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Fairfax County supervisors have opened the door to giving property owners tax rebates when the county finishes a fiscal year with a significant budget surplus.
The Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday, May 19, to direct county staff to examine the technical challenges and administrative costs of a potential rebate program. Springfield District Supervisor Pat Herrity proposed the review.
Herrity said the county should consider returning money to property owners when revenue substantially exceeds projections rather than keeping all the unexpected funds.
Board Chair Jeff McKay said supervisors have discussed the concept before, but its complexity prevented them from pursuing it. Technological advances may now make rebates easier to administer, he said.
McKay and Herrity emphasized that the program would make sense only if its operating costs were reasonable. Staff will study the advantages and disadvantages before presenting its findings at a future meeting of the board’s Budget Policy Committee.
The review will also examine Virginia localities that have adopted or considered similar policies, including Henrico and Louisa counties and the city of Richmond.
Louisa County authorized a 3.3% rebate in early 2025 and automatically applied it to tax bills issued later that year. Richmond mailed rebate checks to property owners in 2025, though the process encountered problems.
Virginia has also issued state income-tax rebates. Local governments cannot levy income taxes, however, and depend heavily on property-tax revenue.
State law prohibits localities from operating at a deficit, prompting governments to include financial cushions in their annual budgets. Money remaining at the end of a fiscal year typically goes into reserves or pays for expenses that were not included in the original budget.
Hunter Mill District Supervisor Walter Alcorn supported studying the proposal but questioned whether rebates were the right way to handle surplus funds.
“This comes across to me as kind of gimmicky,” Alcorn said, calling it “a solution seeking a problem.”
Alcorn argued that the county could instead lower the real estate tax rate the following year.
Supervisors recently adopted the fiscal year 2027 budget with a quarter-cent reduction in the rate, bringing it to $1.12 per $100 of assessed value.
Staff revisions provided the board with about $23 million in available general funds for fiscal 2027. Supervisors used unallocated money to boost affordable-housing funding and reverse several proposed cuts, although reductions remained for school crossing guards, Fairfax Connector bus service and other programs.