This Monday, Aug. 11, the Falls Church City Council will convene at Berman Park at 6 p.m. to participate in a ribbon cutting calling attention to improvements made to the much beloved neighborhood park located between 229 Kent St. and 234 Irving St. It will highlight the new playground equipment provided and pedestrian crossings adjacent to the park. Then the Council will come to City Hall to meet closed to the public at 7 p.m. to obtain legal advice. The regular business meeting will convene at 7:30.
Two foci of this meeting will be on modifications to the City’s Solid Waste Policy and affordable living policies. On the second matter, the Council will consider extending criteria for income-based exemptions to City real estate taxes to assist more retired, disabled and lower-income households.
The more consequential policy will involve a major modification in the City’s policy for collecting waste that over 3,000 household addresses in the City currently have picked up every week from their curbs.
The new plan that the Council discussed at its work session last week and will take up officially this Monday involves a shift away from including the cost of the service in the general real estate taxes that all citizens and businesses pay, and to replace it with a special fee that would be paid only by those who use, or benefit from, the service.
This means that the multi-year complaint of residents of multi-family buildings, apartments and condos, have raised for many years, especially those from the Lee Garden condos on N. Maple St., that they’ve been required to pay for a service they don’t get, themselves.
The new policy would fix that problem, although it won’t extend the service to the multi-family buildings or the businesses. It simply would no longer include the cost of the refuse collection service from being included in the tax bills to those entities.
The new plan would involve a two-tier “pay as throw” fee program, based on what size city-provided waste, or garbage, cart is used. In tandem with this, the overall real estate tax rate would be lowered for everyone.
“The City aims to realign the curbside solid waste program by replacing the uniform real estate tax rate for all taxpayers with a fee structure,” a City staff memo to the Council succinctly states. Additionally, a new ordinance would expand composting curbside service through a third cart for organics. As stated at the meeting this week, simply, “Those who get the service pay for the service.”
Overall, the cost involved is about $1.2 million.
The proposed new ordinance would involve a modification of Chapter 34 of the City code and would, if approved by the Council, go into effect this fall.
At the work session earlier this week, a preponderance of the Council appeared favorable to the change.
The cost of the annual fee discussed at the session would be $355 annually for those who use smaller 35-gallon carts, and $390 a year for those who use larger 65-gallon carts. In exchange, there would be an overall 1.8 cent reduction in the real estate tax rate.
The service would center on the 80 percent of single family homes in the City that range in assessed value from $750,000 to $2 million, about 3,000 addresses.
Billing for the service would be included on the twice-yearly bills for real estate taxes. There would also be fee relief provided for lower income, senior and disabled residents.
According to the report to Council, the idea of extending the service to include multi-family and condo units was not enthusiastically received by representatives of those units, so that, and the fact that providing that service would be “complicated” led to the decision not to include them in the new policy.
Plans for the change were hammered out by members of a Solid Waste Task Force that City Manager Wyatt Shields called into being earlier this year, headed by Deputy City Manager Andy Young and staff from the Department of Public Works, Finance, Treasurer and Communications offices. Residents from single family homes, condos and townhouses were also appointed, and its meetings were open to the public.
The Council is expected to grant first reading to an draft ordnance to implement the new policy this Monday, and to give it a second reading final OK in early September, which needs to happen by then in order to get the policy in place this fall for the December tax billing.
