There are at least three interesting agenda items for tonight’s Town Council meeting. You can find the meeting materials on this page. One has to do with “vacating” town alleyways (i.e., selling the land to an abutting land owner). A second has to do with the Town setting a goal for the “level of service” on Maple Avenue, that is, a goal for the most congestion it will tolerate before trying to do something about it. Third, the Town is finalizing plans to hire a contractor to tell them how much it will cost to put the utility lines underground along Maple. Continue reading Post #506: Tonight’s Town Council meeting
Category: Town of Vienna, VA
Post #505: Revisiting #2: Let’s move the Noah’s Ark meeting into the 21st century.
Read Post #480 for the definition, and Post #495 for how this applies to Town’s decision to establish the rules for rewriting all the zoning in Vienna in private, out of the public view.
In a nutshell:
- Under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), any time three* or more members of a public body gather to discuss public business, that’s a public meeting.
- All public meetings have to be open to the public, unless there’s some well-defined reason for having a closed meeting. The statute identifies a specific list of such reasons (e.g., personnel actions).
- A meeting of two members of a public body is not a public meeting. It has to be three or more.
* Or, if a quorum is fewer than three. So if there’s a two-person subcommittee, if those two people meet to discuss public business, that’s a public meeting.
OK, now think like a bureaucrat. How do you dodge the clear intent of the Virginia FOIA, and manage to hold a meeting of (e.g.) seven members of the Town Council, but bar the public?
Simple: You break your meeting up into little pieces, where each piece only has two Town Council members present. Let me term each such piece of the overall meeting a “meetinglet”.
A single meetinglet, by itself, is more-or-less useless. But now, instead of one meeting with all seven present, you hold a coordinated series of meetinglets, one after the other, with Town Staff providing information on what has been said in all prior discussions. For legal purposes, instead of that being treated as one meeting of seven people that has been broken up into meetinglets, the law treats each meetinglet separately.
Hence, “Noah’s Ark” meeting, because you bring in the Town Council two-by-two. You break the seven-person meeting into a series of two-person meetinglets, and presto, it’s legal.
Continue reading Post #505: Revisiting #2: Let’s move the Noah’s Ark meeting into the 21st century.
Post #504: Revisiting old business #1, the mystery of the additional $7,000,000 2020 loan
I don’t quite have the heart to write a post summing up where we stand on MAC zoning. Which is how I should start the new year.
So, in the meantime, I’m revisiting a few old issues, mostly those that I find puzzling or annoying. Today’s issue is both. Today’s post is about the Town’s forthcoming $28M — or-is-it-$35M? –2020 bond issue.
Mostly, I’m revisiting this because, upon reflection, what the Town said about the $35M borrowing authorization simply reeks of baloney.* They said that the last $7M of borrowings was added with no purpose in mind, and it would be used to add to the reserves in the capital fund.
* I realize baloney does not reek, but my wife made me change this from the original wording.
The sole point of this post is to point that out, as clearly as possible, that this is nonsense. And then to take a pure guess as to what’s actually going on. The Powers That Be in Vienna will or will not inform the peasantry of the true reason for the additional loan (i.e., the spending of the peasantry’s tax dollars), at some point, as they deign. Or not. All I can do is point out that what they said in that meeting about the additional $7M in borrowings isn’t plausible. Continue reading Post #504: Revisiting old business #1, the mystery of the additional $7,000,000 2020 loan
Post #503: 21/150
Image Source: Linked from the Dominion Power outdoor lighting website.
Maybe it’s because I’m so burnt out, writing about the Town of Vienna. Maybe it was an exchange I had with somebody where I said that if you actually look at the “olde-tyme” streetlights along Maple, they look like hell. Maybe it’s the fact that the Town is going to place four of those lights along Wade Hampton. Maybe it’s just my knee-jerk reaction to quantify the data wherever that can be done cheaply and quickly.
In any case, the title of this post is the count of olde-tyme “acorn” streetlights that are burnt out (21), out of the total of such lights (150) along Maple. In round numbers, one out of seven street lights along the “nice” section of Maple (Courthouse to East Street) is burnt out.
Just FYI, it took me about 5 minutes to count them, by taking a drive along Maple. So this is the count, as I was driving by. It might be off by one or two. But it’s materially correct.
