To generate some savings in its new budget, Arlington County is targeting low-performing bus routes in North Arlington.
It proposes axing one route between Courthouse and Ballston, along Lorcom Lane, that saw just 2.1 passengers per hour in the 2023 fiscal year (ART 62) for a savings of $348,613. Two bus routes — ART 61 and 53, serving the Ft. Myer and Radnor Heights neighborhoods and the Ballston to East Falls Church Metro stations — saw just 3.4 and 4.3 passengers per hour, respectively could be combined for a savings of $316,940.
“This restructuring eliminates service to the least performing sections of both routes and maintains service for lower-income and minority neighborhoods that are more transit-dependent,” per the proposed 2024-2025 budget.
ART ridership is continuing to recover steadily but remains below pre-pandemic levels, given employment behavioral changes with telework. For some, these cuts are hard but make sense; for others, they are a few drops in a bucket, given low farebox recovery ratios.
“I think it’s regrettable they’re cutting those but it’s understandable, given the low ridership,” Joan McIntyre, chair of the Climate Change, Energy and Environment Commission said in a County Board budget work session Tuesday. “It’s also an indication the county should start looking to rethinking some of its transit and how it can, literally, meet people where they are. “
Former Transportation Commission member Joseph Warren, a transit budget hawk who has criticized the $1 million bus “super stop” and the Columbia Pike streetcar proposal, tells ARLnow that “it’s time to be serious about trying to control the costs.”
Projected operating costs are expected to increase from $25.3 million in the 2025 fiscal year to nearly $33 million by 2034, according to the county’s 10-year Transit Strategic Plan for ART. These projections do not include recommended service expansions projected to add another $20 million through 2034.
Warren says ART should pump the brakes on more weekend service until cost-recovery rates improve from current levels — around 11% as of the 2023 fiscal year and a projected 12% in the FY 2025 budget. That is under county goals of 20% for most routes and 35% for more popular ones — meaning less money to pay for new services, Warren says.
“This is the dilemma that people don’t understand. So when they say, ‘We want shorter routes, we want faster service with fewer stops,’ that means there’s going to be more service,” he continued. “The whole process is biased toward more service that doesn’t provide riders, or potential riders, with [financial] information to make a useful and helpful decision on that.”
The county says more weekend service responds to requests from residents for more service outside work hours.
“That’s why, with our [transit plan], we focus on increasing weekend and evening service and increasing frequencies — specifically the times of day that people are moving toward,” Transit Bureau Chief Lynn Rivers, who notes ridership recovery trends in Arlington are similar to those elsewhere in the region, said in the budget work session.
Arlington Dept. of Environmental Services spokeswoman Claudia Pors tells ARLnow the department does not yet have a timeline for when frequency and weekend service will be expanded.
McIntyre, meanwhile, urged the county to study micro transit, arguing on-demand van service would be ideal for North Arlington, and to take on at least some of the transportation needs of middle and high school students. Rivers says DES has applied for funding for a micro transit study.
County Board members were likewise keen on micro transit as a way to serve students, observing ART’s fare-free program for students, iRide, generated a 50% increase in student ridership. This includes the low-performing North Arlington routes: for instance, ART 62, which served Washington-Liberty High School, had 817 student rides.
“How confident are we that we’re not cutting off our hand in removing service to several high schools where we were seeing increased participation?” asked Board member Susan Cunningham. “And, to C2E2’s point, [can we] imagine a better-coordinated transit system that supports all our needs, including all our school children?”
An Arlington summer camp teaching teenagers firefighting skills could go up in smoke this year.
Camp Heat, which annually enrolls around 25 teens, is on the chopping block in the county’s budget draft. Cutting the free five-day camp to save $47,000 is part of a plan to maintain the Arlington County Fire Dept.’s current $76 million budget in Fiscal Year 2025.
“By eliminating Camp Heat, the Arlington community will lose a week-long summer camp opportunity for teenagers,” the budget says. “Also, the camp is a professional development opportunity for emerging leaders in the Fire Department who serve in coordinating and supervising roles at the camp.”
