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Begrudging respect for Waynesboro City Council: They’re doing one very important thing right

waynesboro2editsCritics of Waynesboro City Council think of the public body as a do-nothing kind of group. Maybe that’s a good thing?

A Libertarian, Frank Lucente, has been the guiding force for the City Council in Waynesboro since winning his first full four-year term in 2008.

Full disclosure: I ran on a ticket opposite the ticket led by Lucente, which swept the three open seats on the ballot in the May 2008 elections.

Lucente’s approach is simple: keep taxes low to stimulate business, harkening back to the push in the Ronald Reagan ‘80s, the Laffer curve and all that.

The idea is to make Waynesboro as business-friendly as possible.

A complete picture of the business climate in Waynesboro would have to point out the numerous anecdotes from entrepreneurs who have had to endure delays in getting permits needed to get their businesses open and running and making money. Some promising projects have ended up being left on the cutting-room floor as a result of the inefficiencies in this area, a clear area where Waynesboro has room for improvement.

So when the numbers show that Waynesboro is succeeding, it’s succeeding in spite of itself, but whatever, success is success.

The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Serivce at the University of Virginia is a repository of reams of useful information about our fair Commonwealth. One that caught my attention back during my ill-fated run for City Council in ’08 offers information, broken down by locality, on taxable sales, basically a rendering of local economic activity that one can view as being akin to local GDP.

Since the Lucente-led City Council took the reins in 2008, the first year of the U.S. recession that marked the end of the George W. Bush era and the first two-plus years of the Barack Obama administration, Waynesboro’s aggregate taxable sales, its GDP, has grown 16.0 percent, from $405.7 million in taxable sales in 2008 to $470.8 million in 2014.

And sure, to a degree we should be seeing those numbers improve, because as I mentioned, 2008 was the first year of the U.S. recession, so the numbers should have gotten better over time as the U.S. economy climbed out of the recession.

So I use as a test case our neighbors a few miles west on U.S. 250, Staunton, where taxable sales in 2008 were measured at $351.8 million, and were at $347.0 million in 2014.

Meaning Staunton’s economy has retracted 1.4 percent over that same period.

Continuing to paint the most complete picture possible, it must be noted that those trends bear out into a more distant past. Go back to 2004, for example, and Staunton’s local GDP was at $354.9 million, still higher more than a decade ago compared to the most recent full-year figures, while Waynesboro was at $288.0 million.

Over the period 2004-2014, then, Waynesboro saw its taxable sales increase 63.5 percent, even as Staunton’s economy was retracting 2.2 percent.

The point of this exercise isn’t to criticize Staunton leaders, who have their own unique issues to deal with, most notably a shortage of developable land ringing the city.

What I’m doing here is giving begrudging props to the do-nothings in Waynesboro, who had the good sense to get out of the way as progress was on the horizon.

Waynesboro is, at least for now, ideally, most importantly centrally, located in a region that encompasses growing population centers in Western Albemarle just across the mountain to the east, Stuarts Draft and Fishersville in Central Augusta, and Staunton out to the west.

Location, location, location. So Waynesboro is in the middle of these population centers, and it had land to develop right next to an underutilized east-west interstate.

You’d have to go out of your way to try to screw up the confluence of good things that Waynesboro has going for it right now.

The millions that City Council approved several years ago in what still feels like a thank-you to former political supporters was, is and likely will be of no use to anybody, and that’s not 20-20 hindsight. (I was and remain a vocal critic.)

I’m also a critic of the current City Council’s approach to downtown redevelopment, which it seems to me was tossed aside just as investments were starting to reach a critical mass. But then I say that, and look at several thriving downtown restaurants, and the Wayne Theatre a few months from coming online, and say, meh, things are coming together even without the city’s participation.

The school system and police department continue to demand our attention, particularly with regard to salaries for teachers and police officers, who are woefully underpaid vis-s-vis their cohorts regionally, creating an effect wherein our neighbors poach our schools and our PD for the young talents that we have invested a few years of time and money into training to then go off elsewhere and be top-quality teachers and police officers somewhere else.

So there are a few areas where we can improve upon how we do things here in Waynesboro, no question. The schools, the PD, the ongoing effort to create the most business-friendly climate possible: check, check, check.

By one objective measure, we’re doing one very important thing as well as anybody. Our local economy is probably as strong as it can be.

Here, finally, are the begrudging props, seven years in the making.

Good job, Frank.

– Column by Chris Graham

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