Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down at Albemarle TAX INCREA$E Town Hall — Jack Jouett Middle School (Monday, Marc

Thumbs up to the audience and to Albemarle Economic Development Director Faith McClintock.

Thumbs down (again) to County Executive Tom Foley and to the Albemarle BOS when it comes to holding legitimately engaging meetings with constituents.

Here are a few of my observations on the combined Rio and Rivanna Districts meeting with Supervisors Brad Sheffield and Norman Dill.

Both thumbs up to 19 members of the public who showed up at Jack Jouett Middle School last night to pepper Albemarle County Executive Tom Foley and Albemarle Economic Development Director Faith McClintock with budget and business questions for a couple of hours. And for a change, the public finally out-numbered County staff and government officials (I counted 7.) at this TAX INCREA$E Town Hall that drew plus or minus 26 people. Most of the members of the night's public, though, are also members of the Board of Supervisors Places 29 Community Advisory Committees — North, Hydraulic, and Rio. This particular town hall was called specifically for them.

My continuing thumbs down to Tom and to the BOS stem once again from the format of these meetings. The public was NOT allowed to ask questions of Supervisors Brad Sheffield (D, Rio) and Norman Dill (D, Rivanna) during the town hall, only of County staff. If someone wanted to interact with the two Supervisors, this was only allowed after the more than two-hour show put on by Tom and Faith and their assistant Emily Kilroy. (Or before the meeting, if a person knew to arrive early.) Meanwhile, Albemarle County’s publicity for these meetings still contends that they are “engagement” sessions.

Not even close. Two thumbs down.

In addition, Tom still cannot bring himself to say to his audiences that the proposed budget for FY2017 represents a 3% increase in the tax rate on top of the individual homeowner’s assessment increase. Saying 2.5¢ sounds smaller. After all, pennies really do sound smaller than percentages. Meanwhile, if taxpayers pay attention to the legal advertisement required of the County, the effective tax rate increase is actually 4.07%. With one party rule on the Albemarle BOS, Tom only has to say what he’s comfortable saying which, in my opinion, is not the complete and true story.

Not even close. Two thumbs down.

What was impressive, however, at last night’s TAX INCREA$E Town Hall was that the audience didn’t sit on their thumbs for a change as Tom began droning through his “engagement” and “aspirations” slides once again. They wisely started asking questions within a few seconds of his first slide rather than waiting around for a Q&A period at the end. The result: another routine presentation by Tom was made more tolerable by ten or eleven audience questions, by my count, during his 43 minute talk. Even better were the 19 additional questions and/comments the audience posed for an additional 23 minutes after Tom had finished his Power Point performance.

Here’s a sampling of some of the questions/comments tossed to Tom during his 66 minutes before the group:

• What is Albemarle doing to control growth? (Tom: “We’re known for our good growth management policies.”)

• How much of Albemarle’s Bright Stars preschool program is funded by grants? (Tom said the majority is not funded by grants. If I heard him correctly from the second row, he said he thought the program cost $7-8 million per year. Maybe he misunderstood the question or was thinking of some other budget item. Maybe he was tired. The County’s budget documents show that Bright Stars costs taxpayers $1.4 million with $477,000 of this through a grant from State taxes.)

• Are Albemarle residents poorer or just becoming cheaper? (Tom said he didn’t believe County residents’ incomes were going down. Tom added, "Our revenue depends on the real estate market.”)

• “You didn’t really answer my question. Are we importing poverty or are we less willing to pay [taxes]?” (Tom: “I don’t know that there’s less willingness to pay, but there are demands on our budget — school demographic changes, for example.”)

• What are the tax rates for Albemarle’s peer counties on your expenditures slide? (Tom: “We have that information.”) This information never gets provided at these meetings. I know. I’ve attended many of these TAX INCREA$E Town Halls all over the County for years and a slide of comparative tax rates WITH median property values is never shown.

• Why does Albemarle’s peer county, Montgomery, have such low expenditures by comparison? (Tom: “They’re doing some different things there.”) The man who asked the question suggested to Tom that the reason for Montgomery’s low expenditures should be researched. I think I saw Tom’s head nod affirmatively.)

Here are a couple more of my observations about questions that were asked of the County Executive. (In fairness, I don’t expect Tom to be able to answer everything thrown at him, but I didn’t think he would get the following two wrong since he’s talked about both of them multiple times and it is his budget after all.)

(1) Once again Tom showed his slide of what he calls Albemarle’s “average” home value of $289,000 from the year 2007 and said the taxes on that were just about the same now. I interrupted and asked him what the current figure is. He didn’t know. Economic Development Director McClintock immediately provided the 2016 figure: $319,000 — and, a special note here, these are medians, NOT “average” values.

(2) When asked a question about how much an efficiency study of Albemarle’s General Government (not including the School Division) was going to cost, Tom said $100,000. Again, his own budget document shows this consultant’s study will cost taxpayers $125,000. But shame on me for quibbling over $25,000 in a $375 million spending plan!

Tom was once again grilled with several questions about what’s going to happen at Woodbrook Elementary School. Community members are still questioning a million bucks for a design study for a 300-student addition that could cost $14 million to build while student growth numbers don’t appear to be rising to anything close to that 300 number. In Tom’s defense, he didn’t add the million bucks for the Woodbrook design study. The six Democrats on the BOS added it to the Capital Improvements Program (CIP). In a follow-up question, Tom was asked why the School Board didn’t accept the redistricting recommendation from the School Board’s Redistricting Advisory Committee. Tom suggested that the School Board needed to be asked that question.

Great questions all evening, Jouett audience. Two thumbs up over and over again.

Besides the audience's questions, the star of the evening was Faith McClintock, Albemarle’s Economic Development Director, a data-driven dynamo who delivered a candid Power Point presentation and answered sharp questions on the state of industrial and commercial growth opportunities and weaknesses in Albemarle County. The audience kept the Faith for 31 minutes.

According to the energetic McClintock, now in her second year with the County, business revenue to Albemarle amounts to around 15% of total revenues. The “gold standard” is for the mix of residential to business taxes to be more like 70:30 so that the 30% of taxes from business can knock down the tax burden on homeowners from 85% to 70%.

Some other interesting nuggets from Faith’s presentation:

• the lack of public bus service to the UVA Research Park near the airport;

• the high cost of leasing space in the UVA Research Park (higher than in Boston, according to one prospect from Boston who decided not to bring his business to Albemarle);

• there are more businesses in leased space than in owner-occupied space in Albemarle;

• To a question about what the public could do to help her do her job, Faith replied: “Tell the Albemarle story with the data we develop. If we leave our boundaries as they are currently, we will have to look at redevelopment and incentives. My job is to show everybody the data. It’s up to the Board [of Supervisors] and the Planning Commission to maybe reallocate some land a little bit.”

• “Most definitely,” said Faith, answering the following question from the audience: “There are a lot of people living here who don’t want anything more coming here. Is that a challenge for you?”

Two thumbs up for details and candor, Faith.

Take note, Tom and Board members. This is how it's done.