IV-A. The Lie of Not Knowing

On March 25, 2026, County Executive Marcus Henry delivered his annual budget address. He proposed the 17 percent property tax increase. He cast it as the answer to a $42 million structural deficit. Asked about the budget conversations he had with his predecessor, now-Governor Matt Meyer, Henry "took a deep breath and laughed. Then he said he didn't know in late 2024 that the deficit was going to be as large as it is today".

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That statement is contradicted by the documented record in five distinct ways.

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First, by Henry's own service. Marcus Henry served as Director of Development at the Wilmington Housing Authority from 2007 through 2011, working on community revitalization and affordable housing. He then joined the New Castle County Executive Office and served under three successive County Executives across roughly ten years before his own election. From 2011 through 2013, he was General Manager of the Department of Community Services, mostly under County Executive Paul Clark. Clark was never elected to the office. He held it only by elevation, lifted automatically from Council President when Chris Coons resigned on November 15, 2010, to take a seat in the United States Senate. Clark ran for a full term in 2012 and lost the September 11, 2012, Democratic primary to former County Executive Thomas P. Gordon, 46 to 33 percent.

From 2013 through 2017, Henry served as Economic Development and Policy Director under Gordon, who won the November 6, 2012, general election by 64 percent, was sworn in early on November 13, 2012, to finish the brief unexpired Coons-Clark term, and then served his own four-year term through January 3, 2017. From 2017 through December 14, 2021, Henry was back as General Manager of Community Services under County Executive Matt Meyer, whose tenure ran from January 3, 2017, through January 7, 2025. Henry announced his retirement from County employment in October 2021; Meyer nominated Carrie Casey to succeed him on November 17, 2021; Casey took the role on December 15, 2021.

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Across all three administrations, Henry was in the executive office. He sat in cabinet meetings. He ran a department covering the Library system, Community Resources, Community Development and Housing, and the Hope Center. He oversaw the absorption of American Rescue Plan Act positions into that department. He was in the room while the Meyer administration spent ARPA dollars on recurring operating costs. He was no stranger to County finance. He was a senior architect of the very trajectory now under examination, embedded in three administrations across ten years before he ever took the top job.

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Second, by his own published résumé. On his own LinkedIn profile, Henry lists among his key accomplishments with the County: "Negotiated the purchase of a former Sheraton hotel, utilizing specialized federal funds to create an innovative facility called the Hope Center, which provides integrated services for unhoused people in New Castle County". Henry was the architect of the Hope Center. He led the project. He directed the staff who worked on it. Carrie Casey, then Manager of the Division of Community Development and Housing, worked under him and was assigned her duties by him.

Casey’s later public statements and biographical materials, including her ACLU of Delaware biography, describe her as having "presented the case to New Castle County government to purchase the former Wilmington Sheraton South." That overstates her role. Casey worked under Henry’s direction. The decision authority, the negotiation, and the project leadership were his. The pattern of Casey claiming public credit, including on the County’s own website, for projects she did not lead is a documented feature of her tenure that deserves its own scrutiny in a future report. For the Hope Center, the controlling fact is simple: Henry, in his own résumé, takes personal credit for negotiating the purchase. The Hope Center is now a $2.7 million annual line in the General Fund. It did not exist as a budget line in FY2024. Henry cannot claim authorship of the project and surprise at its cost in the same breath.

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Third, by the public and published record. The author of this report announced her candidacy for County Executive on March 21, 2023. Her published campaign platform, posted that year, identified the structural problem directly, warning against what she called the “unfettered use of one-time federal pandemic funds,” and describing an administration that had expanded County government and routed CARES Act and ARPA money toward recurring and state-level purposes rather than the durable infrastructure that would have delivered lasting value. She committed to restoring core services without a tax increase, through financial restraint, Council oversight, and the elimination of long-vacant funded positions. She campaigned on that analysis for a year and a half, at candidate forums and community events across New Castle County.

