City elections vital for future

By The News Virginian Staff

Published: May 5, 2008

Straining like the Israelites under the Pharaoh’s burdens, colonial America turned on the Empire and cast it into the Atlantic. But the Founders did something more. They took quill to parchment and in documents unfurled the initial step in an idea of a place in which power, seated in individuals and the communities composed of them, spread from points within toward the center rather than reaching outward from that singular locus.
Those points were America, and that singular locus is Washington, the incarnation of the Empire from which we sought refuge, then offered it. Now U.S. reach extends across the oceans, and the Capitol rather than the crown lays upon the backs of the people levies difficult to bear.
Still, the Founders’ idea persists, which leads us to today. Familiar issues bob on the surface of local elections in Staunton and Waynesboro. Both cities are coping with the necessity of stormwater improvements and the complexities of finding an equitable means of footing the costs with taxpayers’ money. Taxes themselves, of course, are a perpetual concern, but acutely so at a time of deep national economic uncertainty.
With regard to Waynesboro, however, there is something more. Assuredly, taxes are of prime concern. So too are stormwater funding, capital improvements and the thorny question of whether to invest more of the people’s money in the Wayne Theatre.
But the city election is moreover about identity. Despite federal government’s penetration of the private lives of individuals and their towns, community self-determination remains a right and an opportunity. Nothing restrains us from transforming our city and its future, and with it, ours.
Nothing except us, and those who lead us.
Recent initiatives, such as the Town Center tax breaks, have turned the once sleepy west end into a retail mecca. Now the task before the City Council is to help engender a similar makeover of Waynesboro’s core, which is nestled along the ends of two great American byways at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
True leaders will recognize that allowing downtown to persist in its current state of stagnation is an unacceptable alternative chosen and accepted by predecessors for decades. Industrial evolution has produced a climate in which economic models reliant upon manufacturing have become dangerously outmoded. A diverse business base driven by a vibrant downtown is Waynesboro’s best and perhaps only hope for enduring economic vitality.
True leaders will recognize that seeking to transform our city does not necessitate bankrupting it. One course of ease is to do nothing and declare victory because of stable tax rates. Another is to attempt to do all things while emptying city bank accounts and taxpayers’ pockets. Neither will do. We need leaders capable of thinking and acting outside these narrow boundaries.
We persist in our conviction that the era will arrive when Waynesboro no longer need consider the city it can become, when merely keeping in order its present affairs will be sufficient. That day is not today.
Going to the polls today is about something more. It is a potential first step in building a city of lasting vibrance and financial strength. It is a decision about identity, not of whom we are as a city but whom we shall be for the remaining half of the millennium. Federal elections get pundits’ attention, but these remain the decisions that matter.