Activities at the summer camp include physical training and fire medical emergency simulations and meeting with female ACFD leaders. The program’s webpage highlights teamwork and gender inclusivity as key values. The camp was initially offered only to teen girls, but was opened up to boys a few years later.
In place of the camp, ACFD would “explore alternative ways” to conduct public outreach. Possibilities include CPR training, providing free smoke alarms and conducting school visits.
This is the first time the county has formally considered giving the ax to Camp Heat, which started in 2013, ACFD spokesman Capt. Nathaniel Hiner told ARLnow. He said camp enrollment has remained fairly consistent over the years.
The Arlington County Board is scheduled to spend the next several weeks finalizing the county budget, and Board members have given themselves some flexibility this budgeting cycle. Concerned about funding uncertainty in Arlington Public Schools, the Board authorized hearings on a 2.5 cent tax hike — 1 cent higher than the rate proposed by Arlington’s County Manager.
The union representing firefighters and paramedics, IAFF Local 2800, argues that a portion of that funding should go to boost ACFD’s budget. The union argues that low wages are responsible for the department’s current 7.5% vacancy rate.
Beyond Camp Heat, some other proposed cuts and sources of savings include:
- Eliminating the ART 62 bus route and combining the ART 53 and 61 routes — all low-performing routes in North Arlington ($665,553 savings).
- Contracting out an in-house dental clinic for low-income residents, which served 515 clients in the 2023 fiscal year ($165,581 net savings).
- Freezing a position in the Cultural Affairs Division that would further delay the opening of a public art facility at the former site of the famed Inner Ear Studios at 2700 S. Nelson St. in Green Valley — a project that is already several months behind schedule ($115,061 savings).
- Eliminating an outreach worker who provides therapy to patients with tuberculosis. The budget says 13 patients completed treatment according to county protocols in 2023 ($102,281 savings).
(Updated at 11:05 a.m.) Arlington Public Schools Superintendent Francisco Durán has proposed a 2024-2025 budget that he says avoids new expenses in a lean fiscal year compounded by state funding uncertainty.
He presented an $824.7 million budget — which increases the current budget by $12.2 million, or 1.5% — to the Arlington School Board last week.
The superintendent said his budget includes a $29.5 million gap, in part because APS could lose some $5.7 million in state funding. These come from cuts Gov. Glenn Youngkin proposed in his budget for preschool, tutoring and compensation supplements.
“Here’s the bottom line: with everything I’ve shared, with the revenues that I have provided, the cuts that we have done, the expenditures that I’ve outlined [excepting staffing changes tied to enrollment, a part-time custodian and $100,000 for a new student safety software] are not new expenditures,” Durán said during his presentation on Thursday night. “Everything else is currently things that we’re maintaining and sustaining.”
In the best-case scenario, the nearly $30 million gap would drop to $5 million with a 2.5 cent tax rate increase and a competing state budget proposed in the Virginia senate that would send $11 million to APS. The Arlington County Board authorized hearings on a 2.5 cent tax rate increase in large part to address funding gaps if Youngkin’s budget is approved.
“This is not the budget that any of us want to be presenting,” said Board Vice-Chair David Priddy, who read comments from Chair Cristina Diaz-Torres, who could not attend the meeting. “At best, this maintains the status quo of APS, but we know the status quo is not sufficient for our students, for our staff or for our community.”
Youngkin’s conservative budget comes despite a recent report from the Joint Legislative Audit & Review Commission, which found Virginia gives less funding to schools than the national average, using outdated models from the Great Recession, Durán noted.
On top of this statewide deficiency, APS receives less funding from the state, says School Board member Mary Kadera. State funding accounts for 29% and 27%, respectively, of the budgets for the public school systems in Loudoun and Fairfax counties, compared to 15% for APS, she said.
To mitigate the gap, the budget includes some $21 million in cuts. Durán axed $15.7 million in Central Office expenses and reduced staffing by 38 full-time equivalent positions: 19 in the Central Office, of which four are vacant ($2.7 million) and 19.8 school-based art, music and PE positions ($2.15 million).
This change corrects outdated planning calculations without increasing class sizes or impacting classroom instruction, per Durán’s presentation.
