Falls Church City Council members are questioning a proposal to reduce the city’s budget for road paving.
City staff currently propose spending $700,000 on paving operations for the fiscal year beginning July 1. That’s down from $1.4 million in the current fiscal year, when Council members pumped additional funding into the paving budget to catch up as road conditions deteriorated.
It’s also down from the $870,000 spent in fiscal 2025, before the additional funding was added. At an April 6 work session focused on the city’s financial condition, some elected leaders suggested the change could be shortsighted.
“We’re going in the wrong direction,” Council member Laura Downs said.
“We don’t love that we are going backwards,” Mayor Letty Hardi said.
Council member Erin Flynn said that, over the long term, shortchanging paving would be “creating vulnerabilities we are not addressing.”
“On the Council side, we need to figure out and dig in a little bit more” to find extra funding, Flynn said.
City Manager Wyatt Shields said he would return with proposals to stretch the paving budget further in time for final Council budget consideration in May.
But given economic realities, something else may have to be cut to fund additional paving.
“It’s a challenge,” Shields said of the city government’s fiscal situation.
The additional funding provided for fiscal 2026 has allowed the city to pave nearly 3.9 lane-miles of roadway, up from 2.2 lane-miles in fiscal 2025.
“We are making really good headway,” deputy public-works director Tara Hoff told Council members.
Hoff said staff would work with whatever budget number materialized.
“If more money comes in, it’s something we can definitely utilize,” she said. “[If we have] fewer resources, we will have to decide what we prioritize.”
The same message was delivered by Department of Public Works director Amanda Stout Brain.
“If we had additional funds, we’d add more segments,” she said.
An additional fiscal challenge in coming months will be addressing roads impacted by the harsh winter storms of January and February, city staff said.
Every three years, the city commissions a study of roadway conditions. The last was completed in 2025; the next is set for 2028.
Getting that data will help the city determine how long repaving projects last and determine priorities for future projects.
“Unfortunately, the city doesn’t have great records on what it has done historically,” Hoff said of paving efforts.
Council member David Snyder said getting updated information will be key in determining how to move forward.
“I need grounding in what the data shows,” Snyder said. “There’s a significant amount of work that needs to be done here before we make a lot of quick judgments. If this is really a major capital challenge, then we should treat it like that.”
In the interim, Snyder said, he wouldn’t oppose adding more funding to the fiscal 2027 paving budget, but only if it didn’t take away from other priorities.
“If we have some additional money we can find, great, but if it is really a long-term infrastructure challenge, let’s deal with it as such,” Snyder said.
Council member Justine Underhill also was looking to the long term.
With about 80 lane-miles under its control, the city needs to replace about four miles per year to keep up with a 20-year replacement cycle, she said. The additional funding in fiscal 2026 helped, but “we still have a backlog that’s building up,” Underhill said.
She also voiced concern that most repaving funding was going to basic milling of the top layer of asphalt, not more comprehensive work deeper down in the roadbed.
“If you just do the surface reconstruction, great, but that doesn’t address some of the underlying issues, especially for those roads that are in really poor condition,” Underhill said.
Downs agreed that deferred maintenance could be a fiscal ticking time bomb.
“In the end, 20 years from now, we have a mess on our hands,” she said.
To augment city spending last year, Falls Church successfully sought just over $710,000 from the Virginia Department of Transportation for repaving N. Washington Street from Park Avenue to the city line.
In addition to paving, the project will add 24 Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant curb ramps and four new crosswalks.
The city has also applied for state funding to repave portions of Broad Street from the city line to Falls Avenue and Washington Street from Hillwood Avenue to Park Avenue. A decision on those requests is expected in June.
