Category: Town of Vienna, VA

Post #1607, Hating Maple Avenue

Today, as I was driving home after a trip to one of our local parks, I got honked at on Maple Avenue, in the Town of Vienna, where I live. 

My offense?  Failing to cause an accident on Maple Avenue.  Apparently the Tesla driver behind me wanted me to clear the roadway by running into the car that was blocking the lane ahead.  Instead, I stopped.  (It’s not as if I had a choice, because I literally couldn’t get around the lunkhead blocking the lane.).  In any case, after a three second delay, the lane cleared, and we all proceeded merrily down the road.

Despite the stupidity of honking at me for failing to run into somebody, maybe that impatient driver can be forgiven.  Because, unless you’ve bothered to look at the data, you probably don’t realize just how many car accidents occur on that innocent-looking two-mile stretch of road we refer to as Maple Avenue.

So in this post, I’m going to dig up a few pieces of data on reportable accidents along Maple Avenue in Vienna.  Just to remind myself that on this stretch of road, the occasional bit of defensive driving is no sin.

Saturday afternoon is the pits.

The main commercial district of the Town of Vienna, VA lies along an arterial highway, Virginia Route 123.  Although here in the TOV that stretch of Rt. 123 is called Maple Avenue.

It’s a congested urban arterial highway that sees about 30,000 vehicles per day.  With all that implies.

In the past, I outlined the fundamental reason why traffic is so consistently awful on this piece of road.  The Washington and Old Dominion railroad was here before the roads.  There’s roughly a five mile stretch of the old W&OD rail bed  that acts like a fence.  For that stretch, the only gate in the fence — the only road that crosses that old railroad bed — is Maple Avenue (and a couple of nearby side streets). As a result, anyone who wants to move north-south in this area, or east-west in this area, and doesn’t want to use the interstate, ends up driving on Maple Avenue in Vienna.  Either that, or do an end-run around that old railroad bed.

 

This road is congested during the AM and PM rush hours every business day.  But at least during rush hour, the traffic flow is predictable.  Almost everybody is just passing through.

For my money, the absolute worst time to drive on Maple Avenue is Saturday afternoon.  In addition to having the road packed and the traffic slow, traffic is chaotic.  Cars are moving in all types of unpredictable ways.  It’s jumbled mix of people running errands locally, and people just trying to get from one side of Vienna to the other.

Traffic crawls.

To add to the fun, in order to squeeze five lanes into the road bed, the lanes are about as narrow as they can possibly be.  The travel lanes are about 10′ wide.

But the real killer is is that the center turning lane is just 9 feet wide.  Which, if you drive a small car, is OK.  But if you drive a large SUV, crossover, or truck, you need some real skills to get your vehicle fully out of the travel lane, and fully into the turn lane, on-the-fly.  And, since many people lack those skills, but still drive those vehicles, the result is that people making left turns consistently block the adjacent travel lane, because they haven’t pulled their vehicle fully into the allotted 9′ space.

Which is why I got honked at today.  I couldn’t move forward, because the rear bumper of the left-turning SUV in front of me stuck out about two feet into the travel lane.

I’ve lived here long enough that I’m completely used to this.  I expect it.  If it’s Saturday afternoon, you aren’t going anywhere very fast on Maple Avenue.  And you’ll be dodging a lot of bad driving along the way.  That’s just the way it is, as we all try to negotiate this narrow urban arterial highway.

Nor is that ever going to get any better.  The Town, in its Wisdom, ensured that some new, large, and very expensive buildings were going to get put up right next to the road.  (They made it a condition of the zoning that the face of the building could be no more than 15′ from the road.)   So, short of Armageddon, there will never be any way to widen that roadway.  There’s a roughly 49′ curb-to-curb distance now, and that’s the way it’s going to be.

If that’s not enough, we’re now in the middle of changing the zoning in order to pack in some high-density housing directly on Maple Avenue.  Because, apparently, what we think we need here in Vienna is thousands of additional residents, all living directly on Maple Avenue.

Congestion has predictable consequences.

