The One-Sided Decision in the Reversion of Martinsville – the Start of a Trend?
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25 responses to “The One-Sided Decision in the Reversion of Martinsville – the Start of a Trend?”
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Richmond is a city over 50,000. Is there a provision for such a city reverting?
I have long thought that would bring sanity and potential improvement as opposed to Henrico and Chesterfield arbitraging against Richmond…-
no
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Tom – is there a UVA Parents Facebook Group?
I’m not on Facebook, but I know there are many people POed about the vaccine mandate.
Walter Smith
VP, Counsel
The YouDecide Building
4470 Cox Road, Suite 140
Glen Allen, Virginia 23060
(804) 840-1137
[email protected]
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South Boston, another southside municipality, reverted to township status in Halifax County in 1995. I wonder how that worked out.
The consolidation of Martinsville and Henry County will eliminate the expenses of a city council, a school board, and five constitutional offices. There will be some savings. I would be interested to see a fiscal impact analysis.
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South Boston has continued to lose population over the past decade. It is 57% female and 57% Black. Median household income at $42,311 in 2019 about half of the state average. Halifax County as a whole is better off economically than the town. MHI of $51,184 in same year. Halifax County as a whole 60% white.
I suspect that Sentara Halifax Regional Hospital is the biggest private employer.
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Our leaders in Richmond and Washington have had decades to do their part to revitalize the economies of forgotten places in Virginia such as Martinsville. Throwing the city and county into a blender and flipping the switch will not produce puree. More likely lumpy mashed potatoes.
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How quickly you forget. Many here have commented about the evil of independent cities. The General Assembly agreed and in 1990 set up a process whereby any city under 50,000 could revert to town status. The result would be that a lot of duplicate services – schools, social and health services, constitutional officers, etc. – would become the responsibility of the receiving county. In turn, the residents of the new town would become subject to taxation by the county, i.e., real estate and personal property, machinery tools, BPOL, etc. so the town residents would be treated like municipal residents in the other 50 states, subject to double taxation. The reverted town would remain responsible for all debt contracted by the former city. A special incentive to the county would be that it would get to collect the bulk of the sale tax in the town. Towns are treated different than cities with respect to sales tax because they do not operated their own school system. In theory, the reversion would be a financial “wash” but I have not see any long term studies to say one way or the other. Also, there are certain financial incentives in state law to encourage reversions and/or consolidations.
In addition, the town could never return to independent city status [the law also forbade the creation of any new independent cities], but the town could initiate an annexation against the county, something independent cities have been barred from doing since 1997. In almost all of the reversions resulting from a negotiated settlement, like that proposed in the Martinsville-Henry County situation, have contained a temporary bar on annexations by the new town.
The reason why the county cannot say “HELL NO” in reversions is that the General Assembly, and the legislative study that proposed the process, wanted to encourage cities, especially the small and or struggling ones, to give up their independent status. The county can, however, make the process very expensive for the city, and the county, taxpayers, by hiring law firms that specialize in city-county battles and draw the process out through the review of the city’s petition by the Virginia Commission on Local Government and then the special three-judge court. After the first court-ordered reversion of South Boston, the parties agreed that a negotiated settlement was a win-win situation. Two of the subsequent reversions – Clifton Forge and Bedford – were settlements.
Martinsville is unique in that it will be the first reversion involving two truly separate school divisions. All three of the preceding reversions involved consolidated or partially consolidated city-county school divisions. Henry County has been trying without success since the early 2000s to get special legislation [DHS can explain that to you] to require Martinsville’s reversion subject to approval by the residents of both the city and the county. Since Martinsville had previously tried at least once to bring about a consolidation of the city and county, the city leaders thought that reversion was the best process.
According to the news reports, Henry County says it will lose money in the reversion. I would have to see their study and ALL of the assumptions behind every number. As you all know, one set of “experts” can “prove” white is black while another set can “prove” black is white. Perhaps the school consolidation issue is the reason for the possible money loss to the county.
For those who want to dive more deeply into the subject, there is a very dated report done by the Virginia Municipal League at https://vml.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Reversions96_1_0.pdf. You can also read the advisory reports on all the revisions so far at https://www.dhcd.virginia.gov/reversion-city-town-status. You can also read the report of the legislative study commission that came up with the reversion idea and why here https://rga.lis.virginia.gov/Published/1990/HD69/PDF
Happy reading!
Bosun -
Farmville, Virginia, is similar in size, economic base and demographics to other Southside communities. But its downtown area is more vibrant than most others. What makes the difference? Green Front, the furniture retailer. The entrepreneurial founders of Green Front found a winning formula in retrofitting old warehouses and filling them with furniture. People drive an hour or more or more to shop there. Farmville is a Saturday destination for furniture buyers in the Richmond area.
I’m guessing the company has redeveloped at least a half dozen buildings, providing a stimulus for others to invest in the downtown area. Successful private business does more to revive an area than all the government programs in the world. Keep the cost of government low (which may be consolidating cities and counties). Keep taxes low. Foster entrepreneurial business formation.
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About 10 years ago, about 90% of the sale tax revenue received by Prince George County came from businesses within Farmville. Green Front and Longwood helped. Back when it was allowed, the town did a study about becoming an independent city, but the cost of creating a separate school division was too great.
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Prince Edward, not Prince George.
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Thank you for correcting my geographic error.
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Unless your major business, as in Lynchburg and Petersburg, is a 501c3 hospital system that pays no taxes, federal, state or local. Martinsville’s hospital system pays taxes – over $9.3 million last year.
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Good thing, because Centra Southside’s three facilities in Farmville pay no taxes.
And Farmville’s median household income in 2019 was only $35,995.
Hampton-Sydney and Longwood probably are a net plus, but I don’t know the numbers.
They are not on the top ten financially stressed list only because their city government lives within its means.
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TOWN!
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Would you prefer to end the moratorium on annexation that largely created this problem? I thought not.
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Bedford reverted from city to town a few years ago. They unified their water & sewer systems as well as the schools. I think that Bedford was stagnating, but still in better shape than many of the cities listed.
I think that most of the city/county mergers in Tidewater were done to prevent Norfolk from gobbling the counties up.
A big reason many cities are hurting is that a lot of businesses are moving into the counties. This is probably more for cheaper land and to follow population growth then to avoid city taxes, although NIMBY may also play a role. I remember back in the 1980s a developer wanted to build a mall in Charlottesville. The zoning and planning restrictions and challenges got so bad they just went a few miles north to some vacant land in the county to build it. Charlottesville turned around and tried to annex that part of the county, but that was around the time the state stopped allowing cities to annex county land.
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Also BPOL taxes…better public schools…lower RE tax rates on lower valuations
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Bedford schools were already partially consolidated. You are correct that the Tidewater mergers were defenses against Norfolk, Portsmouth, Hampton and Newport News from annexing. There is a book written about it.
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Accepting that the reversion statute applies by its terms only to cities under 50,000 in population — what about merger, as in the Hampton Roads consolidations of the 70s: Chesapeake, Hampton and Virginia Beach? Isn’t that option still available to Richmond or Lynchburg?
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Yes, if the counties agree.
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[…] are several clarifications, as well as context, needed in response to his post on this subject, which would be too long for a comment. Therefore, I have decided to use a […]
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There’s a useful Wiki:
Administrative divisions of Virginia
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[…] recent posts and comments concerning the reversion of the city of Martinsville to town status (see here, here, and here) provide a good opportunity to discuss the complexity of local government finance […]
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[…] latest posts and feedback in regards to the reversion of town of Martinsville to city standing (see here, here, and here) present a very good alternative to debate the complexity of native authorities […]
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