Author: Andy Zipser

A former newspaper reporter and campground owner, I and my wife Carin have lived in Staunton since early 2021. After three years of maintaining a blog about RVing (renting-dirt.com), I became concerned about the lack of affordable housing and started a new blog (StauntonAskance.com) to focus on that, and other, local issues.

It’s time to take off the blindfolds

A map of Staunton’s Area Deprivation Index shows the city’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods, where residents are most vulnerable to disasters.

(Reading time: 14 minutes)

The timing could not have been tighter. On Jan. 22, the Staunton City Council adopted an update to its Emergency Operations Plan (EOP). On Jan. 23, City Manager Leslie Beauregard activated that very plan as a major winter storm battered the region with heavy ice and snow. The emergency declaration, Beauregard explained, “removes any barriers to our response efforts and allows us to mobilize additional resources, if necessary”—a prescient call, as it turned out, when the city had to call on additional contractors with beefier equipment to clear ice-bound streets.

How did it all work out? So-so. An after-action review of the city’s response detailed what worked well, what did not work so well and what “action steps” the city should take in response. Staff dedication, contractor response and communications all got high marks. On the other hand, the sheer enormity and unpredictability of the storm, as well as staffing shortages and equipment limitations, all hindered an adequate mobilization. Notably, despite its rating of communications as one of the things that worked well, the review conceded that a lack of radios in the field left the city with no way to track plow locations or coverage history.

There were other problems as well, followed by a list of 15 suggested corrective actions, from upgrading training and equipment to improving overall coordination and communication. Those action items include development of a winter storm public-facing webpage to show which streets have been cleared (as well as, inexplicably, an instructional video on how to shovel out a driveway), in response to perceived “unrealistic public expectations for immediate street clearance.” Most of the recommended actions seem worthwhile, suggesting that lessons were learned, yet taken in its entirety, the list falls short.

More on that in a bit.

STAUNTON’S EMERGENCY OPERATIONS PLAN is only one side of a coin, the “what do we do when we have a problem” face. The other side of that coin is the question, “what can we do ahead of time to minimize the consequences of a disaster?” 

The attempted answer is a 275-page document prepared by the Central Shenandoah Planning District, first drafted in 2005 and updated several times since, most recently this past spring. The Central Shenandoah Hazard Mitigation Plan covers five counties and the cities they encompass, with a general overview of the region followed by city- and county-specific recommendations. The plan identifies 12 hazards—severe winter weather among them—and prescribes a series of mitigation actions for each of the 21 jurisdictions it covers, including more than two-dozen for Staunton.

“To mitigate” means to reduce the extent, severity or painfulness of something. So, for example, among the mitigation plan’s recommendations for Staunton are stream restoration projects and creek daylighting to reduce flooding, or a program of vegetation management around buildings to create defensible spaces against wildfires. The mitigation plan, in other words, is preventative, whereas the emergency operations plan is reactive. But as with the EOP, the Hazard Mitigation Plan concentrates most heavily on the physical environment and on the city resources needed to manage it. Both plans give only passing mention to the beneficiaries of all this planning, making the mistake of treating city residents as customers or victims and not as collaborators.

In that respect, the mitigation plan overlooks one of its potentially biggest resources—which brings me back to the EOP.

IT’S ONLY NATURAL that an after-action analysis concentrates on the emergency just passed, and on the actions taken by those responding to it—natural, but myopic. That’s how armies end up fighting the last war, building defenses against historic attacks, only to be overrun by newer technology or an evolution in tactics. What’s needed is a bigger picture overview.

In that bigger picture, the January winter storm could have been much, much worse. The most obvious missed calamity would have been a widespread power outage, due to falling trees or a heavy truck sliding on ice-slicked pavement into power poles or transformers. Had that happened, restoring power would have taken hours and possibly days, given how thoroughly everything was locked down by implacable ice, trapping residents in their unheated homes in freezing temperatures. A rigorous after-action evaluation therefore should have looked not only at what did happen, but at what could have happened just as readily under the same circumstances, and whether the city would have been able to respond adequately.

Just because we missed a bullet once doesn’t mean we’ll miss it the next time.

Ironically, the Hazard Mitigation Plan recognizes there’s a high probability of power outages in our region, noting that Virginia ranks 42nd out of 50 states for electric grid reliability, with 50 being the worst. It also notes that the Central Shenandoah region had at least four major power outages in the six years through 2024, demonstrating “a clear pattern of recurring vulnerability.” Yet despite that assessment, there is next to nothing in the mitigation plan addressing power outages per se, other than to coordinate with Dominion Energy to “remove dead or hazardous trees near power lines.” Instead, the plan addresses a dozen threats by hazard type—flooding, wildfire, severe winter weather, drought, high winds, etc.—rather than by hazard impact, such as impassable roads, downed power lines or broken water mains.

Against that backdrop, it’s sobering to realize that 21.5% of Staunton’s population is 65 or older, many living alone and many relying on electrically powered medical equipment, such as oxygen concentrators and CPAP machines, as well as on refrigerated (not frozen) medications.

Moreover, old age is but one marker of vulnerability. More than 15% of the city’s residents have a disability, and 12.4% live below the poverty threshold. Much of the city’s housing stock is decades old and in various stages of weather resilience, so that even as city real estate prices have been shooting up the welfare of its residents has been declining: the incidence of unhealthy or unsafe living conditions in the Staunton-Augusta-Waynesboro region jumped from 9.9% to 14% between 2019 and 2025, according to the 2025 Community Health Needs Assessment prepared by Augusta Health.

These and other factors that exacerbate the impact of public emergencies have been combined nationwide by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) into something called the Social Vulnerability Index (SVI), a comparative measure that identifies communities most in need of support before, during and after disasters.  The SVI is intended to “help public health officials and local planners better prepare for and respond to emergency events,” according to the CDC—and residents of Staunton, as illustrated by the map at the top of this post, are in the front ranks of Virginians needing such help.

That rather alarming map ranks census block groups by averaging 16 variables, including income, education, employment, mobility and housing quality. Most of the city is ranked at the sixth decile or higher, which means those neighborhoods have a higher level of disadvantage—are more vulnerable—than half of Virginia’s population. Unsurprisingly, the most vulnerable of them all is the West End south of West Beverley, which is at the very highest decile, but large expanses of the city are at the ninth and eighth decile and may be expected to suffer disproportionately when disaster strikes. But with one generalized exception (about which more in a moment) you’d never know that from either the EOP or the Hazard Mitigation Plan.

The CDC, in promoting the vulnerability index, says it’s designed to be a tool for better emergency preparedness planning, but there’s little evidence that Staunton planners have paid it much heed. For example, these are the steps the CDC believes should be taken to formulate an effective plan: estimate the type and quantity of needed supplies, such as food, water, medicine and bedding; decide on the number of emergency personnel required to assist people; identify areas in need of emergency shelters; create a plan to evacuate people, accounting for those who have special needs, such as those without vehicles, the elderly or those with limited English comprehension.

Little of that is in the EOP, and especially not the part about an evacuation plan. Nor, despite being acknowledged by the Hazard Mitigation Plan, is there any indication that the SVI analysis factors into Staunton’s proposed mitigation actions, which largely treat the city as a monolithic entity instead of a patchwork of vulnerabilities. Had there been a widespread and prolonged outage during the January storm, for example, there would have been no evacuation plan for immobilized residents left without heat or power. And while the EOP designates the city’s public schools as emergency shelters for those who can get there, the schools are not stocked with bedding or other needed supplies, which the EOP expects the Red Cross to provide—which assumes, of course, that the Red Cross can reach the shelters.

Moreover, while the plan optimistically asserts that the schools have sufficient food stocks on hand—“optimistically” because each school is assessed as having adequate shelter for at least a thousand people—it also notes that there will be no food at the schools from about June 5 until after Labor Day, and that it will take about 48 hours to get refrigeration units back to operating temperatures.

