Despite the news that Loudoun will receive a mere $1,024 for fiscal 2011-2016 from the state, people living near roads slated for improvements were elated that supervisors still would move forward with plans. – Loudoun Times-Mirror
One of the things that has impressed me while I’ve lived in Leesburg and Loudoun is the fact that our roads have improved over the past ten years in spite of the state government. Local funds and developer proffers have been used creatively to make sure that critical interchanges and throughways were built to help alleviate the crushing burden of traffic we experience every rush hour. Meanwhile, the Republican-controled General Assembly tries to ignore the problem.
This year, a significant decline in fuel consumption, vehicle sales, registrations and the state’s sales tax collections has drained funding for Loudoun, VDOT officials said.
County leaders and members of the General Assembly are asking Gov. Bob McDonnell to call a special session to address the state’s transportation woes.
McDonnell campaigned on promises to fix the state’s transportation problems, but so far has failed to do so, they say.
“I hope everyone understands the sad state of affairs we’re in with this six-year program,” said Loudoun Supervisor Jim Burton (I-Blue Ridge). “I just wish that the General Assembly would get its act together. Funding for these projects are the responsibility of the state and they haven’t stepped up.” – Loudoun Times-Mirror
In case you missed it, Supervisor Burton is referring to the fact that the state will be providing just under $171 per year for “secondary” roads in Loudoun over the next six years. For reference, that’s about what a commuter pays to ride the Greenway for three weeks. I put the word secondary in quotes above, because what is secondary to Richmond is not secondary to you and me.
“There are areas of the commonwealth where their primary roads are what we would consider secondary roads,” Connaughton said. “And no matter what we do we will never be able to keep up with the subdivisions. We don’t have the resources and we don’t have the crews. VDOT’s down to 7,000 folks.” – Leesburg Today
Of course, roads (secondary and otherwise) have been built through local initiatives in Loudoun for years. Indeed, the proffer system has been invaluable in our ability to get the essential arteries of our area built. It was only last year that Assembly Republicans tried to kill even that!. Had we lost the ability to negotiate proffers from developers, Loudoun would have become impossible to traverse as new developments came without needed roads.
This history didn’t stop Gov. McDonnell’s Secretary of Transportation from coming to Loudoun to lecture us on doing more, however.
Connaughton said the biggest thing to help transportation is going to be localities partnering with the state to create funding.
“One thing you’re going to see is trying more and more to get localities to take up the burden of road building,” Connaughton said. “We just don’t have the resources to continue to meet the need. – Leesburg Today
Apparently, Secretary Connaughton is ignorant of how we’ve been doing things here for the past twenty years. We already are building our own roads, far more than the state is! Furthermore, it is remarkably disingenuous to say that “we just don’t have the resources” when it is the Governor’s own party that refuses to provide the resources.
Chairman York pointed out an inconvenient reality at that same event.
Funding for transportation projects locally would be difficult, if not impossible to sustain for Loudoun, York added.
“As long as we have a need for school construction, there’s really no capacity to start adding bond referenda,” he said. – Leesburg Today
The Governor and his administration are asking the county to put its good credit on the line to fulfill a responsibility the commonwealth has abdicated, even though the commonwealth continues to expect the county to send the same level of taxes and resources to Richmond. Our Supervisors are doing the best they can to keep up with our transportation needs, but the county is facing hundreds of millions of dollars in deficits each year, and being forced to choose between traffic and schools because the Assembly is playing politics with both is unconscionable.
But hey, at least we sill get to buy our liquor at state-run ABC stores.
(With a tip-o-the-hat to Loudoun County Traffic for the articles that inspired this post.)
That’s part of the argument I made on my blog a month or so ago, and the righties got indignant about it. We are the richest county in the nation, yet the share of our incomes that we pay in taxes is low, relative to other counties.
I’m just saying that there’s no way for a property tax to focus just on the people who can afford to pay more.
The State hasn’t granted the county the ability to impose an income tax, and the state doesn’t send our state income tax money back to us.
And though our home foreclosure rate last year was one of the lowest in the country, it was the highest it had ever been in the county.
