Taylor's $3,000,000 Mistake.

Waste in the MCPS Operating Budget.

In October of 2025, Superintendent Thomas W. Taylor revealed that he decided that MCPS needed a new warehouse. This was not a proposal that had been announced in the MCPS Capital Budget Master Plan. It was a surprise.

It was surprising because MCPS had already leased a new warehouse in April of 2023. Superintendent Taylor neglected to mention this fact in his October MCPS Capital Budget announcement.

Within days of Superintendent Taylor’s October announcement of the need for a “new” MCPS warehouse, the Board of Education approved a 10 year lease for an 161,500 sq. ft. empty shell building that Superintendent Taylor planned to convert into a warehouse and offices.

The “new” warehouse lease, which was announced to have been signed in December of 2025, committed MCPS to monthly payments of $245,614.58. The lease included an escalation clause. The first lease payment is due July 1, 2026. Lease payments come out of the MCPS Operating Budget.

But the building is just a shell and MCPS would need to build out the interior (shown above). That would require a Capital investment of $13,000,000.

Superintendent Taylor inserted the $13,000,000 to build out the interior of the shell into the MCPS FY 2027 Capital Budget.

The Montgomery County Council did not fund this request. The County Council removed all expenditures for this project from Superintendent Taylor’s Capital Budget request.

However, the lease had already been signed.

Superintendent Taylor now has monthly lease payments of $245,614.58+ due for the next 10 years for a building that is just an empty shell. That $3,000,000+ a year in lease payments will come out of the MCPS Operating Budget for a building that can’t be used.

How many MCPS special education resource teachers, media assistants and pupil personnel worker positions will be cut from the MCPS Operating Budget due to the poor planning and waste of education funds by a Board of Education and Superintendent who are asleep at the wheel?

From the County Council’s PDF for this MCPS project:

A lease has recently been signed for a centralized warehouse that would consolidate multiple functions throughout the county, reducing delivery times and thousands of driving miles per year. An FY 2027 appropriation was requested for the interior construction of the new warehouse. However, due to fiscal constraints, the County Council removed all expenditures for this project in the 6-year period as part of the adopted FY2027-2032 CIP.