The biggest information void, of course, will be knowing who needs help and how to match those people with the hoped-for volunteers who are expected to show up in their four-wheel drives. Nor does the EOP acknowledge the psychological and emotional resistance those volunteers may face when reaching out to the elderly and infirm, who historically have been the most resistant to leaving their homes and who account for a disproportionate number of deaths when disaster strikes.

There are other hurdles as well. The shelters are not supposed to admit pets, which will dissuade some people from going to them. The schools must be brought up to “operating temperatures” before they can accept evacuees, and although most are equipped with generators (Shelburne and Dixon apparently are not), ramping up heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer could delay their opening.

In short, as bad as the January storm was, it could easily have been much worse. Had that occurred, the after-action review would have been considerably more bleak.

WITH THEIR UNDERSTANDABLE FOCUS on city manpower, resources and command structure, both the EOP and the Mitigation Plan tend to treat the people they’re intended to help largely as afterthoughts. That oversight is evident not just in the lack of an evacuation plan or of the absence of any provision for mental health resources, but also in the lack of a granular understanding of which residents are most vulnerable, where they’re located and what kind of assistance would be most needed. In that sense, the plans are one-size-fits-all schematics.

But both plans have another, equally critical oversight, rooted in an assumption that members of the public are victims and plan responders are their rescuers. Instead of exploring how city residents could become collaborators, the plans create a binary rather than a continuous spectrum of helpers and the helped. Yet the stark reality is that in any true disaster, defined as an overwhelmingly large and complex emergency that could include mass casualties, the city’s personnel and physical resources simply won’t be up to the task. Staunton will need members of the public to help its public works employees, firefighters and cops, but it isn’t prepared for that eventuality.

Such a manpower shortage was already evident in the January storm response, a decidedly mid-level emergency as it actually played out but which, as the after-action review acknowledged, suffered from a lack of sufficient staffing in the streets. Only eight crew members were available, according to the review, presumably accounting  for an unexplained halt in plowing on Saturday night, “when snowfall was at its heaviest” and “when conditions demanded continuous operations.” That pause played a significant role in exacerbating an already difficult operation, allowing not only more snow accumulation but a compression and freezing of what had fallen to create an almost impenetrable ice shield.

But while a major disaster would require a robust community response, the Mitigation Plan gives only two brief nods in that direction, one that is largely pro forma and one that isn’t happening at all.

The pro forma nod is the plan’s recommendation “to coordinate with the Staunton-Augusta-Waynesboro Community Emergency Response Team” to “encourage and improve the disaster readiness of volunteers and the citizenry.” That’s misleading, to the extent that referring to a “team” implies there is some kind of trained and organized entity that can assist first-responders in an emergency. Although in fact there are CERT teams of that sort elsewhere in the U.S., the local CERT program is basically advanced first aid training offered by Augusta Health, together with tips for stocking up on emergency supplies. It’s useful information, and it may ultimately benefit a CERT participant’s immediate neighbors. It is not, however, a way to bolster direct city action in response to a disaster.

The second nod calls for creation of “an educational campaign on individual household preparedness and mitigation measures, particularly for affordable housing or Low-to-Moderate Income neighborhoods”—in other words, precisely those neighborhoods shaded the deepest red in the vulnerabilities map above. Unlike the CERT training, which apparently is offered only once a year to a limited number of people who have to make their way to Fishersville for seven weeks, such an educational campaign would go to the people where they are and offer them the information they need to better ride out a crisis. Things like how much food and water to stock. Alternative but safe sources of heat. How to stay up-to-date on disaster response. Creating neighborhood support groups.

Unfortunately, nothing like that is happening. Although the city notes that its Fire and Rescue personnel do extensive outreach to vulnerable communities, most recently installing fire alarms in people’s homes, there is no educational campaign on household disaster preparedness. And while every home benefits from having fire alarms, installing such alarms must be seen as providing a service, not as enlisting community partners against the day when Fire and Rescue will need a trained citizenry covering its back.

The thing about a major disaster is that it quickly drives home the point that we’re all in this together—think Venezuelans digging through rubble with their bare hands to rescue earthquake victims, or New Orleans residents paddling from house to house in canoes and rowboats after Hurricane Katrina to pluck their neighbors from the rooftops. People will respond that way naturally when circumstances become extreme enough, but their ad hoc efforts will be much more effective—and much safer for everyone—if they are trained and supplied in advance of calamity.

What can be done locally? Disaster planners should hold regular tabletop exercises to game out various scenarios, in some cases including local community members who can point out oversights or missed efficiencies. The city could maintain a contact list of residents with four-wheel drive vehicles who are willing to transport people and supplies in an emergency, and there could be inventories of other personally owned resources—chain saws, generators, freezers, tarps—that city residents would be willing to share. There should be an inventory of homes whose residents have voluntarily consented to get wellness checks in extreme circumstances.

And on and on, sometimes at absurdly mundane levels. During the winter storm, for instance, I wrote about the problem of buried fire hydrants—surely an obvious concern, but one that I think remains ignored. Other “doh” examples surely abound, and presumably would become evident during the tabletop exercises already mentioned.

The thing is, things are only going to get worse. The top three hazards addressed in the Emergency Operations Plan are all weather-related—flooding, wildfire and severe winter weather—as are four of the remaining nine, and all are trending in the wrong direction because of an increasingly extreme climate due to global warming. Other threats also are growing, such as the increased likelihood of a catastrophic failure in the city’s water supply because of its corroding, century-old delivery mains. Meeting those challenges is going to take all of us, and it’s way past time that we started.

Of drunken crows and pesky trees

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

When I was in my early 20s, Robin Hughes and I set out with passports, vaccinations and very little cash to explore the world. We got as far as Vancouver on our thumbs, at which point the romance of the road had worn thin. Robin wired her parents for money and flew back to the East Coast. I didn’t have that kind of backing, so I hitched my way south to look for work in Seattle—little realizing that I was walking into a Puget Sound economy The Seattle Times was describing as “the longest and deepest recession since the Great Depression.”

I lucked out, though. Although jobs were scarce, I got hired as a gravedigger and all-around helper at a small Jewish cemetery on top of Queen Anne Hill. I was the only employee working under the head groundskeeper, a grizzled old guy with a permanent dab of tobacco under his upper lip and a habit of regaling me with stories about growing up in rural Oregon, spitting and talking while I was digging six-foot holes. We had no power equipment, so it was all shovel work and only enough room for one man at a time, which meant I shoveled and he talked. One story that stuck with me concerned his dad, who had a habit of soaking corn in alcohol and then throwing it out in front of the house for the crows to eat. Dad would sit in a rocker on the porch, shotgun across his lap, watching the crows have their fill, and once they’d gotten good and drunk he’d get to his feet and fill them with buckshot.

That pretty much summarized my boss’s approach to groundskeeping, too.

The older parts of the cemetery had traditional headstones, but at some point a decision had been made to allow only flat markers that laid level with the ground. Making that change meant greatly enhanced productivity, since chain mowers could now ride straight across the lawns instead of zigging and zagging while someone else worked around the tombstones with a hand mower or weed whacker. Not everyone took to the idea, however. Bereaved relatives would plant flowers on the graves, and in some cases would plant little bushes around the perimeter of the plot or stick in the occasional small tree. What should have been a wide-open expanse was getting broken up into an obstacle course, and a crusty old guy brought up on a practice of shooting inebriated birds certainly wouldn’t sit still for that sort of interference.

So for the six or seven months that I worked at the cemetery, there was a lot more death than could be accounted for by the occasional fresh grave. My supervisor hunted weeds relentlessly from a tractor-mounted sprayer, pouring untold quantities of herbicide on weeds—and to him, everything looked like a weed. Leaves wilted, flowers drooped, a brown tinge infected and overcame anything that wasn’t grass. But that grass! Vibrant green, thick, boosted by Seattle’s near-daily afternoon showers, standing in stunning contrast to the vegetative carnage all around it. And so easy to cut!

