Macy’s ‘tough crowd’ was just rude
Nov. 25: Beth Macy has become the third Democrat to announce her candidacy for the Sixth Congressional District currently held by absentee Republican Ben Cline. Unfortunately, what she learned yesterday on the first stop of her listening tour is that some potential voters are more interested in hearing themselves talk, even going so far as to film the whole exchange while talking into a cell phone.
Paper or cell phone? No contest.
October 31: When did it become a given that you are no longer an accepted member of society if you don’t have a cell phone? And who’s the bright bulb who decided a QR code is an appropriate replacement for an old-fashioned paper map—the kind that gives you a bird’s eye view of where you are and where you can go without having to squint at a tiny screen?
Staunton Crossing dissonance
October 24: Sixteen years and roughly $30 million later, Staunton Crossing has brought in a less than impressive 200 or so jobs. When will the balance of that 300-acre site ever pull its weight? Hard to say, partly because the city has been less than forthright about what kind of industries it wants to bring in, or at what environmental cost.
A ‘Failure to Act,’ a 28% water loss
October 3: Here’s what I learned in school this week: that for the past decade, the American Society of Civil Engineers has awarded the nation’s water infrastructure a D-minus, or just a hair above an F. That isn’t an academic abstraction, nor is it irrelevant to Staunton—not when 28% of all the water produced by the city’s treatment plant simply disappears, at a rate that’s almost twice the national average.
‘Unknown causes?’ Give me a break!
Sept. 12: Claiming that Staunton’s major water main break had “unknown causes” amounts to whistling past the cemetery. Most if not all of the city’s biggest water mains are made of brittle cast iron, which has an expected useful life of 100 years—and that centennial anniversary will be reached this coming January. The only “unknown”? How soon before the next rupture.
(Re)turning the tables
August 25: Fans of Bed, Bath and Beyond may take solace that it lives on as an internet ghost, selling its wares online and preparing to reenter the brick-and-mortar world with new storefronts. But its management under Marcus Lemonis, who strangled another middle-class institution known as Good Sam, doesn’t augur well for the future.
The main question: why did it break?
August 18: Why did a 16-inch water main break last week, in the middle of summer, closing schools for two days and disrupting businesses?? And what does that say about where we’ve placed our priorities when it comes to spending scarce capital investment money on behalf of city residents?
Let’s not send our water into the cloud
August 13: That million-gallon water tank looming over I-81 a year is being built mostly to supply coolant for a proposed data center that a) will bring few jobs to the city; b) will threaten an already precarious drinking water supply; and c) will result in as-yet-incalculable higher electricity bills for the area. Maybe we should be rethinking the Staunton Crossing master plan?
If you don’t sell it, it won’t sell
August 6: You might think, with the $7,500 federal tax credit for EVs set to expire at the end of September, that car dealers would be making a huge push to get buyers in the door before that inducement evaporates. But to do that requires them to believe in their product—and in Staunton, at least, that seems not to be the case.
Looking askance 