Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #1495: Town of Vienna, isn’t our Mayor a math teacher?

 

Last week we passed the first day of spring.  That means its time for our property tax and water bills to go up, here in the Town of Vienna.

This looks at the Town’s recent proposal for the real estate tax rate.  In particular, the Town is legally required to tell citizens how much their real estate tax bills are going up, on average.  And, four years into this new legal requirement, once again the TOV made a math error and got that materially wrong.

I’m not even sure why I bother to do this, at this point.  I guess, after four years, this is now a small-town tradition.

But, to me, it’s not really about the math error.  It’s that incidents of this nature seem to reveal that our elected representatives don’t read the details.  Nobody read this and said, hey, that doesn’t make sense.  How can our budget show property taxes going up almost four percent, but our notice to the citizens shows them going up just 1.6 percent?  It really wouldn’t take any more effort or attention to detail than that.  Read the one-pager, and see if it matches what is arguably the single most important number in the budget.

In theory, I’m supposed to be a good do-bee and just quietly inform the Town of the error in their latest notice. 

(Now let the pitch of your voice rise slowly as you read these next few sentences:)  But, four years into a task that requires a three-line spreadsheet to do correctly?  A task that’s a legal requirement for one of the Town’s most important revenue sources?  That can easily be checked four ways to Sunday?   And it’s still messed up?

I’m just not feeling the discretion this morning.  If you don’t want to read about it on the internet, TOV, check your math before you publish the notice.  I list four easy ways to do that, at the end of this posting.  Pick one, any one.  Chaos around this legally-required notice is entirely unnecessary.

It’s pretty clear that almost nobody in the citizenry cares about the taxes or the water bills.  Most are unaware of the timing, e.g., that the Town is in the process of setting the rates for the coming fiscal year right now.  Few show up for the (poorly-advertised but legally required) public hearings.  Some years, for the annual hike in the water and sewer rates, literally nobody shows up.

It’s equally clear that nobody bothers to check the math used in that legally-required real estate tax notice.  Except me.  FWIW.

So, in a very real sense, we have gotten the government we deserve.  And I’m talking to myself.

Which is liberating, because I don’t have to apologize for talking about the math.  Equations, even.  If you can’t stand the algebraic heat, stay out of my numerical  kitchen.

For the few of you out there that are still bothering to read this, the bottom line is that real estate tax bills, on existing properties, are going up an average of 3 percent, in the Town of Vienna.  The Town’s notice shows something around half that.  But that can be traced back to a math error.

The only real importance here is that this notice is a legal requirement.  The Town must, by law, inform its citizens of the coming tax increase.  If the Town materially misinforms the citizens, does that count?  Even if the citizens patently don’t give a crap?

Algebra

Background: Post #218,Post #1128.

A brief note on #218.  After being confronted by Town staff about that post, as I attended a Town Council meeting.  I did the reasonable thing and removed it, and then made light of that in a subsequent post.  I withdrew the post even though the numbers were right.  And now it’s deja vu all over again.  I’m no longer so sure that taking that down and making fun of myself, instead, was the right thing to do.  Why?  Because it’s four years later, and still, nobody checks the math.

The Commonwealth of Virginia requires that local jurisdictions show how much real estate tax bills will rise in the coming year.  Local governments have to do the simple math to combine the change in assessments, and change in the tax rate, and show citizens the bottom-line number:  How much will the tax bills increase, on average.

This is an obvious good-government measure.  Rather than present citizens with a bunch of gobbledygook, local governments must put all the pieces together on one page, do the math, and show citizens the one number that matters to them:   How much more will they have to pay.

While every other jurisdiction that I have looked at in Virginia manages to do this, we can’t seem to get this right, in the Town of Vienna.

The killer here is that concept really isn’t hard.  If assessments are going up 10%, and the tax rate is unchanged, then the notice has to end by saying that tax revenues are going up 10%.  By contrast, if assessments are going up 10%, and taxes are lowered to offset that fully, then the bottom line has to show that there will be no increase in total real estate taxes for the coming year.

Easy, right?

The second killer is that you can (almost) guess the correct number with a simple quick-and-dirty calculation. To get it exactly right, you need to do the math.  But to get close, all you need is a little common sense.  (And so, if you have made a material mistake in your algebra, it’s really, really, really easy to spot it.  If you care enough about it to check your work.)

