Andy Zipser

Staunton’s curse of low expectations

(Reading time: 6 minutes)

It’s been a week since Staunton’s city council got together with members of its Comprehensive Plan Committee to review the status of the comprehensive plan update, and I’m still trying to figure out what that was all about.

One problem facing city council members is that they can’t just sit around a table and discuss the issues of the day. Aside from a limited set of circumstances, any occasion in which more than two of them exchange views becomes a public meeting, subject to all the constraints that implies. That’s great from the viewpoint of public transparency and avoiding the appearance of back-room deals, but not so great when it comes to a frank exchange of ideas and opinions on issues that require foresight and leadership. So when the council scheduled a meeting about the plan that’s supposed to guide the city for the next 20 years, the implication was that this would be a chance for Staunton leaders to air their concerns and offer suggestions for a supposedly seminal document.

Nah.

The June 3 meeting was held not at city hall but at the public library, where apparently it was not videotaped. No more than a handful of Staunton residents observed the session, which was notable mostly for its low energy and a PowerPoint presentation punctuated by long silences in response to the question, “Any questions?” To be fair, however, the bar was set incredibly low right from the start, when Rodney Rhodes, Director of Community Development, explained that the Virginia Code doesn’t actually require the plan to be updated. All that’s needed is a “review” of the plan every five years, which in essence could amount to a quick flip of the pages of a document adopted in 2019 and an equally quick “yup, looks good.”

Or not. Point being, anything that the Comprehensive Plan Committee had come up with was already far more than mandated, so don’t sweat the small stuff. Or that’s pretty much how it sounded.

It also was in marked contrast to the stress placed on the document by Will Cockrell, the consultant with EPR PC in Charlottesville who ran the PowerPoint. The comprehensive plan “is not a policy document—it’s the policy document” undergirding all other city policies, spending choices and investments, Cockrell emphasized, before lapsing into an increasingly monotoned overview of a revised plan that is “significantly shorter” than the original. Indeed, the revised plan’s greater brevity, generous use of artwork, larger type and more graphic design were all lauded as major improvements over the original, which by implication has been moldering in a musty drawer somewhere, unread and unappreciated.

To be fair again, the council was not completely without comment, starting with the revised plan’s glaring omission of any reference to Staunton Crossing. Noting that the city faces $300 million in unfunded capital needs, councilman Jeff Overholtzer pointed out that getting some tenants into Staunton Crossing could go a long way toward generating much-needed additional revenues for those needs—although what businesses should be pursued, and how, remained unspoken. Councilman Adam Campbell echoed that concern, but also noted the plan’s silence about Staunton’s unhoused population and its many vacant buildings. Councilwoman Alice Woods said she worried about the plan’s failure to more rigorously address the city’s lack of sufficient “middle housing” for its essential teachers, firefighters, cops and other service workers.

Yet such observations were relatively few and elicited scant discussion, suggesting little consensus about the purpose of a comprehensive plan. Indeed, Mayor Michele Edwards opined that the comprehensive plan isn’t a plan at all—that it’s “more a guidepost, a vision.” She received no push-back on that interpretation, just as there was no back-and-forth on any of the few other comments or opinions. The evening was, as already noted, a rather low-energy event—which only begs the question: why was it even held? What was the point?

One possible answer is that this meeting, like so many of the others having to do with the comprehensive plan, was more about process than content. About establishing a paper trail attesting to public input and official attention, regardless of substance. The June 3 city council meeting was merely one of a string of get-togethers dating back to Sept. 19, 2024, when the 11-member citizen steering committee met for the first of 15 sessions, not to mention several public presentations and workshops, all of which seems to attest to weighty substantive debate. Yet a close reading of the minutes—when they’re available, that is—suggests that much of the time was devoted to discussions of “branding,” how to word various outreach materials, reviewing survey results, and other logistical matters. As for the plan’s actual content? That seems to have been generated largely by the consultants, who presented committee members—and later the public—with menus from which to choose their preferences.

(Apparently the consultants were unable to come up with a branding idea that would “honor Staunton’s past while looking towards the future,” so it remains the “Comprehensive Plan 2045.”)

The comprehensive plan isn’t supposed to be just a gauzy vision of the future. Nor should its scope be defined by outside consultants, who despite their best efforts at tapping into the local zeitgeist are necessarily limited by what is reflected back to them. In that sense this whole process has been a hall of mirrors, with the consultants conducting polls and issuing questionnaires to learn what city residents want, then drafting proposals that summarize the feedback they received and asking residents what they think. If nothing else, we can conclude that city residents who have kids in school and have to get from home to work and back again don’t spend a lot of time thinking about Staunton Crossing—or about homeless people or vacant buildings or a host of other issues I raised a month ago, and again more recently.

That’s where political leadership should play a role, and thus far has not. Just as the 2019 comprehensive plan suffered from the lack of anyone at a policy-setting level stating that the plan needed to address housing issues, the current review/update has numerous blind spots that limit its effectiveness. The $300 million in unfunded capital needs mentioned by councilman Overholtzer is just one stark example—but now that it’s been raised, what’s next?

Looks like Cline won’t have to worry

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

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 MAGA Republican Ben Cline.

Holding forth at The Frenchmen restaurant in Staunton’s old railroad station at an event hosted by the Staunton Democratic Committee, Macy appeared not to have received the news that she has no primary opponents—that a May 15 U.S. Supreme Court decision had put a last nail into Virginia Democrats’ redistricting efforts. That ended any chance the Sixth District would be reconfigured this year to make it less of a red swamp, resulting in an exodus of potential contenders. And, just like that, Macy became the last Democratic candidate standing in a district that Cline has carried by 60% or more in four consecutive elections.

So why is Macy still so intent on introducing herself as if this were last November? Given an opportunity to rally several dozen potential shock troops with an impassioned denouncement of her only opponent, Macy instead chose once again to put her major focus on burnishing her working-class credentials, while also—yet again—recounting her risk-taking journalism in going after Big Pharma. She had grown up Appalachian-poor in a small Ohio town. Her dad was a military vet, her husband a schoolteacher. She had raised one child who is trans and another who is gay. All her life and that of her family has been a struggle, Macy kept repeating, and that’s why she’s a fighter and that’s why she’ll be a fighter on behalf of the rest of us.

But someone else wrote Hillbilly Elegy first, and it’s all old news by now, anyway. And for all her talk of being a fighter, Macy landed only a single, glancing blow against her opponent, in lambasting him for taking corporate campaign funding.

That’s not to say that Macy didn’t offer the expected round of complaints about the abysmal state of the union, from cuts to Medicaid and food stamps to the diminished helpfulness of Pell grants to the evisceration of the Veterans Administration and its medical resources. But it was all rather bloodless, with few connections linking such carnage to Cline. Where was the itemization of particularly callous Cline votes, the recitation of Cline’s dismissive statements about the very real needs of his constituents, the detailed condemnation of Cline’s coziness with political and religious extremists and zealots? And on other pressing issues of direct importance to a largely rural, agricultural district, there was barely a murmur. What, for example, has Cline done for farmers battered by soaring costs of fuel oil and fertilizer—or just as much to the point, what would Macy do in his stead?