Here’s a map of reportable accidents that occurred in 2021, on or around Maple Avenue in Vienna.  As you can see, there were 100 car accidents involving significant property damage, injury, or both.

But 2021 was a good year, as traffic was down due to the pandemic.  If you look at the last pre-pandemic year, the count was 134 accidents.  More-or-less an accident every three days, along Maple and vicinity.

Source for both maps:  VA TREDS system

I guess I’ll stop there.

Fact is, every year, a whole lot of people damage a whole lot of expensive hardware, doing stupid things in Maple Avenue traffic.

And so, if some yoyo is partially blocking the travel lane, yeah, I think I’ll stop.  Honk at me if it makes you feel better.  Because it’s probably smarter to stop, than to roll the dice and see if I can squeeze by without doing any damage.

I am not, in general, a patient or polite person.  But on Maple Avenue, on a Saturday afternoon, I purposefully strive to be both.

At the end of the day, I guess I pity the folks who still can’t manage to figure out that no matter how much you honk your horn, if you’ve chosen to drive in that traffic, you aren’t going to go anywhere very fast.  It’s just the way it is.

 

Post #1597: Vienna sports fans, it’s time to start asking for your new ball fields.

 

The Town of Vienna and the surrounding areas of Fairfax County are chronically short of ball fields for organized youth and amateur sports.  This is a complaint you’ll hear from anyone tasked with finding field time for practice, let alone for competition.   The ball fields around here are pretty well booked up at peak periods.

With the completion of the Town of Vienna’s large new police station, Vienna now has a rare opportunity to add to the stock of public ball fields in town.  A few years back, the Town bought the former Baptist Church on Center Street, for $5.5M of your tax dollars.  That was used as the temporary police station, as the new police station was built.  But now, that 3-acre tract of land — located directly across from existing Waters and Caffi fields — is no longer needed for that purpose.

If you’d be in favor of turning that land into playing fields, you’d better start speaking up right now.  Get your preferences known.  Because, as sure as night follows day, and as sure as every new building in Vienna will be absolutely as large as the law and the lot allow, if sports advocates don’t get dibs on this plot of land soon, somebody’s going to find an excuse to put a great big taxpayer-financed building on it.

I’d bet money on that.

Dimensions, please.

A U.S. football field is 360′ long and 160′ wide (reference).  That’s a fairly big chunk of land in an urban environment, amounting to about 1.2 acres.

Below, you can see a standard football field laid out in the Astroturf outfield of Waters field, in the heart of the Town of Vienna.  (You can verify the dimensions using (e.g.) Google Maps).  You can also see the now-idle three-acre former Baptist church tract, owned by the Town, directly across the street.  You can verify those dimensions using the Fairfax County tax map.

Source: Google Earth, annotations mine.

Just in case it’s not readable, the former Baptist Church lot measures out to be 400′ deep and 325′ wide.  There’s probably a bit of ambiguity on the depth, regarding the exact location of the Town right-of-way.  So the usable space may exceed that by a bit.  But those dimensions are good enough for doing a bit of rough planning.

First, that former Baptist Church tract is a nice size and shape.  As a matter of arithmetic, it would be feasible to squeeze in not one, but two full-sized football fields.  

Admittedly, that would leave room for just about nothing else.  The combined dimensions of two standard U.S. football fields, would be 360′ x 320′.  That leaves a total of five feet left over, at the sidelines, and 40 feet, at the end zones.  Two football fields would fill the lot from side-to-side, more-or-less lot-line-to-lot line.

So, practically speaking, it would probably be inadvisable to put two full-sized football fields in.  But, for sure, one football field would fit.  You’d have 20′ of running room past the end of each end zone, and plenty of room for a parking lot on one of sidelines.  Likely, you’d put the parking lot adjacent to the existing homes, to put some space between the field and the nearby housing.

Soccer fields for high-school aged kids are about the same size as a football field.  So, more-or-less ditto for a standard high-school soccer field.

But soccer fields for younger kids are smaller.  For ages 12 and under, a soccer field can be as small as 255′ x 120′ (reference). You could fit a two “youth” soccer fields in there with room to spare.  In that configuration, there’d be room for a couple of rows of parking directly adjacent to Center Street.