Decades later, and the spirit of that scorched-earth approach to managing the environment lives on in Staunton. Faced with the inevitable encroachment of plants of all sizes on its power lines and transformers, Dominion Power has again retained the services of Asplundh Arbor Assassins to beat back the jungle and ensure that no storm-driven branch will sever its connections to our homes. It’s a ruthlessly efficient business, limbs amputated without regard for what gets chopped off, what stumps are left behind, or how disfigured or lopsided the offending tree will be rendered. Indeed, some may not survive at all.

Crawling down our streets with their boom trucks and chain saws and chippers, the Asplundh horde is in some cases laying waste to trees that were here long before Dominion erected its poles and strung its wires overhead. There are alternatives, of course. Just a couple of years ago, for example, Dominion took a chunk of its service area in the Baldwin Acres area and converted its overhead lines to underground ones, boring laterally through the soil so it didn’t have to trench. But the real estate is more expensive over there, and the trees are thicker and bigger. Elsewhere, it’s faster and a helluva lot cheaper just to slice right through the landscape.

It could be worse. It can always be worse. In some rural areas, such as along railroad tracks, the state of the art is to use helicopters from which dangle long chains of rotating circular saws. Flying buzz saws, swinging against anything in their way. That’s not something you see every day. Or drunken crows.

Zombies in our housing market

(Reading time: 3 minutes)

One of the most puzzling aspects of the local housing market is the number of vacant homes in and around Staunton. Despite an ostensibly tight housing market, anywhere from 2% to 8% of the city’s housing stock sits empty (no one has a good handle on the actual number), in some cases for years on end. Some of that stock consists of second homes, owned by affluent city dwellers elsewhere who have the money to maintain a small-town retreat. Some is “vacant” only in the sense that the homes are unoccupied more often than not, owned by investors who use them as short-term rentals.

But some of those homes, it turns out, are simply waiting for someone to die.

That insight comes from an April story in The New York Times, which quoted an estimate from Flock Homes, a real estate investment service, that there are roughly 7.2 million vacant single-family homes nationwide that are deliberately kept off the market. These so-called “zombie homes”—it’s unclear from the article whether that’s the writer’s label, or whether he picked it up from Flock—typically are owned by retirees who have paid off the mortgage but no longer live there. Some may be in nursing homes or assisted living facilities, some may have moved in with their children or to a second, smaller home that better meets their needs.

Whatever the reason, the house sits empty because the tax bill triggered by a sale would far exceed the cost of leaving it vacant. That exit penalty primarily includes capital gains taxes, paid on the increased value of a home that’s sold, but in some cases might include depreciation recapture taxes, which apply to sellers of rental properties. In the biggest markets, the total tax liability can add up to more than $100,000, compared with annual costs of less than $10,000 for insurance, maintenance and real estate taxes on a vacant property.

Real estate that get passed down to heirs, on the other hand, is inherited on a “stepped-up basis” to the current market value, effectively eliminating the tax overhang. Under those circumstances, it makes perfect economic sense to leave a house sitting empty rather than putting it on the market, since even a decade in limbo may mean less of a financial bite than a quick sale. Indeed, Flock’s analysis concludes that in Los Angeles, where 34% of the homeowning population is 65 or older, it would take 19 years before carrying expenses exceed exit taxes.

Locally, our carrying costs and exit taxes presumably are lower, but that doesn’t mean Staunton or the wider SAW region have escaped the zombie problem. Indeed, real estate values have climbed so sharply since the pandemic that the temptation not to sell grows larger with each passing year. “Our market does have ‘zombie’ houses, even though I had not heard of that term,” a local realtor acknowledged for me in an email exchange. “I have my eye on two, and when I say ‘my eye on,’ it’s obituaries, because the families are waiting until their loved one dies in the nursing home they have moved into.” The realtor added that there’s no estimate of how prevalent the phenomenon may be locally, but it’s “probably more than we realize.”

Meanwhile, it’s worth remembering that vacant homes generally don’t fare well, and even less so when family members are trying to minimize maintenance expenses over a period of several years. Indeed, if you Google “zombie homes,” the top definition refers to bank foreclosures that result from properties being abandoned and subsequently becoming dilapidated and run-down. From there, it’s just a few steps to more widespread urban blight, suggesting that city officials and homeowners’ groups should take a livelier interest in identifying the zombies in our midst.

A cold shoulder for the heat-stricken

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

Been hot lately? If you’re a farmer, you know all about that. Ditto for construction workers, city public works employees, high school kids in the marching band all decked out in their uniforms. But perhaps no group of people is more attuned to changing weather and temperature extremes than those who don’t have a home.

For these folks, where to sleep on any particular night is always an issue, of course. But so is figuring out how to shower and wash clothes, how to protect personal possessions from theft or confiscation, how to take care of relatively minor injuries or illness before they blossom into left-threatening maladies. All those efforts are complicated by extreme heat, such as we’ve been experiencing this summer, but also by extreme cold, snow and ice, as when Staunton was hammered this past winter.

So it’s encouraging, at this summer mid-point, to learn that Staunton’s government, the city’s faith-based community and its social service agencies have finally acknowledged that they have a responsibility to help this most vulnerable segment of our local population. Thanks to the outspoken leadership of several key community leaders and a vigorous fund-raising effort, augmented by a generous allocation of city funds and an outpouring of volunteer support, we can now expect . . . ha-ha-ha! Just kidding. None of that actually happened.

What did happen was very little, and the near-term outlook is for even less than that.

Here’s some of the good stuff. The Valley Mission continues to operate the area’s primary homelessness shelter, supplemented by other organizations providing limited shelter space for women. Trinity Episcopal in downtown Staunton is still serving free lunch each weekday (as does the Mission), thanks to a rotating roster of supporting groups of volunteer cooks and servers. After a fumbling effort last year, a cooling shelter has been open for eight hours each weekday since early July in the basement of Faith Lutheran Church, also in downtown Staunton.

Here’s some not-so-good stuff. Valley Mission continues to sit on a multi-million-dollar windfall it amassed, thanks to a surplus of pandemic funding, with no public indication of how it might use that money to expand its operation. The cooling shelter is scheduled to have its last day Sept. 4, long before daytime highs will be reliably moderate, but not before its volunteer staff dwindles to a fraction of its start-up numbers. The director of the Waynesboro Area Refuge Ministry, which provides overnight shelter in church facilities during the winter months, is stepping down for health reasons—even as church participation in the effort has been declining.

And looming over all of that is the federal government’s attack on social services funding of every description, from SNAP (food stamp) benefits to housing vouchers to Medicaid coverage. Perhaps most egregious, however, may be the Trump administration’s efforts to kick people out of permanent supportive housing and back onto the streets by changing the way the Dept. of House and Urban Development (HUD) grants more than $4 billion to homelessness programs. Although those changes have been enmeshed in months of court challenges and reversals, there still is no clear resolution in sight.

“HUD doesn’t know what’s going on,” said Crystal Stuck, chair of the Valley Homeless Connection (VHC), in a recent conference call of local service providers. “For now, things are going to stay the way they are—but we don’t know what’s coming down the pike.”

Meanwhile, the homelessness situation in our region is only getting worse. Because this past winter’s devastating snow/ice storm essentially torpedoed the annual Point in Time (PIT) census, limiting the count exclusively to sheltered populations, VHC for the first time decided to conduct an additional, summer-time census. Although the statistical analysis of the summer PIT isn’t expected until next month, the raw numbers July 15 were 101 people in shelters in the VHC service area of Augusta, Rockbridge and Highland counties and their cities, as well as 73 people living unsheltered, primarily in tent encampments or cars. That contrasts with 259 people that VHC has on its list of coordinated entry applicants for housing, suggesting that fully a third of the area’s homeless people could not be located.

(By comparison, the local PIT census last year turned up only 156 homeless people, of whom a mere 19 were unsheltered. Then again, the day of that count, Jan. 22, had a high of 22 degrees and a low of 4 degrees in Waynesboro, so once again extreme weather undoubtedly distorted the results.)

According to VHC vice chair Jackson Weatherly, the July PIT counters found “a lot of abandoned encampments” in Staunton and Waynesboro, presumably the result of their occupants being forced to move out. Consequently, he added, “there were many people we were unable to find,” with other homeless people attesting to the existence of new encampments that are staying under the radar. Crunching all the numbers, Weatherly concludes that the SAW region has less than 40% of the shelter space needed for its homeless population.   

