By Brian Trompeter
The Board of Supervisors’ budget public hearings are a window into just how diverse and extensive Fairfax County’s operations are – and how passionately people will compete to obtain finite resources or keep their own earnings.
Supervisors on April 11 held the first of three budget public hearings and the proceedings began, as usual, with testimony from officials representing Fairfax County Public Schools, which gets slightly more than 52 percent of the county’s general-fund budget.
School Board Chairman Rachna Sizemore Heizer (At-Large) called County Executive Bryan Hill’s proposed budget a “mostly good-news budget story” that finances all of the school system’s recurring costs.
Fairfax County Public Schools is facing a “significant” teacher shortage, with fewer people entering the profession and many leaving, she said.
“We need to provide market-competitive compensation and incentives to recruit and maintain staff,” Sizemore Heizer said. “We cannot have excellent schools without excellent teachers.”
Only 25 percent of the school system’s $65.2 million budget request for student needs and higher enrollment would go toward the latter, she said, while the rest would finance services for English-as-a-second-language learners, special-education students and pupils coming from low-income families.
But tax critics were plentiful, at least in the initial batch of people testifying.
James Parmelee objected to some speakers’ request for market-rate adjustments for school and county employees, saying many local residents got no such cost-of-living increases during the pandemic and some lost their jobs, savings and businesses.
“Remember, half the economy basically lost everything,” Parmelee said. “As it turns out, a lot of the shutdowns were overblown. A lot of the stuff you guys did was incorrect, did not follow the science and ended up hurting a lot of folks.”
Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance (FCTA) board member Charles McAndrew, who has lived in the county since 1968, said he wouldn’t have minded supervisors’ recent vote to give future board members significant pay increases if the board also had reduced residents’ real-estate-tax burden.
McAndrew asked county officials to do “zero-based” budgeting that evaluates all programs and services, looks for savings and eliminates redundancies.
William Peabody, testifying by telephone, at first seemed to be talking about opium, but it turned out to be OPM: Other Peoples’ Money. Peabody objected to a planned dredging project at 55-acre Lake Accotink, saying costs had ballooned from $9 million in 2010 to $395 million today.
“It may be the same process that led to the Silver Line,” Peabody said, alluding to cost overruns on Metrorail’s expansion.
FCTA president Arthur Purves said the county’s residential-real-estate taxes since fiscal 2000 had risen at a rate nearly three times higher than household income. Higher compensation for county and school employees – especially pension costs – is to blame, he said.
In return for those higher costs, “we get a county that is unaffordable, feels unsafe and has falling SAT scores,” Purves said. “The Taxpayers Alliance feels that the county’s deteriorating affordability, safety and schools do not give us a good return for our real-estate taxes.”
Pew Research polls show 80 percent of Americans do not trust the government – and for good reason, said Thomas Cranmer of Great Falls.
“The taxes you are proposing are unreasonable,” he told the board. “When people’s [house values] inflate with ‘Biden-flation,’ that means that it is not a real increase, it’s not a realized profit. You are taxing unrealized profits and people cannot spend this money.”
Mark Welch requested a 7-cent cut in the county’s real-estate-tax rate and a reduction in the school system’s transfer, saying county schools had a $295 million surplus at the end of fiscal 2022 and the overage has increased since.
“FCPS is as likely to spend $3.7 billion in fiscal year 2023 as I am to spontaneously grow a full head of hair,” said Welch, who is mostly bald. “I understand that you are not responsible for directing school expenditures, but you do have a responsibility for making final decisions that balance funding needs for all county programs with the burden on taxpayers.”
Speakers from a wide array of other agencies and interest groups also made their pleas.
Fairfax Parks Coalition Chairman Lydia Lawrence urged supervisors to create “targeted equity programs and not just [see] parks as not just something that we can save money on in the budget.”
For example, grant-funded mobile nature centers could visit under-served parts of the county and engage residents on the importance of the environment, parks, plants and animals around them, Lawrence said. Bilingual staff positions for this program would cost about $229,000, she said.
Corie O’Rourke, representing the Council to End Domestic Violence, asked for more resources to combat familial violence.
“Without adequately funded programs to address the complex challenges associated with domestic violence, survivors feel trapped in unsafe relationships,” she said.
Raymond Baxter III, who serves on the Tysons Transportation Service District Advisory Board, asked supervisors to obtain money for and expedite improvements at the interchange of Routes 7 and 123. The unfunded project is needed because of intensive roadway widenings nearby, he said.
“Otherwise, we are going to have miles of traffic backing up on either side of that intersection,” he said.
Brian Engler, chairman of the Fairfax County Public Library Board of Trustees, said the library system last year saw a 52-percent jump in program attendance as the pandemic lifted. Virtual programming also took off over the past few years and the system’s digital collection is highly popular with patrons, often resulting in their waiting for materials, he said.
“The libraries budget, not including increases to staff salaries, has been flat for many years now,” Engler said. “Investing in your public library’s budget for purchasing electronic materials and books is a very good way to meet community needs, as expressed through your strategic plan, while also ensuring that residents don’t have to wait for an inordinate amount of time waiting for materials, which they need for educational, workforce-prep and recreational purposes.”
Supervisors also held budget public hearings April 12 and 13 and on May 9 will adopt the fiscal 2024 budget, which will take effect July 1.
