Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has approved their 2016 budget, giving the schools an additional $66 million in their $2 BILLION budget. But that wasn’t enough. The schools had requested an additional $14 million. [read_more]
The board’s vote was 8 to 2 in support of the budget with only Pat Herrity (R-Springfield) and Linda Smyth (D-Providence) voting against the $4 BILLION budget.
The board kept the tax rate the same at $1.09 per $100 of assessed value. (Loudoun and Prince William exceed the Fairfax tax rate.) Fairfax has lower commercial tax revenues because of the large number of vacancies in commercial buildings, the largest since the 1990’s.
1 comment
Linda Smythe confuses me. The ONLY way Fairfax County is going to recover from its budget woes is by packing in the commercial users and DINKS in Tysons Corner, which is in her district. But she hates development and loves to slow down traffic with “calming measures” and bike lines and such crap. So what alternative does she want? Sell off the parks and recreation space? (obviously not) Cut off all the county’s generous welfare and subsidized housing benefits? (not likely) Raise the residential tax rates MORE to make up for the lack of commercial tax revenues? (seems plausible) So likely her motives for voting against the budget were the opposite of Herrity’s. Politics makes strange bedfellows.