Choosing Priorities

Today at City Council, the majority of members voted to allocate $1.5 million to Countryside Golf Course for improvements. This $1.5 million will come from the sale of municipal bonds, so once the million and a half dollars is repaid, with interest, it will have cost taxpayers more like $2.5 million. Given the financial circumstances in which residents and businesses, as well as City government, find themselves, and given the dire infrastructural needs in our City, I do not believe that putting money into a golf course is in our best interest.

Countryside is a nice golf course that could be much better had its maintenance not been neglected for so many years. It's layout is very good, and it is a beautiful piece of property. I understand the desire of residents around the course to want to keep green space near their houses. But having said all this, I fundamentally disagree with the idea that the City of Roanoke should be in the golf course business. We could turn some of the course into a 20- or 30 acre park so that residents living around the course who don't golf can also benefit from the green space, and then seek input from developers as to what would make sense for the remainder of the property.

A few hundred residents and taxpayers in Roanoke actually play golf at Countryside. So as we invest so much money into the course, we are forcing 93,000 other non-Countryside golfing residents to shoulder the financial burden that this debt brings us. And the worst part is that we are not actually investing money that will improve the course; rather, we are patching up some deficiencies in the course such as repaving cart paths and putting in a new irrigation system. These items won't make the course better, attract new or more players and improve the experience of golfers (of which I am one). These items will simply be better than they presently are, with less potholes and higher water pressure. But at the end of the day we are sinking millions of dollars into a city-run golf course that will add debt obligation and likely general fund subsidies to our already stressed City budget.

And within the next six months or so, City Council will be addressing whether or not to add a stormwater utility fee onto each property in the City, causing residential property owners to pay an additional fee each month and commercial properties to often pay enormous monthly fees. So in this instance, and knowing that we have over $60 million in needed stormwater facility improvements, we are choosing to invest capital money into a golf course to benefit those couple hundred folks that play golf at Countryside, and then will come back to talk about adding fees to cover what we know to be a desperately needed stormwater fixes. To me, that is a total mis-prioritization of where we are spending our limited capital resources.

The decision has been made and Countryside will remain a golf course for the time being. I just hope folks remember this choice when we come back to discuss adding additional fees onto our taxpaying residents and businesses to cover our very basic, and largely neglected, infrastructure needs.

Community Input Budget Meetings

Many thanks to City staff for their hard work in scheduling two community input budget meetings to be held at the beginning of March. These meetings will offer residents the chance to learn how the budget process works, where scarce resources may or may not be allocated and other information that contributes to the very tough decisions that will have to be made during the current budgetary crisis.

The second purpose of these two community meetings, and the main reason I think these meetings are so important, is that while each department within city government is being asked to label programs high priority, medium priority and low priority, taxpaying citizens ought to have the opportunity to tell City staff their priorities in this tough fiscal time. We need to make sure that we acknowledge that sometimes staff might consider something low priority while citizens consider that very same thing a high priority. Open communication and a transparent process are vital .

The two community meetings will be held on:

Tuesday, March 3
Virginia Western Community College
6:30PM

Thursday, March 12
Roanoke Civic Center
6:30PM

I strongly encourage all those interested in providing input and understanding budgetary requirements, and those leaders throughout our neighborhoods, to come to one or both of the community meetings.

Hope to see you there!

More Reason to Prioritize

We have now been delivered news that gives us even more reason to prioritize in the City and to remain focused on those things that are vital to a community's well-being, present strength and future prosperity: our schools.

The Virginia Department of Education informed us today that using their new cohort method for calculating graduation rates, our City's schools have only graduated 51.6% of our seniors in four years. This new number to what has been an ongoing problem should provide us even more of an impetus to refocus our energies as a City on the things that can bring our community together, united behind the common goal of working to transform our schools into not just good schools, but rather great schools.

We often spend time focusing on such matters as spending millions of dollars on a golf course or other capital projects. We are in an economy that is contracting and has cost a couple of trillion dollars in wealth to pension funds during the last couple of months alone. Now is the time to step back, look in the mirror as a community and decide whether we like what we see and whether we must have these capital items right now.

Our schools can be our greatest asset or our biggest boon. Now is the time to commit to doing what it takes to making our schools first-rate, to put aside capital projects that would be great for the community, but that are discretionary and require sound finances and a strong economy with increasing revenues. We must work to bring more and better jobs to the City, which requires a firm committment to improving our schools and to providing them with the resources needed to turn out well-educated, well-rounded students qualified for the 21st century workforce.

Now is the time when we must tighten our purse strings and realize that we can't always have everything, but that a community's core committment is to its children. Without great schools, the future of those children will be tougher and tougher. And our City's future is tied to that future.