Letter to the Editor
A writer challenges Stafford's Board of Supervisors to "choose your hard."
Choose Your Hard
The saying “choose your hard” aptly frames life as a series of hard choices and equally hard consequences. You wouldn’t know it from the current stir of popular political rage in Stafford, but “Choose your hard” also frames our current tax rate dilemma quite well.
Let me explain. Some politicians claim if we hold the line against increased taxes, we will avoid Armageddon-scale consequences. Don’t get me wrong – I too have bills that seem to grow faster than my salary. However, we need to acknowledge that when we choose higher tax bills, we are paying more for services that are also typically better. When we pay less, we pay for the resulting diminished services in tradeoffs – the hard choices which include:
More thorough facility maintenance now, or more expensive repairs later
Faster response from more seasoned deputies, or slower response from fewer deputies who eventually leave Stafford for better pay elsewhere
Fully developed emergency services, or cheaper but riskier fire and EMT capabilities
More and better-educated teachers who bring critical skills to the classroom, or more substitutes with less education in bigger classes, with predictable effects on student outcomes
School bus systems that serve all residents, or atrophied transportation departments that require large “no service” areas and staggered school bell schedules
Libraries that provide full services to our student and adult community, or ones that are often closed and offer less to the county even when they are open
Parks that provide well-tended recreation areas and ample sports facilities, or fewer, more crowded and austere facilities
Stafford already trends toward the austere, but a bill has nonetheless come due; in 2021 the Board of Supervisors voted to use federal grants from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) to pay for sheriff deputies’ raises. ARPA funds expired on December 31, 2024, requiring Stafford to begin paying for the raises from the general fund. All other things being equal, the cost to taxpayers should be embedded in a two-cent increase in the real estate tax rate.
However, hard-liners of the Stafford Republican Committee have resolved that Republican supervisors Bohmke and English must join Crystal Vanuch in refusing any residential real estate tax increase until a review of Stafford and SCPS budgets is conducted. Apparently, the local GOP intelligentsia are unaware that the supervisors already review both budgets annually at public meetings and work sessions. Also, they seem unaware the School Board and Supervisors already hold annual joint meetings to discuss SCPS budgets in detail. In their defense, GOP elites might not know of the joint meetings because Republican supervisors have a habit of canceling the meetings and missing the meetings they don’t cancel. Vanuch’s manufactured crises are even more noteworthy in that the 2021 effort to use ARPA funds for the deputies’ pay raises was her brainchild. If she is successful, Stafford will face the GOP-made dilemma of funding the deputies’ pay raises by cutting existing programs, or cutting deputies’ pay. Trust me, they’ll try to cut the school budget.
To make matters worse, this policy stand was voted in at last week’s GOP committee meeting by 70 mostly unelected die-hards who plainly felt their little group was more worthy of influencing supervisors than the 54,000 voters from their districts who were cut out of the discussion. This is today’s Stafford GOP in a nutshell – alarming citizens and then promising them salvation for the price of their votes, sidelining the same voters, and hiding the real price of GOP policies while party elites serve themselves in undisclosed ways.
Don’t be fooled – all decisions come with costs. Know the costs to you, your family, and your community. Choose your hard, or it will choose you.
Michael Parkyn
Stafford County
Local Obituaries
To view local obituaries or to send a note to family and loved ones, please visit the link that follows.
Support Award-winning, Locally Focused Journalism
The FXBG Advance cuts through the talking points to deliver both incisive and informative news about the issues, people, and organizations that daily affect your life. And we do it in a multi-partisan format that has no equal in this region. Over the past year, our reporting was:
First to break the story of Stafford Board of Supervisors dismissing a citizen library board member for “misconduct,” without informing the citizen or explaining what the person allegedly did wrong.
First to explain falling water levels in the Rappahannock Canal.
First to detail controversial traffic numbers submitted by Stafford staff on the Buc-ee’s project
Our media group also offers the most-extensive election coverage in the region and regular columnists like:
And our newsroom is led by the most-experienced and most-awarded journalists in the region — Adele Uphaus (Managing Editor and multiple VPA award-winner) and Martin Davis (Editor-in-Chief, 2022 Opinion Writer of the Year in Virginia and more than 25 years reporting from around the country and the world).
For just $8 a month, you can help support top-flight journalism that puts people over policies.
Your contributions 100% support our journalists.
Help us as we continue to grow!
This article is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. It can be distributed for noncommercial purposes and must include the following: “Published with permission by FXBG Advance.”
There is a lot to digest in the mar 29 letter by Michael Parkyn which he or someone headlined "Choose Your Hard". Mr Parkyn spends part of his long letter denigrating the Stafford GOP Committee and Republican Supervisors for questioning and resisting a proposed County Budget for next year of over $1 Billion. It is difficult to find comparable figures over time to determine exactly how fast our budget has grown over time, but the figures I can find show expenditures in FY 2017, just 9 years ago of just over $500 Million.
He makes what he considers a telling point in opposing the GOP's call for a review of the Stafford budget before acquiescing to the large tax increases needed to sustain the spending of a billion dollars. His point is that Stafford budgets are already reviewed during the budget process. What he doesn't acknowledge is that when budgets get that large, it it easy to hide significant sums and difficult to find them without dedicated effort to do so. Whatever you might think about the accomplishments of the DOGE team at the federal level, they are uncovering large expenditures that no thinking American would defend.
Mr Parkyn also dedicated much of his letter to what amount to a series of false choices. Apparently he believes that any cutting of any part of the budget will lead to catastrophes that he alone can foresee.
Republicans believe in a judicious approach to spending the hard-earned dollars of citizens. This includes as much transparency and citizen input to the budget process as possible. Several Virginia Counties utilize citizen review boards to help identify low-priority line items in budgets. As far as I know Stafford only uses one only for the School budget.
Les Gabriel, Stafford County