We’re past the point of introducing ourselves to voters. With less than five months until the election, it’s time to re-introduce Cline to his constituents, and in such a way that even his most ardent supporters understand just how much he has waged war on their best interests.

In failing to unleash the dogs of war and taking the battle to Cline, Macy lost an opportunity this week to hone that message with a much friendlier audience than the ones she’ll confront this summer in huge swaths of the Sixth. Out in the rural precincts, where the Stars and Bars are still more prevalent than the Stars and Stripes and MAGA’s stench has yet to penetrate, Macy’s “I’m one of y’all” pitch will come across merely as Cline-lite. Unless, of course, she comes out swinging and shows herself to be the fighter she claimed to be this week. Unless, that is, she does more than merely ask us to take her word for it.

Fate can teach us fiscal sustainability

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

In a somewhat puzzling change of venue, Staunton’s city council will be meeting Wednesday evening to discuss the Comprehensive Plan update not at city hall—where its chambers have more room, better seating and the proceedings can be readily videotaped—but in the second-floor meeting room of the Staunton Public Library. The ostensible reason for this choice is to bring the discussion into more of a community setting, which doesn’t speak well of the council’s perspective on its own digs. But given that the community is invited to watch but not speak at this last public airing of the update before a council vote later in the month, you do have to wonder about the logic of it all.

But let me not quibble. With the deadline for public input now past, it will be interesting to see just which of the plan’s shortcomings will be addressed and how, and whether they will be deemed sufficient to send the whole exercise back to the Comprehensive Plan Commission for revisions. That seems unlikely, even though some of the update’s omissions are rather glaring, as I recently documented. That’s not how these meetings usually work. But one of those omissions—any acknowledgment of the city’s huge unfunded liability to replace a leaky and brittle century-old water delivery system—when viewed in the context of the McIntosh Village development, which recently received qualified approval, underscores an even more fundamental hole at the center of the plan: its failure to address issues of fiscal accountability. And that all by itself should compel a do-over.

Just as the “comprehensive” plan conveniently ignores major capital improvement expenses that will become unavoidable over the next 20 years, so the McIntosh Village application was processed without any true understanding of what it ultimately will cost the city. Unlike infill development, which is how the comprehensive plan assumes the city will add most new housing over the next couple of decades, and which benefits from existing city infrastructure, McIntosh Village will add 267 new homes over a five-year period. That’s 267 homes that will have to be serviced by thousands of feet of new roads, new curbs, new water lines, new sewer lines and new storm water management systems. Once in place, all that new infrastructure will become the city’s responsibility in perpetuity to maintain, upgrade as needed and eventually replace.

How much will that cost? No clue. But as with the ignored water mains that supply Staunton with its water, this is the kind of predictable but significant expense that the Comprehensive Plan doesn’t recognize—not just at McIntosh Village, but in numerous other parts of the city where such development can be reasonably expected, such as the large open tracts zoned for low-density residential housing along Springhill Road. There simply is no city policy that requires a staff assessment of what financial obligations Staunton is accepting when it approves a new development.

A housing development isn’t only a financial burden, of course. Improved property adds to the real estate tax base, the residents who fill its homes presumably spend money in local businesses and thereby pay city sales tax, and so on. But just as any well-run business won’t undertake a significant expansion without preparing a spreadsheet that balances expected costs against anticipated revenues, a city shouldn’t willy-nilly take on 40- or 50-year obligations without a clear-eyed understanding of what that means for city residents.

This isn’t a revolutionary idea, although admittedly it remains somewhat rare among municipalities. But consider the example of a city northeast of Dallas, Texas, with a population of roughly 23,000, or just a bit smaller than Staunton. Fate—yes, that’s the name of the city—adopted its first comprehensive plan in 2015, then updated it five years later. It’s worth a look, if only to dispel any notion that the Lone Star State is completely allergic to any kind of land use planning. Apparently, that’s true for only some parts of the state.

As Fate would have it (sorry, couldn’t resist), any proposed developments within the city have to provide answers to four basic questions:

What infrastructure costs will be created?
What long-term maintenance obligations will result?
What tax revenue will be generated?
Does the math work over the long-term?

Or as the city explains at more length, its comprehensive plan includes a “fiscal sustainability” policy, which “means that over a long-term period the City of Fate will be able to cover its cost obligations and provide high service quality for its residents without major increases in property tax rates, high levels of debt through bond issuances, or degradation of city facilities due to lack of maintenance staff or resources. To maintain fiscal sustainability it is therefore critical that we evaluate new development proposals not only against our adopted development regulations and construction standards but also in relation to the fiscal productivity of the project” [emphasis added].

There’s a whole lot more explanation in Fate’s comprehensive plan for anyone who wants to get into the weeds, including a definition of fiscal productivity and a sample of the spreadsheet the city uses in its evaluation, but the bottom line is simply this: “These contributions and costs are compared to one another to ultimately determine if a project is going to contribute to the long-term fiscal sustainability of the city, or whether it will serve as a financial drain on our city’s taxpayers.” The remarkable thing about that statement is that it comes from a city marked by explosive growth, with a population that is expanding almost 8% annually—precisely the kind of city most susceptible to the municipal version of a Ponzi scheme, in which current residents get the benefit of a sudden infusion into the tax base while the cost of paying for its long-term obligations are kicked down the road.

We’re seeing now how that works out long-term, and it’s not pretty. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t adjust course for the benefit of future Stauntonians by having a comprehensive plan that adds fiscal sustainability to inclusivity, harmony, and all of the other aspirational values it embraces.

Absentee owners vs. Staunton NIMBY

(Reading time: 6 minutes)

One of the biggest housing developments ever proposed for Staunton recently cleared a number of procedural hurdles, gaining preliminary planning commission and city council approval to move forward with plans to build 267 single-family homes on the city’s south side. But despite providing a much-needed addition to the city’s housing stock, McIntosh Village is bringing with it a whole lot of angst and hair-pulling—and, we may hope, a lesson about property rights and the importance of being aware of what’s going on around us.

The city’s tentative thumbs-up to this outsized development comes with a score of caveats and requirements, many of which any project of this size would command, but many in response to objections raised by residents of the adjacent Green Spring Valley development. That includes such understandable concerns as the insufficient number of access roads to the property and the effects on neighboring homes of the blasting that will be needed for site development, as well as more conventional worries about increased stormwater run-off and increased local traffic.

