Thank you Governor
Here's the link. Very good news.
We'll have plenty of time to battle the Governor on other issues -- but he gets full credit here for taking a firm position on this issue which was critical to the taxpayers and kids of Fairfax County.
Now we still have to resolve the rest of the state budget.
Sounds good. So, on what will the funding calculations be based now? I'm somewhat familiar with how counties fund their schools, but not the state funding.
Frank: Basically, the state uses the LCI formula to calculate "local wealth" for each jurisdiction. Then they rate the localities on a scale of 0 to 1, with higher scores having higher wealth (and thus getting less state money). The LCI is based on an aggregation of a number of econ statistics, with the most important being the value of RE in the locality.
Thank you so much for your hard work lobbying the Governor on this issue. I'm so pleased that the NoVA delegation successfully made the case for the LCI adjustment.
I am far more of a Republican than a Democrat. For example, I voted for Gov. McDonnell. However, I will sometimes vote for the Democratic candidate if I think he or she is the better person for the job (example: Jim Webb vs. George Allen).
I also contribute to the campaigns of Northern Virginia politicians outside of my district. I do that because I want Northern Virginia to have high quality representation in Richmond. Chap Petersen is one such candidate.
It is times like these that convince me I have made the right decisions. Chap is too modest to write about his role in all this. McDonnell was originally going to keep the LCI freeze. He was smart enough to wait before talking but I am convinced that he was on the way to preserving Kaine's freeze. Then, the Northern Virginia delegation to the General Assembly did something the political "masters of the universe" in Richmond didn't expect. They started rallying the voters of Northern Virginia. Some crossed their own party lines and criticized Democrat Tim Kaine's idiotic freeze.
Chap Petersen was one of the leaders of this uprising. Scott Surovell was another. I can't vote for either of these gentlemen since I don't live in their districts. But I can write checks.
Well done Sen. Petersen!
I believe that Gov. McDonnell weighed the political pros and cons of the freeze and, based on the uprising, saw it as a political negative.
Those who led the uprising will have my support. Those who did little to nothing (such as Sen. Janet Howell) shoiuld expect both my vote and my money to go to her opponent in 2011.
I urge all Northern Virginians to join me in supporting those who support us - regardless of party.
This "victory" for NoVa comes at the expense of the rest of the Commonwealth and puts your friends at a disadvantage when the conversation turns to 2013.
I don't understand why it isn't fair. NoVA schools are seeing dramatic enrollmment increases, and we still pay for about 70% of our school budgets with local taxes. Downstate enrollment is dropping, and localities are only responsible for about 50% of their school budgets. The LCI adjustment is fair - it will help keep NoVA strong and it will help us keep up our tax revenue base, which ultimately benefits the entire state.
I am unfamiliar with enrollment projections for every jurisdiction across the Commonwealth, but it is clear from this change of formula, if it survives, that money that otherwise would have been provided to each City and County not in NoVa will be re-directed northward, leaving each jurisdiction to either make additional cuts or raise additional tax revenue than had the formula been left alone. The economy is NoVa is robust compared to many other places in the state, but residents of each of those places, from wealthiest to poorest, will see either a tax increase or a reduction in service so residents of the most affluent area of the state can derive a benefit. It will be hard to characterize that as fair in those places so adversely effected.
It's not a change in formula. The LCI is scheduled to be adjusted every two years. Kaine proposed freezing it, but it's scheduled to be adjusted this year. Why is it okay to adjust it in years when it doesn't benefit Northern VA? I am a strong supporter of public schools all over Virginia (and in fact, Northern VA funds them, and I'm fine with that), but I don't understand why it's unfair that our school system, which is the 12th largest in the country, should get more money in a year when OUR real estate tax revenues also declined. Our school enrollment is up by about 9,000 students since FY08.
No one concerned with education around the rest of the Commonwealth ( outside of NoVa) will care about your point. You have not refuted mine. We in the rest of the state see money being shifted from poorest to richest. Don't tell us it's fair, because we're not buying.
One more time. 9,000 more students in Fairfax county. They don't matter?
I'd like to apologize to Senator Petersen - this is probably not the place for this conversation. But I would also like to say that I can see there's another side to the issue besides the Northern VA side - I understand that schools in other areas of the state are suffering just like ours are. I hope that you, kingfish, can see that we in NoVA care as much as our schools are you do. There is obviously a larger problem with education funding. Education should be a very high community priority in all of our communities, and dramatically cutting funding won't help anyone. And it obviously doesn't help unite the citizens of our state, either.