Marshall Surpervisor Candidates

Below are my initial thoughts on the candidates for the Marshall seat on the Fauquier County Board of Supervisors.


Michele Noel

My first impression of Michele was her website. My advice? Get a proof-reader--and someone who knows how to maintain websites wouldn't hurt either.

The Website
All of this should be taken with a grain of salt--Mr. Schwartz doesn't even have a website for his campaign.
I found the site difficult to navigate.  Modern websites typically have the page header link back to home, but her's doesn't.  The major issue I had with the website layout was that when on one of the pages here if you click on "business" you get linked to "public safety", and if you click on "home" you get "business". This is a really simple mistake which screams "unprofessional" to someone who is quick with a mouse (or track-pad in this case).

Proof reading
It doesn't help Michele's case that on education, Michele's website has a note about the school budget:

"It comprises over 60% of the counties[sic] budget. We need to effectively manage every penny of the school budget." (retrieved September 26, 2011).

There's a little bit of irony in the two errors here. 
The first is already marked with the [sic].  This can be easy to overlook, but it should read "county's budget" instead.
The second takes a bit of knowledge about the county, because it is actually the school board that manages "every penny" of the school's budget.  The Board of Supervisors is only tasked with managing the transfer of local funds (mostly property taxes) into the School Board's budget.

Current Conclusion
It appears that Michele is a fresh personality on the political scene, which may appeal to a lot of voters since Mr. Schwartz seems to have a political past (at least in attempting for office). She leaves me the impression of a great person who has done a lot and wants to extend her contribution to the county as a whole. The talking-points described on her website seemed pretty canned, but I can't wait to hear her at the upcoming forum to see if her website is simply a "work in progress" fluke.




Peter B. Schwartz, Incumbent

I can't find much information about Peter, besides what is listed on the county website.

VA Election History
He ran as a Democrat back in 2001 for the Virginia House of Delegates, District 18. Peter grabbed 37% of the vote in the three-way race against the Republican candidate, Clay Athey who pulled 54% of the vote.
Peter won his current seat on the Board of Supervisor in an uncontested election back in 2007.

Current Conclusion
Color me cautious. From the little information I have, I believe I have good reason to start off being cautious.  During his 2001 bid for the House of Delegates, Mr. Schwartz outspent Mr. Athey by more than 330% (for a total of $220k) and lost by a 17 point margin.  Granted this is a Republican-leaning area, but I think it can be called a failure for outspending your opponent by that margin and losing by that much.  Like Mrs. Noel, I also can't wait to hear Mr. Schwartz at the upcoming forum.

Fauquier County Board of Supervisors

On November 8th, 2011, the Fauquier County Board of Supervisors seats are up for election. As you may recall, Fauquier County has 5 Magisterial Districts: Cedar Run, Center, Lee, Marshall, and Scott.  Each of these districts have a member on the Board of Supervisors.

As it turns out, only two of the seats are contested in the general election this year. On Wednesday, October 5th at 7:00 P.M., there will be a Board of Supervisors Candidate Forum at Warrenton Middle School.

The seats are as follows, with the uncontested districts first:

Center District

Chris N. Granger (defeated Supervisor Terrence L. Nyhous in the Republican primaries on August 23rd)

Lee District

Incumbent: Chester W. Stribing

Scott District

Incumbent: R. Holder Trumbo, Jr.

Cedar Run District 

D. Lee Sherbeyn

Charles C. "Charlie" Dixon

J. M. "Jim" Stone

Note: Current Supervisor Ray Graham is not seeking reelection.

Marshall District

Michele C. Noel

Incumbent: Peter B. Schwartz

FY2012 Budget and County Debt

The Fauquier County fiscal year runs from July 1st of one year to June 30th of the next with the label of the year applying to the year in which the fiscal year ends. So, in other words, FY2012 stands for "the Fiscal Year ending June 30th, 2012".

Now that we're all pros at understanding why budgets are called what they are, lets dive right into the big numbers.

The total budgeted amount of spending across all of the funds is $260,566,628 with the major portion, around $154.2 million, being allocated to the General Fund.  This general fund includes several categories, but the big one is the School Division Operating fund. Below is a chart showing the allocation of all finances within the General Fund. I've clumped together a couple of the smaller line items into an "other" category for now.

Do you see the "Capital Improvements Fund"?  It shows up as 0%, but its actually $200k.  What is the Capital Improvement Program fund (CIP)? Well, it is the county's way of keeping track of capital projects and funding for those projects.  Simply said, this fund is for building stuff.  There is one small twist though because the $200k allocated to this fund is actually a down payment on the planned debt for the year, which is $17.2M.  For those of you not as quick with numbers, $200k is equal to that $0.2M on the end of the $17M.   So I decided to play with the numbers and see what the chart would look like if you include the full $17.2M in the budget rather than the 1.16% down payment.  Essentially, this is what the fund allocations would look like if we paid in full for these building projects. Below is the result.

