Arlington County seeks public input on the Manager’s recommended allocation of $17.8 million in surplus “one-time” close-out funds (from FY2016) and on the Board’s proposed budget guidance to the Manager for FY 2018.
The Board will vote on both matters in November.
Peter’s Take is a weekly opinion column. The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ARLnow.com.
At its October 15 meeting, the County Board approved a County staff recommendation to advertise draft regulations relating to Airbnb.
The School Board has begun the process of revising high school attendance boundaries in order to balance enrollment and better utilize spaces at Arlington’s three comprehensive high schools. These boundary changes will be effective September 2017, apply to current eighth grade students who will be entering high school next fall and to each freshman class in the next three school years.
The final revised high school boundary plan is scheduled to be voted upon at the School Board’s December 1 meeting. Further information is available here.
In last week’s column, I outlined some of Arlington’s self-imposed limitations in utilizing “community benefits” as conditions for approving developer site plan requests for additional density. See also my Sept. 22 column recommending preparation of integrated, project-specific fiscal impact statements.
Critical Reforms
This is the first of two columns.
Today, I’ll discuss some of Arlington County’s self-imposed limitations on site plan conditions for “community benefits.” These are benefits that Arlington receives in exchange for granting developers additional density and other zoning changes.
The Community Facilities Study Group’s (CFSG) Final Report contained this recommendation:
Add an economic and fiscal impact section to private development (special exception/site plan and Form Based Code) project staff reports to provide information on the costs (e.g. the projected service demands and other costs to the community) and benefits (e.g. the taxes and other economic benefits) likely to be generated by a proposed project.
As my fellow columnist Mark Kelly and I both have previously advocated, it’s time to overhaul the seriously-flawed process Arlington County government has been using to allocate any surplus funds left over at the close of the County’s fiscal year.
Discussion
In July, Arlington received an award as the top digital county in the nation for its population size (150,000-249,999).
Among the reasons:
Last week, Mark Kelly, my fellow columnist at ARLnow.com, and David Alpert over at Greater Greater Washington each posted a column about fixing Metro. Both arrived at essentially this conclusion:
Metro can’t be fixed unless its Board and senior management have sufficient freedom to hire and fire.
A recent article (“Arlington Studying A Plan That Would Pay for your Uber to Metro”) in The Washington Post triggered feverish comments on its website, ARLnow.com and social media, like:
So my South Arlington taxes will be used to chauffeur the 1% from North Arlington?
The Virginia Association of Counties recently granted an achievement award to Arlington County’s Startup Arlington program.
Discussion
Last week, Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe announced that the state of Virginia is in “very serious negotiations” with the Washington Redskins to help the team build a new stadium in Virginia.
Governor McAuliffe explained how he plans to negotiate:
