MAN ABOUT TOWN: A City in Retreat

By GEORGE SOUTHERN
Falls Church Times Staff

As I write this on a dreary, wet Monday afternoon, the City Council and the School Board are preparing to retreat. Shakespeare could not have orchestrated more appropriate weather, nor could our elected officials have chosen a better name. Because when conditions are this bad, a retreat is indeed required.

One definition of retreat is “a period of group withdrawal for prayer, meditation, or study.” Given the financial state of the City, all three options may be required.

Tonight (Nov. 30)  at 7 p.m., City Council and the School Board will retreat to MEH Middle School cafeteria. One item, and only one item, is on the agenda:

1. FY11 Finance discussion

That’s it. Assistant City Manager Cindy Mester’s 1-page cover memo describes the retreat as a time for “a comprehensive financial discussion for the FY 2011 budget development.”  She then injects some tragedy/comedy:

Time: 7:00 p.m. – 9:30 p.m.

That’s the comedy. A combined City Council/School Board meeting will do well to have recited the Pledge of Allegiance by 9:30. Now for the tragedy:

Refreshments – dinner, drinks beyond water will not be provided this year

So it’s Bring Your Own Drinks Beyond Water, just to set the appropriate tone. Hemlock, anyone?

Since misery loves company, Ms. Mester has provided a little Schadenfreude for the solemn occasion: background reading about others’ financial miseries. First on the list:

“Virginia’s State Budget: A Train Wreck about to Happen”

That should cheer them up.

Then some more intimate reports: the financial miseries of our neighbors in Alexandria City and Arlington and Fairfax counties. They went on retreats, too.

Alexandria anticipates FY 2011 revenue to fall by about $20 million (from $530 million to $510 million).

Arlington tops that easily, with a projected revenue decline of $40-50 million (on an $880 million budget).

Then comes Papa Bear Fairfax County, overshadowing them all with a revenue drop of $232 million (on a $3.3 billion budget).

Presumably, the flood of red ink in neighboring jurisdictions should make us feel better. But in fact the comparisons make us look even worse, because proportionally our neighbors are in much less financial trouble:

Alexandria’s deficit: 3.8 percent

Arlington’s deficit: 5 percent

Fairfax County’s deficit: 7 percent

City of Falls Church’s deficit: 11 percent

Or in other words: our fiscal problem is three times as bad as Alexandria’s, twice as bad as Arlington’s, and one and a half times as bad as Fairfax County’s.

At the retreat, officials will mull the now-famous Nov. 16 “Tuohy memo” from our Chief Financial Officer. Were Mr. Tuohy’s bent a literary rather than a financial one, he might have quoted Dickens’ “Macawber Principle”:

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness.

Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

Applying the Macawber Principle to the City you get:

Annual income $59,433,871, annual expenditure $67,092,386, result disaster (or a whopping tax increase).

So the tug-of-war tonight at the retreat will be between raising taxes and cutting services. To avoid cutting services means increasing the tax rate from the present $1.07 to something in the vicinity of $1.30. That’s about a 20 percent increase. City Councilman Dave Snyder has already proclaimed that he won’t go along with that, which doesn’t really matter since he’s in the minority on most issues.

But what’s the alternative? Cutting the schools budget? You’ve just touched the “third rail” of City politics. Tampering with the schools is like cutting Social Security benefits. Do so at your electoral peril.

So, pass around the cold water, ladies and gentlemen (or anything Beyond Water which you might have brought along). It’s going to be a long retreat.