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In search of a leader on development
July 2, 2009 by afp
I give the News Virginian hell often enough that it is only fair of me to give kudos to the paper when deserved, and it’s deserved in the matter of the call in a Wednesday editorial for somebody on Waynesboro City Council to step forward and take the lead on downtown.
I’ll take their call one step further to suggest that we need, desperately need, even, for somebody to come forward to be the point person on City Council on economic development citywide.
We’re sorely missing that right now, with the prevailing attitude seeming to be set by Vice Mayor Frank Lucente’s Herbert Hoover-like laissez-faire approach having the city get out of the way to let private entrepreneurs who obviously aren’t flocking to Waynesboro do whatever they’re not going to do.
The NV in its editorial pushed for Mayor Tim Williams to take the economic-development ball and run with it. It does seem appropriate to have the mayor playing that kind of role, and I’d back him wholeheartedly if he wanted to take it on. Same as I’d back Lorie Smith or Nancy Dowdy if they were to try to create for themselves a bully pulpit to push development in Waynesboro.
I’d even jump on the Lucente bandwagon if he’d steer it in the direction of having the city be an active player in the development game.
One thing that’s for sure is that the current strategy that has had us operating in the economic-development sphere without even an economic-development director on staff for going on a year now is not working and shouldn’t be expected to work in the future. That mindset is akin to staking your personal economic future to playing the lottery in hopes of taking home the big jackpot and then neglecting to even buy the ticket.
Yep, we’re a couple of biscuits short of breakfast as it is now, in a manner of speaking, and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better, because while we’re sitting our asses on our hands waiting for manna to fall from heaven, Staunton is out recruiting new business and industry and doing what it can to retain and grow its existing business and industry, and Charlottesville is doing the same, and Harrisonburg is doing the same, and you get the picture.
This is one thing conservatives and progressives and liberals should all be able to agree on. Economic development isn’t a partisan pursuit.
- Column by Chris Graham
The city really needs each of the council members to designate a surrogate in the form of an ombudsperson responsible for detecting and reporting the hot- button topics of their respective wards. If my impressions of Ward C are valid there is a comprehensive and urgent need for the less-techniical job opportunities ! For example: The ombudsperson could contact both Lowes and Home Depot to determine if either or both might be interested in opening a sattelite office downtown offering planning and/or product purchasing assistance to those repairing or upgrading the older home. The same entre might generate interest for personal service businesses such as a tailor shop, sporting goods shop, personal shopper service, organic products, etc.! All of these could be made more attractive through enticements similar to the west end big box operations; to a lesser scale of course. In addition the stimulus monies local banks have access to would crerate what is today so sorely lacking…LIFE !
While it is easy (and appropriate) to fire volley after volley at the current idiots running city council, it is revisionist history to pretend the liberal regime who was there before was any less moronic in their “strategy” on downtown. I mean, come on, anchoring your economic development strategy on the ability of a crumbling theatre to bring down hundreds of travellers daily from the parkway to watch a locally produced play ABOUT the parkway? Anyone who actually saw the plan for the theatre project knew it was based on ridiculous assumptions which could never have actually been expected to work.
Ask Shenandoah Shakespeare, performing the fantastic works of the greatest playwright ever in an incredible facility in the middle of Staunton’s bustling downtown with a professional cast if this is rational. (I was there earlier this year when they themselves were passing the hat to make ends meet.)
Ask the Artisan’s Center of Virginia, who turned down the city’s gift of a free facility in downtown Waynesboro because it wasn’t a viable business location and ended up stuffed into an old, deserted pet store when the city’s West End strategy bulldozed their home. (And, yes, this happened purely because of their own arrogance; rather than being the fault of the city.)
Back in the good old days of liberal majority, Nancy Dowdy had a chance to push for real change - but where did she spend her political capital (which, by the way, was bought and paid for by her buddy Frank Lucente)? She spent it fighting for a law regulating and taxing yard sales because she didn’t like her neighbor having so many of them. Wow. Was the lack of yardsales a political platform or an economic development platform? Or was it just blatant self-interest taking over … as is the case with Lucente. Bottom line - Dowdy and Lucente have far more in common than there are differences between them. That’s why he bought her her seat on council and why she voted to give him his. (This is what is known in big city circles as a “reach around”.)
And Lorie Smith - as head of the school board she presided over the huge cost overruns in the mismanagement of the rennovation of the high school. Her fiscal incompetence in allowing those overages - largely for fancy accoutrements rather than anything that actually would have helped the kids - helped drain the city’s reserves and was money that wasn’t there for basic things like water treatment and wroking stormdrains. Again, she had her chance, and did nothing with it.
If the city waits much longer, the solution in downtown will be simple - a bulldozer. The narcissitic art, museum and theatre strategy didn’t work, the big ol giant furniture mart didn’t work (as the closing of Grand in downtown this weekend proves), the “lets havie meetings and jabber about how great things used to be” (WDDI) strategy was a ridiculous failure and the Lucente “let it rot” strategy definitely isn’t getting anywhere.
