Waynesboro City Council knew three years ago that Northrop Grumman was going to release two tons of hazardous pollutants into our local environment every month – the air, then, eventually, our groundwater – and decided, We need the money.
Our City Council failed us on that.
We’re going to have the bear the cost of that failure for generations to come.
ICYMI
Waynesboro Public Schools is, measurably, failing – as in, the Virginia Department of Education has all four of our elementary schools, our middle school and our high school getting failing grades.
Despite this, the School Board decided two years ago to give the superintendent who had overseen Waynesboro Public Schools since 2013, Jeffrey Cassell, a four-year contract extension.
The School Board members involved in that decision need to be asked to step down.
We can’t trust their judgment on naming a replacement for Cassell, who announced earlier this month that he will retire at the end of the calendar year.
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The City Council members who signed off on Northrop Grumman setting up shop here to bring a relative handful of jobs, at a cost of $850,000 a year in local tax breaks, and immeasurable, irreversible damage to our environment, need to be asked to step down.
They sold their souls, and ours, for 300 jobs, most, if not all, of which aren’t going to go to locals.
So, we need an all-new School Board, an all-new City Council, and while we’re at it, we need to clean house in City Hall, where the professional staff bends the arc of the moral universe not toward justice, but toward those with money and access.
We see that in matters of utmost importance like Northrop Grumman and the decades of pollution we’re going to have to endure from their operations, and hyperlocal neighborhood matters, like the request of a corporate exec who bought a property in a residentially zoned neighborhood six years ago, built it into an events business, and only now is asking the city for the proper permitting to be able to continue.
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The rules, per the people who we pay to run things for us in City Hall, don’t apply to the Northrop Grummans and Mimosa Farms of the world; they only apply to the 99 percent who don’t have the means to woo the electeds and their credentialed functionaries with invites to fancy soirees.
Waynesboro needs a refresh, from the top down.
Our City Council has failed us.
Our School Board has failed us.
The people they hired to run the day-to-day in City Hall and the central office have failed us.
All we’re getting for our tax dollars is the bare minimum – the lights are still on, the trash gets picked up, the school busses run on time.
We need to stop settling for the bare minimum.
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Chris Graham
