To the Editor:
I recently completed the Fairfax County Transportation Survey by rating perhaps a dozen or more taxing options to “pay for $300 million in Fairfax County transportation needs” — I rated them all as not acceptable.
Call me crazy — I was looking for a survey with the obvious choices — cut expenses or raise taxes or some combination. But not one proposal in that survey addressed working the expense side of the revenue-expense model.
If we’re going to look at raising taxes, we should be willing — first — to reprioritize existing programs and re-allocate resources. We may be surprised to learn we have enough coming in already — or not — but that analysis has not been done or if done, has not been made available.
Families should keep more of what they earn and the county should learn to live with what they already get from a broad range of taxes — not a penny more. That’s what we do in our families when we want more than we can pay for — we do without or we re-prioritize expenses to be sure we can afford the essentials. There will always be more “things” we can do at the county level — but that doesn’t mean we should do those things if we don’t have the money.
The prior County Executive proved the value proposition that gave us four years of level or near-level county expenditures. His is the gift that keeps on giving. We can model the future on his example — he found savings where few thought savings were possible. Can one doubt there’s more savings available?
Consider this: new taxes, once enacted, never go away — they only increase. We should be loath to enact an additional level of permanent taxes to pay for temporary expenses — especially for expenses which are rightly the province of the state of Virginia. We set an onerous precedent by considering taxing ourselves a second time to pay for transportation. That just gets the state of Virginia off the hook so even more resources can be diverted to less serious matters down state while we tax ourselves at higher levels to do the heavy lifting needed here.
We send the county and state sufficient money already to do the heavy lifting we need done on our behalf — let the legislative process take it from there. Giving bureaucrats more money just gives them a reason to ask for more next year — which you can be sure they will.
Enough already. Make do. Everyone else has to. Why not government?
Barry Meuse
Alexandria