Now that the election is over, the Town has posted the first detailed look at its economic development study. (Download it from this link, ,pdf).
Per the Town’s consultant, we need to put 2400 apartment on Maple merely to “catch up” with “competing” areas. And we must stack those in at 100 dwelling units per acre, to be economically viable.
Continue reading Post #1138: 100 dwelling units per acre, up and down Maple Avenue
The people of Vienna have spoken, and they wanted the incumbents, not the challenger. Turnout was middling, for a recent contested election in Vienna. Continue reading Post #1136: Town of Vienna election results
N.B., That exceeds the population of Herndon because that’s total votes for all open seats, not total voters.
In Post #340, August 2019, I made the case for moving the Town of Vienna elections to November, to coincide with the general election. If you think that voter participation is a good thing, all you had to do is look to the well-run Town of Herndon to see what happened to voter participation when they did that (above).
In Post #1059, I noted that the Virginia legislature had passed a bill moving all elections to November. There’s some interesting detail there, including the fact that this was uniformly opposed by all Republican state legislators.
That bill has since been signed by Governor Northam. As a result, this is probably the last May election in Town of Vienna history. Continue reading Post #1135: The final Town of Vienna May election.
If you want the background, look at Post #532, Post #1056, Post #1096, and Post #1120.
Briefly, here’s the story up to now: A former Town Council member left $7M (now $9M) in her will for use in constructing sidewalks in Vienna. There’s a five-year time limit, starting more than two years ago. The executor of that will imposed a limitation — not mentioned anywhere in the will itself — that the money could only be spent literally for the sidewalk, not anything else that you need to build a sidewalk. No “curb and gutter”. The Town’s staff then put a lot of effort into finding the streets where it already had curb and gutter in place, and in effect chose streets for sidewalks based on what concrete had been poured a half-century ago, instead of some objective measure of need. And with that restriction, by my simple calculation, it was obvious that the Town wasn’t even going to be able to spend the interest that trust money would earn in five years, let alone spend the principal on new sidewalks.
In the last Town Council meeting, if you look at the details, turns out, they were just kidding about not paying for curb and gutter. Hence the image above. Of the first five projects for which the Town has approved construction funding under this bequest, and that the Robinson estate trustee has agreed to, sure looks like the trust is paying for curb and gutter for four of them.
The Town voted to approve the construction of those five projects without so much as a comment on the flip-flop. And, apparently, with no change in their planning, despite drawing up those plans based on streets with existing curb and gutter.
In Vienna, decisions just kind of wander around until they stop. And it looks like this is where this one has stopped. It is what it is, and it’s not even all that unusual, in this context. Looking on the bright side, after more than two years, they did manage to get some of the money allocated before the upcoming Town election.
My only due diligence on this, now, is to figure out what happened to the first three streets that the Town approved more than a year ago (Post #1056). People forget about those. They no longer appear on any of the documents, presumably because they’re a done deal. And yet, I can’t seem to find where the Town did a similar funding approval for their construction. (They approved only the money to pay for the engineering work that must be done prior to construction.) The key question is whether the Town will approve the funding, for the first three, in time to get them built within the five-year window. Or does the Town Council think they already did that?
Continue reading Post #1133: Robinson sidewalk bequest, odder and odder.
Yesterday I had to watch a bit of video of the last Vienna Town Council meeting. I needed to find a number, and the only way to find it was to play the recording of the meeting and listen to what was said (Post #1128, regarding property taxes.)
As I scanned through that video, trying to find that number, I noticed an odd exchange. It seem as if the Mayor was scolding Town Council members to remind them that the vote had to be unanimous.
I’m not sure I heard that right, but it was just weird enough to catch my attention. It seemed like there was some sort of informal, unspoken agreement that everybody had to vote “Aye”.
This isn’t the sort of thing where you can just ask and expect to get a straight answer. So, instead, I decided to check it empirically. And while summarizing the votes doesn’t prove anything, I thought that it might be an interesting piece of data.
Continue reading Post #1132: Getting to “Nay” in the Town of Vienna.
The back-story here is that Dave had had a particularly hard time getting his kids to bed. The house had finally settled down. And then this started up, below. This is directly in front of Town Council candidate Dave Patariu’s house. And that’s Dave, going out to ask the Town crew what they were doing. At which point they finished up and shut it down. Continue reading Post #1129: If you don’t want to get hosed by the Town of Vienna, vote for Patariu
The Mayor and Town Council are more than happy to boast about cutting next year’s real estate tax rate. But they somehow don’t mention that your actual real estate tax bill will continue to increase.
That’s human nature, I guess. But the fact is, they’re doing what Fairfax County is doing this year, to within rounding error. They are offsetting some of the ongoing high rate of increase in the real estate assessments by reducing the tax rate a bit.
And, in typical TOV fashion, when I went to find the key numbers — what’s the new tax rate going to be, and how much will tax bills rise — I couldn’t find either one of them. Not based on the materials published by the Town of Vienna. It took a while to sort out all the confusion.
So, for the record, with details to follow:
I defy you to find either the 0.2225 rate or the 3 percent increase in anything the Town published about this.
I realize that most people aren’t good with numbers. But I have to wonder if anybody on Town Council ever bothers to read the background material. It wasn’t that hard to tell that the numbers as presented didn’t make sense.
So, fair warning. I’m going to do the math, and I’m going to show my work. Continue reading Post #1128: Town of Vienna, it’s deja vu all over again on the property tax rate.
This post started out as a tirade about “free” mulch, because TANSTAAFL. The idea was to compare the value of the mulch to the value of the quality-of-life losses in houses adjacent to the Town’s mulching operation.
But in the end, I wrote this one backwards. The important part is not this little raggedy bit of analysis that I do next. The important part is the cost numbers that have been put in front of Town Council, shown at the end. Unless I’m missing something, getting rid of the Town’s mulching operation seems like a total no-brainer from an economic perspective.
Continue reading Post #1126: TANSTAAFL, or free mulch in the Town of Vienna
Two years ago, in Vienna Town Council elections, supporters for the two pro-development candidates reminded voters that they didn’t have to vote for three Town Council members. They could vote for just two.
This year, the non-incumbent candidate is reminding voters that they don’t have to vote for three Town Council members. They can vote for just one.
Every year, in Town Council elections, the vote total is less than three times the number of voters. Even though every voter may select up to three candidates on the ballot.
How tall would they allow buildings to be, in the revised Town of Vienna zoning? That’s really the only question I’d like a clear answer on, from our various Town Council candidates.
At the end of this post, I list a number of aspects of the revised Vienna zoning that I don’t think are in doubt, or that I never want to have to hear about again. They just don’t matter.
To me, it all boils down to building height. Continue reading Post #1123: Town of Vienna, the one question I’d like a clear answer to, from Town Council candidates.
