EASTON — On April 26, Maryland Comptroller Brooke Lierman made a stop to visit the Talbot County Council on her tour of the Eastern Shore. She has been traveling around the state to let different county councils know what the comptroller is up to.
Her stops emphasized getting women back into the workplace in Maryland by supporting them with better day care.
The council members asked questions after Lierman’s 15-minute update.
“I have three key roles as comptroller. No. 1 is to act as an elected CFO. To see every dollar in and every dollar out of the state. We also pay all the employees and balance all the books with a general accounting of the state. The second responsibility is that we act as, or I am on, a number of financial boards for the state,” Lierman said.
She said she was on the Board of Public Works, which approves major contracts and any contract or grant over $200,000. She is on the State Retirement and Pension System Board with $65 billion in assets.
Her third role as comptroller is revenue administrator.
“We just finished tax season, and I will give you a little update,” Lierman said. “We have processed about $2.7 billion tax returns. We are ahead of schedule from last year. We have sent out refunds to 1.7 million Maryland households.”
Then Lierman got into how the Board of Public Works affects Talbot County.
“We have approved five projects worth almost $1 million since I took office,” she said. “For the renovation and expansion of the St. Michaels Library and a 665-foot living shoreline as well.”
She touted the modernization of her office.
“Louis Goldstein used to brag that he took the Office of the Comptroller from pencil and paper to the mainframe. We now we are moving from the mainframe to the cloud. … The online portal is called Maryland Tax Connect. We launched it in February,” she said.
The number of workers is affecting the state’s economic profile.
“We are constrained in our economic growth because we don’t have the labor force we need. We have seen a lower labor force participation rate in Maryland since the pandemic. Other states have rebounded, and we have not. We have lost around 181,000 workers since COVID,” she said.
One of the key demographics is loss of women in the workforce.
“We lost about 2%, and nationally was about 1%. One of the key reasons that we did see, and that was cited, is the cost of child care,” she said.
Earlier in the day, Lierman visited Critchlow Adkins Day Care Children’s Center of Easton and found that they have a waiting list of over 100 people for their services.
“If we are talking about the economy and we are not talking about child care, we are missing a big part of the picture. It is a key piece of economic development,” she said.
“We are the eighth most costly state for child care in the nation right now. We lost a number of child care spots in the pandemic, and we haven’t recovered all of them. We need accessible, and affordable and high quality child care available for families who want to have working parents, who need to get out into the workforce,” Lierman said.
The council members had questions for Lierman.
Council member Lynne Mielke asked about affordable housing. Lierman responded with statistics about the population shrinking in Maryland because people are moving away. People are moving from high-cost to low-cost-of-living states.
She said the No. 1 reason for people moving is the cost of housing.
“The support for housing really comes from the Department of Housing and Community Development budget,” she said.
“Part of your housing crunch is because you have so many short-term rentals. It used to be long-term rentals. You on the Shore face this,” Lierman said.
Lierman invited those who want to learn more about her office and Maryland’s economy to go to marylandtaxes.gov.
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