Post #501: Hebrews 13:8
In memory of my dad, who I’m sure would appreciate the joke, because I stole it from him.
1:
2:
Source: https://gifer.com/en/gifs/impatient
If it’s not funny, re-read it and place more emphasis on the first two words.
4:
5: Warning: Recorder got bored and left early
2019-12-16 Town Council Work Session audio file.mp3
6:
Post #492: Bus strike ends, for now
Re Post #478, workers have returned to their jobs for now, so Fairfax Connector bus service should be running normally. See this article for details.
Post #489: The Mayor will not run for re-election
Post #487: We’ve lost
By we, I mean people who don’t like MAC zoning as written. The only twist here is that it’ll take 18 to 24 months to determine just how badly we’ve lost.
What I’m talking about is the item discussed around 10:45 at last night’s Town Council meeting. At that point, they got around to addressing a proposal by Councilmember Potter:
I. 19-1527 Motion by Councilmember Potter for comprehensive reorganization and update of Subdivision and Zoning Ordinances, Chapters 17 and 18 of Town Code.
This was passed 6-1, with Councilman Majdi the only dissenting vote.
What: Zoning Czar
First, let me put in a copy of the scope of work for this task, then mock describe it. So you can read it yourself, and don’t have to rely on my interpretation.
Lengthy caveat: What you see below is what Councilman Noble assured me was the scope of work (SOW) for this task. I originally thought that I could not get a copy of the SOW, because nothing was posted with the Town Council meeting agenda. But Councilman Noble corrected me and pointed me to one item from a Town Council work session from a couple of months ago. That’s the SOW below. I am fairly sure that no other SOW document has been made public by the Town of Vienna, irrespective of whether or not Town Council members have or have not seen such a more recent draft, if such a more recent draft does or does not exist. I.e., having been explicitly directed by a Town official to look at this SOW, well, by golly, this is the SOW I’m looking at. In case you wonder why I’m saying all this, I really hate being wrong, and so I’m covering my ass, just in case there actually is some updated scope of work that the Town is using but has not yet made public.
In a nutshell, this task says that Town Council is letting Planning and Zoning staff do the rewrite of MAC zoning. And of all other zoning in the Town of Vienna. And they are getting about a quarter-million dollars to hire the consultant of their choice to help them do that.
And, while the examples of possible zoning changes given in the document are innocuous, note that there are absolutely no limits given. Taken at face value, absolutely nothing about the current zoning is off-limits. In fact, it’s pretty darned explicit about the fact that anything goes — new types of zones, altering existing zones, altering rules, changing the zoning map — that’s all in there.
I would like to say that Town Council has given Planning and Zoning a blank check to rewrite the zoning rules. But that’s not correct, because, of course, the SOW itself was written by Planning and Zoning staff. The correct statement is that Town Council has allowed Planning and Zoning staff to give itself that blank check, with the authority to recommend modifying any zoning rules, anywhere, in any way they see fit.
And once you realize who wrote the SOW, the rest of it falls into place.
Now the stern and exacting language circumscribing and limiting Planning and Zoning staff behavior makes perfect sense. Here’s the full extent of the limits on Planning and Zoning actions. Ready:
Staff from the Department of Planning and Zoning will manage the project with the Planning Commission serving as the primary advisory board, working closely with the Town Council.
Man, that’s some tough language there. Not just working with, but working closely with Town Council. Yeah, buddy, that setting some hard limits. (Again, realize this was written by Planning and Zoning staff).
Given how much loose-cannon behavior Planning and Zoning has already exhibited (e.g., Marco Pologate), I’m flabbergasted that Town Council would just swallow that whole. But there it is. That right there is the full extent of limits and controls on Planning and Zoning staff. Seems a touch ill-defined to me.
And, of course, for getting input from the citizens, you’d think that if not one, but two different Town Council members had insisted on doing a proper random-sample survey … well, surely that would be part of the plan. But once again, Town Council didn’t write the SOW. So the “citizen input” side of this rejects the whole idea of getting representative and objective data, in favor of the same loosey-goosey approach that Planning and Zoning applied to MAC. As I have noted repeatedly, that both allows them to propagandize, and allows them to substitute their subjective interpretation of what citizens want in place of any objective data on what citizens want. In short, Town Council will be told what the citizens want, based on what Planning and Zoning’s says they want. They same way “the citizens want 28′ wide sidewalks” came out of Planning and Zoning looking at ratings of pictures. And if Planning and Zoning doesn’t like what people say, heck, they’ll just ignore it.
