House GOP leaders pledge support for bay cleanup: Impact to be felt in Augusta

Ken Fanfoni’s eyes are locked on the date … 2010.

It’s not a space odyssey that the Augusta County Service Authority executive director has in mind, but rather a bay odyssey.

Service-authority customers in Augusta are on the hook for $25 million in improvements to eight wastewater-treatment plants so that the county can reduce the level of nutrients that it discharges into the Chesapeake Bay by a 2010 state-imposed deadline.

That’s $25 million that, right now, is supposed to come out of the monthly bills of Augusta County residents – the majority of whom live closer to Gettysburg, Pa., and Greensboro, N.C., than they do the Chesapeake Bay, for those keeping score at home.

A year ago, the county service authority approved a period of phased-in rate increases for its customers over the course of the next several years to provide the working capital that it will need to meet the new state requirements.

“We didn’t want to wait until it got to the point where we had to do something drastic all at once,” Fanfoni told The Augusta Free Press.

“The decision was made to do something more gradual that we could look at again if the state were to decide to do something a year or two down the road,” Fanfoni said.

Republican Party leaders in the House of Delegates aren’t interested in waiting a year or two to do something about earmarking state dollars to the wastewater-treatment-plant upgrade problem.

Speaker Bill Howell said Monday that the House GOP will support a $500 million commitment to the state water-quality improvement fund over the next 10 years that would provide monies to localities whose treatment plants are in need of upgrades to meet the 2010 clean-up-the-bay deadline.

“We hold the resources of our Commonwealth in stewardship. Fortunately, Virginia is blessed with an abundance of natural resources, including the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries. Today, we are announcing the largest commitment of new funds this decade to clean up the bay and improve Virginia’s waters,” said Howell, R-Stafford.

“Economic prosperity is essential to environmental progress,” Howell said. “By dedicating $500 million over the next 10 years to this far-reaching initiative, we are taking a dramatic step forward to reduce the amount of pollution that is released into streams and rivers that feed the Chesapeake Bay.

“Improving the quality of our lakes, streams, rivers and the bay isn’t a luxury; it is our duty as responsible stewards. Our heritage from the past must be our legacy to generations to come,” Howell said.

Gov. Mark Warner indicated Monday that he would support dedicating to the Chesapeake Bay clean-up effort a significant portion of the additional revenues that the state is now expecting will come from the revenue reforecast.

“The best guess right now is that we’ll see an additional $230 million to $290 million in this two-year budget,” said Warner’s spokesperson, Ellen Qualls.

“Ongoing state support for bay initiatives is crucial, but can’t be promised without a new dedicated revenue source,” Qualls told the AFP. “The governor is not proposing such a source, but would support making the bay a general-fund priority as funds allow in the future, without cutting into education and other core services.

“He regards the bay as a pay me now or pay me later proposition, because the federal government will eventually force cleaner systems, and the costs will eventually be passed on to Virginians,” Qualls said.

The Virginia Department of Environmental Quality has estimated the cost of upgrades to the 122 wastewater-treatment plants in the Chesapeake Bay watershed in the Old Dominion to be in the area of $1.2 billion. And that’s not accounting for the cost inflation that Fanfoni fears will result from having all of the upgrade projects going live essentially at once.

“Something that is going to complicate this is that between Maryland and Virginia, you’re talking about 200 or so treatment plants that are all going to be upgraded at basically the same time,” Fanfoni said. “That’s 200 projects going out to bid at the same time. Now, what happens when you have a bunch of projects going out to bid at the same time? What happens when the construction market is oversaturated? The price goes up.

“How many engineering firms are there out there to accommodate the demand? How much construction firms are out there? There are issues with the availability of steel and concrete. I’ve seen the $1.2 billion number that they’re throwing out there. It’s a construction estimate. That’s how much it should cost. But these are far from ideal conditions. We’re throwing around the $20 million to $25 million number. It’s likely going to cost a lot more than that,” Fanfoni said.

“This is a point that we’re trying to make to the state. This is going to have a domino effect on the costs of this work. We bring these issues up over and over again with the DEQ, but they don’t seem to go anywhere,” Fanfoni said.

Alan Pollock, the manager of the DEQ’s water-quality program, said the department has taken note of the concerns expressed by Fanfoni and others related to cost.

“We’ve been talking with public and private treatment-plant operators about the implementation, and we’re aware of the issues related to concerns about the cost of construction,” Pollock told the AFP. “We’re also aware of the constraints that we have as far as the agreement that is in place and the involvement of the federal government and the courts. We’re sensitive to all of these issues.

