The city of Norfolk got rid of the city sticker in January 2005. What they didn’t eliminate was the decal fee, which is now a part of the personal property tax bill. Now Fairfax County has become the first locality in Virginia to eliminate both the sticker and the fee.
The change was approved by the Board of Supervisors this spring. Households, on average, will save $58 a year, county officials said, and Fairfax will lose about $20 million a year in revenue.
Chairman Gerald E. Connolly (D) said when he proposed the idea in January that he wanted to balance property tax relief between homeowners and other constituents who own cars but not homes.
Now there’s an idea – giving tax relief to everybody. (Actually, it is something that I had proposed during my campaign.) The fact that Fairfax is willing to lose $20 million in revenue pales in comparison to the amount of revenue Hampton Roads localities earn from the sticker fee. Suffolk, the region’s latest city to eliminate the decal, only generates about $1.4 million. The sticker revenue in Norfolk was estimated to be $3.5 million at the time the stickers were elminated.
Now I understand that Fairfax is much richer than Hampton Roads’ cities, but surely we can at least reduce the sticker fee.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Amen, Vivian. I am tired of paying for something we no longer need. Now I know why the city councils were so willing to go along with getting rid of the sticker. They got rid of the expense without losing the money. I still have my old sticker on my car. I’m going to need a jackhammer to get it off after all the time it has been on there.
http://hrconservative.blogspot.com
It would have been nice if the budget actaully decreased by 20 million. Oh wait it increased
Why is that? Did real estate tax revenues make up the difference?
I am interested to see how FFX County will keep its compliance and tax delinquency under control without the decal. And how it was done in the past (was it done?), since the DMV data do not give localities information on out-of-state or out-of-area vehicle owners.
vjp basically yes real estate revenue made up the difference
FY 2007 Revenues 3.23 Billion
FY 2006 Revenues 3.02 Billion
They also did the whole look we are reducing your real estate tax rate when the actual bill still increased. Basically, its going to get ugly when real estate starts to level off. The market has cooled quite a bit so the FY 2008 budget will be very interesting.
The argument against is that the decal revenue diversifies the tax base beyond just the homeowners.
Ingrid – I wondered what your take on this would be. As I looked at the Norfolk article, the collection of deliquencies was a concern. I would suspect that there will be some loss there, if the DMV data is not complete.
novamiddleman – All of the localities are going to be facing that issue as real estate values level off. That’s one of the biggest arguments against a huge reduction in the rate. It seems to me that the prudent thing to have happened over the last few years is that the localities set aside some of the increased real estate revenue in a rainy day fund to deal with the leveling of revenues that is bound to take place when the real estate values stop increasing. I fear that is not happening and, instead, we will be looking at increasing real estate rates in the realtively near future.
insider – I would generally agree except that the (now increasing) personal property tax already does that. Giving relief to homeowners with no corresponding relief to non-homeowners just seems unfair to me. When real estate taxes increase, non-homeowners end up paying for it thru higher rents. How many of them get any benefit of a lower real estate rate? My guess: none.