The quickest way I can describe this is that the Town of Vienna just created a Zoning Czar. The Director of Planning and Zoning has been given free rein to recommend changing any aspect of zoning, as she sees fit, in any way she sees fit. She’s been given a quarter-million dollars to hire a consultant to help her do that. And if there are any limits whatsoever, on that process, they are so vague as to be meaningless. But she will have to work closely with Town Council. And, I believe, whatever she ultimately comes up with, Town Council will be given the sole option of taking it or leaving it, as a package.
How: Beats me.
But the truly godawful part of this was not even what was decided. It seems ill-advised to me, to allow an aggressively pro-develoment Planning and Zoning department to write its own ticket. Just as a business matter, that seems to be courting mischief.
But the truly noxious aspect of this is what went on in the Town Council meeting.
I’ll give a link to my audio recording here, as an mp3 file on Google Drive, so that you can listen and form your own judgement. This portion of the meeting starts 2:36:30 into my recording of the meeting. (Please note that I did not record the entire meeting).
See how it sounds to you. Here’s how it looked to me.
First, it was clear that the outcome of this had already been decided, in advance, out of the public view. I had heard rumors of a Noah’s Ark meeting behind closed doors. It’s pretty likely, based on the (non-)discussion at the meeting, that this was true. What we got to see in this public meeting was pure theater.
Second, hand-in-hand with that, there was zero public discussion of substantive issues. (Caveat below). The entire discussion consisted of one Town Council member after another praising Councilman Potter for his wisdom. About how lovely it was to have a united Town Council. How appropriate for the holiday season that peace, joy, and love should break out, and that we should bask in love for all of humankind.
OK, I made that last one up, but it’s not far off.
There were, as I recall it, exactly two substantive points. Councilmember Patel called for doing a real, hard-numbers, random-sample survey to get a fix on what citizens actually think. She got no response, and I would bet much money that’s not going to happen. And Councilman Majdi said he wasn’t going to vote for it, because (and I paraphrase) it repeats the same mistake that the Town made with MAC zoning in the first place, which was proceeding without first gather information on traffic, economics, and similar factors.
Other than that, the entire discussion was simply peace-joy-love. Which you may think sounds great, but which isn’t businesslike, and truly is not a good way to go about going the people’s business.
And?
Well, who’s kidding whom here. Town Council has placed the Director of Planning and Zoning in the drivers’ seat, given her ample staff, money to pick the consultant of her choice, placed no restrictions on what she can do, and offered only the vaguest possible management guidelines (work closely with). All done via a SOW document authored by — Planning and Zoning.
Sure, they’ll work closely — with the Town Council members who agree with them. Just exactly as they have done for the past couple of years. But get out of line, and let’s see just how closely they work with you then.
So, seriously, what do you think is going to happen? Given the setup, where do you think this ends up, 18 to 24 months from now?
I have my opinion. I could run this into the ground, but let me limit it to one aspect. This is the Planning and Zoning director who relentlessly pushed for taller buildings. You know, I’d bet that somehow, the revised MAC statute is going to include taller buildings. Anybody want to bet against that?
And at the end of that period, for Town Council’s will face what I described in Post #483. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Because they have commingled the plain-vanilla “clean up” of the code with all of the additional substantive changes that Planning and Zoning would care to make.
I’d really like to know how they got everyone but Majdi on board. But we never will know, because that part of the public’s business was done in private. All we will get to see publicly is peace and love, at the last Town Council meeting, and then whatever-it-is that comes out of this staff-run, staff-dominated process a year and a half from now. This is nobody’s idea of a businesslike way to run things. Guess I need to learn to peace out, or something.
Post #488: A followup and correction on the 2020 bond issue
For the record, I need to correct what I said about the 2020 bond issue (Post #485). It’s the part where I summarized it as: “Can they really pay that back? I think the answer is a qualified yes.”
I believe that’s not true if they borrow the full $35M that they have been authorized to borrow. I don’t think they can do that without violating their stated minimum reserve requirements for their capital fund, based on their current economic model. And I didn’t realize that until I saw all the details presented at last night’s Town Council meeting.
