You think your one vote doesn’t matter? Consider the 2022 election that put MAGA conspiracy theorist Jim Wood on Waynesboro City Council, which came down to 17 votes.
One Facebook post from one person that got a few of their friends and neighbors out to the polls could have changed the outcome of that election, and the trajectory of the city, with Wood now in position to gain control of the City Council in the Nov. 5 election.
ICYMI
- Independent Waynesboro candidates challenge vice mayor Jim Wood, GOP slate
- Jim Wood is putting himself on the ballot again in Waynesboro. Vote accordingly.
- Quiet subtext to 2024 Waynesboro elections: Not letting Jim Wood become the mayor
Wood, the current vice mayor, is also the chair of the Waynesboro Republican Committee, and he put together a hand-picked ticket to compete for the three seats being contested in the 2024 cycle.
His end game is obvious: Jim Wood wants to be mayor, and more important than that, because mayor is a ceremonial position, mainly involving banging a gavel to start meetings and representing the city at ribbon cuttings, he wants to control the direction of city government for the next four years.
Waynesboro cannot afford to have a wannabe Fox News carnival barker setting our direction, or lack thereof, for the next four years, any more than America can afford to have Wood’s hero, Donald Trump, running the country into the ground.
“I think the government has to change. We can’t be the way we have for the last two years,” said Bobby Henderson, himself a former city mayor, who is running this year for the At-Large seat on City Council.
Where we’ve been the last two years is back to being where we were when the Frank Lucente political clique had the majority on City Council for a lengthy stretch in the 2000s and 2010s decades.
The focus for Lucente, a self-styled conservative, except when it came to spending city money on his pet projects and giving it out to his political backers, was on keeping taxes low, at the expense of having the city address its crumbling infrastructure and the chronically underfunded K-12 school system.
“If you’re not funding your city, we’re not planning ahead for the new school, we’re not planning ahead for big projects. Everything is done for today and nothing for tomorrow. And you can’t run a city like that,” Henderson said.
But that’s the way things have run the past two years with the Republican trio of Wood, Lana Williams and Bruce Allen forming a 3-2 majority on the City Council.
More troubling is that it has felt for those past two years that Wood has been more interested in generating controversy to attract attention to himself than the nuts and bolts of actual governance.
Case in point: the controversy he created out of the thin air last year with a flippant comment on his now-defunct Facebook talk show in which he cruelly denigrated Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, calling Buttigieg “Pete Buttplug,” a crude reference to Buttigieg’s sexual orientation.
The comment did get national headlines, not the good kind – and it came just as the city was lobbying Buttigieg to approve a federal grant for a city project.
ICYMI
- Waynesboro vice mayor hits Buttigieg with gay slur after asking for federal money
- Waynesboro vice mayor defends ‘Pete Buttplug’ slur of Pete Buttigieg
- Waynesboro Vice Mayor Jim Wood offers half-hearted apology for ‘Pete Buttplug’ slur
- Waynesboro mayor rebukes Jim Wood on ‘Pete Buttplug’ slur: ‘No place in our City’
- Pete Buttigieg is aware that Waynesboro’s vice mayor called him ‘Pete Buttplug’
- City Council members, city residents, urge Waynesboro Vice Mayor Jim Wood to resign
The latest generated controversy has Wood’s two appointees to the Waynesboro Electoral Board, Curt Lilly and Scott Mares, engaged in a lawsuit against the Virginia Department of Elections in which Lilly and Mares are asserting that they will not vote to certify the 2024 election, because they don’t feel that the use of voting machines to tabulate the final vote count is fair.
“If you want to talk about fairness, I mean, let’s just talk about fairness and the quality and security of our elections and how they’re held in Waynesboro, just for a minute,” said Terry Short, who is running for a third term on City Council in this year’s election cycle.
“All you have to do is turn on YouTube on Monday at 7 p.m. and watch five people who come from very, very different political dynamics and political persuasions, and they all got elected the same way, using the same tool, using the same process, using the same certification that folks in tinfoil hats now don’t want to use,” Short said.
