Fairfax County supervisors consider giving themselves a big pay raise
The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors voted 8-2 on March 7 to consider giving themselves a big raise.
Under the resolution, board member salaries would go from $95,000 a year to between $125,000 and $130,000, an increase of as much as 37 percent.
The chairman’s salary could increase as much as 45 percent to $140,000-$145,00 from the current $100,000.
The board will hold a public hearing on the potential pay raise on March 21, 4 p.m.
The pay raises would come at a time when homeowners are facing big increases in property taxes due to rising assessments and county employees are complaining that their salaries are not rising enough to offset inflation.
The proposed county budget for FY 2024 would raise employees’ salaries by just 2 percent, with additional merit and longevity increases.
“Despite our calls for wage fairness for county employees, it appears the county has another priority: raises for politicians,” said Tammie Wondong, president of the Fairfax branch of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU Virginia 512).
“A meager 2 percent raise combined with the crushing weight of wage compression has left us feeling devalued,” Wongdong said. “When employees have to work multiple jobs to get by or can’t afford to live in the county, it’s clear change is needed. Now more than ever, we need to secure a union contract to achieve pay fairness.”
Supervisor John Foust (Dranesville) introduced the pay raise as a way to encourage more people with modest incomes to run for supervisor. “Compensation should not be a barrier to run for or serve in public office,” he said.
Foust is not running for re-election and will be off the board when his term expires in January.
The two board members who voted against the measure are Pat Herrity (Springfield), the lone Republican on the board, and Walter Alcorn (Hunter Mill), a Democrat.
“It is unbelievable that this board would propose a 37 to 45 percent raise for themselves when our residents are struggling with high inflation and a 50 percent increase in homeowner taxes over the last decade,” Herrity stated on Twitter.
He also notes that the budget “does not address the staffing crisis in public safety and other critical county positions.”
Supervisors’ salaries haven’t been increased since 2016. While the position is considered part-time, most board members treat the job as full-time.
Board or council members’ salaries are lower than Fairfax County’s in Alexandria ($37,500), Arlington ($77,600), Prince William County ($43,400), and Loudoun County ($70,900). Those positions are considered part-time.
Council members are paid more in D.C. ($154,400), Montgomery County ($146,400), and Prince George’s County ($134,000), where the position is considered full-time.
If the pay raise is approved for Fairfax County, it would take effect in January 2024.
Excellent news! Our supervisors occupy executive-level positions, and should be compensated as such. They oversee a sprawling county with over a million residents, as well as a multi-billion dollar budget. Frankly, it’s about time.
The proposed salaries are fair & not excessive for the big job these folks do.
The job should be then re-classified as full-time.
Also, what is the total value of the compensation, current and proposed? Salary, healthcare coverage, retirement, an other cost items, including any perqs.
I’m ok with a raise, if they start picking up the garbage on the streets, patrol and ticket the speeding hot rod cars at night, reduce our property taxes and improve our general quality of live.
If not, they are worthless and need to be all fired.
Agreed. This property tax increase every year it just insane. Please get a grip on the damage you’re doing. Causing everyone mortgage and rent to go up every year. Money is worth less, and they keep gouging
I’m ok with a raise, if the BoS start picking up the garbage left on the streets by the terrible County Waste Management, patrol and ticket the speeding hot rod cars at night, reduce our property taxes and improve our general quality of live.
If not, they should all be fired. What a worthless lot!
OMG! The board of supervisors is a part time job. They all can make money outside of (yet surely influenced by) public service. Some do. Moreover, the county executive is just as bad – again claiming a property tax freeze knowing full well that all assessments went up and the county will collet over $500 more. Compounding the challenge is that government employee unions are also demanding an extra pay raise. WE Pay way to much now for horrible services from these folks. Trash collection problems, vagrants pooping and such in public buildings, county police prioritizing criminals due to equity over police enforcement, the county planners actively working to increase density development in Mason while reducing parking to result in more congestion and work trucks parked on the streets, county schools being racist by explicit excluding Asians and whites from college prep programs, and the list goes on and on. When will Fairfax county tax payer live up to the state motto – sic semper tyrannis – and vote these tyrannical officials out of office? If you keep voting for corrupt clowns we have, then the horrible circus continues. It a liberal version of Trump only slightly more cuth.
Sad. Getting a raise for a part time job. These are people who lack the common sense to run a successful bake sale and are easily manipulated by corrupt county staff . They couldn’t figure out how to get the price right on the Lake Accotink dredge. They fail to enforce their own zoning rules. Mostly nice, thoughtful people who have absolutely no business running the county and certainly don’t deserve a raise based on most recent performance – the Lake Accotink fiasco is reason enough to cut their salary.