Finally, baseball and softball fields are a bit more flexible, but I see a recommended length of 275′ for each foul line for a Little League field (reference).  So you could put in one Little League baseball diamond and still have plenty of room for (e.g.) a small parking area, perhaps a row of cars along Center and a row adjacent to the nearby housing.

FWIW, under no circumstances would I suggest that these fields be lit, because they are directly adjacent to housing.  I’d be thinking more along the lines of a set of low-key daytime-use ball fields.  Something more akin to the baseball diamond at Meadow Lane, which sits directly across from single-family homes.  And not a clone of the lit-and-Astroturfed Waters Field.

 

Isn’t fitness one of our town goals?

In any case, I think this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to convert that land to open green space, in the form of ball fields, before somebody thinks up an alternative use for it.  If you think that’s a good use of your tax dollars, you should start talking that up sooner rather than later.

Think of it as the Town’s tangible commitment to youth fitness.

As the Town proceeds with its rezoning, and likely opens the door to a whole lot of new housing along Maple Avenue, it seems like there needs to be some balance to offset all that population growth.  Part of the balance needs to be some effort to increase the amount of land available for recreational purposes.  And if this particular track of land gets built on, the opportunity to include this green space in an ever-more-crowded Vienna will be lost for good.

Post #1594: Dysfunctional acorn lights. Maybe it’s time to start getting rid of them.

Source:  Fairfax County, VA

Consider the following proposal.  Instead of installing regular overhead streetlights, I proposed to light the road and adjacent sidewalk with spotlights, aimed directly into the eyes of oncoming drivers. Continue reading Post #1594: Dysfunctional acorn lights. Maybe it’s time to start getting rid of them.

Post #1592: Patrick Henry Parking Garage. (And Library).

 

Just tracking the progress on this.  It’s not as if the powers-that-be are ever going to ask any library users what they’d like to see.  So this is just an attempt to keep track of how far this has moved from the original objectionable design.

Recall that the Town of Vienna has gone in with Fairfax Count to replace the existing Patrick Henry Library with combination parking garage and library.  I last looked in on this issue in September 2021, in Post #1263.

The original design proposal was pretty awful, with a one-floor library squatting under one half of a three-floor parking garage, with minimal window area, what has to be a dark interior, and no green space to speak of.

 

Basically, look at any of the light, airy, award-winning libraries that Fairfax County has built.

Source:  Fairfax County website, pictures of Dolley Madison library.

And do the opposite.

For my part, I suggested that this would work a lot better if they did what every new commercial structure on Maple is doing, and put the bulk of the parking underground.  That would have allowed the Town to wrap the new library around a little pocket park, and avoid having a huge above-ground parking garage as the centerpiece of Vienna.  Outlined like so, with the park in green, surface parking in black, and a two-story library in blue.

This was, of course, completely ignored.  Why should the Town put the parking underground just because every other responsible decisionmaker along that stretch of road was doing exactly that.

But, Town staff assured us to ignore all this claptrap, because the original design was just a something-something-something and they were already redesigning it.  Don’t worry yourself about it.

Anybody who could do arithmetic soon realized that this was going to be one very crowded site.  The proposed building will have 3.4 times as many parking places (213) and 1.5 times as much library floor area (21,000 square feet), as the current library.  To fit in both an enlarged library, and all that additional parking was going to be a trick, no matter how you stacked it.  It was going to fill that lot with building, side-to-side, front-to-back.  (Unless you put the parking underground, as illustrated above.)  As I put it in that prior post, everything is going to get 25% closer together, get stacked much higher, and even with that, it’s a given that all the green space is history.

Source: Google Earth.

In June the Town of Vienna got the formal proposal from the architects chosen to design the new library.  This was presented in a Town Council work session (now called conference session, I think.)  You can see the documents at this link.

The good news is that, as of the June iteration, the architects managed to cram all of that on the lot and mostly hide the parking garage.  You now have a tall one-story library running the length of Maple.  The majority of the lot is taken up by a four-level parking garage running behind that.  The proposed library manages to hide about two-third of the view of the parking garage, when viewed from Maple.

