By Heather Michon
Correspondent
Fluvanna County residents will see lower real estate and personal property tax rates under the budget adopted by the Board of Supervisors on Wednesday night (April 20).
The total budget came for the Fiscal Year 2023 came to $98,029,405, a decrease of 13.2 percent over the amended FY2022 budget.
The real estate tax was set at $0.87 per $100 in assessed value. County management analyst Tori Melton told supervisors that the average homeowner would see a drop of around 1.58 percent on their tax bill.
Personal property taxes will drop from $4.35 to $3.70 per $100.
The business tax rate will stay at $2.90 and the machinery and tools tax will stay at $1.90.
The largest increases in expenditures were seen in school funding, where the county will pay about $1 million of the school system’s $5 million budget, and county staffing, where cost-of-living, salary increases, and rising health care costs totaled $550,000.
The cost of public safety rose as well. The sheriff’s office budget was increased $249,000, and the E911 budget was increased by $220,000. Fire and rescue received an additional of $161,000.
The largest drop in expenditures over FY22 was in the Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) which is used to fund expenditures focused on building, upgrading repairing, or replacing equipment and infrastructure.
Last year, supervisors voted on a massive $25 million CIP package to fund long-delayed projects like school bus replacements and the construction of a new county office building.
As anticipated, this year the CIP was a more modest $4.5 million.
During the discussion before the vote on the budget resolutions, Supervisor Mozell Booker said in her 32 years of county services, there had never been so much revenue as there was this year.
“I just feel like we ought to drop another penny on the real estate tax and I would even want to drop some off the personal property tax,” she said.
She also called for fully funding all nonprofit requests. “When the COVID hit us, those people did not stop for one minute,” she said.
Booker acknowledged that it was late in the budget season to look at changes, and while fellow supervisors agreed with her broader points, there was no appetite to delay the vote to a special session on April 27.
However, there was consensus that the way the Board currently hears non-profit presentations during the budget season needs to change, so supervisors can better assess each organization’s needs.
The resolution to adopt the FY23 budget passed 5-0.
OTHER MATTERS:
During a presentation on VDOT’s six-year transportation plan for the county, VDOT representative Scott Thornton told supervisors that crews had completed the removal of tree debris from January’s catastrophic storm along the interstates, including 100,000 cubic yards along the section of I-64 that passes through Fluvanna. Crews will continue to work on clearing secondary roads with an estimated completion date of June. “Whether that’s the beginning of June or the end of June…opinions vary,” said Thornton.
Supervisors voted 5-0 to allocate $601,500 from American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds to Firefly Broadband as matching funds for a state grant awarded to Firefly. ARPA rules allow funding to be put to the expansion of rural broadband. The remaining $4,137,070 in ARPA funds were allocated to “revenue loss” to cover government services. This is a category under ARPA and gives the county flexibility in using the remaining funds before the program expires over the next four years.
Supervisors also approved a $4,500 expenditure by the Registrar’s Office to create an updated Political Road Index map to verify voting districts after last year’s redistricting. The mapping was last updated in 2018.