OK, smart person, off the top of your head, if assessments are going up by 9%, and the tax rate is going down by 6%, how much will the tax bills increase?

If you guessed, um, like 3%?, then you’d be um, like, almost right.  Not four-significant-digits right.  But definitely in the ballpark.

The exact arithmetic is this:

  • Prior assessment * 1.09 * prior tax rate * 0.94  =
  • (Prior assessment * prior tax rate) * (1.09 * 0.94)=
  • Prior bill * 1.025

Or 2.5 percent higher.  So the simple guess was 3 percent, but the correct answer is 2.5 percent.  My point being that it takes more-or-less zero effort to get close.  And so you can easily have confidence in your algebra, if it comes out close to the simple-minded guess.

Let me just pull some numbers out of nowhere, and for no particular reason, redo that calculation for a 9.1 percent increase in assessments, and a 5.555 percent reduction in the tax rate.

New tax bill = old tax bill * 1.091 * 0.9444 = old tax bill * 1.03 = 3 percent increase in taxes.

Hold that thought, as we take a look at this year’s legally-required notice of the proposed real estate tax rate for the coming fiscal year, as posted with the materials from the last Town Council meeting (at this .pdf link).

Notice of tax increase 2022 for FY 22-23

In order to do the calculation, you need to know the current tax rate.  Which the Town of Vienna does not bother to list in that notice.  And never has.  So you have to find it in other Town documents, such as this one, to see that the current rate is 0.2250.

So, the data are:

  • Assessments are going up 9.1 percent.
  • The current tax rate is 0.2250 (dollars per $100 of assessed value)
  • The new tax rate is       0.2125 (ditto).

I’m not here to question the assessment data.  I’ll just accept that.  But, given those data, how much are real estate tax bills going to increase the Town of Vienna?

First, how much is the tax rate going to fall?  The new tax rate is 94.44% of the old one (.2125/.2250 = .9444, to four significant digits, same as the rest of the calculation).

Now do the simple calculation.  How much are tax bills going to go up, in the coming year?  What is 94.44% of 109.1% of current taxes?  It’s (.9444*1.091 = 1.0303), that is, …

Three percent higher, plus rounding error.

If the TOV notice doesn’t say that, then it’s wrong.  Because the entire point of that tax notice is to let the citizens know how much their tax bills are going up.

Well, nope.  The Town says that tax bills are only going up 1.6 percent.

That’s wrong.  That’s a bit over half of the actual number.  And please note, this isn’t an opinion.  It’s a calculation.  Aside from acceptable rounding error, there is no ambiguity here.  Either my math is wrong, or the Town’s math is wrong.

Now let me drag out the spreadsheet that I’ve used the past three years — and made public so that anyone could download it (say, to check their arithmetic) — and see what the prior “known good” calculation shows.

In the meantime, don’t be fooled by the arcane language of that paragraph.  Read the background posts if you want to know more.  But that is, in fact, where the TOV is supposed to tell citizens what the net change in the average real estate tax bill will be.

Or, if you just want to do a common-sense check:  Well, assessments are going up a little more than 9 percent, taxes are coming down a little less than 6 percent, so if you had to guess, you’d guess that the total tax bills are going to go up about 3 percent.

Here’s the exact calculation.  Same spreadsheet I’ve used for the past three years.  Same one that reproduces the calculations shown by other Virginia local governments, to within rounding error.  And when I do the formal calculation, I get what I now know is the correct answer, 3 percent.  That’s the second cell highlighted in yellow, below.

If you trace through it, all of the errors in the Town’s notice come from the fourth line — the revenue-neutral tax rate. Which, once again, is not hard to calculate.  If assessments are going up 9.1%, and the current rate is .2250, then the revenue-neutral rate has to be 0.2250/1.091 = 0.2062, to four significant digits.

The Town, by contrast, shows it as 0.2092.  Hijinks ensue.

But if you really want to drive yourself crazy, try comparing this official notice to what’s in the Town of Vienna proposed budget.  And you will soon see that the 1.6% in this notice contradicts what’s in the budget.  Apparently nobody, not even the folks voting on the budget, thought to compare this legal notice, for benefit of the citizens, to the actual budget numbers.