But then there are the objections that suggest, bottom-line, that the only acceptable use of the 77-acres at issue is to leave them . . . undisturbed. To not build anything. One local resident said she had moved to Green Spring valley for its “quiet, peaceful nature.” Another lamented the destruction of the area’s “natural beauty” and urged that more trees in the development be preserved and a wider buffer be required. A third declared that he was “Staunton born and bred” and that while he wanted to see the city grow, he did not want it to change. A fourth insisted that the reason the land in question had not been developed was because it isn’t suitable for development, which amounted to a snake-eating-its-tail kind of logic.

All this and more was delivered in public hearings and without obvious embarrassment at such a stunning display of entitled behavior. These were supposedly reasonable objections by one set of property owners about plans by other property owners to develop their land in conformity with existing zoning and other regulations—but what they really were was a complaint that someone was robbing them of a pastoral idyll that wasn’t theirs in the first place. Maybe, just maybe, they should have bought that land themselves . . .

. . . which is not as far-fetched as it might sound. It would, however, require more thought than the Green Spring Valley complainers exhibited. It also suggests that the neighbors of any sizeable piece of vacant land in Staunton should be asking the questions that Green Spring Valley residents didn’t: Who owns it? How much did they pay for it? What are their plans for how that land is to be used?

A first clue in this instance is the working name for the proposed development, McIntosh Village. That’s a reference to Bruce McIntosh II, a wealthy resident of Loudon County who lived in a 5,000-square-foot 1860 colonial house on 133 acres in Waterford until he died, three years ago. More than 30 years ago he sold one of this family’s two farms and invested the proceeds in Staunton and Augusta County real estate, but he never lived here. His land just sat there, idle, lulling folks into thinking this would be the status quo forever—until September of 2024, when Bruce McIntosh’s estate sold 11 contiguous parcels, amounting to slightly more than 100 acres, to Staunton Augusta Properties for a mere $500,000.

Let that sink in a moment. For less than the assessed value of just two of the homes backing onto the proposed new development, all the land for McIntosh Village—and then some—could have been purchased by the people who now are complaining that someone will be paving their paradise. Whether individually or as a group, perhaps united under the umbrella of a non-profit limited liability corporation, the people who are predicting a coming onslaught of noise, dust, earth tremors and radon gas could instead have bought their very own private park. But of course, that would have required forethought, research and planning, for which developers apparently have cornered the market. It would have meant someone looking out a window and musing, “Gee, I wonder what’s going to happen to all that empty land zoned R-2 just sitting there?”

Make no mistake: this isn’t the last time this sort of thing may happen. For all the nonsense emanating from city officials about Staunton running out of empty land, there’s still a surprising amount of it, and that’s without harping on whether it makes sense to have an ag-forestal area inside the city limits. And a fair proportion of that vacant land is owned by people who don’t live in Staunton, nor in Augusta County—people who, like Bruce McIntosh, view it merely as an investment, which is not the same as investing in Staunton.

Some of the vacant land is quite extensive, like the 34.3- acre parcel at 502 Old Greenville Road, or the 21.32 acres at 70 Carann Street, both zoned R-2 and both adjacent to the future McIntosh Village. The owner of the first parcel lives in Alabama. The owner of the second lives in Sacramento. Or consider a couple of smaller parcels, such as the vacant four acres, zoned R-2 and R-3, directly behind the city’s new J&DR Court building. That owner lives in South Carolina. Then there’s a vacant 6.3 acres, zoned R-2, at 721 Paul Street, owned by someone in Charlottesville—closer to home, to be sure, but still at a remove. How much concern will any of those absentee owners have for the sensibilities of their neighbors when the time comes to unload their property?

Are there more absentee owners? Undoubtedly, but it doesn’t appear that anyone at the city has made an effort to track them, which means we’re always vulnerable to surprises like McIntosh Village. And absentee ownership, it should be noted, can carry negative consequences for developed property, too, as reflected in recurring complaints of neglect and deferred maintenance of rental housing, especially in the West End. When someone living in another state, or even in a distant part of Virginia, owns a rental property in Staunton solely as an “investment,” there’s little incentive in an extraordinarily tight housing market to do more than the bare minimum to maintain it.

At least the folks who eventually move into McIntosh Village will have paid for the property they live in. Maybe by then their neighbors will get over their resentments and make them feel welcome.

Seeking Dominion with a $25 bribe

(Reading time: 3 minutes)

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.

NextEra, already this country’s largest utility,is known as its biggest developer of renewable energy even as it assiduously contributes to the rapid build-out of natural gas-fired power stations. That apparent contradiction is a result of its partnership with Google Cloud to provide electricity to its data centers, a partnership with gas turbine maker GE Vernova to develop power plants to serve data centers, and its early efforts to develop 10 gigawatts of natural gas capacity in Pennsylvania and Texas to fire up the turbines that power those data centers. So, not exactly a “green” power company.

Dominion, meanwhile, supplies electricity to the world’s largest concentration of data centers, right here in Virginia. What could be a better fit? Unless, of course, you’re one of the 3.6 million homes and businesses currently served by Dominion, which bumped up residential rates $11.24 a month this past January. Or as summarized by state assemblyman Suhas Subramanyam, whose district includes the data center megaplex in northern Virginia, “A company that specializes in building energy infrastructure just bought a company that likes to increase rates for new infrastructure.”

The merger is so clearly not in the best interests of Virginia ratepayers that the utilities are proposing to sweeten the pot with $2.25 billion in bill credits to ratepayers over two years—a seemingly impressive number that works out to just $25 a month per customer. After that, of course, it’s back to business as usual, albeit with an even more imposing multi-state behemoth than we have now flexing its lobbying and campaign contributions muscles to get its way.

Industry consultant Arif Gasilov, who sees data center electricity demand as fundamentally restructuring utility ownership, told POWER Magazine this week that mergers like the one now on the table threaten to overturn public restraint on critical utility monopolies. “Virginia’s SB 253, signed into law this spring, was specifically designed to shift more of those infrastructure costs onto data centers and away from residential customers,” he said. “The question now is how NextEra [a company whose growth thesis is built on serving large-load customers] implements a law that was designed to make those same customers pay more and more. That inequality between the new owner’s business model and the state’s cost allocation policy is what stakeholders should be watching.”

The merger won’t be a done deal for at least another year, as it must be approved by shareholders of both corporations and pass muster with a bevy of regulatory agencies, including the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the U.S. Dept. of Justice, as well as state regulators in Virginia—notably the State Corporation Commission—and both Carolinas. But as imposing as that sounds, it comes in the context of a White House that is more than receptive to corporate mergers and whose favorite adjective is “big.”

It also comes at a time when the massive data center build-out is driving electricity bills steadily higher, with Americans paying an average of 8.5% more for electricity in December than a year earlier, and 28% more over the past five years. The National Energy Assistance Directors Association is projecting that U.S. households will pay an estimated $778 to cool their homes this summer, also an 8.5% increase over last year.

Roof-top solar has never looked more attractive. The proposed data center at Staunton Crossing has never looked uglier.

Follow the colored-dot road . . .