As is mandatory with new Town of Vienna buildings, this is more-or-less the largest structure that could possibly fit on that lot.  There will be some little vestiges of green, but otherwise this appears to fill every legally available square foot, and nearly every legally available cubic foot, of space.

The latest design, delivered to the Town just a few days ago, shoves the building back off the street a bit, provides a bit of open space, provides access to the school behind the library, and and tries harder to hide the garage when viewed from Maple Avenue.  Those all seem like improvements over the last iteration.  You can download the most recent design from this TOV web page.

The result is this:

Source:  Fairfax County, VA, URL given above.

This obviously won’t be as spacious and neat as the architect’s rendering makes it look.  And it has more-or-less nothing to do with anything that’s on Maple Avenue now, not even the new construction under MAC.  And, based on the description, they’re going to have to ask for a few zoning variances to be able to shoehorn that onto the lot.

But at this point, I think we can breathe a sigh of relief.  As in, the library will have windows.  And they’ve done their best to hide the fact that the bulk of the building is a parking garage.  And so on.

Looks like they are keeping the goofy, environmentally unfriendly, and completely unnecessary acorn street lights.  Which are now jarringly out of place in front of this aluminum-and-glass building exterior.

All that glass surface means this is a small environmental disaster due to the heating and cooling load through all that window area.  (I’m sure the Town will point to LEED certification, but all that means is that they’ve constructed it well, not that the design isn’t an energy hog from the start.)  But if they go with modern heat pumps, the (now-mandatory) de-carbonization of the Virginia grid will eventually reduce the C02 emissions from those large heating and cooling loads.

Unlike the other big new buildings on Maple, this one isn’t adding to the existing congestion.  We won’t have hundreds of people living there, or streams of new business flowing into and out of it.  By and large, it’s going to serve the people who use that library now.  So, in contrast to other construction occurring on Maple, this is mostly harmless despite the size.

All in all, it’s not my cup of tea, in this tightly-packed urban context.  But it could have been a lot worse.  Most importantly, it will work, as a library, and it hides the fact that it’s mostly a parking garage.  Anything beyond that is gravy.

Post #1589: Correction to Post 1586

 

A local who has the Tea Party plates on his car took exception to my blanket statement that those plates mark environmentally insensitive individuals.  My claim that I’d never seen cars with (e.g.) greater than 30 MPG EPA rating, with Tea Party plates, is now wrong, courtesy of three outliers that he photographed and emailed to me.  I haven’t bothered to check the EPA ratings, but these at least aren’t low MPG trucks.

The gist of that prior posting still stands.  But as a matter of fact, there are some vehicles with Virginia Tea Party plates that do, probably, get over 30 MPG.  Contrary to what I said in that posting.  I don’t think that’s the norm, but mea culpa.

Still seeking a photo of that rarest of beasts, the Tea Party Prius.

As to why I call them the Tea Party plates, well, that’s what they are.

https://vatp.org/2010/11/13/va-tea-party-plates/

Three photos courtesy of an email correspondent:

Just to be clear — because I didn’t blur the plates or anything — it’s legal to photograph anything you can see from a public right-of-way.  At least here in Virginia.  Commercial use of such an image may fall under some different set of statutes.   But posting such an image with no claim to copyright and no intent to harass is fair use here in the Commonwealth.

Post G22-034: Taxpayer-financed leaf disposal, a harmful relic of the past?

 

My town goes to great effort and expense to collect and dispose of leaves each fall.  Homeowners are instructed to rake their leaves to the curb.  The leaves are vacuumed up, trucked off, and hot-composted.

To me, this looks increasingly like an anachronism.  It’s one of those practices that was a point of civic pride 40 years ago, but which today appears to be a convenience that results in needless environmental harm.

We need a new paradigm that turns this maximum-effort approach on its head.  Instead of collecting as much leaf volume as possible, our goal should be to encourage town residents to do as little as possible. Citizens should be encouraged to:

  • leave their leaves alone, or
  • rake them into an unused bit of their yard (“sheet composting”), or
  • mulch them directly into their lawn.

