As the Howard County Council prepares to vote today on the FY24 budget and, specifically, on the fate of the proposed $143 million “Lakefront Library” , here is the voting track record for each County Councilmember (Opel Jones, Deb Jung, Christiana Mercer-Rigby, Liz Walsh, and David Yungmann) on a variety of County Council bills related to land-use/development, environmental impact/flood mitigation & preservation, governmental Board accountability/oversight, and the Adequate Public Facilities Ordinance (APFO) that came down to 3-2 split decisions from 2019 through the end of 2022.

The Council bills have been color coded by what this HoCo Watchdog deems to be the level of importance to the county and the severity of long-term impact that the resulting decision (Pass or Fail) will have on Howard County.

Blue = potential positive impact

Yellow = potential moderate negative impact

Orange = potential significant negative impact

Red/Dark Red = potential severe negative impact

The data, notes and commentary about these bills were retrieved from Hiruy Hadgu’s fantastic County Council bill tracking and scoring tool.  ( https://www.hocogovernmentoversight.org)

Credit to Mr. Hadgu for collating all of these bills and their voting results in a central repository and providing excellent insight into many of them.

All County Council bills and their history and voting outcomes can be found here ( https://apps.howardcountymd.gov/olis ).