March Krupicka Council News

Dear Friends,

Bald.  That’s right.  Bald.  The first word of this month’s newsletter is bald.  The St. Baldrick's Foundation raises money each year to help fight childhood cancer.  Every St. Patrick’s day thousands of people agree to be shaven bald as a fundraiser to raise people’s spirits and to fight this complicated and challenging disease.  A local Alexandria woman asked Delegate Englin and I if we would participate this year.  We both have young children and we both felt strongly that this was a cause worth losing some hair, and perhaps a little dignity, over.  So, on Saturday the 17^th between 3 and 4 PM at a Likely Story on King Street, we’ll be going bald.  You can do your part by signing up to join us with the clippers or by just giving a few dollars. 

http://www.stbaldricks.org/participants/shavee_info.html?ShaveeID=7940

Feel free to contact me anytime.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day,

Rob

(If you or others want to be added to the newsletter list, send a message to newsletter@krupicka.com with “Add Krupicka List” in the subject line.)

Budget Update

The budget process is in full swing.  The City Manager put forward his draft budget proposal last month and since then we have been meeting regularly to go over every detail.  We still have two more months of that process. Under the City Manager’s proposed budget, the average homeowner would get a tax cut of about $124 dollars.  This is accomplished through about $3.5 million in cuts to the city base-line operating budget, including a reduction in staffing, by pushing off some capital projects to future years, by foregoing a cost of living increase for city and school staff and by asking the schools to identify about $4 million more in reductions on top of the $6.2 million in staff positions and program cuts they have already recommended.

There is no question that the new city budget process and the City Manager’s “managing for results” initiative are making a difference.  This year’s budget is the easiest to read in years and begins to put in place performance metrics for every city program and function.  It will take a few years to get the performance metrics exactly right, but this budget is a big step towards a more transparent and accountable city budget. 

Over the last 15 years, the average number of city employees for every 1000 residents has been about 15 to 17.  The Manager’s proposed budget has proposed a reduction of 15 city positions and holds the city to 17 employees for 1000 residents.

While the average home in the city lost about 3% in value, new construction and commercial property value growth offset those loses to give us a modest increase in revenues.  In total, property taxes make up a little more than 50% of the city revenues (residential represents about 32% and commercial represents about 22%).  The other half of the city’s revenues come from other taxes and fees, as well as state and federal aid. The city’s revenues are hampered a bit this year by a reduction in state aid to our schools and a slight decrease in intergovernmental revenues. 

One way to look at the budget is to compare it to the average income of an Alexandria resident. Over the last 30 years, the amount of money our city spends has hovered around 5 percent of the income earned by Alexandria residents.  The proposed budget has spending at about 4.7 percent of personal income earned.

As we look at the budget, I am focused on ensuring we are being as fiscally responsible as we can and are planning ahead for future years of modest revenues growth.  I also want to ensure the city services we do provide are of high quality.  And I want to make sure we provide our staff with competitive salaries.  We will be looking closely at salary choices being made throughout our region to understand the impact of those proposals on the competitiveness of pay in Alexandria. Providing our staff with competitive pay is one of the most important components of managing our city and impacts everything from our school quality to our public safety to the day to day operations in city hall. We live in a expensive jurisdiction within an expensive region.  Much of our staff lives outside the city because they can’t afford or choose not to live in the city.  It is incumbent upon us to make sure our salaries are competitive.  If Loudoun County or other outlying jurisdictions pay more and also have less expensive housing, that can become a significant hurdle to overcome when we are trying to hire police, teachers, firefighters and other city staff.

None of this is going to be easy. There are two more months to this budget process and a lot of pages to review and questions to ask.  You can keep up with meetings, public hearings and information through the city web site at:

http://alexandriava.gov/budget/budget2008/proposed/budget2008proposed.html

Global Warming and Alexandria’s Environment

Over a 100 people showed up last month to watch the Inconvenient Truth at the Masonic Temple.   It was a great crowd.  I want to thank Congressman Moran and Councilwoman Pepper for joining us at the event.  Ideas brought up after the show are going to be shared with Alexandria’s Environmental Policy Commission as it works to develop Alexandria’s Environmental Action plan.  A number of people have asked for a follow-up discussion and we are working to arrange that.  We’ll keep you posted.