Across the 2024 primary campaign, she and Marcus Henry appeared together as the two Democratic candidates for County Executive at no fewer than seven documented public candidate forums between March and August 2024. They shared a stage on March 3, 2024, at the 23rd Representative District forum at the Take the Lead Dance Studio in Hockessin; on May 2, 2024, at the 8th and 9th Representative District forum at the MOT Senior Center in Middletown; on June 20, 2024, at the Leadership Delaware forum at CSC Station in Wilmington, moderated by former DelDOT Secretary Jennifer Cohan; on July 16, 2024, at the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce State of the County forum at the University of Delaware’s Clayton Hall; on July 17, 2024, at the New Castle County Board of Realtors candidate forum at Riverfront Events in Wilmington, streamed live to the organization’s membership; on August 19, 2024, at the League of Women Voters of New Castle County webinar; and on August 22, 2024, at the Rotary Club of Wilmington forum in the Gold Ballroom of the Hotel du Pont. Several of these forums centered expressly on the County’s economy, its finances, and its management, including the Chamber’s State of the County program and the Realtors’ policy forum.

At those forums and more, the author raised the structural mismatch between the federal pandemic spending the County had built into its operations, its recurring operating costs, and the recurring revenue base that could not sustain them. The two men who shared those stages with her are now the Governor of Delaware and the County Executive of New Castle County. The federal funding cliff arrived as she described it. The structural deficit followed.

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Fourth, by a documented in-person meeting after he took office. In early March 2025, the author of this report met Marcus Henry for lunch at a local restaurant. The campaign was over. The two met as colleagues. The author told him directly and in detail what the County’s finances required: that he restructure the government immediately, pull back the spending the Meyer administration had built on one-time federal pandemic money and never reduced, eliminate the funded-vacant positions, find efficiencies, make real cuts, and end the programs whose federal funding was expiring. She told him there was no new revenue available and no flexibility left in the budget, that the County could not afford the structure it was carrying, and that unless he corrected it at once, the eventual correction would land on homeowners as a property tax increase on the order of 43 to 47 percent. She offered him her help and the help of her advisors, at any time and for any question. He told her he had good people and that they were working on it. At that same meeting, Henry told the author that he had read her website every day. The remark is recorded here for a single reason: the County Executive, who would later say he had not understood the size of the deficit, was, by his own account, a daily reader of the fiscal analysis that had been describing it.

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That meeting took place roughly five months before the County’s own Office of Finance posted the August 31, 2025, General Fund projection that put the FY2027 gap at $47.9 million. The author did not raise the alarm after the County’s own documents surfaced the problem. She raised it before they did. What she told him in March 2025, the County’s own worksheet confirmed in August 2025.

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What he did with the warning is a matter of record. Over the fourteen months between that lunch and his budget address, the County did not restructure. The payroll grew. The appointed and exempt ranks grew. The budget grew. The programs built on expiring federal money were not wound down. Then, on March 25, 2026, he told the public he had not known the deficit would be as large as it is. He had been told, in person, by a former Council President who had run against him, and he had been reading her published analysis of it, by his own account, every day. He raised the rate 17.2 percent on May 26, 2026, the first installment of exactly the correction he had been warned was coming.

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Fifth, by Henry's own public posture in his budget address. Henry told reporters the County had "been in a budget deficit for several years, but costs were previously covered by one-time federal appropriations that the county received as a result of the COVID pandemic". That is the exact structural problem the author warned him about during the campaign and at their March 2025 meeting. Henry was not surprised by the deficit. He was describing the deficit he had helped build, helped obscure, and now chose to close with a tax on residents who were never told the truth in time to plan for it.

The Documented Awareness Timeline

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The chart that follows gathers the documented points at which Henry was exposed to the County’s deteriorating fiscal condition, each with its date, drawn from the public record and from the author’s own record as a former elected official who served alongside and directly with Henry during the relevant years. Every entry is documented elsewhere in this report. Here they sit in chronological order, so the arithmetic of his exposure is visible in one view. Every date in the chart precedes the March 25, 2026, budget address, where Henry said he “didn’t know in late 2024 that the deficit was going to be as large as it is today.”

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Henry Did Not Walk Into the Deficit. He Helped Create It.

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The framing that Henry was handed the deficit by his predecessor is a partial truth. Henry was handed a County government with a structural mismatch between recurring revenue and recurring expenditures, a reliance on federal pandemic dollars to cover ongoing operating costs, and a Tax Stabilization Reserve headed toward exhaustion. That part is accurate. What the framing leaves out is that Henry, as General Manager of the Department of Community Services from 2017 through December 14, 2021, was the senior department head who prepared and submitted to Council the Community Services operating budget for each of those four full fiscal years. The budgets he authored grew his department’s spending base, added the Hope Center as a new operating facility with a documented federal funding cliff built into its financing, and absorbed American Rescue Plan Act positions onto the County’s recurring payroll. Every one of those decisions was a contributing line in the structural gap Henry now calls a problem handed to him rather than a problem he helped design.

