The organization most vigorously pressing for Arlington governance changes has affirmed its desire to see the General Assembly bestow blessings on the efforts.
The Arlington County Civic Federation earlier this month approved its 2025 legislative-priorities package, which includes requests to support measures related to changes in the county government’s governance structure.
With the vote, Federation delegates reaffirmed, without changes, the package that had been adopted a year ago.
The vote to approve the same package for 2025 was 32-0, with one abstention. Though Dave Schutz, who heads the Federation’s form-of-government subcommittee, was on hand to answer any delegate questions, none materialized.
The Federation urges the General Assembly to permit Arlington to make substantive changes to the governance system that has been in place since 1932. Among the major Civic Federation recommendations:
- Changing the size of the County Boad and School Board from the current five members to seven.
- Scrapping Arlington’s every-year election cycle for County Board and School Board seats, changing it to a system where multiple seats are on the ballot every other year. The four-year term for Board members would be untouched.
- Changing the current every-year rotation of members into the chairmanship, allowing a single individual to serve successive years.
- Increasing the pay of School Board members.
- Permitting ranked-choice voting for School Board as well as County Board elections.
Civic Federation delegates adopted those proposals in late 2023, requesting authorization from the General Assembly to allow their implementation.
Del. Patrick Hope (D-Arlington) introduced legislation in support of the changes in the 2024 General Assembly session. The measure failed to gain traction in the legislature after several County Board members said it was premature.
Whether Board members decide to get on the governance-change bandwagon in 2025 might be known on Jan. 6, when members of the body lay out their priorities for the coming year. Federation officials have requested that a task force on governance issues be set up.
On Feb. 26, Federation delegates will participate in a two-hour work session with the Board, where governance likely will be among major topics on the table.
“We’ll be able to focus on an assortment of issues — we will present [them] to the Board and they will respond,” Federation chair John Ford said.
In addition, there will be an opportunity for “some free-form discussion,” Ford said.
The Federation’s legislative-priorities package does not stipulate whether major changes to Arlington’s government structure should be via citizen referendum or County Board vote. The General Assembly could mandate one or the other route, and set other rules, in any enabling legislation.
The General Assembly is involved because Arlington — alone among Virginia localities — operates under the “county manager plan of government.” That form of government mandates a five-member governing body, while most of Virginia’s other counties have the ability to choose any membership between three and 11 members.
Hope’s legislation from the 2024 session also would have allowed for Arlington to be carved into magisterial districts for County Board, as is the case in most Virginia counties. That is a change the Civic Federation has not sought.
Supporters say districts would make Board members more responsive to the public, but opponents say the at-large system works best in the 26-square-mile community.
Hope’s unsuccessful measure also would have allowed, either the public through a referendum or Board members through direct action, making the County Board chair a separately elected position.
From the Reconstruction era after the Civil War until 1932, Arlington (known until 1920 as “Alexandria County”) was governed by a three-member, district-based Board of Supervisors.
Those three elected officials exercised executive, legislative and even quasi-judicial powers in a community that was only slowing evolving from its agrarian past.
After receiving authorization from the General Assembly, county voters in November 1930 approved the switch to a five-member County Board, which retained responsibility for overall policy and to hire, oversee and dismiss the county manager.
The first County Board was elected in 1932. Most day-to-day operational responsibility for the county government, then and now, rests with the manager.
While the county-manager governance structure was untried in Virginia in 1930, more than two dozen cities in the Commonwealth, and 400 nationwide, already had similar systems in place, advocates said during that year’s referendum.
The Federation’s 2025 legislative-priorities package also asks the state government to give localities such as Arlington more autonomy to address flooding and tree-canopy issues.
