The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors acknowledged it – tacitly – a couple of weeks before, and on Dec. 17, equally tacitly, the Arlington County Board did the same.
Homeowners can expected to get hammered at tax time next year.
With values of commercial properties having declined during COVID (if you can’t fill them up with tenants, they can’t be taxed as high); with the local governments soon to be taken to the cleaners in the collective bargaining that they imposed upon themselves and the tax-paying public; with home assessments likely to be higher in 2023 than they were in 2022 despite the recent slowdown – all suggest that homeowners will be the default source to fund expansive government spending in Northern Virginia.
And one wonders if elected leaders even really care about the impact the increasing taxes are having on the working-class residents trying to retain a presence in the two counties despite an ever-increasing cost of living.
(Give Fairfax officials credit; they at least reduced the tax rate a little earlier this year to partially blunt the impact of rising assessments. Their ravenous counterparts in Arlington wouldn’t even take that step.)
It seems like the increasing burden being placed on lower-middle-class and middle-middle-class homeowners in the two jurisdictions is as much under the radar screen of the powers-that-be across in Northern Virginia as the hidden inner-city crime waves and rural opioid-abuse ruination are at the national level.
But one can only ignore systemic problems for so long. When Northern Virginia wakes up one day and its middle class has high-tailed it elsewhere, don’t blame us: We were the ones sounding the alarm.