Category: Town of Vienna, VA

Post G23-033: First backyard coyote sighting.

 

As a gardener, I try to keep an eye on the thievin’ varmints wonderful creatures of nature passing through my back yard.

As a retiree, I have nothing better to do.

But my eyesight ain’t what it used to be.

Keep that in mind when I say that I’m fairly sure I saw my first backyard coyote yesterday.

The pictures you might typically see — making the coyote look like some noble offshoot of the wolf — don’t match reality of the eastern Coyote.   Around here, if you see something about the size of an adult fox, but without the good looks, chance are, that’s a coyote.  If you see an ugly brown dog with a mottled coat and a long tail, not acting like a domesticated dog, chances are good that you’ve spotted an eastern coyote.

Background

This was not unexpected.  Coyotes are native to the western U.S., and have been expanding eastward for the better part of a century.  The predominant theory is that we invited them in by killing off bigger predators (wolf, bear), and converting forest into open areas.

I got my first-hand introduction to the Eastern coyote about five years ago, camping at Sky Meadows State Park.  That sits adjacent to the ridge of the Blue Ridge.

Just at dusk, the coyotes had themselves a howl.  At first, you hear a few individuals starting it off.  You think, oh, cute, that must be a coyote.  A minute later the entire ridge is ringing with the sound of howling coyotes.  Three minutes later they wind it down, and silence returns.

It was chilling.  There aren’t a few coyotes in those woods.  Like bear, or foxes.   There were hundreds within earshot of where I was camping.  At least by the sound of them.

In short, the Blue Ridge Mountains are infested with coyotes.  Given how few bear and foxes there are left, I’m guessing coyotes are now the dominant predator species in this area.  That’s a complete change from my youth, where there were no coyotes in this area, period.

And they are here in the ‘burbs.  There have been sporadic reports of pets being eaten by coyotes, here in the  D.C. area.  I think I spotted one crossing a construction site a few years back.

But it’s a different thing entirely to find one eyeballing your back yard. It skedaddled as soon as I opened my back porch door.

I would like to think I’m not the sort of person to form an opinion about animals based on cuteness.  For example, I loathe deer, for the destruction they bring.  Despite being handsome creatures.  Foxes, I like for the fact that they eat squirrels, and not just because they are really elegant-looking beautiful animals.

Eastern coyote?  My gut reaction is, one step up from rat.  They may be noble wolf-like creatures in the western climate.  And most photos you’ll see of them make them look the part.  But around here, they look like mangy stray dogs.  As in this view, from Wikipedia:

Good or bad?

Looks aside, near as I can tell, this newest invasive species brings along only one good attribute:  They kill deer. 

Better yet, they kill baby deer. More specifically, in many areas, coyotes are the number one cause of death for fawns.  (See, e.g., this random reference).

Much of the literature on this topic comes from the deer-hunting community, which of course tut-tuts over these premature deer losses.  The deer hunters have a valid point of view.  For them, coyotes are competition.  Having eliminated wolves and nearly eliminated bear in this area, the deer hunter is the only native carnivore that’s in competition with the coyote.

By contrast, as a back-yard gardener, I’m am definitely on Team Coyote on this one. 

However.

However, coyotes are omnivores.  Sure they eat fawns.  They also eat poodles.  And squirrels.  And garbage.  And fruits and berries, if there’s nothing else around.

Oh, and they are known to attack small children occasionally.  Just thought you might want to know, in case you were still harboring some sympathy for coyotes.

This invasive species is definitely going to put some pressure on our local fox population.  And that’s a pity, because the foxes in my neighborhood don’t go around hunting down my neighbor’s cats.  Or kids.

So if the coyote succeeds in pushing out foxes, we’ll have replaced a relatively benign and good-looking wild creature with one that’s far more of a nuisance.  And ugly to boot.  But one that is capable of reducing the deer population.

Summary

If Fluffy goes missing out of your backyard any time soon, you’ll know whom to suspect.

Coyotes aren’t advertising their presence.  They aren’t howling, here, yet.  (I think that’s a large-group activity for them and they aren’t yet that numerous.)  They are stealthy, and they are hard to spot.  They are easy to mistake for a fox or a stray dog.

But they are here.  As in, prowling the suburban back-yards of Vienna VA.

In the grand scheme of ongoing slow-mo environmental apocalypse — (reference insect loss, reference global warming) — I guess this hardly even registers.  Just another nuisance invasive species to deal with.

 

Post #1797: Rethinking mail-in voting in Virginia

 

I’m not one to bash the USPS.  For two decades, my business-related financial transactions went through the mail.  The only time a check ever got “lost in the mail” is when a client sent it to my prior address.  To within rounding error, in all that time, the USPS had more-or-less a 100% success rate.

