County Board members have taken the first steps in considering changes to the community’s 93-year-old governance structure.
The action marks “the beginning of a long discussion, a very long path,” Board Chair Takis Karantonis said at a meeting yesterday (Tuesday).
He announced that an advisory “working group” on the topic will be appointed “in one of our next meetings,” with a mandate to begin discussions no later than February 2026.
The Board chair, who has been skeptical of taking on such a major initiative in times of economic and political uncertainty, said the endeavor will prove a “healthy, meaningful exercise.”
Karantonis didn’t say how long he expects the work to last, or what will happen after the working group submits its recommendations.
Arlington switched to its current governance structure — a five-member, at-large County Board and appointed county manager — in 1932. For the 60 preceding years, the locality had been governed by a three-member Board of Supervisors elected in districts spanning the northern, central and southern areas of the county.
Critics of the current structure say it is out of step with modern Arlington. They have pressed for more Board members, a separately elected chair and, potentially, district-based elections.
The relationship between the Board and county manager also might be a topic of study.
All five current Board members spoke to the concept yesterday. Of them, only the newest member — JD Spain, Sr. — gave unqualified support to moving forward with change.
“This conversation’s been going on for decades,” he said. “We need to deliver. This moment, in my opinion, is the right moment.”
His colleague, Matt de Ferranti, was won over by arguments to initiate a process to at least study the issue.
“Just because we have a very good government doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider how we’ll be governed in the next hundred years,” he said.
While none of the five members publicly opposed moving forward, some raised potential red flags.
Maureen Coffey voiced fears of unintended consequences of “something as big as thinking about our form of government.”
“We are a good county, and the risks of messing that up are real,” she said. “Getting the engagement right is critical, starting from a position of ‘what are we trying to accomplish here?’ This is not a low-stakes conversation.”
Neither Coffey nor Susan Cunningham seemed inclined to support significant staff or budget resources for a governance-change effort during an increasingly challenging financial context. Both added that efforts need to be made to improve the current governance system’s responsiveness to the community.
“We still have work to do there,” Cunningham said, pressing her colleagues to “focus on delivering on the government model that we have today.”
Coffey agreed that the current system could use improvements.
“We can engage better. We can listen better. We can make sure that we are accessible and responsive,” she said.
The vote to move forward and study options is a victory for those, mostly within the Arlington County Civic Federation, who have pushed the governance-change idea for the past five years. But even in that body, the proposal did not win unqualified support when put to a vote in 2022.
It was the Civic Federation that, in 1930, helped convince state leaders to give Arlington the power to convert to what at the time was the first county-manager form of government in the nation.
By giving the county its own government form, distinct from that of Virginia’s 132 other cities and counties, the General Assembly also required that any major future changes must go through Richmond.
Legislation giving Arlington the power to make additional changes to its existing governance form was vetoed by Gov. Youngkin earlier this year. The measure had not been sought by County Board members, and a similar bill the year before was actively opposed by Karantonis and the then-Board chair, Libby Garvey.
Karantonis hinted that he’d like to see the task force complete its work before any further enabling action is considered in Richmond.
Among those who think governance changes hold both promise and the potential for pitfalls is John Milliken, a former Board member and currently a senior fellow in residence at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University.
Speaking last November to the Inter-Service Club Council of Arlington, Milliken said he hoped 2025 would prove the year the governance-change process began.
But he also said the process should take place without any preconceived conclusions in mind.
“There’s no right or wrong answers. They need to be thought through,” Milliken said of available options.
One of the changes sought by the Civic Federation was a move to ranked-choice voting in County Board elections. That has already been implemented — permanently for party primaries and on a trial basis for general elections.