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The arithmetic is documented in the Community Services operating budgets Henry signed and submitted. FY2018 was the first full fiscal year of his tenure as General Manager. FY2021 was the last. Across those four fiscal years, the Department of Community Services' operating budget grew. The Hope Center facility, acquired December 1, 2020, with $19.5 million in federal CARES Act funds, was layered onto the department’s operating commitments without a dedicated recurring revenue stream and without Council appropriation of County General Fund dollars to support its operations. The arrangement worked, on paper, only so long as federal pandemic dollars covered the operating costs. The decision to layer the Hope Center onto the department’s operating responsibilities was made on Henry’s watch. The decision to absorb ARPA-funded positions into the department’s recurring payroll was made on Henry’s watch. The decision to grow the department’s operating base while the County’s recurring revenue base remained flat was made on Henry’s watch. When the federal funding cliff arrived as predicted, the structural gap his decisions had contributed to became the deficit he now seeks to close with a 17.2 percent tax increase on residents.

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The scale of the one-time money that built this trap is worth stating plainly. New Castle County received $322 million in federal CARES Act Coronavirus Relief Fund dollars in 2020, of which it passed $136 million to the State of Delaware, and approximately $108 million in federal ARPA State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds delivered in two $54 million tranches in 2021 and 2022. The State of Delaware separately received its own CARES allocation and over $1.74 billion in ARPA funds. That is the universe the Hope Center and the absorbed positions were funded from: hundreds of millions in non-recurring federal money, spent in part on recurring obligations that did not end when the money did. The cliff was not a surprise that befell the County. It was the predictable end of one-time money the County chose to spend on permanent things.

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Henry was handed the deficit by Meyer. Henry also helped create the deficit as Meyer’s senior department head and General Manager of the fastest-growing department in the County’s General Fund. Both statements are documented. The second is the one Henry’s public account of the budget address leaves out.

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Why Henry’s Publicly Stated Cuts Are Not Really Cuts

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In the days after the March 25, 2026 address, the Henry administration called parts of the FY2027 budget “cuts.” Held against what a cut actually means, the record does not support the word. A budget cut is a reduction in the County’s operating commitment below the prior year, for the same function. Moving a position from one department to another, reclassifying an existing position, shifting a funded position between funds, or striking a position that was already vacant and unfunded in practice, none of those is a cut. They are accounting moves. They do not lower the County’s operating commitment. They rearrange the budget book without touching the spending trajectory.

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The headline items the administration called cuts were the elimination of 56 positions from the published budget, a 10 percent reduction in library staff, the loss of five parks employees, and the cancellation of Sleep Under the Stars at Carousel Park. The 56 positions had been vacant for long stretches and were not supporting active County operations. Eliminating a position empty for a year or more does not lower current spending. The salary line was not being spent. The benefits line was not being spent. Taken together, these are the kind of position cleanup the Council President tried to legislate back in 2017, the amending ordinance documented in Section VIII. The Henry administration is doing in 2026 what the Council President proposed in 2017 is consistent. Calling it “cuts” instead of overdue housekeeping is not consistent with what those positions actually cost in FY2026, which was nothing.

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The 10 percent library cut and the five lost parks jobs were real service reductions in libraries and parks that shifted location from the public-facing side of County government, not on the administrative overhead that grew across the period this report examines. Library staff and parks employees are the County workers residents actually see. Cutting them in public while keeping the layered Executive Assistant appointments documented in Section XII, and while continuing to fund the parallel Hope Center, Inc. operating structure documented in Appendix L, is a choice about who absorbs the cost of the administration’s spending and where those employees quietly move. The visible cuts fall on the public. The structural costs that grew during Henry’s years as General Manager and his first fifteen months as County Executive stay right where they are. The Sleep Under the Stars cancellation is the most visible cut and the smallest dollar item; it is in the “cuts” list mainly to give the framing a community-facing example to point at.