I realize it’s too late to do anything, as the Town Council approved the bond issue. But I think it’s worth stating this for the record. Just on the off chance that anybody in Town government cares about it. Presumably, Town staff will redo the reserves calculation just prior to the time of bond issuance using updated information.
Continue reading Post #488: A followup and correction on the 2020 bond issue
Post #485: The (up to) $35 million dollar bond issue
I did a brief description of this in Post #482. Tonight (12/9/2019) there will be a public hearing on this proposed bond issue, as part of the Town Council meeting. So in this post, I’m doing my homework to get up to speed on it.
The key questions are a) what are they going to spend that money on, and b) how are they going to pay it back. The short answer to a) is, a lot of sewer and water pipes, and a police station. The answer to b) is, I’m not sure. So the point of this posting is to nail all that down.
To cut to the chase: Can they really pay that back? I think the answer is a qualified yes. Yes, you can do a big bond issue like this, once in a long while. If you stretch out the payments to 20 years, and spend a chunk of your existing reserves, and assume that some large capital projects will be free (meaning, paid by others, such as the Patrick Henry library garage), then yeah, it looks like the Town can borrow this much money at a time, and make the payments. As near as I can tell. And they appear to be doing it honestly — by using the meals tax, and spending accumulated reserves, and not by transferring money out of the increased sewer and water revenue stream. Again, as far as I can tell.
The Town certainly can’t borrow like this on a regular basis. So a bond funding of this size is unlikely to be repeated (and indeed, not scheduled to be repeated) in the next couple of decades or so.
The bottom line is that this proposed 2020 bond funding appears to strain but not break the Town of Vienna capital budget. As long as they promise not to do it again for a good long time.
Separately, the Town’s total bond fundings are higher after 2020 than before. But a good chunk of that appears to be due to higher spending on sewer and water infrastructure. And that spending should be more than adequately covered by the increase in the Town’s water bills (Post #448).
So between the higher water bills paying for the increased investment in the sewer/water infrastructure, and the Town’s throttling back any non-water/sewer borrowing after this 2020 bond issue, it all appears to work out.
The basics of the Town bond issues.
First, you can find a copy of the Town budget at this link (.pdf). I’m not going to go over the budget, except to say that the capital budget and the prior bond issues and such are listed at the end of the document.
Briefly: The Town of Vienna borrows money (issues bonds) every two years, mostly to pay for large capital expenditures. Historically, those amounts were on order of $5M to $7M, as you can see from the graph above. So, historically, the Town would borrow that much, every couple of years, to pay for big capital expenditures. And then pay that back over time.
An example of such an expenditure would be building the addition to the Community Center, or building the new police station. The town also uses money from these bond sales to cover planned sanitary sewer and water pipe replacements and similar infrastructure costs.
You might ask why I didn’t include streets, curbs, sidewalks, storm drain and such, in the list above. The answer is that that town uses some bond money to pay for those, but largely it gets state funds and other sources to pay for those. So while the Town spends a lot of money building and rebuilding all that road and drainage infrastructure, by and large it doesn’t borrow a lot of money to do that. Instead, most it gets the money from other sources such as state grants, and uses bond funding to only a minor extent.
Typically, the Town pays back that borrowed money (the bond), with interest, over a fifteen-year period. The Town dedicates the revenues from the town meals tax and lodging (hotel) tax to paying back those bonds. (The tax rate for both is currently 3%). In addition, it transfers money out of sewer and water revenues (i.e., payments from your water bills) to cover the costs of borrowing for sewer and water projects.
FWIW, the town has a top bond rating (low risk of default), and pays reasonably low interest rates, on order of 2% to 2.5%, for the most recent issues. (Sometimes the actual interest rate is difficult to calculate, due to a “premium” amount being offered on top of the bond amount, but that’s an extras-for-experts that I will skip for now.)
Page 358 of the FY 2019-2020 budget (reproduced below) provides a concise summary of the Town’s current obligations to repay its existing bonds. Below, the columns are the individual bond issues and some totals, and the dollar amounts are the “debt service” amounts (i.e., payments the Town is making to pay back those bonds).
