Opinion: As James City County budget adoption looms, disconnect between supervisors and residents is glaringly apparent

Binging James City County Board of Supervisors meetings is a bit like watching sausage being made. The pattern becomes legible. So does the queasiness.

The pattern is this. When residents stay home, they are described as apathetic. When residents show up, they are told they don’t understand the budget. When residents organize, the petition is acknowledged and set aside. When residents testify at a public hearing, the board moves to closing remarks and talks about something else.

Underneath all of it, holding the pattern together, is something simpler: the board does not count taxes the way residents count taxes.

Residents count cumulatively. They live one household. The bills arrive in one envelope or one inbox. The property tax goes up. The meals tax goes up. The water bill goes up. The ambulance fee goes up. The sales tax has been higher than that of any other Virginia county for seven years. Each piece is small. The pile is large. Residents have been doing this addition for months. They are doing it at kitchen tables and on the way to work and during the part of the night when the bills don’t let them sleep.

The board counts categorically. Each tax is a separate conversation. The meals tax is presented in staff calculations of “96 cents for a couple” dining out. The property tax is presented as a “three-cent reduction” from the prior rate. The new admissions tax is presented as a credit-rating instrument that “would play very well with the rating agency.”

The utility increase, the ambulance fee, the speed-camera revenue, the regional sales tax surcharge — each is its own line, in its own meeting, defended on its own merits, compared to its own narrow set of jurisdictions. Nowhere in the budget deliberations does any supervisor request a single number representing what a typical household actually pays this year that it did not pay two years ago. That number does not exist in the board’s deliberations. It exists in residents’ kitchens.

If you watch enough of these meetings, you start to notice why the board’s math diverges so sharply from the residents’ math. The supervisors say so themselves, on the record, in their own words.

The Chairman, defending the meals tax increase: “The question is whether somebody would stay home from their night out to save a dollar or two. I don’t think that’s likely to be the case.” When a colleague down the dais interjected that she did, in fact, consider the differential when choosing where to eat, the Chairman replied: “Well, good for you.” Then a few sentences later: “Maybe I travel in different circles.”

A supervisor on the disabled veterans tax exemption, which he qualifies for at fifty percent and would receive in full if his rating reached one hundred: “I would be really reluctant to take that exemption because I have the assets to be able to do it. People who don’t have the assets are the ones I think that we really need to be helping and protecting.” The line was honorable in intent. It was also a public disclosure of personal asset sufficiency, on the record, in the middle of a budget debate over whether to expand relief for residents who do not have those assets.

Another supervisor, at the same May 5 work session, used several minutes of floor time to correct two colleagues over the colloquial name of one of the regional taxes. The exchange was substantive on its own terms. It explained where that tax’s revenue went and what it had funded. It happened in a meeting that included no discussion of what residents pay across all the county’s taxes combined, no presentation of any household total, no use of the words “cumulative” or “burden.” The energy was available to defend the name of one tax. The energy was not available to add the others.

These are not gaffes. They are descriptions. They describe the experiential context from which the supervisors are making decisions about other people’s experiential contexts. “Different circles” is honest. “Save a dollar or two” is honest. “I have the assets” is honest. The dais is not split by party or politics. It is split by whether the cumulative math reaches the supervisor in his or her own life.

The frustration with this board is not that it spends money on the county. It is that no supervisor on this board has been willing to hold both halves of the resident position at the same time. The county has services worth funding. The cumulative tax bill has reached the point where many residents can no longer absorb it. Both are true. At the previous meeting, one supervisor tried a version of the middle ground; by the next meeting, he had returned to the working majority’s position. The chair where someone would sit who held both halves at once is empty.

This is what the disconnect looks like in operation. Seventeen residents testified at the April 14 public hearing. None spoke in favor. The audience applauded after every speaker. When the board moved to closing remarks, no supervisor addressed the property tax rate, the meals tax, or the cumulative effect of the increases the seventeen residents had just described. A petition opposing the budget direction had been presented to the board twice on the public record by then, with the count more than doubling between presentations and collection still active.

The Chairman’s response was that he was “not quite sure” why people were “gathering petitions to have us do something we always do,” and that petition-signers should instead “take advantage of the opportunities that we have provided over the last several years to better understand the budget.” A May 5 work session decided the rate without taking a single public comment.

I have spent the last several months sitting with the public record of this Board going back more than a decade. The pattern is not new and it is not a function of the people currently in the chairs. It is what the room is set up to produce. What is new this year is the size of the cumulative tax bill the room has produced, and the number of residents who have done the addition.

On May 12 at 5 p.m., at the Government Center on Mounts Bay Road, the board will have a public comment period, during which the question facing residents is the total. Residents will need to add. The board still won’t.

The seventeen will come back. Some of them, anyway. Others will join them. They will speak across whichever of the three hearings they pick. They will say, in their own words, what they have been saying for months. The board will hear them, or will appear to. Then the board will vote.

The question of who this board still belongs to is being answered in the sign-up line.

Tommy Turner is a researcher and citizen-analyst based in Williamsburg.