Moreover, the shortage is more dire for some groups than for others. The Mission, for example, although a local mainstay, does not admit homeless people who are registered sex offenders and cannot accommodate couples or people with pets. Meanwhile, as both local and national statistics  attest, the homeless population is aging—according to the PIT count from this past winter, 29% of the sheltered population was 55 or older—which creates additional mobility challenges; half of the Mission’s beds are top bunks that may be inaccessible for much of that group.

So the squeeze is on—more homeless people living in more extreme circumstances but with dwindling prospects for more help. Indeed, it’s fair to say that after a whole lot of talking and hand-wringing locally about the homeless, the local people and institutions that ostensibly were coming to their aid are faltering, at best, and dropping away altogether at worst.

 Meanwhile, hard though it may be to envision in mid-August, there is another winter coming.

J. Blair, the man behind the curtain

(Reading time: 5 minutes)

At first blush, the City of Staunton demonstrates a remarkable accessibility for residents wanting to learn the ins and outs of their local government. Currently, for example, the city is taking applications for Staunton Citizen University, an annual 10-week course that introduces 25 of its residents to the city’s inner workings. It has numerous boards and commissions led by members of the public who supplement the city’s employees. Its city council and planning commission meetings can be observed remotely and are videotaped for those who can’t make the scheduled times. The city charter, annual budget, zoning code and lots of other documentation are accessible online.

All of which is praiseworthy, even as it also makes the city’s  reticence about its attorney so much more obvious. And inexplicable.

Go to Staunton’s website and click on “Departments,” and you’ll see a heading for “City Attorney.” Click on that link and what you’ll see is . . . nothing concrete. No name. No picture. No phone number or email address or even a physical location. There’s a single sentence of boilerplate explaining (some of) the city attorney’s responsibilities, and a whole lot more saying what the city attorney does not do and please take your questions elsewhere.

Contrast that with the way Roanoke presents its information, below, and it’s clear that there’s nothing in state law requiring such anonymity. So what’s with Staunton?

It’s not like John Blair’s role is a secret. Google a question seeking the name of Staunton’s city attorney and his name will pop right up, including mention of his former employment as city attorney in Charlottesville—whose website, by the way, doesn’t have a picture of its current attorney but does provide the incumbent’s name, plus a mailing address and phone number. Once you get Blair’s name from Google and return to Staunton’s website so you can reach out to him, however, you’ll find that he’s also not listed in the city’s directory. The man doesn’t exist.

Because I had a question about the city’s civil prosecution of property owners who don’t respond to notices of infractions, I asked a city council member why Staunton keeps the city attorney’s contact information out of sight. His brief response was that the position “by statute is an internal-facing resource for the city, advising Council and staff,” and presumably that’s why Blair doesn’t show up in the public directory. Which, when you think about it for even a heartbeat, is simply nuts. Neither the Virginia Code nor the City Charter create categories of positions that are “internal facing” versus their presumed “outward facing” counterparts, with different sets of rules applied to each. And while Blair’s duties do include legal counsel to the city, which is protected, the city attorney also has numerous “outward facing” duties, such as drafting contracts, leases and other documents, defending the city when it’s sued and prosecuting civil cases on its behalf.

All of which should be fair game for information requests and questions. And while presumably such inquiries could be submitted via the city manager’s office, as my city council member suggested, the city’s organizational chart explicitly keeps Blair’s office separate from the city manager and makes it answerable only to the city council. It’s therefore clear that keeping Blair behind a curtain is a de facto city council policy, not a city manager’s decision or a state mandate. Trying to reach Blair via an intermediary is an unnecessary hurdle quite out of step with the city’s otherwise admirable accessibility practices, but if that has to happen, such a gate-keeper role more properly rests with the city council and not with the city manager.

There’s another aspect of Blair’s position worth noting, the result of his taking on additional duties as clerk of council. The cost-saving move occurred earlier this year, following the resignation of former clerk Kiley Kesecker, when the city council decided that such a full-time position was no longer needed and that Blair could also be responsible for keeping all records of council and commission meetings. In making that change, of course, the council moved the clerk of council behind the same curtain that conceals the city attorney. Have a question or dispute about the minutes of last month’s city council meeting? Good luck figuring out how to contact the man responsible for them.

It should go without saying that both the city attorney and clerk of council are taxpayer-funded positions, which all by itself suggests a certain amount of public accountability that is undermined by making the positions unapproachable. The city attorney’s remuneration, set under Staunton’s pay classification system, is grade 25 and ranges between $130,361 and $195,541; the clerk of council is paid at grade 12, ranging between $54,167 and $81,252. It’s not clear whether John Blair is drawing two paychecks or just one, but the city has budgeted the two offices in the current fiscal year for $342,767 and $36,860, respectively—and in each office, Blair is the only employee.

I’d like to learn how all those numbers pencil out, and have some other non-privileged questions to ask as well. Now, if only I had a phone number or email address to send them to . . . .  

Aug. 7 postscript: Earlier this week, Staunton’s public information officer responded to this post with the information that a) John Blair does not draw a paycheck for his work as clerk of council; and b) that his salary as city attorney is $188,967.30 a year. No response or explanation for the lack of other information on the city’s website—and, again, no email address or phone number for John Blair to ask him for an explanation.

Where art thou, Habitat art?

Screen grab of one of the most widely known Polish posters, a giant 37 x 26 inches in size. This particular piece is advertised as an original 1980 print that was buried for seven years during martial law and is one of five copies numbered and signed by artist Jerzy Janiszewski. Price? You gotta ask.

(Reading time: 13 minutes)

When you give a buck to a panhandler, you do so with the understanding that your money may get spent on food or shelter—or on cigarettes or a cheap high. You have no control and no oversight. What is important to you may not be important to the recipient of your small donation, and vice versa, and you shouldn’t expect an explanation for how your buck will get spent.

What you also shouldn’t expect is for non-profit social service agencies to operate in the same way.

Donations made to charitable organizations known as 501(c)3s, for example, are accepted for a stated purpose. In the case of the SAW Habitat for Humanity, that purpose is to “build and restore homes, lives and communities through faith.” Stewardship of such contributions is vested in a board of trustees, drawn from the community, and the money is administered by a director who answers to the board. Public transparency for this process is provided in annual filings with the Internal Revenue Service, known as Form 990s.

Such filings are the quid pro quo accepted by charitable organizations in exchange for being tax exempt—they represent a compact under which an organization accepts the public’s money to perform a public good and in return doesn’t have to pay taxes. Form 990s, in other words, are not merely bothersome red tape. They are a window into an organization that allows for public transparency. By law, they are to be filed by the fifteenth day of the fifth month after the end of an organization’s fiscal year. Late filings can result in daily financial penalties, and missing three consecutive years results in automatic revocation of tax-exempt status.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. But then there’s our local Habitat, which at worst is busy covering up its financial misfeasance and at best is just financially incompetent.

Habitat’s financial stumbling dates back to the spring of 2024, when its executive director, Lance Barton, was given the boot for a variety of reasons too complicated to repeat here but which were amply chronicled in the Augusta Free Press. At that time, the most recent Form 990 that Habitat had filed was for its 2021 fiscal year, which ended on June 30, 2022.

Following Barton’s ouster, temporary control of Habitat was placed in the hands of David Wenger, who came aboard in September of 2024 and stayed as acting director until spring of 2025.  On May 13, 2025, in an apparent effort to clean up the organization’s books, Wenger filed a 2023 Form 990 for a changed fiscal year, defined on the form as the calendar year ending Dec. 31, 2023. In doing so, Wenger inexplicably overlooked any financial accounting for the latter half of 2022. Nor did he file a Form 990 for 2024, even though the due date for that filing was just two days after he filed the 2023 return.