There’s one thing about a leader. Leaders get you where you want to go. Waynesboro clearly doesn’t know where it wants to go. Until you put someone in office who both has a plan and a clue, its all a huge waste of time. Going 90 miles an hour in a circle is the same as sitting still - except it burns a lot more gas. The people paying for the gas (the taxpayers) need to keep that in mind.
Donna
We can look at this time in Waynesboro’s history as one where we give up and let the tumbleweeds take over, no question, one where we continue spinning in circles at 90 mph, as Donna has well put it here, or as she suggests one where we get an idea, work to make it happen, accept nothing less than success as the result of our work, and continue to work hard once we’ve achieved what we set out to achieve.
My plan, in a nutshell - take the concept of the green higher-ed program that Urbie Nash et al have been working on off and on for the past few years a couple or more levels up and build an actual college or university, public, private or a hybrid public-private, around it. Aim to build a school to accommodate roughly 1,000 undergrad and grad students 10 years from the iopening. Have it focused on green technology development. The Republicans think otherwise, but green is our economic future. Waynesboro, then, gets on the cutting edge of that future.
Locate the college/university on the Willetts property at Exit 96 off I-64. Put some basic student and faculty housing around it, connect the complex to Lyndhurst Road and across to Rosser. Then build up faculty and grad student housing in downtown anticipating demand for moderate upscale housing in a district appealing to a higher-ed clientele. At the same time, we continue work on our arts-museum-theatre strategy, which adds the appeal to the higher-ed clientele and of course also appeals to visitors in the area on the Parkway and Skyline Drive and in the area for Shakespeare over in Staunton.
Now we have two bases of residents/customers/foot traffic downtown - residents and visitors. Plus we have professors, grad assistants, grad students, undergrads, support staff and parents weekends associated with a college/university as an economic engine citywide. And the residual benefit therein in terms of brain power and people power making our City Council and School Board and boards and commissions and nonprofits that much more effective.
I agree in part with Donna that the arts/museum/theatre strategy isn’t going to work on its own. We can’t spend millions of dollars simply hoping that we’re going to be able to pull people down from the mountains without some sense of how we’re going to get return on investment. We have to have something much more concrete than hopes, and not just because we’re spending taxpayer money, and we have to ensure that we’re spending it as wisely as we can since it is taxpayer money. The implication from those who carry that mindset is that we can either do something or do nothing, and in my view, we cannot at all afford to simply do nothing at this point.
This is make-it-or-break-it time for Waynesboro. What we do in the next 5-10 years determines the next 100 years of this city’s history. We’re either a vibrant city with a productive economy and a strong quality of life, or we’re Virginia’s Detroit.
This is why I ran for City Council last year. It’s taken a year for me to realize that this wasn’t just a personal setback.
Chris,
As much as I like you and respect you, I have to say the direction you suggest is just plain crazy. All over Virginia, large and respected universities are cutting staff because they can’t make ends meet. Many of them have buildings sitting empty where such a green program could be put in place immediately and without expending millions of taxpayer dollars. The federal dollars to create such a plan would clearly go to them — not to an unproven pie in a sky program in a city with a long history of poor management and neglect of services.
We can’t get funds to maintain our basic public necessities, the police, or our schools — and you want to build a university in hopes of creating a gentry class of educators who can support the same stillborn arts/theatre/etc strategy which has already failed.
There are already hundreds of UVA and JMU and Mary Baldwin college staff and faculty who already live in Waynesboro. Its been a bedroom community for them for years. Yet they’ve never done the things you expect your “Mythkatonic University” to do in terms of creating a nexus of the arts in downtown. Twenty years ago, largely due to the profitable DuPont site, Waynesboro had the most PhDs per capita of any city its size in Virginia and school test scores that other schools envied. Yet even in that environment, none of what you suggest ever happened.
Chris, I admire you wide-eyed optimism — but there is a difference between and plan and a fairytale. Waynesboro needs a plan that makes more since than “if you build it, they will come.”
Donna
Chris, just to set the record straight, as I believe in dealing with the facts, there were no overruns on the “middle” school project. That project came in under budget. Further, we now have classrooms that have the space and technology necessary to educate our children for the 21st century. Our children are our future.
Interesting note from Lorie Smith who wanted to “set the record straight” and believes in “dealing with facts.” I noticed she pointed to there being “no overruns on the middle school project.” How about the high school project, Lorie? Is there a reason for throwing a complete red herring of an answer out there instead of addressing the issue of the overruns in the WAYNESBORO HIGH SCHOOL PROJECT?
Its like answering a question about the cost of the war in Iraq by saying “There is no money being spent on the war in Greenland.”
Terry Pasquale
I guess we’re supposed to expect that the economic downturn that has some colleges and universities cutting staff will continue into the future. If we extend that mode of thinking across the board, we should give up on all economic-development efforts, because nobody is expanding or starting new businesses given the economic climate.