Only as a last resort, rake them to the curb, to be trucked around by town staff and ultimately sterilized via hot composting.

The Town still has a necessary role in removing leaves from roadways and storm drains.  Getting them up off those impervious surfaces prevents rapid flow of leaf-borne nutrients into already-overburdened local waterways.  (And continued street sweeping is a legal requirement here, given that we relied on the existing street-sweeping program to comply with certain nutrient runoff reductions mandated by the Chesapeake Bay Act.)

Beyond that, the town needs to recast this annual leaf collection not as some great municipal benefit, but as a necessary evil of living in a tree-dense suburban landscape.  And as such, it should devote resources to minimizing the quantity of leaves input into this process.  I’m guessing that just a little bit of effort in this direction can both save money on leaf collection costs and generate some small improvement in the local environment.

Every suburbanite owns a power leaf mulcher

Let me start this section with one weird fact:  The mulching lawn mower was invented in 1990.  This, per Google Patents.  That 1990 patent document cites the the avoidance of significant monetary and environmental costs of yard waste disposal as a major advantage of a mulching mower.

Today, all mowers are mulching mowers.  Or nearly all.  My local Home Depot has 54 different power lawn mowers in stock.  I checked the first dozen listed, then spot-checked another half-dozen further down the list.  Every one was advertised as a mulching mower.  Gas, electric, multiple blade — it made no difference. To a close approximation, mulching is the default.  In the modern era, “lawn mower” is synonymous with mulching mower.  With effort, you might be able to find one that doesn’t mulch.  But you’d have to work at it.

There appears to be near-universal agreement that mulching your fall leaf litter in place is beneficial to your lawn.  By which I mean, mowing your leaf-covered lawn with a mulching mower.  Which, these days, per the above, means mowing your lawn.

Everyone from Fine Gardening to Virginia Tech Extension Service to Bob Villa says that this practice benefits your lawn.  When shredded by a mulching mower, leaf litter disappears quickly, with an upper limit of roughly half-a-foot cumulative leaf depth (per Kansas State).  The resulting mulched leaves provide a modest degree of fertilization (e.g., leaf litter is about 2 percent nitrogen). And the leaves of maple trees contain chemicals that suppress weed-seed germination (Michigan State University).

Even Scotts, the biggest vendor of lawn fertilizer in the U.S., tells you to mulch — not rake — your leaves.  (And top it off with a bit of fertilizer, of course).  The radical environmentalists at  Scotts summed up the case for leaf mulching pretty well.  (What’s next?  Exxon promoting electric cars?)

When you rake up your leaves, it costs you. Your local taxes pay for trucks to sweep up your leaves or pick up your leaf bags, all of which often end up in landfills. If you burn leaves, you're just sending up clouds of carbon into the atmosphere. Mulching leaves simply recycles a natural resource, giving you richer soil for free.

In short, if you just use a mulching mower to chop up your leaves, rather than rake them up and dispose of them, you’ll end up with a greener lawn with fewer weeds.

The upshot is that more-or-less every suburban homeowner already owns a power tool that eliminates the need to rake leaves.  That’s a radical change from three decades ago.  Once upon a time, that was a specialty piece of equipment called a mulching mower.  Now, near as I can tell, it’s called a lawn mower.  And for the few who don’t have one, the cost of on-site leaf disposal is just the cost of hiring somebody to mow your lawn with a mulching mower.

My point is that, 30 years ago, nobody owned a mulching mower.  Now, if you own a mower, it’s a mulching mower.  To a close approximation, every citizen of my town already owns a tool that allows them to dispose of their own leaves, with minimal effort, on their own property. 

So, why does my home town encourage all citizens to rake their leaves to the curb, for taxpayer-financed pickup and disposal?  Forty years ago, that was a real life-style improvement, because nobody had a convenient way to dispose of fall leaf litter.  Now, everybody does.  So why have we maintained that ancient program, unchanged?

