It’s the most wonderful time of the year, nerds: local budget season.

Local government and school officials in Northern Virginia are poring over hundreds of pages and billions of dollars in proposed spending for the next fiscal year — and trying to help their localities recover from the long-term health, economic, and workforce consequences of the pandemic.

Multiple sources of revenue into local coffers have rebounded, and several officials say this year’s budget proposals are a first step out of pandemic crisis mode and into a solid long-term recovery.

“We’re sitting in a much better position, a place of stability that we have not really had the benefit of over the past couple of years,” said Fairfax Board of Supervisors chair Jeff McKay following a presentation by county staff.

“Overall, it’s a relatively good news story,” said Arlington’s County Manager, Mark Schwartz, in an interview with DCist/WAMU.

But while the worst pandemic austerity measures are no longer in place, like freezes to hiring and raises, Northern Virginia jurisdictions are still dealing with a complicated set of realities, including nationwide inflation and rapidly rising housing values that officials worry will result in heavy tax burdens on residents.

“We will be in a tougher budget season than I believe we’ve been in the entire seven years I’ve been in office now,” said Loudoun County Board of Supervisors chair Phyllis Randall.

The desire to minimize tax burdens will likely mean that Loudoun won’t fund every departmental request, or even approve the full amount requested by the school system, Randall explained. She expects the county will prioritize investments in badly-needed physical and behavioral health services.

“We’re going to come to these budget books, ask every question and pass a budget that is the lowest possible tax rate that adequately funds county services,” Randall told DCist/WAMU.

There are some key similarities in the budget proposals across the region. Several localities — including Fairfax County, Arlington County, Loudoun County — are raising public employee and educator salaries, in an attempt to reward and retain the workers central to their pandemic responses.

The budget proposals continue to include federal relief money, and the localities are still responding to the pandemic’s health and mental health effects, but county managers say they’ve sought to begin to wean this year’s budgets off of one-time funds.

And all of the proposals wrestle with continuing long-term trends in the region, particularly skyrocketing housing values and other affordability challenges. It’s also not yet clear to what extent office workers will return to their buildings full time in the future; many office buildings in Northern Virginia still sit empty, clouding the extent to which localities will be able to rely on tax revenues from those offices in the future.

Most local budget proposals were just released in the past week or two. Next, they’ll get debated and tweaked by county elected officials, who will also collect resident perspectives in public hearings and online. (Details at the end of this article.) Most will be approved by county boards in April or early May. School budgets — which are usually the single largest line item in localities’ broader budgets — are closer to finalized, and most districts have already held public meetings about them.

Advocates underscore the importance of promoting public engagement in the budget process.

“At this moment, we have individuals in our community who perhaps have lost a lot of trust and confidence in government. Government plays a significant role in the daily lives of Arlingtonians,” said Arlington NAACP chair Julius Spain. “In order for it to work… you have to proactively go out and have conversations with them throughout the year, and your budget should reflect the presence and desires of the people.”

Want to learn more about your local budget proposal and what it means for the public services you use — and the taxes you may need to pay? Here’s a guide to some of the broad issues affecting local budgets in Northern Virginia.

Could my taxes go up?

Probably. But that’s generally not because localities are proposing to raise tax rates. In almost all localities, those are either staying the same or even decreasing, in the case of Loudoun and Prince William counties. However, because real estate values in Northern Virginia are rising fast — more than 14% in Loudoun and more than 11% in Prince William — the average resident will probably owe more in residential taxes.

Most budget proposals show an estimate of the average tax bill for residents. In Arlington, Schwarz projects that the average tax and fee burden on residents could go up $505 in fiscal year 2023, a 5% increase, if the county keeps its tax rates static. In Loudoun County, the average tax bill for homeowners — not renters — could increase from $5,437 to $5,694, or $257, even though the county is proposing lowering the tax rate overall. And in Fairfax, the increase would be $666 on average.

Prince William County, even though its budget proposal recommends a reduction in its property tax rate, is proposing adding a 4% meals tax that would cover prepared meals served in restaurants.

Randall, in Loudoun County, says officials are “keenly aware” that the rise in taxes comes amid a significant rise in inflation nationwide.

“Milk costs more this year than it did a year ago. Home values have gone up. Clothing costs more,” she says. “We are aware of inflation. Elected officials are also citizens and we go to the grocery store and shop and do all the same things everyone else does and pay all at the same prices. And so we feel the pinch and the numbers just as anybody else would.”

Meanwhile, the commonwealth’s politically divided General Assembly and Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin have yet to come to a consensus on state tax policy. Youngkin had advocated for lowering state income taxes and other burdens, and he’s also pushing to end Virginia’s 2.5% grocery tax. Democrats, who control the state senate, are proposing much more modest cuts, ending only the state’s 1.5% portion of the grocery tax and rejecting a Republican proposal to suspend a planned gas tax hike. There appears to be bipartisan agreement on a $300 individual tax rebate for single Virginians and $600 for married couples. The deadline for the state’s new budget to be approved by both houses of the General Assembly and signed by Youngkin is March 12.

Who is getting a raise this year?

Increasing pay to help recruit and retain public employees is a near universal trend in Northern Virginia budget proposals this year — something Arlington’s Mark Schwartz told the Board was the county’s “biggest challenge at the moment.”

“You’re going to hear this a lot from me,” he said. “How do we compensate our employees in a time where the way work is done in our country has changed? Employees are no longer physically tethered to one location…it’s a very difficult job market.”

Schwarz is proposing a 4.5% raise for general employees and a 6.5% raise for public safety employees. Other jurisdictions have similar proposals on the table: in Fairfax, employees could get a 6% raise, on average, and nearly 8% for public safety employees. Others may not be quite so generous: Prince William County is considering a 3% performance-based raise.

