City leaders want to delay new Waynesboro High School talks: Smart move

Waynesboro City Council leaders want to delay talks with the Waynesboro School Board over the future of Waynesboro High School until after the May city elections.

Of course this makes eminent sense. On paper, anyway.

Because voters, theoretically, will head to the polls on May 3 with the chance to elect, again theoretically, three new members to the five-member City Council and the five-member School Board.

Now, we all know that only a relative handful of us will actually head to the polls. May city elections have a hard time breaking the 20 percent turnout Mendoza line most springs.

And as far as having the chance to elect new majorities to the City Council and School Board, well, you need candidates, and we seem to be running short on candidates.

To date, Mayor Bruce Allen, who represents Ward B, and Vice Mayor Tim Williams, who represents Ward A, are unopposed for re-election. Frank Lucente, the at-large member, is retiring, with two candidates, Terry Short and Nancy Dowdy, competing for the at-large seat.

The School Board, honestly, hate to be the one to say it, but it’s pretty much irrelevant the way we do things here in Virginia. School boards here have no real spending authority, being reduced to doing whatever they can do with the money they get from city councils, boards of supervisors and the General Assembly.

Why we even bother to elect school boards is more worthy of debate than spending any time worrying about who gets elected to them.

So it might seem pointless to put the debate off into the future so that a relative few of us can pretend to exercise our God-given constitutional right to vote, but …

That’s the way things work.

Then sometime next fall, when the City Council and School Board don’t do what we want them to do, we can complain. That’s also how things work.

It’s called America.

– Column by Chris Graham