Compiled by Chris Graham
freepress2@ntelos.net

The canvas was clean. The answers to my questions would paint the picture.

What will the Greater Augusta area look like in 2025?

I asked several local leaders to weigh in on the topic. As you will see, the conversations were open and honest.

Augusta County
Nancy Sorrells, Riverheads District Supervisor, Augusta County Board of Supervisors

Q: What will Augusta County look like in 2025?

A: “If we can make our comprehensive plans work, I think we’ll certainly have many more people. But hopefully we’ll have retained many of the things that make life in this area so special. Which are very friendly communities that are livable communities, that are walkable, that you don’t have to get into a car to drive across the county to go to the doctor’s office or to the grocery store, that you still know your neighbors, and that you still have open spaces, and that we’ve retained the beauty of what’s here.”

Q: Will growth put more pressure on the county to provide more fire, rescue and law-enforcement services?
“The state gives us money for every 1,500 people to hire an additional law-enforcement person. So if you have 1,500 people in a well-designed, nice subdivision-type of community, maybe one deputy can do that. But if you have 1,500 people, and you scatter them through the great geographical vastness of the North River District or the Riverheads District, one deputy isn’t going to cut it. You’re going to need to hire more than one deputy to run the roads and go to all those different places.

“The same with fire and rescue. If you have more and more houses way out in the outlying areas, the smaller volunteer fire departments and rescue squads aren’t going to be able to serve that growing population in the way that they expect and deserve to be served.

“We are holding tightly to our tax rate, but someplace down the road it’s going to have to go up.

“You can have fire-service districts. Draw a line around a new subdivision, it’s a planned community, and maybe they get two more cents on their real-estate tax to help provide for those needs that they’re going to have. Or, and they do this in different parts of Virginia, a sewer district - say the village of Greenville needs to be served by sewer, and they will sooner or later, by 2025 they will, because they have these very small lots that have been there for 200 years, and if your septic field fails, there’s nowhere else to put a new septic line, so they’re going to have to be served by sewer, or else they’re going to have to dump raw sewage into the South River. Traditionally we’ve thought of sewer as a way to encourage increased development, but in this case you want the sewer not to encourage more growth, but to better serve the growth that’s there.
“Eventually there will be pressure to go from a sheriff’s department to a police force.”
Tracy Pyles, Pastures District Supervisor, Augusta County Board of Supervisors

Q: What will Augusta County look like in 2025?

A: “The population here hasn’t grown as fiercely as one might think. We’re hardly in a high-growth range. If you look back, we were 54,000 in 1990, and we’re roughly 70,000 now. We’ve grown quite a bit while Waynesboro and Staunton have been stagnant. You put it all together, we have a reasonable rate of growth. You want to have some growth, and the area as a whole has a 1 percent increase per year, something like that, one, one and a half. So you project ahead 15 years, you can project that the population will increase 20 percent compounded from now to then, and if we’re at about 112,000 population total now, in 2025, 130,000 is kind of a number I’d think about.
“The rest of that can be nestled easily within the Staunton-to-Waynesboro-to-Lyndhurst-Stuarts Draft area. It’ll be a concentration in those areas. We have to make the connections to water and sewer both available and reasonable in costs, and we’re having some problems doing that because of issues with the Chesapeake Bay Act and that sort of thing. But I think land costs will continue to rise, so it should be enough to offset people going into the rural area.

“I just see us being more tightly compacted in the Fishersville area and the Waynesboro suburbs, if you will, and Stuarts Draft. But I think the overall rural character of Augusta County won’t change. Just those limited parts of it.”

Q: Will growth put more pressure on the county to provide more fire, rescue and law-enforcement services?
A: “I don’t see a lot of changes in how we do fire. I think that works very well. Volunteers, for the most part, are willing and able to do it. And with the professionals that we have backing them up, I think that does OK. I don’t volunteers, as constituted now, will be in place in 2025. Where right now we have largely a volunteer organization, supplemented to a degree by paid professionals, by 2025 we’ll have professional organizations supplemented with volunteers. How does that impact costs? To an extent, we’ll have to have adopted revenue recovery so some of the costs will be spread into medical insurance and that sort of thing. There will be some increases in costs, but we spend quite a bit for volunteers now, and we’re going to have to redirect that toward professionals. I see it costing another few cents on the tax rate to make that work.
“That’s being driven by a lot of things. The demands of the state on our volunteers - they’ve tried to make it where it’s closer to a doctor in the ambulance and treatment form the get-go instead of what they call load-and-go, where you go there, and what you’re trying to do is get them to the professionals as quick as you can, trying to do first aid and that sort of thing. But as that has changed, it’s putting more and more on the people, so we’re losing our volunteers. The fewer volunteers, the greater the load on people. The demands are increasing with the amount of people that we have in our population, so I just see that as something that’s going to have to change.
“I can see us having a combination sheriff’s department/police department. I think eventually we’ll have an Albemarle County or Fairfax County, where there’s one law-enforcement agency for the three localities. I think that would bring cost savings and get some redundancies out. I think we should have a service authority that handles Staunton and Waynesboro. We’ve got triplication there. We’re so intermixed now that we buy water from Staunton, and we sell sewage services to them. It’s very confusing to developers, and it ends up costing them.

