(Photo by UFCW Local 400)

Citing concerns about a competitive disadvantage with nearby counties, Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett vetoed a bill that would have raised the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

The county “has already put itself in the forefront on the minimum wage issue and several other initiatives to assist our more vulnerable residents,” Leggett wrote in a letter to the head of the Montgomery County Council. “We must act in a more measured way based on the best information available and the potential unintentional impacts to Montgomery County.”

The Council passed the bill last week by a 5-4 vote. It would have seen the wage gradually rise from the current rate of $10.75 (scheduled to go up to $11.50 in July) to $15 by 2020, with an additional two years for businesses with fewer than 25 employees to comply.

Leggett had sought an exemption for small business and other modifications to the bill. In the letter he outlined the conditions under which he’d be willing to support a modified version of the law and demanded additional study of the potential impacts.

“It is clear there is broad support in the community and on the Council for an increase in the minimum wage to $15/hour,” he wrote in the letter, which also argued that the county faces more challenges than a “destination” city like New York or Los Angeles. “The real questions are how quickly we get there and what exemptions should be made.”

Supporters of the law had previously pushed back on many of those demands and argued that a study won’t give them useful new information. “You can’t do an examination of what’s going to happen in the private sector,” the bill’s main sponsor, Marc Elrich, told The Washington Post. “You can study what has happened, but you can’t tell what will happen going forward.”

Calling on Council lawmakers to attempt to override the veto, which would require flipping a vote, a coalition of labor groups slammed Leggett’s decision.

“Working families who fear life under the Trump presidency need not wait for the White House to make their lives harder—their own local leaders have already started … Montgomery County Executive Ike Leggett has chosen to yank back a critical lifeline and leave working families only a payday away from poverty,” read a statement from 32BJ SEIU, CASA, Jews United for Justice, Progressive Maryland, UFCW Local 400, UFCW Local 1994, and the Metro Washington Central Labor Council.

Maryland’s state minimum wage is $8.75 an hour and several jurisdictions exceed that amount, but none have reached $15. An effort to pass a $15 minimum wage in Baltimore failed by one vote over the summer, though city legislators have pledged to take the issue up again this year.

In D.C., after a ballot initiative looked certain to pass, a diverse coalition of politicians and labor and business groups came together on an agreement last year to raise the wage wage to $15 an hour by 2020.