bunny wave
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Capital improvements, projected for implementation over the next five years in the City of Falls Church, will press the City to its fiscal limits, Assistant City Manager Cindy Mester told the City Council Monday. She said that a projected total of $68 million in expenditures on maintenance, renovation and construction of the City’s
infrastructure will increase the City’s debt to the maximum limit, allowed to retain its current bond rating, by 2013. She added that contributions to the projects from the City’s operating budget will also lower the fund balance to the edge of its “safe zone” by the same year. The report startled some Council members. Councilman Dan Sze called it, “daunting, if not downright frightening.”
Others were quick to indicate they may put some projected improvements on indefinite hold. Those would include a $16 million renovation of City Hall and $30 million for the construction of a new school. They constitute $46 million of the total $68 million projected as needed during the next five year period. Councilman Dan Maller,
It came as a startling revelation to some on the Falls Church City Council Monday that, despite prospects of raising the real estate tax rate from $1.01 to $1.04 to balance the coming fiscal year budget this spring, the result will be that homeowners in Falls Church will pay an average of $112 less in taxes. That’s due to the fact that a sharp average drop in residential real estate values will more than offset the three-cent increase in the tax rate. The Council will have a month, until its April 28 meeting, to deliberate and hold public hearings on the budget proposed by City Manager Wyatt Shields earlier this month. In its first action on the budget, the Council approved on “first reading” an ordinance to set the tax rate. By putting the $1.04 rate per $100 of assessed valuation, into the ordinance, the Council is now bound not to exceed that amount in its final budget. It can lower it, but not raise it. Still, the $1.04 rate represents a far more modest impact on citizen pocketbooks in Falls Church than that in some surrounding jurisdictions, where the collapse in housing values is requiring a combination of draconian cuts in services and huge tax rate hikes. In Loudoun County, for example, a rate hike of as much as 22 cents is being contemplated. Shields told the Council Monday that, for the second year in a row, the preliminary contribution of some of the new large-scale mixed-use projects recently completed or under
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