Public Input Is Sought on Budget Gap

County, Schools Plan Meetings

Fairfax County and its public schools are holding joint meetings this fall to solicit input on how to make ends meet during bleak fiscal times.

To balance its $3.3 billion budget this year, the county froze employee salaries, cut $92 million from agency budgets and raised real estate tax rates to compensate for falling housing assessments. Largely because of ever-shrinking real estate tax revenue, officials are projecting a $315.6 million budget shortfall next year.

County schools are in similar straits, though they were cushioned from what might have been harsher cuts by an injection of $42 million in federal stimulus funds. Already, per-student spending is down $442 from last year, 788 positions have been eliminated, class sizes are up and the district's massive student transportation system -- the largest in the country after New York City's -- has been trimmed.

Schools officials face a projected $176 million deficit, in part because of falling state funding and rising employee retirement and health insurance costs.

"Last year was hard, but there was some low-hanging fruit we were able to eliminate," county Supervisor John W. Foust (D-Dranesville) said. "This year, we're cutting at the end of the bone. There are going to be a lot of disappointed people, and supervisors will be among those disappointed people."

Foust said he would rather cut costs than services. He predicted difficult debates over raising the real estate tax rate and the school transfer, the percentage of the county's general fund given to the school system. The transfer is 3 percent.

Twelve community input meetings will be held at various locations through Nov. 14. About three dozen people attended the first session, at McLean Community Center last month, to discuss what they can and can't accept in terms of deeper cuts and higher taxes.

"We were too polite last year," said Alvah Beander, president of the Fairfax Library Foundation.

The library system lost 15 percent of its county funding in the last budget process, she said, and an additional 3 percent when the county made a second round of across-the-board cuts. Libraries have had to cut hours just as the failing economy has attracted more patrons.

"There's a lot that the library does that people don't know about," Beander said.

A spreadsheet she carried at the McLean meeting last week showed that one to three supporters will attend each community meeting to ask that the library's funding be partially restored next year.

Parents of students in the county's foreign-language elementary schools also showed up to defend the program, saying its benefits far outweigh its cost.