Category: Town of Vienna, VA

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 2020

So 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.

Post #483: CORRECTED: A big strategic mistake

In the original version of this, I was incorrect when I said I could not obtain a copy of the scope of work for this task.  Councilman Noble has pointed out that I could, in fact, find an earlier draft of the scope of work for this task, posted as the last item on an October 28, 2019 Town Council work session.  The earlier draft was posted for that work session, but not for the Town Council meeting.  I apologize for my error, and have modified this post accordingly.

This post is a re-analysis of the proposal to allow Planning and Zoning to rewrite the entire town zoning ordinance, including MAC zoning.  It boils down the lengthy Post #483 into a straightforward summary.  The summary is the title of the post.

Caveat:  I supported Steve Potter for Town Council.  But you probably aren’t going to remember that by the time you’re done with this.

The setup

The last item on tonight’s Town Council agenda is this:

I. 19-1527 Motion by Councilmember Potter for comprehensive reorganization and update of Subdivision and Zoning Ordinances, Chapters 17 and 18 of Town Code.

To translate:  The Town Council is going to stop looking at revising MAC, or revising parts of the commercial code to match MAC.  Instead, they’re going to do a mash-up of the MAC rewrite and a second proposal to “clean up” the rest of the zoning code.  That “cleanup” proposal was previously billed as a purely technical exercise, one that would make no substantive changes in Town of Vienna zoning.  But with this motion, Town Council will fold everything into one big code rewrite, under the direction of Planning and Zoning.  Basically, they are punting, handing this task to Planning and Zoning, providing some oversight (I guess), and then, as I understand it, they’ll vote on the whole ball of wax at the end.

I think this is a big strategic mistake, for those of us who don’t much like MAC as-written.  And in this post, I’m going to explain why.  In a nutshell, if you do this, you give Planning and Zoning the vehicle that they will use to cram MAC down your throat, at the end of this process.  It’s a variant of the classic poison-pill strategy.  With this approach, if you want the zoning code cleaned up, you have to swallow the poison pill as well.

Now, mere citizens are not allowed to see the scope of work for this task.  But as I vaguely understand it, the proposed voting scheme for this is modeled on the original MAC.  Whatever package Planning and Zoning puts together will be put in front of Town Council for an up-or-down vote.  Town Council will have to accept the entire rewrite, or reject it.

Assume that’s correct, for now, and try to figure out how this will turn out, in the end.  Assume further — and I’d say this is pretty much a given — that Planning and Zoning will have larded this revised law with many potentially objectionable clauses to encourage greater density of development, larger buildings, and so on.

Or, simply assume that they return a package that leaves the current MAC language unchanged.  But now, instead of MAC being a stand-alone piece of legislation, it has been firmly embedded in the rewrite of the existing code.  Now you can’t separate the two.  You can’t have one without the other.  That’s the core of the problem.  And that’s source of the leverage you are needlessly giving pro-development forces.

So, just for a moment, assume that happens.  Assume that the final product has either the existing MAC language, or language preferred by Planning and Zoning that would allow even larger buildings.

What are a Town Council member’s options at that point?

If you don’t want the revised MAC, or the many other pro-development provisions that Planning and Zoning is likely to stick into the revised law, you’d have to vote against the whole package.   If you have the courage to.  Because at that point, you’ll be accused of being against Progress, of wasting the Town’s time, wasting the quarter-million-dollar contract.  Standing in the way of a much-needed cleanup of the Town’s zoning ordinances.  Tossing the baby out with the bathwater.  And so on.

And if you give in to all that, and vote for it, and use the rewrite of the code as cover for your actions — then you’ll have had MAC crammed down your throat.

I can surely understand the technical merits of revising the code all at once.  And I understand the amount of time it would save Town Council to punt on revising MAC, and have somebody else do it.  Those are laudable goals.