Or we can presume that we are going to claw our way out of the doldrums, and try to figure out what the growth sectors of the economy are going to be post-downturn. It’s clear to me that green and green technology are going to be two growth sectors for the future, as consumers seek to improve on energy efficiency at home, at work and in transit, and business and industry work to meet the demands of consumers.
The idea that dollars will go to colleges and universities with supposedly existing capacities is an argument in my mind for why we need to get on this push now and not five years from now. The notion that I’m advancing is not to build a new UVa. or Virginia Tech or JMU in Waynesboro. It’s to partner with the likes of UVa. and Tech and JMU and SRI International to initiate a higher-ed program here that none of them can do on their own given their own resources.
UVa. and Virginia Tech, for example, already partner in a significant way in Northern Virginia with a center focused on high-tech research and development. SRI International partners with JMU on high-tech drug research and development in Harrisonburg. I’m proposing Waynesboro as a location for hgh-tech green-tech R&D.
The advantages to the state for the Waynesboro location include our rough equidistance to JMU (40 minutes) and UVa. (30 minutes), our unique urban setting that includes a river that cuts the city in half and close proximity to the heart of the Shenandoah Valley agribusiness sector, our industrial setting, and our relatively cheap stock of developable acreage.
In terms of state politics, we have a case to make for the location of a green-tech higher-ed program in Waynesboro. We’re the only city for 50 miles in any direction that doesn’t have its own college or university. Our state legislators should be able to make that case for us.
I am not “crazy” or “wide-eyed,” and this idea is not “pie in the sky” or a “fairy tale.” Somebody somewhere is going to jumpstart the program I’m suggesting here, in Waynesboro or somewhere else. I don’t doubt that it won’t be Waynesboro that gets it done, because people here tend to focus on what can’t be done instead of what can be, and prefer to like to limit their passing fancy with what can be to reports that sit on a shelf collecting so much dust.
I’m making a promise to myself today to cease being frustrated at the naysayers on both sides of the political divide in Waynesboro. It’s your city; if you want it to wither, so be it.
For further clarification, the high school project was completed under a School Board that I was not on.
Yes, Lorie, the high school project was COMPLETED under a school board you were not on. But wasn’t the issue of the overages and lack of reporting of them to city council during your tenure on the school board?
According to my notes, the resolution to the funding issues was handled by the School Board in the fall of 2002 and the spring of 2003, during the first year of Lorie’s term on the School Board. I know because we actively covered the story of the funding issues between the School Board and City Council.
The issue with “overruns” was misstated above. First, Smith was not chair of the School Board at the time, as was asserted. Bob Gunther was the chair in 2002 and 2003. Second, the “overruns,” in the area of $500,000 on a $9 million project, were not the result of “fancy accoutrements.” The “overruns” were simply higher-than-projected construction costs in a hotter-than-expected building market.
Nor did the project “drain the city’s reserves” as was claimed above. The issue was that the School Board followed an existing policy in committing its year-end fund balance to capital projects. Normally the Board would spread the money out to several smaller projects across the school system, but it decided to commit the bulk of the monies left over from its 2002-2003 budget to finishing the WHS project.
There was a miscommunication with City Council over what was being done in that respect, and Council members raised issue with the move in the interim until the matter was resolved at a joint meeting of Council and the Board.
As sometimes happens in these kinds of cases, the truth is a lot less interesting than the stories that you hear told.
You’ve very publicly supported Lorie Smith as head of the Democratic Party in Waynesboro, and that is just fine. But you should he honest about your political connections here - otherwise you are just as quilty as Lucente and the other folks you are out there tailing about doing things secretly with a hidden political agenda.
Unless the Augusta Free Press wants to follow “Truth in Advertising” and ident themselves appropriately as the party newspaper of the Democratic Party, you should be a little fairer and a little more honest about who you are supporting and why.
I was in city council meetings where Lorie Smith and others tried to explain why they had kept budget overruns secret from Council — so she is not the innocent lamb you and she try to make her out as.
- LB
Original point here from Lynn. The label at the top of the page, “The Valley’s Progressive News Source,” might be an indication of our sympathies. Interesting how that can be perceived as harboring a “hidden political agenda.” Makes me wonder what Lynn’s hidden agenda might be.
Facts are facts. I was in those same City Council meetings. Go back and check the minutes. There was not a word about “why they had kept budget overruns secret from Council.” That’s an explosive charge, and I’m assuming that you have a hidden agenda for making that charge knowing that there would be nothing to back it up.
You could be referring to the decision of that School Board to commit its end-of-year surplus monies to the WHS project. There was nothing secret about that at all for anybody who followed the School Board at its regular meetings.
I’m glad to see here that the do-nothing faction here in Waynesboro is interested enough in the issues of the day to get back to the smear campaigns that they have been so fond of in the past. One can tell that we’re counting down to the next election- T-minus 10 months and counting.
Not taking a side here, but liberal, progressive and Democrat are not all the same thing. Have you ever heard of Jim Crow laws?
Donna