“We all want to reduce the level of pollution going into the Chesapeake Bay, and we all want to see that it is done in the most cost-effective means possible. We don’t want to see local customers’ bills go up,” Pollock said.

Pinehurst, here we come

Golf Things Considered column by John Rogers
JSpencerRogers@msn.com  

It’s February. That means some slim green fingers, tulips to be, stretch out from soil softened by the sun after another night’s freeze, seeking Gulf moisture in the air, and some warmth, which lingers a day or two before Canada blows hard again and reminds us that there are still several weeks to winter. Read more

The inside scoop

Golf Things Considered column by John Rogers
JSpencerRogers@msn.com 

Golf, like life, has a lot to do with causal relationships.

Say what? Causal relationships.

Like when you tell your boss that you are late to work because your alarm did not go off. Of course, the direct cause for being late was that you overslept. Oversleeping was caused by the alarm failing to go off (and because you stayed up too late watching the Golf Channel). The alarm didn’t work because you forgot to pay the electric bill, which caused the electric company to cut off power to your house. So in a roundabout way, you were late for work because you forgot to pay the electric bill. Causal relationships. Read more

‘I die with honor’: Mother picking up the pieces after son killed in action

The Top Story by Chris Graham

Her son was due home from the front lines of Iraq next week.

Next week.

Could you believe it?

It might as well have been five minutes from now, she had been anticipating the moment so.

She could already see him walking up to the door.

“He would have said, ‘Howdy.’ With a cowboy hat on,” said Rhonda Winfield, speaking of her son, Jason Redifer, 19, who had shoved off for the war last July 4, a date whose irony wasn’t lost on anybody.

Jason was “a walking contradiction in terms,” his mother said, forcing a smile as she reminisced in the living room of her Stuarts Draft home about the good times.

“He never would have had an inkling of the power of the positive force that he emitted and that he gave to everybody. He would have told you he was just one of the guys. ‘I’m not the smartest,’ although he was so sharp. ‘You can dress me up every now and then, but … but I’m still just a cowboy.’ He refused to say ‘pretty.’ It was always ‘pur-r-r-rty.’ Sometimes I felt like we ought to black out a couple of his teeth and put a hillbilly hat on him, and he would have done just fine,” Winfield said.

Winfield was awakened early on Monday morning to hear his voice on the other end of the phone line.

“He slipped away and was making a phone call when he shouldn’t have been. Just because he needed to let me know that the elections had gone well, and he was well. And that he was leaving for his final mission,” she said.

“He would be coming home in nine days. This mission would only last three days, which was much shorter than the majority of ones that he had gone on.”

As he spoke, mom picked up on something going on beneath the small talk.

“He had a very guarded tone,” Winfield said. “He said all the things that he always said. He tried to have the same sense of humor. He tried to give me the words of encouragement that I wanted to hear. But he also, I could tell by his tone, knew that this was not a feeling that, ‘I’m in the home stretch.’ This was going to be increasingly dangerous.

“He was making sure that he had all his bases covered with everybody,” Winfield said. “He e-mailed friends, and called friends, and said things that he thought everybody needed to know. But if you knew Jason, he made sure that you knew those things all the time. So it wasn’t like he said anything shocking.

“We chatted a little bit. He told me he could not wait to get off that bus coming home and get his boys (his little brothers, Courtland, 8, and Carter, 6) in his arms. And he was just looking forward to getting this behind him, and looking forward to being able to call me and tell me that this part was done.”

Two hours later, Jason was dead.

Defender

“He would have been furious with me for allowing any sort of pomp and circumstance,” said Winfield, who has busied herself making plans for Jason’s funeral and consoling friends and family members who are themselves having a hard time believing that the light of their lives is gone forever.

And that’s not overstating what Jason Redifer was to everyone who knew him – as unassuming as he was.

“If you would have heard what other people had said about him, and looked at a lineup of 10 people, he would have been the very last person that you would have pegged to have been the owner of that personality,” Winfield said. “He never met anybody that was uncomfortable. He never met anybody that he would have judged or wouldn’t have liked. If he could find one glimmer of redeeming light in you, he would have defended you to the end.”

Jason was the world’s defender long before he signed up for the United States Marine Corps, to hear his mother tell it.

“I cannot tell you how many times he would come home and would have been in a confrontation with somebody. And that was so unlike him. He wouldn’t ever want to be negative to anybody,” Winfield said.

“I would say, ‘What on Earth happened?’ ‘Well, I was just walking through the Wal-Mart, and the next thing, I heard this ruckus over in produce.’ And then he would go on, and somebody would have done something unjust to somebody else, and he didn’t have a phone booth, so he just jumped into his cowboy boots instead of his Superman cape, and he made it his responsibility to save the day,” she said.