But, to me, having worked for a decade in a Federal legislative-branch agency, this proposal looks like a variant of the classic poison-pill strategy.    The poison pill here is MAC, and all the other clauses our pro-growth Planning and Zoning department will put into the revised law.  And the sugar coating is the presumed need to … simplify?  streamline? … our current and functional zoning code so that it’s easier for developers to understand.  The only difference between this and a classic poison pill is that, traditionally, the poison pill was used to kill legislation, under the assumption that it would force legislators to vote it down.  Here, by contrast, it looks like the strategy is to get the Town Council to swallow it.

So, again, whatever the technical merits, by rolling this up into one big project, you are setting yourself up to allow pro-MAC pro-growth pro-developer interests to feed you a piece of poison-pill legislation at the end of this process.  That’s a big strategic mistake.

What could you do instead?

First, and most obviously, one option is simply not to do this.  Continue on the path you’ve already started down, which is to revise MAC and make the relevant portions of the commercial code adhere to the “MAC streetscape”.

Apparently the pro-MAC Town Council members have decided to deride that as a “piecemeal” approach.  So keep your ears open, and count the number of times the word “piecemeal” comes up at tonight’s meeting.

But I could as easily deride the proposal as “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.  MAC is broke.  It got some sitting Town Council members voted out of office.  The rest of the code is awkward, but it works.  Buildings manage to get built under it.  I certainly don’t see any shortage of new houses being built, for example.

Second, if you proceed with this, you need to preserve your right to separate out the votes for the various pieces of it.  That’s the only way to extract the poison pill.  You have to separate the poison-pill portions (MAC and all the other pro-development language) from the sugar coating (the zoning rewrite that was originally proposed — the purely technical cleanup of the existing zoning.)  And give yourself the option to vote on those pieces separately.

And in this case, if you game it out fully, you’ll realize you need to break this into at least three pieces.  (And so, this corrects what I wrote in Post #481.)  What are those pieces:

  1.  The purely technical rewrite that preserves existing zoning unchanged, just streamlines and simplifies it.
  2. MAC zoning.
  3. All other changes that Planning and Zoning has introduced into the code.

Why do you need three pieces, and not two?  Because Piece #1 will, by definition, contain the existing MAC zoning rules.  And if you don’t break MAC out separately, then if you vote for Piece #1 — the plain-vanilla “clean up” that this code rewrite was originally billed as — you’ll be voting to reinstate MAC as it is currently written.

So it really does need to be broken into three parts.  With that, Town Council will have the option to take or reject the parts as they see fit.

Let me put this another way:  If you truly believe that a revised MAC and other pro-development changes really are in the best interest of the citizens, then let those parts of the revised law stand or fall on their own.  This poison-pill approach is, at root, an admission that you are unwilling to do that.  It’s an acknowledgement that now that we’ve seen what MAC is bring us, the average Vienna citizen may not want what you are offering.

Other red flags

I realize that when I write a post like this, if I paid any attention to social media, I’d get a lot of what I call kumbaya blowback.  Oh, gosh, I’ve made all these mean assumptions about how Planning and Zoning will behave.  I haven’t given certain Town Council members credit for their ability to keep this process in check.  Can’t we all just be friends and assume that everyone is working for the greater good.  And so on.

Well, my observation is that Planning and Zoning considers it their duty to get as much development as possible in the Town of Vienna.  Full stop.  In a sense, that’s pretty much what the current crew was hired to do.  It’s their mission.  And so, because I don’t want to see a bunch of “medium-density” development here, I don’t want those people running the show.  I think that’s pretty straightfoward.  This is business, not friendship.

But now let me line out a few additional red flags that parts of this process have raised.

This next paragraph was wrong.  Town of Vienna posted a draft of the Scope of Work as the last item in their 10/28/2019 Town Council work session.   I missed that by looking only at the current Town Council meeting posting, which had only the staff description.  The draft SOW is included here.  If you read the “review and potentially revise” lines, I think you can see that the contractor has broad scope to make significant change in … pretty much every aspect of Town of Vienna zoning.

Draft Scope of Services to Reorganize and Update Subdivision and Zoning Ordinances - Oct 2019-1

First, we as citizens don’t get to see the documents that Town Council has been looking at, as they prepare to vote on this.  In particular, we don’t get to see the scope of work for the contract that would be issued to cover the bulk of this work.  If you know anything about the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, and have read my writeup of the hoops that the Town would have to go through to sidestep the guarantees written into the act, that’s one big red flag.

