Blog posts are the personal views of Letty Hardi and not official statements or records on behalf of the Falls Church City Council

Dear Friends,

We are deep in budget season now with a marathon 5+ hour work session this week, all about public works, street related initiatives, and big capital projects – these are always the areas of highest interest from the community and City Council. We spent more time on the unglamorous parts that usually get less attention – paving and signals – that will need more maintenance dollars. I’m also including highlights of budget Q&A that are worth your time. With the Fitness Challenge underway, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the budget and other priorities at my walking office hours today at 5 pm. Meet me at the Broad St entrance of Howard Herman Trail – let’s walk and talk!

On Monday, we will be taking our first vote on the budget and tax rates. I know that might feel soon, but this vote is to set the ceilings for tax rates not the final tax rates. Then over the next month with continued work sessions, deliberations, and public hearings until we adopt the budget on May 11 – we can go down from what we advertised as the ceiling rate, but cannot go above unless we do a new first reading vote.

You can share your thoughts via email, in person next Monday night, or at an upcoming town hall as well.

Enjoy the beautiful weekend ahead!
Letty

PS – if you haven’t seen it yet, last week the city rolled out with a more modern, cleaned up website!

What Happened This Week

(1) Budget Deep Dive

This week was all about Public Works related initiatives and capital projects. These have been areas of high interest for the community because street projects are highly impactful in changing our streets and improving walkability and safety. We also focused on maintenance budgets for paving and signals. I’ll share some highlights below but encourage you to skim the presentation if you’d like more details. We have a lot of projects happening around the city that span traffic calming, signals, paving, sidewalk additions, sidewalk repairs, and more.

• Quick history on public works budget: during the Great Recession era 15+ years ago and then our big capital push to afford the debt for a new high school, city hall, and library in the early 2020s – maintenance budgets got less money. The past several years when revenues have been good with Covid dollars and high interest income, we injected that one time money into the paving budget and stabilized paving conditions. We are also developing more routine paving schedule based on paving scores we get every 3 years (the last was 2022 and 2025). We also received state grant money to modernize our signals with better “smart” technology and improving timing (8 out 18 done).
• This year: with that one time money going away, the City Manager’s proposed budget included declines in paving and sidewalk maintenance budgets. There was concern from all of us on City Council – this seems like a step backwards especially given the community’s priorities for walkability and street safety. We asked for better funding options, especially seeing photos of rusting mast arms that need quicker replacement and road conditions after this winter.

👍 Proposed paving schedule

👍 New “missing link” sidewalks coming

👍 Potholes and Sidewalk Repairs – submit requests via email or online

👍 Signal Modernization – 8 out of 18 done, Broad St signal timing complete in October and under review

👍 Big street projects underway

👍 Small safety projects coming

👎 Issue: mast arms

Letty’s Thoughts: I am grateful for the broad portfolio of projects happening in Public Works. Upgrading our streets to be more walkable, bikeable, and safe is a community-wide priority. As you can see above or just being around the Little City, a huge number of capital dollars are going towards those projects – it takes a lot of time, money, and patience to evolve the city. On the other hand, maintenance budgets are less glamorous than building new projects, but they merit attention from us as well. It’s an important and sometimes tricky balance between building new things, maintaining what we have, and taxpayer burden in the middle of that. We all pressed for finding more money for paving and mast arms in particular.

My thoughts re the shift in approach – I am glad we’re are becoming more methodical and disciplined in our approach in tackling public works projects to prioritize limited resources – for example, using data on crashes and near misses to improve street safety, using a regular pavement scores to implement a paving plan, using smart technology to improve signal timing for traffic flow. Also, I’ve long said that as part of building new things, we should be budgeting for the maintenance cost in the decision-making so we don’t end up short changing the maintenance budgets. We also need a longer term capital pipeline beyond the 6 year CIP – where we show the big investments that need to be made so they don’t become urgent, surprise issues, or backlogged like the high school was when I first joined City Council in 2016.

(2) Budget Q&A

The Budget Q&A document is a good read – this is a running list of questions that Councilmembers submit to city staff as we digest and read the budget and we get answers back. It’s helpful insight into the concerns and areas of focus. A few that I’ll highlight:

#10 – analysis in response to the concerns about high residential property assessment – about 20% of total properties are growing over 10% (excluding new construction). Higher sales values in the City have driven the higher increase, along with 2025 assessments did not grow as significantly as it should have.

#14, 15 – increasing the car tax back to $5.00 per $100 of assessed value (we had dropped it to $4.80 during Covid when used car prices shot up to mitigate the impact). The 20 cent increase generates $340K in revenue. That also happens to be about equivalent to a 0.5 penny decrease in the real estate property tax, which had some interest from us to lessen the impact of high real estate assessments.

#29 – this year’s budget includes 4.2% commercial real estate growth from new projects (again, real estate makes up about 60% of our total city revenues so we pay attention to real estate). With no major projects in the pipeline other than the Quinn/Homestretch project (which was approved in 2024 and awaiting demolition/construction), this Q&A shows that without any new projects, the medium and best case scenarios are 1.5% to 4% growth in next year’s budget.

#31 – comparison of budget growth vs student population vs overall population growth over the past 7 years

#35 – A FAQ I’ve fielded is how the new development contributes to the budget, especially in comparison with neighbors. (Letty’s thoughts: this chart makes clear that because of growth, we have much healthier revenues this year than others – 7% real estate value growth and about 7% average in local economy growth. The reason the budget feels tight is because we also have some high expenses – such as police pay with nearby neighbors paying more, interjurisdictional contracts, and other contractual obligations.)

What’s Coming Up:

April 13 – City Council Meeting & Work Session* (budget)

April 20 – City Council Work Session* (budget)

April 27 – City Council Meeting & Work Session* (budget)

May 4 – City Council Work Session* (budget mark up)

May 11 – City Council Meeting* (budget adoption)

*All Mondays (except 5th Mondays and holidays) at 7:30 pm. You can access the agenda and livestream here, including recordings of past meetings

Office Hours:

Letty’s Walking Office Hours – Friday, April 10 (5 pm, Broad St / Howard Herman Trail)

Letty’s Jogging Office Hours – Friday, April 17 (12 pm, Library)

Letty’s Walking Office Hours – Friday, April 24 (5 pm, W&OD / West End Park)