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A real cut produces a lower expenditure line next year than last year, for the same function. By that standard, the FY2027 budget Henry proposed, and Council adopted on May 26, 2026, contains no meaningful cuts. The Operating Budget Summary shows an FY2027 General Fund operating budget of $387.6 million, above the FY2026 level. The budget grew. The 17.2 percent tax increase funds the growth. The position cleanup, the library reduction, the parks reduction, and the Sleep Under the Stars cancellation together are a sliver of a spending trajectory the administration sold to residents as discipline. The Tackett and Toole amendments named real cuts the administration could have proposed itself and did not, and the administration opposed them, as Section XXIV documents. The arithmetic of a real cut was available. The administration did not reach for it. What it offered and called cuts is a smaller, more palatable version of what a real reduction would have demanded.

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The Department-by-Department Cut Inventory

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The specific dollar amounts of the supposed cuts in the adopted FY2027 budget became public on May 28, 2026, two days after the vote, in a breakdown the administration had not fully disclosed at the March 25, 2026 address. The cut inventory, in descending order of size, is as follows.

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First, $2.8 million cut from the Community Services Department. That is the department Henry himself ran as General Manager from 2017 through December 14, 2021. It holds Libraries, Community Resources, Community Development, Housing, and the Hope Center. The department whose spending base Henry helped grow across four years of budget submissions is now absorbing the single largest dollar reduction in the FY2027 budget. But the cut does not touch the Hope Center General Fund line, still funded at roughly $2.7 million a year, as Appendix L documents. It falls on the library system and on Community Resources, both of which serve residents directly.

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Second, $2.5 million cut from open space and Agricultural Preservation. These programs run mostly on dedicated revenue tied to the Realty Transfer Tax, and they have long been the County’s most visible commitment to keeping land open. Cutting $2.5 million shrinks the County’s ability to preserve farmland and open space at the exact moment development pressure is intensifying, the Project Washington data center proposal documented in adjacent Truthline reporting, and the corridor of warehouse and logistics development pushing through the southern County. This cut outlasts the budget cycle. The land that gets developed because conservation money was pulled cannot be un-developed in a later budget year.

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Third, $1 million cut from County special events. This line pays for community programming, public observances, and County-sponsored gatherings, small in dollars, large in how many residents they touch. Cutting $1 million here is a visible community sacrifice that barely dents the structural problem the administration said it was solving.

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Fourth, a 10 percent cut to library budgets. For many residents, the library is the most visible County service there is, especially for seniors, parents of school-age kids, and people who depend on it for internet access, job-search resources, and a place to be. A 10 percent cut means shorter hours and libraries closed one day a week. The hit to residents is real and visible. The savings are not, because the County’s collective-bargaining obligations cap them, as the next subsection shows.

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Fifth, 56 unfunded positions. The mechanism is exact: the County would “allow 56 unfilled positions to go unfunded.” Read it closely. The positions were unfilled before the FY2027 budget. They will be unfunded under it. The County’s actual operating spending does not move either way, because by definition those positions were not drawing salary or benefits in FY2026.

Housekeeping, presented to residents as discipline. We will likely see them refunded though amendments during the year,

used as a slush fund.

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Sixth, higher credit-card fees on sewer bills and land-use permits, plus a 5 percent increase in sewer rates. These are not cuts. They are revenue increases, stacked on residents on top of the 17.2 percent property tax. Calling the FY2027 budget a mix of cuts and tax increases hides the real picture: residents are being hit on several revenue lines at once, while the service reductions land on those same residents.

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Seventh, the 17.2 percent property tax increase itself. The new residential rate is 18.46 cents per $100 of assessed value. The new non-residential rate is 27.9 cents. The increase will raise about $23 million a year. For the median owner of a $378,000 home, that is roughly $102 a year, about $8.50 a month, on the County share of the bill. The school share, the larger one, is set by local school districts under State authority, not by the County. New Castle County does not run the schools. The schools sit under the State of Delaware. The County prints the County tax and the State school tax on one statement, mails it, and collects the money, but the two taxes are separate. The 17.2 percent the Council adopted on May 26, 2026 falls on the County line only. Section XXII takes that apart in full.