Second, the bland and plain-vanilla description offered by Town Staff, in the meeting materials for tonight’s Town Council meeting, cannot possibly be an accurate description of this project.  Because now they’ve rolled the MAC zoning rewrite into this.  And so, we’re already starting off with the public-facing portion of this — the stuff we’re allowed to see — presenting a misleading picture of the actual task.  That’s a second red flag. (That’s an exaggeration, I thing.  If I’d done my homework and looked back to the October work session, I could clearly see that more-or-less everything in Town of Vienna zoning is up for modification per the Scope of Work.  So the short description posted for this evening’s Town Council meeting is, in fact, not an accurate description of the full breadth of the scope of work.  But if I’d done my homework, I could have known that.)

Third, the language the Town has used to sell this rewrite of the zoning keeps shifting.  Which, to me, means that either that somebody is lying about it, as a matter of expediency, or that there really is no firmly-defined and clearly-circumscribed scope of work.  I.e., it means that Town of Vienna government, as a whole, hasn’t really said with they intend to do with this.

The very first descriptions of this code-rewrite proposal touted it as a way to get more, bigger, and faster development.  I documented that over a year ago, in this post.  But when Town Council discussed it on 1/7/2019, some Town Council members ran away from that as fast as they could.  The Mayor herself is on tape unambiguously stating that the goal of this rewrite was NOT to change any aspect of Town zoning.  You can see my writeup of that in this post from January 2019.

And now it has devolved into typical Town-of-Vienna hash.  You can’t be quite sure what the goal is.  The public-facing writeup appears to be pap written to assure us that nothing will change.  But the actual task now includes the MAC rewrite, where I’m pretty sure the sentiment of the majority of Town Council is that something had to change.  And the actual scope-of-work document that will direct the contractor’s work is secret.  (Wrong.  A prior draft is available, as noted above.)  The continuously-shifting description of the task is yet another red flag.

Fourth, we are making the same ready-fire-aim mistake that was made with MAC.  This process is set to proceed before the Town has done its due diligence in the areas of traffic, economics, and costs imposed on the Town (in particular, cost of burying utility lines).  Not to mention, before the Town has surveyed public opinion on proposed changes.

It’s not like this is some uniquely new  idea — get your facts together before you proceed.  When Councilman Majdi voted against the original MAC legislation in 2014, he plainly said that the Town needed to do a traffic impact study, a parking impact study, and an economic impact study before proceeding with MAC.  So at least some people recognized the need for this information half a decade ago.

And now, the Town is finally getting its act together, somewhat, to get that information.  But they don’t have it, yet.  And the fact that they are willing to proceed with the rewrite anyway, before the information is in hand, tells you that the place no value on that information.  To me, that approach says that these studies are all for show, and the planning process in Vienna — such as it is — isn’t going to be affected by what those studies actually say.

Finally, directly addressing my lack of “kumbaya”, I don’t think there’s anything to suggest that town staff will “play fair” during this process.  In fact, I’d say the preponderance of evidence strongly suggests otherwise.   In a nutshell, if you give them the opportunity to have leverage over this process, I’d say it’s a pretty good bet that they will take full advantage of that.

And on that note, I’m just going to copy in a shorter version of paragraph from Post #481, and call it a day.

Let me just take stock a bit.  A brand new significant pedestrian hazard on a walk-to-school route.  Substitution of building plans in the middle of the approval process.  Ah, don’t forget about quietly giving away four feet of the public right-of-way for benefit of a developer.  Heck, substituting one building for another, after approval.  So far, for two out of four projects, the locally-known builder got the zoning, then turned around and sold the development rights.  Ah, and we can’t leave out the mythical hundred-day rule that the Town (and only the Town) adheres to.  And four-floors-really-means-five-floors (which is still in the draft revision of MAC zoning), and mezzanine rules only apply to residential mezzanines, and so on.  Oh, and the fact that we dove into this having no clue what it would cost to put utilities on Maple underground, and are just now getting around to finding out.  And had no idea how much MAC would contribute to Maple Avenue traffic, and are only just now finding out — but the Town Council still hasn’t discussed that in public.