E.g., on page C2 13 of the proposed FY 22-23 budget, the town shows current and projected property tax revenues, from which you can calculate that the TOV projects a 3.9 percent increase in total property tax revenue.  (That seems approximately correct, because that includes the additional value from improvement of properties, including both replacing small existing homes with larger ones, and the big new buildings along Maple Avenue). (I will note that elsewhere, you can find yet different numbers, but those appear to apply to the median property, not to the average property).

Post mortem

So it’s not as if the TOV can’t do the math.  They just don’t seem to bother to check that the notice informing the citizenry is correct.  And, in a realpolitik sense, that’s entirely appropriate, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody in the TOV cares about the taxes or water bills.  Which is why I end up being the one to find an error, if there is one.

I count at least four easy ways to check the math.  There’s the quick-and-dirty test outlined above.  There’s the spreadsheet that I made available for download in prior posts.  There’s all the notices by other local governments, where you could load their data into your calculation to see whether or not you can replicate their results.  And there’s the simple comparison of what is said in this notice, and what is said in the Town’s own budget documents.

Anyway, the upside is that nobody (but me) cares.  So this has to be classified as annoying but harmless.  Anybody who actually cared about the rates could do the math themselves, I guess.  Actually, substitute “must” for “could”, and you’ll have a more accurate picture of the situation here in the TOV.

Post G22-015: First test of tote-based food dehydrator, version 2

 

Construction details are given in Post G22-014.

Bottom line:  Works just fine if you ventilate it with a computer fan.  Leaving this outside on two consecutive chilly, dry, sunny days was adequate to get 1/4″ potato slices dry enough to snap crisply when bent.

It was a little cold yesterday for solar food dehydration, not expected to top 60F.  But it was sunny and dry.  And that was enough to let me test and refine my revised tote-based food dehydrator (Post G22-014).   This is nothing more than an under-bed plastic tote with a bit of radiant barrier insulation outside, some cheap cooling racks inside, and a few holes in the top connected to thin plastic pipe.

Continue reading Post G22-015: First test of tote-based food dehydrator, version 2

Post #1494: COVID-19 trend to 4/27/2022, now 16/100K.

 

The count of daily new COVID-19 cases continues to rise across the U.S.  We’re now at 16 new cases per 100K population per day.  The rate of increase has slowed to about 20 percent per week, down from 25 percent (or so) in the recent past.  The Northeast region — which led the way in this secondary Omicron wave — continues to see weekly increases at about half that rate. Continue reading Post #1494: COVID-19 trend to 4/27/2022, now 16/100K.

Post #1493: W&M COVID uptick continues

 

Source:  Calculated from the W&M COVID-19 dashboard, and Commonwealth of Virginia counts of COVID-19 cases by age group.

This is just a quick post to note that William and Mary is still seeing about five newly-reported COVID-19 cases per day.   That rate has been roughly steady for the past couple of weeks.  On a per-capita basis, that’s well above the officially-reported rate for the 18-24 age group for Virginia as a whole.

I guess I’ll track this through graduation, as I will be in Williamsburg for that, and I’d like to have some estimate of the risks (or lack thereof) before attending any indoor ceremonies.

My guess is, I’ll be so thrilled to see my daughter graduate, I’m not going to pass on any events, COVID or not.  But I’m still going to calculate the odds of exposure.

Post #1492: Ceci n’est pas un parc, or surrealism in the Town of Vienna

 

With apologies to the master of surrealist painting, René Magritte.  Source for image above, The Treachery of Images entry in Wikipedia.

In the spirit of surrealism, I offer you this post, Ceci n’est pas un parc.  Which I will roughly translate as “this here isn’t a park”.  And, according to a Town of Vienna official, stated clearly and unambiguously at the 4/18/2022 Town Council session, this tract I’ll be looking at, it’s not a park, it has never been a park, and those who keep calling it a park are just stirring up trouble.

Because, I repeat, the thing I am going to describe is not, and never has been a duck.  I mean park.  Even if, at some point, it appeared to have walked like one, quacked like one, and so on.

The subtle surrealism of the current Town of Vienna on-line Zoning Map.

