Nonsense in Staunton: Why you don’t put Republicans in charge of anything

Staunton is without a city manager, at a time of year that has the city organization in the midst of its annual budget, and at great expense to city taxpayers – and the reason is nothing but pure spite.

The forced resignation of Steven Rosenberg, who had been city manager since 2019, after a six-year run as the deputy city manager, seemed foreordained from the surprise May 2020 election results that had a conservative bloc win a majority of Staunton City Council.

Staunton had long had a progressive majority on City Council, and it’s par for the course that there will be a change at the top when there’s a seismic shift as the kind that was seen in the 2020 elections in the Queen City.

The timing here is awful. The city manager would be expected to have a proposed budget to City Council in March to jumpstart the springtime deliberations leading to the adoption of a spending plan for the coming fiscal year ahead of when the spending calendar flips on July 1.

The City Council moved Wednesday to appoint the assistant city manager, Leslie Beauregard, to serve as the interim, so there is technically somebody in the big chair, but presuming that someone else in the organization will now have to step in to serve as an acting assistant city manager, you can see the issue here.

What was achieved with this move, other than the bloc flexing whatever muscles it thinks it has, at the expense of putting more work on city staff, and more expense on city taxpayers?

To that end, the News Leader is reporting that taxpayers are on the hook for $194,220 to pay Rosenberg to leave, plus whatever costs the city will incur to find a new city manager.

All this, so that the bloc can let the city know who’s the boss.

Something similar happened in Waynesboro back in 2008 when a conservative bloc won control of the City Council and forced out then-City Manager Doug Walker.

Fourteen years later, Waynesboro can’t even clear snow from its streets, the game plan in the River City being, it’ll eventually melt.

When you try to do local government on the cheap, it’s basic services that suffer.

Staunton has, for the past couple of decades, been the example locally for how to get local government right.

Now it’s the latest reminder of why you don’t put Republicans in charge of anything.

Story by Chris Graham