Three-Way Race For County Chairman Heats Up

Editor's note: This is the second part of an ongoing series on the race for chairman of Prince William County. The first article in the series can be read here.

Prince William County residents will have three choices at the polls this November for county chairman.

The incumbent, Corey Stewart, is a Republican who has made a name for himself with national headlines on his tough stance against illegal immigration.

Democrat Babur Lateef is a newcomer to the local political scene. He's an eye doctor who moved to Woodbridge in 2002 when he opened a new practice.

John Gray has spent 35 years as a certified public accountant who has challenged Stewart before in the race for the Occoquan District supervisor.

Corey Stewart

Corey Stewart (R) has been the Chairman At-Large of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors since his first term in 2006. Before that, Stewart served on the board in 2003 as the Occoquan district supervisor –a position currently held by Mike May– for three years. He is originally from Saint Paul, MN, and now lives in Woodbridge with his wife and two sons.

Stewart said he has cut $140 million from the county’s budget while lowering the real estate tax rate to its lowest average amount in three years. Although there was an average tax bill increase of about $70, Stewart said the bills are less when inflation is factored in. He also touts his zero tolerance on illegal immigration and improving transportation.

As a lawyer who works in Washington, D.C. Stewart is well aware of the traffic nightmares that commuters face each day that the board approved last month, Stewart pressed for the $200 million from the 2006 bond money for transportation to be spent.

"I am very excited about the transportation improvements," said Stewart in a December 2010 interview on . "The widening of the Prince William Parkway will also take the pressure off of Old Bridge Road and from a policy perspective, there has never been a better time to build roads."

Stewart took up the crusade of cracking down on illegal immigration in Prince William County in 2008 when the county adopted a change in policy that evaluated immigration status and again in 2010 after an illegal immigrant charged with

Under Stewart’s leadership, the county adopted a 287(g) agreement that allows local police to act as Immigration and Customs and Enforcement agents to check the immigration status of persons under arrest. He has also spearheaded the Virginia Rule of Law Act, which takes a strong stance against illegal immigration.

“I definitely created some enemies and that’s a consequence of standing firm on a controversial issue,” said Stewart in March.

In the past, Stewart’s critics have said that he has intended to run for public office on the state level, removing his focus from the local arena. But in March, when Stewart announced he was running for reelection for chair, he skirted the topic of state office 

“I’ll make a decision about running for Senate sometime next year,” said Stewart in his reelection press conference. “At the end of the day you never know what is going to happen and I’m not going to plan that far ahead.”

Although his two opponents disagree, Stewart said the county has performed well in job growth and economic development. He said there has been $412 million invested in Prince William County in just the last year and supervisors last month reduced the Business, Professional, Occupational License tax to lower the tax burden for local businesses.

Stewart leads the money race so far. He has $162,455 on hand to spend and almost all of it is from state residents. The state’s Republican Party, Potomac Nationals Baseball and RK Realty each donated $10,000 to his campaign. The developer industry is by far the biggest contributor to Stewart’s campaign and his two opponents have cited this as a concern that he is becoming to cozy with developers in a fast-growing county.

Babur Lateef

Babur Lateef, a Woodbride eye doctor, has never held public office. The 39-year-old father of four said one of the reasons he went to medical school was so he could help people with a community-based approach.

While in medical school he was president of a school medical organization and he interned on Capital Hill on the Science, Space and Technology committee. This is where Lateef got his only political experience.

He came to Woodbridge in February 2002 when he bought his own office building for his own practice. His wife, a pediatric neurologist, finished her medical degree at Georgetown University.

Lateef moved here with no children. He has always been a Democrat and had helped with local races in his hometown in Youngstown, OH. His father, Abdul Bari Lateef, is a longtime Democrat, and was professor of forensic science and criminal justice at Youngstown State University for almost 40 years. His dad always talked to his son about public policy and education was critical to him, being a professor.

Education funding is one of Lateef’s top concerns. He wants to attract the best teachers and decrease class sizes. He criticized the Board of County Supervisor’s decision not to take federal stimulus money to pay for more teachers, which Lateef said fuels a perception that Prince William County schools aren’t as good as those in surrounding areas.

“If you are coming to this town to interview for a job and you are reading in the newspaper that this county is not accepting federal money to hire more teachers and decrease class sizes, and then the hospital is showing you around the local schools and they see trailers in the back, you think ‘Man, I don’t want my kids going there. Education is not a priority,’” Lateef said.

Lateef said the school system’s natural budgetary growth could have absorbed the salaries of those new teachers and no one would have been laid off, but Stewart and other supervisors politicized the issue to get national headlines. Lateef said they did the same thing with health care reform. Instead of researching the huge amount of data that already exists on how the reform would impact local governments, the County Board of Supervisors contracted with Wells Fargo to conduct a study.

“They came up with this 60-page report that was just a complete joke,” Lateef said. “All it said was we are going to have to pay more for the county employees [to have coverage]. Do we need to hire a consultant to do everything?”

Lateef’s ties outside Virginia have helped his campaign coffers. Besides his business and his own campaign loan, the top donors from Virginia are a homemaker in Great Falls and a physician in McLean, who both donated $10,000 each. After deducting the funds Lateef loaned his campaign, the donations from his business and those from his father and sister-in-law, most of Lateef’s $117,787 in cash on hand came form came from people who live outside Virginia. A total of $62,850 of his $150,267 in total receipts is from out-of-state donors. Not surprisingly, almost $100,000 of the money comes from the medical industry. Two of his top donors were from out-of-state are attorney from Brookville, MD, who gave $10,000 and Lateef’s sister-in-law, Najia Shakoor, a physician from Hinsdale, IL, who also gave $10,000. Lateef’s father has donated $5,000.

