“No one spoke” has to be one of the most common descriptors when recounting Albemarle/local government budget meetings.
- What happens if we lost ~$27M in Federal Funding?
- Want to challenge your real estate property assessment? – I’m happy to assist if you need help. Ask me.
Dig into the current Albemarle County budget here, and make time if you can to attend the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors meeting at noon Wednesday 26 February at the County Office Building. Or zoom in.
This is a pretty cool – and useful – visualization of last year’s County Budget.
Republishing from the excellent and indispensable Charlottesville Community Engagement.
And I’ll reiterate my request – I will happily pay for your subscription to Charlottesville Community Engagement if you ask me. (limit to this offer: two people)
“When you’ve covered the same community for many years, there are multiple rhythms to the year and one of the major beats relates to the proposed budgets for the next fiscal year. These documents explain how a locality works. The final week of February is when the six members of Albemarle County Board of Supervisors have a special meeting to review what county staff will recommend for their review.
There are no materials available in advance but I’ll attempt to provide some perspective. I appear to be the only practitioner of journalism who devotes any time to the county’s budget . This is not how it should be, but it is how things are. Information Charlottesville, the archive site for this newsletter, has a category called Budget-Albemarle if you want to see what I’ve been able to note.
You may note there are not as many articles as I’m able to write in Charlottesville. If you look at the Budget-Charlottesville category, you’ll note that there are many more articles about the prep for FY26.
If you want a sense of the process, take a look at the article I wrote last year when County Executive Jeffrey Richardson recommended a budget based on $629,054,446 of revenues. That was a 13.4 percent increase over FY24. Supervisors opted to increase the lodging tax rate from eight percent to nine percent and the personal property tax to $3.96 per $100 of assessed value. That led to a total budget of $642.2 million.
Some questions based on three recent stories.
- What effect will a 5.1 percent increase in property assessments bring about?
- What effect will a disintegrating federal government have on Albemarle County’s bottom line?
- How universally supported is a push for real property tax increases to pay for more housing construction?
To illustrate how little this topic is written about by other journalists, I did a search on news.google.com on “albemarle county budget” and the only relevant article that turns up is from the Crozet Gazette.
How can there be productive conversations about the allocation of tax dollars if there is no way for people to know what’s happening? I am committed to growing my enterprise and have demonstrated this for the past five years.”
