The Arlington government plans to spend over $200 million on human services programs and personnel in the coming fiscal year, a new record high.
While officials are making some efforts to rein in the increase, they warn that local and national economic factors may force them to either add more funding or scale back existing initiatives as the year progresses.
The Arlington County Board is slated to adopt a new budget on April 9, but County Manager Mark Schwartz noted that economic impacts may not settle in until later in the year.
“It probably won’t be until sometime in May, the end of May, that we’ll have a solid sense of what the anarchy we’ve seen [in D.C.] has caused,” he said during a recent budget work session with County Board members.
DHS budget would rise 5%
Anita Friedman, the longtime director of the county’s Department of Human Services (DHS), acknowledges that growth in human services spending has been “pretty precipitous” in recent years.
Schwartz’s draft Fiscal Year 2026 budget allocates just under $205 million to the department, up 5% from the adopted FY 2025 budget.
That’s above the overall 3.1% growth rate across all county programs, and also higher than the 4.4% growth rate for the second largest budget line item, public safety — counting police, fire, sheriff and emergency communications.
The budget proposal calls for a net year-over-year increase of 15.2 full-time-equivalent DHS staff positions, rising to about 815. In fiscal 2021, the staff total was about 714.
The growth in staff “is largely in direct services,” Friedman said at her department’s March 11 budget session with County Board members.
Arlington taxpayers are not funding all the costs or all the personnel. Federal and state grants and charges to those receiving services offset about a quarter of expenditures, but net tax support will still be about $148 million.
At the work session, Board members maintained that DHS offers some of the most impactful services in the county. The department, which focuses on priorities such as health, safety, racial equity and financial security, supports programs ranging from psychiatric and behavioral health care to housing assistance and employment services.
“I cannot overstate how thankful we are that you’re all here and covering an enormous, ongoing crisis [that] has been building up since the pandemic,” Chair Takis Karantonis said.
Vice-Chair Matt de Ferranti said he broadly supports social safety net funding, especially for the 29,000 Arlingtonians who participate in the federal Medicaid program.
“As a community, we try to be inclusive and value every human being,” he said.
Where does DHS funding go?
Arlington’s 1,136-page FY 2026 budget document devotes more than 150 pages to detailing human-services spending.
DHS is slated to spend about $17.8 million of its 2026 funds on administration and overhead. The rest goes into five broad service areas:
- “Economic independence” — a catch-all including public assistance, housing assistance and employment services — is set to receive $58.2 million, up 11% from the current spending plan
- Public health is budgeted at $27.9 million, up 1%
- Behavioral health’s budget of $44.2 million would rise 5%
- Child and family services would see a budget of $25.6 million, up 2%
- Aging and disability services also would see a 2% increase, to $30.1 million
The jump in the economic assistance funding bucket is partly due to increases in housing grants, which would rise from $2.47 million to $17.55 million.
How does DHS funding compare?
For the first time, Arlington’s General Fund expenditures are slated to pass the billion-dollar mark in FY 2026, up 3.1% to $1.017 billion — not counting roughly $647 million to support Arlington Public Schools.
The county plans to spend more on human services than any other sector of the general government budget except for public safety, where the General Fund proposed expenditure for the coming year is about $248 million to cover police, fire, sheriff and emergency-management operations.
Among other sectors of the budget, the only one that comes close to either human-services or public-safety costs is the Department of Environmental Services — Arlington’s equivalent of a public-works department — at $127 million.
Proposed funding for other departments includes about $65 million for parks and recreation, $23 million for planning and zoning and $19 million for libraries.
Eviction-prevention funding slashed
The DHS budget proposal includes cuts in personnel and programs. Perhaps the biggest planned reduction is in eviction prevention.
Friedman acknowledged that the program has ballooned in recent years.
“No other jurisdiction has this level of funding,” she said of the approximately $4 million that will be spent during the current fiscal year on helping those who cannot meet their rental costs.
The program had been even more costly — $6.5 million — in FY 2023, as the county government attempted to make up for the elimination of federal support provided to renters in the early part of the pandemic.
“We have to make adjustments and try to bring this back to a reasonable-sized program,” Friedman told Board members.
One planned alteration: Households seeking county rent support would, in most cases, need to have been in the property for more than six months to qualify for help.
A county analysis showed that 44% of recent recipients did not meet that standard.
“What does that say?” Friedman asked before answering her own question. “People are going into unsustainable leases — basically setting people up for failure.”
If the policy change is made, many of those renters will now be on their own. But for those who do qualify, the cap of $3,000 in annual support will remain unchanged. In FY 2025, the average support per household is averaging $1,692.
Another planned change is that individuals seeking support will need to provide proof that eviction proceedings have begun in order to qualify.
Public hearings scheduled
This week, the public will get an opportunity to weigh in on the budget proposal and the tax rates sought to fund it all.
Public hearings are set for Tuesday, March 25 and Thursday, March 27 at 7 p.m. each evening. Speakers must sign up in advance.
The budget expected to be adopted on April 9 will go into effect July 1.