But for this post, I’m going to make an exception. Continue reading Post #1797: Rethinking mail-in voting in Virginia

Post #1788: Recycling plastics, Part 2: My Town tells me to do the wrong thing. Does yours?

 

I am in the middle of looking at plastics recycling in my area.

Any internet search in this area feeds you a lot of pessimism about the entire concept of plastics recycling.  People say that it’s not worth doing, that it’s greenwashing, that it’s a scam, that it all ends up in the landfill, and so on.

But is that true?  It all seems to start from a figure that just 5 to  8 percent of U.S. waste plastic is recycled.

Less than an hour of internet search, and I now know that figure is totally irrelevant to the situation I’m investigating.  The often-cited 5% is for every conceivable form of plastic waste — stuff that was tossed in the trash, stuff that was tossed on the ground, plastic resins that are not recyclable, plastic items that are not inherently recyclable, plastic integrated into multi-material items, and so on.

That’s a problem, for sure.  But right now, I just want to know what happens if I properly handle a recyclable plastic object, where I live.  I want to know two simple things:

  • What plastic should go in the recycling bin, here in Vienna, VA, and
  • What fraction of (say) a clean #1 (PETE) bottle actually gets recycled?

Continue reading Post #1788: Recycling plastics, Part 2: My Town tells me to do the wrong thing. Does yours?

Post #1782: A 4.3 percent increase in real estate taxes for the coming year.

 

I tuned in to parts of the Town of Vienna Town Council meeting last night, on Verizon channel 38, to listen to their legally-required public hearing on the property tax rate for the coming year.

There’s a simple question that citizens want to know:  How much are real estate taxes going up, in the coming year? 

And the answer, from the Town of Vienna, was, figure it out yourself. 

Which, although it may somehow satisfy the letter of the law, is the exact opposite of the clear intent of Commonwealth statute.

An apparently pointless Virginia law

The Commonwealth of Virginia requires that any government entity that charges property taxes must inform its citizens about the increase in taxes from year to year.  (As long as total taxes are expected to increase by at least one percent.)  There’s a standard notice, with a calculation and language set out in statute.  The whole point of which is to combine the increase in assessments with any change in tax rates, and tell the citizens the bottom line on how much their real estate tax bills will rise, on average.

 But every year, the Town manages to goof up the math on that legally-required notice.  See, e.g., Post #1495, for the 2022 notice.  They literally get the math wrong, year after year.  And, so far, they have always understated the actual increase in taxes that would occur based on the proposed tax rate.

I post about that every year.  Each year, the Town posts a notice that does not comply with the statute, because it does not do the calculation correctly.  (The details of the calculation are laid out in statute, shown at this reference).  Each year, the Town ignores it.

This year, we continued that long-standing tradition.  The 5.4% increase, underlined below, is actually an 8.4% increase, based on the numbers shown.  Roughly speaking, the 9.7% increase in assessments, less the 1.2% reduction in the tax rate, leads to an approximate 8.4% increase in total real estate taxes.

If you had an interest in the Town’s legally mandated public hearing on the tax rate, this is the document the Town showed you (reference).  For purposes of that hearing, as a citizen, you’d think that the new tax rate was going to be 0.2025 cents per $100 of assessed value, and that taxes were going up an average of 5.4%.

But in addition, as of two weeks ago, at the Town’s public hearing on the budget, the Town also knew that the tax rate stated in that notice was incorrect.  The Town wasn’t going to proposed a new tax rate of .2025 cents, but instead Town staff had already figured out that they could balance the budget with a new rate of 0.1950.

The bottom line is that none of the numbers in that legally-mandated notice to citizens was correct.  Except for the increase in assessments, which comes from Fairfax County.  Based on the tax rate shown in the document, the percentage increase in total taxes was a math error.  The numbers supporting that estimated increase were incorrectly calculated.  And, in addition, the tax rate for the coming year had itself changed weeks before the public hearing.

But nobody felt the least obligation to change or correct anything.  Or even note that they were wrong, in the public hearing.

Which leads to an obvious question: If the numbers in that legally-mandated notice don’t have to be correct — if the stated tax rate isn’t the rate the Town is planning to use, and if the stated increase in total taxes (and subsidiary calculated figure) isn’t even calculated correctly — then what, exactly, is the point of the law that requires it?  You can use any tax rate that’s in the ballpark, and do the arithmetic wrong, and … well, basically offer a page full of misinformation as the background to your public hearing.  And … that satisfies the letter of the law?

I guess so.  I have to wonder of the folks who wrote that piece of the statute realized that this would be the bottom line.  It literally appears to make no difference whether the numbers in that document bear any relationship to reality or not.

Answering the question, even if nobody cares.

Not that it really matters here, because the citizens are indifferent.   Routinely, the public hearings on taxes, water-and-sewer rates, and the budget draw no public comment.  Literally, nobody cares enough about it to say anything.

