Dear Friends,
I hope you’re enjoying spring-like weather. The Board is into budget season.
FY ’25 Budget and Tax Rate
The Manager presented his proposed budget on Saturday and we had many votes on Tuesday to advertise the various fees and tax rates. The main item for this meeting, as usual, was advertising the real estate tax rate for FY ‘25. Although real estate taxes have gone up in actual dollars because the value of real estate in Arlington continues to increase, we have not raised the tax rate for the past three years. The full proposed budget and other informative links are here: https://www.arlingtonva.us/About-Arlington/Newsroom/Articles/2024/Proposed-FY-2025-Budget-Invests-in-Priority-Needs
This year the Manager recommended a 1.5 cent increase in the tax rate. We are facing declining commercial real estate values as people continue to work virtually and have not returned to the office to work as they had pre-pandemic. Likely they never will which leaves many office buildings empty or only partly filled. This lowers the County’s revenue. With inflation and needs for housing and food continuing to go up, demands on our safety net continue to increase. In addition, certain crucial jobs are increasingly difficult to fill and we have vacancies in our police, fire and behavioral health departments. Our colleagues on the School Board are facing similar issues.
As my long-time readers know, when we advertise the tax rate we also set a cap on the tax rate for the year. We can adopt a rate lower than what we advertise, but not higher. In conversations with our School Board (APS) colleagues, we learned that they face unusual uncertainty in what monies they can expect from the Commonwealth. APS will need to make significant cuts to balance their budget even with the 3% increase they can expect from the County.
It’s hard enough for APS to make difficult cuts in a budget, but worrying about possibly cutting another $10M because the State might not provide what can reasonably be expected will make it doubly hard. Given all the uncertainty, we decided to advertise a penny above the Manager’s recommendation, or a 2.5 cent tax-rate increase. As insurance for APS, we would cover for them an unexpected deficit in State funding. I am very hopeful that the State budget – in the end – will have reasonable school funding and none of that extra penny will be needed by APS. Then we can keep our budget increase to not more than the 1.5 cents the Manager recommended.
Budget Work Sessions
We now begin regular budget work sessions during March and April. They are posted on our website and you can see which portions of the budget we are covering in each work session. Attending these work sessions is a great way to gain a deeper understanding of the departments and programs your County government manages. You can do so in person or watch them online either live or later. If you have a particular question or concern that I might address during a work session, feel free to send me an email with what you would like to know. You can also write to the Board about the budget or attend an Open Door Monday session to talk more in depth about an issue. The public hearing on the budget will be on Tuesday, April 2nd at 7:00 pm.
Goodwill Site
On Saturday we also approved the application for the Goodwill site at 10 S. Glebe. I suspect many of my readers have donated and/or shopped at this Goodwill site. It is one of the most active Goodwill locations. For the first time (with this project), Goodwill will be locating affordable housing on the site of a collection and sales center. They are also providing a childcare center on-site; making improvements to the streetscape; and incorporating many sustainable design elements. While there were concerns about the interaction with pedestrians and all the traffic on the site, many adaptations were made to improve safety and everyone will continue to work on improving pedestrian safety and overall experience. I think this project will be a big improvement for that location. I’m excited that Goodwill is trying this new model of co-locating affordable housing and their operations.
Rank Choice Voting (RCV) for General Elections
We also adopted Rank Choice Voting (RCV) as the method of electing the 2024 general election County Board candidate. You may remember that in December we adopted RCV for the County Board primary election. This RCV election will be simpler than last year’s primary because there is only one seat up for the general County Board election. While I continue to have concerns about using RCV for multiple-seat elections, I am very comfortable using it for a single-seat election and believe most voters are as well. The concept is easy to understand. Also, with RCV, because candidates will want to be a voter’s second choice if they cannot be their first choice, both candidates and supporters will avoid antagonizing other candidates’ supporters in order to gain that second vote. This leads to less negativity in campaigns.
Columbia Pike Form Based Code & Green Building Standards
We amended the zoning ordinance to include the Columbia Pike Form Based Code in our Green Building Standards. This will help bring future projects along the Pike up to our current standards for green buildings and is long overdue, I think. There was discussion that this does not go far enough to help the environment, but Board members mostly felt this is a good start.
Arlington 2050 Kick-off
Finally, I was delighted with the Arlington 2050 kick-off event earlier in February. People came away energized and happy to have met new Arlington leaders they had not met before. Our panelists were interesting and prompted good discussions. They enjoyed the event as well and stayed afterwards to talk with each other and attendees. I think the youngest attendee was 16 and I was certainly among the oldest. Hundreds of people have already sent in both physical and virtual “postcards from the future,” which we are collecting and will organize. We will continue to welcome the cards (you can pick one up and drop it off at our libraries, or complete it online) for the next several months.
Also, we will be finding other ways to gather ideas from residents including working with organizations and individuals who would like to have smaller events to collect information about what people want for Arlington in specific areas such as mental health, environmental sustainability, or form of government. You can watch the event here: https://www.arlingtonva.us/Government/Departments/County-Board/Arlington-2050
As always, I hope this has been helpful and welcome and comments, suggestions or questions.
All best,
Libby