In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, it’s deja vu all over again.

Post #482: Public hearing tomorrow on the $35 million Town of Vienna bond issue.

 

This was originally an afterthought from the last posting, but it got so long I decided to post it separately.  And so that leads to a major caveat:  I haven’t had the time to do my homework on this one.  I’m usually pretty good about getting the facts straight before opening my mouth.  But for this one — which comes up tomorrow — I started to look at it, and I kept coming up with what I thought were some fairly important questions that I don’t think I’m going to be able to answer in time for that meeting.

Anyway, tomorrow’s Town Council hearing looks to be a real Duesy.  You might want to have a look at the agenda (.pdf), and maybe even take a look at the meeting materials if something catches your eye.  Maybe plan to be there, or at least catch it on cable or internet (as described halfway down this Town of Vienna web page.)  I’ll post the agenda at the end of this article, below, for ease of access.

Among other things, Town Council is holding its one and only public hearing on a borrowing $35 million for various construction projects and reserves.  It is a legally required public hearing, and if you have any thoughts on that bond issue you can speak for up to three minutes.  But I suggest you do some homework on it first, because the more I look at that, the less I understand it.  If I have the time, I’ll amend this posting to add links to prior Town discussions of this bond issue.

The amount of the Town’s borrowing represents a significant departure from the past.  In fact, that by itself is so noteworthy that I ginned up that little graph at the top of this post, right out of the Town’s 2019-202 budget, using data take from pages 359 and forward, and adding in the proposed $35 million.  As you can see, we’ve never done anything like this before.

I haven’t looked at the details/done my homework, but my guess is that, in large part, this is made possible by the 50% increase in your water bill (Post #448).  Of which you have only seen the first 20%, so far.   (Some portion of water bill receipts are used to cover the Town’s debt issuance (“capital fund”) costs.)

But now that I think that through, if the Town is counting on those water bill receipts to pay off this debt issue, doesn’t that makes the next three annual votes to raise sewer and water rates kind of a joke?  Has Town Council really put us in a position of “raise the rates the full 50%, or default on our bonds”?  I’ll have to look into that, but that’s my first question.  Are they predicating the payback of these bonds on rate increases that they haven’t yet voted on?  I would certainly hope not, but I don’t know.

Anyway, the proposed sewer and water projects are on top of the Town building itself a new police station, and a few other things, and … hmm.  I don’t really know how they plan to fund even that piece, in the normal fashion (meals tax and hotel room tax), because that, by itself, the police station and other projects amount to twice our normal bond issue.  I guess I really haven’t done my homework.  I sure hope our Town Council has.  I wonder just how much of this is projected to be funded by the water bill increase?

And let’s not forget that the Town capital budget includes $0 to pay for the nearly $5 million Patrick Henry garage.  Yep, we assume that’s free, because we think the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority is going to be stupid enough to pay for all of our merchant/restaurant parking at that site, even though that organization has absolutely no business doing so (Post #446 and Post #447).  (Oh, and let’s not forget that we assume they’ll pay for about half the cost of a garage on Church street, just for good measure.)

If you add in the capital projects that we think we’re getting for free or at half price (the two garages), we’re looking at another, oh, $7 million or so in liabilities on top of that.   (Alternatively, this may be why Town staff are asking for about … you guessed it … $7 million in additional funding as part of the overall $35 million debt issue, to provide “reserves” that, somehow, are earmarked for as-yet-unnamed property acquisition within the Town?)

Anyway, no matter how you cut it, that’s a heck of a departure from tradition.

N.B.:  If you took $35 million in hundred-dollar bills and laid them in a straight line, they would stretch from Vienna to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia.  So we’re borrowing a a pretty good-sized pile of cash.

And there are a couple of other deusies on that agenda, in addition to the bond issue.  Check it out for yourself.  But in typical Town fashion, the agenda often gives no clue as to the dollar value or other importance of any one item.  So you have to read it carefully, then check the Town web page cited above for whatever details have been made public.