Wenger was succeeded by Brad Bryant, who became Habitat’s director effective June 2, 2025. Under Bryant’s leadership, but over the signature of Habitat’s treasurer, Keith Clark, the organization filed a 2024 Form 990 that reverted to its former fiscal year: the 2024 filing is for the period July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025. In other words, this filing also opened up a six-month gap, from Jan. 1, 2024 to June 30, 2024, for which there is no financial accounting.

Put another way, the 990s posted on Habitat’s website (scroll to the bottom of the page) seemingly show six consecutive years of reports, 2019 to 2024. But the actual years of the reports, as seen in the upper right corner of the front page of each Form 990, skip over 2022.

All this might seem like a lot of whoop-de-doo about nothing, were it not for the fact that the net result is a full year’s worth of money coming in and going out for which there is no acknowledgment or explanation. And just to be clear, this isn’t a matter a few dollars here or there: Habitat routinely pulls in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in contributions and has total assets in the millions. A missing 12 months of financial accountability is a huge deal.

And that’s only the beginning of it.

ASIDE FROM FAILING to report a year’s worth of income and expenses, the Form 990s that Habitat did file raise several questions. They also, perhaps inadvertently, supply at least one possible reason for the sloppiness: while the forms filed during Barton’s tenure showed a $14,000 expense for accounting, the 990s filed by Wenger and Bryant leave that line item blank. Moreover, the form acknowledges that Habitat’s financial statements were not “compiled or reviewed by an independent accountant,” leading to the conclusion that its financial data was compiled in-house, for better or worse.

That’s not to say that the 990s were entirely without oversight. While an independent accountant was not retained to compile the data, the latest filing asserts that its financial statements were audited by such an accountant—individually, and not on a consolidated basis. Separating them that way presumably avoided any questions about the changing fiscal years and gaps in information. And while the 2024 Form 990 also asserts that Habitat has “a committee that assumes responsibility for oversight of the audit, review, or compilation of its financial statements and selection of an independent accountant,” that committee clearly missed several red flags. Among them: an unexplained $33,942 payment to “former executive director Lance Barton” between July 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025, or months after Barton had been forced to resign.

There undoubtedly are explanations, however weak or unconvincing, for all the obvious questions. The problem is that no one with the answers is willing to give them.

For example, why did David Wenger change Habitat’s fiscal year and in doing so skip over six months of financial reporting? And after filing a Form 990 for calendar year 2023, why did he not also file a Form 990 for calendar year 2024? Only Wenger can explain his reasons, but when I reached out to him via his former employer, the Central Valley Habitat for Humanity, the response—relayed by office manager Ittaty Coto—was that Wenger would not speak to me and that any questions about SAW habitat’s finances should be directed to Brad Bryant.

Bryant, of course, can’t speak to why Wenger made the decisions he did. But Bryant’s explanations for the decisions he’s made in the 13 months since becoming Habitat’s executive director, delivered in a July 8 emailed response to my questions, are no more illuminating than Wenger’s stonewalling:

  • Why is there no 2022 Form 990 posted on Habitat’s website? Bryant replied that he didn’t know but that he “physically put my hands on the hard copy this morning” and would get it up on the website soon. As of this writing, that has not happened. My request that he email a PDF directly to me went unanswered.
  • Why did Barton get paid months after he was no longer working for Habitat? If that was a severance payment, why was it not reported in the year it was incurred? Bryant wrote that he did not know but was investigating to find out.  
  • Why was Habitat’s fiscal year changed under Wenger, then changed back under Bryant, enabling the fiscal sleight-of-hand that buried a year’s worth of financial reporting? Bryant denied that Habitat changed its fiscal year, the Wenger-filed Form 990 notwithstanding, and wrote that he “cannot find anything that suggests or shows any voted-on changes from July 1-June 30 as our reporting year.”

Two subsequent emails to Bryant have gone unanswered. The second, sent a week ago, asked for the names of board members serving on the financial oversight committee and for contact information for the committee chair.

UNDERLYING AND WOVEN THROUGH all this confused financial reporting are the Polish posters. No one wants to talk about the posters, but it is the posters that triggered much of the drama of the past couple of years and it is the posters that hang over Habitat’s finances as a huge question mark.

“Police,” by Mieczyslaw Gorowski

That might sound obscure to most Americans. But just as select American comic books might be worth thousands of dollars to a discerning collector, so Polish poster art has a niche following of similar passion and valuations. Formally known as the Polish School of Posters, the art form had its heyday in the ’Fifties and ’Sixties, when its illustrations of movies, plays and daily life were slyly subversive of the Communist regime. Readily recognizable by their painterly quality and use of metaphors, hyperbole, flair and imagination, the Polish posters were a subversive rallying point “even in the darkest moments of Polish history,” as explained by one critic.

There remains to this day a lively market for such art, with contemporary posters selling on-line for $30 or $40 apiece, but rarer or more historically significant pieces can go for many hundreds of dollars apiece and are marketed with certificates of authenticity. And several hundred such posters now belong to SAW Habitat, although just how many and of what quality is unknown. Indeed, even current board members do not all know where the posters are being kept, with Bryant saying only that they’re under lock and key.

How Habitat came to possess the posters is a strange tale, but basically comes down to Lance Barton convincing his board that the art would make a unique and profitable fund-raising investment for the organization. That led to Barton and local artist Cleveland Morris traveling to the source, with Habitat covering Barton’s expenses for his Polish buying excursion. Although the Augusta Free Press, quoting Morris, reported that Barton spent $10,000 on posters, Barton himself claims an expenditure of nearly twice that amount—and that of the $18,000 he spent, a third was his own money. (Morris also declined my interview request.)

“King Lear,” by Walkuski

Not that Barton is eager to say much of anything. Not long after his return from overseas he was ousted from Habitat, all the posters were locked away, and repeated threats from Habitat of criminal charges have forced him into keeping a low profile. That he said anything at all to me was only the result of my surprising him May 30 at his Staunton home while he was mowing his lawn, an interruption during which he lamented that the only way he’ll be able to claim his third of the art will be to force Habitat into court. Since that brief exchange, however, Barton, like Wenger, has declined to answer my questions.

Barton’s claim to a third of the purchased posters, however, raises ownership issues and explains Bryant’s inability to come to grips with the subject. The only apparent game plan at Habitat is a hope that the whole affair will just go away. After more than a year as executive director, Bryant has yet to find a qualified appraiser for an art collection that conceivably could run into six figures and explains his inaction by saying that “it just does not have a priority in my world with the amount of things we are trying to move forward on.”

“Masquerade,” by Andrzej Pagowski

Meanwhile, Habitat’s refusal to acknowledge its art stash extends to its erratic Form 990 filings, which among other things ask “did the organization maintain collections of works of art, historical treasures or other similar assets?” Habitat repeatedly has replied no.  But as Schedule D to Form 990 helpfully notes, answering “yes” would apply to art held “for financial gain,” which presumably encompasses art acquired for fund-raising purposes.  

“I am going to look into that,” Bryant responded when asked about the untruthful response, “but I would guess it to be an oversight.” Easy to do, when everyone is busy ignoring the art elephant in the room.

IT’S HARD TO FIGURE OUT whether the unresolved Polish poster art saga is the result of embarrassment, legal uncertainties or misplaced priorities. Possibly a combination of all three. But the episode almost certainly feeds into the screwed-up filing of federal tax forms that followed and the unresolved question of what happened to 12 months of financial transactions, and it appears that one can’t be resolved without the other.

Much of the responsibility for presiding over this mess has to rest with Bryant, who despite his abilities as a builder seems to be in over his head with this aspect of his job. But at least as much responsibility resides with Habitat’s board of directors, who seemingly have not been asking the tough questions or providing the resources needed to resolve Bryant’s predicament. In that respect, at least, the current board seems to be cut pretty much from the same cloth as the board that green-lit Barton’s Polish expedition—which is to say, inattentive and easily rolled.

The Augusta Free Press, in originally reporting on Habitat’s travails with Barton, provided an extensive list of local organizations that have been hit with financial irregularities and outright embezzlement because of inadequate financial oversight, in some cases over a period of several years. For those that were governed by a board of directors, the failures were the result of a board that didn’t heed its three primary legal duties: the duty of care, the duty of loyalty and the duty of obedience. The latter deserves special attention, as the duty of obedience is not to a specific person but to applicable laws and regulations, the organization’s own bylaws and to its stated mission.

