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If you want to understand a person’s core values and priorities, don’t listen to what they say: look at how they spend their money. Cash has a more honest vocabulary than cheap words.
As much can be said for governments. Staunton is now formulating its spending plans for the next fiscal year, and they speak volumes about the problems and opportunities the city recognizes—and those it chooses to ignore or simply not see. Anyone thinking of living in the city beyond next year should be looking at those numbers and realizing what they mean, for them and for their neighbors. What does our municipal spending say about what we think is really important?
Much of the city’s annual budget is devoted to operating expenses—paying for past decisions—but it also includes a Capital Improvement Plan that in many cases accounts for decisions yet to be made. Known informally as the CIP, this running five-year wish list that gets updated annually describes what city planners think we need, how much they think it will cost and how they think we should pay for it. To see their conclusions, you can review the current 153-page draft online, or you can attend the Feb. 19 meeting of the city’s planning commission at city hall, where it will hold a public hearing on the CIP before submitting it to city council a week later.
What’s in the CIP? A tad over $47 million in spending, which is a $3.4 million increase over the five-year plan adopted by city council just a year ago. Where that money is to be spent can be loosely grouped into three categories. One is the things for which Stauntonians have been clamoring for years, such as more sidewalks, improved park facilities, revitalization of the West End and Uniontown, etc. A second is things that the people who run and operate our city say they need to do their jobs more effectively, from relocating the police department from city hall to a yet-to-be-built headquarters building (with an estimated price tag of $23.4 million), to buying new fire trucks and maintenance vehicles, to reroofing various city facilities. Both those categories have some wiggle room, since they’re largely based on “good or even prudent to have or do” items but are not “essential must-haves right now.”
The third general category is less forgiving, encompassing either imminent or already real infrastructure failures. The current poster child for this category is the flood-damaged tunnels in the Wharf district, for which the CIP is reserving $8 million for repairs. That’s a strong statement about how the Wharf district is viewed as a critical aspect of the city’s commercial and economic health, and it’s hard to rebut that premise.
But now consider that the CIP proposes to set aside a mere $250,000 for its “affordable and workforce housing fund,” which was established last year in response to the city council’s “Staunton Plan,” in which “affordable housing and housing for working families was prioritized.” It’s not unreasonable to observe that reserving less money over six years than would suffice to buy a single average-priced home in Staunton suggests the city’s “priorities” in this case exist primarily on paper—a perception strengthened by the laziness that went into crafting the description of this initiative, which was lifted directly out of last year’s CIP and so describes future events that have already happened.
A further indication of how this is a token effort is seen when the stingy housing fund is contrasted with, oh, I don’t know—how about the $360,000 reserved over the same six years to buy new golf cars? I don’t play golf, but I have nothing against spending tax dollars on golf cars that become a revenue generator, and which provide yet another amenity that makes Staunton a special place for so many people. The problem is that amenities fall into the “nice to have” bucket, whereas affordable housing veers perilously close to the bucket into which we put the city’s commercial and economic health.
So there are problems with how capital improvements are balanced against each other. But an even bigger problem is how some capital spending is avoided altogether, despite what might appear as a screaming need to address an issue before it becomes a full-blown crisis. Exhibit A in this regard are the unfunded projects in the water fund CIP, which is separate from but issued in tandem with the much larger general-fund CIP. Those projects—there are four of them—are not only unfunded but also unscheduled, despite appearing in the CIP year after year, presumably because no one has been willing to tackle the ginormous problem of finding an extra $50 million or so to ensure Staunton’s water supply remains uninterrupted.
That water supply is delivered via 16- and 20-inch cast iron mains that are now 100 years old, which is at or beyond their expected service lives. Half of the water Staunton consumes is piped from a reservoir in the George Washington National Forest, 14 miles away. Replacing that pipeline, plus the one that feeds the city from Gardner Springs, would cost an estimated $41.5 million. Developing a backup well system to tap groundwater in a crisis, as recommended in a 2018 study that the city commissioned, would cost an additional $7,950,000—and while that may seem like an unnecessary “extra,” it bears pointing out that our part of the state is already under a drought warning.
Springs can run unexpectedly dry. So can reservoirs, at which point it will be a little late to start wishing the city had drilled those wells. But it’s all too tempting to kick big projects and capital expenditures like this down the road, when some other city council will be forced to deal with it—and with the angry city residents who will be demanding to know why there had been no planning for such a predictable calamity. The short answer will be that it was easier to respond to the many more voices lifted on behalf of other, cheaper improvements.
Looking askance 