“There may be ways in which we can do better with this year’s budget, even with the challenging numbers just presented,” School Board member Miranda Turner said. “I very much appreciate that you focus cuts on… Central Office and not within the schools, but we need to compare the proposed position cuts… We have essentially the same number of positions being cut in Central Office, several of which are vacant anyway.”
Durán says APS began the budget process with a much larger, $73.4 million gap, largely due to the use of $53.7 million in one-time funding in the current budget. Most of this sum was used to make salaries more competitive with surrounding jurisdictions.
For the 2024-2025 budget, Durán proposes $17 million in step increases and a cost-of-living adjustment, which could be augmented by the 3% compensation increase included in the state Senate’s proposed budget. (Youngkin’s plan includes a 2% salary increase for teachers, per the Virginia Mercury.)
The APS proposal disheartened June Prakash, the leader of the local teachers union, the Arlington Education Association.
Arlington’s police and fire unions are vying for more funding in the county’s proposed $1.62 billion budget to fix compensation issues they say fuel attrition and vacancy issues.
County Manager Mark Schwartz, meanwhile, makes the case in the 2024-2025 budget that the county has been and is committed to meeting these problems with funding while balancing other budget priorities.
Since Arlington County authorized collective bargaining in 2022, the unions representing police, firefighters and paramedics have focused on tackling how members are paid, blaming it for driving employees to work for other jurisdictions in the region with higher compensation.
Currently, the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF) Local 2800 has 25 vacant uniformed positions, for a 7.5% vacancy rate, while ACPD has 72 vacancies, for a 19% vacancy rate, according to presidents for both IAFF and Arlington Coalition of Police (ACOP). IAFF says this is more than twice the number of vacancies in 2018, while police vacancies appear on par with ARLnow’s last report in the fall.
Last budget cycle, the county committed to a three-year effort to fix these problems for first responders. Union leaders say the county has contributed enough to change its pay system to one where salary increases track with years of service. Still, they say, it has not set aside enough to ensure all members are paid according to their years of service.
“Last April, the County Board identified addressing pay compression for firefighters as a priority for FY25 but our members are still waiting for relief,” IAFF Brian Lynch said in a statement. “Meanwhile other communities are responding to the nationwide shortage of firefighters and police officers by increasing wages across the board, and our people have been voting with their feet.”
The 2025 budget proposes a 2% increase over last year’s budget for ACPD, for a total of $85,839,546. The fire department’s budget is unchanged from last year for a total of $76,023,512. The budget includes step increases for ACOP and IAFF employees in line with their collective bargaining agreements.
“Our employees are the foundation of all the great work that we do in the County,” Schwartz says in his budget message. “This budget continues our commitment to the collective bargaining agreements (CBA) in place and provides pay increases for non-bargaining employees… We will continue to evaluate various job classifications and contribute to the increases in healthcare costs.”
Still, the 2025 budget acknowledges that understaffing is impacting public safety metrics, at least for ACPD. Between 2020-23, received cases increased from around 6,800 to north of 8,400, but assigned cases hovered around one-quarter to one-third of these totals. During the same time, the percentage of successfully closed cases dropped from a high of 60% to a low of 48%, attributed to an understaffed Criminal Investigative Section.
The fire department’s budget section does not discuss understaffing impacts. It does note that the total number of incidents has and will continue to increase, partially driven by more hospital transports and public service non-emergency responses.
These trends may fuel intradepartmental shortages. Lynch says this spring ACFD will lose 13 personnel to an accelerated paramedic training program and six to teach a new class of recruits. Vacancies in emergency services will also increase by 19 as ACFD pulls firefighters from the field to train them to also be EMTs and medics.
“That’s with no one leaving the department,” he said. “That is over 13% of the bargaining unit — an unprecedented lack of personnel.”
The Arlington County Board is considering a potential property tax hike that could be even higher than what County Manager Mark Schwartz proposed.
Board members yesterday (Tuesday) voted 5-0 to advertise hearings on a maximum property tax rate of $1.038 per $100 of assessed value, a 2.5 cent increase from 2023. That is 1 cent higher than the increase of 1.5 cents that Schwartz proposed in his $1.62 billion budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2025.
