Fairfax County Executive Tony Griffin on Monday will announce his blueprint for closing a nearly $650 million budget shortfall, in a spending plan expected to include deep cuts and a proposed increase in the property tax rate.
The fiscal 2010 budget rollout is the first step in a months-long budget-making process, one of the most painful on record amid a deepening recession and housing crash. The shortfall is rooted in a drop in home values as steep as the appreciation seen during the height of Northern Virginia’s building boom.
Supervisors, who will adopt the budget in late April to cover spending for the fiscal year beginning in July, expect Griffin to propose keeping the average homeowner’s tax bill roughly equal to this year’s, which would require a significant increase to the tax rate of 92 cents per $100 value of home.
At the same time, Griffin likely will offer a painful set of reductions to departments, including an across-the-board salary freeze, eliminating vacant positions and laying off employees. Agencies spent months drawing up how to trim their budgets by as much as 15 percent, and the county executive’s budget is expected to at least match the severity of those proposals.
“I think it’s going to be grim for a lot of folks,” said Lee District Supervisor Jeff McKay. “I’m honestly looking forward to [Griffin’s proposal], because I don’t really think that many people in the county have understood the magnitude of this yet.”
Some agencies will see deeper cuts than others, said Board Chairwoman Sharon Bulova, who said some county services might be eliminated entirely in the proposal.
“I would be surprised if [Griffin] just took the entire 15 percent as though all agencies were the same,” she said.
Public safety unions, especially, hope for fewer reductions.
Police hope to hold the loss of positions to attrition, not layoffs, said Marshall Thielen, head of the Fairfax Coalition of Police. Layoffs for administrative personnel, however, are “a very real possibility,” he said.
Fire officials are bracing for a 5 to 6 percent budget cut, said John Niemiec, president of Fairfax County Professional Fire Fighters and Paramedics.
“We are in an unbelievable economic downturn right now, this stuff is real and it’s staring us right in the face,” Niemiec said. “We got to be real careful that we’re not in the mind-set that we feel we’re exempt from that.”
Fairfax County Public Schools, which depends on the board for most of its budget, already has adopted its fiscal 2010 spending plan.
McKay expected the funding transfer to the system to be roughly the same as last year’s. About half of this year’s $3.3 billion budget went to schools.