Agenda-66

 

 

Post #481: CORRECTED: Are we really going to open up the entire zoning code, right now?

 

In the original version of this, I was incorrect when I said I could not obtain a copy of the scope of work for this task.  Councilman Noble has pointed out that I could, in fact, find an earlier draft of the scope of work for this task, posted as the last item on an October 28, 2019 Town Council work session.  The earlier draft was posted for that work session, but not for the Town Council meeting.  I apologize for my error, and have modified this post accordingly.

Complete this sentence:  If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to:

A) drop the shovel.

B) pick up more shovels.

I’m going for A, but I would accept the traditional “stop digging” as an acceptable answer as well.

Background

If there is anything I have learned from sitting through countless Town Council meetings, it’s that Town staff put the controversial stuff last on the agenda.  And they make it sound as innocuous as possible.

Maybe that’s purely by chance, but I have always assumed they do that as a way to thin the crowd out before the controversial stuff gets discussed.  Those Town Council meetings go on for a long time.  In fact, the only thing I have learned, for certain, from attending these meetings is that my bladder disqualifies me from public service.  (If you see a fat guy sprinting for the door after the first few hours of one of those meetings, that’ll likely be me.)  And I don’t think I’m alone in that.  But whether it’s the call of nature or just plain fatigue, you’ll often see that Town Council chambers will be nearly empty by the time they get to the good stuff at the end of the agenda.

So I have learned to read the last item first, and make sure that I (think) I understand it.  The item of interest for tomorrow’s Town Council meeting is:

I. 19-1527 Motion by Councilmember Potter for comprehensive reorganization and update of Subdivision and Zoning Ordinances, Chapters 17 and 18 of Town Code.

Caveat:  I supported Steve Potter for Town Council.  But you probably aren’t going to remember that by the time you’re done with this.

This is a long post.  Links to specific sections are given directly below:

The scope of work (SOW) isn’t public, and I bet the SOW includes a lot more than just the simple project as described in the Town Council meeting materials.

Making this one big package deal is a strategic blunder.

You’d be smarter to break this into two pieces:  the non-controversial purely technical changes that merely clean up existing code, and, separately, all the other would be everything else that Planning and Zoning is going to add in.

Are we really going to make the same mistake all over again, and do the rewrite in an information vacuum?  Or are we going to wait until various studies are completed, and actually based the rewrite on information?

Rewriting the by-right zoning is serious stuff, compared to MAC.  Are we going to have any serious guidelines and guide rails written down, or is Town Council’s input limited to occasional and informal guidance to Town Staff?

Put in writing that the MAC zoning rewrite was not finished, and that the things in the existing red-lined copy are far from agreed-upon by Town Council.

If you keep digging yourself into a hole, do you really want to pick up more shovels?  Maybe just skip this additional chaos for the time being and fix only what needs to be fixed right now.

 

Continue reading Post #481: CORRECTED: Are we really going to open up the entire zoning code, right now?

Post #480: Virginia Freedom of Information Act and Noah’s Ark

Above:  Abstract depiction of Town Council meeting.  (Note:  Illustration of town officials as unclean animals is unintentional, and unavoidable given popular misunderstanding of Genesis 7:2)

The Virginia Freedom of Information Act

The Virginia Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA) is your only defense against local or state government entities that want to act in secret, behind closed doors, and away from the sunshine.  It’s the only real way to keep governments in Virginia from treating the peasants citizens like mushrooms — you know, keep us in the dark and feed us a bunch of manure.

Even if you never read the entire VFOIA, it’s well worth reading the first two paragraphs.  I’m going to boldface a few key phrases, from the link cited just above:

B. By enacting this chapter, the General Assembly ensures the people of the Commonwealth ready access to public records in the custody of a public body or its officers and employees, and free entry to meetings of public bodies wherein the business of the people is being conducted. The affairs of government are not intended to be conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy since at all times the public is to be the beneficiary of any action taken at any level of government. Unless a public body or its officers or employees specifically elect to exercise an exemption provided by this chapter or any other statute, every meeting shall be open to the public and all public records shall be available for inspection and copying upon request. All public records and meetings shall be presumed open, unless an exemption is properly invoked.

