After a Decade of Tarter, Certain to Be a Woman

The newly constituted Falls Church City Council will commence its business this coming Monday night with the election of a new mayor. With David Tarter now off the Council, choosing not to seek re-election in November to end an unprecedented and accomplished 10-year stint as mayor, Monday’s vote will be for someone new for the first time since 2013.

Sources have told the News-Press that only one thing is almost certain at this point, which is that the new mayor will be a woman.

That is because as a result of last November’s election and the official swearing in of the newly-elected ones last month, fully six of the seven seats on the Council will be held by women. With the three women elected last November – current vice mayor Letty Hardi being re-elected to a third four-year term and newcomers Erin Flynn and Justine Underhill being elected for the first time – the Council now consists of those three plus Marybeth Connelly, Caroline Lian and Debbie Shantz-Hiscott. The lone member upholding the cause for the male species is veteran David Snyder, who has been on the Council since 1994.

A City Council composed of six out of seven women! That is unprecedented in the City’s 75 year history, and such a lopsided majority for women is highly uncommon for any senior governing body of any jurisdiction in the entire U.S., it may safely be said. It is not lost on many that this development comes as the City’s first woman mayor, Carol DeLong, having served four terms in the role in the 1980s, passed away just last month at age 93.

(Now, some are hoping for a national news-making seven out of seven sweep after the next Council election in November 2025, but Snyder, as the only remaining male now, or other males contemplating a run, may have something to say about that).

Although there have been no formal or informal meetings among the new Council going into this Monday night (being that the law forbids any assemblage of more than two Council members for purposes of any political decision making without giving formal advance public notice). But there have been countless opportunities for casual exchanges between two of the members at any given time, including while crossing paths on a sidewalk, at a supermarket, at a public event or at the Farmer’s Market on Saturday mornings.

Out of such informal encounters, or by shared notes, email, text messages or phone calls, it is almost certain that a consensus, or near consensus, may have already been reached by a majority on the Council, and so it can be expected that come this Monday night, no great amount of time will be taken nominating and voting either for the mayor, or the vice mayor, for that matter. There may be speeches, of course.

But no one is sharing information on plans for this Monday, not with the News-Press at least, other than the comment of Council member Marybeth Connelly that “there is a general agreement that while Mayor Tarter did a highly commendable job for 10 years, no one thinks that one person should ever serve that long as mayor again in Falls Church, especially given that the position is not elected directly by the public.
It may be that there is a plan afoot for a formal provision to require that the mayor’s post be rotated every two years, as is the case now in Arlington with the chair of its county board.”

But that may not take the form of a formal change to the rules, but merely an informal one.
Informal oddsmakers are predicting that current Vice Mayor Hardi will be elected mayor Monday, having been the top vote getter in the November 2023 election and on the basis of her current role as vice mayor.

But while this Monday’s first meeting of the newly constituted Council will be largely ceremonial, the business of running the city will quickly take center stage over the course of the month, keyed around the push to adopt new annual operating, school and capital improvement budgets and whether there will be room for any further real estate tax cuts beyond the 13-cent cut it adopted two years ago.