Opinion

The Right Note is a weekly opinion column published on Thursdays. The views and opinions expressed in the column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ARLnow.com.

If you have ever attended a Saturday morning County Board meeting, you probably know it kicks off with a public comment session at 8:30 a.m. If you want to hear about the issues buzzing in the community, public comments are a great place to start.

What could be on the docket this week?

The county brought in a podium, loudspeaker, Congressman Moran, and three County Board members to have a ribbon cutting for a sidewalk in Pentagon City. This monumental event comes on the heels of losing the National Science Foundation to Alexandria and the Signature Theater bailout. Maybe this event falls into the “any port in a storm” category?

Speaking of the Signature Theater, Treasurer Frank O’Leary reports he received the delinquent tax payment bailout for the property. For those counting at home, this has no real impact on our bottom line other than an accounting maneuver to erase a debt, with exactly zero public hearing time on the subject. In essence though, each and every one of Arlington’s approximately 210,000 residents just contributed about $1.20 to the arts. The remaining question is, how does the theater plan to pay next year’s bill or is this just going to be an ongoing line item in our budget?

The urban agriculture report is in, and it attempts to strike a middle ground on backyard hens — saying larger yards could have them provided they meet certain conditions. Many people believe that regardless of the conditions, permitting any hens will cause an enforcement nightmare for the County. The ball is now in the Board’s court, or coop.

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The Right Note is a weekly opinion column published on Thursdays. The views and opinions expressed in the column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ARLnow.com.

According to a 2009 announcement, the Artisphere was supposed to be open 12 hours a day, seven days a week, attract over 250,000 visitors a year, become profitable in three years, and spur additional economic development in Rosslyn.

Two years later, the Artisphere produced massive first-year operational cost overruns and revenue shortages that would require escalating taxpayer subsidies for the foreseeable future. County Manager Barbara Donnellan produced what she deemed “a much more realistic plan.”

The new plan has still failed to put the Artisphere on a trajectory towards self-sufficiency. The bottom line is that we have pumped millions of taxpayer dollars into it, and the Artisphere is still nowhere near fulfilling the promises the County Board made to us, not once but twice.

Last week, we learned that the County Board had voted unanimously to bail out the Signature Theater to the tune of $250,000. The bailout covers the theater’s delinquent taxes — taxes they chose not to pay in an effort to “control expenses”. This bailout led one newspaper to deem the theater “too fabulous to fail.”

How would this have gone over with Treasurer Frank O’Leary if the offender had been anyone but a county-backed project? Quite possibly, it would have been sold to pay the debt.

Instead, the County Board essentially made a simple spreadsheet maneuver. The taxes were magically marked as paid courtesy of the rest of us who pay our taxes every year while controlling other costs in our budget. The money is still in the general fund to be spent elsewhere this year, while the theater is simply off the hook.

If you reach back into your memory banks, you may remember the County Board’s approval of another theater project in January 2012. As part of site plan concessions, the County will receive a black box theater on Wilson Boulevard. The County will pay to fill in the developer-provided shell, but it will make out well on the lease, at $1 a year. This is a similar deal to the 15 years of free rent for the Artisphere. The new theater will likely not be saddled with the repayment of a huge construction loan, something Signature still owes to the tune of $7.8 million.

So, will the financial honeymoon end soon after operations begin as it did with the previous two projects? According to the press release announcing the new theater last January:

“County staff will work with the Arlington Commission for the Arts and others to develop a business plan and economic options for the operations of the theater. These will address a series of cost, use and operational alternatives for review by the County Manager in the preparation of future budgets.”

Hopefully these are not the same county staff who assisted with the Artisphere’s original business plan or its “new” and “more realistic” plan. Of course, if they can count on the County Board for ongoing subsidies and bailouts, creating a business plan is little more than an intellectual exercise anyway.

The bottom line is Arlingtonians deserve more accountability than we are getting from our taxpayer-funded arts endeavors.

Mark Kelly is a former Arlington GOP Chairman and two-time Republican candidate for Arlington County Board.

The Right Note is a weekly opinion column published on Thursdays. The views and opinions expressed in the column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ARLnow.com.

On the way down to Richmond for the GOP convention, I found myself in the stop and go (mostly stop) traffic caused by the hazmat incident that shut down I-95 south for four hours. After slowly making our way around some back roads, my wife and I arrived at the junction of highway 17 and I-95 just as the interstate was being re-opened.

While waiting for the traffic to move, I spotted a man walking in the middle of the highway with water bottles and realized it was none other than Terry McAuliffe. The Democrats’ presumptive nominee for governor was politicking with fellow stranded motorists — a smart political move. There is no question that McAuliffe has a larger than life personality, an asset he is sure to bring to the campaign trail this year.

Before the Republican convention was gaveled to a close the next day, Virginia Democrats were attacking the Republican ticket as “too extreme for Virginia.” If that sounds familiar, it is precisely the same rhetoric they used unsuccessfully four years ago.

My counterpart here at ARLnow, former chairman of the Arlington Democrats and current State Democratic Committee member Peter Rousselot, got the memo and joined in the attack. In fact, he has written multiple columns attacking Republican nominee Ken Cuccinelli. In last week’s column he even presumed to know what Arlington Republicans would think about the entire 2013 GOP ticket.

Rousselot’s most recent column did drop the specific criticism of health clinic regulations, presumably in light of the horrific Kermit Gosnell case in Pennsylvania. At the same time, Rousselot has written exactly zero columns supporting his party’s candidate. I do not recall that there has even been a single supportive sentence in his columns for McAuliffe.

This “attack first” strategy should not come as a surprise. McAuliffe failed to impress Democratic primary voters four years ago. He was called out as a forum shopping candidate with little to offer Virginia Democrats. He eventually lost the nomination contest convincingly to State Senator Creigh Deeds, who went on to lose to Governor McDonnell by more than 17 percentage points in November.

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