Reply to Break Up Fairfax County and other DC Metro counties.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Greatly increase the county legislative reps & BOE seats to make them more individually/local-communuty responsive.  Make planning boards similarly elected instead of appointed.  Get rid of at-large seats which only reinforce majority hegemony.  Elect them every 2 years.  Pay these elected reps well enough to make the job full time at a reasonably professional level.  Counter the increased cost of their salaries with lower allocations for legislative staff, since they wouldn't need as much outreach support to cover their smaller constituencies.  Force the above with ballot initiatives.

Side benefit: special interests that end up with outsized influence from their campaign contributions would see that influence diluted.

[/quote]

Yeah, and guess what happens, more boards, more councils, etc etc after breakups mean more pols.  More pols mean more govt salaries and lifetime pensions and retirement healthcare plans you now have to fund.  That means a doubling, tripling, or quadrupling of propety taxes and local taxes/fees.

You people never learn lessons from what has already been done before...aka New Jersey.

I can't wait until this happens and then people piss and moan about $50, 60, 90, 100+ k property tax bills per year like NJ.[/quote]

Not exactly.  Don't balkanize into smaller districts.  Still have one Board of Supervisors (or County Council), one BOE, etc., but have more members of each accountable to fewer.  Don't allow seniority to confer, institutionally, greater power.  More pols, yes, each with salaries, but lower than current for the county legislators (BOEs need bumps, though) and with lower numbers of staff (offsetting the increase in legislators), as they'd be expected to handle more direct interaction with constituents since the constituent-legislator ratio would be lower.  And each pol would have less concentrated power.

New Jersey, as another poster mentioned, followed the balkanized, town-by-town path.  That's the one with more councils, etc.[/quote]

FCC has a population of 15k with a real estate tax rate of 1.23% Fairfax County has a population of 1.15M with a real estate tax rate of 1.14%. The economies of scale for local governments are negligible or nonexistent after they get to medium small size in the 15-25k population range. Prince William, Arlington and Loudoun all have lower real estate property tax rates than Fairfax. If anything Fairfax county actually has the opposite problem, it is too big. Our county has already moved into the diseconomy of scale area of the cost curve where government spending becomes more wasteful with increasing population size. [/quote]

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