Pyles wins fifth term on BOS, but quartet falls short with loss in Wayne race
An effort by a group that ran on a platform raising issue with the handling of the 2009 Augusta County reassessment fell just short of taking a majority on the county Board of Supervisors.
Pastures District incumbent Tracy Pyles won a fifth term in Tuesday’s elections, and was joined by ticketmates Marshall Pattie in the North River District and David Karaffa in the Beverley Manor District. But the fourth member of the group, Kurt Michael, fell 125 votes short in his race against Jeff Moore in the Wayne District.
Moore, a Republican, received 53.2 percent of the vote in the race against Michael, a former Augusta County Republican Party chair.
Pyles, a Democrat, garnered 65.1 percent of the vote in his two-way race with Republican Jim Warren.
Karaffa, an indepedent and former candidate for the 20th House District GOP nomination, won by 46 votes over Republican incumbent Jeremy Shifflett. Karaffa received 51.1 percent of the vote in the race.
Pattie, a former Augusta County Democratic Party chair, received 64.6 percent of the vote in a three-way race with former Augusta Republican chair Larry Roller and independent Stephen Morris.
Larry Wills (Middle River), Michael Shull (Riverheads) and David Beyeler (South River) were all unopposed.
Candidate details county economic-development strategy
North River Supervisor candidate Marshall Pattie detailed on Thursday a change in economic-development strategy for Augusta County that would boost local small businesses.
“For the past two decades, the Board of Supervisors has followed the strategy of recruiting high-tech and manufacturing firms to the county with limited success. Rather than recruit outside firms, we should focus on growing our small businesses,” Pattie said.
The Pattie plan:
- Raise the materiality for tools and equipment to between $300 and $500. “We currently tax small businesses on every tool and piece of equipment that they own, right down to the last hammer,” Pattie said.
- Eliminate taxes on tools and equipment when the property has fully depreciated.
- Phase out taxes on inventory. “In slow times, inventory grows, and the county reduces the profits of these firms every year,” Pattie said.
- Offer incentives to local business and industry looking to expand. “We have vacant industrial parks that have been sitting there for years. If a firm from Pennsylvania, for example, wants to come here, we provide significant incentives for them to do so. However, we don’t do this for local firms. If a local business wants to expand and hire more Augusta County residents, then I would be willing to offer similar incentives that we offer to outsiders,” Pattie said.
Chris Graham: A new order in the offing in Augusta?
A changing of the guard is in order in Augusta County, where the incumbents on the Board of Supervisors have been dropping like flies of late.
At last count, four of the seven-member board have announced that they won’t be running for re-election, with Board Chair Jeremy Shifflett and Pastures Supervisor Tracy Pyles confirmed to be in the running and South River Supervisor David Beyeler either expected to announce his intention to run for another term (according to some) or join the parade of retirees (according to others).
The balance of power could be shifting in the direction of Pyles, a Democrat who has forged an interesting coalition with former Augusta County Republican Chairman Kurt Michael, former Augusta County Democratic Chairman Marshall Pattie and local Tea Party veteran David Karaffa.
Karaffa is the only member of the group who will face an incumbent, Shifflett, a Republican who narrowly won election in 2007 (by 16 votes over Democrat Lee Godfrey) in the Beverley Manor District. Pattie and Michael are both running for seats being vacated by incumbents (Pattie in North River, Michael in Wayne), and Pyles, while he has am opponent, has not seriously been challenged in his four election victories, which date back to 1995.
Pyles was the voice in the wilderness leading the charge against the controversial property reassessments in 2009 that the majority of the Board of Supervisors decided to handle by an equally controversial measure that gutted the county property-tax rate. Shifflett joined the Pyles crusade late in the game, maybe too late to sidestep criticism that he did so for political reasons. How he fares against a challenge from the right in the form of Karaffa will be one of the key storylines in the upcoming election cycle in Augusta County.
Number one on that list will be how the disparate coalition that Pyles has forged will be able to work as a team. The grouping has a better-than-even chance of forming a working majority on the Board of Supervisors come January. United as they are right now on fiscal issues, could there be room for their opponents to play a divide-and-conquer game by going all social issues on them?
Not if the quartet follows this piece of advice: Local elections, and local government, aren’t about abortion and gay marriage. To borrow from the campaign mantra that carried Bill Clinton through contentious elections in the 1990s, it’s the economy, stupid. Economic growth and balanced budgets – that’s what the voters want.
Candidates forum set for June 15
The first in an advertised series of town-hall meetings featuring four candidates for seats on the Augusta County Board of Supervisors is set for Wednesday, June 15, at the Augusta County Government Center in Verona.
Incumbent Pastures District Supervisor Tracy Pyles will be joined by Beverley Manor candidate David Karaffa, North River candidate Marshall Pattie and Wayne candidate Kurt Michael at the 7 p.m. forum.
The public is invited to attend and ask questions.
