The owner of a typical single-family home in Arlington will have to pony up about $12,650 in taxes and fees for local-government services in the coming year, up about 4 percent and another in a string of all-time highs, under County Manager Mark Schwartz’s proposed $1.54 billion fiscal 2024 budget unveiled Feb. 18.
The proposal, which kicks off a two-month budget season, suggests no change to the existing real-estate tax rate of $1.03 per $100 assessed valuation, even though most county homeowners got hit with higher assessments to ring in the new year.
County Board members on Feb. 21 are set to advertise the maximum tax rate for the coming year, which likely will be at least the $1.03 recommended by Schwartz.
Unlike leaders in other local jurisdictions, Arlington board members have been steadfast in refusing to lower real-estate tax rates during the pandemic era, even as home prices skyrocketed and homeowners were forced to dig deeper under the cushions for the cash to fund government operations.
Under the budget plan unveiled by a perhaps understandably tired-looking Schwartz on Feb. 18, about $933 million of the overall revenue pie will fund general government operations, up 2.1 percent from the current fiscal year, with $607 million going to county schools, an increase of 7 percent.
The report to County Board members was slightly less downbeat than one delivered in December, when Schwartz had suggested there would be a $35 million gap between revenues and planned expenses that would need to be filled.
“Tax-revenue growth was higher than we anticipated,” he told board members in Feb. 18 remarks.
The $12,650 figure for a typical household’s tax burden is a GazetteLeader estimate of the costs associated with ownership of a single-family home valued at $1 million, and includes real-estate taxes (with stormwater fees included), vehicle taxes, water/sewer fees, refuse-collection fees and utility taxes. The county government releases its own tax-burden estimates based on the overall assessed valuation of residential property, which includes condominiums and townhouses as well as single-family homes, and clocks in for the upcoming year at $10,655.
Refuse/recycling costs for households are slated to rise 33 percent to $409, owing to new contracts that are significantly more pricey than before, Schwartz said. Tax bills on vehicles are slated to be down slightly from a year before, but Schwartz has recommended returning to using 100-percent valuation for tax purposes, up from 88 percent during the current budget cycle.
Fees for some recreation programs also will rise, as the county government continues its efforts to recoup 100 percent of costs.
Not discussed much was the the elephant in the room: What will happen to millions of square feet of office space – and the deluge of tax revenue it brings in – if a work-from-home environment lingers? But Schwartz did have some good news to report on one segment of that market.
Hotel taxes are “very close to where we were pre-pandemic,” he said, the culmination of a long slog back from 2020, when hotel rooms went largely unoccupied.
The public will get its say on all this at hearings slated for March 28 and 30, with County Board members slated to adopt the fiscal 2024 budget on April 22. The new budget goes into effect July 1; real-estate taxes are retroactive to Jan. 1.
