Vienna Resident Speaks Out

Does anyone realize that these studies are a self-perpetuating cycle created to increase salaries of public employees? It's a simple cycle, an increase occurs in a locale and then that increase is used to increase the salaries in the next locale and so and so forth. It's a great Merry-Go-Round if your on it. It's an interesting comparison for me personally, since I worked many years until very recently in the Civil and Electrical engineering professions doing very complex and important work to ensure the safety of dams in the U.S. and in other countries, and I never approached the salary levels that are proposed for some of the town employees. There is something very wrong here. If anyone wants to look into what engineers are paid for instance with private engineering firms, it's easy to get that information, and the level of work should be a part of such an effort. While some people may have seen their taxes stay about the same or in some cases go down this year, our neighborhood was hit yet again by Fairfax County with an increased tax assessment of 8.34 % based on homes valued in the millions of dollars when our homes are valued at a fraction of the comparison homes. This is on the heels of last year's double digit increase and the dramatic increases over the last 6 years. There is no let up and no mercy. We DO NOT get annual income increases remotely approaching the increases this stealth salary study proposes, nor can we expect anything near what the study proposes in the future. It's time that we clean the entire slate of elected officials if we cannot have some sanity in Government and some constraint in the level of spending. I'm fed up.