(Reading time: 17 minutes)

A draft of Staunton’s revised and updated Comprehensive Plan is out for review, following 18 months of data collection, meetings and pulse-taking—including hundreds of colored dots on a wall of easels—and presumably is heading for rapid city council adoption in early June. Public comments are being received until May 26. We should hope there are many.

As plans go, this latest iteration is an improvement over the original, which was adopted July 11, 2019—before Covid and before the post-pandemic explosion in real estate prices, an affordable housing crisis, devastating downtown floods and numerous other shifts in the firmament. That initial “plan” was far more descriptive than prescriptive, more a gazeteer than a road map suitable for navigating two decades. Its conservative approach meant the original plan avoided being derailed by the Covid era, but even on those few occasions when it tried to peer into the future it often missed the mark, as when it projected that Staunton’s population in 2040 would be 25,442—a number the current draft revises upward by 10%.

Predicting the future is tricky business, to be sure. But the 2019 plan also was hindered by its blinkered view of what properly falls within the city government’s scope of responsibilities, a perspective shaped at least as much by philosophy as by financial limitations. The plan’s view of housing, as “primarily a private system that is influenced by factors beyond those controlled by local government,” is perhaps the most egregious example of a hands-off attitude that produced a planning document with obvious blind spots. The result was a soulless slab of prose, devoid of vision or inspiration, suffocated by the expectation that the Staunton of 2040 would be just like Staunton in 2020 only more so.

The new draft, by contrast, takes a more expansive view of the city’s role, which is a welcome change. But it also goes to the opposite emotional extreme, so devoted to “vision” that it often reads like a romantic ode, a fulsome psalm to a city that is welcoming, vibrant, empowering, resilient, inclusive, thriving, harmonious, sustainable . . . and on and on. Fair enough—who wouldn’t want to live in a place like that?—but at some point it does become a repetitive blur. The new draft also is big on graphics and states forthrightly it intends to “minimize text,” which may be a nod to shortened attention spans but which undermines its credibility as a planning document. We think, analyze and plan more with words than with images, although images do provide a better complement to the whole “vision” thing.

But whether dry or frothy, both the original and the revision fall short of being either “comprehensive” or of being a “plan.” The update is more aspirational than the original, to be sure, but its attention to detail is erratic and uneven, ranging from the highly specific—even providing exact dollar amounts for specific sidewalk expenditures—to the kind of broad-brush statements of intent with which no one can quibble but with little or no guidance regarding how to get there. The lack of sufficient affordable housing, to offer just one example, is acknowledged as being “a foundational theme that touches nearly all chapters” of the plan, yet the housing section has the least number of proposed “tactics” of any of them, and even those few are wan at best.

Does it matter? On the plan’s own terms, it should. The Comprehensive Plan, according to its introduction, “guides Staunton’s efforts to update local ordinances, justifies city programs and initiatives, helps officials set budget priorities, and directs decisions or development applications.” In other words, the plan defines what’s important and what isn’t. If something isn’t in the plan, it doesn’t exist and stands a good chance of being overlooked. Any evaluation of the plan therefore should pay as much attention to what isn’t there as to what is.

Land Use

In the news business, it’s called burying the lede: starting a story with peripheral details, only getting around to the core concept many paragraphs later. In the section on land use, the lede is buried in a grey table of “tactics” that makes passing but repeated mention of “updates to the Zoning Ordinance” to solve various problems (infill, residential development in commercial districts, cottage courts, accessory dwelling units, etc.) without any prior narrative introduction of the ordinance, its limitations, or whether the whole thing should be overhauled rather than be subjected to a thousand tweaks and cuts. Instead, the explanatory text preceding the “tactics” (recommendations) is replete with mostly generic drawings of various land uses and how they might be improved, seemingly borrowed from the Cincinnati Urban Design and Architecture Studio, together with concepts like “building to street ratios” that it doesn’t explain. It’s all very colorful, but given the lack of a comprehensive review of the zoning code, mostly unhelpful.

How much more useful would this have been if the plan’s drawings were of actual Staunton city blocks, the streets and existing buildings clearly labeled, together with a vigorous discussion of how Staunton currently assigns land use and how it might do so differently? As it is, an ostensibly comprehensive plan casually presents information that should—but doesn’t—elicit sharp questioning, such as its unquestioned endorsement of reserving nearly a quarter of the city’s land for “heritage farmland.” Should it? Why? How is it sensible to set aside municipal acreage for cattle grazing when we’re surrounded by the state’s second largest agricultural county?

That’s not to say that the misleadingly labeled “ag-forestal” (much more ag than forest) corner of the city should be turned into suburbs, but that there is no sign that the comprehensive plan even considered alternative uses for the land. It also plays into repeated nonsense like this statement: “Trends analysis indicates that roughly 86% of Staunton’s land is already developed, meaning future housing growth will rely primarily on reinvestment, infill development, and reuse of existing structures.” That sounds dire, doesn’t it? But given that 22% of Staunton’s land mass is, as just noted, undeveloped agricultural land, it’s also absurd.

A more accurate—and helpful!—statement would be that “roughly 86% of Staunton’s land is already developed under current zoning constraints,” which opens the door to all kinds of fresh possibilities. Zoning is something we invented. It’s something we could change. And if we did, it’s amazing how much land would abruptly be available for all sorts of urban designs.

Farmland aside, there are numerous examples of ostensibly “developed” but underutilized land in Staunton. Consider, for example, the commercially zoned dog-leg rectangle between N. Central and Augusta that runs from West Frederick to Pump Street. Covering approximately 7.5 acres, this three-block area is immediately adjacent to the much more densely occupied multi-use downtown area that is generally regarded as an example of enlightened land use. But what do we find here? Five financial institutions, two fast-food restaurants and a store-front church—eight buildings altogether, with a combined footprint a tad over 35,000 square feet, covering just 11% of the land they occupy. As for the other 289,000 square feet of that “developed” land? Mostly asphalt parking lots and driveways.

Imagine if, instead of all those borrowed graphics, the plan had mapped out this three-block expanse and showed how it could be redeveloped for maximum use and return on the dollar. Yes, the land is privately owned. But the private sector, more readily than government, recognizes how it benefits economically from greater density and its synergistic effect on business. What the private sector doesn’t have is the overarching vision and resources to assemble such a transformation. That’s where the comprehensive plan could make a difference.

Blind Spots

The unquestioned acceptance of continuing the ag-forestal land-use designation is symptomatic of a bigger problem within the comprehensive plan: that of failing to see or question what’s right in front of our faces.

Decaying churches

Staunton is chock-a-block with churches, many with congregations that are aging out and increasingly unable to support large sanctuaries. Some are relatively modest, others may include spacious grounds and additional buildings. But like aging parents with a house stuffed full of belongings that no one will know what to do with when they die, too many will pass away without proper dispensation of their assets. For one example of what that looks like, see the former Bibleway Community Church on West Beverley, vacant for all of this decade and increasingly showing it.

