Business, and personal
Yeah, we’re jumping the shark alright. “I haven’t agreed with Chris on much lately, so we’ll just add this one to the list,” wrote Cliff Garstang, the vice chairman of the Augusta County Democratic Committee and a member of the Sixth District Democratic Committee, in a comment posted on Cobalt6, a local Democrat blog that he runs with a former local radio deejay named Eddie Garcia who I got to know well a couple of years ago when I featured him in a story in our New Dominion Magazine.
I actually know Cliff pretty well, too, from our work in local Democratic Party circles and our involvement in a writers and artists group that I helped found.
Knowing Cliff as I do, I expected a reaction from him when news of my endorsement in the gubernatorial primary hit the news. I don’t know that I expected distortions and mischaracterizations, since we are still both Democrats, at least last time I checked I was still a Democrat.
“He took a very odd stance on the county reassessment issue; it wasn’t based on logic or data, simply on political expediency,” Garstang commented on a blog written by Garcia raising question with the endorsement.
Nice slam there, and as inaccurate as hell. As I explained to Cliff personally, and those who read our series of stories on the Augusta County reassessment issue earlier this year would already know this, that my stance on the issue came not from “political expediency” but rather on the logic and data that Garstang claimed to be lacking. To summarize the thousands of words that I wrote on the issue from earlier in the year, I crunched numbers based on local real-estate sales figures dating back to the beginning of calendar-year 2005 and found what appeared to be a sizable discrepancy between those numbers and the numbers being touted by the majority on the Board of Supervisors, and the reason that was made clear to me in conversations with Riverheads Supervisor Nancy Sorrells for the discrepancy was that the company conducting the reassessment was using a new method for determining value of land in agriculture districts that inflated the values assigned to wide swaths of land in rural parts of the county.
These objections weren’t “political expediency,” and for Garstang to characterize them as such is dismissive and disingenuous.
He then went on to write that I had written “some slimy words about a public official in Augusta County, without any evidence that he revealed,” obliquely referencing a column written on Board of Supervisors Chairman David Beyeler’s wagging of the finger at Board critics that had him pontificating from on high about people only agreeing with laws “when it suits our fancy.” My column took us back five years to 2004, when Beyeler found himself caught up in a controversy regarding a trip to an international builders conference in Las Vegas that was the subject of much discussion in county-government circles due to a controversial vote and revote on a matter that benefitted a local builder who had invited Beyeler and two other members of the Board of Supervisors to the Vegas conference.
The Augusta Free Press broke that story and did the only original and followup reporting in the local media on the issue. The reporting cited an advisory opinion from the local Commonwealth’s attorney and quotes from members of the Board of Supervisors, including Beyeler, on the matter. Which might render Garstang’s observation that the reporting was done “without any evidence” nonsensical considering.
Let’s not miss the forest for the trees here. This was written in response to a column that was critical of my decision to endorse Terry McAuliffe for governor. For this I am subjected to the level of gutter tripe that I wouldn’t expect and haven’t received from Republican friends and readers.
I guess I’m supposed to be the adult here, because really, what ends up happening if I respond in kind and slash and burn my way through this dustup? It has become apparent that the county Dem leadership is backing Creigh Deeds for governor, for example. I could make it a point to blog down Deeds’ qualifications for the job, sophomorically refer to him as a glorified loser in reference to his near-miss in 2005 in the attorney-general race, emphasize that his backers locally couldn’t even win the county for Mark Warner in a 63 percent landslide statewide and have exactly one elected Democrat to show for their efforts, and they talk about him behind his back like they do me every chance they get.
This all does us any good – how, again? When we’ve got three House of Delegates races to work on locally, any one of which could end up being the upset win that turns the majority in the junior chamber back in our favor? And when we’ve got a gubernatorial race that’s going to come down to any one of our three qualified candidates running against Pat Robertson acolyte Bob McDonnell?
I like to tell people that my feelings don’t get hurt, that everything to me is nothing personal, just business. A lesson I’m learning here is that sometimes business can be personal. I got next.
- Story by Chris Graham
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Hi, Chris. I’m sorry if I ticked you off with my comments, but that happens sometimes in politics, as you know.
But here’s my position, as I’ve mentioned to you a couple of times, I think.
On the assessments, I found the clamor against the Board of Supervisors to be emotional and not based either on the law or logic. The law provides a means for appeal and equalization of faulty assessments, and provides no way to disregard the assessments just because some people don’t like them. So I saw no issue there at all, political or otherwise, and if you were NOT one of the Democrats–there were some, of that I’m sure–who thought we ought to seize this issue as a party, then I do apologize for the “political expediency” comment. I don’t see the issue as political at all, and my view is and was that party affiliation ought to stay out of it. If I misunderstood your motives then, again, I apologize.