“I’m going to be pushing the regional EOC thing. The budget problems are going to drive people who are not receptive to change - it will drive people who have to look at things differently to think differently. We can use this budget crunch that Waynesboro has and Staunton has to say, Come on, guys, you turned your eyes from us two years ago, we need to get on with this thing and save the money.”

Staunton

Dave Metz, Vice Mayor

Q: What will Staunton look like in 2025?

A: “My vision that I see most of all for the area is the fact that we’re seeing an exodus from the major cities. Quality of life is so important. And I think with this area being in such proximity to Washington and New York, I think you’re going to see people who are saying that they need to get out of a more hectic life and into more quality of life coming here.
“The real question that comes up to us is, Can we provide, in a competitive nature, can we provide the quality of life that people are looking for? Can we provide the arts? It’s so critical that we are able to attract people, because when people get to be my own age, my primary concern is not my tax rate, it’s, What can I do in my spare time to enjoy retirement? And virtually every community outside the major areas is going to be competing against each other in terms of, How do you attract the baby boomers when they retire? And not just in terms of the initial, but in chapter four, when they’re in a nursing home, and they need skilled care?
“What I see as the major question is, How do we compete against other places to provide that quality of life? We have to recognize that the arts and theater and health care and schools are important. We have to have kids around. We need to hear the sound of playgrounds. And we need to attract high-tech jobs. And you can’t attract high-tech jobs if you don’t have kids.”

Q: How will the region develop in the intervening 17 years?

A: “I see the corridor between Staunton and Waynesboro as being a vital economic engine. Because of the proximity of the hospital down there. We’re going to have to realize that that’s going to require urban services. People are not going to accept a 58-cent tax rate and expect a 30-minute response from the police or fire department. That’s impossible in today’s environment. There’s going to have to be a way for us to share revenue and share expenses to provide for these heavily urban areas that are going to need a higher level of services.

“The county is truly, in my opinion, a suburban county already. It’s preposterous to think that Augusta County thinks of itself as a sleepy little county. I used to do a lot of tents in Augusta County. I use to drive out in the middle of nowhere and put up these tents. And I’d come back years later to do an event somewhere in that area, and I’d say, Where are all of these houses coming from? The county is going to have to take a really hard-nosed look at their comprehensive plan, and where they say agriculture, they have to mean agriculture, and we’re not even going to think about rezoning for housing or industrial. Instead of just this willy-nilly, Well, maybe this would be alright if it was industrial. You have to look at the big picture sometimes and say, We want to force development in this area, because then we can provide the services for it.

“Too many times, Augusta County is looking at the obsession with the 58-cent tax rate, and that translates to disparities with the cities, because the cities are providing higher levels of services.”

Waynesboro

Lorie Smith, Ward D Representative, Waynesboro City Council

Q: What will Waynesboro look like in 2025?

“A vibrant city. One that is absolutely nurtured from the East End to the West End of town. One that is comprehensive in nature in terms of development. Taking advantage of our river, taking advantage of the Blue Ridge Parkway. And also making sure that we’re nurturing the commercial and industrial sector of our community. I just see a well-rounded community that’s well-supported, has a healthy tax base and a bright future.”

Q: What will the city economy look like in 2025?

A: “We are struggling competitively to put the right deals on the table. And we know that we’re competing with foreign countries for industrial growth. Some of the industry that we currently have, there’s competition for their outsourcing. So we know that we’re competing already here in Waynesboro. What we need to do, in my opinion, moving out 10 to 20 years, and that work has to start right now, is looking at how we can broaden that base, looking at light-industrial-based businesses, technology-oriented businesses, businesses that we view are going to have some long-term sustainability in our culture and our environment.

“Certainly Invista, I think that they are reaching a point that they’re struggling to be competitive with China and with other countries. We’ve got to understand, like we did five, 10 years, that when we have all of our eggs in the basket of DuPont years ago, that’s where the city went broke and basically relied on its tax base. So the broadening of our tax base with our retail and commercial sector has certainly enabled us to have a little bit more confidence moving forward that we are expanding our tax base. We have to be absolutely vigilant about trying to protect the base that we have, but understanding that it is a completely different environment.”

Q: Will South River and stormwater-related flooding be issues in Waynesboro in 2025?

A: “In 2025, I don’t think flooding is going to be on the radar screen for council in terms of things that we need to be doing. Hopefully by 2025 we’ll be doing preventive maintenance only. Obviously moving forward we need to be moving on the stormwater, which I have concerns about with the current program that we have. But understanding the nature of what we need to do downtown around the South River, there are certainly remedies that go along with our companion pieces to development, and we can achieve those things. It’s going to take strong political will. It’s going to take this community getting behind conceptually ideas that we need to address. And it’s going to take a lot of all these pieces coming together. Can we do it? Absolutely we can do it. But it is going to be a communitywide undertaking, where we’re going to have to rely on the very strong leadership of our city council, and we’re going to have to rely heavily on public-private partnerships. But flooding can be addressed.”

Filed under: 1-July 2008 Issue