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Councilman David B. Carter, one of the eleven who voted yes, framed the constraint that drove the “cuts” conversation on the record: “I don’t see where there’s anything that can be cut without hurting something else at this point. You can shift things around, but short of massive layoffs, we just can’t do it.” Carter also noted that “the majority of the county’s budget pays for staff salaries, and many of those are negotiated union contracts.” The budget confirms this: salaries, wages, and benefits account for 62 percent of the FY2027 operating budget. Sixty-two percent is locked into union contracts, civil-service positions, and benefits. The discretionary money available to cut is the other 38 percent. Also, Notice Councilman Carter did not mention the exploding number of appointed positions, ARPA rollovers, and other obvious options ripe for cutting. He followed in lockstep with the Executive. Did that help his constituents and their pain? Not a single “Hail Mary” budget amendment did he offer. Only a defeatist quote to add to the theatre of the day, offered as an explanation for failing to try.

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Councilman Kevin Caneco of the Twelfth District, one of the two who voted no, named the cause more bluntly. Caneco argued the deficit is the product of the County “kicking the can down the road” and leaning too hard, in past years, on federal COVID money. He told the public-comment audience the vote amounted to telling residents, “you have to foot the bill because we, as a government, were incompetent.” His conclusion: “Eventually this charade has to stop.” Caneco’s charge of governmental incompetence is on the record. It is the same charge the author of this report raised during the 2023 and 2024 candidate forums, when both Henry and Meyer called her a liar for naming the structural deficit.

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Two days after the vote, Henry offered yet another version of his “I didn’t know.” He said: “I was presented information that showed us in a deficit, but it ended up being much, much larger than what I was shown.” The framing had shifted. In March, he said he “didn’t know in late 2024 that the deficit was going to be as large as it is today.” By May, he conceded he was shown a deficit but called its size a surprise. The County’s own August 31, 2025, General Fund Financial Projections worksheet, posted publicly to the County’s own ArchiveCenter as Item 3769 and documented in Section X, projected the FY2027 gap at $47.9 million. The deficit Henry announced on March 25, 2026, was $42 million. The County’s own projection, seven months earlier, was $5.9 million larger than the number he announced. Nowhere in the County’s records is there arithmetic that turns the deficit’s size into a surprise.

The Union Contract Reality: Why Library and Parks Cuts Do Not Produce Library and Parks Savings

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New Castle County’s workforce is represented by several collective bargaining units, all under AFSCME Delaware Public Employees Council 81, headquartered at 91 Christiana Road in New Castle, with Executive Director Michael A. Begatto and President Faith Morris. Council 81 represents roughly 5,000 public employees across Delaware. The County’s AFSCME units, certified by the Delaware Public Employment Relations Board and documented in the County’s own 2017 Workforce Diversity Report, are organized by job classification, not by department. Local 459 represents skilled and unskilled labor, including County Park Workers and the crews that maintain parks, facilities, and grounds. Local 1607 represents clerical, administrative, and technical employees, which includes Library Specialists, Library Assistants, and the staff who do property assessment and reassessment work. Local 3109 represents professionals, managers, and administrators. Local 3911 represents emergency services employees. Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 5 represents sworn officers. The Sheriff’s Fraternal Order of Police represents Deputy Sheriffs. The International Association of Firefighters represents fire and EMS personnel. Every one of these contracts spells out what happens to bargaining-unit employees when the County curtails operations, closes facilities part-time, or moves workers from one function to another. That detail is the whole point of what follows.

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The County’s own Workforce Diversity Report, prepared and posted by the Department of Administrative Services and Human Resources, put the bargaining-unit workforce at 1,443 employees, organized as follows. These are the County’s own figures, from the County’s own published report. Notice that the classifications follow the kind of work done, not the department it is done in. A library worker, a property-assessment technician, and an administrative aide in any department who do clerical, administrative, or technical work are all in AFSCME Local 1607 under the same contract, no matter which department signs their timesheet.

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​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​That classification structure is the key to why the FY2027 cuts do not produce the savings the administration claims. Library workers who lose patron-facing hours are in AFSCME Local 1607, the same Local that represents the property-assessment technicians doing the reassessment work. Parks workers reassigned out of Parks are in Local 459, the same Local covering the County’s broader labor workforce. Moving a worker from one function to another inside the same Local renegotiates no contract terms. Same wage scale, same benefits, same protections. The worker stays a County employee on the County payroll. The service the worker performs may change. The budget column may change. The General Fund payroll commitment does not.

