By SHARON O’MALLEY
PHOTO CREDIT Giuseppe LoPiccolo
College Park’s city manager has proposed a $29.6 million budget for fiscal year 2026 that would not raise property taxes and would add three full-time staff members to city hall.
In addition, the proposal includes an 8.5% increase over last year for employee salaries and benefits as part of an effort to make compensation more comparable with neighboring cities.
Overall, the proposed budget asks for an increase of $261,763, or 0.9%, over the budget the College Park City Council approved for fiscal year 2025, which will end on June 30. By contrast, the fiscal year 2025 budget was 10.8% higher than the prior year’s and included an 11% residential property tax increase.
“Increasing property taxes has never been popular,” Mayor Fazlul Kabir told College Park Here & Now. “This year, thankfully, it’s not happening.”
Councilmembers, who will adopt a budget ordinance in May, spent the day Saturday in a worksession reviewing the proposal.The city will hold a public hearing on the budget proposal on May 6.
The proposal requests the addition of an economic development coordinator, a deputy city manager and a public safety manager.
The public safety manager’s role, in part, will be to serve as a liaison between the Department of Public Services and the community and between the city and its contract police officers and the nearby police departments that help patrol College Park, according to Director of Public Services Jatinder Khokhar.
College Park does not have a police department and instead relies on contract and park police, and officers from the county, the University of Maryland and Metro Transit.
“It’s quite a bit of work and I’m thankful this position is created,” Kabir said. “It will give a sense of safety to our community members. … This position will be in touch with the community members.”
The new economic development coordinator, Kabir said, is needed to help the economic development director to keep up with an influx of businesses; nearly 20 businesses set up shop in College Park last year or relocated within the city, some with financial aid from local government programs.
The budget proposal does not continue funding for a $150,000 student housing subsidy pilot program, which the council approved last year to help tenants of Route 1 apartment complexes pay their rent. Also absent is funding for the city’s annual parade, which staff has said is time-consuming to plan and lacks interest from both local performers and volunteers.
A city ordinance requires each year’s budget to be balanced; that is, expenditures cannot exceed income.
Kabir said the city is not considering another property tax this year, in part, because its tax base–the sum of all residential and commercial property values within the city–continues to rise. As property values rise, the city collects more property taxes, even without a tax increase.
Last year, the city council increased property taxes to 33.5 cents per $100 of assessed value and commercial rates to 38.5 cents. The move marked the first time the city had raised the residential property tax rate in 10 years.
For the seventh year, the budget proposes a “homestead cap” of 0%. That program exempts homeowners who enroll from paying property taxes on any increase in the assessed value of their homes.
In his budget message to the council, City Manager Kenneth Young noted this year’s budget season “comes at a turbulent time, with a myriad of challenges and economic uncertainties at the federal, state and county levels of government.”
He wrote that the impact of potential layoffs of federal workers–College Park is home to approximately 1,100 of them–could be “severe,” adding, “This budget is one of the most difficult budget years in history.”
For now, Young wrote, the city has not experienced “a direct significant impact, but depending on the level of employee cuts at the federal level and ongoing and uncertain impact of federal aid and programs, that is subject to change.”
