Should homeowners in Reston be worried that their property taxes could be increased to pay for roads and bridges necessary for the density planned around the Silver Line Metro stations?
The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has just given the residents of Tysons Corner a lump of coal in their Christmas stockings.
The Board of Supervisors is in the process of creating a special "service" tax district to pay for road and bridge improvements to support the creation of the new city of Tysons. The current residents of Tysons Corner will have their property taxes raised. Since estimates on large construction projects are usually underestimated, Tysons residents can reasonably expect that tax burden will increase over time. . .
Should homeowners in Reston be worried that their property taxes could be increased to pay for roads and bridges necessary for the density planned around the Silver Line Metro stations? They should. This (service district) is the mechanism the county intends to use to pay for Reston's redevelopment. . . .For the rest of this important letter, click here.
Kathy's letter raises an important issue that should concern all Restonians: Who pays for all the infrastructure investment that the major re-development around the Metro stations will require?
In Tysons, the proposal before the Board is that those who own property within the Tysons District (about 2,000 acres around its four Metro stops) will pay roughly two-thirds of the transportation infrastructure costs. (The other third would be paid through County taxes and any funds coming from the state or federal government--probably none.) In rough terms, those costs are now pegged at $3 billion in 2012 dollars and nearly $6 billion in future dollars (the dollars actually paid). They are likely to increase. And those numbers do not include debt service costs for bonds issued to finance specific projects.
Tysons' residents--various condominium developments in the District--are lumped in with the District's corporate commercial developers. The proposal under consideration would force them to pay the same extra tax pro rated to their property's value as the corporations. Unlike the corporations, however, they will not be able to pass on their added tax costs to their customers, clients, etc.--because they don't have any!
More than a year ago, the Reston Citizens Association (RCA) approved a resolution supporting its Tysons' area counterpart citizens group, McLean Citizens Association, in calling for the developers to carry to brunt of the infrastructure development cost load, specifically 75% with the rest carried across the county.
The infrastructure tax issue is one of fundamental fairness. All the development in Tysons will not increase the income of its residents. It will likely skyrocket the profits of the commercial developers in the area. Those who profit ought to be the ones who pay the investment cost.
As for the Reston Task Force, although the RCA representative has raised implementation and financing issues on several occasions and Reston 2020 has called for addressing these issues in its papers, the task force has so far avoided these issues all together.
While the County staff stated it did not want to make the same mistake that the Tysons staff did by including implementation and financing issues in planning discussions, the fact is that the "mistake" at Tysons was not including them in detail in the planning effort. To have done so would have probably reduced the approved plan level of overall growth to a more realistic level. Moreover, as a result of the failure to tackle the tough financing issues, the transportation implementation issues alone have taken more than an additional year to reach consideration before the Board.
The Reston Task Force is on course to make the same huge error the Tysons Task Force made with the implication of significant tax increases for some or all of Reston's residents.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Your comments are welcome and encouraged as long as they are relevant, constructive, and decent.