Aging churches can be revitalized or repurposed in various ways, most notably but not solely as affordable housing. But whatever transformation may occur often requires the intervention of an outside agency, such as the city, working from an inventory that assesses which churches can continue to flourish and which ones need hospice care. Most critically, repurposing church properties typically requires someone else to initiate the conversation, since most aging congregations are reluctant to acknowledge they can no longer support their long-established houses of worship. That’s an understandably delicate exchange to have, but it only gets harder the longer it’s postponed.

Even without an inventory of an estimated 76 Staunton churches, there are a couple of obvious places where the comprehensive plan could get the ball rolling. The Marquis Memorial United Methodist Church on West Beverley, for instance, has more than two acres fronting on one of the city’s principal gateways, as well as several vacant and near-vacant buildings. It also has a dwindling congregation and can afford only a part-time pastor. Heating and cooling costs for its large sanctuary are so high that the church frequently holds services in other spaces on the property that have lower ceilings. How much more productively could that property be used?

Or consider Christ United Methodist Church on Churchville Avenue, also a Staunton gateway. A potential candidate for revitalization rather than repurposing, Christ United sits on five acres that present several development possibilities. Some of that land, for example, could be used for housing or a mixed-use development that would generate revenue for the church, thereby creating an income stream that offsets declining financial support from a diminishing congregation. But here, too, it might take creative city outreach to set such a change in motion.

Other iffy assets

Numerous though they are, Staunton’s churches are hardly the only large buildings that are under-utilized or facing obsolescence. Two of the most notable are the vacant and decaying Ingleside Resort, on the north end of town, and the spooky, shuttered sanitarium next to the Frontier Culture Museum. The former apparently is mentioned nowhere in the comprehensive plan. The latter gets a nod in one of the two appendices, in which attendees at an open house suggested the “DeJarnette campus” has development potential. No explanation or context is provided for that description, which would be meaningless for Staunton residents without a good historical grounding, and no attempt is made in the plan to explore the development potential of either property.

An even larger property within the city, widely referenced by the plan as a notable asset while avoiding a direct examination of its precarious outlook, is Mary Baldwin University. The plan does make a brief suggestion that the city should “develop plans for what to do if the worst-case scenarios unfold,” but then fails to describe what those scenarios might be or how the city might respond. That’s unfortunate. The university encompasses 58 acres of prime land and multiple buildings, including dorms that could be repurposed as low-income housing. While closing the campus would be a significant loss to the city, it would open other possibilities to which Staunton should be ready to respond in a timely fashion.

In addition to such major examples, Staunton has numerous vacant buildings whose existence the plan acknowledges but doesn’t address, beyond mentioning that it would be a good idea to inventory them. We’ve known that for years, of course, but for some reason such an inventory has yet to be assembled, which means the city is often flying blind when trying to match unmet needs with unused assets. One example is the city’s recurring failure to find space for a day shelter for the homeless—even though there is, and has been for quite some time, a vacant storefront right next to city hall, as well as several vacant buildings on South Augusta Street, all of which would be more than sufficient for the purpose. And then there’s the former Coca Cola bottling plant at the intersection of Augusta and Churchville streets, which at one point was eyed as a possible brewery but which remains empty year after year.

How is that we have people who need a roof over their heads, and buildings that have roofs but no tenants? And how is it that such an obvious pairing of needs and resources goes unaddressed in the city’s “comprehensive” plan?

Infrastructure

Sewer and stormwater systems are among the infrastructure elements that make it possible for more than 25,000 people to live in close and supportive proximity to each other. But so is the network of water mains and pipes that delivers potable water to every city home and business, and while the comprehensive plan has much to say about storm water it is almost entirely silent about the drinking kind.

That may be the inevitable result of the very visible destruction caused by recent flooding, leading to the plan’s emphasis on storm water management, versus the comparative invisibility of the water that’s being moved underground. On the other hand, last year’s major water-main break came in the middle of the comprehensive plan’s drafting process and should have been top of mind. Instead, the plan says nothing at all about pipes that are now more than a century old, or about a water delivery system that loses more than one in every four gallons that are pumped into it—a rate nearly twice the national average—or about the $40 million to $50 million the city says it will need to fix these problems.

The city shows no sign of knowing where that money will come from. This plan won’t be any help in that regard.

Economic development

To read the comprehensive plan, you might think that the only economic vitality in Staunton is centered on the downtown area, and that the only kind of business the city wants to attract is the kind that plays well with tourists: outdoor recreation, arts and music festivals, restaurants, galleries, theaters, pop-up markets and so on. If the city wants to attract manufacturing of any sort, you wouldn’t know it from this document. Nor would you know what kind of business development the city would like to see along Greenville Avenue or Route 250.

But the plan’s biggest economic oversight is the blind-eye it turns toward Staunton Crossing, which it mentions not at all despite the millions of dollars already poured into that industrial park’s development. That may be because among the park’s targeted industries is a data center, with all the electricity and water consumption issues and controversy that entails—reason enough, perhaps, to just pretend that there’s no “there” there. Unfortunately, that also means there is no consideration in the plan of possible alternatives for the park, such as manufactured housing or solar panels and batteries, which would create many more long-term jobs than a data center and at a far lower social and environmental cost.

Ignoring the inevitable

Unlike blind spots, which refer to things the plan simply doesn’t acknowledge, there are several problems or issues the comprehensive plan does see—and then ignores.

Homelessness

As mentioned above, the new comprehensive plan goes where the old one didn’t by recognizing the centrality of housing to virtually every aspect of the city’s vitality, from economic development to meeting educational needs to community health. And as have other plans that seek community input, the draft plan acknowledges public concern about the consequences of inadequate affordable housing. When plan consultants conducted what they describe as “public intercepts,” housing was the number one concern voiced by the people they encountered, by far. Attendees at an open house highlighted “the lack of focus on vulnerable populations, particularly homelessness, in current plans.” Vision statements for the city called for “more services for the unhoused.”

So it comes as a surprise that the comprehensive plan presents not even one suggestion for meeting the needs of people who lose their homes, even as it gives pro forma recognition to “the challenges faced by people facing homelessness.” Instead, it deflects. Housing is a “national issue,” the plan explains, presumably as much beyond local control as climate change. “Local efforts are unlikely to ‘solve’ the housing affordability problem.” (Bye-bye, Staunton Housing Commission?)

But failing to “solve” the housing affordability problem, it should go without saying, only guarantees that the number of people who are homeless will continue to grow. Indeed, Alec Gunn, executive director of the Waynesboro Area Relief Ministries, says that demand this past winter for overnight emergency shelter grew 26% over the previous year, even as the number of churches willing to provide such shelter is declining. Efforts to create a day shelter for the homeless have been even more ragged, with a church that was intermittently open for that purpose last summer—a first—declining to do so again this year.

Regarding all this and more having to do with homelessness, the comprehensive plan is silent.

