LOUDOUN COUNTY’S COMMUNITY-OWNED NEWS SOURCE
LoudounNow
[ Vol. 4, No. 18 ]
[ loudounnow.com ]
[ March 21, 2019 ]
■■ PUBLIC AND LEGAL NOTICES - PAGE 32 ■■ EMPLOYMENT PAGE 40 ■■ RESOURCE DIRECTORY PAGE 42
Protecting Loudoun’s Buried Past Historians, Community Leaders Work to Identify Historic Cemeteries BY KARA C. RODRIGUEZ As Loudoun’s growth continues at a rapid pace, government staffers, local historians and community stakeholders are trying to work just as quickly to take inventory of all the burial sites in the 262-year-old county. For some, the process of identifying, studying and preserving Loudoun’s burial sites started long before a Board of Supervisors initiative to create a database of active and inactive cemeteries, which is well underway. Historian Wynne Saffer’s interest in historic cemeteries sprang from delving into genealogy in the 1980s, which led to him tracing his own ancestors to a historic cemetery in southeastern Loudoun. He also served on a committee of the Loudoun Preservation Society when the General Assembly was considering more protection of cemeteries was needed, and he chaired a Thomas Balch Library committee on historic cemeteries. While on the Balch committee, he worked closely with former Loudoun County mapping director Larry Stipek to inform him of any burial sites the committee discovered, which Stipek would then mark in the county’s GIS system. Saffer continues to serve on the library’s Loudoun HistorPatrick Szabo/Loudoun Now
BURIAL SITES >> 46
A small cemetery with just a handful of graves has been the quiet neighbor to a drive-through CVS Pharmacy in Ashburn for about three decades.
Supervisors Wrap Budget Work Amid Tax Windfall BY RENSS GREENE Loudoun supervisors have finished work on the county’s fiscal year 2020 budget, marshalling more than $3 billion in operations expenditures, debt service, and capital projects. The county government is adding more than 175 full-time equivalent positions this year, the second year of a planned three-year project to catch staffing levels and pay up to the rest of the region and Loudoun’s own growth. In all, the county will channel about $25 million to that project this year. The county purse is buoyed in large part by contin-
ued, 30 percent year-over-year growth in the county’s data center market, this year bringing in more than $200 million in taxes on computer equipment. That meant that while supervisors had previously been warned that this may be the most difficult budget discussion of their term, instead they breezed through what Vice Chairman Ralph M. Buona (R-Ashburn) said was “by far the easiest” of his eight years on the board. He credited that in large part to the Department of Economic Development and its executive director, Buddy Rizer, recognized nationally for his work growing Loudoun’s data center market. Additionally, while at first county officials warned
of as much as a $28 million gap between the School Board’s funding request, for the first time in recent memory, the school system’s budget request fit within the county’s fiscal guidance and was approved in full with relatively little debate. The county will send $76.3 million more to the schools this year, for a total of $873.7 million in local tax funding for the school system’s $1.28 billion annual operating budget. The School Board still may have to make some cuts in its budget after allocations of state funding came in $2 million lower than anticipated. BUDGET >> 47
ECRWSS Postal Customer
Permit #1401 Southern MD
PAID
U.S. Postage PRESRT STD