The Prince George’s County Council is about to decide how to spend more than $5 billion. We need you to help ensure the budget sustains the proposed affordable housing funding, and does a better job to build safer streets and deliver better bus service.
County Executive Angela Alsobrooks has proposed the 2024 fiscal year budget to the County Council, and now they must decide what’s in and out of the budget. Let’s urge the council to fund these three important priorities:
1. Affordable housing – support proposed funding for the Housing Investment Trust Fund and the Right of First Refusal program which has been deployed to aggressively save apartment buildings, preventing displacement, and to build new affordable homes.
Local funding is essential to making affordable housing deals work, which leverage federal and state programs. Prince George’s only began funding its Housing Investment Trust Fund two years ago. We want to keep it going because Prince George’s renters pay more of their income to housing than neighboring jurisdictions.
2. Safer roads – support funding for redesign of dangerous Prince George’s roads. The county has a road safety problem, and much of it is due to high-speed, over-designed multi-lane roads that put all users at risk, especially people who are walking. These overly-wide, fast roads also undermine the county’s efforts to create transit-oriented communities around its transit stations.
We’re asking the County Council to align the Capital Improvement Program (CIP) budget with the county’s commitments to safe, “complete streets,” and 2017 Urban Street Design Standards. The county won millions of dollars in federal and state funding for the Blue Line Corridor, for other transit stations, and the Vision Zero street safety program. These funds must be directed to building truly safe, walkable streets to support the county’s economic development goals and safety needs.
3. Better buses — support improved bus service, safer walk/bike access to bus stops, and bus priority on the roads. Metrobus and TheBus service are a lifeline to residents, especially those who earn low wages or live on fixed incomes. We need to invest in bus lane and bus priority road designs, safe access to bus stops, and bus stop amenities through the capital budget, and implementation of urban street design standards.
The budget is a crucial document that directs how the county will address its needs. Send an email to your Council Members urging them to support proposed funding for affordable housing, and ask them to use county dollars to ensure safer streets and better buses.
Thanks for all you,
Cheryl