Pattie throws hat into ring in North River
Marshall Pattie and his wife, Megan
Redoing the controversial 2009 Augusta County reassessment might not lead to a result that is embraced by everybody, “but it at least it would be a fair-market value,” said Marshall Pattie, a James Madison University business professor who this month announced his candidacy for the North River seat on the Augusta County Board of Supervisors.
“I think a lot of people feel that there wasn’t fair-market value when the reassessment was done,” said Pattie, 34, citing his own personal example of receiving a property assessment in 2009 that was 10 percent higher than what he had paid for his property a few months before the notice came in the mail.
County leaders compounded the problem by lowering the tax rate to compensate for the artificially high assessments. Declining state revenues based on a reworking of state funding formulas for the county in the wake of the reassessments will translate into a double-whammy for Augusta. “That may be substantial. It may be hundreds of thousands of dollars that we have to cut out of our budget due to that decision,” Pattie said.
A consultant to several Fortune 500 companies, Pattie was outspoken in his criticism of the Board of Supervisors in the ’09 reassessment discussions because he said what he witnessed in those discussions was “a process that didn’t make a lot of sense.”
“I saw a lot of supervisors making decisions that were based on their feelings, not on any facts or statistics,” Pattie said. “What I want to do is use my business background to help that process along, look at statistics, look at rational thought, look at some support in order to make decisions, as opposed to just going along with it unless people get upset with them.”
The incumbent supervisor in the North River District is Republican Larry Howdyshell, who hasn’t tipped his hand as to his plans for a possible run at re-election in November. Pattie, for his part, is running as an independent.
“Myself and many people in the area are fed up with political parties and taking out their battlegrounds with the rest of us. We really just want to work and focus on the issues that matter to us, not necessarily the issues that matter to people in California or New England or Alabama,” Pattie said.
Video
Story and video by Chris Graham
Chris Graham: The County Quartet
Posted by afp on November 7, 2011 · 2 Comments
This is what the 2011 Board of Supervisor elections will come down to, in my view. Do you like the way things are going in county government? If so, you’ve got excellent candidates to choose from in the four contested races on the ballot on Tuesday, for starters in the race for Pyles’ Pastures District seat, where he is being challenged by Jim Warren, a well-spoken small businessman.
Jeremy Shifflett is the current chair of the board and running for re-election in the Beverley Manor District against David Karaffa, one of three challengers who have aligned with Pyles. The second of that group is Marshall Pattie, a James Madison University business professor running for the North River District seat against Larry Roller and Steve Morris. The other contested race pits Kurt Michael, an educator also aligned with Pyles, against School Board representative Jeff Moore in the Wayne District.
(The incumbent in North River, Larry Howdyshell, and the incumbent in the Wayne, Wendell Coleman, are not running for re-election this year.)
Ads run in the local media paid for and authorized by the local GOP committee will tell you that the proper vote choices in the races would be Warren, Shifflett, Roller and Moore. In going with recent history in local politics, though, the ’11 elections in the county are a lot more complicated than any party ad line could spell out for you.
Pyles has been elected four times in Pastures as a Democrat, and Pattie is a former Augusta County Democratic Committee chair. Their ticketmates, Michael and Karaffa, have histories on the other side of the aisle – Michael as a sometimes-controversial former Augusta County Republican Committee chair, and Karaffa as an activist in local Republican circles who made a bid for the 2009 20th House District GOP nomination.
The County Quartet, as I’m branding them, are staking their political fortunes to the groundswell of public disfavor with the handling of the most recent county reassessments, which pushed property values up significantly (and locked them in for four years) just after the real-estate market had begun to crater. The bad situation there was made worse, in their view, by the way the Board of Supervisors responded, with a move to cut the county property-tax rate nearly 20 percent, eroding county revenues at a time when, the Quartet says, the county stands to lose millions in state funding for education and other public services due to the faulty reassessments.
I’m in a minority of one among the local news-editor set in agreeing with the perspective on county policy advanced by Pyles and his group, which means I’m also in a minority of one wanting to see a change in leadership at the Government Center in Verona. I’m OK with that, because unlike the other news entities here locally, which have had to cut jobs and outsource operations to remain afloat, I’ve actually been able to grow my business and even create a few jobs in the past couple of years, and I see the Quartet pushing a similar agenda.
Let’s get county government running well first, with a stable source of government revenues, from local sources and from the state, and then let’s turn our attention to jobs. Not that long ago, we had the interest of a major auto manufacturer that wanted to locate here in the Valley. It’s hard to believe that we turned that opportunity down, and I don’t see a Pyles-led board doing so a second time. And in the meantime, we can give the county economic-development department more resources to market county locations, including the still-practically-empty industrial park in Verona.
The good news for county voters is that if you see things differently, if you like the way county government is being run, you’ve got some solid choices among candidates who can continue the status quo.
I really think Augusta County will be in good hands whatever happens on Nov. 8. I just happen to think it will be in better hands if Pyles, Karaffa, Pattie and Michael are victorious at the end of the day.
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