By Heather Michon
Correspondent
A meal tax may be on the agenda for the Board of Supervisors in 2025.
Fluvanna voters rejected a meals tax in a 2018 referendum, triggering a six-year cooling period before it could be revisited. In 2019, the state law changed to allow boards to implement the tax without a referendum.
Whether or not Fluvanna’s supervisors want to take that step prompted a lengthy discussion at their first meeting of the year on Wednesday (Jan. 8).
The meals tax would apply to the two dozen county restaurants and in-store delis serving ready-to-eat foods, but it would not apply to groceries.
Several neighboring counties have instituted meal taxes. Charlottesville and Albemarle charge the highest rates at 6.5 and 6 percent, respectively, while Louisa, Greene, and Nelson counties each charge 4 percent.
County Administrator Eric Dahl estimated a 5 percent tax rate could net the county between $300,000 and $600,000 annually.
Supervisor Tony O’Brien (Rivanna) noted that those figures could rise significantly once the Wawa at Zion Crossroads opens. “The average Wawa makes $13 million annually, with about 50 percent of that coming from deli and prepared foods,” he said.
O’Brien, along with Mike Sheridan (Columbia) and Tim Hodge (Palmyra), supported taking the issue up for a vote in the coming weeks or months.
“When you only have two tax levers to pull—real estate and personal property—if you need to increase or decrease, it’s on one of those two,” said Hodge. “Isn’t it better to have three or four?”
Sheridan suggested some of the money could be set aside to pay for future school construction projects.
Chris Fairchild (Cunningham) and Mike Goad (Fork Union) were more skeptical. Fairchild, in particular, saw it as another burdensome tax on county residents.
While a meals tax would theoretically be paid in part by people passing through the county, “I don’t know that I can go back into my area and say, ‘This isn’t a tax on you,’ when we have one restaurant that only people in Fork Union eat at,” said Goad.
With a majority of members in favor of moving forward, county staff will bring a proposed ordinance to the floor at a future meeting.
Waterline
A long-running discussion over building a mile-long extension to the Zion Crossroads waterline may have come to an end, as supervisors voted 4-1 to deny future action on the project.
The West Waterline Extension was proposed by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) to give relief to a cluster of houses whose wells were fouled by a petroleum release several years ago. Extending the waterline 1.1 miles further down Rt. 250 would provide clean municipal water to those households.
DEQ offered the county $1 million to facilitate the construction of the extension, but as Dahl explained, the ballooning costs of construction had pushed the costs over $2 million. He presented several potential funding options if the supervisors wished to move forward.
In their deliberations, some of the supervisors argued that the limited opportunities for business development on that section of Rt. 250 made the extension a poor investment for the county in the short term.
Organization
At the top of the meeting, Fairchild and O’Brien were unanimously elected as chair and vice-chair for the year. Meetings will continue to be held twice a month in the main courtroom of the county courthouse. The first meeting of each month will start at 5 p.m., and the second meeting will begin at 6 p.m.