Anyway, if you listened to last night’s public hearing, you still wouldn’t have been told what the proposed increase in total taxes is.  Amidst all the back-patting, and the emphasis in cutting the rate (while increasing the assessments), nobody bothered to inform the citizens what their average increase in real estate taxes will be.  I think that just underscores how little this seems to matter, in this increasingly wealthy town.

In any case, 1.097*(0.1950/0.2050) =~ 1.043, or a 4.3 percent increase in real estate taxes, on average, for the coming year.  That’s what I calculate.  That’s the increase in assessments, times the reduction in the tax rate.  Not that anybody cares.

The bottom line is that the Commonwealth enacted a rule requiring entities such as the Town of Vienna to tell citizens how much tax bills were going up, on average.  The Town has to provide a document combining the increase in assessments with any change in the tax rate.  And the Town does that.  The only problems are that the document bears no relationship to the actual increase in taxes.  And it’s still up to the citizens to calculate, for themselves, what this year’s increase in taxes will be.

Post #1777: Correction on Town of Vienna elections

 

I’ve removed two posts:

Post #1591: How to disenfranchise Town residents, at random.  Posted on September 15, 2022

Post #1675: Town of Vienna elections, there’s no excuse for this.  Posted on January 9, 2023

As it turns out, I was wrong.  The Town of Vienna web page that begins with this paragraph (emphasis mine) …

Due to a change in Virginia election laws, Town Council elections no longer take place in May. The next Town Council election will take place on Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023. All seven Council seats will be on the ballot at the same time, rather than the staggered 2-year term cycle in past elections.

… does not actually describe how you will vote under the changed Virginia election laws.   

In particular, this paragraph  …

Voting takes place at a single polling location for Town elections: The Vienna Community Center, 120 Cherry Street SE. ... (Note that other polling locations are open in Town for state and national elections.)

…  is wrong.

Shame on me for not checking with the people who actually run that election, Fairfax County, rather than relying on what was posted on the (seemingly) updated Town of Vienna web page.

My understanding as of this morning is that, contrary to what it says on the Town of Vienna web site, you will be able to cast all your votes — state, local, and town — at your normal polling place for state elections.

Post #1649: Capital Bikeshare at Tysons: 170 slots, 14 locations, 6 round trips a day.

 

This final bit of analysis of Capital Bikeshare is here just in case anybody in Vienna actually believes the cheerleader-style reporting you may read regarding  Capital Bikeshare.

Here’s the actual use of the Bikeshare racks around Tysons, for the past 12 months. To understand this, realize that the underlying unit of data is a “trip leg”.  It’s a transport of a bicycle from one rack to another, or, in the case of a round trip, from one rack back to that same rack.  E.g.  if you rode one of these bikes from the Metro station to work in the morning, and then back in the evening, that would be two trip-legs.

To get a better estimate of the actual number of users, I divide trip-legs by two to get “trips”.  (Except for round-trips, for which each one counts as a trip).  I’m betting that in most cases, this is a far better estimate of the number of unique users on any given day.

Then, I divided these 12-month totals by 365 to get them on a per-day basis.

The upshot is that, on a typical day, the entire Capital Bikeshare investment in the Tyson’s Metro area — 14 racks, total of 170 bike slots, and an unknown number of bikes — typically benefits six people.

Let me point out that this is a mostly-mature system at this point.  Most of those racks have been there for years now.  And let me further point out that it looked just like that the last time I analyzed the data for Tysons Metro in isolation.  And it looks like this out in the far Maryland ‘burbs as well. And in Reston.

If you can look at that, and say, oh, boy, let’s spend a quarter-mil to install those in my Town  — then let’s pay Lyft (the owner of the company that operates Capital Bikeshare) whatever annual maintenance they charge, on top of that.

If you can say that, then I think you and I live in alternative realities.

I don’t even care if it’s somebody else’s tax dollars paying for it. Building more of these, when we already know what the outcome looks like out here in the exurbs, is just the worst kind of government.

In case anybody wants to check my work — nobody ever does — the underlying data are here:  https://ride.capitalbikeshare.com/system-data.

Finally, let me reiterate that in the central urban core of the DC area, Capital Bikeshare is a fine idea and it works well.  (I’ve said that in almost all of my prior posts on this topic, and repeat it here to be sure that you understand I am not anti-bike or anti-Capital-Bikeshare.)  The heavy use of the bikes in that area contributes to a reasonable cost-per-ride.  But in those areas, a) there are lots of nearby places to go from and to, where racks can be sited, and b) as I recall, a typical bike rack slot turns over an average of six times a day.

In other words, there are maybe two-orders-of-magnitude more riders per bike slot in the dense urban core than in the far-flung suburbs.  Bikeshare provides value in that urban core.  It does not out here.

