County Supervisors pass budget with 1-cent Real Estate Tax hike and 10-cent Machinery and Tool Tax increase

FRONT ROYAL –With little fanfare, and clear support for four additional School Resource Officers (SRO) requested by the Warren County Sheriff’s Department, the Warren County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the Fiscal Year 2019 budget.  South River District Supervisor Linda Glavis made the motion to adopt the budget, with Vice-Chairman Dan Murray (North River District) seconding the motion.

Murray said that he felt adding the four SROs to the Warren County Sheriff’s Department was “the right thing to do.”

“We need to protect the children,” Murray said before thanking staff for the hard work that had gone into preparing the budget and getting it to the final stage.

Archie Fox (Fork District)  said before the vote that he had not been prepared to vote for a tax increase, until the recent Florida school shooting, but following that incident, he supported the school system’s position and wanted to ensure that the children were protected.  The additional four SROs will allow each of the County’s nine public schools to have a full-time officer during operating hours.

Shenandoah District Supervisor Tom Sayre stressed that voting for a tax increase was a first for him–but he felt he had to “bite the bullet” because of the safety concerns for students.

Chairman Tony Carter  said that while it was good to have citizens’ input in April, as the budget is being wrangled, citizens need to be involved in the process year-round.  “Next year won’t be easy…we’ve had two fires recently…we need staff.”  Carter mentioned the fact that the Warren County Sheriff’s Department had been losing trained officers to jurisdictions offering higher pay and also mentioned teacher salaries as a topic of concern and a topic that needed addressing during next year’s budget process.

On April 10, the supervisors listened to 25 minutes of comments from 13 citizens during the budget public hearing, nine of whom directly addressed the budget and proposed real estate tax increase. Of those nine, five spoke for the budget and tax hikes included to balance it, and four against a budget that could not be balanced without a tax increase. See related story 

Budget dynamics

What was on the table for approval Tuesday night was a total budget proposal of $107,826,301, requiring $76,251,417 of local revenue. The total budget is a 2.08% increase ($2.2 million) over FY18’s number of $105,626,234. The local revenue number is just shy of a $2.3-million increase over the current budget year’s $73,955,107 use of local revenue.

As Royal Examiner previously reported following the April 10 budget public hearing, in addition to the 1-cent Real Estate Tax hike from 65-cents to 66-cents per $100 of assessed value, a 10-cent hike – from $1.95 to $2.05 – to the Machinery and Tool Tax was included in the budget.

Additional revenues from the tax increases total about $575,000. That includes $511,850 on the real estate side – $404,850 from each penny hike, plus another $107,000 in Real Estate tax-based fees, primarily to Dominion Power – and an estimated $63,000 from the Machinery & Tool tax increase.

That revenue coupled with $1.1-million in cuts to departmental and other budgets, as well as the use of nearly $2-million in General Fund reserves was utilized to balance the FY19 budget.

The real estate tax hike came despite an early budget process commitment by the supervisors to approve an FY19 budget with no additional tax burden on citizens after last year’s divisive 3-cent real estate hike enacted largely to fund operations at the county’s new middle school. LINK-Divided board approves Warren County budget by 3-2 vote

However, as Royal Examiner reported in the wake of March 23 budget work session discussion a “perfect storm” of financial variables created a need to generate some additional revenue. That “perfect storm” included: employee health insurance rate increases of 12% to about 20%; a public school budget including wage hikes to keep teacher salaries competitive after a decade of floundering to do so and the unanticipated increase in the Sheriff’s Office budget to accommodate additional school security personnel in the wake of the Florida and Maryland school shootings in the last two months; and revenue losses totaling about $1.6 million.

An additional $326,905 will raise the School Resource Officer (SRO) Sheriff’s Office budget to $692,997. That operational increase will add four resource officers so that each of the county’s nine public schools will have one full-time, on-site SRO on duty during school hours. Currently one SRO circulates between the system’s five elementary schools.

Primary in the negative revenue column was the loss of over $570,000 in tax revenue from the Dominion Power plant due to a pollution-mitigation equipment exemption ruling by the State Corporation Commission and the loss of over $1-million in State Composite Index (which judges a community’s ability to fund its public schools) revenue.

In one cost saving measure the board approved both proposed county staff and the school system’s employee salary hikes for half the fiscal year, effective on January 1, 2019.

(Roger Bianchini contributed to this story)