Mélange

Looks like Cline won’t have to worry

June 10: Would-be politician Beth Macy spoke before a packed and supportive Staunton audience last night, in what should have been a rousing call to arms to unhorse the horse’s ass currently representing Virginia’s Sixth Congressional District. Unfortunately, the former journalist seems to have forgotten one of the prime directives drilled into all cub reporters, “Show, don’t tell.” In doing so, she foreshadowed yet another easy win for Ben Cline.

Fate can teach us fiscal sustainability

May 29: Staunton’s comprehensive plan update has a glaring oversight, as underscored by the city’s recent conditional approval of a development that will build 267 new homes—and a whole lot of new infrastructure that the city will have to maintain in perpetuity, but with no idea of how much that will cost. What’s missing is a fiscal sustainability policy to determine if new projects will be a plus for the city, or whether they ultimately will become a drain on Staunton taxpayers. To fill that gap, we could learn a few things from a Texas city named Fate.

Seeking Dominion with a $25 bribe

May 20: To the many reasons we already had to be wary of the siren call of data centers, we now can add this week’ s announcement of a proposed $67 billion merger of Dominion Energy with NextEra Energy. The combination would create the world’s largest regulated utility, on a par with the world’s largest oil companies, which right there should give us pause. When the elephants in the room start their mating rituals, it’s time for the rest of us to rush for the exits to avoid getting trampled.

Follow the colored-dot road . . .

May 13: A draft of Staunton’s revised and updated Comprehensive Plan is out for review. It’s an improvement over the original, which was issued in 2019. It’s also significantly deficient, with several blind spots and a tendency to ignore uncomfortable issues—but perhaps that’s only to be expected from a document designed for short attention spans, heavy on graphics and unabashedly determined to “minimize text.”

When data centers pull the plug

May 5: The industry watchdog that monitors what data centers do to our electrical grid issued its highest warning yesterday—a level 3 alert—for only the third time in its history. The catalyst? Data centers in Virginia and Texas abruptly disconnecting from the grid in 2024 and 2025, threatening widespread blackouts.

Staunton’s cross(ing) is hard to bear

May 1: We’re now more than three weeks into the 90-day timetable Tim Davey gave Staunton City Council for updating the Staunton Crossing master plan, and so far there’s been no word on how or when this process will begin, or how the city’s residents will be included. That’s a problem, and more so if the city is seriously thinking of trying to land a data center.

United Way: new bottle, same vinegar

April 22: United Way of Central Shenandoah Valley is pelting me with fund-raising appeals that stress how useful it is, helping people with free tax preparation services and providing kids with free back-to-school backpacks. But it’s still contributing only 30 cents of every dollar of the donations it solicits to local social service providers—you know, the agencies that deal with the little things in life, like food, shelter and health care.

Data center FOMO with a side of nuke

April 13: Nice town you have here. Be a shame if it was the only one in Virginia without a data center to juice property tax revenues. And oh, yeah—just to sweeten the pot, whaddya say to building a small nuke to feed the beast?

There’s thrifty, and then there’s cheap

April 5: Staunton is looking at tens of millions of dollars in long overdue maintenance of its physical infrastructure, so why is it looking at increasing the average household’s water and sewer bills by just $7.41 a month? At that rate, it won’t be able to replace its century-old main water pipelines for another 81 years—but at least it’ll have bragging rights for its low taxes and cheap utility rates.

A solid ‘A’ on Staunton’s report card

Feb. 28: A biannual survey of Staunton residents, only the second time it’s been taken, shows a huge jump in confidence in city government and an overall high level of satisfaction with living here. But economic anxiety is running high, and there are hard to interpret concerns about the city’s utility infrstructure.

Put your money where your mouth is

Feb. 10: The city is currently trying to figure how to prioritize next year’s spending—and the choices it’s making in some cases reflect badly on its values and its unwillingness to bite the bullet.

It’s not just the weather that’s chilly

Jan. 26: Well, this is a Fern mess we’re in. Seven inches of “snow,” actually tiny and therefore densely packed crystals that have frozen into slabs of ice. Sub-freezing temperatures that will drop into low single digits every night this week and won’t break above 32 degrees for at least another week. And a tone-deaf city government whose main concern is that you follow its rules about clearing the “snowfall” from its relatively few sidewalks.

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.

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.