What am I saying when I say that Waynesboro has potential? For starters, that Waynesboro has empty buildings. That’s certainly part of it. Big buildings empty downtown. The old Kmart building out on West Main has been empty for 15 years.
You can look at empty buildings two ways – as a reminder of past successes and present failures, or as future building blocks. I prefer the latter.
So there’s that for our potential here. What else am I saying about our potential here? Well, we could also look at how we’re not doing anything at all to take advantage of what we have at our disposal.
Our city sits a couple of miles from the Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive, which bring millions of visitors a year to these parts. And what do we do to bring those folks down the mountain? Nothing. Those who do venture into the Valley drive past us to Staunton, Harrisonburg, Lexington, anywhere else.
That’s exaggerating things, to be sure. They stop at our chain restaurants at the Interstate 64 exit on their way to somewhere more interesting. Aside from bringing us a relative few tax dollars, though, that does little to build wealth for our local community.
But we have potential. In those empty buildings downtown, for one. I just spent a refreshing week down in the Outer Banks, and while recharging my batteries my thoughts turned to business when a storekeeper asked us where we were from.
“Waynesboro.”
“Oh, the mountains. Beautiful. People will be heading up that way soon once they’re done with the beach.”
Precisely. They come here once a year, to peep leaves. We can get them coming back throughout the year if we can offer them something like what your average beach community does.
Think about it. OBX and other beach towns have chain restaurants and retail stores, but where do you spend your money when you’re there? Right, with the locals.
We’re going to figure out sometime soon that the trick to getting those millions of people down from the Parkway and Skyline Drive is going to be in offering them a uniquely Waynesboro experience, whatever that is.
We need our local government to do three things, one of which it’s already beginning to do – aiding and abetting. The planning department is holding a series of meetings next week to engage the local citizenry in an effort to map out the future of development in our fair town, and for that effort, I applaud them.
But there’s something else that our local government does that is just killing our potential for growth and development. Did you hear about the pizza shop that was going to open downtown that ended up on the cutting-room floor because the entrepreneurs were frustrated with the roadblocks put in front of them by the bureaucracy? That story is repeated often these days. Even small businesses that do eventually open only do so because of the persistence of their owners.
We can’t have government getting in the way of progress with reams of paperwork and nasty attitudes. That’s a big reason we have all those empty buildings, er, potential.
Which leads me to thing #3 that our local government can do to get us to realize our potential. In addition to getting out of our way and assisting with framework and vision, how about being more willing to invest more of our community’s resources into our future?
Big things are about to happen here. I see a Waynesboro in 10 years that is a hotbed and linchpin for the tourist industry in Virginia and the Mid-Atlantic. We have that kind of potential. It’s time to make it real.
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