Habitat skated right to the edge of that abyss but pulled back at the last second, largely on the strength of Bryant’s reputation. It’s a shame he’s now reduced to the 501(c)3 equivalent of a panhandler, looking for donations but unable to explain where they’ve gone in the past. Meanwhile, of course, the abyss is still there. You have to wonder what a Polish poster artist would have done with that image.

Kicking the ADU can down the road

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To better understand why Staunton can’t get a handle on its lack of sufficient affordable housing, consider the June 18 meeting of its Planning Commission. Dominating the 90-minute session was a meandering and inconclusive conversation about a subject the commission has largely ignored, over which it has little control, but about which it is willing to entertain dystopian fantasies. In doing so, it made an inadvertent argument for renaming itself, perhaps as the Reaction Commission. Or the Let’s-First-See-What-Everyone-Else-Is-Doing Commission.

Among Staunton’s most pressing problems is its largely acknowledged if imprecisely documented shortage of housing that local residents making local wages can actually afford. There just isn’t enough of it to go around in the first place, so what’s available is priced out of reach. The obvious solution is to build more housing that is smaller and less expensive, leading to the equally obvious question: why isn’t that happening? And the obvious candidate to answer that question is the provocatively named Planning Commission (there’s also the newly formed Housing Commission, but that bunch is still trying to figure out what it’s doing), which one might think is currently consumed with trying to cut the Gordian knot of failed housing policy. One would be mistaken.

True, there are numerous reasons why Staunton has an insufficient housing supply, reasons that are at work all across the country and most of which are quite out of reach of a mere five Stauntonians meeting once a month, mostly to review rezoning requests. The cost of construction materials has sky-rocketed since the pandemic, the ranks of skilled construction workers have been depleted by Trump’s xenophobic deportation policies, interest rates are high and apparently poised to go higher. Those aren’t things a local planning commission can affect. But there’s also the matter of housing design and density, and that fits squarely within the planning commission’s wheelhouse. It’s also something the commission avoids looking at too closely.

Strange though it might seem, there’s not enough land available for building small homes in Staunton. With an average population density of just over two people per acre, it might appear that Staunton has lots of room for additional housing. But parks and agricultural districts and heavy industry whittle down the amount of land suitable for development. So too with land devoted to roads and parking lots, as well as land that’s too steep or too rocky or subject to flooding. There is land available for sizeable developments, as evidenced by the recently announced 267-home  McIntosh Village, but that’s big money chasing market-rate housing that will be too big and too expensive for empty nesters or service worker paychecks.

But then there’s our fondness for zoning that deliberately spaces homes far apart, allowing few homes per acre and dictating setbacks and minimum lot sizes and maximum lot coverage—our self-imposed limitations on what’s possible, in other words. Not geography or geology, but the very sort of thing that a planning commission concerned about an adequate housing supply for its existing population should be examining.

Just how inadequately it is doing so was on display June 18, when the commission was presented with a proposed amendment of the city zoning code that would clear the way for accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to be built pretty much anywhere Staunton allows housing.  The proposed revision was not something the Planning Commission had solicited. Nor was it sought by the Housing Commission, which has been slow-walking the ADU idea to some future chin-stroking evaluation. It was instead mandated by the Virginia General Assembly, which to its credit got fed up with all the wheel-spinning in the provinces and adopted this past session a bill that overrides local zoning authority.

Most succinctly, the state is mandating that as of July 1, 2027, ADUs are to be permitted by right—that is, without requiring “May I?” special-use review—in all zoning districts throughout the Commonwealth that allow single family use. ADUs are defined as “an attached or detached dwelling” that provides “complete independent living facilities for one or more individuals.” There are restrictions on size and placement, as well as parking and building code requirements, but basically the new law opens the door for homeowners to double their capacity. It could be with a backyard cottage, a basement apartment, a garage with a second-floor apartment. The additional space could be rented out, or it could house an aging parent or adult child. Best of all, the increase in the city’s housing stock will come without requiring any of the new roads, storm water management, water and sewer lines and other infrastructure that come with a new subdivision.

Planning commission reaction? Mixed but generally aghast. Commission member Dale Hansen, fantasizing about slap-dash cabins with hot plates and composting toilets popping up in backyards, said he wants to see some kind of allowance for ADUs “but not getting too crazy, and I don’t know how to regulate crazy,” eliciting sympathetic chuckles from other commissioners. The way the law is written, Hansen complained, “It’s sort of the Wild West—anyone who wants one can get one.” Well, yeah. That’s the idea.

Commission chair Jessica Robinson summarized the commission’s approach to the idea of getting ahead of an issue by asserting, “I don’t want to be a trailblazer.” No fear there—the state has already taken on that mantle—but because Staunton doesn’t have to amend its zoning code before next July, Robinson clearly is hoping to kick the can down the road. “I don’t think it’s impossible that people will start pushing back on this and that at the next General Assembly session it gets put off further?” she suggested, albeit on a questioning note. “And I think we should wait and see and make sure it survives all that.”

There was talk among the commissioners about seeing what zoning amendments other cities are writing—“Let them fail first, before we fail,” Hansen offered helpfully—and a suggestion that perhaps the Housing Commission could provide helpful insights. There was musing about feeling like “deer in the headlights.” None of it grappled with the fact that Virginia now has an explicit law to which Staunton must conform, without a lot of room for creative embellishments or escape clauses, which means there are only so many ways the city’s zoning code can be amended to be in compliance. The rest is wishful thinking.

Unfortunately, it’s not at all clear that the planning commission comprehends just how much the regulatory landscape is shifting beneath its feet. For the state to wade into a zoning issue—one of the few areas of responsibility reserved for localities—is huge. (See also the new state law that gives churches the by-right power to build affordable housing on their property.) At the same time, the commission’s tone-deaf approach to ADUs suggests its members haven’t been paying attention either to the ADU concept or to the housing needs of their neighbors.  ADUs as a relief valve for housing pressures have been around for years—long enough to be a significant part of the conversation at last year’s Virginia Governor’s Housing Conference, as I wrote last fall, and long enough to be discussed by the city’s Housing Strategy Group and in Comprehensive Plan ruminations. The problem locally is that it’s been just that—talk—and little more, as if a bunch of old folks were sitting around discussing the desirability of going to heaven.

The green and (to a lesser extent) the black area in the graph above are prime sources of potential tenants for ADUs and now comprise substantially more than 50% of all households.

Nor will ADUs be the end of it. In addition to having a high percentage of relatively low-wage workers, Staunton has a higher percentage of elderly residents than the national average. It’s sobering, therefore, to learn that the fastest growing group of people entering homelessness are those 55 and older—people increasingly on fixed incomes, often in poor health, who can no longer afford to live in the city in which they were raised or worked or raised their own families. ADUs are not only more appropriately sized for these populations, which don’t need multiple bedrooms or a backyard, but can be built more cheaply and therefore rented for less than single-family homes. But they’re only one possible approach.

Other housing variations that are excluded from permitted uses within current zoning regulations, such as cottage courts, may be next. Expect pressure to grow for allowing single-family home conversions into duplexes or triplexes by right, or for eliminating lot size minimums in established neighborhoods, or for eliminating all parking mandates for housing, thereby freeing up more land for infill development. None of these are novel concepts in the wider world, although they are locally. All should enter into the planning (and housing) commission’s awareness if it wants to avoid future “deer in the headlights” moments, and if it intends to take seriously the “planning” part of its mandate.    

Instead, the commission won’t be meeting again until August, when it’s not clear whether the proposed ADU revisions to the city code it receives will be substantively different from what it’s already seen. The city’s community development planners have been given next to no guidance on what changes to make, beyond a vaguely worded request to “keep refining it.” At some point the commission will have to hold a public hearing on the proposed changes; next April was suggested as a good choice.

No sense in rushing things. Or starting them, for that matter.