The provisions of this chapter shall be liberally construed to promote an increased awareness by all persons of governmental activities and afford every opportunity to citizens to witness the operations of government. Any exemption from public access to records or meetings shall be narrowly construed and no record shall be withheld or meeting closed to the public unless specifically made exempt pursuant to this chapter or other specific provision of law. This chapter shall not be construed to discourage the free discussion by government officials or employees of public matters with the citizens of the Commonwealth.

Here’s a couple of additional key points, again from the reference above:

What is a meeting?  It’s when three or more of our elected or appointed officials get together, in any setting, and discuss the public business.

"Meeting" or "meetings" means the meetings ... of (i) as many as three members ... of any public body.

There are numerous common-sense exceptions to the rule that meetings must be open.  For example, when the Town Council is considering buying real estate, or considering personnel matters, it may conduct its discussion behind closed doors.  Otherwise, if three or more gather to do the public’s business, that has to be done in public.

And, as I noted in Post #457, anything that Town Council gets to see, as part of a meeting, the public gets to see as well.

...

F. At least one copy of the proposed agenda and all agenda packets and, unless exempt, all materials furnished to members of a public body for a meeting shall be made available for public inspection at the same time such documents are furnished to the members of the public body.  ...

The Town hasn’t been too good about doing that.  For example, of late, they’ve taken to not providing copies of Town staff presentations as part of the agenda packet that is issued prior to a meeting.  And then, when asked, providing copies to Town officials afterwards.  So they aren’t in the agenda packet, but they are presented at the meeting, and delivered to Town officials afterwards.

You can always take a picture of what’s on the screen, in a meeting, with your cell phone, I guess.  So maybe that meets the letter of the law.  But that’s not my main gripe.  At least not for this post.

 

And now a brief quiz, with answers given in the last section.

Hypothetically, suppose a Virginia town wanted to sidestep the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.  Maybe they have some document that they want their town council to discuss and vote on.  But they want to keep that document out of the public eye, and they want to keep everything but the vote out of the public’s view as well.

And so they develop the following method.  They bring town council members into a room, two-by-two, to have them read the document and discuss it.    That way, all the elected representatives of this town would have had a chance to read and discuss this document among themselves.  And they will “daisy chain” the information — every town council member is free to inform every other town council member of what any other town council member said.  So they all get to read the document, and they all get to know what everyone thinks of it, but because there were never three of them in the room at the same time, that discussion is not a “public meeting” and can remain secret.  And the underlying document can remain secret.  That is, out of the public’s view.

Question 1:  Is that legal?  Is it legal to for a town government to create a formal method for sidestepping the intent of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act by , in effect, holding a town council meeting serially — two-by-two — instead of all at once (seven-in-the-room)?

Question 2:  Should that be legal?

Answers

Question 1:  Is that legal? Yep, that’s legal.  I couldn’t find it in black-and-white, but it’s a common enough trick that I found it discussed by a Virginia county attorney on YouTube.  She even referred to it as “daisy chain” and “Noah’s Ark”.

So the Noah’s Ark meeting — conducting a discussion by an entire public body, in private, two persons at a time — appears to be a valid legal loophole by which a Virginia town government can sidestep the clear intent of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.

Got to 4:30 in this YouTube video to hear the discussion of open meeting requirements, and go to 5:30 in this clip to hear the two-by-two “Noah’s Ark” method described.

Question 2:  Should it be legal?  I’d say that depends.  If this is the only way you can avoid fisticuffs in a meeting — by literally keeping combative parties physically separated — I think most would argue that’s a legitimate (if regrettable) way to get the public’s business done.

By contrast, suppose that the only reason a town did that was to circumvent the Virginia Freedom of Information Act?  Suppose that they used the Noah’s Ark meeting purely as a way to keep discussion and documents out of the public eye.  Suppose they used this method to conduct business, in private, that could just as easily have been done in public — they just didn’t want the citizens to know about it?

