After taking several votes that ended up in a 4-4 tie, the Board of County Supervisors finally settled on an advertised tax rate of $1.195 which will amount to an average increase of 3.5%. This rate might go lower, it just cannot go any higher. The supervisors who supported the higher tax rate that passed were Caddigan, Nohe, Principi, May, and Jenkins. Stewart, Covington, and Candland voted against this rate.
Good for Caddigan, Nohe, Principi, May, and Jenkins to give us enough wiggle room to look at all scenarios. Teachers need a raise, a step increase and smaller class sizes. More school resource officers are needed. We need more police officers. Basically, if you talk to county employees, you will hear that they often do the work of 2 people. There doesn’t seem to be enough money to update IT products that would make the job of running a county easier.
Pete Candland gave an interesting presentation that called for increased money for teachers, more police officers and an investment in parks. What he didn’t explain to my satisfaction was where the money was coming from. He vaguely referenced FTE and carry over funds but I am not sure how that would work. It sounds like the county needs to fill those empty positions. Additionally, the increased money for teachers was not an across the board raise or step increase. Instead it was merit pay.
Merit pay is the boogeyman for educators. How do we determine who the best teachers are? Let the principal decide? Go by test scores? I guess the teacher who take on the most challenging students can not count on that money. It sounds like a whole lot of room for brown-nosing. Teachers continually reject merit pay because it only serves a few. There is just no way to evaluate most teachers fairly.
Smaller class sizes can be formed only one way, hiring or assigning more teachers to individual schools. That takes money. The average teacher salary is $60,000.
Are people in Prince William County really suffering under the weight of a bad economy? The unemployment rate in the region, including PWC, is much lower than the national average. Why is there this need to find a lower tax rate? For ideology sake? How did the department’s in need of additional employees respond to the cutting of those FTE’s? How did they respond to a budget cut? What would be sacrificed for a flat tax rate?
Unfortunately, local bloggers have decided to blast Caddigan, Nohe, Principi, May, and Jenkins as tax and spend liberals. PUH-LEEZ. I am so tired of sound bites. They most certainly are not tax and spend liberals, whatever that is. They were elected to run the county based on what the people want and need. Obviously people want their children to go to decent schools and they want reliable public safety. That is hardly being a [best girlie voice] A LIBERAL. Most of us want decent services and don’t want to live on the cheap.
The Sheriff continues to put Candland on a pedestal where he can do not wrong. It’s a shame to turn a nice guy into a hated figure by turning him into “Peter Perfect” while at the same time maligning those who disagree with his policy proposals. Let’s listen to Candland’s opinions and evaluate them as to how they will fly in PWC. Seems fair to me. We don’t need to lift him up by denigrating all the other supervisors. Pete is perfectly capable of selling his own ideas without the choir coming along and trying to bully the rest of us into going along with what appears to be a love-fest for Pete.
The blatant adoration actually demeans what Pete is trying to say and do.
Feh, yesterday was little more than posturing, a Kabuki dance enabled by the politically spineless. Marty serves as the perfect example, if he had no intention of ever voting in favor of a 4% increase as he stated AFTER the motion failed, then he should never have even considered voting in favor of setting that as the rate for “discussion purposes”. A little courage in conviction would be nice from Supervisor Wishy Washy, guess he left his crib notes in the pocket of his other pants.
Stewart, Covington, Candland, Principi and Jenkins performed as expected, voting in a fashion that matched their stated opinions. Like their respective positions or not, at least they were consistent. May was again the adult in the room and after attempting to broker a deal more in line with his thinking settled for the next best alternative. Marty flip flopped about as is his norm and Caddigan didn’t say a damn thing as is her norm (at least when those despicable bloggers aren’t in the BOCS chambers).
Say what you will about Pete but this at least the second time he has had a plan (the origin of which is somewhat irrelevant) and everyone else showed up at the table empty-handed. Unlike Caddigan who only stakes out a position at election time, at least Candland and those like Jenkins marked their turf early and voted in accordance with those positions. I wonder what considerations Maureen and Marty were given in exchange for their support (or in Marty’s case initial support to be withdrawn at a later date) of the 4% rate.
When all is said and done, Board of Supervisors adopted budget guidance in December.
Both the CXO and the Superintendent were directed to propose budgets based on their April 2012 adopted Five-Year Budget which included a 4% average residential real estate tax bill increase.
Why do they balk over the tax rate after directing those in charge to base the budget of 4%?
Cognitive dissonance?
This really should have nothing to do with personality quirks. 🙄
I am just not a flat tax kind of person.
I know people at the hill work hard, often doing the jobs of several people. They have never gotten back up to speed after immigration/crash when their numbers were cut back so severely.