On the other matter, I’m going to have to stick with my original view on your article. Yes, you did some fine reporting on this in 2004. But what you said in 2009 insinuated, unfairly in my opinion, that Mr. Beyeler cast his vote on the reassessment issue in order to benefit developers. (What you said was “Act II of the reality check comes this spring, following the finger-wagging from Beyeler about obeying laws. The Board of Supervisors is advertising a tax rate of 48 cents per $100 assessed value to correct for the inflated property values in the ‘09 reassessment, a 10-cent decrease from the current 58-cent rate. Who do you think benefits the most from a 17 percent tax-rate cut?
I’ll leave you to muse on how well my friends in the home-building industry are going to do with a 48-cent tax rate once the economy picks back up in the third or fourth quarter this fall.”) This is what I found slimy. Nothing personal at all. I just think it’s inappropriate.
State Code does presuppose that a county might disregard a property reassessment. There is a section in the Code delineating a penalty for such an action by a locality. It has never been enforced, though there was an instance in the 1970s when it could have been.
The penalty is a slap on the wrist. Somebody would have to do some research on the legislative intent of the General Assembly that put the penalty in place to deign its intent. I would suggest not having done that research that the penalty being as slight as it is could be an indication that that particular GA didn’t consider overthrowing a property reassessment to be that serious a violation of state law.
As I’ve mentioned to you a couple of different times also, I came to my conclusions on the faulty work done on the reassessments through a good bit of research and numbers-crunching on my own. I don’t remember you responding in kind except to say that you saw no logic to my position. My response was to repeat my logic. I’m reminded of something Ed Koch once said to a reporter: I can explain it to you, I can’t understand it for you.
You picked up correctly here my insinuation in the Beyeler column. It’s not out and out corruption that I’m getting at here, but if there’s anything slimy to this matter, it’s an elected official who was once offered an all-expenses-paid trip to Las Vegas by local developers (which he ultimately says he paid for himself) casting a vote in favor of a reassessment that will likely lead to a dramatic reduction in the county real-estate tax rate that will no doubt benefit developers once the economy gets moving in the right direction again.
That this issue was brought up by you on a thread on a blog post in which a cohort of yours referred to one of our Democratic Party gubernatorial candidates as a “dirtbag” is awfully rich. I would submit that gratuitously calling someone a “dirtbag” is slimy. Connecting faraway dots to raise question about the wisdom of a public-policy decision is critical thinking.
As a followup, I realize I didn’t answer a key charge from Cliff here related to the idea of “political expediency” and my position on the assessment issue.
Having concluded as I did that there was an issue in the conduct of the assessments, and that the best recourse would be to set the assessments aside for a year to allow for a correction, I thought it would serve the cause of Augusta County Democrats to back the sole member of the Board of Supervisors who was fighting this fight on behalf of county taxpayers, who also happens to be an elected Democrat.
It also happened that the most vocal of the critics of this elected Democrat were elected Republicans.
Logic being on our side after having crunched the numbers and finding that the reassessment was not conducted properly, it then made logical sense to play being on the right side of the issue to our political advantage. For an example of how this works, see the recent work Democrats are doing making the Republicans’ wrongheaded move to block the receipt of $125 million from the federal government for an expansion of the unemployment-benefits system in Virginia into political fodder.
This is Politics 101. Get on the right side of an issue, exploit being on the right side of the issue to tactical advantage, and use being on the right side of an issue to win elections.
I know where Cliff stands on that bit of “political expediency” on the unemployment issue from his blog. My opining on the reassessment issue on the AFP was an attempt to drag Augusta County Dems into the perimeter of wisdom with me concerning the reassessments.
We can rehash that one out ’til the 2011 county elections, but it’s immaterial now. County Dems chose not to do the right thing on the reassessments, and the political issue is now lost, and life goes on.
We can hope that the next elections for officers in the ACDC lead to the installation of leaders who realize that their job isn’t just electing presidents and senators and governors and state legislators, but also having the backbone to fight the fight locally for county residents and county taxpayers.
I hate primary season.
And I hated your decision to endorse McAuliffe. He’s not the one.
I’ve been writing some stuff about McAuliffe; if you are itnerested, check out the following:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-stark/the-banking-crisis-sls-vi_b_184375.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-stark/terry-mcauliffe-the-tortu_b_186907.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-stark/dont-do-this-virginia_b_172238.html
Maybe a bit much, but you have a right to think what you think. To me, Terry clearly is the one.