Norfolk Tea Party 2 blasts city decisions, calls for another tax reduction

NORFOLK

Councilman Barclay C. Winn said he heard nothing that surprised him from the crowd of 150 or so disgruntled taxpayers who gathered to vent at the Banque restaurant on a cold, rainy Saturday morning.

The city is spending too much money downtown, many said. They want better roads, more police and new schools – not more convention centers or cruise ship terminals.

But most of all, real estate tax rates need to be cut to compensate for soaring assessments.

Those were the messages most often heard at a town hall meeting called by the Norfolk Tea Party 2, formed a year ago to help reduce property taxes.

“There are some unhappy people in the city,” Winn said. “We’ve got some work to do. But I knew that before today.”

The group is circulating 10,000 surveys in part to gauge how much support there is for a 12-cent cut in the tax rate. Saturday’s meeting, called to distribute surveys and hear directly from residents, came four days after city administrators painted a bleak fiscal picture for the City Council.

Assistant City Manager Marcus Jones said that even without giving employees pay raises, the city faces an $18.6 million deficit in the budget to be adopted in May.

Tea Party head Brian Smith told the crowd that if the city weeded out waste in government, the deficit could be closed and taxes could be cut.

Under pressure from the Tea Party, last spring the council reduced the tax rate by 16 cents, to $1.11 per $100 of assessed value. The city administration told the council that was the break-even point, where tax revenues would neither increase nor decrease.

However, Jones told the council that the city actually raised several million dollars more than expected from real estate taxes because residential assessments were higher than expected. Jones, who did not give an exact amount of how much more was raised, said residential assessments rose 17 percent rather than the predicted 16 percent.

That was no surprise to the gathering at the Banque. When asked if their taxes had increased over the past year, most raised their hands.

City officials did not fare well in the same informal poll. Less than a dozen raised their hands when asked if Mayor Paul Fraim is doing a good job. Only two supported City Manager Regina V.K. Williams.

Even Winn and Councilman W. Randy Wright, who helped form the Tea Party, drew mixed reviews when the audience was asked about their council representatives.

Joe Hedrick, a resident of Riverfront, a neighborhood between Old Dominion University and Norfolk Naval Base, said that’s in large part because residents in the city’s suburban neighborhoods feel they are being ignored.

Hedrick said he was appalled that Winn and Wright were the only council members who attended the meeting.

“They don’t want to listen to what we have to say,” he said of the other six council members. “They don’t care – they don’t care at all.”

Dranan Sparks, head of the Bayview Civic League, recently wrote a letter to Fraim on behalf of his organization that expressed “our deep disappointment and dismay at the practices and direction of our city government.”

The letter lamented poor city services and the lack of transparency of city government.

Sparks said the letter is a result of years of frustration that boiled over last fall when Williams hired Alphonso Albert, a former drug dealer convicted of manslaughter, to run a crime-fighting agency. Albert eventually resigned.

“People are upset with how that situation was handled,” Sparks said. “It made the city look incompetent.”

Harry Minium, (757) 446-2371, harry.minium@pilotonline.com