Let’s start in the present, then look at some history.  Right here, right now, the Town of Vienna maintains a current(-ish) on-line version of its official Zoning Map.  This Map, in its official form, has significant Legal Implications for this, that, and the other.  But the on-line version is just so citizens can look up the status of a piece of land.

You can find that map by clicking this link to this this Town of Vienna web page.

If you look in the northern part of town, you’d see this.  The various colors represent different types of zoning in Vienna.

But there’s writing underneath the zoning layer.  If you strip off the zoning layer, you’d see this:

To save you the squinting, let me blow up the relevant portion.  The black annotation is mine.

How anyone could possibly have gotten the notion that the area in question was, at one time, called and considered to be a park, I cannot imagine.  If you are somehow so delusional as believe what is literally written on the Town’s own on-line zoning map, just keep repeating to yourself:  Ceci n’est pas un parc.  Because you’ve been told that is isn’t, and never was, a park.  Eventually you will believe it.

In all fairness, that’s not currently zoned as a park.  But “park” zoning is a recent phenomenon in the Town of Vienna. And that’s after the Town quietly decided it wanted to use that land for another purpose.

Instead, that’s called a park — on the Town’s current map — because — see below — that’s how the Town of Vienna classified it for decades, and that’s how it was used for decades.

If you wish to verify that the Town’s map actually says this, I suggest you hop to it.  This may disappear now that TOV officials are aware of it.  I just couldn’t resist pointing out the irony.  For as long as it lasts.

No, wait, scratch that.  That’s inconvenient.  Just keep repeating:  Ceci n’est pas un parc.

And, also to be fair, if zoning is the sole arbiter of park status, then the W&OD Park isn’t a park, either.  That’s the curved arc cutting through the middle of this view of the TOV on-line zoning map.

Apparently, once a zoning category for “park” was established (late 1990’s?), for whatever reason, the Town did not change the zoning on either of those.  I’m sure there’s some reason for it, in both cases.  Possibly the W&OD exists solely as an easement?  Beats me.  All I know is, it’s not zoned as a park.

Four decades of ancient history and the middle ages.

Before the Town adopted a separate zoning category for parks, the only way to tell that the Town considered a parcel of land to be park land was from the official Land Use Map.  That dates back into ancient history.   And then, at some point, in the Town of Vienna’s middle ages, that map became part of the Town’s Comprehensive Plan. Both of these have Significant Legal Implications for allowable land use in the Town of Vienna.

The oldest such map on-line on the Town of Vienna website is the 1957 Town of Vienna proposed land use map.  You can find that by clicking this link for the .pdf on the Town’s website.  The orientation is a bit odd, with Maple Avenue runs left-to-right in the graphic below, but you can probably recognize the shape of the-thing-that-was-never-a-park.   Apparently.  Despite the green color, well … the annotation says it all.

Source:  Town of Vienna 1957 proposed land use map, link given above, annotation in black mine.

If we fast-forward two decades, to the 1979 Town of Vienna official land use map (available by clicking this link to the Town of Vienna website), drawn during the Town’s Crayola Period, you’ll get yet another view of that thing which, despite clearly having been lovingly hand-colored in green crayon, is not and never has been a park.  Like so:

Source:  TOV 1979 official land use map, link cited above, annotation in black is mine.

You’ll have to trust me that every official map between those two tells the same story.  (And that I picked 1979 solely because it sorts to the top if you search for land use map on the TOV website.)

It doesn’t stop with the maps.  If you look at official inventories of park land in the Town of Vienna, in their five-year Comprehensive Plans, this same thing — that never was a park — somehow manages to end up on the list of parks, a counterfeit among all the real and true parks.

To understand the truth, you just have to be able to separate the true parks from the fake parks.  But that’s easy.  Allow me to demonstrate.

Just to pick one, like so, yet another couple of decades later, from the 1995 Town of Vienna comprehensive plan, you can find a tabular view of that thing which never was a park.   It somehow smuggled itself onto the Town’s official inventory of parks, with the word park attached to it.

Source:  Town of Vienna 1995 Comprehensive Plan, annotations mine.

See?  Easy-peasy.  Now, that was never a park.

