As our Town Council works up the nerve to OK the single largest expense in Town of Vienna history, I thought it might be a good time to repost this.
In a nutshell, adjusting for inflation, over the past 60 years:
- Town population increased 43%
- Number of town residences doubled.
- Value of residential real estate increased five-fold.
- Town of Vienna operating budget increased ten-fold.
Post #1820: Dribs and drabs of Town of Vienna historical data.
And, I guess it’s worth saying, pretty much everything we pay the Town to do for us would already be included in taxes paid to Fairfax County. The sole exception is, I think, trash service. The Town may do it nicer, or better, or something. But if Vienna ceased to exist, Fairfax County would still maintain the roads, pipes, police and fire service, and so on, for the taxes that we all already pay to Fairfax.
From this perspective, to make the single largest capital investment in TOV history, to produce something that’s all-but-indistinguishable from a Fairfax County rec center, right down to the annual fee to use it … I guess that’s not unexpected.
Edit: Now that I re-read that, I’m not sure it’s the largest in Town history. I didn’t literally check, memory fades. And when you get right down to it, you need to CPI-adjust everything.
But memory fades, and costs are often pieced out across multiple fiscal years.
But surely, of recent projects (police station, expanded community center, and now this), surely, once I start talking about the expected annual operating loss, then at that point, this building and all it entails surely dwarfs the other two, CPI or no CPI.
If the interest rate is 5%, the value of a perpetuity is 20x the annual payment. If I take (what I see as the grossly optimistic) assumption of the Town’s consultant, of a mere $500K annual loss, a commitment to pay those losses in perpetuity is worth $10M now. (And accordingly, if the real annual loss is more like $1M, that’s about like then town shelling out an extra $20M now.)
It’s a big decision. Let’s leave it at that.
The decision to buy into the government-run gym market appears to me to be, right now, the single largest purchase the Town ever makes. For a long time, anyways.
So in theory, it needs that level of due diligence.
If nothing else, I’d like to see the Town Council put together a local panel of experts, meaning, representatives of nearby local governments that already run municipal pool/gyms (a.k.a. rec centers). Then ask them discuss two topics: Annual operating cost, and annual operating revenue, from running one (or more) of these pool/gym/rec-center things.
Heck, that could be interesting.