I always used to accuse the county of trying to create time. (they did)
I think Pete is trying to create money. Robbing Peter to pay Paul is not good governance. If we have extra money to throw around, it should go to hire more cops and teachers and county workers. No one should be working 12 hour days and going in to work on the weekends just to keep their heads above water.
I appreciate his hard work but I wonder if he has ever really sat down and talked to people in the various departments to see what their needs are.
You can’t create money or time.
“In my defense, The Sheriff hopes that commoners will understand that things may appear to be one thing, when in reality it is quite another thing. That is what The Sheriff believes is the case in the current rhetorical bind I find myself in today.”
Howling with laughter…..methinks the mighty she-ruff should apply this to just about everything he or she has written. Hey sher-ruff, we commoners get it. Some of us learnt to cipher AND read before we left schools. Bbbwwwaaaaaaaaahaaaaa snort, snort.
Moon I completely agree with your assessment. Caddigan, Nohe, Principi May and most of all Jenkins are the ones who are invested in PWC. They’re not here for personal aspirations or to pander to a small group. They care about PWC families AND individuals who live here. All the time. By the way, they are the only ones that interact with county employees regularly in a pleasant way. Theres something to be said for that.
I had heard that they were particularly cordial to staff. I know if people want something fixed, they call Mr. Jenkins, regardless of what district they live in.
Mr. Nohe is also very quick to lend a helping hand. He was most helpful in helping us with the district realignment. He really didn’t have a major dog in the fight. he is very approachable.
For the record, one more time, I am not bad mouthing Pete Candland. I do want to know where he is getting the money from for his plan. I would also want to know if he had talked to agency/department heads to see what their needs are.
It seems to me that moving money around without talking to the people who are directly involved dehumanizes it all. It isn’t the best practice to simply move money and strip down things when you don’t fully understand the function of the department.
There are human needs in this county that cannot be overlooked.
Mrs. Caddigan always watches out for the schools unless Corey bullies her into silence.
Mr. Jenkins is a budget guru. He can project a budget change sitting right up on the dais.
It seems like Mr Candland needs to try coalition building. He has some good ideas and energy. He needs to sell ideas to his colleagues first. They can help him iron out the pitfalls before presenting.
funny, the dynamics of voting blocks is always adjusting with newcomers. May is a middle of the roader, looking for what works best, not necessarily what is ideologically pure. As a long time silent observer of the Board, I say we need more of him. If he would take a leadership role, you would see meaningful change I believe.
Why can’t the supervisors do what they say? Why even bother with budget guidance if they aren’t going to follow it? 5 of them had to approve it in the first place.
“It seems to me that moving money around without talking to the people who are directly involved dehumanizes it all. It isn’t the best practice to simply move money and strip down things when you don’t fully understand the function of the department.”
Moving money around without gaining full buy-in from department heads is often the only way to achieve cost effective budgeting. The problem is that the budget materials provided by the CXO do not give a very detailed picture of where the money is going and for what. Neither do those materials provide a clear pictures of past budget allocations and actuals for those years. They give you just enough to question some allocations but not enough to provide that AHA moment.
Take the Contingency Reserve on page 55 of this year’s budget. $666,977 was allocated in FY’12 and the actual was $265,404 or 39.7% of the allocation. Nevertheless, $1,068,021 was allocated in FY’13 and $1,066,321 (an increase of nearly 60%) proposed for FY’14.
Another example can be found in the IT budget on page 104 of this year’s budget. $23,300120 was allocated for the first four lines in FY’12 while the actual was $17,478,574 or 75% of the allocation. Nevertheless, $21,499,136 was allocated in FY’13 and $21,238,429 proposed for FY’14, and increase of 21.5% over the last known actual.
The best example lies in the Planning Office budget. Long Range Planning was allocated $1,129,797 in FY’12 and only expended $920,876 (81.5%) of that budget. Although that line item was slightly decreased to $1,040,869 in FY’13, it balloons to $2,729,461 in the proposed FY’14 budget, an increase of 196% over the last know actual.
This is the type of analyis that should be going on at both the high level budget line items and the supporting budget details, the type of hard work that staff has proven incapable or unwilling to undertake and demonstrates a level of oversight by the BOCS that is severely lacking.
BTW, Caddigan, Nohe, Principi May and most of all Jenkins are ALL about personal aspirations and/or pandering to a small groups, at least in my opinion and based on my interactions with them.
It may or may not be the Sheriff’s intention to put Candland on a pedestal, but he is providing a convenient platform to those who wish to. Additionally, he has not made any effort to address this “enthusiam” by offering any counter points that may give one pause to think over some of Mr. Candland’s proposals and study them for long term effects to all PWC citizens, not just a few of his friends in his district.
