Hold back growth and taxes, northern James City residents urge their representatives

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Supervisors Tracy Wainwright, left and Barbara Null listen to constituents. (Williamsburg Watch photo)

More than 100 residents of northern James City County crowded into a town hall put on by their supervisors Thursday night and pushed for a slowdown in development and lower real estate taxes.

The town hall at the Croaker library was sponsored by Stonehouse District Supervisor Barbara E. Null and Powhatan District Supervisor Tracy Wainwright, who have emerged as a board minority pushing back on county taxes and spending.

Town halls by supervisors are not official government meetings where votes are taken. But unlike a public hearing, where citizens do not engage in conversations with the supervisors, the town halls provide a question and answer format, with county staff on hand to answer specific questions.

Thursday evening covered a variety of resident concerns and questions. But the main topics returned to overdevelopment and taxes.

“When is enough, enough in terms of development in the upper part of the county?” said Bonnie Winston, a resident of the Elmwood subdivision. To the applause of most of the room, she urged the two supervisors to vote against the proposed Bluffs at Kiskiack development in Croaker, which would build 704 homes as well as mixed office and commercial space and house the Presidents Heads museum.

Residents outlined a litany of complaints brought on by rapid development, from crowded roads to dangerous intersections and crowded schools.

Jim Etchberger of Woodland Farms then turned the conversation to double digit growth in home assessments, which he said are raising taxes and pricing lifelong residents out of the county.

Null and Wainwright said the supervisors had discussed ways of capping assessment increases, and Null said she would be in favor of a Proposition 13 solution. Proposition 13 was approved in California in a 1978 voter referendum that capped both home assessments and property taxes, after decades of rapidly growing home prices.

“The other way to bring down your real estate taxes is to bring down county spending,” said Wainwright, to more applause from the room. “If you watch the (video of the meeting where the board approved the current county budget) Ms. Null and I were the only ones who asked for reductions in spending. And we were overruled.

“That is the only way to reduce your real estate tax rate, “ she said.

Residents also expressed concern about the impact in county water supplies from new construction.

Doug Powell, general manager of the James City Service Authority that runs water and sewer, said the county was in the process of renegotiating its permit to draw groundwater with the state Department of Environmental Quality.

He said if the new permit lowers the county’s permitted water draw, it would have to look at using treated wastewater, building a desalination plant at a cost of $250 million or more, or buying water from the Newport News Waterworks system.