Conclusion

So, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?   Remember, all I’m doing here is agreeing with the Official Party Line of the Town of Vienna.  How anyone in the Town of Vienna could possibly have gotten the notion that this was ever a park is just beyond me.  This was never a park, therefore all the people in that neighborhood who keep saying that are just a bunch of liars.   Trouble-making liars, at that.  Just keep repeating, Ceci n’est pas une pipe, or parc, or maybe duck, and eventually the you will able to double-think your way into total agreement with the official Town of Vienna position on this matter.

Post G22-014: Plastic tote food dehydrator, version 2: Construction.

 

Edit:  See Post G22-015. Skip the drying racks, just place the food directly on the floor of the tote.  Replace the ventilation “chimney” with a computer fan.  With those changes, two days in the sun produced perfectly dry potato slices.

Last fall I came up with what I hoped would be a cheap and simple solar food dryer capable of drying tomatoes in the humid climate of Virginia. Continue reading Post G22-014: Plastic tote food dehydrator, version 2: Construction.

Post #G22-013: Toward a theological and horticultural theory of parthenocarpic zucchini.

Edit 7/29/2022:  Read post G22-050 first.

Theological and horticultural background

A parthenocarpic plant is one that produces fruit without fertilization, that is, without pollination.  The resulting fruits are sterile and lack fully-developed seeds.

Without getting into the deeper theological aspects, the word derives from the Greek “parthenos”, meaning virgin.   And “carp”,  meaning to complain.  Thus,  the Parthenon is a temple to Athena, who was virgin who had few complaints.

(Technically, carp means seed.  So parthenocarp means “virgin seed”.  I like my version better.)

Of course, now that you know the word, examples crop up everywhere.  The banana is almost surely the most familiar example of a parthenocarpic fruit.  If you’ve ever wondered why bananas are seedless, now you know.  It’s due to their parthenocarpic nature.

Every parthenocarpic fruit is more-or-less seedless, but not every seedless fruit is parthenocarpic.  Some still require fertilization, they just don’t (or rarely) produce fully mature seeds.  Seedless watermelons fall into that category.  Unlike true parthenocarpic plants, seedless watermelons must be pollinated to bear fruit.  The term of art there is “stenospermocarpic”, which seems to be Greek for narrow fertilized seeds.

This is also not to be confused with plants that require pollination, but not pollinators.  Those include plants that are “wind pollinated” (like most cereal grains), and plants that may be “self-pollinating” due to perfect flowers containing both male and female parts, so that simply shaking the flower may sometimes pollinate it.  (This is the source of the electric toothbrush hack for ensuring good tomato pollination.)

Parthenocarpic cucumbers and summer squash.

Greenhouse and poly-tunnel farmers provide the commercial demand for parthenocarpic varieties of common garden plants such as cucumbers and squash.  In those enclosed environments, without bees, those crops would otherwise have to be pollinated by hand.  That’s an obviously labor-intensive step, and may be a practical impossibility for crops grown under low “hoop house” type row covers.

Several different varieties of parthenocarpic cucumbers and squash are available to the U.S. home gardener. I’ve been compiling a list, but I’ve limited it to the small subset of fruits that appear more-or-less identical to their seeded, pollination-requiring cousins.  The subset of interest to me includes:

Cucumbers:  H-19 Little Leaf, Corintino, Dive, Excelsior, Piccolino, Quirk

Squash: Venus, Part(h)enon, Burpee’s Sure Thing, Defender, Duntoo, Dunja, Cavili, Golden Glory.

(Parthenon or Partenon, sure.  But Venus?  Singularly inappropriate.)

As far as I can tell, these are exclusively F1 (first-generation) hybrids.  (Because, seedless, right?)  So if you will only grown heirloom plants, or those from which seeds can be saved, this is not for you.

To determine which varieties to grow I will apply the Tomato Paralysis cure from Post G22-001.  List in hand, I’ll cruise the seed racks at my local garden center and grow whichever of those they carry locally.

As a bonus, I can have my very own guilt-free arena of death.

I ended up here because I had such a dismal time trying to grow cucumbers and summer squash for the last couple of years.

The squash vine borer is present in this area (Virginia Zone 7) for a couple of months.  That is, more-or-less for the entire squash growing season.  If you restrict yourself to relatively short-lived pesticides (I used spinosad), controlling it requires careful spraying at five-to-seven day intervals. See Post #G27, A Treatise on the Squash Vine Borer.