West End suffers from city’s ADD

(Reading time: 6 minutes)

Rereading the West End Revitalization Plan, as I did over the past week in preparing my last post, was a stark reminder of how much we suffer an institutional version of attention deficit disorder. Two examples from that document will make my point: the brownfields study, and the tax increment financing district.

The brownfields study has been cited repeatedly in Staunton planning documents as a critical tool for redeveloping the West End. Funded by $300,000 from the EPA, the three-year Brownfields Assessment Grant was intended to “return vacant or underutilized properties to productive reuse” by assessing West End sites for possible environmental hazards. That would be followed by remediation, which, grandly, would “incentivize investment and jumpstart redevelopment and area-wide revitalization.” Study oversight was to be provided by a consortium of nine West End groups and organizations. Monthly and quarterly reports would keep everyone apprised of the progress made.

Or not.

Because as I wrote a year ago, local oversight never occurred because the Brownfields Redevelopment Advisory Group never met, there have been no monthly reports, and the quarterly reports are remarkably repetitive while also being short on detail. The initial three “high priority” sites targeted for assessment became just one, which in fact was developed and now is home to the city’s new court building on West Beverley, but of the other two sites there has been no public accounting.  The good news, if you can call it that, was that at least the grant money was not completely squandered—indeed, so little of it was spent that by the end of the three-year grant period more than half was still available. That led to a requested one-year grant extension—and then to a second.

With the now five-year grant period set of expire this coming Sept. 30, as of the end of April—the most recent available account—the city had yet to spend almost a fourth of the original grant amount. What it might be doing with approximately $70,000 is anyone’s guess. From the skimpy documentation that’s available, city officials in April were still trying to find suitable sites to assess, with four possible candidates lined up—none of which, it bears noting, are actually in the West End, with the possible exception of an old pump station building near the main entrance to Gypsy Hill Park. The others, however, include the former Coca Cola bottling plant on North Augusta Street; a site on Richmond Road [sic]; and the art school at 219 West Beverley Street, adjacent to the Central United Methodist Church.

It’s possible some or all of these sites should be assessed for environmental contamination, although “brownfield” is not the first image that comes to mind when contemplating a park pumphouse or an art school. But whatever the merits of these four candidates as posing environmental hazards, the bottom line is that federal money once touted as a needed economic shot in the arm for the West End is going to be funneled elsewhere, apparently because there are no more environmental hazards to be found in the West End itself.

But let me not quibble. Let’s instead take a look at tax increment financing, which one might think would interest a city council that often cites the Dillon Rule as a major reason why we can’t have nice things. (Without getting too much in the weeds, the Dillon Rule is a governing principle that essentially means city and county governments in Virginia don’t have the authority to do anything that hasn’t been explicitly permitted by the state legislature. Which means, among other things, that the city council can’t just levy whatever taxes it wants.) Yet tax increment financing (TIF) is one of the taxing authorities that the state has given the city, and among the West End Revitalization Plan’s key recommendations is for Staunton to “research and establish a TIF district” in the West End to “finance infrastructure needs and improve public amenities.”

From page 35 of the ignored West End Revitalization Plan

As the revitalization plan explains, TIFs have been used throughout Virginia since 1988, typically to “finance infrastructure improvements in blighted and disinvested areas.” Here’s how they work: a “TIF district” is established via a city ordinance, in this case encompassing much of the West End, from which property tax revenue to the city is capped at existing levels for the life of city-issued bonds. Revenue from those bonds pays for eligible projects in the TIF district, including public infrastructure like streets, sidewalks, and sewer and water lines, as well as land acquisition and demolition, structured parking or plazas and, yes, brownfield remediation. As new buildings are constructed and renovations occur, property values in the district rise, as does the amount of property taxes collected—but the difference between the capped tax revenue and the increased revenue due to improvements is used to retire the bonds that funded them. This difference is the “increment,” hence the name.

Such a self-financing mechanism would address one of the biggest obstacles to Staunton’s efforts at revitalization, which is its lack of financial reserves. It’s also, despite being explored at some length in the revitalization plan, a concept quite foreign to city planners and officials. The Staunton Housing Strategy Group, for example, despite reviewing literally dozens of possible funding mechanisms as it laid the groundwork for what is now the city’s Housing Commission, never once considered TIFs. The city’s Economic Development Authority likewise never examined the possibility. It’s not as though city officials considered the pros and cons of such an approach to the West End’s needs and reached a reasoned conclusion—they just ignored the concept altogether.

None of this is to say that TIF is a panacea. While creating such a district in the West End could short-circuit the on-again, off-again piecemeal approach to revitalizing the area that has characterized Staunton’s efforts to date, it would tie up incremental revenue increases to pay off the bonds instead of using that money for other critical public services, some of which would face increased demand precisely because of TIF-enabled growth. Yet it scarcely needs to be pointed out that without the TIF approach that growth is less likely to occur in the first place, and with it a growth in jobs and in the long-term tax base.

More to the point, the lack of discussion about TIF districts raises the question of why efforts like the Revitalization Plan are undertaken in the first place. Staunton hardly needs more dust-catchers, which is the fate that awaits ignored plans and recommendations (take heed, those of you laboring on the Comprehensive Plan update). City councilman Jeff Overholtzer, the council’s liaison to the Economic Development Authority, said in response to my questions that he will “start a conversation” with that body about a possible TIF approach, which is certainly overdue more than 18 months after the city council signed off on the Revitalization Plan. But then again, given the city’s track record with its brownfields grant spending, maybe we shouldn’t expect too much even now.

Warring against willful ignorance

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Staunton’s census tracts, showing homeownership percentages (in black) and poverty levels (in red), with Census Tract 2 highlighted in pink at left; from Anna Leavitt’s presentation to Staunton City Council on June 25.

For several weeks now—ever since the latest American Community Survey statistics were released—I’ve been thinking about writing something tentatively titled “A Tale of Two Cities.” The piece would have focused on the West End generally, and on Census Tract 2 specifically, and on the various disparities between that area writ small and Staunton overall. And then this past week Anna Leavitt beat me to the punch, at least partly, with a presentation to city council that was an unexpected and bright counterpoint to Staunton’s generally sluggish approach to such matters.

Leavitt, former director of CAPSAW (Community Action Partnership of Staunton, Augusta and Waynesboro), apparently has an affinity for complex acronyms: these days she identifies herself as Staunton’s EMOSA, which stands for Economic Mobility and Opportunity Special Assistant. She’s been in that position only since January, yet already has done more to fill in the terra incognita portions of Staunton’s demographic map than any of the numerous studies and plans generated over the past decade. That’s truly good news. But it’s only a start.

The bottom line in Leavitt’s presentation on Thursday was that it doesn’t matter where you live in Staunton, a median household income is no longer enough to buy you affordable housing. That holds true regardless of whether you’re a lower-income single parent with one child, a two-earner moderate- or middle-income household with two children, or a retired senior living on a fixed income: in each case, expenses outstrip income by several hundred dollars a month. In some parts of the city, however, the deficits are larger than others, and Leavitt’s analysis thus far is only scratching the surface of what that means.

Look at the statistics for Staunton’s seven census tracts, and you’ll be immediately struck by the extremes of Census Tract 2. This is the area south of West Beverley Street often recognized as a major part of the West End, which as defined by the city also includes a hefty chunk of Census Tract 3, on the north side of West Beverley. But Census Tract 2 is considerably more immiserated than its counterpart, as evidenced by median household incomes—$49,470 for tract 2, $80,914 for tract 3—and other indicators of economic well-being. As a result, discussions about the West End generally blur many significant variations; they also obscure the even more stark comparisons between Census Tract 2 and Staunton overall.

For starters (and as Leavitt pointed out), Census Tract 2 has the highest poverty rate of any Staunton census tract, at 19.2%, compared to the city’s overall rate of 12.6%. It also has one of the city’s lowest homeownership rates, at 43%, compared to a citywide average of 61%. That means nearly three of every five homes in Census Tract 2 are owned by someone who lives elsewhere, whether that’s in the house next door or in Virginia Beach, accounting for the large number of complaints from area residents about absentee landlords and neglected properties. It also means the tract’s 4,000 residents have limited financial resources, and therefore limited mobility, to improve their living conditions.