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How the County actually handles service curtailments and closures inside its union environment is documented in two records. The first is the Delaware Public Employment Relations Act, 19 Del. C. Chapter 13, which requires the County to honor its collective bargaining agreements and to negotiate in good faith over wages, hours, and working conditions. The second is the County’s own history. In April 2010, during the Coons administration’s response to an earlier shortfall, the County reached agreement with AFSCME Local 1607 to continue a 5 percent salary rollback in exchange for an explicit commitment that “there will be no layoffs for AFSCME Local 1607.” It struck parallel no-layoff deals with Local 459, covering parks and maintenance workers. The County’s documented practice in a comparable squeeze has been to negotiate continued pay in exchange for wage or benefit concessions, not to impose layoffs on union workers by fiat.

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The contract terms themselves sit in the County’s collective bargaining agreements with AFSCME Council 81 and its Locals, ratified by Council resolution and published on the County’s DocumentCenter. Resolution R20-233, which the author of this report introduced on December 8, 2020, authorized the County Executive to sign the agreement with Council 81 and its affiliate Local 3911, the full text published as Exhibit A. Resolution R21-065, which the same author introduced on April 13, 2021, authorized the parallel agreement with Council 81 and Local 459, covering parks and maintenance workers. The Local 1607 agreement covering library workers and assessment technical staff is likewise ratified and published. The FOP Lodge 5 agreement was ratified by R14-118. Paragraph 31 of the Local 3911 agreement, on Seniority and Reduction in Force, sets the obligation: “The County agrees to seniority by occupational classifications and occupational groupings with respect to layoffs, recall, transfer, and promotion.” Paragraph 35 sets the sequence after a reduction in force: “employees affected will be transferred to other departments within their occupational classification exercising their seniority on a County-wide basis.” The Local 459 and Local 1607 agreements carry materially the same reduction-in-force, transfer, and seniority terms. The contract requires transfer first, displacement of junior by senior within classification second, and layoff only after both are exhausted.

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The same is true in Parks, and in other functions taking the announced staff reductions. The five parks employees “lost” under the FY2027 budget, as the County’s public communications put it, are not gone from the payroll. They are reassigned. According to County employees who spoke with the author of this report, the FY2027 Parks function adds three new lead positions to manage the workflow of employees being reassigned into Parks from elsewhere, and reportedly three new hires for reasons so bizarre it deserves a published report of its own. Along with reports of expensive incorrectly purchased park playground equipment sitting in a warehouse without a home. So the net effect is not a reduction. It is a reorganization that adds management overhead while keeping the underlying payroll for the reassigned line workers.

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None of this is in dispute. Delaware Code Title 19 Chapter 13, the Public Employment Relations Act, requires County employers to honor their collective bargaining agreements, and the Public Employment Relations Board can enforce it. So when the County calls reduced library hours a “cut” without mentioning the contract obligation to keep paying the affected workers, the word is incomplete in a way that overstates the savings residents are promised. The reduced library budget would only balance if the library workforce shrank. The County’s own account is that the workers are reassigned, not removed.

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The fiscal effect of reassignment without elimination is to move the payroll line from one departmental column to another without changing the County’s total payroll. Residents see shorter library hours. Residents see fewer parks staff on weekends. The General Fund keeps paying the same number of workers. The reductions are visible to residents and invisible to the bottom line. That is the definition of a cut that is not a cut: a service reduction with no spending reduction behind it.

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The Executive Assistant Expansion: From Department Heads to Political Workers

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For most of the County’s history, under the Charter and across multiple administrations, the Executive Assistant title was reserved for a defined set of senior appointments: department heads like General Managers, the Chief of Police, the Chief Administrative Officer, the Chief of Staff, and a handful of senior policy positions. Executive Assistants were the County Executive’s leadership team. They were not the County Executive’s political operation.

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The current administration stretched the title well past that. New Executive Assistant titles appeared that match no traditional department-head job. Position descriptions were written carrying the Executive Assistant label for work that under prior administrations would have gone to lower-graded merit employees, or would not have existed at all. The expansion documented in Section XII, from about 21 Executive Assistants under Thomas P. Gordon, to about 44 under Matt Meyer, to about 48 under Marcus Henry, did not happen because the County’s departments more than doubled. The departments are the same departments. The functions are the same functions. Only the Executive Assistant count more than doubled.

