Shaun Kenney represents the Columbia District on the Fluvanna County Board of Supervisors and also serves as the board’s vice chairman. He was elected in 2009, when he defeated incumbent Marvin Moss by a narrow vote of 544 to 506. Kenney is also well-known around Virginia as a political activist and blogger.
On May 3, Kenney spoke with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about the Fluvanna County board’s recent budget decisions and assessed the budget process with suggestions for how that process can be improved in the future.
Raising the Tax Rate
In the week prior to the interview, the Fluvanna Board of Supervisors had voted 4-2 to raise the county’s property tax rate from 50 cents per $100 of assessed value to 54 cents, an increase of 8 percent.
Asked what the argument was in favor of raising the tax rate, Kenney replied:
“Really, there wasn’t much of an argument for raising. It was more of a Band-Aid® to take care of problems that have been created by the previous board.”
Offering his “honest opinion,” Kenney said that the 54 cent figure “was a number that stuck to the wall to paper over previously existing problems. We really haven’t solved anything by doing it at 54 cents. In truth, we’ve actually made the problem a little bit worse.”
Deeper Issues
Kenney had argued against the tax raise during the budget discussions, saying that more fundamental problems needed to be addressed.
“The problem with the budget situation we have in Fluvanna,” he said, is that “there’s 10 cents for the debt service alone, which we have to come up with for the new high school. There’s an additional 2 to 4 cents that we have to come up with to replenish our cash reserve, which was raided by the previous board of supervisors. There’s an additional penny that we need to come up with for an emergency 911 system, something we’ve needed to update for the last ten years and haven’t.”
Moreover, he said, “there’s also the additional questions and controversy revolving around the Zion Crossroads water pipeline project.”
But, Kenney noted, “We haven’t even taken one step in addressing any of those issues whatsoever.”
Instead, he continued, “the most we did was paper over the demands of government with a four cent tax increase and have not even come close to addressing the other concerns we have. They’re staring us down and frankly next year we’re going to have no choice but to wrap our arms around it.”
Refining the Process
Next year’s budget decisions will come during an election year, Kenney noted, “so it’ll be interesting to see exactly where the cards fall.”
Kenney hopes that in 2011 there will be some changes in the budget process itself.
“This year,” he said wryly, “it seemed a little bit more like ‘budget bingo’ rather than a budget ‘process.’”
What happened, he said, was that “at the end of the night, people were posting the budget up and putting in for their pet projects and then walking away, but they really didn’t address any revision or long term goals or anything along those lines.”
Kenney hopes that next year people in Fluvanna County will “see a lot more cohesion among certain Republican members of the board to try to come up with a budget that actually makes sense this time.”
What Kenney wants to happen is “a little bit more of a construct around our budget process to try to meet our goals rather than just react to current events.”
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