Taylor wants $106,813 to hire - not a teacher! Staff for private company.
Superintendent Thomas W. Taylor put a $106,813 position in his FY2027 Operating Budget to pay for a full-time person to do the job of the private bus camera company.
Buried, and we do mean buried, in Superintendent Thomas W. Taylor’s FY 2027 Operating Budget request is a new full-time MCPS position to do nothing but review BusPatrol America videos.
BusPatrol America is the company that has the no bid $7,101,365+/- a year deal with MCPS to put stop-arm cameras on MCPS school buses.
Try and find the purpose of this position in Superintendent Taylor’s requested FY 2027 Operating Budget. It’s not there.
The explanation for this new “Video Records Specialist” position is contained in an Exhibit to the Budget’s Table 1A, a document that wasn’t made available to the public until over 2 months after the proposed FY 2027 Operating Budget was released. The link to that Exhibit isn’t even in the FY 2027 Operating Budget document. The Exhibits to Table 1A are in an entirely different document, not linked to the online FY 2027 Operating Budget.
Obviously, the public couldn’t comment on the addition of this position to the MCPS Operating Budget. It’s buried in the MCPS Operating Budget and now before the Montgomery County Council for approval.
Why exactly is this position more important than that of an additional classroom teacher?
There was a document known as a “Proposal to Cure” prepared in February 2022 by the Montgomery County Ethics Commission regarding a former manager with the Automated Traffic Enforcement Unit (ATEU), Thomas Tokarz. Mr. Tokarz was found to have violated ethics rules when he left the MCPD after three years working closely with BusPatrol to become their employee just a month later - without waiting the mandatory one-year period before working for a contractor doing business with the County/MCPD. Here is a revelatory passage in the Ethics Commission’s document:
“As an administrative specialist working in the ATEU, Tokarz managed the administrative elements of the ATEU, including supervision of ten civilian police department employees who were engaged in the processing of citations received from BusPatrol.”
Therefore, it is very likely that MCPD has had at least ten employees working full time on school bus citations for nearly ten years. Why would MCPS need another full-time employee for the same purpose?
MCPS could bring in an extra $160,000 per month if the BusPatrol contract were renegotiated to give them the same split in the ticketing revenue as Suffolk County, NY (on Long Island) has had with them since 2019, which is 45%. Instead, MoCo has secretively gifted BusPatrol 60 % of the revenue since 2019. However, there is the other matter of where the County's 40% of the ticketing revenue (a little more than $5 million per year) goes, as Marc Elrich has covered that up. At this point, unless Elrich presents the data, it is unclear whether MCPS gets any of the camera ticketing proceeds, with MCPD being the likely recipient.