Moreover, the housing that exists, for renters and homeowners alike, ain’t that grand. Of the census tract’s approximately 1,120 rentals, nearly half have what the Census Bureau calls a “condition”: either a lack of complete bathroom facilities, a lack of complete kitchen facilities, an occupancy higher than one person per room, or rent that takes more than 30% of their tenants’ income. Homeowners aren’t faring a whole lot better, with nearly a quarter living in a home with a “condition.” Overall, then, it’s safe to conclude that a huge chunk of Census Tract 2 residents are living in crowded conditions or are paying way more for housing than is financially sustainable for the long term.

 Other Census Tract 2 statistics further underscore the challenges its residents face. Eleven percent of the population was without healthcare coverage in 2024—a percentage sure to have climbed this year because of the federal government’s decision to end Obamacare subsidies—as against 6.4% for Staunton overall. Sixteen percent of Census Tract 2 residents are disabled, which is not that much higher than the city’s rate of 15.2%, but which is more consequential in the context of all the other problems they face. It’s also noteworthy that 45.5% of Census Tract 2 residents have never married, a metric typically associated with household stability and individual health and longevity, compared with a citywide average of 33.9%. And a bit more than 15% of the area’s adults older than 25 don’t have high school diplomas.

The residents of Census Tract 2, in other words, face numerous obstacles that are more limiting than those found elsewhere in the city.  

THE POOR HOUSING SITUATION in the West End generally, and in Census Tract 2 specifically, is no secret. Indeed, having recognized the area’s potential to go into an economic tailspin, the city in 2020 embarked on a four-year exercise to forestall disaster by studying the area and formulating a remediation plan. The result was the 115-page West End Revitalization Plan that the Staunton city council formally adopted at the end of 2024. Woven throughout the plan are the concerns and complaints of area residents about a lack of available and affordable housing, as well as the widespread deterioration of existing housing stock.

But housing, as it turned out, was only a small part of the plan’s remit. And the final plan’s remedial housing recommendations are . . . superficial, to say the least. The leading “action item” regarding housing, for instance, calls for connecting West End homeowners “to existing resources” that would help them address “building and property maintenance code violations.” Only one of the plan’s proposals directly addresses renters, and then by suggesting they should be educated about their rights, presumably so they could hold their landlords accountable for providing decent, safe and sanitary quarters. Indeed, when you parse the handful of housing-related recommendations, it all boils down to a lot of talk but no action or any commitment to provide new city assistance.

It should go without saying that people one step away from being homeless are hardly in a position to insist that their rights be respected. When you’re scraping by at a job that pays less than $20 an hour but still have to fork over more than $1,000 a month for rent because there’s nothing available for less, your airy “rights” take a back seat to more pressing concerns when your landlord won’t get around to fixing the AC. You suck it up. And as I wrote 18 months ago, while the wool-gathering that went into the West End Revitalization Plan encountered repeated complaints of unscrupulous landlords and neglected properties, little of that got more than a passing acknowledgment in the plan itself, apparently because anecdotal stories are easier to ignore than hard numbers.

The lack of hard data should by now be a matter of civic embarrassment. Roughly six years after the revitalization study was started, city planners still do not have an inventory of vacant and developable land in the West End, or an inventory of deteriorating or abandoned dwellings that should be refurbished or condemned. (The city tax assessor presumably has that data, but that speaks to another city problem, of siloed information.) The city has no idea how many rental properties are owned by people who live outside of Staunton. And then there’s the problem of information bias creeping into studies like the Revitalization Plan: of approximately 170 responses to a community survey conducted for the plan, for example, only 78% were from people who actually live in the West End—and of those, nearly 90% were homeowners. In other words, responses from the renters comprising the majority of Census Tract 2 residents were vanishingly few.

Little wonder, then, that the revitalization plan’s proposed remedies regarding housing instability are so toothless. A meaningful recommendation, for example, might have called for adoption of a rental inspection program specifically targeting Census Tract 2, similar to programs operating in Roanoke, Winchester, Hopewell, Colonial Heights, Petersburg—cities throughout the Commonwealth that are both larger and smaller than Staunton. Such programs focus on specific areas in each city where older residences, absentee ownership and low incomes create an environment conducive to property neglect and housing deterioration.

Although the Virginia Landlord and Tenant Act makes landlords largely responsible for the living conditions in their properties, it doesn’t have a mechanism for tenants to enforce its provisions when a landlord ignores complaints. So a tenant’s options when faced with an intolerable living situation are to move—not exactly an alternative in the current market—or to file a lawsuit, which is an even more burdensome proposition. In cities that have rental inspection programs, however, rental units are subject to periodic inspections to ensure they conform with the state’s Maintenance Code, providing some assurance that such problems are less likely to crop up in the first place.

Waynesboro seemed about to adopt such a program three years ago, but then scrapped the effort amid claims that it would be too expensive to implement and that it would raise the already high cost of housing. That sounds remarkably like the fallacious arguments often made against increasing the minimum wage, serving mainly as a rationale for paying people slave wages or, in this instance, keeping them in blighted housing. But it gets repeated uncritically by those who don’t believe government should get involved in housing issues in the first place.

So, for example, asked why Staunton doesn’t have a rental inspection program, John Glover, whose job title is Building Official in the city’s Community Development department, replied that city staff had looked at the possibility in the past and “decided it was not necessary.” Having such a program, he wrote in an email that echoed Waynesboro’s rationale, “can increase the cost of rentals, which is detrimental to affordable housing.” It would require additional staffing, “which can be costly for the city.” A more cost-effective approach, he maintained, is complaint-based enforcement of the state’s Maintenance Code, which can result in the city taking legal action against property owners who don’t remedy violations.

Without providing any specifics about how many complaints have been investigated or how many times a property owner has been taken to court, Glover concludes that “this approach has proven to be very effective for many years.” Perhaps. But as with so many city responses to the West End’s problems, that assertion is made without a factual grounding. It assumes that people living in deficient housing not only know of the city’s complaint-based enforcement of the Maintenance Code—a code that gets only a single, unexplained mention in the Revitalization Plan—but that they have enough courage or desperation to risk calling attention to themselves by filing a complaint. A scarcity of complaints does not necessarily indicate the lack of a problem.   

ALL OF THE ABOVE presupposes that indeed there are unattended housing problems in Census Tract 2. Given the area’s general economic data and the anecdotal feedback received by the Revitalization Plan, that seems like a pretty safe bet. But that very wobbly assertion also attests to the city’s willingness to not look at things too closely.

If you can say with a straight face that you don’t see a problem, then no one can fault you for not fixing it, and that’s pretty much how Staunton has approached its housing problems in the past. That’s true city-wide, but especially so in the West End, and Census Tract 2 more specifically. That’s why the hard data is so spotty. It’s why city staff can so blithely declare that city intervention or oversight “is not necessary.” It’s how residents’  feedback can be superficially acknowledged but ignored when spending and policy-making decisions are made. It’s why planning study after planning study ends up gathering dust on a shelf somewhere.

That changes are afoot, albeit at a glacial pace, is not due to any sudden epiphany, but because at some point being oblivious stopped being an option. Our homeless population is not going away, and indeed—as may be confirmed mid-July in a special Point in Time census—appears to be growing. The state, which historically has left zoning decisions up to localities, is now mandating that Staunton and other cities allow construction of accessory dwelling units—essentially a second home—anywhere they allow single-family homes, an option over which Staunton has been dithering for at least the past year. Another state initiative, signed into law last month, allows churches and other tax-exempt nonprofits to build affordable multifamily housing on their property without prior city approval. And meanwhile the gap between what people are paid and what they have to pay to keep body and soul together is widening.

Staunton’s new EMOSA seems intent on plugging some of those data holes, which will make a deliberate ignoring of the problem much, much harder to sustain. Good luck, Anna!

Staunton’s curse of low expectations

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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?