Student population growth

While the plan draft acknowledges that Staunton’s public schools are at or beyond “functional capacity,” its forecast of what that means for the future is tentative at best—even as it cites the possibility of “urgent space management.” “If” current population growth continues, the plan states, “further modular units and long-term facility expansions will be necessary.” But the plan makes no effort to project how much the student population may grow, or in what parts of the city, basically deferring to Staunton City Schools to “assess current conditions and identify future infrastructure, modernization and capacity needs.”

That may be appropriate in jurisdictions where there is greater distance between municipal and pedagogical governance, but the two are intertwined more tightly in Staunton. The city, because of its planning and zoning responsibilities, is in a better position than the school district to assess future growth patterns. At the same time, the city inevitably will be involved in whatever financing is needed for new school buildings, and possibly for expansion or renovation of existing facilities, suggesting that city planning for such developments should be more proactive than the comprehensive plan contemplates.

In closing . . .

To the extent that the revised comprehensive plan is more user-friendly than its predecessor, thanks to more graphics and minimized text, it may pull in more eyeballs and thereby increase public engagement. That’s a good thing. The not-so-good thing is that such overly visual and summarized presentations tend to diminish critical analysis, acting like cotton candy for the brain: long on mouth-feel, but neither filling nor nutritious.

Much of what the comprehensive plan presents is a distillation of the aspirational and critical comments it received from the public in multiple forums—and yes, that’s also a good thing. But most of that feedback was in response to alternatives presented by the plan’s architects (for this feature, do you prefer A or B?), which means public input was largely limited to the subjects and choices it was given. That’s why the plan has so many blind spots, and presumably many more than the few I’ve offered. And when the public was given a more open-ended opportunity to voice concerns, subjects it raised that didn’t fit within the plan’s parameters often would be acknowledged but then ignored.

Making 20-year decisions based on how many colored dots ended up on a series of easels, which was one of the primary methods used to solicit public feedback, is better than casting a series of animal bones onto a blanket to divine the future. But not that much better.

When data centers pull the plug

(Reading time: 2 minutes)

Although my biggest concern about a data center possibly setting up shop in Staunton has been the enormous amount of water such centers consume, their voracious consumption of electricity also is top of mind. It’s notable, therefore, that the North American Electric Reliability Corp. yesterday issued its highest level of warning about the risks that data centers pose to the electric grid. The rare Level 3 alert followed several incidents over the last two years in which more than a gigawatt of data center load simultaneously and unexpectedly disconnected, destabilizing the grid and creating a potential blackout.

The North American Electric Reliability Corp. (NERC), often described as the continent’s “grid watchdog,” issued its alert after analyzing disruptions of electric service in Virginia and Texas caused by data centers abruptly pulling the plug in 2024 and 2025. Such disconnects may occur when data centers respond to relatively minor grid disturbances, such as a local lightning strike or line fault, by switching to backup power supplies so they can maintain consistent voltage flow to sensitive computing equipment—but the sudden load loss stresses grid infrastructure, like transformers, that consequently may shut down as well, triggering a cascade of system failures.

Currently, data centers don’t have to follow the rules that require power plants to inform grid monitors when they are going on- and off-line, even though some centers can add or subtract as much or more power than a power plant. And while the data center contemplated for Staunton is hardly on that scale—measured in megawatts rather than gigawatts—it could be part of a wider network of such centers triggered by a common disruption. An analysis by dozens of scientists from the largest AI companies warned last year that their industry’s power swings could physically damage the grid.

Yesterday’s Level 3 alert was only the third in NERC’s history. It was followed by the corporation’s call for transmission planners to develop a detailed list of “modeling data, settings and parameters needed from computational loads” and to study the grid stability “margin” at least annually in areas with large AI infrastructure, such as Virginia.

Such developments don’t happen in a vacuum. As evidence of the outsized negative impact of data centers on communities, electricity rates, water supplies and the electric grid become unavoidably in your face, resistance to new centers is snowballing. At least 20 proposed new centers were canceled the first three months of this year due to local pushback, as tracked by Heatmap, with more than a hundred new fights added within the same time frame. Recruiting a data center for Staunton, in other words, means inviting a whole lot of problems the city can do without.

Staunton’s cross(ing) is hard to bear

(Reading time: 6 minutes)

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.

For those who missed my earlier write-up on the subject, Davey, director of economic development for the Timmons Group, addressed the city council April 9 to acknowledge that “a long time” had passed since Timmons designed Staunton Crossing. Despite that lengthy hiatus, during which data centers have exploded in number, size and recognized adverse environmental impacts, Davey argued they should remain in the recruiting mix, if only because of the tax revenue one or more such centers would generate for the city.

Along the way, Davey also mentioned, almost parenthetically, that a data center might need its own on-site electrical plant, which these days is the industry response to widespread uproar over the higher electricity rates such centers cause. That would be a new and seemingly significant change to the Crossing’s master plan, especially since the industry’s default option in such cases has been gas-fired generators, which add to local noise and air pollution. Then again, Davey did mention the possibility of a “small” nuclear reactor. Either way, it seems that Staunton’s residents might have some thoughts on the subject.

Davey was equally blithe—and seemingly misleading—in his response to concerns about how much of the city’s water supply would be consumed by a data center. Those concerns have at least two sources. One is the city’s fragile, century-old system of feeder mains that increasingly is prone to catastrophic breaks and which already can’t account for 28% of the water pumped into it. The second is an increasingly erratic climate of precipitation extremes that includes periods of severe drought. The city doesn’t have the $50 million or so needed to beef up its water system, and it has no idea or plan for how to obtain it. And despite some recent showers, all of Virginia has been in a drought since last fall described as the most extreme in two decades.

But not to worry, Davey counseled—there’s always the possibility of recruiting a data center that uses a closed-loop cooling system, thereby limiting water demand. Note the tenuous nature of that “possibility.” Although closed-loop systems are indeed possible, most data centers don’t use them because they’re more complicated, involve higher upfront costs and typically require up to 40% more electricity to operate their additional pumps and heat exchangers, effectively swapping water and electricity burdens.

More to the point, it’s questionable just how much water is conserved by closed-loop systems. A closed-loop system simply means that the water used to cool the processors that comprise the bulk of all data centers—and which, incidentally, run at average temperatures of more than 188 degrees Fahrenheit—runs through a closed loop that passes through a heat exchanger. The other half of the heat exchanger is not a closed loop. The water in this outer loop absorbs the heat from the closed loop before passing through a water-cooling tower, in which it evaporates and thereby releases its heat into the atmosphere. Cooling towers require a constant water flow to work, each day releasing hundreds of thousands of gallons into thin air.

That’s obviously a concern when long-term water availability is a question mark. But a similar concern can be raised by pharmaceuticals, which Davey threw out as a new, possible recruitment target for the industrial park. To be fair, it was just a passing mention, so seemingly off-the-cuff that it provoked little follow-up from council members. It’s worth noting, however, that pharmaceutical manufacturing also is a thirsty business—so much so that the industry acknowledges it faces “major challenges in terms of water consumption with potential impacts on the environment and sustainability.”

