Augusta County Administrator Tim Fitzgerald made the call on Nov. 15 to terminate the contract with a Roanoke-based consultant that the county had hired in 2023 to assist with the update to the county’s 20-year comprehensive plan and economic development strategy.
The move by the administrator hasn’t come without controversy, namely, over whether Fitzgerald should have first consulted with members of the Augusta County Board of Supervisors before terminating the contract.
Another question here: how has the termination impacted the projected spring 2025 completion time frame?
Great question.
“Though we have not set revised milestone dates for the completion of the plan, staff is working with internal short-term deadlines. We believe adoption of the plan will be in early summer 2025, which loosely reflects a two-month delay in the process,” said Mia Kivlighan, the communications manager for Augusta County government, in an email to AFP on Monday.
The delay would actually be about six months behind the original project schedule, which had called for both the comprehensive plan update and the new economic development strategy to be in place by the end of the 2024 calendar year.
Hill Studio is the Roanoke-based consultant hired in 2023, at a contract cost of $317,780, to assist the county with the updates.
The original timeline for getting that work done had the economic development strategy being in place in the summer of 2024, and the updated comprehensive plan on the books at the end of the calendar year.
We don’t have specifics about what is behind the delays in meeting the original deadlines.
“We didn’t know we had a problem ‘til we knew we had a problem, and then we decided that that’s the direction we need to go,” Fitzgerald told members of the Augusta County Board of Supervisors at a BOS meeting on Dec. 11.
As mentioned above, Fitzgerald had come under some fire from board members over the decision to terminate the contract with Hill Studio, which was one of three finalists for the consultant job, and lists, on its website, its successful work on community planning projects in Lynchburg, Bedford and Pulaski, all involving planning for future growth in their downtown districts.
Mike Shull, who represents the Riverheads District on the Board of Supervisors, was critical, in comments made at the Dec. 11 BOS meeting, of the decision made by Fitzgerald to cut bait with Hill Studio, raising issue with how Fitzgerald didn’t consult with supervisors before making that call.
“Hill Studio, we weren’t informed on anything that was going on about that organization until the day that we got an email about termination,” said Shull, who then questioned how Fitzgerald came to the decision, apparently without consulting the BOS, to break the contract.
“I’m still pondering and questioning that, when we as a board voted on that company to come in here and things,” Shull said. “I feel like we should have been informed when the problems were arriving, and they weren’t giving us the right product that we were looking for.
According to the project timeline on the county website, the comp plan/economic development update is still in phase two, Plan Draft Development, of what is laid out as being a five-phase process.
That draft development work, per the county website timeline, began on Aug. 20, so, around three months ahead of Fitzgerald’s decision to terminate the contract with Hill Studio.
“We told the board right away,” Fitzgerald said. “It didn’t, I mean, we didn’t, we weren’t fighting problems for six months. It was, once we got a product, and we saw what we had, we determined that was the time that we needed to make a decision to go in a different direction. And we made that from a staff level, knowing that we didn’t have confidence that they could get across the finish line in time we needed to. And we had confidence in our folks that we could pick it up. So that’s the reason why that decision was made, to go forward.”
The comp plan and economic development strategy documents are used as guides for county leaders as decisions come up regarding public investments and managing future growth and development.
The county is currently still working off a comprehensive plan that was adopted by the Board of Supervisors in 2007, and updated in 2014 and 2015.
The county’s on-the-books economic development strategy was adopted in 2009 and updated in 2015.
A lot has changed, obviously, over the past 10 and 20 years, in terms of the assumptions behind economic development, public health and public safety, K-12 education, the environment, housing affordability, and so much else.
In the grand scheme of things, a delay of a few months in getting these planning documents on the books shouldn’t be a big issue.
The bigger issue here is: process.
“That should have been brought back to this board,” Shull said, criticizing the decision by Fitzgerald to act unilaterally. “We (have) a discussion on it, and we decide on whether we tell them, can you give us the right product? This is what we’re looking for. Or if they said they couldn’t, then it should have been a determination of the board to terminate them. I don’t think the staff and Mr. Fitzgerald had the rights to really terminate them before they came back and talked to this board.”
Share
Chris Graham
