Nobody wants to throw cold water on the now-ongoing holiday season. But it seems that with things so horribly wrong in Washington now, and so deeply impacting lives in our region, disproportionately in fact, bad news just heightens the desire to find joy in our holiday traditions.

So to be clear, what came out of Monday’s Falls Church City Council and School Board annual joint meeting to set parameters for the coming year’s budget cycle was not good news. Worse, the projections for the coming year did not take into account the first month, this October, when the fuller impact of the mass federal government and consequential contractor layoffs began being more fully felt. The data for October won’t be known for a few more weeks.

But the bottom lines for what the City’s schools will need and what the City expects to bring in are already showing a significant disparity. With the schools locked into new collective bargaining agreements, the necessity of meeting annual step and cost-of-living increases for all school personnel, lower than usual revenues overall, calculated on the present real estate tax rate, will confront our local lawmakers with some genuine challenges this spring. Holding the line on that tax rate will be the most difficult aspect.

With residential tax assessments expected to rise by roughly six percent, even with the present tax rate of $1.185 per $100 of assessed value, and even as that represents a 16 cent cut from an earlier level, taxes will not insignificantly go up for homeowners next year. The scissors crisis (to coin an economic phrase from 100 years ago) is the contrast between the rising costs of owning a home, on the one hand, and shrinking government revenues combined with a rising unemployment rate, on the other. On that score, although Falls Church is a very small jurisdiction, the unemployment rate here has spiked due to White House policies, and as the City’s new chief financial officer exclaimed at the meeting this Tuesday, with his federal employee wife furloughed until the month-long government shutdown ended, they never ate out in order to save money during the shutdown, adding to the problem of shrinking meals tax revenues.

The other big story is the Weldon Cooper study done for neighboring Fairfax County, reported in this edition, which shows that Fairfax sends twice as much money to Richmond as it gets back. It is similar for Falls Church and other Northern Virginia jurisdictions, too. On top of that, the City is burdened with making another large contribution to the Metro system. With the state and Metro themselves not looking at rosy situations, it is hard to see how much will be able to come from any revisions there.

So, thank heavens for the Little City’s recent years’ economic development push. But for the revenues coming, and expected, from this development, things would be far worse here. Therefore, as they say, let’s count our blessings.