County Board Chair Libby Garvey said she hopes to whittle down the possible tax hike during upcoming budget discussions. She introduced the motion to add a penny because Arlington Public Schools still does not know how much state funding it will receive.
In the worst-case scenario, Garvey said APS could have a substantial budget shortfall in the upcoming fiscal year.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty this year when it comes to budgeting,” Garvey said in a statement. “I’m very concerned about our schools and whether the state will do the right thing and provide the level of expected funding — or if the state will leave APS short millions on top of the cuts already made. Hopefully, the state will come through, and this extra penny will not be needed.”
Schwartz’s proposed budget already includes $10 million in additional funding to APS to help close a projected $30-35 million budget gap. Superintendent Francisco Durán is scheduled to present APS’s proposed 2025 budget tomorrow (Thursday).
If adopted in April, a 2.5-cent increase would cause the typical Arlington homeowner to pay an additional $472 in taxes, based on the average home value of $824,700, per a county press release. That’s in addition to rising fees for stormwater management, waste collection and other services.
In total, the average Arlington homeowner would see their total fees and taxes increase by $582 if the Board adopts the 2.5-cent tax rate increase, the county says.
Arlington County held its property tax rate steady during the pandemic, though rising property assessments caused the average homeowner to pay some 4-5% more annually anyway.
Board members noted that a higher advertised tax rate will allow for more flexibility in discussions about funding for housing, mental health and public safety, with a focus on the county’s detention facility.
“I think there’s just too much unknown at this particular moment for us to box ourselves in,” said Board member Maureen Coffey.
The Board can still choose to adopt a lower rate, but not a higher one.
Rising taxes and property values are also expected to put upward pressure on rents, as apartment assessments are expected to increase by an average of 6.6%, or $215 per unit.
The proposed $1.62 billion budget would eliminate 33 county staff positions — many that are currently vacant — in various departments, saving about $10 million, according to Schwartz. The budget includes a 4.75% salary increase for all non-union county employees.
There is also additional funding for teen programs intended to help combat the teen opioid crisis, mental health and substance abuse programs, affordable housing and eviction prevention and environmental initiatives.
Arlington’s police and fire unions have called for further tax increases to fund raises for first responders and reverse staffing declines, particularly in the police department.
The Board will conduct a series of budget work sessions in March, followed by a pair of public hearings on the budget and the tax rate on April 2 and 4, respectively. The final budget adoption vote is scheduled for Saturday, April 20.
When Carrie Lombardi left her New York City finance job to teach at Burgundy Farm Country Day School, she was surprised to hear clucking from a colleague’s classroom one day.
The students, she learned, were raising chickens as part of their science curriculum.
After recovering from her initial shock, Lombardi engrossed herself in the subject. In August 2022, she brought her experience with hands-on science lessons to Arlington Public Schools as the system’s first part-time science coach. Today, she works with Barrett Elementary School teachers to supplement their science lessons with experiments.
Barrett students will not be raising poultry but last week, fifth-graders were learning the difference between insulators and conductors by testing whether paperclips, popsicle sticks or cotton balls could carry electricity between a power source and a light bulb.
“My role here is basically to support the teachers to take science where they want to take science,” Lombardi said. “Having a science coach who can run and get the materials, or support the willingness in the class, it’s really opening up possibilities.”
The approach can get lost in an era of videos and devices, she says. During Covid-era remote learning, videos replaced student-conducted experiments. Lacking the bandwidth to pick experiments, gather supplies and squeeze the lesson into a 40-minute window, some teachers still lean on videos post-pandemic.
This impacted how students viewed science.
“‘Science is boring,’” Lombardi recalled pupils telling her. “‘We hate it. All we do is watch videos.’”
The school system currently provides science professional learning to all elementary educators who teach some science but it is not a requirement, according to APS science supervisor Dat Le.
By contrast, Barrett clocked a 30-point increase in its science standardized test scores after hiring a part-time coach to support teachers throughout the year, according to Kristen Parsons, the chair of an APS science advisory committee.
Earlier this month, Parsons and Le made the pitch for 25 sciences coaches like Lombardi to address science performance gaps tied to historically inconsistent science instruction, which Covid-era remote learning exacerbated. Looking to address gaps that exist at any school, the committee requests one per elementary school.