In Arlington and elsewhere, concerns over employee retention among first responders and mental health care professionals have been ongoing. Last year, at Schwartz’s urging, the Board approved $3,500 bonuses for first responders and a 1% mid-year raise for all workers, starting in January.

Arlington and other localities had to scale back or freeze pay increases at the height of the pandemic. Schwartz acknowledges that the proposed raises this year don’t make up for losses over the past two years.

“These things are meant to try to help close that gap, but we’re not going to get to a point where people will be made whole for what it was that they lost, and I think that’s really unfortunate,” he says.

The focus on compensation also comes against the backdrop of new government employee organizing. Arlington, Fairfax, and Loudoun counties and Alexandria all passed ordinances last year to allow public workers to collectively bargain, a major shift in a historically right-to-work state. Local budget proposals also include funds for staff who will be tasked with handling upcoming negotiations with unions over worker contracts.

What are some of the other big needs local budgets are trying to address?

Local officials say they’re juggling immediate pandemic response needs — making testing available, continuing the vaccine campaign, providing public employees with good masks and other protective equipment — with the response to longer-term problems that the pandemic has heightened, like evictions and housing affordability, spikes in mental health needs, and schools working to serve students following more than a year of virtual classes. Schools are the single biggest-ticket item, sometimes accounting for close to half of the entire local budget; in Prince William County, 57% of every dollar of revenue goes to the schools.

Health: In addition to the ongoing regional pandemic response, Loudoun County and Prince William County staff have included funding to make their health departments county-run, instead of managed by the Virginia Department of Health. Randall says the move will allow Loudoun County to “pivot and move faster” to serve residents without needing to get everything approved at the state level.

Mental health: The pandemic has worsened an already crushing burden on mental health resources in Northern Virginia, where officials are dealing with persistent staffing shortages and a deficit of spots in crisis treatment facilities. In Prince William County, the budget proposal includes $2.7 million in funds for a long-desired 16-bed adult crisis stabilization facility. Acting county executive Elijah Johnson told the Board of Supervisors the project will require $4.7 million total in start-up costs; the county is hoping for $2 million in support from the state before it moves forward with the project. Similarly, Arlington is seeking to expand its crisis intervention center to provide a place for people in crisis to receive emergency mental health care while waiting for a treatment bed — and divert them away from local emergency rooms and out of law enforcement custody. The Arlington project, according to budget documents, is moving ahead, but its completion is being held up by “recruitment and retention issues in the behavioral health field.”

Housing: “We were already in a housing crisis,” says Randall. “COVID has made it worse,” and she worries that rising home prices and home values will further exacerbate the problems, a concern shared by officials across Northern Virginia. Loudoun is dedicating $5.9 million in property tax revenues to affordable housing. Further east, Arlington is proposing spending more than 5% of its total budget on eviction prevention as well as longer term housing grants, including nearly $17 million to the county’s Affordable Housing Investment Fund and $14 million for its housing grant program, which provides direct rental assistance to residents. The investments, which generally maintain the level of county support from previous years and add spending for permanent supportive housing, come just after the county worked with Amazon to help preserve low rents at a major apartment complex in South Arlington.

Schools: Many school budgets continue the regional focus on increasing employee compensation. Fairfax County schools has proposed a 4% raise for staff. In Alexandria, the school district is planning to bump eligible staff up into the next highest pay grade and offer a 2.5% market-rate adjustment to salaries. In Arlington, the school system is planning to restructure its entire pay scale to increase its competitiveness with other districts around the region, changes it says will result in an average pay increase of 7.3% for teachers and administrators and nearly 10% for support staff.

Racial Equity: In the past few years, several area localities, including Fairfax, Alexandria, and Arlington, passed resolutions to focus on racial equity in future policymaking. In its proposed budget, Fairfax would invest nearly $900,000 for five new staff positions devoted to advancing equity training and equitable hiring and retention efforts. In Arlington, the county is proposing spending more than $200,000 on equity-based professional development and trainings and an additional $500,000 of federal relief money on a study to examine racial disparities in the county’s procurement process.

Arlington NAACP chair Julius Spain feels the county could go further; he’d like to see the county “ensure that all decisions that are made when it comes to the budget … use the racial equity lens and toolkits.” Other jurisdictions in the region have made inroads in this work. D.C. and Montgomery County, for instance, both require racial impact analyses for proposed legislation.

County manager Mark Schwartz says Arlington staff and its chief race and equity officer discuss whether each expenditure advances the county’s equity goals, but notes that more data-driven analysis of racial impact is difficult in the absence of “really good measures or disaggregated data” — information the county is still figuring out how and when to collect. In the meantime, Schwartz says, they’re focused on three major areas: promoting health equity, closing the racial achievement gap in schools, and maintaining and expanding affordable and market-rate affordable housing.

How do I learn more — and weigh in with my thoughts?

Alexandria: You can find the proposed budget, documents that help break it down, and information about the public comment process here. The calendar for the city’s budget process is here.

Arlington: You can find the proposed budget, documents that help break it down, and information about the public comment process here. The calendar for the county’s budget process is here.

Fairfax County: You can find the proposed budget, documents that help break it down, and information about the public comment process here. The calendar for the county’s budget process is here.

Loudoun County: You can find the proposed budget, documents that help break it down, and information about the public comment process here. The calendar for the county’s budget process is here. Note: the Loudoun Board of Supervisors already held its first public hearing this week on the proposed budget, but residents can attend its second public hearing on Saturday. They can also submit comments online, by phone, or through the county’s social media pages. 

Prince William County: You can find the proposed budget, documents that help break it down, and information about the public comment process here. The calendar for the county’s budget process is here.