“That is ludicrous to me, and again, the same machines, the same process that and the same certification process that were just fine in June for the Republican primary, it’s incredible to me, but there it is. I guess people do what they do, right? But I’m an optimist. I think it all kind of worked its way out, but it is embarrassing,” Short said.
ICYMI
- Waynesboro: Judge seems to tip hand in suit over Nov. 5 election certification
- Waynesboro: Ground Zero for Republican efforts to steal the 2024 election?
- Waynesboro voters seek court order requiring Nov. 5 vote certification
- Waynesboro Republicans file suit to pre-emptively challenge Nov. 5 vote count
If that feels like the local Republicans giving themselves an out in case they lose this week, it’s a tactic from the playbook that the Lucente side played back in 2007, when Lucente used a technicality to block a referendum approved by 57.4 percent of city voters to build a new fire station in the city’s West End.
That delay prevented ground from breaking on the fire station until last month, 17 years later, costing taxpayers nearly $6 million, all told.
Which is to say, there is a cost to doing nothing, eventually.
ICYMI
- Waynesboro, 17 years late, finally breaks ground on West End fire station
- Does your vote even count? In Waynesboro, maybe not
“I’m willing to not just stick my head in the sand and hope the problem goes away,” said Lorie Strother, who is running for the Ward A seat currently held by Williams.
That line of thinking stands out because it’s not what we’ve been getting the past couple of years, since Wood eeked out his 17-vote victory over Sam Hostetter, a primary-care physician who had been elected in 2018, and had the support of Henderson, among others, in his bid for re-election.
For Henderson, coming out for Hostetter in a race with Wood, a Republican nominee, meant being threatened with censure by the local party.
Henderson didn’t cower in the face of the censure threat.
“I resigned,” he said, after a lifetime as a member of the Republican Party, which he feels has left him, and other Republicans, with its shift to the far, far right in the MAGA era.
That was a risky move politically, considering that Trump won Waynesboro in 2020 with 51.4 percent of the vote.
The demographic trends may favor the center and center-left in the city in 2024, but the local race is about as 50/50 as it can be on the eve of Election Day.
That’s why I’m writing this column.
You and a few of your friends could have prevented Waynesboro from having to endure this Jim Wood guy and his nonsense the past two years.
We’re better than that – than having a guy who thinks it’s OK to use homophobic slurs, that it was OK to make light of the hammer attack on the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who fever-dreamed about how he wished he’d been there on Jan. 6, running our city.
ICYMI
- Waynesboro Republicans cast doubt, then joke about attack on Pelosi
- Waynesboro: A vote for Jim Wood for City Council is a vote for Jan. 6
If you’ve already voted to move Waynesboro forward, good – your job now is to make sure your friends and neighbors have voted, and if they haven’t, to get them to the polls tomorrow.
The early vote totals tell us that about 60 percent of the people who are going to vote already have.
That still leaves a big chunk of people for us to get motivated.
This election is about putting people on City Council – like Lorie Strother, in Ward A, Terry Short, in Ward B, and Bobby Henderson, in the At-Large seat – who will keep the city running while also planning for tomorrow, who will work to address our infrastructure needs, who will work for solutions on issues like affordable housing and homelessness, who will prioritize our schools.
And who don’t look at serving on City Council as a steppingstone to something bigger, like getting their own talk show on Newsmax, or an appointment to a judicial post.
It’s time for Waynesboro to get serious, basically.
ICYMI
- Interview: Waynesboro City Council candidate Bobby Henderson talks with AFP
- Interview: Waynesboro City Council candidate Terry Short Jr. talks with AFP
- Interview: Waynesboro City Council candidate Lorie Strother talks with AFP
- The next level: City Council candidate Lorie Strother looks to help Waynesboro ‘move on up’
- Unfinished business: Terry Short Jr. hopeful for another term on Waynesboro City Council
- He’s back: Bobby Henderson eyes at-large seat on Waynesboro City Council in November
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Chris Graham