Parsons told Superintendent Francisco Durán and the School Board that the coaches are the committee’s only recommendation this year, given the tight budget year ahead and the proven impact coaches can have. The committee took a firmer stance this year compared to the 2021-22 school year, when it suggested at least five to be sent to schools where the return-on-investment would be greatest, should funding for more coaches be unfeasible.
School Board Chair Cristina Diaz-Torres signaled coaches would not make the cut this year absent “a magic wand” or “pot of gold.” Board members requested more information on where the coaches should be sent if a few could be made available, more data substantiating their touted benefits and descriptions of the science training that elementary teachers receive today.
The coaching requests respond to the committee’s concerns about pass rates for elementary science state standardized tests, called Standards of Learning, which took a hit during Covid.
“During the height of the pandemic when students were engaged in virtual learning, it appears that elementary science instruction was impacted,” the committee said at the time. “Anecdotal information from parents and teachers consistently points to the limited or lack of science instruction.”
An intensifying climate and ongoing impacts of the shift to remote work will transform Arlington over the next 25 years, experts say.
At the same time, the county’s workforce will need to become more nimble to keep up with changes driven by artificial intelligence.
Speakers made these predictions on Monday during a panel that kicked off a year-long discussion of what Arlington should look like two-and-a-half decades from now, called the Arlington 2050 Initiative.
Arlington County Board Chair Libby Garvey, who moderated the event, said the county will use community input to produce two or three visions to guide later decisions.
“For now, we’re just trying to get as many views as we can, as possible, to begin to form those alternate visions of what our future should be,” Garvey said.
At the end of the evening, a crowd of about 150 attendees filled out postcards imagining that they were describing Arlington in the year 2050. Common themes included more green spaces, expanded public transit and the erasure of racial and economic disparities.
“Diverse thought and opinions are prioritized in order to make Arlington a place where people can live comfortably, and at times during difficult conversations, uncomfortably, in order to progress our county,” said a 16-year-old representative from the Teen Network Board, reading aloud from a postcard.
The climate in 2050
In terms of the climate, Arlington’s 2050 forecast calls for hotter summers and more intense precipitation.
In the 1800s, Arlington used to experience about 20 days each summer above 90 degrees, said panelist Jason Samenow, a meteorologist and weather journalist at the Washington Post. These days, it’s more like 40.
Between 2041 and 2070, Arlington is expected to average 65 days each year above 90 degrees — and that’s based on an optimistic model. More aggressive scenarios, he said, call for even more serious impacts.
“It just means more suffering, especially for vulnerable populations, for people who are poor, the homeless,” Samenow said. “On hot summer nights, they can’t cool off. That increases heat-related illness, heat-related mortality.”
A warming climate disparately impacts urban areas such as Arlington, which tend to have lots of concrete and asphalt, he said. These surfaces absorb heat and radiate it back into the environment, making them hotter than more rural areas. The county can combat these effects by planting more trees and investing in surfaces that reflect heat instead of absorbing it.
In addition to heatwaves, heavy rainstorms are expected to take a toll and the meteorologist warned of more flash flooding such as the severe floods Arlington saw in 2019.
He urged the county to find ways to reroute traffic and redirect floodwaters during torrential rain.
“I think we have to start thinking real mitigation, from the perspective of how an engineer sees mitigation,” Samenow said. “That means redesigning how we live, redesigning how we work, redesigning how we play.”
Adapting to remote work
Another challenge that Arlington faces is people leaving.
Even before the pandemic, many young urban professionals across the country were seeking less expensive places to live, said Hamilton Lombard, a demographer at the University of Virginia Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. Arlington was not immune from this trend, exacerbated by the shift to remote work, the consequences of which are still playing out.
Remote workers continue to leave Arlington en masse, Lombard said, noting that last year, people moved out of Arlington “on a scale comparable with 2020 and 2021.”
If many workers can live anywhere, the county needs to figure out why people should choose to remain here.
“There’s a lot of rural counties in Virginia that are very happy to compete with Arlington,” the demographer said. “I think five years ago, people would have laughed at that idea. But they’re not. They’re very serious about it now.”