So, e.g., looking below, the schedule of the Town’s repayments for the bonds issued in 2006 started in 2007, and they will be fully-paid-off in 2021. Similarly, the 2010 bonds will be fully paid off in 2026. (There was no 2008 bond issue.)
The last three columns below show the total of repayments due, for all bonds, and then, where that money is coming from. For 2019, the Town owed $3.3 million in “debt service” payments, of which $0.6M was transferred out of sewer and water revenues, and $2.7M was covered by meals tax and lodging tax.
Source: Town of Vienna FY 19-20 budget, page 358.
N.B., Don’t make anything out of the declining payment totals toward the bottom of the chart. Those are an artifact of methods. You’d see those if and only if Vienna never issued another bond. In the real world, as time moved forward toward those years, you’d see the earlier bond issues drop off the table (as the 2006 issue will in 2022), and columns of additional payments, for new issues, added to the right of the 2018 column.
So that’s a quick summary of where things stand today, prior to the proposed 2020 bond issue.
For completeness, I need to mention three other things.
How much bond debt is outstanding currently. For this, I have to turn to the Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (2018 edition). There (page 5) it states that the Town owed about $27M in outstanding bonds and notes. There’s some uncertainty there, as other town documents put the current figure closer to $24M-ish? Possibly that’ due to the year, possibly that’s due to some difference in definitions used.
Pension liabilities. But those bonds are not the only long-term liability on the books. From that same source, the Town has a long-term obligation in the form of future pension payments that it must make. The current estimate of that appears to be about $16M.
Cash balances. The only other thing to note is that, at least by eye, the Town has lots of cash reserves. Again, from that same source, assuming I’m reading it correctly, the Town has about $28M in cash reserves.
I’ll go out on a limb here, but if we ignore pension debt, and ignore non-liquid assets like land and buildings, I think the Town is in roughly a break-even position right now. It has about $27M of outstanding debt, and it holds about $28M in cash reserves.
The 2020 bond issue and capital improvement plan.
The Town Council passed the final 2020-2036 capital improvement plan at the 10/21/2019 Town Council meeting. A link to the relevant materials is given here.
What will they spend it on? The Town’s capital spending plan lists about $28M worth of capital spending that requires bond funding (borrowing) in 2020. That list was posted with the 12/9/2019 Town Council meeting materials, and can be found at this link (.pdf). Let me paste in a copy that in below, but briefly:
- $15M for a new police station
- $8M for sewer and water projects (of which $2.5M is a transfer to Fairfax County that the Town of Vienna is obligated to make).
- $1.6M to buy into a Church Street parking garage (with the assumption that the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority will pay for the bulk of costs on that project.)
- $1M or so in paving and other street projects.
Those items account for more than $25M, and the remainder of the proposed $28M is a collection of miscellaneous items.
project listing 2020So answer the question about how the Town will spend the money is straightfoward: Police building, water and sewer projects, part of a parking garage, and some road work. And then a collection of small items.
Some of those expenses are going to take place over several years. So it’s not like they’re going to spend the $28M in 2020. They’re going to borrow it in 2020, and spend it over the next few years doing those tasks.
In addition, Town staff would like to borrow roughly another $7 million to cover contingencies. Or, at least, that was true the last time I looked up the information on this issue. For example, if the Town of Vienna has the opportunity to buy a piece of land, it would like to have the funds available.
If you want more detail on those individual tasks, I think you can find that in Town discussions of its Capital Improvement Plan. A link to the relevant materials is given here. For example, from that, you can see that the sewer and water expenditures consist of 30 to 40 small, separate projects. A water line here, a sewer line there. Nothing big. Looks very much like business as usual.
How will they pay it back? Here’s where it gets a little interesting, because off the crack of the bat, the Town looks like they are pushing the envelope a bit.
First, assuming I have this right, they are planning to stretch out those easy monthly payments. For every other bond issue, the Town had a 15-year payback period. But for this one, it’s a 20-year payback period. Presumably they wouldn’t have done that if they hadn’t needed to, in order to get the payments to match available revenues.
Second, they have assumed that a couple of large projects are free or mostly free. They assume that the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority will pay for our shopping/dining parking at the Patrick Henry garage. And they assume NVTA will pay for two-thirds of our shopping/dining parking garage on Church Street. NVTA has no business paying for either of those, but plausibly they will be sloppy enough to pay for them anyway (Post #447).