Realistic transportation policy needs to recognize that and be shaped accordingly.  Early on, local governments could be forgiven for taking a chance on a technology that, in hindsight, just doesn’t work out here.  Now, by contrast, with all the accumulated evidence, there’s no longer any excuse.  We know it doesn’t work, in the sense of having an outrageous average cost per mile of transportation, due to negligible use rates.  Why are we still expanding it?

Post #1617: When will the tear-down boom end, the sequel.

 

It hasn’t been possible to buy a small house in Vienna, VA for at least a decade now.   Every small house that goes up for sale is purchased by developers, who then proceed to tear it down and build the largest house that will fit onto that lot.

This sustained destruction of middle-class housing, replacing it with lot-filling McMansions, is what I have termed “the tear-down boom”.

I have written about the various implications of the tear-down boom.  Among other things, this continual replacement of small houses with gigantic houses means that:

  • Post #519.  Town revenues from residential real estate have been pushed materially higher by the resulting increase in the price of the houses.
  • Post #308.  There’s a tremendous mis-match between the stock of houses in the Town of Vienna, and the houses available for sale.  Middle-class people can live here — if they already own a house — but they can’t move here, because all the middle-class houses are replaced with McMansions before being re-sold.  As a result, increasingly, Vienna is a town for the wealthy, not the middle class, something I termed the “Mcleanification” of Vienna.

And yet, some of the economics of the tear-down boom just didn’t seem to make a lot of sense, simply as way to generate housing stock.  People really don’t need 10,000 square foot houses, and everything I read about the next Gen X and later is that they have no interest in buying such gigantic pieces of real estate.  Seemed like a classic case of “sell it to whom?”.

The best explanation I could give for the tear-down boom is that it was the result of two toxic Federal economic policies.  These were the huge tax advantages to home ownership, including both tax sheltering of current income and tax-exemption of any capital gains, and near-zero real (inflation-adjusted) interest rates.   In 1997, the Federal government eliminated capital gains on housing.  (With some limits.)  That was on top of the tax sheltering that housing provides via income-tax deductibility of mortgage interest and property taxes.  Then, in 2008, the Fed dropped inflation-adjusted interest rates to zero or below, following the near-collapse of the U.S. financial system.

Between those two policies — the tax advantages and the free money — it became ludicrously cheap to finance the purchase of a mega-home.  And that mega-home was a highly-leveraged investment that was, ultimately, better than tax-free.

But trees don’t grow to the sky.  Back in 2019, I asked “When will the tear-down boom end?”  That was Post #217.

Even then, the market was showing some oddities.  Oddity #1 is that these mega-homes were appreciating less rapidly than adjacent lower-priced homes.  Oddity #2 is that the changes in tax law in 2018 made it much more expensive to own homes costing over about $850,000.  Here’s the analysis of just how much more expensive it became to carry the cost of a $1.4M house after the 2018 changes in Federal tax law:

Not only did it suddenly cost a lot more to carry that $1.4M house, almost all of the additional cost came from the housing value just in excess of $850,000.  Basically, the law reduced the size of what I would term the “tax efficient” house, that is, the house that earns you the maximum tax breaks as a percent of cost.

As a result, in 2019, I looked at that and said, isn’t this going to put the brakes on the tear-down boom? 

And so far, the answer is no.  Just casually driving around town, these still seems to be a tear-down on pretty much every block.

So far.

Today’s mortgage interest rates.

In this last section, all I want to do is assess the impact of the rise in mortgage interest rates.  Literally, dig up the spreadsheet above, and replace the then-current 4% mortgage interest rate with the current 7% (or so) rate.

Source:  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) system.

Redoing the analysis, I find that the carrying cost of a $1.4M (small) McMansion in Vienna is now about 50% higher then it was back in 2018.  And 86% higher than it was in 2017, before they changed Federal tax law to reduce the tax advantages of owning an expensive home.

So, to be clear:  Those houses are still big money-makers for the owners, as housing prices have risen steeply in the past year.  That said, if home prices merely stabilize, new McMansions will have after-tax carrying costs in today’s environment that are 86% higher than they were in 2017.

My belief is that this plausibly is going to put a damper on tear-downs in Vienna.

I’ve been wrong about that before.

But I believe it strongly enough that I spent last week painting the front of my house.   That’s a real change for me, because I had simply stopped doing any maintenance on my house that didn’t directly affect occupant health and safety.  I figured, why bother to keep the place up, when they’re just going to tear it down when I eventually move?

I was letting the house deteriorate, peeling paint and all.  But now I have about a decade’s worth of deferred basic maintenance to do. Because in today’s environment, it’s no longer a given, I think, that this house will be torn down when I leave it.