In the meantime, if you are interested in learning more about city environmental efforts, these presentations provide a useful overview.

http://alexandriava.gov/tes/DEQ/deqpublications.html

and

http://alexandriava.gov/tes/DEQ/deqnewsandevents.html

Economic Development – The Mayor’s Working Group

Alexandria has lost a few thousand jobs over the last six years.  During a period when job growth in our region was skyrocketing, jobs in Alexandria actually declined.  If you take out jobs created by the PTO, our job base would have declined by about 10 percent over the last few years.  A few of us on Council have talked for years about the challenges of doing business in our city.  This job-loss number further amplifies that challenge.  Looking at our budget, you will see that the City has become more reliant on residential property taxes and less reliant on commercial taxes over the last few years.  The job loss number and the changing revenue mix in the city gives me pause.  We either need to change how we work with businesses or we need to understand that our reliance on residential property taxes is going to grow.  Arlington and Fairfax are hitting this issue head-on and are adding jobs, some at our expense, like the recent loss of PBS to Crystal City. 

The Mayor has put together a work group with a number of distinguished Alexandrians to bring forward ideas about policy changes the city can take.  I personally believe we have to re-think our entire approach to economic development.  We can’t just rely on property development to fund much of our budget as it is doing this year.  We need to work smarter to increase the value of and effectiveness of our commercial and retail property.  I’d like to see us finding ways to reduce the amount new residential development and to increase commercial development which, incidentally, puts less cost burden on our tax base.  We need to do more to ensure Alexandrians want to shop in our city.   And we need to make sure anything we do for economic development complements the character and uniqueness of our city.

I’d also like to see us working harder to attract new commercial businesses that complement our unique community assets.  We have done it before.  Twenty years or so ago the City worked hard to attract associations to our City.  Associations were a good fit because they didn’t require huge buildings or amounts of space and could work within some of our smaller-scale commercial structures.  And our proximity to DC made us a natural place for them. We need to do that again, but this time we should be looking at professional services firms like architects and planners, IT firms, and boutique consulting, legal and financial services firms.  These firms also work in some of our smaller scaled office space. We have a great quality of life and these types of businesses would benefit from that quality of life as well as our proximity to national airport and east coast transportation corridors.

I am looking forward to the final recommendations from the Mayor’s working group and the much needed community discussion about how we want to respond to the challenges in front of us.

Photo Red Updates on what to do in Alexandria

With the passage of the Photo Red Light bill many people have asked how we move forward with this in Alexandria.  The short answer is that we will have to look at this during the budget process.  The technology isn’t inexpensive and the legislature has specifically limited the fines to prevent them from generating positive cash flows for the city.  The allowed fines are barely able to cover the cost of the technology.  This is going to force us to establish a way to prioritize intersections for the technology and to find funding to pay for the installation.  As I learn more, I’ll share it with you.

Pre-K Update

The governor’s proposal to create a quality rating system for Virginia pre-schools has been accepted by the General Assembly.  This voluntary system will help ensure Virginia parents have the best possible information when they are making pre-k choices for their children.  The General Assembly has also provided funding for new pre-K pilot programs to test out the benefits and challenges of public-private pre-k programs. 

I serve as chair of the evaluation committee of the Governor’s Start Strong Pre-K Council.  The Council expects to have its final recommendations for improving access to Pre-K by late summer or early fall.  My committee is working to make sure all decisions we make now and in the future are based on good quality research and evidence about what types of pre-k programs truly help children succeed in school.   There is a lot of strong evidence around the country and with Virginia’s existing pre-school programs that good quality programs improve a child’s success in elementary school and ultimately throughout their academic career. 

March 20, 2007 is Climate Crisis Action Day!

Click here to be a part of the Climate Crisis Action Day in Washington D.C. on March 20, 2007, and tell our leaders we can’t wait any longer.

Visit ClimateCrisisAction.org to sign up today – or to find out other ways to take action right now even if you can’t make it to DC.

3:40:31 PM