The chair of the Waynesboro Republican Committee, Jim Wood, the guy who signed off on the three Republican candidates for Waynesboro City Council, is also the city’s vice mayor.
No conflicts there – that the guy who signed their election paperwork would also be the mayor if at least two of the three win.
This Jim Wood, party chair, is also the Jim Wood, wannabe Fox News carnival barker, who thrust the city into the national headlines last year after using a hateful homophobic slur on his now-defunct Facebook talk show to demean Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, right as the city was asking Buttigieg to approve an application for federal grant funds.
Smart.
ICYMI
Jim Wood is also the guy who nominated Curt Lilly and Scott Mares to serve as the Republican members of the Waynesboro Electoral Board.
Lilly and Mares are in the news right now for their pre-emptive lawsuit challenging the Nov. 5 election, which they say they won’t certify absent a judge’s order.
This could have cascading effects all the way up to the presidential race, even if Lilly and Mares end up in jail for contempt of court in the process.
ICYMI
These Waynesboro Republicans, under the thumb of our Jim Wood friend, are quite busy these days.
Standing in Jim Wood’s path are three independent candidates for the open seats on City Council – two former city mayors, Bobby Henderson and Terry Short, and long-time city-government volunteer Lorie Strother.
ICYMI
- Interview: Waynesboro City Council candidate Lorie Strother talks with AFP
- Interview: Waynesboro City Council candidate Terry Short Jr. talks with AFP
- Interview: Waynesboro City Council candidate Bobby Henderson talks with AFP
Since they’re running as independents, they didn’t have a party chair to sign their election forms; they had to get signatures from hundreds of city residents to qualify for the ballot.
There was value to that process.
“I had to actually go and stomp those grounds, and I would say the first thing, first and foremost, is that Ward A people said, Wait a minute, someone’s knocking on my door trying to hear from me about what the issues are. You know, they said that they had not seen that, they had not seen people come to them and be interested in what it is that they wanted to see, basically,” said Strother, a 33-year Waynesboro resident running for the Ward A seat.
Strother, who works at the University of Virginia as the leader of the Supplier Diversity Construction Team, served for nine years on the Waynesboro Economic Development Authority, and also served a term on the Waynesboro Cultural Commission.
Her opponent, Dave Goetze, who calls himself “Major Dave,” focuses his attention on North Carolina politics as the vice president of research for the Electoral Education Foundation, an outfit founded by North Carolina Republican lieutenant governor nominee Hal Weatherman, the running mate of Holocaust-denier Mark Robinson, who is losing bigly in his campaign for governor to Democrat Josh Stein.
Goetze’s main qualification, for Wood, the Waynesboro Republican chair, is that he lives in Ward A and is a Republican.
Just to be clear, you’re not going to see Lorie Strother posting to social media several times a week about voter-registration trends in North Carolina.
Her focus is on affordable housing in Waynesboro, and the related issue of homelessness, which is a function of the higher cost of living for residents in the city.
“I’m not a career politician. I analyze things,” Strother said. “I think I have the ability to see what the problem is, see what the potential solutions are, and be able to roll up my sleeves and work with my co-councilors to make a viable decision, and that’s it.
“That’s where I start with the homelessness and housing solutions and economic development. Because of my experience with economic development, I can readily get in and be able to support businesses, tourism, parks and recreation, depending upon what the project is, and then also just infrastructure, again, supporting what we already have, but then improving on things that we could possibly improve on,” Strother said.
Short is running for a third term on City Council, in a race for the Ward B seat with Will Flory, who is currently the city’s deputy Commonwealth’s attorney.
Short’s day job has him serving as the director of the Local Assistance Division at the Virginia Department of Transportation, where he has worked since 2005, with a 16-year stint as the planning manager for VDOT’s Staunton District, which covers a wide swath of Virginia including the Shenandoah Valley and the Alleghany Highlands.
With busy workdays at VDOT, Short could have used somebody signing off on his election paperwork to take the easy route to get on the ballot.
“You’ve got three candidates that are running for Council this election who knocked on 140 to 180 doors and worked their tails off to get signatures, myself included. I did that over about a three-, four-month period, dedicating time after I got off of work, going out on weekends, riding my bike around town, and committing the time to it,” Short said.
Hard work, in other words, on the one side, “versus three other candidates who, I don’t think our community may fully understand, that our vice mayor put them on the ballot in the hopes of becoming mayor. I mean, that’s, at the end of the day, what this is about,” Short said.
“These three folks didn’t go knock on any neighbor’s door. They didn’t go to a community event and handshake and get to know people. They decided that it was just more convenient and easier and simpler to get the signature of one individual in order to put them on the ballot. And that’s really super unfortunate, and I think it speaks to the character of folks, to take sort of that easy road,” Short said.
Henderson, a U.S. Army veteran, served a four-year term on City Council from 2018 to 2022 before taking a break from city politics to focus on his day job with a fire-investigation company.
Henderson is back to run for the At-Large seat on City Council because he isn’t on board with the direction of the governing body under Wood, Lana Williams, the current mayor, and Bruce Allen, the long-time Ward B representative.
Williams and Allen are not running for re-election.
“One of the big things is, I think as citizens, we’ve lost our voice with Council, with the current Council that we have. They make decisions, secure their 3-2 vote, and move on, and don’t give us the chance to voice our opinion. And that’s probably my primary reason to get back in,” Henderson said.
Henderson’s At-Large race, in which he is facing Republican nominee Jeremy Sloat, is the lone citywide race on the Nov. 5 ballot, and thus may be the toughest one for the slate of independents to win, though the demographics of Waynesboro are more favorable than they were even four years ago, when Donald Trump won the presidential election in the city with 51.4 percent of the vote.
“We’ve grown a lot since 2018, and we’re getting a lot of folks coming from the UVA-Charlottesville area, moving to our because of the cost of living, and I get that, so I think the dynamics has changed in Waynesboro,” said Henderson, who concedes that he will need to get “some of the citizens that normally vote Democrat to look my way and give me their vote.
“I know there’s a number of Republicans that have placed their votes to me and will be sending their votes my way. I get calls, Hey, I voted today, you got another vote. I’m like, Well, I appreciate that. But that’s the unknown,” Henderson said. “You really don’t know, as polarized as we are as a society, now, who are they voting for? Are they voting straight Republican? Are they looking the candidate individually? And, unfortunately, I think a lot of people are voting straight party lines.”
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Chris Graham
