In particular, several nonprofit organizations urged county leaders not to reduce contributions to programs that serve homeless children or to a pool of money known as the “consolidated funding pool,” which nonprofits compete to use through competitive and innovative strategies.
“We are willing to pay more in real estate taxes in order to maintain the quality of life,” said Ann Zuvekas, head of the Fairfax County Alliance for Human Services.
But a taxpayer watchdog organization says that rising taxes are squeezing the middle class out of the area’s wealthiest jurisdiction and that government officials could still trim plenty of fat from the bureaucracy without harming social services.
Arthur Purves, president of the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance, said that despite the county’s efforts to style itself as well-run and efficient, its government has lavished its employees with generous salaries, benefits and pensions that residents can ill afford. In the past 12 years, spending on pensions and health care for its staff has more than doubled, Purves said.
“We have Wisconsin here, even though we don’t have collective bargaining,” Purves said.
County officials are well into the process of drawing up a spending plan for the new fiscal year that begins in July. County Executive Anthony H. Griffin has proposed a budget that would leave the current tax rate unchanged, maintain the same contribution to public schools as last year and freeze county employees’ pay for a third consecutive year.
Yet Griffin’s proposed budget, which anticipates rising home values, would still increase the average homeowner’s tax bill by about $111 a year. His proposed budget also left the Board of Supervisors about $30 million to use at its discretion — a sum that now appears to have grown by $4.7 million, thanks to robust holiday sales in December and other favorable trends. It could be returned to taxpayers or used to reduce program cuts or give county employees pay increases.
At the board’s budget committee meeting Tuesday, Kevin H. Bell, chairman of the Human Services Council, urged supervisors to maintain support for critical programs, especially in the face of threatened cuts by Congress.
If the House of Representatives were to prevail with its proposed cut of $1.1 billion, or 15 percent, to Head Start, the county would suffer a loss of $1.1 million, thereby increasing the waiting list of 1,326 children, Bell said in a letter to the board.
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