Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 19, 1994 TAG: 9404190126
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Brian Kelley
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Because such utterances mean it's baaaack.
The annual budget-making funtime, that is.
Like a rumbling avalanche, aswarm with pie charts, percentages and paper, budgets sweep away the time of harried county politicos and their staffs in an annual rite of spring.
Montgomery County finished its budget earlier this month, just ahead of the redbud. After 29 hours of meetings over nine nights spread across nine weeks, the Board of Supervisors finally got to the show-your-cards-or-fold stage.
In the end, five of the seven supervisors went for a minimal tax increase to avoid major spending cuts for schools and other county services.
Just before 11 o'clock April 5, the board set the 1994-95 tax rates that will, in part, pay for a $70.6 million spending plan beginning July 1. The new real-estate tax rate is 72.5 cents per $100 of assessed value, a 21/2-cent increase. The personal property tax rate is $2.45 per $100 of assessed value, a 15-cent jump. The supervisors had advertised tax increases of 8 cents and 25 cents, respectively, in March, before finding spending delays and cuts, and new revenue to lessen the blow.
The horse trading, the dog-circling-its-tail aspect of the budget negotiations made me wonder what a budgetary novice, should he have been foolhardy enough to wade into the mire and muck of the last-minute maneuvering, would have thought.
So I called Dave McKee.
McKee is director of the marching band at Virginia Tech and showed up at that April 5 meeting as a representative of the Gilbert Linkous PTA. He admits his bias: with two children in school, he believes more resources should go toward education. "They're doing a lot right now," he said of the Board of Supervisors. "I think they could do more."
Two things surprised McKee: the give-and-take over even another half-cent on the real-estate tax; and the apparent lack of public interest in the haggling.
In the end, the real-estate rate increase will cost McKee $24 over the next year. "I think our schools are worth at least that much," he said. Several members of the board, on the other hand, point out that a real-estate tax increase hurts people on fixed incomes or no incomes who own their homes or farms. That's one of the reasons there was little support for a more significant jump. Next year's elections in four of the seven supervisors' districts may have been another.
It also struck McKee that the big decisions were being made in a small room containing just the supervisors and a handful of onlookers, most of whom were connected to the county school system in some way.
This year may have been unusual in two respects. First, the board didn't direct its various departments to budget with a spending-increase cap in mind. Several board members have mentioned that they may favor going this route next fall. This was the process the county used during the tight recession years of the early 1990s.
Second, there was no significant organized opposition to a tax increase. The Montgomery County Taxpayers Association, which rallied opponents several years ago, is all but defunct now. One former leader, Barry Worth, is a School Board member who had a hand in preparing this year's modest school budget request.
Should you want to plunge into the perilous paper flow next spring, you may find some differences.
Supervisor Jim Moore of Blacksburg wasn't the first and likely won't be the last to ask for changes. He brought the issue up before his colleagues at a meeting last week.
Moore asked County Administrator Betty Thomas if there wasn't some way the process could be simplified. Expect Thomas and her budget expert, Fiscal Management Director Jeff Lunsford, to come up with some suggestions later this year.
"We do spend a lot of time on nickel-and-dime items initially," Moore noted. Then, with a deadline fast approaching, the board makes six-figure decisions one after the other.
Supervisor Joe Gorman has pushed to have the entire process occur later, so the board could have the benefit of knowing the outcome of General Assembly action that could affect school funding or other revenue sources.
Whatever the outcome of such talk, don't expect the Montgomery budget process to become any less of a "political chess game," as one county insider sagely described it before all the rigmarole.
My suspicion is that for most folks, the county budget and tax rates are like a sausage sitting on a breakfast plate. You either praise it or complain, but either way it's best not to dwell on how it got there.
by CNB