget transmittal — “facilitates real time community reporting of Federal immigration action, connects impacted individuals and families with emergency support, and links callers to critical resources,” including referrals to immigration legal services and “Know Your Rights” education. Notably, the county funds this hotline but doesn’t run it — it’s operated by CASA, an immigrant advocacy nonprofit, deliberately kept outside county government “to preserve trust among immigrant residents,” per the county’s own budget documents. The county separately sends CASA another $500,000 through its FY27 Cost Sharing grant program, a distinct line from the hotline money.
This isn’t new. In 2018, the Council appropriated $373,957 to the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition specifically to provide legal defense for county residents in deportation proceedings — funding that explicitly excluded anyone convicted of a defined list of crimes, and drew a public hearing where opponents argued taxpayer money shouldn’t go toward defending people who entered the country illegally. Whether that specific fund is still active in its original form isn’t confirmed, but it established the pattern the CASA hotline continues today: county dollars funding services available to immigrants regardless of status, funneled through outside nonprofits rather than county departments.
None of this is hidden.
None of this is hidden. Council President Fani-González’s own newsletter touts the county’s role in ending local 287(g) cooperation with ICE and passing the state’s Community Trust Act as wins for “protecting immigrant community members.” That’s a defensible policy position for the county to take, and readers can judge it on the merits. But it’s also money the county has chosen to keep spending in a year it says it can’t afford to keep a $692 credit whole for 201,000 homeowners — and that’s a trade-off homeowners are entitled to weigh, whatever they conclude about it.
That’s a trade-off homeowners are entitled to weigh, whatever they conclude about it.
Where The Critics Overreach
A government this insulated from its own electorate doesn’t need a single villain to produce bad outcomes. The structure does that on its own.
None of this needs exaggeration to be damning, and some of what’s circulating online does exaggerate. A widely shared claim that Montgomery County “lost more federal jobs than any other jurisdiction in the DMV” is directionally consistent with real data — Maryland led the nation in federal job losses in 2025, and Montgomery County specifically lost an estimated 9,900 federal jobs between January and November — but no source ranks Montgomery above D.C. proper, Prince George’s, Fairfax, or Arlington specifically, and Prince George’s has a nearly identical federal-employment concentration to Montgomery’s. Treat that superlative as unverified.
A figure claiming the “average” county homeowner’s bill went up $2,000 also doesn’t match anything the county has published; combining the county’s own numbers ($23/month from assessments plus the flat $692 ITOC loss) puts a typical affected homeowner’s increase closer to $968 a year. Anecdotal ranges circulating online — “17 to 25 percent,” a Republican Party claim of 29.3 percent cumulative since 2022 — are real for the individual bills they’re drawn from, but no official countywide average exists, and treating any single number as “the” average overstates what’s actually documented.
The dysfunction here runs deeper than any one member.
And a note on the vote record specifically, because getting this wrong undercuts everything else here: Jawando voted against reducing the ITOC in the May 8 straw vote, the vote that actually decided the policy, then voted for the final overall budget two weeks later once that change was already locked in. He is not the architect of this specific cut, whatever one viral post claims. If anything, that vote sequence is a reminder that the dysfunction here runs deeper than any one member — enough councilmembers flipped their votes between the straw vote and the final budget that even assigning ownership of this decision takes real digging. A government this insulated from its own electorate doesn’t need a single villain to produce bad outcomes. The structure does that on its own.
The Bottom Line
Montgomery County’s Democratic-controlled Council took $692 away from roughly 201,000 homeowners this year, called it something other than a tax increase, and did it in a state that is already losing residents by the tens of thousands annually because it costs too much to stay. The incoming executive who’ll oversee the next four years of these decisions was chosen by 52,738 people in a county of over a million, in an election that structurally excluded 170,306 of his future constituents before a single vote was cast. The county’s own homestead assessment cap — set at the state maximum — guarantees this kind of pain will keep compounding no matter what happens with the ITOC going forward. Meanwhile, the people making these decisions are paid more than any other county council in the region to make them.
The story is — a government that taxes everyone but answers to almost no one.
The specific viral numbers bouncing around social media don’t all hold up. The underlying story — a government that taxes everyone but answers to almost no one — does.
Sources: Montgomery County Department of Finance; Montgomery County Council straw vote coverage and final budget vote announcement (montgomerycountymd.gov); Bethesda Magazine reporting on the May 8 straw vote and May 15 budget agreement; statements from County Executive Marc Elrich and Councilmember Kate Stewart (montgomerycountymd.gov); Montgomery Community Media, “Your Montgomery County tax bill may be higher this year. Here’s why” (mymcmedia.org); Montgomery Perspective; Maryland Comptroller’s Office, “Housing & the Economy” report (October 2025); WTOP and Maryland Matters coverage of the comptroller’s outmigration report; Maryland State Department of Assessments and Taxation 2025-2026 tax rate and homestead credit cap tables; Maryland Association of Counties FY2026 salary survey; U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates (2024); Maryland Department of Labor federal employment data via MCM News; MDBayNews, “A County of a Million, Decided by 52,738 Votes” (July 16, 2026); Montgomery County Board of Elections certified 2026 primary results; Maryland State Board of Elections voter registration statistics; 32BJ SEIU public statements; Montgomery County Council FY27 budget staff reports and County Executive budget transmittals (montgomerycountymd.gov/granicus); Montgomery County Council press release, “Council Approves Funds Aiding Immigrants Facing Deportation” (2018); Council President Fani-González constituent newsletter (April 2026); reader comments on MDBayNews’ Facebook page, published with names as they appeared publicly.
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