WASHINGTON — A proposal to raise the minimum wage in Montgomery County, Maryland, to $15 an hour by 2020 faces an uncertain future as the county council prepares to take up the legislation during a meeting Tuesday.
The bill has enough votes to pass, but Montgomery County Executive Isiah “Ike” Leggett has indicated he may veto the measure if it is approved.
The Washington Post reports five council members are in favor of the bill, while four others are hoping to delay a vote and instead study the effects of recent minimum wage hikes in the county as well as possible effects of further increases. Five council members would be enough to pass the legislation, but supporters would need six votes to override a veto.
“When you have four people [opposed] and … many businesspeople opposed to this and you don’t work to get a solution, that’s a recipe for a movement going nowhere,” Leggett told The Post.
For months, Leggett has expressed concern that the bill is controversial and unpopular among the business community, although he has said he might be open to supporting the idea if the wage hike was scheduled to be implemented in 2022 rather than 2020.
The bill’s sponsor, council member Marc Elrich, said he would be willing to propose a 2022 timeline, but only for smaller businesses with 25 or fewer employees, The Post reports.
“I want to see how all this shakes out,” Leggett told The Post. “I’m not going to negotiate publicly about it.”
Council President Roger Berliner is skeptical. He said in December he’d rather study the issue before voting on it.
“Our small business community is totally concerned that this will throw people out of work, that it will cause them to close their businesses, that they will have personal bankruptcies,” he said.
Montgomery County’s minimum wage is $10.75 and will rise to $11.50 in July.
Under the proposed legislation, it would increase to $12.50 next year, $13.75 in 2019 and $15 in 2020.