“Sometimes it panned out, sometimes not, but it never slowed him down from keeping on.”

The reluctant rifleman

That he ended up being the sniper for his Marine Corps unit is an accident of life – one of those things that will never be explained.

“It was the most bizarre thing about that. His older brother (Justin, an Army reserve) has always been the sportsman. He’s always been the rifleman, enjoyed hunting. Jason went one time. He shot a squirrel, and couldn’t wait to rub it in his brother’s face. He got it on the first shot, first shot. But then the gravity of having taken the life of something overwhelmed him. And he was so upset by it when he came home. And while he liked to target shoot, he said, ‘I will never take a life again.’ So it was a very strange turn of events that this was his occupation,” his mother said.

“He was just so skilled with the rifle, and he just said, ‘As it turns out, who would have thought, but I’m very good at my job. And if that’s where my talent lies, and that’s where my contribution has to be to make a difference, then that’s what I’ll do. And as long as I can look into the eyes and see some hope in some children here, then that’s going to wipe out the look in the eyes that I see at the end of the scope.’

“That’s what he had to cling to.”

The fall

Winfield got home from work a little after four Monday afternoon to find an unmarked van with government tags parked in the driveway.

“And your first thought is, ‘Gosh. There’s no way,’ ” she said.

“Part of me thought quickly, ‘Well, we’re dairy farmers. It could be someone checking water quality.’ I picked up my cellphone to dial his number to get some affirmation that he was OK.

“As I was dialing the number, Scott (her husband) and two Marines in full dress blues came around the corner. And you know when you’re a Marine mom that when they come to your door, it’s not to tell you, ‘Hey, the mission went well, and your son is going to come home in nine days.’

“The shock, that first moment of denial, you think that you can backpedal a few steps, not get out of the car, or you can make it go away,” Winfield said.

“I got out of the car, and they had the we’ve-come-to-tell-you-about-a-death look on their face. And so I took the I’m-going-to-yell-at-them-and-tell-them-they-cannot-tell-me-any-sort-of-bad-news-about-my-son-and-scare-the-Marines-away approach.

“They were Marines. It didn’t work.”

The soldiers were patient, Winfield said, “while I came unglued.”

“Somehow, you change channels in the midst of all of it, and you realize that you have to hear them say the words, you’ve got to hear every single detail that they can give you. Because you’re going to need it later. And then you’ve got to figure out where you go, and what you need to do.

“And if you let yourself fall down then, I don’t know that you can get back up.”

Evening news

Jason had often warned his mother not to watch the evening news – not because of what she would see, she said, but because of what she could not see.

” ‘Because you know what you don’t get to see?’ He told me this once, and it put it all in perspective,” Winfield said. ” ‘You don’t get to see the woman who lives in a house with 15 other people that has nothing, and as you walk in in the middle of the night, and they see nothing but you and your full battle gear, and your rifles, and rather than revealing that you’re there, or that they’re angry, it may be one house in a thousand, but that one time that people look at you like you’re the cavalry coming in to give them promise, and that one person who will want you to sit down and have tea with them, and give you what little they have, you can’t see that, and you can’t know what that feels like.’ ”

The movie

“After the initial shock, after hearing it out loud, I took a breath. And then you go to the business end of things that you’ve done in your mind since your child left for boot camp,” Winfield said.

Before Jason had left for Iraq last summer, he had laid out plans for what the family should do in the event that something happened to him in the Middle East.

“I knew what he expected to be done in honor of the situation. I knew what he would want me to do,” Winfield said. “I also knew what he looked like in those dress blues. And I could envision what he would look like if he came home in a casket.”

Against Jason’s wishes, she found herself watching the television news regularly.

“And every time you ever heard of a horror on the news, involving a soldier, you have that thought in your mind, and that movie in your mind telling you what to do when something happens starts to play,” Winfield said. “And then, of course, when you hear something, and you realize you’re OK, everything’s OK, it’s ‘OK, rewind.’ ”

The movie telling her what to do when something happens is playing full time in her head now.

“That first night, trying to make yourself realize that you’re living the movie now, that it’s not a replay, that was hard. You can’t rewind now. You can’t rewind,” Winfield said.

“I know that as difficult as that first night was and that all of this has been, it’s when all the people go home, and you’re left with just your thoughts, and your realization of ‘here we are,’ this at least I’ve practiced. The hard part starts after he’s been laid to rest, and I have to figure out how to live life without Jason,” Winfield said.