Better yet, #leavetheleaves

Beyond feeding your lawn, leaf litter is reported to play a key role in the life cycle of many beneficial insects, including pollinators.  In particular, both butterflies and fireflies need winter leaf litter to survive.  You can find any number of responsible organizations who tell you not to mulch your leaves but, ideally, just let them be.  Or rake them up and let them decompose naturally.  That, in a nutshell, the worst thing  you can do is have centralized hot-composting of leaves, because that effectively eliminates next year’s butterflies, present in the leaf litter as larvae and pupae.

And many others.

In particular, as this article makes clear, if you pride yourself on your butterfly-friendly garden, then rake your leaves to the curb each fall, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.  You’re basically in the business of attracting butterflies into your yard, so that you can exterminate their offspring.

While many of us are growing more sensitive to the plight of the pollinators, mindfully incorporating pollinator-friendly plants into our gardens in the spring and resisting the urge to use pesticides in our garden all summer, we are unwittingly undoing our hard work and good intentions when we clear away the leaf litter and standing dead plant material in the fall!

What?  You mean I am killing off the very pollinators that I “cultivated” all summer?  Yep.  Ouch!

Caveat:  That said, while many reputable sources say that leaving leaf litter is necessary for butterflies and other beneficial insects, I could not find even one objective study that quantified the impact of it.  So this is one of those things that you just have to take on the faith of expert testimony.   It makes sense, experts say it.  But as far as I know, it has never been quantified.

Nothing stops you from doing some of each

There are two types of people in this world:  Those who divide people into two types, and those who don’t.

By which I mean, thinking that you must adopt just one of the methods outlined above is arbitrary.  Nothing stops you from doing a bit of each.

This fall, maybe let some of year leaves alone.  Maybe rake some aside for your own butterfly sanctuary.  Maybe mow some into your lawn and skip the fertilizer in the spring.

All of that reduces the tonnage that the town has to collect.  And that’s unambiguously good.

Nutrient load in local waterways.

Source:  US Geological Survey, presented in this document.

The only significant environmental caveat that I can identify is that leaves left on impermeable areas (such as roadways) end up putting nutrients into the local waterways.  

Unfortunately, the best study of this issue (in Madison, Wisconsin) evalulated a combined program of  leaf collection (asking people to rake their leaves to the curb) and street sweeping.  You can see the full reference at this location.

That said, their conclusion is that frequent street sweeping is far more important than leaf collection, for keeping nutrients out of stormwater.  At least, that’s how I read their summary, emphasis mine:

Collection of only leaf piles, leaving streets unswept, showed no significant reduction in loads of total or dissolved phosphorus and an 83 percent increase in load of total nitrogen. The majority of nutrient concentrations were in the dissolved fraction making source control through leaf collection and street cleaning more effective at reducing the amount of dissolved nutrients in stormwater runoff than structural practices such as wet detention ponds. Based on the results of this study, municipal leaf management programs would be most effective with weekly street cleaning in areas of high street tree canopy, whereas the method and frequency of leaf pile collection is of less importance to the mitigation of nutrients in stormwater runoff.

Source:  US Geological Survey, https://pubs.er.usgs.gov/publication/sir20205109

Beyond that one study, every other reference I can find refers only to the link between tree canopy over the street, and apparent fall nutrient loading in surrounding waterways.  E.g., this one.  Similarly, this one looked at all sources, but pointed to urban trees adjacent to streets as the significant wintertime nutrient source in the watershed it studied.

So it’s pretty clear that if you have leaf-covered streets, the decomposing leaves wash into the storm sewers and add nutrients to local streams.  For sure, the town has a proper role in sweeping the streets in the fall to remove fallen leaves before they can get into the storm sewers.

But as far as I can tell, asking citizens to dispose of their own leaves, on their own property, is not a concern.  Almost all of the research shows that it’s the leaf load on the streets that is the major driver of fall nutrient runoff.  So, absent information to the contrary, I’d assume that as long as the town continues to sweep the streets in the fall, a program of encouraging residents to keep their leaves on their own lot would have no significant implications for compliance with the Chesapeake Bay Act.

Conclusion

Some time in the distant past, my town began a program of mass collection and composting of fall leaves.

This started before before the invention of the mulching mower.  It started decades before it was widely understood that many beneficial insects need the leaf litter to survive, and decades before research made it clear that frequent street sweeping was far more important than bulk leaf removal, for preventing high fall nutrient loads in urban storm water.

