Donna

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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