That’s not to say that the possibility of a pharmaceutical manufacturer setting up shop in Staunton Crossing should be discarded. It is, however, a reminder that there are no silver bullets and that any industry will bring drawbacks as well as advantages. The trick is to publicly and honestly identify assets and liabilities alike, without minimizing costs or overstating benefits, so that everyone is given an opportunity to weigh trade-offs and draw his or her own conclusions about what is or isn’t acceptable. Thus far, at least, that seems not to have happened with Staunton Crossing—or not in nearly a decade, at any rate.

It’s also worth noting that the past decade has seen the development and even explosion of industries that scarcely existed when the Staunton Crossing masterplan was being drawn up—industries that Davey did not mention and that council members didn’t raise, but which should at least be in the mix of any “update” review. One obvious industry group sure to gain momentum in the years ahead, for example, is anything to do with renewable energy: photovoltaic panels, storage batteries, even electric vehicles of various sizes and applications if Staunton Crossing is large enough for their assembly plant. This sector includes newly developed perovskite-silicon cells that achieve 34% efficiency, solar paint, solar windows and thin-film solar panels—all technologies still in their early days, with lots of development potential ahead, unlike the data center boom that even Davey says is nearing an end.

Another industry group that has been ignored—and one that could have additional benefits for our affordable housing-starved area—is manufactured housing, with a particular focus on factory-built or prefab housing. Unlike data centers, which move electrons rather than physical products, a manufactured housing plant could take advantage of Staunton Crossing’s accessibility to rail and highway transportation networks, one of the industrial park’s presumed selling points. Moreover, off-site modular housing construction, like renewable energy products, is an industry of the future, with the U.S. playing catch-up to countries like Sweden, where prefabrication accounts for 84% of the residential market. The Netherlands (20%) and Japan (15%) likewise have a significant share of their homes built this way, compared to just 5% in the U.S.

There may be, on closer examination, convincing reasons why neither renewable energy nor factory-built housing (nor an unknown number of other industries one might think of) is a suitable match for Staunton Crossing. It may also be that they are desirable industries to recruit, but that finding and wooing them will take more work than simply opening the doors to the data centers that are sprouting up everywhere in Virginia like mushrooms after an (increasingly rare) soaking rain. But that’s why a three-month “refresh” of the Staunton Crossing master plan, off to a slow start at that, doesn’t seem like a sincere effort as much as a rush job toward a foregone conclusion.

The housing squeeze, part two

(Reading time: 8 minutes)

I recently wrote about the housing affordability crisis in our region (although we’re hardly unique) that can be summarized in just two numbers: a median home sales price in February of $330,000 (jumping to $347,250 in March) vs. a median Staunton wage income of $55,023. That puts the average home out of affordable reach of most two-earner households, never mind single-parent households, who then have no recourse but to lease a home—where, no surprise, they put greater upward pressure on that market, pushing local rents above $1,300 a month.

If wage incomes and housing costs were in balance, the market would respond by building more housing until equilibrium is restored. But while a lot of housing is in fact being built, it won’t do anything to relieve the affordability shortage because it costs too much. That’s not because developers are greedy, but because local incomes haven’t increased as much as have labor, materials and the other costs of building new homes. Those new homes will be sold to people moving in from elsewhere—and working elsewhere, where they’ll get paid more. In other words, what we have here is a broken economy.

When other aspects of a local economy are broken, we don’t expect it to miraculously heal itself. We turn to government, with its size and scale, rule-setting powers and taxing authority. If roads must be built or repaired to facilitate commerce, government does that. When economic inducements are needed to lure industry, government provides those. But when it comes to helping people get into affordable housing, well, that’s historically been a different story. People were expected to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even when they didn’t have boots, and while that attitude is changing, it’s a long, slow process.

To be sure, there are government programs to help with housing—it’s just that they’re relatively few in number and rarely up to the task. Community Development Block Grants, for example, often are touted as one such source of help. But while Staunton has received such grants for several years, you’ll be hard-pressed to point to even one affordable housing unit that exists because of CDBG funding, with most of the money going instead to projects such as fixing sidewalks or getting a new kitchen for the Salvation Army. With the Trump administration now seeking to defund the CDBG program altogether, even those limited expenditures may soon seem fanciful.

Indeed, Trump’s budget proposals are consistent with a stubborn insistence on the extreme right that we’ll never have sufficient affordable housing until government gets out of the way. “The states should reduce barriers to multifamily housing investment by cutting property taxes and liberalizing zoning and building regulations,” urged a Cato Institute spokesman in Congressional testimony last May, apparently oblivious to the fact that property taxes are set at the local level. Or, for that matter, oblivious to the necessity for raising property taxes in many localities.

Unfortunately, many of the libertarian Cato Institute’s simplistic remedies, and those of its philosophical soulmates, are given legs by their more telling critique of today’s status quo. Take just one example, made topical by a recent legal threat to derail an affordable housing project in Waynesboro, the first in our region since 2020 to benefit from the federal low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC). LIHTC apartments rent at below-market rates to families with incomes below the median income, which in our area are legion. They’re also nothing new to the area, in which developers used LIHTC funds for the first time in 2001 to renovate Fairfax Hall in Waynesboro, and subsequently added 968 rent-subsidized apartments and town homes at 11 separate locations in Waynesboro, Staunton and Augusta County. But getting to that point wasn’t easy, and now is becoming less so.

The way LIHTC works is thus: each year, the Internal Revenue Service distributes credits to the states, which in turn award them to developers to cover part of their costs of constructing or rehabbing apartment buildings. In exchange, the developers agree to cap rents for low-income tenants. The developers then sell the credits to investors to raise cash with which to start construction, giving investors equity in the projects and credits to apply against their tax returns over a 10-year period. That sounds like a win-win for most everyone—except that this process has grown into such a bureaucratic nightmare over the years that most builders won’t even pursue LIHTC projects.

It also provides Cato and other critics with their most powerful ammunition against “the growth of the welfare state.” For example, the LIHTC statute and related IRS regulations are 442 pages in length, the IRS auditing guide for the LIHTC is 344 pages, an IRS guide for LIHTC building compliance is 214 pages. An industry guidebook to the program runs to 1,942 pages. That’s a whole lot of deterrence against even applying for LIHTC certification, and it doesn’t end there: once such a project is completed, building owners must adhere to rent caps and tenant income limits for 30 years and keep records of each residents’ income, assets, and family composition.

Because of these and other LIHTC requirements, the cost of such units is significantly above those of non-subsidized housing. Those requirements also result in increasingly complicated financing packages, referred to as “capital stacks,” to underwrite construction. Such stacks consist of an array of government and other subsidies, each of which comes with its own rules and fees, and each of which takes time to cobble together, thus adding to the bottom line. The LIHTC cost disadvantage, according to various estimates, is around 20%, although it can be twice as high in more rural areas. That’s just so much raw meat for the free-market crowd.