“People can tell you what to expect in this process, what you should do in this process, how grand a burial at Arlington will be. They can say all those things, and help you fill in the gaps, and help you steer yourself through whatever is coming,” Winfield said.

“But there’s not another person in this world who has ever been Jason’s mother, or has lost him, or has any kind of clue how I am going to live without him. That’s when the hard part comes. This part, we just do.”

‘I die with honor’

“You couldn’t feel anything else. You couldn’t feel anything other than so proud,” Winfield said, her eyes glistening.

“They had heard me boast about God and country since they hit the ground running. Who could I be to stand up and say it, if I thought, gee, it was OK for everybody else to send their child, and not let yours go? So … I know he’s pretty ticked off at this minute because he didn’t get to get home and square things with his brothers. But aside from that, he’s feeling he wrapped things up in a pretty good way,” she said.

As for mom …

“I’ve never claimed to understand many of the things that Jason has gotten notions to do. Nor have I supported many of the things that he had gotten the notion to do. But he was so proud of this. And he felt like he was laying down a legacy for his brothers that would be something that he could be proud of,” Winfield said.

He said, ‘We lose people every single day. Statistically speaking,’ and if I heard that one more time, I’d have throttled him myself, ‘if I don’t come home, I die with honor doing something they can be proud of, and not everybody can say that.’ ”

The life and times of a genuine American hero

The Top Story by Chris Graham

Heart

“I feel a person has to give their whole heart to whatever they do,” United States Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jason Redifer once said.

“If it’s not worth putting your heart into, then don’t do it. There are enough things in life to do with your heart; you don’t need to waste time on other stuff.”

Having heart

Redifer, 19, who was killed in action in Iraq on Monday, nine days before he was due to return home to Augusta County, embodied the spirit of what it means to have heart.

“We think as adults in this community and this environment that we teach things to our students. But we actually learned so many things from Jason,” said Connie Davis, the school nurse at Stuart Hall, the Staunton private school where Redifer made history in 1999 upon being the first boy admitted to what had been for more than a century and a half an all-girls prep academy.

“The Marines were very lucky to have this young man,” Davis said.

“I know that we have been better off, and our lives have been enriched, for having known him. And for him sharing his life with us here for four years. He’s truly going to be missed. For only being 19, he is truly a man. He was much more mature, beyond his years,” Davis said.

Foreboding

“Cowards die many times before their death; the valiant never taste of death but once” – a quotation from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar that Redifer included on his page in the 2002-2003 Stuart Hall yearbook.

Memoriam

It was Davis that Redifer had asked for last week after he had been injured in an explosion in Balil – known in Iraq as being part of the “triangle of death” due to the presence of Sunni insurgents in the province located to the south of Baghdad.

“I asked for you, Mrs. Davis, but they told me you were busy,” Redifer wrote in an e-mail that he sent to teachers and former classmates after the incident.

The news of his passing sent shock waves through the Valley – from downtown Staunton to his home in Stuarts Draft, where his mother, Rhonda Winfield, had spoken to him early Monday morning.

“I spoke with him a couple of hours before his death. He was headed out on his final mission,” Winfield said.

Winfield was left “devastated” by what happened to her son – as were friends and former teachers who gathered after school on Tuesday to talk about Redifer and the impact that he’d had on their lives.

“We had made plans when he came home that he was going to come over for a homemade dinner. He had just e-mailed me to ask me about what we were going to have,” said Beth Hinkle, his math teacher for three years.

“The last time he came in, we went out for dinner. When he stopped back by, he bought my daughter an ice-cream cone. He was a one-in-a-million guy,” Hinkle said.

Smile

“Live it up,” Redifer said. “A person cannot laugh too much. Laughing is what gets me through anything.

“As long as I keep laughing, I’ll be alright.”

Life of the party

“He had such a sense of humor about him. He was so witty. He was such a funny, funny person,” Stuart Hall college counselor Robin von Seldeneck said.

“He always had something he could say. He could always make people laugh,” Hinkle said. “He always knew exactly what to say to make you laugh. He seemed to have this inner sense about people that he could know what to say when somebody needed him to say something to make them feel better or make them feel important.”

Happiness

“I think a person really has to find happiness before he/she can get anywhere,” Redifer said.

“If you are not happy, then you have nothing to live for.”

Work ethic

Redifer juggled three jobs to pay his way to school.

He toiled on dairy farms, broke horses, worked the rodeo circuit one summer to earn money.

“He did not shy away from hard work. He hit it head on,” Hinkle said.