I’m not a lawyer, but in that case, I’d bet you could find a sympathetic judge to rule that illegal.  Particularly when the statute says this, quite plainly:

The provisions of this chapter shall be liberally construed to promote an increased awareness by all persons of governmental activities and afford every opportunity to citizens to witness the operations of government.

I’d say that the use of the Noah’s Ark meeting, purely to keep documents and discussion out of the public eye, was in direct contradiction to that clause in red.  But then again, I’m not a lawyer, and I could not find any reference to that being tested in court.

Of course, the trick there is that nobody would be stupid enough to say that this method was being used solely to keep government action secret.  If pressed, any town government could gin up some fiction as to why it chose to keep discussion and documents private, rather than public.  So, maybe the reason I couldn’t find any challenges to this practice is that it would be effectively impossible to prove that the motive was purely to sidestep the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.

Anyway, the bottom line is that if you ever wondered how, sometimes, at our own Town Council meetings, Council members are aware of the technical details of an issue, and sometimes the discussion makes it seem like the issue in question is a done deal.  Without there having been any publicly-available documents posted for a meeting.  Or anything like a public discussion where you heard them agree on the issue at hand.  Well, the Noah’s Ark meeting is one way they can do that. It’s one way a public body in Virginia can do its business in private, and still, at least in theory, meet the letter of the law with respect to the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.

Post #478: Bus strike

Above:  Fairfax Connector 463 bus route.

Just in case you hadn’t heard, the Fairfax Connector bus workers are on strike.  You can read about it at this link.

Per Fairfax County, it looks like the main Maple Avenue bus (the 463 route, Vienna Metro to Tyson’s Metro via Maple Avenue) should run on a Sunday schedule (hourly, 8 AM to 8 PM).  But if you read the details, that’s not guaranteed.  It will depend on how many drivers show up for work despite the strike.

According to Fairfax County’s Facebook page, the bus tracker website will show incorrect information.  It will continue to show a weekday schedule, so you can’t rely on it to tell you when the next bus is coming.

None of the other Connector routes in Vienna will be running.

Post #477: A Councilmember’s proposal in response to the Wawa tree destruction

Something remarkable appears to be happening in response to the mistaken removal of mature maple trees at the Wawa lot.  A Town Council member is trying to fix the system so that this doesn’t happen again.  You can download Councilman Majdi’s proposal from this Google Drive link (.pdf)  This is a rare enough event in Town of Vienna government that it’s worth writing up for that reason alone.  And, separately, because it might actually work to prevent a repeat of what happened at the Wawa.

Continue reading Post #477: A Councilmember’s proposal in response to the Wawa tree destruction

Post #462: On mail-based surveys and other methods to gather public opinion

The proximate issue is Councilmember Patel’s proposal to have a short survey routinely included in the Vienna Voice, the Town’s monthly newsletter.  I judge that Town staff’s response to that proposal was not an even-handed discussion of the issues (Post #461).

In fact, I was so flabbergasted by Town staff’s response that I’m having a hard time figuring out what to write about it.  And not just because some of it was wrong on the facts.  (Or some of the straw-man assertions.  I thought “Is Council setting an expectation that all decisions will be made by referendum” was particularly over-the-line.)

What really astonished me is that virtually everything they said, to knock the idea of a newsletter-based survey, goes double and then some for every alternative that they suggested.

From the standpoint of statistics, more-or-less all the things that they thought were wrong about a newsletter-based survey are even more wrong about the alternatives they proposed.  And upon reflection, I think they genuinely don’t understand that.  There’s no reason they should.  They weren’t hired to be survey experts.

And I’m guessing they are trying so hard to quash this idea because they think it’s vastly inferior to various alternatives.  But it’s not.  And that’s what I’m going to concentrate on here.

As a means for:

  • determining what the average Vienna voter thinks,
  • in a way that is transparent, and
  • in a way that can be audited, where
  • the results are not the product of staff’s subjective interpretation of data,
  • using methods that we can afford …

It’s hard to beat a mail-based survey.  And the two large advantages of using the Vienna Voice for that are that we’ve already paid for the postage, and (probably) people will at least glance through it before they throw it out.

