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When publicly-traded companies have bad news they’re forced to share with the public, such as plunging revenues or earnings losses, the time-honored strategy is to release it late on a Friday afternoon. That way, goes the forlorn hope, some of the shock will have dissipated by the time stock trading resumes Monday morning.
That seems to be pretty much the thinking behind Staunton’s promised taking-of-the-pulse for Staunton Crossing. Eight months after the city’s consultant on the massive economic development project, Tim Davey, told city officials that the project’s master plan is overdue for a reevaluation, the people who live in the city finally will be asked to chime in with their thoughts on the subject. Well, sort of—if that’s what you call an online survey consisting largely of multiple-choice questions issued in the holiday-frenzied weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. But to me, that reads more like a pro forma Friday-afternoon corporate release of bad tidings.
Not that there’s anything surprising about the move. Davey’s contempt for public input was clearly telegraphed at the October meeting of the city’s Economic Development Authority (EDA), which has oversight of Staunton Crossing’s development, when he revealed unsuspected soothsaying powers by counseling against public information sessions because they wouldn’t yield any new thoughts or insights. An online survey, on the other hand, would be “easy, quick and nimble,” which is consultant-speak for “avoiding messy public emotions and objections.”
The desire to tamp down public input was repeated at yesterday’s brief and sparsely attended EDA meeting (three of seven members were absent), at which Amanda DiMeo, the city’s director of economic development, said there was “nothing to show yet” because the survey is still being drafted. Still, she added, it would consist largely of multiple-choice questions because “we didn’t want to slow up the process too much” by having it “too open” –in other words, by posing open-ended questions that might require fresh analysis of new ideas. Far better, in the interests of “easy, quick and nimble,” to have a fixed universe of acceptable issues and defined responses.
The decision to forego any public hearings, to rely for public feedback solely on an online survey, and to release that survey at precisely the time of year when the public is most distracted from civic issues, is an uncharacteristically cynical posture for Staunton. It is, however, entirely consistent with Tim Davey’s unrelenting advocacy of recruiting a data center for Staunton Crossing. Public support for data centers has plunged all across the country, for numerous and well-known reasons, but Davey has been undeterred and keeps flogging them in one public appearance after another. And make no mistake, data centers are at the center of all this fretting about a plan “update.”
Typically, the pitch has been either “Gee, everyone else is doing data centers, you don’t want to be the only municipality in Virginia to miss out,” or the more blatant dangling of ginormous tax revenues that Staunton could be collecting—as much as $26 million a year if Staunton Crossing were to be carpeted with the things, as Davey observed last month. Not, of course, that he would suggest such a thing. Just saying. . . .
Often obscured by the data center fixation is the original reason behind Staunton Crossing, which was primarily to generate well-paying jobs for a city too disproportionately tilted toward the lesser paying service sector. Aside from the initial construction phase, data centers—which are little more than glorified warehouses—fall remarkably short on that measure, so Davey’s relentless pursuit of that option is at least questionable, and all the more so in the context of an industry that is all too fond of non-disclosure agreements as it pursues new sites.
To get the best bang for the buck—that is, to get the largest number of decent jobs while also maximizing the taxbase—almost certainly calls for recruiting light manufacturing plants, because of their combination of large capital investment and skilled trades. But on that score Davey is remarkably myopic, leaning heavily on pharmaceuticals because that apparently is the latest “it” thing in the state’s economic development, pointing to multi-billion-dollar projects in Albemarle, Richmond and Elkton.
Well, maybe—although it’s worth observing that any development comes with trade-offs, and any chemical-dependent industry has significant environmental implications that deserve a discussion that has yet to take place. But aside from his superficial broaching of the possibilities, Davey’s bigger failing is that he’s so fixated on what others are doing and so obviously uninterested in being progressive or forward-looking. What are the industries of the future, where Staunton has a chance of getting in on the ground floor? What will be the next “it” thing, not this year or next, but in 2030? How can Staunton Crossing take advantage of its location along major road and rail transportation links, which it touts so widely in its promotional material but about which data centers care not one bit?
Instead of feeding the same hackneyed development menu to city planners and officials, how refreshing would it be if Davey and the EDA explored the possibilities of solar or other green industries, from solar panels to batteries to geothermal equipment or wind turbine manufacturing? Or how about picking up on fast-moving changes, both legislatively and technologically, in home manufacturing, with modular housing poised for explosive growth? What could be more fitting, for a part of the state that suffers from a growing shortage of affordable housing, than a manufacturing plant that cranks out wall panels, modular bathrooms and kitchens, and entire housing blocks that could be assembled at a fraction of the cost of site-built homes?
There undoubtedly are numerous other possibilities worthy of discussion, but community discussion clearly is the last thing Davey and the EDA want. The Staunton Crossing plan is nearly a decade old, but talk of “updating” it is window dressing for those who put it together in the first place, and who have locked into its main features. A sincere effort to solicit public input might provide the imagination and vision that is so conspicuously missing at the moment, but that would be too much like work. It wouldn’t be “quick, easy and nimble,” which have become today’s watchwords.