As Arlington continues to seek solutions to the effects of remote work, Lombard said the county should consider just how much it has adapted and changed at other points in recent history, such as its “smart growth” along Metro corridors.
“Arlington has shown in the past that it has the capacity to make some serious adaptations and changes,” he said. “It did this with Metro. I think in the next couple decades, [Arlington is] going to have to make changes on a scale that has been successful in the past.”
More dirty details have emerged in the county’s $175 million plan to start using sewage for consumer-friendly fertilizer and renewable energy.
The first step is a $32 million budget authorization, set to be considered by the Arlington County Board this Saturday, to begin new upgrades the Arlington County Water Pollution Control Plant.
The county says the upgrades are overdue. The plant currently relies on solids handling processes that date back to the 1950s through 1990s. Irritating fumes sometimes force staff to use respirators, according to a county report.
“The facilities that thicken, store, dewater, and stabilize the residuals are beyond their useful life and break down frequently,” the report says.
All that is supposed to change.
Better sludge storage tanks, improved odor control systems and anaerobic digesters all play a role in the county’s plans to turn sewage into fertilizer and harness the natural gas byproduct for energy. Additionally, while Arlington sewage byproducts already fertilize agricultural land elsewhere in the state, better equipment will make it possible to either sell the county’s biosolids as a retail product or make them available to residents.
“The upgraded processes will produce a higher quality biosolids product as well as renewable natural gas, which will reduce the County’s dependence on fossil fuels,” according to the report.
Arlington wouldn’t be the first municipality to sell its processed sewage to consumers. Anyone who enriches their garden or lawn using the fertilizer brand Milorganite does so using treated sewage from Milwaukee.
The county is budgeting $175 million for all the upgrades and changes, plus an additional $23 million in soft costs, bringing the total budget to nearly $200 million.
The bulk of the funding comes out of $510 million in bonds that Arlington voters approved in 2022. This project is part of a host of initiatives, upgrades and maintenance projects that make up the county’s 2023-32 Capital Improvement Plan.
Staff have discussed the project with community members since 2015, the county report notes. People near the Water Pollution Control Plant, near the Arlington-Alexandria border and west of Route 1, have raised concerns about noise and vibrations that construction might cause, as well as possible emissions.
The county has pledged to use techniques to minimize impacts on the neighborhood when possible, per the report. Following stakeholder concerns, the county also nixed plans to burn the biogas byproduct to generate electricity onsite. It will instead clean and inject the resulting natural gas directly into the Washington Gas pipeline.
Photo via Arlington Dept. of Environmental Services/Flickr
Arlington’s office vacancy rate remains high but may be stabilizing after an initial, sharp increase due to Covid remote work policies.
As of the fourth quarter of 2023, the countywide office vacancy rate stands at 24.4%, according to a new report from commercial real estate company Colliers.
Since 2020, Arlington’s overall vacancy rate has risen 4.3% points, per the report, prompted by the pandemic-era shift to remote work and in defiance of return-to-office efforts. The county saw a 3-percentage-point jump between 2020 and 2021 followed by a more modest 1-percentage-point increase over the last year.
“The big story last year was the delivery of Amazon’s HQ2 which drove absorption earlier in the year,” Colliers Research Manager Miles Rodnan tells ARLnow. “Sublet space across the D.C. region has leveled off, which has helped slow down vacancy increases.”
“Additionally, as companies continue to settle into their return-to-office/hybrid policies, the decisions to offload space have been made in many instances,” he continued. “As leases continue to expire, there will be downsizes, but the rate should taper off.”
(Arlington County also tracks its vacancy rate and, notably, it reported a rate hovering around 21.5-22% this fall. This discrepancy may be because the county and Colliers have different numbers for total office buildings and rentable square footage. Graphs tracking rates over time, from the county and Colliers, have similar trend lines.)
At the end of 2023, the Colliers report says vacancy rate was slightly higher for the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor, at nearly 25%, than for National Landing — Pentagon City, Crystal City and Potomac Yard — at 24%.
While the difference is marginal, the rate is trending down in National Landing dropping 0.7% point over 2023, while the rate increased 0.8% point on the R-B corridor, the report said.