A bold punch in the face to county residents. Shouldn’t a raise be based on performance? BoS deserves a salary cut based on their performance this year. The justification is a joke. This isn’t leadership – It’s robbery. How do they sleep at night? There are many elderly volunteers at our church who could do a better job than this collection of morons.
Replying to FFX homeowner – nope-because if these people were in the private sector they would be fired because of incompetence – No Raises until ,they stop wasting money -period…no more changing street signs, or school names, no more money for useless social programs…and let law abiding citizens defend themselves on our trails and in our parks – this board loves them some criminals except for The Sup from Springfield…
It’s real easy just to say you’re against everything that our currently-elected BoS is doing, and therefore they should all be recalled, fired, or whatever. But superficial and generic partisan screeds don’t add anything valuable to the discourse. You all sound like angry dogs pulling at the end of your chain leashes in your backyards, barking endlessly at every leaf that blows in the wind. The same interminable loud bark, all day long. It’s tiring, and counterproductive to attaining whatever your goal is.
Watch the BoS meetings and look at their appearance schedules. Attend public meetings in your District. Your supervisor puts forth A TON of time and effort toward his/her job. And it’s safe to presume they’ve all got orders of magnitude more to do than what you and I see. While they might be officially classified as part-time, I’m pretty sure they work AT LEAST as long and hard as the rest of us full-timers, on a myriad of complex and involved initiatives. And I mean ALL of the Supervisors, both Ds and R.
BTW, as far as I can tell, your Springfield Sup spends far too much time simply being reflexively against every BoS initiative. Perhaps he works in the background to influence BoS actions, and that’s the gist of his self-perceived value proposition. But if he reported to me at my company, we’d be having a l-o-n-g talk about how he could reasonably contribute toward meaningfully influencing BoS policy and outcomes, as opposed to just being contentious and dismissive toward the vast majority of Board matters.
When everything they propose is crazy and counterproductive, yes, it’s easy to be against it. Going to the meetings you suggest is also meaningless. My decision is to move to a place the woke have never heard of. You all can have this place. It will be run into the ground like every other leftist experiment.
What place is that?
I am not a fan of a significant pay increase at this point for our supervisors; I think it sends the wrong message. I don’t disagree that it is a pretty thankless job, long hours, lots of competing interests demanding attention, and a pretty complicated arrangement of local, regional, and State bureaucracies that would challenge anyone.
On the other hand, so much of what commenters complain about seems unrelated to the issue. Costs are going up in almost every sector of the economy – not because of our supervisors – and they are responsible to balance the needs of employees and residents. I am a big fan of trails and sidewalks – but the costs of construction of these have doubled and tripled in the last four years. Hiring staff for County agencies is incredibly difficult -there are many vacant positions, working in a County position is pretty much asking to be raked over the coals for any perceived wrongs, and the County pay cannot compete with private enterprise. Can’t get roads cleaned, trails cleared, or signs removed? You have to have people in positions to do this, and they won’t be there if they don’t get what they need – it is a labor market.
Concerns about the “downtown” core of Annandale are misplaced, in my opinion. There have been multiple comprehensive plans for the area, and these all include increased density and reduced parking – even before the “parking diet” was proposed. Just check those plans out online. As many readers of this blog will note, Annandale has been slowly adding new businesses and buildings – all of these add to tax revenue, improving the landscape and, luckily, not gentrifying away what makes our community unique.
Finally, let’s have some consideration for the homeless – there are few resources for them. There aren’t actually that many here in Annandale – just visit Denver or San Francisco to see a real homeless challenge. It was unfortunate what happened in the Post Office, but that speaks more to the need for some appropriate way to accommodate the very real issues associated with the homeless.
All solutions take money, and more money is needed to keep our standard of living where it is or make it even better. I think that the supervisors would be wise to forego an increase at this point in order to show that they are focused on the larger, more expensive priorities that they face.
Fairfax County Police cannot hire officers. As of July 1, 2023 they will be the lowest paid officers in the entire Northern Virginia area, including DC and Maryland. What is the incentive to hire when they can go else were and make substantial more money. Not paying our offices a comparable wage, not being able to retain the current officers we have, and not being able to hire new offices will have a long term effect on the county’s ability to respond to crime and other matters. The county has lowered their standards for new hires resulting in less qualified individuals. Citizens demand police oversight and restraint when responding to an incident. How can that be done when you lower your standards. Just what we need less qualified officers with guns….
I’m not against giving the BOS a raise, but lets be fair all the way around. Our police, fire and teachers deserve more than a 2% raise and a one step in their longevity when they are owed more than that. Their pay and step increases were put on hold during COVID and they have not caught up to what their pay and step increases should be.
