Do the recent Waynesboro elections play out the way they do if there’s no Augusta Free Press?
Warning: yes, this column is hyperlocal.
Obvious answer: no.
Nobody knows that Jim Wood is a closet homophobe if AFP isn’t around to monitor the weekly Facebook talk show he had been hosting for several years, and used to denigrate Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg with a slur playing off Buttigieg’s sexual orientation and last name – calling him “Pete Buttplug.”
From the archives
- Coverage of Jim Wood’s years in Waynesboro politics: click here.
Wood not only did this, but the podcast was recorded and uploaded days after the city had written a letter to the Department of Transportation asking for approval of a grant for a development project – that Wood, as he ran for re-election this year, tried to take credit for making happen.
It’s bad enough that Ward D elected this yahoo the first time; we helped make sure, through our reporting, that the mistake didn’t get repeated.
The tougher one is the case of Kelvin Washington, the affable local pastor with decent intentions regarding running for an open seat on the Waynesboro School Board, who got caught up in a scandal involving a political mentor who admitted to planting fake news about the incumbent in the Ward C race, Debra Freeman, to try to take Freeman down a peg.
Washington, confronted with the news, decided – honorably, I need to say here – to drop out of the School Board race, and certainly nothing personal against Washington, but we can’t let our elections be manipulated with fake news, the way our national politics have been knocked totally off the rails with fake news for the past decade.
That story, like the one involving Jim Wood, isn’t told if AFP isn’t here.
ICYMI
As it stands, Waynesboro went entirely blue in an election cycle for the first time since there was the idea that a city could go blue.
We still have a MAGA Republican on the Waynesboro City Council, Jeremy Sloat, and a MAGA-adjacent mayor, Kenny Lee, but they’re going to be marginalized come Jan. 1, with the first order of business being, getting Kenny Lee out of the mayor’s chair.
ICYMI
It’s not about who wins between your favorite team versus mine or somebody else; to us, it’s about Moving Waynesboro Forward.
Sending Jim Wood back to City Council, and electing Kelvin Washington, as a candidate who would have gotten on the School Board because of a mentor’s dirty tricks, isn’t the way forward for our city.
We have too much on the table to continue taking big steps backward.
Our school system is, by state education metrics, subpar – we at AFP have been leading the effort to persuade the School Board to use the opportunity presented by Jeffrey Cassell retiring from his position as superintendent to hire a new superintendent from outside the current administration’s inner circle, so that we can get a fresh start on tackling what needs done to do what’s right for our kids.
From the archives
- Coverage of the search for a new school superintendent in Waynesboro: click here.
We at AFP were the ones in the local media leading the fight to get the Virginia DEQ to side with citizens who want protections from Northrop Grumman, which wants to inject tons of hazardous pollutants into our air; our side lost Round 1, but me calling it Round 1 signals that we don’t think it’s over, not by a long shot.
From the archives
- Coverage of the Northrop Grumman pollution issue: click here.
The News Virginian, my alma mater, exists in name only now; the once-proud newspaper literally doesn’t have a single reporter on staff anymore, which means, AFP is, and I’ll use the word literally here again, literally the only game in town, in terms of the news business.
Somebody has to keep their eyes on the folks in City Hall to make sure that they’re doing their jobs in our best interests.
That’s our job – that, and also trying to play a similar role for our neighbors in Staunton, where the News Leader, another once-proud newspaper, seems to be on its last legs, and Augusta County, a geographic monstrosity, as big as the state of Rhode Island, which doesn’t have a hometown newspaper of its own.
It says a lot about the state of the news media today that our region with 130,000 residents and the square mileage of a U.S. state has a single dying daily print newspaper with three reporters on its staff and a scrappy online news source with two tasked with keeping tabs on:
- three local governments
- three school boards
- two police departments and a county sheriff’s office
- 30 public schools
The dying print newspaper owned by USA Today Co., which has a market cap at $1.05 billion, is on the verge of tapping out on continuing in our local market.
If you haven’t already guessed, our parent company, Augusta Free Press LLC, doesn’t have a market cap anywhere near $1.05 billion.
But we’re not tapping out.
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Chris Graham
