Loudoun Real Estate Tax Rate Climbs Half-Penny in Budget Talks

BY RENSS GREENE rgreene@loudounnow.com

This year’s real estate tax rate has climbed a half-cent from a proposed 87 cents per $100 of value as county supervisors wrap up annual budget talks.

Supervisors arrived at a tax rate of 87.5 cents, down from last year’s 89 cents. Adjusting the real estate tax rate is the primary way the Board of Supervisors changes the amount of money in the government’s operational budget, and Loudoun’s long practice is to move the tax rate by half-penny steps.

Accounting for the higher average home value since last year, that tax rate equates to roughly $340 more on this year’s real estate tax bill for a homeowner with the average value home, estimated at $691,100.

County Administrator Tim Hemstreet’s proposed budget with its 87-cent tax rate left $1.3 million in unallocated money. Supervisors also got a windfall of $6.7 million in revenues from interest on investments, which had come in higher than assumed in the draft budget. That meant supervisors could add up to about $8 million in spending before the tax rate would climb another half-cent step.

Hemstreet’s proposal was based on supervisors’ direction, and covered only employee compensation, base budget adjustments and hiring and spending necessary to open new facilities as construction completed.

During budget talks, supervisors added $14.4 million in spending, including $3 million more for the school district, 72 new positions—more than half of them in the sheriff ’s office—and funding for programs like composting, an environmental work plan and energy strategy, and Soil and Water Conservation District floodplains work.

The largest single item is a $5 million addition to fund 35 more patrol deputies and one new lieutenant in the sheriff ’s office. The sheriff also got funding for three more deputies as part of an initiative to comply with the state legislature’s 2020 Marcus-David Peters Act, establishing protocols for law enforcement responding to people experiencing a behavioral health crisis. A new Crisis Intervention Team Community Access Response or CITCAR unit will send co-responders along with sheriff ’s deputies to respond to those calls during busy parts of the week.

Supervisors also added $1.6 million to add eight positions to Child Protective Services and nine positions to the public benefits team in the Department of Family Services.

They found only a half million to trim from Hemstreet’s budget proposal. That included saving $53,982 by starting funding for a new school resource officer halfway through the fiscal year—still well in advance of opening the planned school that officer will staff—and cutting almost $4 million from funding for an equipment replacement fund, most of which went to offset the capital costs of new positions in the sheriff ’s office, adding less than a halfmillion back to the county general fund in total.

Sheriff ’s deputies are particularly expensive to hire, due to their training period, extensive equipment, and the practice of buying a vehicle for each deputy to keep at home.

Other new positions added during budget talks include a domestic violence probation officer, a business analyst and a supervising zoning inspector in the Department of Planning and Zoning, a docketing manager for the Circuit Court

TAX RATE CLIMBS continues on page 7