Compared to National Landing, where all the new office construction was tied to Amazon, the R-B corridor saw more speculative office projects: 3901 Fairfax Drive in Virginia Square, slated for delivery next year, as well as George Mason University’s FUSE at Mason Square building, which will house university programs in addition to private office space.
Overall, however, these projects contribute less than a million square feet of leasable office space. Rodnan says this could be a saving grace, given predictions that vacancy rates will continue to rise.
“A breath of fresh air comes from the restrained construction pipeline, which will hopefully allow vacancy rates to stabilize in the region as negative absorption is still anticipated in the near future,” he said.
Generally, newer office buildings — which real estate analysts dub “Class A” — are attracting tenants who are willing to pay upwards of $2 more per square foot to get out of dated office stock, or so-called “Class B/C” buildings.
This is a trend playing out across the region, Rodnan said, not attributing the submarket-level upticks to any tenants in particular.
Amid the well-established “flight to quality,” Arlington County is working on several initiatives to make it easier to reposition these obsolete buildings from which people are moving.
“The work is cut out for us: zoning needs to become reasonably more flexible and less burdensome,” Arlington County Board Vice-Chair Takis Karantonis said during his New Year remarks this week. “We need to be innovative and courageous in repositioning and reusing obsolete buildings.”
County Board member Matt de Ferranti spelled out what this office vacancy rate means for the county budget.
“We depend on our office vacancy rate, which leads to a lower tax rate than our surrounding localities in northern Northern Virginia,” he said, noting that commercial real estate comprises a greater percentage of Arlington’s budget than that of neighbors.
Either this month or next, Arlington County will learn the extent of the impact of decreased office property values on the expected budget deficit, which is preliminarily projected around $20-$40 million.
“That will be sobering news, or perhaps hopeful news,” de Ferranti said.
Through April, the 2024-25 budget process will address the ongoing challenge of high office vacancies.
“Why is this budget more difficult than our last? Haven’t we known about the work-from-home paradigm shift for two years?” said de Ferranti. “Well, we have, but the office assessment process and that market is based on 5-, 10- and 15-year leases. So this year, we’re seeing the reality come home to us.”
(Updated at 12:20 a.m. on 12/7/23) After a 2-year search for new digs, Arlington Independent Media is on the cusp of moving from its long-time headquarters in Clarendon.
Next week, Arlington’s public access TV channel, community radio station and media training provider intends to sign a lease for space in Courthouse Plaza, says its CEO Whytni Kernodle. The building is owned by JBG Smith and home to Arlington County headquarters.
The cash-strapped organization is having to look outside its coffers to leave before its Dec. 31 deadline. The organization disclosed it had $31,000 in cash on hand during its November meeting, according to Lynn Borton, a former producer with AIM who was in attendance.
Kernodle requested $350,000 in funds that Comcast sets aside for expenses by public institutions, Arlington Public Schools and the county government. She also intends to fundraise another $25,000.
Once settled in Courthouse, Kernodle envisions an “On Air!” sign attracting passers-by to come and listen to music and watch AIM produce live shows. Next year, she wants to add public speaking events.
“The really great community media organizations are out in the community without waiting for people to come to their location,” she said. “We’re coming to the community as opposed to expecting the community to come to us.”
AIM will retain its rent-free second location in a county-owned building in Green Valley, for which it pays an “affordable license fee,” according to the county.
Kernodle says it was not a viable headquarters because it was too small and too far from the broadcast tower AIM uses in Courthouse for live shows. She also did not want to give up a North Arlington presence.
The move comes as the organization faces pressure to clarify its finances and rely more on fundraising, membership fees and advertising, and less on county funding, for its operational expenses.
AIM also faces existential pressures from consumers choosing streaming over cable, as fewer cable subscriptions means less funding for Public, Educational, and Governmental (PEG) Access Channels — and fewer viewers.
Streaming, along with better technology and the dominance of social media, can also weaken the value of AIM’s core offerings — professional-grade equipment, studios and training for content creators — says Rodger Smith, a senior instructor in the George Mason University Department of Communication.