Loudoun Interfaith Relief has seen a sharp increase in the number of people seeking food assistance.
More children than ever are qualifying for free lunch in our schools.
The number of people out of work for over a year is at a record high.
We have people in real distress.
All this WHILE we still have the highest median income in the country.
I don’t know what the answer is, but it’s not raising property taxes on people who are facing foreclosure.
BTW: You are allowed to pay MORE in taxes than is required if you want to!
I don’t think MVP is denying that people are having hard times, especially those that lost their jobs, but I am very sympathetic to his argument that you can’t buy a million-dollar home and then complain about your taxes going up $100.
And if the issue is people who lost their jobs, then create a one-year tax exemption for people who can document that they lost their job (for example, they filed for unemployment).
It’s time to pay our share, IMHO.
The BOS could put certain areas into “tax districts” like the Rte 28 business district.
But again, there are a lot of people living in homes in Ashburn who’ve lost their jobs and are having hard times. Owning property, even relatively new property doesn’t equal the ability to pay higher taxes.
The county has been in need of serious reform for a while. I live in Ashburn. It’s more expensive here, the houses are bigger, the people richer. If a homeowner wants to buy a house in Ashburn, they should have to pay a higher tax rate than someone out in Hamilton or Lovettsville. All the biggest public works projects are in the east, so it’s about time we here in the east start paying our fair share.
Mind you, I’m not rich. And I mean that in the most literal sense. My household income is <70k.
This goes to why we need to change the makeup of the Assembly. There needs to be real, not gimmicky, local revenue reform. Dillon rule be damned.
But unfortunately, the county can’t tax income, it can only tax property. And owning land does not equate to an ability to pay a higher tax bill.
We’ve got a large co-hort of people living here on a fixed income who live on land they bought a long time ago or that their parents or grandparents bought.
Which is great, though Loudoun gets the lowest amount of state funding for our CSB. The second lowest gets over twice what we do.
I think people who spend nearly a million dollars or more on a home are probably used to getting whatever they want. They don’t respond well to being told that watering the lawn during a drought will cause their neighbors’ wells to run dry, or that the “alternative septic system” means the maid can’t do unlimited loads of laundry in one day. How can that be, when the developer sold them such a lovely, palatial home with all the upgrades, and never mentioned any of these things?
Wow, thanks for your impassioned defense of County services in the face of small-minded self interest.
I totally agree about the hypocrisy of asking for more services while complaining about the way the County pays for those services. (See, for example, Thank Taxes.)
I believe you are taking issue with my characterization of a trade-off between roads and schools, and that’s a fair criticism. There is, probably, a three-way trade off in the classic “trilemma” model between taxes, roads and schools. The problem with putting taxes on the table is that it has become such a vulgar word that simply intimating that taxes may be part of the solution leads to the election of governments like the one currently in Richmond.
Which is why it’s so important for people like us to talk to our neighbors and start to turn that tide.
It’s tough not to lay blame at the state level–they sure earned all the criticism–but please remember that we live in THE… RICHEST… COUNTY… IN… THE… NATION.
I have been here since early 2007–both as a reporter and private citizen–and have heard nothing but bitching and moaning about the real property taxes, how they just keep going up and up, and how it’s just “too much” for homeowners to handle.
BULLSHIT.
The supervisors just took away $30 million from the school district, just to keep taxes from going up this/next year. Thirty-million dollars! Teachers have not gotten a pay raise in THREE YEARS. Far too many of these supposedly over-burdened homeowners are sitting back in their $800k or even million-dollar homes in Loudoun Valley Estates or Belmont Country Club, whining about their “high” taxes.
They can shove it up their ticky-tack asses!
What they are saying is that even though they pay thousands per month in mortgage, hundreds if not thousands in car payments, hundreds more in club memberships, probably even hundreds more in frickin’ wine alone, they simply could NOT handle a few hundred more each year to pay for the county services THEY ARE ASKING FOR.
I won’t even get on how the BOS portrays the school board. If that’s not the biggest crock next to death panels, then I don’t know what is… [exhales exhaustedly]