Maybe the BOS will think twice about their own raise when they call 911 and no one shows up or an officer who doesn’t know what he’s doing shows up. Or when the “constitutes” are complaining to them about police not responding or being aggressive, whatever the case may be. If you don’t have qualified individuals performing this job then there will be more crime, more police shootings, and more outcry about our police officers. Our county’s crime rate has increased drastically over the last few years. Without being able to hire new qualified officers and the ability to retain our current officers, the County’s crime rate will just keep increasing.
“Supervisor John Foust (Dranesville) introduced the pay raise as a way to encourage more people with modest incomes to run for supervisor. “Compensation should not be a barrier to run for or serve in public office,” he said.”
So $95k/year is not lucrative to those with modest incomes? What kind of asinine reasoning is this?
A 37% increase in salary is ridiculous, regardless of the fact that supervisor salaries “haven’t been increased since 2016”.
How about a 4% increase in pay? Something a little more standard to those with “modest incomes”. Many wager-earners cap out at $95k, and you want to increase that to $130k? Gtfo.
This is shameless and I hope for a good turnout in opposition to this on March 21st.
The rationale for a pay increase for the Board of Supervisors is not “our pay hasn’t increased in seven years.” Rather it is “here what we have accomplished for the residents of Fairfax County in the past seven years that has earned the members of the Board of Supervisors 37%-45% pay increases.” Given that, does anyone really consider that the performance of the Board of Supervisors over the past seven years warrants ANY pay increase at all, much less increases in that range? I certainly don’t. I would rather see my taxes increase so that Fairfax County employees can be given higher pay increases than to give any member of the Board of Supervisors a single cent more than he or she now receives. These folks are completely out of touch.
this is clearly going to be a minority comment here, but I am for raises for not only the BoS, but also School Board. It has nothing to do with how I feel current people are doing at their job, but rather how what kind of talent can be pulled from to run for those positions if the wages remain suppressed.
First of all, let’s be clear that both BoS and School Board positions are in all practical senses full time positions. For both of these positions, full day meetings during the workweek are regular occurrences in addition to extremely long night meetings that can go into the morning depending on testimony. Depending on committee assignments, community office hours, and other constituent services, the hours stack up. The ability to hold another regular job while holding those positions would be extraordinarily difficult.
At current rates, only independently wealthy people or people with another significant income stream (married partner or retirees with pensions) can realistically run and live off of those wages in fairfax county – much less attempt to raise a family. We are cutting out a lot of people who may wish to serve their communities as a representative but simply could not afford to do so. I’ve personally considered it, and while I have no fantasies that I would actually gain enough support to be elected, I’d barely be able to cover the mortgage at those salaries and the ridiculous values we have in the area.
I don’t know about you, but I’d appreciate a wider breadth of candidates for these offices. Hell – we don’t have ANY candidates for school board announced!!!
The salaries of these elected officials is the tiniest of drops in the bucket of the county budget. It’s easy to hate on this proposal because we love to hate on these officials.
Anyways… I get I’m probably very lonely in this opinion, but I thought I’d share a contrary view.
A well-reasoned view.
Why not make these positions full time, as everyone says the hours warrant it?
yes leadership can be a crummy job – lots of scrutiny – lots of blame. Has any decent leader worth their salt ever complained about it. Public service is thankless – and hard – but if you love it and the people you serve, it’s worth it. They are already paid more than enough if their hearts and egos are in the right place.
yes leadership can be a crummy job – lots of scrutiny – lots of blame. Has any decent leader worth their salt ever complained about it. Public service is thankless – and hard – but if you love it and the people you serve, it’s worth it. They are already paid more than enough if their hearts and egos are in the right place.
BoS, nothing but a bunch of bottom feeders. If they did something useful they may get their county’s constituents to support them. But they do nothing, can’t even pick up leaves from last fall. There is only one thing they do well: tax and spend.
Be gone BoS, before a house drops on your heads!
Oh, no. They only serve the developers, the people who pay to get them elected. They could care less about the people who pay property taxes. And they will diminish anyone who gets in their way. The developers and their cronies are the ones who call anyone who says anything about their pet projects NIMBYs. In my case that is not true. We need new development, but there is a sinking office market and retail sector and a reckoning is coming, or perhaps already started with two bank failures. And these problems are global, not just here in Fairfax County. This group is clueless and instead of focusing on redevelopment — where there is already access to public sewer and water — it only wants to destroy what is left of our environment without care about our drinking water. And VDOT wants to solve all our problems by putting down more asphalt. Just what we need. Instead of putting resources into creating better transportation options so people can actually get out of their cars, they are haphazardly putting down multimodal pathways connecting to nowhere in the hope they will connect somehow, someday. But no crosswalks. God forbid people have to actually cross a street to get where they are going. And who doesn’t want to walk on hot pavement in the summer, no shade there because all the trees will be gone. You just can’t make this stuff up.