Lateef wants the county to spend more time on recruiting new business. He criticized Stewart for creating an unpredictable business climate and an unfriendly place to do business in. Stewart said the County Board of Supervisors this year has lowered the tax burden for business by lowering the Business, Professional, Occupational License tax. But Lateef said it’s not enough and Prince William County is losing out to Stafford, Loudoun and Fairfax counties. He said Stewart focuses too much on headline national issues, such as illegal immigration, without working to expand the county’s commercial tax base.

Lateef said small businesses need tax relief and county officials need to work with the state to get more economic development funds.

“We have a county in which two-thirds of the people actually work outside of the county,” he said. We are not bringing those jobs here. I think people and businesses don’t want to work where there is controversy and problems.”

Lateef two opponents have been critical of his financial problems. Lateef went into foreclosure on his $1.2 million estate last summer.  His wife’s name was removed from the house deed before the home was foreclosed on and Lateef’s sister-in-law bought the home at auction in cash for half of what Lateef bought it for in 2006. The Lateefs never left the house that is now owned by his brother, sister-in-law and father. Lateef also owns a rental property in Manassas, his eye practice office building, and another office building in the county. Lateef said he couldn’t keep up with he payments because of the way the recession impacted his business, even though he has not laid of any of his employees or cut their pay.

“The banks are fairly dysfunctional so it wasn’t something I wanted to have happened, I was working out another program with them but they couldn’t get it together. This wasn’t something I wanted. I don’t think anyone says I want to go through foreclosure. I was not planning it. It just got out of hand."

Lateef has refused to release his tax returns to disprove the suspicion that this was a strategic financial decision.

Although Lateef said he doesn’t want his foreclosure to be an issue for his campaign, he cites his troubles as a reason he is proposing a plan to help people deal with a similar crisis. He proposes that on his first day in office he would create a countywide foreclosure task force to address the crisis. He also wants to allow families facing foreclosure to postpone having to pay county taxes so the money can go to mortgages. He also wants to have extended the amount of time banks are required to give homeowners facing eviction from 14 days to 45 days.

John Gray

The biggest issues in the county are the taxing of residents, the county's debt and county spending, said local CPA John Gray, the independent candidate for county chairman. Although the nation seems to finally be recovering from the recession, the county is moving in the wrong direction, Gray believes. 

Although Stewart proclaims that he had reduced county spending and real estate taxes, Gray said the truth is quite the opposite. Real estate taxes have increased in every year but 2010. The county's debt is at $1.23 billion and the majority of supervisors last month agreed to borrow $200 million more to spend the 2006 transportation bond . Gray said these facts don't equate to scrubbing the county's finances, as Stewart has said he has done.

"All we are doing is kicking the can down the road," Gray said. "That’s not cutting spending."

Gray said the county should be spending money on economic development and building out the Innovation @ Prince William business park. Gray said he filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the county's Economic Development department and found that only $100 was spent on trying to attract Northrup Gumman.  Gray said focusing on reversing the commute outside the county for two-thirds of its residents would do much more than the $200 million on road projects that the county board just approved.

"I rather see money go to economic development than going to roads for people who don’t live here so they can drive right through here," Gray said.  "The states not going to do it because we've been doing it for the past 25 years. We've let them off the hook."

Gray said the county has spent $3.5 million to increase staff for the magisterial offices and $50 million that is locked in a SunTrust bank CDA to help county employees purchase homes in Prince William County.  Gray said the money would help buy 267 homes, but only 10 percent has been accomplished so far.

"We've locked up 50 million for  another seven years," he said. "That’s a failed program."

Gray also recommends ending the annual cycle of reassessments because of the volatility in the tax rates. State law allows localities to conduct assessments as far as every five years out, and Gray said the county should consider doing reassessments every two years. Not only could local residents better plan for the tax bills, but they would be less volatile as well.

"Let’s take a look at that because that’s what people complain about—the continual changes in the tax rates. We've got to give the advantage to the taxpayers," he said.

Another problem Gray has with the current county board is that staff predictions are always lower than what generally is collected in tax revenue, and instead of returing that additional revenue to the taxpayers, supervisors spend it. Gray said that if the county staff develop a budget that balances on their projections, then any excess revenue the county collects should be returned to the taxpayers. A penny on the tax rate equals roughly $4 million.

"If I pay in more than what [county staff] expected, I should get a rebate of that," he said. 

Gray said supervisors spent next year's likely overestimated revenue increase on parks and trails, which he doesn't believe is a priority.

The county also has too much money in reserve accounts, he said. He said $5 million is in reserve for technology changes that rolls over every year.

Gray said Stewart focuses too much on controversial issues, such as illegal immigration, to bolster his name. When Stewart won election as county chairman he announced his candidacy for lieutenant governor the month after he took office, Gray said. Stewart has also been rumored as a candidate for the U.S. Senate seat that Democrat Jim Webb will be vacating this year. Stewart oddly even endorsed a candidate for sheriff in Loudoun County this month.

"We need a chairman who will pay attention to Prince William County issues and not be looking elsewhere," Gray said. "He is taking that attention away from Prince William County."

Gray is far behind in the money race, with only $10,200 that he loaned himself to spend.

Candidates Web pages:

John Gray

Corey Stewart

Babur Lateef