How Prince George's County actually works

Start with the eleven

Almost everything in this county runs through eleven people. Nine represent a district, and one of those districts is yours. Two are elected by everybody. So you vote for three of the eleven.

Here is the part that confuses people. The same eleven change jobs depending on the subject. On laws and money they are the County Council. On zoning and what gets built, they are the District Council. On health policy, they are the Board of Health. Same room, same people, different power, sometimes on the same afternoon.

Eleven is a small number. Six of them is a majority.

Who decides what

The money year

The budget is not a meeting. It is a year, and it runs the same way every time.

The school board has to send its request to the County Executive by March 1. The Executive has to send a full county budget to the Council by March 15. The Council holds two hearings in April and May. It has to adopt a budget by June 1. On July 1 the money is real.

By the time the Council votes in June, most of the argument is over. The weeks that actually matter are April and May, and almost nobody shows up for them.

Where you actually get in

Three bodies take public comment, and no two of them do it the same way. This is the part that costs people their chance.

No county page puts these three side by side. If you remember one thing from this page, remember that the deadline is almost always earlier than the meeting, and that it is the deadline, not the meeting, that decides whether you get heard.

Schools are their own government

The school system is not a county department. It has its own elected Board of Education with nine district seats and a student member, and - this catches almost every parent - your school board district is not your council district. They are different maps.

The money is the part worth understanding. Of the school system's 2,984,293,453 dollar budget, the state provides 61.3 percent and the federal government 4.2 percent. The county provides 32.5 percent. And state law sets a floor under even that: Prince George's has to fund the schools at least at last year's per-pupil level. For this budget year the floor was 964,606,822 dollars and the county approved 969,076,600. The part it actually chose to add was 4,469,778 dollars. The year before, it was 34,569.

So when a parent goes to the Board of Education to argue about how much money the schools get, they are in the wrong room, and when they bring a problem about their own child to the Board, they are usually also in the wrong room - that one starts with the teacher, then the principal, then the area office. The Board decides how the money already approved gets spent. That is a real power and it is the one most worth your five minutes.

What one person can actually do

Pick one thing you care about. Find out which of the eleven represents you, and which body actually decides it. Read one agenda. Put one comment in before the deadline - it becomes part of the permanent record on that item, and it is what gets quoted later by anyone arguing about what the public wanted.

That is it. That is the whole method. It is not glamorous and it works, and it works because so few people do it.

You showed up. That matters.