Anyway, either those projects are wired, and somehow the Town knows it will get the money, or the Town is taking a significant risk there. Plausibly, that’s why Town staff would like to borrow an additional $7 for reserves, but I have no way to know that.
Third, the Town plans to use short-term bond anticipation note of $4.8 million to tide it over until the actual bond sale planned for September 2020. So there’s short-term stopgap funding of about $5M built into this. I don’t know enough about typical practices in the Town of Vienna to know how often they do that, but I have the feeling this isn’t normal practice. Looking in more detail, tbe bulk of that is for a $2.5M payment to Fairfax County, presumably our share of payment for capital costs of the entire sewer and water system.
Fourth, assuming I’m reading the charts right, the Town plans to eat through about $5M in existing reserves, in the first decade of this bond issue (2020 – 2029). Well, that’s what reserves are for. But it does show that funds available for debt service are not adequate to cover the debt service for this issue and the prior outstanding issues, for the first few years. The graph below is from the CIP, and the green line is labeled “balance”, so I assume that’s the balance in the Town’s capital fund.
So that’s a bit unusual, but not necessarily a red flag. The point of having reserves is to use them from time to time. This appears to be a time.
That said, when I look at the proposed sources of funds, I can’t quite get my mind around how this will all work out. The issue is having the meals (and lodging) tax revenues cover the debt service that is unrelated to water and sewer. The last time I looked at this, the Town had very nearly maxed out the meals and lodging taxes. That is, my recollection is that debt service, right now, consumes most of the meals and lodging taxes. This 2020 debt issue will roughly double the Town’s outstanding debt. And then, in the years thereafter, they will be replacing old bond issues of around $6M each, with new bond issues of around $12M each.
Part of the answer is that the large 2020 bond will be a 20-year bond. So the increase in annual payments will be smaller, dollar-for-dollar, than if this had been a 15-year bond. In fact, a little back-of-the-envelope with Excel says that they might have risked running the reserves down to zero if they’d had to use a 15-year bond. So spreading the payments out appears to have been a necessary part of this package.
Part of the answer is that the Town will incur little debt, other than for sewer and water projects, from 2022 forward until well into the future. So, in effect, the Town is overspending its debt service capacity (out of meals tax funds) for this big 2020 bond issue. And then it’s paying for next-to-nothing out of that category for the next decade and a half, to balance that out. Like so, taken from page 8 of the most recent CIP.
And so, I think there’s no magic here. The Town is going to spend beyond its means for the 2020 bond issue. But not recklessly so. Best guess, looks like meals and lodging taxes are going to fall maybe $1M short of the required amount to service all the outstanding bonds, in 2021. But as the Town then throttles back its borrowing (other than for sewer and water projects), as long as the economy remains stable, that should eventually right itself. Just as the Town’s projections show.
Total bond funding appear to be systematically higher in that years after 2020 than in the years before, but a good chunk of that is due to a pickup in funding for sewer/water projects, consistent with our higher sewer/water bills. The 2018 CIP had just $2M in Vienna-based sewer-water projects (that is, excluding a $2.5M payment to Fairfax County). The 2020 CIP has about $5.5M of such projects, and that amount continues to grow modestly moving forward.
(As an aside, that said, I could not tell from the numbers whether or not the Town was counting on sewer/water rate increases, for the next three years, that are planned but have not yet been enacted into law.)
In short, best I can tell, yes this is a significant strain on the capital budget. But it’s not reckless. By stretching the payments — and promising not to do something like this again, any time soon — it looks fiscally sound to me.
Final note: The police station cost looks reasonable to me.
The police station build is the most expensive item in the capital budget. Some people have questioned that size of that expense. But I looked at it a year ago and determined that it met industry norms. The cost of it appears completely in line with other new police stations.
The trick here is that, to meet current standards, you have to build a police station like a fortress — fireproof, riot-proof, earthquake-proof, bomb-proof, you name it. So anything built to the modern standard is going to cost a chunk of change.
A lot of the numbers in that post are out of date, but you can read my somewhat outdated analysis by clicking this link. Ignore the part about the 4% meals tax – the Town nixed that at some later time. And at the time, this was still being referred to as a renovation. I would hope that by now, this is being called a new building, not a renovation.