Ahh, much better.  So, you can see that if the CIP were fully funded this Fiscal Year (FY), it would account for about 10% of all funds allocated to the General Fund, without making cuts anywhere, simply increasing the funding.

Some financial/pie chart nerd out there has seen another number already--the "Debt Service Fund".  The Debt Service fund is used to pay the principal and interest on currently accumulated debt.  In the adopted budget this adds up to be 9% of all spending in the General Fund.  I decided to look around a bit and see if I could find a policy on how debt is handled in Fauquier County, and I found the the County Fiscal policies, Debt Issuance & Management section.  This section has a few key items, included below.

The County will consider the use of general obligation debt 

on facility construction projects or acquisitions requiring at least $25,000,000 in debt 

issuance.  Issues requiring the threshold amount of debt issuance shall be subject to 

voter referendum regardless of the financial mechanism.  

Simple enough.  Any debt needed over $25M and the voters get to choose.  What else is there?

Debt Capacity:  The County’s debt capacity will be defined as 10% of the aggregate 

total of budgeted revenue in the General Fund, Volunteer Fire and Rescue Fund and 

the Conservation Easement Service District Fund.

Wait a second, what?  The "debt capacity" is 10% of those 3 funds?  Well, it appears (does anyone know for certain?) that debt capacity refers to the amount of debt the county can handle in a given year.  So this definition would apply to the Debt Service fund, which weighs in at about $13.5M or 9% of the General Fund. 

But what about the amount of debt compared to the amount of money spent by the General fund in a single year?  Using the numbers discussed above with the charts, we see that just this year around 10% is being added to the debt.  Even if you take into account the few million allocated for the other funds, you'll only see those numbers drop by about 1% more.  A little more digging reveals the numbers that there is currently $115.5M in outstanding/unpaid debt.  If you take this FY's $17.0M addition to the debt plus the $115.5M unpaid debt and minus the debt service payment of $14.7M (assuming all goes to principal and none to interest--hey, this is a conservative estimate) you end up with a Debt to General Fund percentage of 76.4%.

Personally, I'd like to see this number a lot lower.  If I live to be 253 years old, like Fauquier County, I would hope that I would be able to save a few million here and there ahead of time and pay for projects in cash, rather than spend hard-earned tax-payer's money on interest payments. After all, if the $13.5M this year spent servicing the debt were saved up, the county would almost pay for their building improvements completely instead of paying interest on it for several years to come.

Ok, there's one last item I wanted to mention from the county's debt policy before you stab your eyes out.

Cash Financing: The Board of Supervisors will attempt to fund not less than 10% of the 

Capital Improvement Program’s construction costs from current financial resources

You'll recall from above that the debt projected to be added during FY2012 is only 1.16% funded this year. That is a lot less than 10% and I would venture to say a very poor "attempt" at funding towards a 10% down payment.   Well, if you look at the numbers a bit more, you'll notice that if you average the debt added and the down payments made over the 6 year plan held by the CIP that this down payment number averages to be over 18%.  That's not too bad, but I'm not sure I read that policy as, "not less than 10% averaged over 6 years".  

About this blog

I am a transplant resident of Fauquier County.  Since moving here I have had problems finding information about my county, especially relating to the local government. As a result, I have decided that I would research the local government and topics of concern and then write about what I learn so that others could benefit as well. This blog is the first product of that idea. My initial plan is to cover those upcoming local elections (November 2011 General Elections) which relate to Fauquier County specifically.

To kick off this blogging effort I am including links to voting district maps.  Fauquier County labels these Magisterial Districts, of which there are 5.  These include Lee District, where I live in the southwest part of the county, Cedar Run in the southeast, Center District is in the center around Warrenton, Scott in the northeast, and Marshall District in the northwest.

Below I have also included links to the Virginia State voting districts which cover Fauquier County.  I will be covering the elections in these districts in the near future starting with the ones in which I live.

Note: These include from the Virginia Division of Legislative Services (DLS) and Google maps from the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP).

Virginia House of Delegates
District 18 - DLS - VPAP - My home district which covers (area wise) much of Fauquier, Culpeper, all of Rappahannock, and parts of Warren counties.
District 31 - DLS - VPAP - Covers part of Fauquier County as well as parts of Prince William County
District 88 - DLS - VPAP - My previous district which covers the Remington area of Fauquier County, parts of Stafford and Spotsylvania Counties, as well as parts of Fredericksburg.

Virginia Senate
District 27 - DLS - VPAP - Covers all of Fauquier, Clarke, and Frederick counties as well as small parts of Culpeper, Loudoun, and Stafford counties.