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The author of this report, who served as an elected official through Henry’s transition into office and watched his hiring from the post-election period forward, has documented in earlier sections the pattern behind the growth. Executive Assistant titles have been used to put political and campaign workers on the County payroll. Friends of the County Executive and members of his political network have received Executive Assistant appointments. Jobs promised during the campaign in exchange for support, endorsements, or fundraising have been paid off through Executive Assistant placements that match no department-head function. The pattern is documented, and patronage in County hiring is not new across administrations, but the scale of this expansion is the largest in the County’s modern record.

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The cost is in Section XII. At an average loaded compensation of roughly $175,000 per Executive Assistant, including the 54.147 percent benefit rate, 48 of them run the County about $8.4 million a year. That is the General Fund cost of a political appointment tier that grew from 21 to 48, while the County’s functions did not. The FY2027 budget that cuts library staff, trims parks, cancels Sleep Under the Stars, and asks residents for 17.2 percent more does not touch the Executive Assistant tier. The political overhead grew while the deficit grew. The political overhead stayed whole when the deficit was “addressed” with cuts and a tax increase. The residents paying the increase are subsidizing the political tier with their property taxes.

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The reform that would have produced real discipline was right there. Cutting the Executive Assistant tier from 48 back toward the historical structure, on the order of the roughly 21 of the Gordon baseline, would save about $5 to $6 million a year in the General Fund. That is in the same range as the $6,532,705.49 in annual payroll savings the 2017 amending ordinance would have produced, documented in Section VIII. The reform was as available to Henry as it was to Meyer. Neither proposed it. The Tackett and Toole amendments, in Section XXIV, tried smaller versions of the same argument. The Henry administration opposed them. They were defeated. The 48-position Executive Assistant tier survived the FY2027 budget intact on May 26, 2026.

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The cuts that residents see are real cuts to resident-facing services.

The cuts the County General Fund actually absorbs

are smaller than the headline numbers suggest.

The library workers who lose a day of patron-facing work remain on the payroll. 

The parks employees who are reassigned out of parks remain on the payroll. 

The 56 unfunded positions were not being paid in the first place.

The political appointment tier that grew during the same period remained intact.     

The 17.2 percent property tax increase funds the political appointment tier

that the cuts did not reach.

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The Office of Finance Assessment Division: Three Rounds of Reassessment-Related Hiring

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While the FY2027 budget calls library reductions, parks losses, and the 56 unfunded positions “cuts,” the same budget adds positions to the Office of Finance, Assessment Division. The Office of Finance has four divisions: Accounting, Assessment, Budget, and Treasury. The Assessment Division prepares and maintains the property assessment data that is the foundation of the County’s property tax revenue. It is also the operating home of the AFSCME Local 1607 reassessment technical staff named in the union subsection above. Those reassessment technicians, alongside the library workers, sit in the 338-employee Local 1607 bargaining unit, per the County’s own 2017 Workforce Diversity Report.

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On March 25, 2026, the day of the budget address, it was reported that “the plan dedicates an additional $1 million to the county’s property assessment office to hire 10 more staff positions, building on five posts already approved by County Council in an effort to stabilize and manage the reassessment system.” So the assessment hiring comes down to three numbers: $1 million in new funding, 10 new positions under the FY2027 budget, and 5 positions Council approved earlier. The combined add this cycle is

15 positions.

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But those 15 positions are not the first round of reassessment hiring. The record runs three distinct rounds across the past decade. The first came during the author of this report’s tenure as Council President, when Council authorized added reassessment positions to support the work then under way. The second came after Henry took office on January 7, 2025, when more reassessment positions went onto the Office of Finance to handle the workload of the first reassessment in a generation, completed for FY2026. The third is the FY2027 action above, $1 million and 10 positions, on a base that already held the five posts Council approved earlier.

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Here are the questions for the Office of Finance, each with a documentary answer it can give in a single response. What is the current total reassessment staffing in the Assessment Division? What is the cumulative FY2025 through FY2027 spending on reassessment positions, including the $1 million in FY2027 and the salary and benefits of the five previously approved posts and the prior-round positions added under Henry? What was the reassessment staffing baseline in FY2024, before any of this? The answers settle whether a budget that calls itself a cuts budget squares with where the County’s payroll dollars are actually going.

The questions are on the record.

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The Office of Finance budget book, published each year on the County’s own ArchiveCenter, is where the Assessment Division’s position count and spending sit, line by line. The FY2026 Approved Operating Budget book lays out the Assessment Division within General Government. That is the baseline against which all three rounds of reassessment hiring are measured.

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