“The commissioner should not be a tool of the supervisors, and they’re working hand in glove,” said Pyles, a Democrat who is running for the soon-to-be-open revenue post in the November general elections.
Chris Graham talks with Tracy Pyles
Virginia elects a revenue commissioner at the local level to keep local tax-assessing operations out from under the control of the local government, but in too many localities across the Commonwealth, the notion that the position should be independent has long since been lost.
To listen to Pyles, this has allowed the Augusta County Board of Supervisors to engage in some funny business with the numbers to get them to say what they want them to say.
“If you’re the commissioner of revenue, you should be the one making the projections of how much revenue you’re getting in the succeeding year,” Pyles said. “The board is not very successful in predicting what they’re going to get, and that comes from two causes. One is they want to underproject, they want their estimates to be wrong. The commissioner should be saying, well, you can set it where you like, but this is where it’s going to be based upon what the assessments are and what the tax rates are.
“The board shouldn’t be involved with that,” Pyles said. “If I’m Commissioner of Revenue, I will do a projection, an official projection from the office, to say, this is what we expect to get in meals, lodging, personal property vehicle and all that.
“They can make it something else, but if they do, then they should explain to the people why they’re not using the commissioner’s numbers. And then when the actual come in, and I’m very comfortable, I’ll be able to give them projections that would be more attuned to reality than theirs,” Pyles said.
That’s one area where Pyles, as the revenue commissioner, would serve as a check and a balance to the BOS, which of late hasn’t exactly seemed to want to have anybody from the outside giving anything resembling input on how it has been doing its job.
Pyles himself was escorted out of a board meeting this summer by sheriff’s deputies after going over his allotted time addressing county issues in a Matters from the Public session.
“They’re spending, I think, up to $100,000 a year for a communication manager and her office, that’s to get their information out. They’re spending that much money to get their information out, but they’re clicking back on what the people want to share with them. That makes no sense. We’re the bosses. Listen to us. Give us time,” Pyles said.
In his time on the Board of Supervisors, the approach to the Matters from the Public part of a board meeting was basically “open mic, alright, come on in and share what you think,” Pyles said.
“Sometimes it was laborious, sometimes it was very repetitious and all that. But I will tell you, I never had a public hearing that I didn’t learn something, where there wasn’t something that came up that I hadn’t thought about. I tried to think about a lot, but you can’t think of everything from everybody’s perspective. So, they lose by not allowing folks to have their say,” Pyles said.
“The people at large, they get it, they know something’s not right,” Pyles said. “When they are trying to stop people from talking, from being hurt, and they want to just put it out like it was Tass or something from Russia. They want to have their propaganda, they’re pretty ice cream sundae presented to us, but they don’t want to hear about what we’re dealing with and what they’re doing wrong.”
It’s something of an uphill battle for Pyles to run for the revenue commissioner job as a Democrat in a county that has in recent election cycles been voting 70-plus percent for Republican candidates at the local, state and federal levels.
He’s a Democrat, he said, because of his experience growing up in Deerfield, in the western part of Augusta County, the son of a union man, reared in the Baptist church.
“I came out of that with a great sense of empathy for the other guy, and it only grew as I as I got older, and my heart was for the people that has less,” Pyles said. “Now, does that make me a socialist? No, no, no, no. You have to make things work. You can only give away so much until it’s not working anymore. So, when I’ve looked at things, how can we make it work long term, you know, some of the things going on with the programs are going to bankrupt us. We know that, and we have to have things properly checked, see that they serve the need that is out there.”
Pyles is also still a Democrat in a county in which it’s not easy to be a Democrat because, well, because he’s the stubborn sort.
“If I wanted to have an easy path in politics, I wouldn’t have been a Democrat,” said Pyles, noting that he was still able to win six elections to the Board of Supervisors as a Democrat.
“I think that was because the people appreciated what I was doing,” Pyles said, “and they appreciated, I think, that I had their back, and I wasn’t going to roll over for anything or anybody, because they didn’t send me there to just be a potted plant, you know.”
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