“Why go to AIM when I can be in my house and I can create a podcast that still sounds broadcast quality or I can produce video,” says Smith, who is also the faculty advisor for WGMU, the campus online radio station. “They have to offer a service that [people] can’t find anyplace else.”
Rocky finances and a forthcoming governance document
AIM will be leaving a building where the rent almost sank it financially, but its woes are not behind it.
When AIM lost free rent at 2701 Wilson Blvd as part of a 2016 local cable franchise agreement, it racked up $80,000 in debts and nearly went under, even after the county paid its market-rate rent for several months, says Borton.
While serving as AIM’s president, she got collections officers to stop calling in 2019 and negotiated a lower rent. The organization has known it needed to move since 2021, when the new owner of 2701 Wilson Blvd opened the Beyond Hello dispensary next door, with plans to take over AIM’s space, Borton said.
All this time, the county tried to wean AIM from county support, proposing, then lessening, cuts after outcry from AIM staff and listeners.
The organization continues to face financial transparency challenges, as it is behind on its Form 990s. The IRS makes public these nonprofit tax forms so people can gauge an organization’s financial health.
Unionized trade workers have tentatively negotiated with Arlington County for wage increases and safety protections for the next four years.
Predicting a budget gap in the 2025 budget, however, the county says it will have to raise taxes or make budget cuts to pay for these provisions, according to a fiscal analysis the Arlington County Board is set to hear about during its Saturday meeting.
If the county opts to raise taxes, residents could see their bill go up $5-9 on average. This would be in addition to a predicted 1.8% increase in real estate values, which works out to an average increase of $146. For reference, property values increased 4.5% for 2023.
Higher taxes or budget cuts would cover most of the increases. The rest would be covered with a nearly $3 utility fee increase and a new stormwater utility fee that residents will begin paying in 2024 in lieu of the current sanitary district tax.
Arlington County held steady residential real estate taxes this year, at $1.013 for every $100 in assessed value. Arlington County Board Chair Christian Dorsey has foreshadowed this could go up next year, however. To cover the tentative wage increases, county officials are suggesting raising the rate to $1.0136 or $1.0141.
County government and the Service, Labor, And Trades (SLT) Bargaining Unit have tentatively agreed to 55 provisions, of which only a handful, including higher wages, have financial impacts, according to the county. Another would ensure employees do not end up getting less weekly pay after responding to emergencies.
“Crews work on emergency situations, like water main breaks, often outside of the normal workday schedule and can be scheduled outside of their normal hours to complete such work,” Director of Management and Finance Maria Meredith says. “In cases where this occurs and impacts the normal work schedule, this premium ensures that staff will receive at least 40 hours of pay in the week if such a situation arises.”
SLT union members also requested more subsidized parking for unionized employees and the ability to do union-related work without forfeiting docked pay or paid time off.
This works out to about $1 million in additional expense in the 2025 fiscal year budget: $511,000 from the General Fund, $401,000 from the Utility Fund and $94,000 to other funds. Budgets through the 2028 fiscal year will be affected, too, and the county is now looking for funding sources.
“Given the projected budget gap in the FY 2025 General Fund budget, the $0.5 million FY 2025 impact of this potential agreement cannot be absorbed within estimated revenue growth without taking service reductions, increasing taxes, or a combination of these options,” per a county report.
The following chart shows two scenarios for how the tax bill could go up to cover the tentative agreement:
If the Board opts not to raise taxes, it could pay for the $511,000 General Fund obligation with across-the-board cuts to the tune of 0.1% or eliminating about four full-time employees who earn $125,000 each, including benefits.
Any reductions “would be considered with input and engagement from the community,” the county says.
“In prior years, similar FTE reductions have been taken across a variety of agencies, including planning, public safety, human services and environmental services,” the county says.
Arlington County proposes a modest increase to the water-sewer rate to cover the $401,000 in increased costs coming from the utility fund.
On average, residential customers would see their water bill go up $2.85 per year. A $0.20 per thousand gallon rate increase to cover expenses to the Stormwater Utility Fund will be included in next year’s new stormwater utility fee.
In December, the County Board “can resolve to make a good faith commitment to appropriate funding to meet the obligations under the tentative agreement,” the report says. If the Board does not, either the County Manager or the union may reopen negotiations.