With grim budget forecasts and an en masse election that could test the records of every Fairfax County supervisor who seeks re-election, 2007 promises to be a tumultuous year for Virginia’s largest local government.
The end of the housing boom and its associated real estate revenue increases are projected to result in a minuscule revenue bump in fiscal 2008, which begins July 1.
The change contrasts sharply with the 20 percent increases in homes values of recent years, and is especially jolting because Fairfax County relies on real estate taxes to provide about 60 percent of its $3.2 billion budget.
Because of the drop-off, County Executive Anthony Griffin has advised agency heads to forget about expanding or initiating new programs in their upcoming budgets.
“While we find ourselves in a relatively healthy period of revenue growth, we cannot assume the trend will continue,” Griffin wrote in February. “It is not a matter of ‘if’ the good times will end, but ‘when?’”
This year will also bring elections for all 10 spots on the county’s Board of Supervisors, most notably its chairmanship, now occupied by the vocal and high-profile Gerald Connolly. It appears unlikely the November elections will wrest control of the panel from the Democrats, who occupy seven seats.
It will, however, prove a test of the public’s confidence in the board on a variety of local issues, including taxes, development, the environment and transportation. Connolly, who is without question the dominant force on the Board of Supervisors and arguably the most powerful Democrat in Northern Virginia, has also emerged as one of the commonwealth’s most outspoken critics of the GOP-led General Assembly.
He has blasted the state legislature for failing to provide adequate transportation dollars to alleviate the region’s traffic crisis, while some in the assembly argue that Connolly, his predecessors and the rest of the board brought the problem on themselves with development-friendly, land-use policies. That argument, too, appears primed to come to a head this year.
