An Answer for Jon Baliles: It’s the Constitution
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11 responses to “An Answer for Jon Baliles: It’s the Constitution”
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Thanks for the history lesson.
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I always learn something by reading Dick's posts.
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Great piece….thank you.
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Thank you Dick, again. What we can be assured of is that Dick does delve into important and useful things that all citizens ought to know, but certainly our elected and politicians! And we can pretty much count on him NOT turning it into some culture war mess nor use pejoratives to describe other folks.
Thank you.
We also have some very blue counties in Va that have AAA bond ratings.. pretty solid "conservative" values. And we have referenda
but citizens cannot initiate it – which they should in my view. -
1928 and early 1929 saw an extreme tightening of general indebtedness, and on trading on margin. There was a double witching in the market when in early Sept29 stock prices turned down in the face of margin tightening. POOF
Obviously there were people who saw it coming, or caused it. One or the other.
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Arthur Ellsworth Howard. A Virginia treasure. Alright so what Jon got one wrong. I still like his blog. I enjoyed reading this one about the DIME bridge not the nickel bridge.
https://rvamag.com/community/rva-5×5-it-was-the-dime-bridge-before-it-cost-a-nickel.html -
To a certain extent, what a AAA rating means is that a county is willing to tax it's citizens to the extent necessary to pay it's debts
AND the county/citizen's actually have the "ability to pay" – which is central to the concept behind the Composite Index for school funding. Not sure exactly how it is determined that they don't have the "ability to pay", might be an interesting blog post.Does not necessarily mean the debt itself is a good thing either, but one presumes citizens have a view about it at elections.
There have been some notable financial issues in some counties and cities in Virginia. I seem to recall a municipal golf course in Buena Vista.
I also wonder if the bond agencies, for a given, county, city, have some proxy they use that assesses "ability to pay"? In other words, no matter what a given county leadership might say or even citizens via referenda – if paying back the bond requires a significant increase in tax rates – that actually increases stress on property owners that results in tax bill defaults, forced sales, reduced assessments, etc… Especially true of some landowners who are literally land-rich and cash poor.
Can't get blood out of stone type thing …
So "ability to pay" for a bond agency might include a look at demographics with regard to income and wealth but not sure
at all if it is a similar calculation used in the composite index.Bonds can include what is known as "enterprise bonds" which in my county have been for water & sewer – AND they got themselves in fiscal hot water by subsidizing their operating expenses with new hookups… The county is on the hook for
"full faith and credit" which means they'll guarantee them with taxpayer funds if the enterprise fund runs into financial issues. Needless to say, that very much gets the attention of the BOS.One thing more and more urbanized counties are doing bond referenda for is transportation as VDOT clearly does not have enough resources for some needs and the SmartScale program favors projects that have some local funding added to the proposal.
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It seems to me that this difference in the management of debt between towns/cities and counties is a holdover from more orderly days.
Once upon a time, a city was meant to be the densely populated part of an area. Due to the dense population, city governments had to provide more services to their citizens. Hence, different needs for borrowing, taxes, etc between cities and counties arose.
As the population grew, the areas directly adjacent to cities grew first and most. Eventually, these areas (in counties) became so densely populated they were more like cities. So, the cities annexed those areas. Through this process, the centuries old process of urbanization was managed / governed.
However, Virginia being Virginia – our state couldn't quite figure out how this is all supposed to work.
The first blunder was not putting cities inside counties – like the other 49 states do. This made annexation a zero sum game for counties.
The second blunder was "temporarily" halting all annexations. In 1979, the Virginia General Assembly temporarily blocked the right of cities to annex territory from counties. The temporary ban has never been lifted, and in 2016 it was extended again to 2024. That's a 45 year long (and counting) temporary ban. Only in Virginia.
The final blunder comes from not accepting that Virginia's governance structure is designed to retard the growth of cities. The net result of blunders one and two is Fairfax County being much more densely populated than 24 of Virginia's "cities" while Arlington (a county) has the second highest population density of all jurisdictions in Virginia (after Alexandria).
Virginia is now a hodge-podge of jurisdictions where the very concepts of "town", "city", and "county" have no relevance. Arlington County has over three times the population density of the City of Fredericksburg.
So, why should Arlington require a referendum while Fredericksburg does not?
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
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I agree it ought to be updated to the current realities but I can cite counties in Va that are far less experienced in finances and while both the adjacent counties to Fredericksburg , Stafford and Spotsy, both have AAA bond ratings.. that's not the case outside the urbanized places in Va where the counties that surround the town/city don't do city services in general and would not if the county voters opposed it. The places that have city services need to have a way to connect with citizens that live there that want city services instead of county voters saying "no". Counties in Va other than Arlington and Henrico pretty much suck at roads as amply demonstrated.
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Cities, like towns, can tax their citizens more to support these added services. It would be better if cities became part of the county and could annex growing areas.
The annexation ban was reasonable because cities were gobbling up the more developed parts of counties that contributed most to county finances. I remember how Charlottesville kept piling on so many more requirements for somebody trying to develop a mall inside city limits that the developer just bought a piece of property in the county a couple miles outside city limits and built the mall there. Charlottesville then turned around and tried to annex the new mall!
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Same thing happened in Fredericksburg and would again if the moratorium went away. So now the county has a lot of commercial but has had a different (rural-driven) view about libraries, parks, bike/ped facilities, etc… At one point , some elected wanted out of libraries, regional jails, etc… because of the "cost". Fredericksburg has crosswalks and bike/ped trails and such. Spotsy has not been friendly toward such even though they have
approved subdivisions out of the wazoo.. they oppose sidewalks in them as well as two entrances or connecting roads , etc. They use the revenues from commercial to reduce taxes. The city uses them to improve the facilities for citizens in the city. I know there is a middle ground but so many rural counties in Va are more like Spotsylvania than towns and cities inside those counties.DJ picked Arlington for a county. Arlington and Henrico are two counties in Va that are not run like most counties in Va and a "good" thing in my view, i.e. Arlington and Henrico are better run counties… run more like cities.
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