Candidates vying for the Democratic nomination for Arlington County Board seem to have accepted that a significant chunk of empty local office space is not going to be reoccupied with a traditional workforce any time soon, if ever.
“It’s a shock to walk around and see how empty some of those buildings are – it’s not a good look,” said Jonathan Dromgoole, one of the contenders vying for the party’s nomination for the seats being left open by the looming retirements of County Board members Katie Cristol and Christian Dorsey.
Dromgoole and other aspirants squared off in an April 11 forum sponsored by the Arlington County Civic Federation.
The county’s office-vacancy rate already was on the rise in the pre-COVID era, and today is above 20 percent and could well go higher if employers downsize owing to fewer workers in the office at any given time.
Candidate J.D. Spain Sr. said county officials may acknowledge the problem, but have not put forward a coherent strategy to address it.
“Doing the same thing we’ve been doing isn’t going to work,” he said. “I don’t think the County Board has figured [it] out.”
Spain suggested getting innovative, recruiting lab-science and biotech firms (“they can’t work from home”), while others on the dais proposed everything from more child-care facilities to indoor farming to pickleball emporiums.
Tony Weaver said county officials need to be more open to converting existing office space to residential properties, despite objections from some that it is technically challenging.
That should not be perceived as a roadblock, Weaver said. “This is a solvable problem,” he said.
Candidate Susan Cunningham echoed the theme of “adaptive reuse” into residential, and also pushed for recruiting education and recreation providers to fill available space.
Candidate Maureen Coffey also pressed for providing more options. “Office space is not going to be used the way it used to be,” she said.
Candidate Natalie Roy served up the broadest array of options, pressing in her remarks for child care, indoor agriculture, recreation and housing as prospective uses for excess commercial space.
“We need to be creative going forward. We need to think outside the box,” she said.
Nine million square feet of Arlington office space currently is sitting idle, and things may get worse, the county government’s economic-development director told County Board members during a recent budget workshop.
With the possible exception of hotels, office buildings are the biggest cash cow the Arlington government has, bringing in oodles of tax revenue and requiring relatively limited government services in return. Because they are assessed (and taxed) based largely on the basis of rental income, empty or half-filled buildings mean the county government’s budget takes a hit.
If vacancy rates remain elevated in a post-COVID world, and if existing commercial properties across the county are razed or redeveloped for residential use, that causes another budget challenge. Residential properties, particularly if school-age children live in them, are money-losers for the county government, owing to the county school system’s high per-student costs.
Example: A residential property valued at $1 million brings in roughly $10,300 a year in real-estate-tax revenue, but the county school system would expend about $40,000 a year if there were two children who attended public schools living there – before any other government services, from public safety to roads to libraries, are factored in.
With tax revenue on the commercial side fading, homeowners have been bearing the brunt of the increasing tax burden since the onset of the pandemic. Unlike neighboring jurisdictions, the Arlington County Board has declined to lower tax rates to offset three years’ worth of much higher home assessments, largely because the additional revenue is needed to prop up the county government’s capacity to issue capital-improvement bonds.
The fact that the Civic Federation and some other county organizations have begun holding candidate forums in the spring, in addition to traditional autumn debates, is an acknowledgment, if perhaps a belated one, that Arlington has solidified into a one-party community where, frequently, the only elections that truly count is the ones in which Democrats choose their nominees.
Four of the Democratic contenders are first-time candidates; Cunningham previously ran unsuccessfully as an independent for County Board in a special election, while Spain unsuccessfully challenged Del. Alfonso Lopez in a Democratic primary.
Also participating in the April 11 program was perennial candidate Audrey Clement, who has announced plans to run for County Board as an independent.
Clement, as she has in the past, pressed for reuse of commercial properties for residential purposes.
