Albemarle residents criticize proposal to raise tax rates
The Daily Progress/Megan Lovett
Rose Sgarlat Myers (right) and Debbie Watson eat at the Albemarle Truth in Taxation Alliance pizza and root beer reception before the county’s public budget hearing. The reception was the second of its kind, mocking Board Chariman David L. Slutzky, who once said a tax increase would mean residents would have to sacrifice a pizza and a beer a month.
A sea of orange posters with the words, “think outside the tax box,” were waived as residents spoke Wednesday night against a proposed real-estate tax increase in Albemarle County.
Yet, others who spoke at the public hearing pleaded for the Board of Supervisors to adequately fund education, transit and other services.
Residents overflowed from seats on Wednesday, lining the walls of the county auditorium and seeping into its balcony. A large portion of residents criticized a proposal in the county executive’s budget recommendation to raise the real-estate tax rate by 5.7 cents per $100 of assessed value.
County Executive Robert W. Tucker Jr. has presented a $307.7 million budget recommendation for fiscal 2010, which is about $26 million lighter than the current budget and calls for the county’s 71-cent tax rate to jump to 76.7 cents.
Because assessed property values have declined, the average homeowner would pay the same real-estate taxes this year as last year if the Board of Supervisors raises the tax rate to 74.2 cents.
The Board of Supervisors, however, asked Tucker to create a budget proposal that would add another 2.5 cents on the tax rate to use if economic conditions worsen.
Many residents said that now is not the time to raise taxes. Some said that the economic downturn has already made it difficult to pay their bills, and a tax increase would only set them further back.
Resident Claude Monger said that he’s had to live within his financial means his entire life but the county won’t pledge to do the same.
“I will not continue to be able to live here if fundamental changes aren’t made,” Monger said. “There’s no way my salary can keep up with your … appetite for taxes.”
More than 100 people attended a “pizza and root beer” party before the hearing — the second gathering of its kind hosted by the Albemarle Truth in Taxation Alliance — mocking Board Chairman David L. Slutzky, who once said a tax increase would mean residents would have to sacrifice a pizza and a beer per month.
“I just plain don’t have it,” one resident said of the additional money he’d have to pay under the tax increase, adding that he’s making less money and paying more in insurance premiums.
Others said that their business revenues have declined and their retirement funds have become depleted, making it difficult to pay their bills.
“Don’t balance the budget on the back of the people you see standing behind me,” said Keith Drake, chairman of the taxation alliance, as dozens in the audience stood on his behalf.
Steven Gissendanner, the president of the Albemarle Education Association, said that the county has operated on “a lean budget” and that the education funding cannot afford to be cut further.
He said the county is already shy of meeting its goals for the number of police officers. Others pushed for funding for the county’s program to acquire land conservation easements, which would receive several hundreds of thousands of dollars less in taxpayers’ money under Tucker’s plan.
Tucker’s proposal is designed to guide the Board of Supervisors as its members create a budget in April and set tax rates.
Tucker’s budget is online at http://www.albemarle.org. The Board of Supervisors will host another public hearing on April 1.
The value of the average single-family residence is down 4.1 percent and the county will have to fork over $4.4 million more this year than last, under a revenue-sharing agreement with Charlottesville.
Despite the real-estate tax rate increase, the county would still have to make vast cuts to services, including freezing 50 county employee positions by the end of January 2010, cutting spending in county departments and delaying infrastructure projects, in addition to providing no salary increases to county employees.
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Reader Reactions
Twenty years in the county school system should help to make my claims credible. My faculty has had three day long meetings/workshops at local vineyards, and two were catered by the vineyard, and an outside company provided lunch for the third one. We were invited to stay afterwards for wine tasting. Only administration and a few faculty members ever remained to participate.It serves little purpose for me to make this up, and as a professional pack rat, I still have the information we received for these meetings (letters, schedules, etc.).
Over the last 10 years, I have personally attended conferences with coworkers in hotels that are well beyond my personal budget. I have stayed both in and out of state in a Hilton, Hyatt Regency, and twice at Omni. I can’t deny that I enjoyed these activities. We ate at some very nice restaurants, the most expensive for dinner only,but we paid for our alcoholic beverages. While we certainly made new discoveries and learned about trends in education, we weren’t held accountable for our specific activities, and the information we came home with didn’t affect classroom instruction unless we were provided with the materials or technology to which we were exposed. Sometimes there just isn’t time for teachers to plan for, and incorporate, what we learn (with the exception of lecture information, such as discipline ideas or teaching methods, which many educators do attempt to apply to our individual classrooms).
Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I had my own children and they entered the county school system that I realized how wasteful spending was hurting them. To this day, I feel both guilty and upset about being a part of the problem that has been to blame, in part, for the budget crisis the school system faces. Certainly these activities are only small expenditures compared to some of the more noticeable ones that D-mocracy mentions. My concern is that the hidden spending, which is not out there for taxpayers to see, adds up and will not be addressed unless the school board pays more attention to all expenditures, the purpose and/ or goals, and how they directly affect the education of our students. It is encouraging to know that there are people out there, such as D-mocracy, that are paying attention.
I am a bit puzzled by Parentuv4’s comments.
She (?) says that the Board of Supervisors has not held the schools accountable, but provides few specifics. In fact, it is the School Board that approves the school budget, and the School Board is an elected body.
Parentuv4 cites wasteful spending…“expensive hotel rooms for out of town conferences,“ for example.
Most teachers, obviously, do not get these rooms. So, who does? It seems to me that some participation by educators in professional conferences is a positive thing. The county is paying for “meetings at local vineyards??“ I’d be more than a little skeptical of this claim.
I think the bigger claim about misguided spending by the schools is better directed at purchases like SchoolNet, sold as an “instructional” tool when it really is a way for central administration to keep track of student test scores. As for its instructional utility, it’s virtually nil.
Or perhaps another example of misguided spending is th money thrown at consultants (DuFours, Antonelli, etc.) who say the same thing each time. Some of these folks embellish greatly the research claims for what they sell.
Make no mistake. Albemarle County, compared to all the other localities in the state, is affluent. It has one of the lowest – if not the lowest – real estate tax rates of localities that approximates its wealth. It also has 5000 properties and 60% of all of its land under Land Use tax exemptions. No locality in the Commonwealth uses these exemptions more than Albemarle does. And, there is a cost to that.
The share of the total county budget that goes to school operations is now about 45%, done from 55% about a decade ago. The school operations category houses salaries. The conclusion is obvious.
Parentuv4 says “the people who are most important to our children won’t see a much needed pay raise.“ She’s right. And while cental administration calls this a necessity, it’s more accurate to call it a choice.
If the Board of Supervisors had held the school system accountable when they were handing out more and more money to them every year then perhaps the citizens of Albemarle County wouldn’t have to pay for their carelessness. Year after year, the schools wasted money on things that had little, if any, positive or direct affect on students, such as expensive hotel rooms for out of town conferences, meetings at local vineyards and restaurants, catered meals, new furniture in offices, laptops for every teacher (when every teacher already has 2-3 computers in the classroom)...the list goes on. As one of those teachers, I’ve watched the spending incredulously, and can’t believe the school board continues to request more and more money each year. Are our students better educated as a result of the above expenditures? Trying to keep up with the Jones’, a/k/a NOVA school systems, hasn’t proved to make a difference for the majority of our children either, especially the learners that are struggling. Now, the people who are most important to our children won’t see a much needed pay raise (especially in these hard economic times). We were fed well, enjoyed some expensive new toys, and had some fun trips, but now we may not be able to pay the mortgage. Add to that the slap in the face of higher taxes, and “a beer and a pizza” will become a meal only to be enjoyed by administration and the school board. By allowing the schools to spend wastefully year after year, the Board of Supervisors dug a very deep grave that the citizens of this county are about to be pushed into with the passing of another budget.
Keithh Drake says the county Board of Supervisors should not “balance the budget” on the back of Untruth in Taxation Dalliance supporters. Who SHOULD bear the brunt of the balancing? Someone has to. Over the last several years or more, the brunt of balancing the budget has been on county employees, especially teachers (since they make up the single largest sector of employees). But over time, the budget is also balanced on the backs of county residents who do not own large parcels of land and thus are not eligible for reduced taxes under the land-use taxation exemption. The Untruth in Taxation Dalliance complains about the tax rate in the county….like they complain about taxes in general (like Leona Helmsley, they seem to think that only the “little” people should pay taxes). The truth is that there is no locality in Virginia that approximates Albemarle’s affluence with a lower real estate tax. The county is a low-tax county in a low-tax state in a low-tax nation (the U.S. has one of the lowest overall tax burdens of all industrialized nations).
One must presume that Drakes and his supporters voted for the ideas and policies of Reagan Bush I and Bush II…the very ideas and policies that have caused economic calamity.
Strangely and perversely, their antidote for the current economic crisis is more of the same.
Sad, sad, sad.
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