Waynesboro City Council’s vote to set the real-estate tax rate at 82 cents will not be unanimous when it comes up for consideration on Tuesday night.
Vice Mayor Lorie Jean Akanbi said she plans to vote against the tax rate; she supports a higher 89-cent rate for the 2025 fiscal year beginning July 1.
Akanbi told AFP that to get everything in the budget that staff and Council members wanted, the rate would have been approximately $1.06 per $100 of assessed value.
Council members, she said, knew right away that would not work, so they started looking at what they could cut back or eliminate to get the rate down to something more palatable.
The current rate in Waynesboro is 77 cents per $100 of assessed value.
After some discussion, Council got the rate down to 92 cents and then, after more work at a budget work session, landed at 89 cents. The majority of Council members seemed to be on board with the 89-cent rate, she said.
Akanbi was caught off guard when she learned that her fellow Councilors suddenly wanted to drop the rate to 82 cents after they had already advertised the higher rate.
“Out of the blue, the 82 cents came along. I really don’t know how we got to 82,” she said.
Conservative Council members Jeremy Sloat and Jim Wood advocated early for an 81-cent tax rate.
Akanbi said she won’t “go along, just to get along” and will cast a vote against the compromise of 82 cents.
“We’re here for our constituents. It just doesn’t make sense to me that we’re doing all these twists and turns to avoid the inevitable. We are one of the lowest taxed cities within the Commonwealth. We are indeed undertaxed; we’re not overtaxed.
“I don’t think the path is the right path, and that’s it.”
For comparison, the City of Staunton recently approved a 91-cent tax rate. Augusta County held its rate at 52 cents.
If approved at 82 cents, Waynesboro will remain among the lowest tax rates in the state for independent cities with the majority setting a real-estate tax rate greater than $1 per $100 of assessed value.
Akanbi: What you lose at 82 cents
The twists and turns, Akanbi said, means that city employees will get an increase in pay, but later than planned, and it will only provide monies for a new community vitality fund for one year.
Akanbi said the lower 82-cent rate doesn’t bring pay rates for city employees up as much as she’d like to see. Council did a cost-of-living analysis earlier this year, and she doesn’t think the 82-cent tax rate adequately brings pay up to where it should be.
With the 82-cent rate, the city is also pushing salary increases back one quarter, resulting in more savings for the city, but less money in the pockets of city workers.
She said the city is twisting itself into a figure eight doing all these things instead of just adopting the 89-cent rate.
One thing she is happy about: the 82-cent rate will fund six firefighter positions, two police officers (one sworn and one civilian) and two sheriff deputies. She believes that having the public-safety chiefs directly address Council during the budget process helped Council members better understand the need for these positions.
Meals tax already high; could be tied for highest in state
In addition to setting the real-estate tax rate, City Council’s agenda on Tuesday night also includes a public hearing to discuss a potential increase in the meals tax from 7 percent to 7.5 percent.
Akanbi said when this ordinance comes before Council for a vote, she will oppose it. She said the increase wouldn’t have been necessary if Council had held the line and kept the tax rate at 89 cents.
Akanbi said that if Waynesboro adopts the 7.5 percent meals tax, it will be among the highest in Virginia. Akanbi is scratching her head trying to understand how Waynesboro’s rate could be the similar to localities that have nothing else in common with Waynesboro.
For comparison, the current food and beverage/meals tax in other localities is:
- Richmond: 7.5 percent
- Portsmouth: 7.5 percent
- Staunton: 7 percent
- Charlottesville: 7 percent
- Harrisonburg: 7 percent
- Norfolk: 6.5 percent
- Lynchburg: 6.5 percent
- Augusta County: 6 percent
- Albemarle County: 6 percent
- Rockbridge County: 6 percent
- Fredericksburg: 6 percent
- Fairfax: 5.5 percent
- Alexandria: 5 percent
- Nelson County: 2.5 percent
Akanbi advocates for town halls with residents
Public hearings give residents four minutes to speak, uninterrupted, generally with no response from City Council members at a regular meeting.
Akanbi thinks Council can do better than that. She’d like to see Council host a town hall on bigger issues so that they can use the setting to get more input and to serve as an educational opportunity to better explain their thinking and allow for some back and forth with residents.
“I think maybe that will help relieve some of the burden of people getting a better understanding about what goes on and how it goes on and just the lay of the land.
“I think we’re at a point, we have a history of having low taxes, and so people that have been here for a long while have really come to expect that, and it’s not the norm. I think we need to educate the public more about what the norms are.”
City Council agenda
Waynesboro City Council will meet on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in Council Chambers in the Charles T. Yancey Municipal Building at 503 W. Main St.
The agenda includes a public hearing on the meals tax, the second consideration/adoption of the ordinance imposing taxes for the calendar year and the second consideration/adoption of an ordinance establishing the annual budget for the fiscal year – July 1, 2025, through June 30, 2026.
Additional comments from the public will be allowed at the end of the meeting.
Regular meetings are held on the second and fourth Monday of each month. The meeting is being held this week on Tuesday due to the Memorial Day holiday on Monday.
The city’s meetings are available online on YouTube.
Related stories
- Waynesboro: City Council ponders increasing meals tax to 7.5 percent
- Waynesboro mayor: Budget addresses needs of city, keeps it in a forward trajectory
- Letter: We need to remember how much money it takes to run a city effectively
- Letter: Waynesboro would benefit greatly from a Community Vitality Fund
- Waynesboro: Jim Wood is at it again, this time over an extra six bucks a week
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Crystal Graham
