Righteous Red Pen 2025: DOGE comes to Charlottesville City Hall (or how to save $86M)

Charlottesville’s City Budget is out of control. General Fund spending has spiraled from $172M (2017-2018) to $252M in the current cycle (2024-2025)—an increase of nearly 47% in just eight years.

Contributing factors to the City’s spending orgy include:

• Inept city management
• Mission creep
• Lack of cost-control incentives
• Unbridled real estate assessments and subsequent taxation
• City Council’s disdain for taxpayers
• Socialist influence in local government
• “Free” Federal money

Most recently, Charlottesville announced a $22-$28M budget surplus for the fiscal year, which it intends to confiscate rather than return to its rightful owners (taxpayers). In a February 4 interview with WINA radio, Charlottesville Vice-Mayor Brian Pinkston made the following justifications for City Council’s arrogation:

• Something unexpected might arise
• We have better use for it than taxpaying individuals
• It’s a “blessing”

This criminally careless attitude toward private property (money) is shared by all of Charlottesville City Council (an exclusively Democrat body), as displayed by their complete lack of advocacy for returning the pillaged loot.

In 2012 and again in 2020, the Schilling Show engaged in a budget-trimming exercise known as, The Righteous Red Pen report. In these brief evaluations tens-of-millions of dollars were eradicated from the bloated budgets of both Charlottesville City and Albemarle County.

Today, local citizens face an even worse situation as spending (and taxation) skyrockets with no end in sight. In addition, Federal and State government squandering has created substantial inflation—a silent and destructive tax on the wealth of individuals and families.

At the Federal level, there is DOGE, President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, which to-date has saved taxpayers over $46B and climbing.

In Charlottesville, sadly, there is no DOGE, nor is there interest in efficient government.

With complete absence of rational local public policy makers, the Schilling Show has assumed responsibility for suggesting ways to sizable reductions in local public expenditures.

The following conclusions are based on the premises that:

• If citizens must make do with less, so must government
• Government spending is extremely bloated
• Pre-pandemic levels of spending should be the goal
• Government must reduce the number of employees
• Government must contain employee salaries and benefits
• Department heads should be tasked with finding at least 10% departmental savings
• Wherever practicable, government should outsource to private entities
• Surplus taxpayer dollars should be returned
• Low taxation is a hallmark of good governance
• Government should not be in competition with private charity
• Government should not be in competition with private business
• Marginal capital projects should be cancelled

Two hours of budget study and analysis has yielded $86M in budget savings for Charlottesville‘s general fund and capital expenditures. Conservatively, this total should allow for a 20-to-30-cent tax-rate decrease, with plenty of room left for contingencies (based on $1.1M per-penny on the real estate tax-dollar, budget document p. 58).

For public review (and municipal implementation), following is the Righteous Red Pen report 2025, DOGE edition: