Wishful thinking. The road to hell is paved with good intentions and the law of unintended consequences always takes over. Breaking up into smaller anything will absolutely end up in more councils, more schools, more police, more fire, more trash, more sewers, more public workers, and more pols. Taxes skyrocket in the end to pay for all of the salaries, pensions, and healthcare handouts. No thanks. NY and NJ are disasters of a tax burden specifically because they went down this rabbit hole. |
Let me guess, your new county would magically have a tiny fraction of the poor population. |
While we are at it, lets split northern VA from the Tidewater and the mountain areas into three states and Maryland into two states and so on. |
I love town government. True democracy at work. |
Yes, it’s very possible that your taxes could drop and the local community would get more control. |
What a majority of people - anywhere not just in metroDC - do not want is change. People will rationalize this in various ways, but the bottom line is people do not want change.
If we already had lots of towns, then people would like that and would not want more centralized county government. Since we already have the more centralized county government, most people here do not want lots of towns. |
Can you blame them? I know people in the City of Alexandria paying $20,000 a year in property tax only to have half the schools filled with non citizens. Do you send 20K to.... Uganda every year? If not, then STFU. |
You misspelled residents. |
+1. And the mayor is married to a drunk felon. |
Recovering victim of the US mental healthcare system. |
It is the same situation in Fairfax with costs for ESOL services exploding in the last few years. You get what you vote for. |
Correct. The efficiencies and benefits of scale are obvious. |
There are diseconomies to scale after a certain population size. Fairfax County is already well past the optimal area of the cost curve and its size is only making it more wasteful with spending money. NYC has a much larger population and higher density, but it actually spends more per resident than Fairfax county $13,611 per resident vs. $10,245 per resident. This argument about "benefits to scale" is just flat out false after a certain size and the optimal size for efficient government spending is well under 1 million residents. |
Fairfax county is one of the best governmentally run units in the country. No it should not be broken up. I would expand by eliminating all of the cities in the county. |
Sorry -- this is a dumb comment. |