Tag: Rodney Rhodes

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?

Staunton Crossing dissonance

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

When it comes to its plans for Staunton Crossing, the city is being less than forthright. Coy, even.

Making this evident was session six of Staunton Citizen University, held last week and focused on all things economic. That, of course, meant paying special attention to Staunton Crossing, the hugely ambitious but largely vacant crown jewel in the city’s efforts to gin up economic development.  With its roots dating back to 2009, when the Staunton Economic Development Authority (EDA) shelled out $15 million in a land swap with Western State Hospital, Staunton Crossing now represents an investment of roughly twice that amount. The number of jobs attributed to Staunton Crossing over the past 16 years? Perhaps 200—and some unknown number of those aren’t new to Staunton, since they merely involved a move from one city location to another.

At its best, then, the money sunk into Staunton Crossing currently works out to a per-job cost of approximately $150,000. That’s hardly a bargain, and even less so considering that most of those jobs are on the low end of the wage scale: desk clerks and housekeepers at two hotels, food servers and salesclerks at a handful of fast-food franchises and retail outlets. But to be fair, the Crossing still has another 275 empty acres just waiting for someone to move in. And city officials say that could mean more than 3,000 additional jobs coming to Staunton, resulting in an enormous shift in any cost-benefit analysis, so perhaps it’s still early days when it comes to doing the math.

But that’s where the coyness comes in. What new businesses is the city trying to recruit, and at what additional cost?

Among the six types of industries advertised on Staunton Crossing’s internet pitch is “logistics and transportation,” which sounds an awful lot like a warehouse distribution center. That’s low-hanging fruit, one might imagine, given the Crossing’s touted “easy access to the East Coast and Midwest” because of interstate and railroad proximity. But apparently it’s also forbidden fruit, at least for now. Asked when a large tenant for the Crossing might be recruited, economic development director Amanda DiMeo responded that a warehouse operation could have been landed “yesterday” if that’s all the city was after. Clearly, there’s hope that there are bigger fish to fry.

Which brings us to the second questionable industry on the Crossing wish list: Data Centers & IT. When it comes to recruiting this latest “must have” industry, the EDA marketing push goes all out in playing the environmental hazards card without any apparent irony. Staunton Crossing, declares its website, “is a prime location for data centers due to its low risk of natural disasters. The area is not prone to earthquakes, hurricanes, or severe weather events, which can disrupt data center operations. This provides peace of mind to organizations that rely on the secure and continuous operation of their data centers.”

And that’s not all! Staunton Crossing has an irresistible supply of low-cost and reliable electrical service, according to its website. It has state-of-the-art fiber internet infrastructure. It has “a large pool of highly educated and experienced IT professionals,” which might be expected to raise  quizzical eyebrows among the relatively sparse IT workforce currently in the city. But notably lacking in this recitation of virtues is any mention of the copious amounts of water that data centers require, although the website does give assurances elsewhere that the city can provide 2 million gallons a day.

And that’s a problem.

Two million gallons a day represents the entire output of one of the city’s two major water sources, drawn from the headwaters of the North River in the George Washington National Forest.  The possibility of such an outsized claim on a critical natural resource, in an age of global warming and greater weather instability, including droughts, has not gone down well with community residents with a less boosterish outlook. There have been rumbles of discontent—which may explain a curious comment about the matter by Rodney Rhodes, the city’s director of community development.

Speaking immediately following DiMeo’s presentation, Rhodes led off with the observation that Staunton’s zoning ordinance does not permit data centers. Any attempt to bring in such a center therefore would require that the zoning code be amended—and that, he assured the class, would be “a hard slog.” Not impossible, of course. But hard, so nothing to get excited about.

Nothing to see here!

And yet, why would Staunton keep chasing after a substantial capital investment that its own rules do not permit? Does the question answer itself? A substantial capital investment of the sort represented by a data center wouldn’t provide much in terms of permanent employment, but it would add handsomely to the tax base. And given the many millions already spent on the Crossing with remarkably little return to date, the promise of a big chunk of tax revenue might be expected to transform a hard slog into a greased done-deal.

As I said: coy.