Blogpost #11 - Proffers Should Not Be a Slush Fund

Blogpost #11 - Proffers Should Not Be a Slush Fund

This letter to the SunGazette was posted (somewhat truncated) on its web site Oct 29 at     http://www.insidenova.com/opinion/letters_to_editor/letter-howze-not-telling-whole-truth-in-discussing-housing/article_9edc77e4-5f74-11e4-b315-2b802e28a47c.html  as “Letter: Howze not telling whole truth in discussing housing”

This letter responds to the Sun Gazette article “County Board contenders vow to protect open space” which covered the October 15 Cherrydale Citizen’s Assn candidate night. (http://www.insidenova.com/news/arlington/apah-nearly-of-first-arlington-mill-residents-are-from-county/article_049482b4-f7a8-11e3-b918-001a4bcf887a.html?mode=jqm) Both candidates made the crowd-pleasing statement that existing park space ought not be converted to affordable housing nor schools.  It’s particularly encouraging to read this from Mr. Howze, who is running with the endorsement of the Board majority which has encouraged identification of park space for just this sort of conversion!  Mr. Vihstadt spoke more to the origins of the problem: the Board has been whooping through thousands of units in new projects, and “..“We ask for all sorts of things” from developers, Vihstadt said, from public art to placing utilities underground, “but we don’t ask anything for schools.”” Mr. Howze’s response was sort of a red herring: he “..seemed less inclined to make developers pay the price...Student growth is “overwhelmingly coming from single-family neighborhoods,” Howze said. “A block that had two families on it a decade ago now has 10 families on it, 12 families.””

I’ve got a going-in assumption here: that County expenditures can be categorized as ‘nice-to-do’ or ‘must-do’, and that having adequate schools for our children is a ‘must-do’ and public art and underground utilities and affordable housing are ‘nice-to-do’.  This makes a very strong public policy argument that expenditures for ‘nice-to-do’ items should be on the budget as much as possible, so that the Board is forced to examine them in the context of everything else discretionary for which it is spending  If we have off budget resources coming in, as we do from the proffers we extract from developers in exchange for site plan approvals, those resources should be devoted entirely to ‘must-do’ expenditures.  Proffers should not be a slush fund for Board members to dip into for the ‘nice’ items they like. This would be true whether or not schools growth was coming largely from single-family neighborhoods, as Mr. Howze claimed.  Mr. Vihstadt's ads say No Vanity Projects, and I think that's not quite true: we are a very rich county and we can and should do some vanity and charitable things.  But they should be compared to our other expenditures, not shielded from scrutiny.

Even though Howze’s claim that growth is overwhelmingly coming from single-families would be a far weaker argument against developer payments toward schools, I want to raise doubt about whether it’s even true: in a June 19 Article, the Sun Gazette quoted APAH officials that of the 375 people in lottery winner families for the 122 units in the new Arlington Partnership for Affordable Housing (APAH)  Arlington Mill Residences apartments, 147 were children under 18.  At $20,000 per year per kid, this is a very large charitable expense the County has taken on!

Now, it may be that residents in non-subsidized apartments are less reproductive than those in subsidized, but I’m going to make up a story about life cycle: some fellow buys a two bedroom condo and rents out the second bedroom to help on the mortgage.  He checks out a couple of library books every year, and consumes $1500 in arrest and booking services for some unfortunate events after a pub crawl involving vomiting on somebody’s lawn while loudly singing Hokie fight songs. With the taxes on his apartment, this guy is pure profit for the County, very nearly!  But then, he turns 30, and he meets somebody nice while pub crawling, and she moves in and nature takes its course and there is now a little one in the second bedroom.   Used to be, someone like that would buy a town house in Vienna, but these guys like Arlington and Vienna’s gotten expensive, so - bang! - another $20000 a year.  I have two kids as Washington-Lee, and both have several friends who live in apartments, so I think my story is at least as plausible as Howze’s.