“Being the nurse, I always worried about his health,” Davis said. “I said, ‘Jason, I don’t know how you can keep on with three jobs and school.’ He said, ‘I have to, I have to, I have to.’

“I knew he was tired, day in and day out. He’d come in sick, and I would say, ‘Jason, you need to go to the doctor. You need to go home and rest.’ ‘I can’t do it.’ That’s what he would say.

“He never wanted to miss class. He never tried to get out of his responsibilities in class. He would go, and he would work so hard,” Davis said. “I just kept thinking to myself, I don’t know how the young man is standing up.

“He told people that anything worth doing was worth doing well. And something that he believed in was something worth working for. He knew the value of his education, and he worked so hard for it.”

Values

“(Faith) will take you as far as you let it,” Redifer said.

Belief system

Von Seldeneck recalled the day that she learned in 2003 that Redifer, then about to graduate, had decided to sign up for the Marine Corps.

“We had talked about him going into the reserves as a way for him to pay for college. But he hadn’t said anything about going active-duty,” von Seldeneck said.

“He came back from the Christmas break and said, ‘It’s all done. I’m not going to school. I’m going into the Marines.’

“I was saddened by that. ‘But don’t you see. There’s a bigger reason.’ That was his time to teach me about life,” von Seldeneck said.

“I was upset when he didn’t want to go right to college,” Davis said.

“You have to understand. He hated school. He would be the first to tell you that,” Davis said. “I wanted him to go to community college, maybe, to get started. He could’ve learned how to manage a dairy business. He loved working on farms. That’s what we were hoping. He said, ‘No, I’ll be all right. Don’t worry.’ ”

“He had brought it up in his usual joking way,” Hinkle said. ” ‘Well, what do you think would happen if I went down there and signed up for active-duty?’ I said, ‘Jason, let’s think this out.’ He talked about it afterwards. He said, ‘Yeah, I’m really sure.’

“A lot of people go into the armed forces, and they do so for many, many reasons,” Hinkle said. “And he is probably the first one that I’ve ever met who truly believed in freedom and the United States of America and what that meant.

“He said he did it for his brothers. He did. He lived for his brothers. He died for his brothers. He died to make the world a better place.

“He did what he believed in. He died for what he believed in,” Hinkle said.

Family

“They (his brothers, Courtland, 8, and Carter, 6) have taught me that you are never too old to be a kid, and that if you don’t worry, it’s not a problem,” Redifer said.

Devotion

“He would be the one who would get up in the middle of the night for his brothers when they were sick and make them hot chocolate and sit at the table with them in the middle of the night until they were OK to go back to bed,” Hinkle said.

“And he must have had every single Disney movie ever made. And he would sit and watch the movies with his little brothers. He loved those two kids more than anything,” Hinkle said.

His boys

“My boys are my boys, and nothing will come between us. I love them, and vice versa.”

The forest

“I know in my heart that the thing that he wanted the most, the thing that he wanted more than anything, was getting up at dawn, going out to his born, saddling up his horse after a newfallen snow, cold and crisp, the light just coming up. Getting out on his horse, riding through the fields, seeing how clean and beautiful the world was. Nobody was up, there was no noise. He would think about the important things in life,” Hinkle said.

The trees

“We all get caught up in this world, and we miss seeing the simple things,” Redifer said.

“We all need to step back and watch the world from time to time.”

Valley loses native son

Story by Chris Graham

The Shenandoah Valley is down one hero.

Jason Redifer, a native of Augusta County and a 2003 graduate of Stuart Hall, was killed in action in Iraq on Monday.

Redifer, a United States Marine, was among three Marines killed in action Monday morning. Two other Marines were wounded, the Pentagon confirmed late Monday.

The group was engaged in security and stability operations in the northern quadrant of the Babil Province when an improvised explosive device detonated.

“We are devastated,” said Redifer’s mother, Rhonda Winfield, who said her son had been scheduled to come home on Feb. 9.

Redifer, 18, had joined the Marine Corps two days after graduating from Stuart Hall in May 2003. He turned down a chance at a prestigious White House guard assignment upon his completion of basic training that summer for the chance to make a difference, his mother said.

“He said he didn’t have a wife and children at home, and people were leaving behind their families to go fight for their country. Certainly, he was in a position to be able to step up and do it,” Winfield said.

“He didn’t waver in it for a moment. Of course, when he was ready to go to Iraq, he’s very home-centered, very family-centered, and he didn’t want to leave anybody behind. But he knew that this was what he had signed on for,” she said.

“Jason said he felt the heart and soul of the Marines was the infantry, and this is where he felt he could make the most difference,” Winfield said.

(Published 02-01-05)