The cucumber beetle was essentially absent from my first year of gardening, and I had a bounteous crop of cukes.  But by my second year I had built up an unstoppable population of them, and got almost no cucumbers whatsoever.  I never found a way to control the cucumber beetle that a) worked and b) was acceptable to me, in terms of environmental impact.

The damned things are like vampires:  All it takes is one bite.  Cucumber beetles spread bacterial wilt.  So it’s not the actual leaf and blossom damage from their feeding that matters.  It’s that any feeding at all infects the plant and kills it.  As far as I can tell, a) once bacterial wilt starts, it’s just a short while until the entire cucumber plant is dead, and b) “wilt-resistant” cucumber varieties aren’t, they end up just as dead as non-resistant varieties.

But if I don’t need pollinators, I can grow summer squash and cucumbers under insect netting/row cover.  In theory, if I can sterilize the soil under the plants (with a neem oil soil drench, perhaps), and keep a bug-proof enclosure over the plants, I can physically prevent those pests from reaching the plants.  And yet have a crop, because barring the bees entry does these plants no harm.

I’ve been hesitant to try this.  Not just because it seems like a lot of work to set up, and a lot of hassle to maintain.  But because of the “vampire” nature of cucumber beetles.  It’s not their feeding that matters directly, it’s the disease they carry.  If a single beetle breaches the defensive perimeter, it’s game over for the cucumbers.  Do I really think I can (e.g.) lift the cover off to pick the ripe fruit and set it back again without letting in a single cucumber beetle?

It seemed to be a fairly non-robust setup.  I understand that insect netting can greatly reduce insect damage.  But because of the nature of the beast — bacterial wilt — I really need to eliminate it entirely.  If the endpoint is going to be a bed of deceased cucumber plants, I know ways to achieve that with a lot less effort.

But if the bees and butterflies can’t get in … then nothing bars me from making that enclosed garden bed an arena of death.  All of those highly-effective (i.e., deadly) pesticides that I normally won’t touch due to bee toxicity are now back on the table.  Subject to some constraints, nothing need stop me from hosing the bed down with (e.g.) pyrethrins on a regular basis (subject to controlling runoff).  This means I can install a secondary, chemical line of defense beneath the primary (physical) barrier.   If need be.

I’m looking for parthenocarpic, not carcinogenic.  So it’s not like any pesticide is fair game.  But cheap, short-lived and effective organics like pyrethrins would seem to be plausible.  Once I screen in the bed, I no longer have to worry about killing off my local bees and butterflies.  More-or-less any bug that gets through the outer defenses is fair game.

Conclusion

Anything worth doing is worth over-doing.  Given how much hassle it’s likely to be to do this at all, I think I’ll go for more, rather than less.

My plan is to dedicate one entire raised bed to parthenocarpic cucumbers and squash.  Roughly 4′ x 16′ or so.

Plausibly the major expense will be for the requisite statue of Athena, so that I may dedicate my parthenocarpic garden appropriately.  And some large-economy-sized Bucket-o’-Death, to ensure that any bug making it past the cover will die ASAP.

Otherwise, for me, this requires no investment in materials.  I already own a more-than-lifetime supply of thin floating row cover.  As well as a pile of loose PVC pipe and fittings, which is to adults what Tinker-Toys are to kids.

A year ago, I didn’t even know that such a thing as parthenocarpic squash existed.  This year, I’m going to grow a bed of it.   I’ll let you know how it turns out.

 

Post #1490: COVID-19, 14 /100K / day, but the Northeast is already starting to peak.

 

The U.S. is now at 14 new COVID-19 cases per 100K population per day, up 23% in the past seven days.  The weekly growth has been in that neighborhood for a while now.

This second U.S. Omicron wave secondary peak of the U.S. Omicron wave started mostly in the U.S. northeast and mid-Atlantic, with New York being the epicenter.  The interesting development today is that the Northeast has visibly reached an inflection point.  If that’s worst that the latest Omicron variant (BA.2.12.1) can bring on, then this second Omicron wave may go on for a while  yet, but it’s not likely to amount to much.

 

Continue reading Post #1490: COVID-19, 14 /100K / day, but the Northeast is already starting to peak.