In case anyone cares, I have considerable bona fides in this area, having conducted surveys as a Federal employee and in other contexts.  Including, oddly enough, actually having used a newsletter to perform what was, and may still be, the largest-ever survey of Medicare beneficiaries’ difficulties in finding a primary care physician.

Continue reading Post #462: On mail-based surveys and other methods to gather public opinion

Post #461: Patel proposal to survey Town residents: I’ll let the staff response speak for itself.

There’s a Town Council work session tonight.  On the agenda is an idea from Councilwoman Patel.  The idea is that the Town might routinely include a brief survey in the Vienna Voice monthly newsletter.

This would be a way for the Town to gauge where the average citizen stood on the issues of the day.

The unsigned, un-attributed Town staff response is quite a piece of work.

Maybe my take on this is just my own bias, as I have done surveys as part of my job.  But I think not.  So I’ll ask you just to read the rest of this, and see if you can get a sense for whether this is a fair and even-handed discussion of this proposal.  Assess how much it strives to present an accurate assessment of the pros and cons of this approach.  (Hint:  See if you can find any pros.)

I’m not going to comment other than to make a single technical point.  Mailing a survey to 100% of residents is, by definition, a random-sample survey.  It’s just that the sample rate is 100%.

Here it is, in its entirety.  Literally cut-and-paste.  Here’s the Town staff response, to the idea of asking you what you think, on a routine basis, as part of the Vienna Voice mailing.  You can find it in its original format on this Town of Vienna page.

Councilmembers Want to Know… survey initiative
Staff questions/concerns
• Unlike the National Citizen Survey, which uses random sampling, this type of survey is not statistically valid. (However, over time, data from survey may be quoted/used as if it is statistically valid – people tend to forget that part.)

• Crafting survey questions is a science. It’s very easy to accidentally inject bias into the question or to shape the question to generate the response desired.

• Is Council setting an expectation that all decisions will be made by referendum?

• Issues and decisions that must be made are often complex. Despite educational efforts, some residents will not be aware of all of the intertwined considerations that factor into decision-making.

• The timeline of utilizing the newsletter for monthly surveys is awkward, and data may not be available in timely enough matter to impact some Council decisions. Newsletter deadline is the 10th of the month preceding publication.

Example of how process might work:
o Councilmember questions due to editor December 10.
o Survey published in January newsletter around January 1.
o Deadline for responses? If January 10, could publish results in February issue; if later than that, would have to be in March issue.

• Who will “vet” questions posed? Editor, individual Councilmember, all of Council?

• Who will be responsible for analyzing and reporting data?

• Sets up unrealistic expectations? What if Council chooses to go in a direction that is different from survey results?

• Limited response, especially as time goes on.

• Will survey responses be anonymous or identified? No way to know that hearing from a representative set of voices.

• How will surveys be returned to the Town? Will people make the effort to drop off or mail to Town Hall?

Engagement best practices – “Meeting People Where They Are,” Sept. 1, 2019 ICMA article
• Conducting outreach and surveying using only one communications channel almost guarantees biased results.

• Need to use all outreach methods at our disposal, traditional and virtual, to provide more residents an opportunity to engage.

• Need to meet residents where they are. E.g., pop-up opportunities at events where people can respond to a survey on their phones or provided iPads; outreach at community events.

• Keeping the barrier to participation low means being able to instantly engage: no usernames or passwords, no creating an account.

• Being mobile-minded is one of the best ways to increase engagement.

• Messaging is best when it shows the value that public input will have on the decision-making process. For example: “Your input will help set priorities for our 2040 Transportation Plan.

• While a boots on the ground approach does build relationships, it’s difficult to scale, especially given time and staff constraints.

• The best way to optimize engagement and increase equity is to combine traditional and online outreach into a cohesive process and build a public participation database so you can analyze input, report findings, and make strategic decisions.

• Selectively leverage technology, budget, and staff time.