No wonder, then, that the LIHTC train ground to a halt locally over the past six years, despite a dozen successful projects completed in the previous decade. Who can handle that kind of aggravation when there’s plenty of demand for new housing at more profitable market rates?

Last year, however, a non-profit developer of affordable homes, Enterprise Community Development, announced it would build Alston Court, a $35 million 96-unit apartment complex near the Texas Roadhouse in Waynesboro. All 96 units would be rented at affordable rates, according to Enterprise, meaning tenants would not pay more than 30% of their income for housing. Eight units would be reserved for households making less than $18,000 a year, which is just 30% of the local median income. An additional 75 units would be set aside for those making less than 60% of local median income, and 13 units would go to households making between 60% and 80% of the median. All that works out to monthly rent topping out at $1,200 a month—and dropping to less than $450 at the low-income end.

But having secured its LIHTC package, Enterprise Community Development had to assemble the capital stack needed to make it all work. It acquired $4.4 million from the state’s Affordable and Special Needs Housing program, a $560,000 grant from the Central Shenandoah Planning District Commission, a commitment of $125,000 from the Community Foundation and another $125,000 in smaller, three-year loans of $10,000 to $25,000 each from a variety of local organizations. It got a commitment from Valley Community Services Board to support 12 to 14 units through its permanent supportive housing program, and a promise from the Waynesboro Redevelopment and Housing Authority to likewise provide housing vouchers for the project. But that still left it $500,000 short of what was needed . . .

. . . and that’s when the City of Waynesboro agreed to pitch in with a grant to meet the shortfall. That’s also when city resident Mary McDermott, a retired telecommunications attorney, decided to get her dander up. As chronicled by the Augusta Free Press, McDermott fired off a letter April 15 protesting a city council vote to “donate” taxpayer dollars and threatening to sue the city in Circuit Court. No grounds for such a suit were outlined in McDermott’s letter, which lacked the rigor one would expect from someone educated at Harvard Law School and which seemed to consist primarily of McDermott’s belief that the grant should have been a loan. Moreover, the whole kerfuffle quickly blew over when McDermott decided just days later—also without much of an explanation—that she wouldn’t sue, after all. If nothing else, however, McDermott demonstrated how precarious such initiatives can be, thanks to their underlying complexity.

Meanwhile, as these numbers illustrate, even an experienced subsidized housing developer like Enterprise Community Development, which already has built more than 19,000 homes across Maryland, Pennsylvania, Washington, D.C., and Virginia, can be hard-pressed to keep its costs down because of the additional costs associated with LIHTC. Alston Court, it should be noted, will pencil out to nearly $365,000 a unit—more than the median sales price of new homes locally, and therefore just the kind of bloated initiative that gets the Cato Institute and its ilk all revved up. Forgoing subsidized housing, on the other hand, only means more people forced to live beyond their means in over-priced housing, many of whom invariably will end up on the street.

Rather than tossing the baby out with the bath water, isn’t it better to repair and streamline the rickety bureaucratic structure that makes affordable housing possible? Because, really, what else is there?

United Way: new bottle, same vinegar

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

All of a sudden United Way is in my face with fund-raising appeals in a big way, hyping its “Power Hour”—occurring as I write these words—to help it reach a $25,000 goal during its “Great Community Give.” The blessings such money will bestow on our community are multiple, we’re assured, with prominent mention of free tax-preparation assistance (presumably, at this point, for next year’s filers) and back-to-school backpacks stuffed with the supplies kids will need a few months hence. Worthy projects all, to be sure, but color me skeptical.

First, a little context. These appeals are being made by the United Way of Central Shenandoah Valley, which until last June was known as the United Way of Harrisonburg and Rockingham County. The name change, and its accompanying turf expansion, followed the late 2024 collapse of the SAW United Way amid a swirl of rumors and allegations of financial impropriety. That, in turn, opened the door for the Harrisonburg-based United Way to expand its domain and thereby broaden its fund-raising base—nature does abhor a vacuum, after all.

The demise of the SAW United Way was no great loss in the overall scheme of things, as I wrote a year ago. Although in its last year the local agency disbursed $196,405 to a dozen or so area social service providers, that represented only a third of the amount it had received in contributions and donations. Virtually all of the balance went to maintaining the office itself, including an $83,250 salary for the executive director. So while Valley Supportive Housing or Renewing Homes of Greater Augusta undoubtedly felt the sting of their lost United Way contributions, local residents who had been contributing to United Way could still provide such agencies with direct donations without propping up a bloated middleman.

But as last month’s IRS filing suggests, the new United Way is only marginally an improvement over the old one.

First, the numbers. For the fiscal year that ended April 30, 2025—which is to say, just as it was swooping into the SAW region—the United Way of Central Shenandoah Valley received donations of $625,909, a 9.5% decline from the previous year. Total expenses, boosted by a 7.8% increase in wages for eight employees, were up 4.3%, to $765,725. Which, yes, means expenses exceeded donations by nearly $140,000, a hole that was partially offset by $25,746 the United Way received in interest from more than $900,000 it has stashed away in investments. The shrinking inflow of donations, meanwhile, continues an overall five-year slide from the $905,253 received in 2020.

What did our now-local United Way do with its money? It gave its executive director, Amanda Leech, a 7.5% raise, to $70,863 a year. It spent more than $7,000 on investment management fees, $42,000 for accounting fees and $103,104 on fundraising expenses. And it expended $197,945—or just 30 cents of every dollar received in donations—on donations and grants to others. Of that, $129,490 went to six community organizations “focused on sliding scale scholarships for local families,” and $68,455 went to support an unspecified number of low-income families with financial emergencies.

United Way, in other words, is a tail wagging the dog. To the extent that people want to support the organizations to which it is contributing, a direct donation will triple the impact. And while its other activities are more or less worthwhile, potential donors should weigh whether its priorities align with theirs. Helping people prepare their income tax returns is not nothing. Nor is there a lack of merit in coordinating an effort that send kids back to school with supplies that they may not otherwise be able to afford. But people contributing to United Way should understand that the lion’s share of their donations are underwriting an organization that is scrambling to justify its continued existence by taking on relatively secondary social needs.

At a time when growing numbers of people are struggling to obtain life’s most basic essentials, including medical care, sufficient food and adequate shelter, numerous local organizations are desperately trying to meet those needs with scant resources. They are leaner, they are more focused and they will make every dollar go further than can be said of United Way. Moreover, unlike United Way, almost all of them will provide you with either a direct link to their latest IRS Form 990, so you can see for yourself how they’re managing your money; or at least their EIN number, which you’ll need to find the forms yourself.

The EIN for United Way of Central Shenandoah Valley, by the way, is 54-0632716; you won’t find it on the website. Or check out its latest filing here—then go back a year from now to see the financial consequences of the agency’s southward expansion.