And yet, even now, every year, citizens are directed to rake their leaves to the curb, so that we can use our tax dollars to vacuum them up and send them off to be hot composted (i.e. sterilized and broken down in large, hot piles.).

All I’m suggesting is that maybe this needs a change of focus.  The town should de-emphasize centralized leaf collection and instead encourage residents to take care of their own leaves responsibly.  This can be as low-effort as simply mowing the leaf-covered lawn with a mulching mower.  It can take the form of raking the leaves to the edges of the yard to let them slowly decompose (“sheet composting”).  And then focusing the town’s resources on sweeping up whatever leaves end up on the streets.

Sure, allow residents to continue to rake their leaves to the curb for pickup if they wish.  But it’s time to stop encouraging that practice.   And, instead, to promote ways in which citizens can responsibly handle their own fall leaves.

Post #1496: Town of Vienna, am I the only one who hears a giant sucking sound?

 

If there’s any topic that’s more exciting than algebra, it has to be accounting.  So, close on the heels of my last post regarding the algebra of the real estate revenue increases, this this post is all about inter-fund transfers in the Town of Vienna budget.

That really gets the blood pounding, doesn’t it?

Let me rephrase that.  This post is about our water and sewer bills.  It’s about how the Town of Vienna has managed to siphon off an additional $1+ million dollars, from those water and sewer bills, between the budget three years back, and this year’s proposed budget, and use that money to fund general government services.

Who cares?

Well, the sharp increases in the Town of Vienna water and sewer bills were sold to the citizenry as necessary to fund much-needed repairs and maintenance of the sewer and water system.  Seems that there was a significant backlog of deferred maintenance.  And so, sewer and water rates were going to have to increase — a lot — or you’d risk catastrophic failure of our infrastructure.

You don’t want us to be the next Flint, Michigan, do you?

At least, that’s how I recall it.  I faithfully parroted that line in defending the initial increases in those rates.

But it’s more than that.  Not only do I not recall anybody saying those water and sewer bill increases would substitute for general tax revenues, I recall a sitting Town Council member going out of his way to deny, in a Town Council meeting, that that would ever happen.  No, the Town had no plans to subsidize the general cost of government with the sewer and water revenues, and anybody who raised that as an issue was just engaging in baseless speculation.

So, here we are, more than a million dollars of baseless speculation later, and ..

Well, to hell with it.  He said, she said, they said, we said.

Numbers.  Just shut up and do the numbers.

And there you go.  Taken from various Town budgets, for which I can supply citation as to document and page number if needed.

The upshot is more-or-less a game of two for you, one for me.  Rounding up, 40% of the increase in the water and sewer bills has gone into the general fund, to fund the general operation of government.

Virtually all of that is in the last three years, where, apparently, a policy decision was made to increase that transfer by a steady $400K a year or so.  To the point where the proposed transfer for FY 22-23 actually exceeds the projected increase in revenues.

Maybe I mis-remember this.  But three years of big increases in that transfer figure just leapt off the page.  That’s completely at odds with everything that I thought I recalled about this issue.

I’m sure the Town will have its own spin on this.  I’ve read what was in the budget this year, and near as I can tell, the explanation this year is “inflation”.   That’s pretty lame, and doesn’t explain the clear change in policy starting two years back.

That said, if I’m the only one who perceives that giant sucking sound, then the Town simply doesn’t have to care.

When it comes to sewer and water, they’re effectively an unregulated monopoly, supplying a good and service with almost completely inelastic demand.  They say it, we pay it.  And Vienna is so bouzhy that none of the people who matter are going to complain about a few bucks on the water bill.  Or what the Town does with that.  It’s just a price we pay for living in such an affluent town.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Algebra

Background: Post #218,Post #1128.

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

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

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

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

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

Easy, right?

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

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

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

The exact arithmetic is this:

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

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

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

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

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

Notice of tax increase 2022 for FY 22-23

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

So, the data are:

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

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

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

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

Three percent higher, plus rounding error.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post mortem

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

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

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