Nohe, Caddigan, May, Jenkins and Principi seem to look more at the overall picture and what benefits the county as a whole. Candland wants a flat tax rate, I want a flat utility bill, a flat grocery bill, I want the general cost of living to be flat. As a well known British poet once wrote, “You can’t always get what you want.”
Nohe, Caddigan, May, Jenkins and Principi are certainly more knowledgeable about county business than 2 out of the other three.
“Nohe, Caddigan, May, Jenkins and Principi are certainly more knowledgeable about county business than 2 out of the other three.”
So is that meant as a compliment or condemnation of them? If I believed it to be true, I would suggest the latter. Unfortunately only May and Principi do any analysis of what is presented on the agenda. Jenkins does whatever suits his particular interests and Nohe and Caddigan bob their heads in time with the CXO wishes.
Fyi. School Resource Officers are funded the county budget. The BOCS will be adding funding so that every high school and middle school will have one FTE SRO.
Yes they are. They are regular uniformed police officers. They should have never been cut back to a share position.
@Mom
The best example lies in the Planning Office budget. Long Range Planning was allocated $1,129,797 in FY’12 and only expended $920,876 (81.5%) of that budget. Although that line item was slightly decreased to $1,040,869 in FY’13, it balloons to $2,729,461 in the proposed FY’14 budget, an increase of 196% over the last know actual
Well, when I read it I see –
$2M of the $2.7 in FY14 is for targeted redevelopement – the project appears to be the responsibility of Economic Decelopment but the funding placed in Planning. Likely due to financial reporting/fund allocation and management.
Therefore the comparable FY14 budget to FY12 expenditure ($920,826) is actually $729,641. A reduction of $191,185 or 21%.
@Wendy – Beat me to the punch on that one 🙂
@Mom – have you had extensive interactions with ALL of them? My observations are the complete opposite of yours. Maybe we have different interests or goals. After 33 years of watching and community involvement I’ve seen plenty. One of the best was Ruth Griggs. She threw up her hands and bailed. Caddigan and Jenkins have been supportive of the towns over the years – the others dont know they exist.
Its interesting that you have gleaned that from the sparse information provided in the Planning Office budget details on pages 172-181 because my review of the sparse details regarding Long Range Planning on page 178-179 don’t seem to indicate that. I’m not saying its not true, I suspect you have some inside baseball info., I’m simply saying that the budget detail doesn’t seem to support that.
As I noted earlier, the data provided does not present “a clear pictures of past budget allocations and actuals”, it simply gives you just enough information “to question some allocations but not enough to provide that AHA moment”. In short, and your comments seem to support this, the budget picture is not transparent. Further, if indeed “the project appears to be the responsibility of Economic Development but the funding placed in Planning” then I would have further questions regarding the efficacy of the budget as presented.
As to the BOCS, at least we agree on Ruth Griggs. As to Caddigan and Jenkins having “been supportive of the towns over the years” I suspect the towns would heartily dispute that particularly with respect to Caddigan.
So at least it seems that we all agree on Mr. Jenkins. He really does care about Dale City and its people. Additionally, if your own supervisor ignores you and you contact Mr. Jenkins over an issue, it gets done. He doesn’t just care about Dale City. While we are at it, for all the heat she has taken, I don’t think enough people have thanked Mrs. Jenkins for her thousands of hours of free time she has given to Prince William County and its residents.
I figured there was something I didn’t understand rather than the folks at McCoart are crooks or idiots or should be referred to with disdain. I’m a little weary of that knee jerk reaction, aren’t you?
After determining that $2m appeared as a first time item in FY14 with the words “targeted redevelopment” i searched the county’s website for that term.
The people at McCoart are required to comply with regulations regarding publications. They don’t make it up. Have you ever read Fairfax’s?? Good thing the Sheriff doesn’t live there – he’d have collapsed from conspiracy theories – now thats a really big budget with LOTS of pages 🙂
My recommendation – no baseball info here on PWC – is to read the beginning of the fiscal document. Most highlights and major funding increases are documented there – in English.
Dumfries and Occoquan have enjoyed good relationships. Not sure about Haymarket.
As I said, the budget in its current format it simply gives you just enough information to question some allocations, although there might be information elsewhere in the 500+ page document, that circumstance is not detailed where it should be, in the Long Range Planning details on pages 178-179. If there were at least a mention there, as there should be, I wouldn’t have called it into question.
Now can you make the same arguments for the examples regarding the IT Budget or Contingency Reserves?
I agree Occoquan seems to generally have a good relationship, at least until that last land use fiasco. Dumfries, not so much, at least according to several of their current and previous elected board members.
“…as there should?” According to you? I figured it out.
Here try this!
Virginia Department of Planning and Budget
1111 East Broad Street
Room 5040
Richmond, VA 23219-3418