Keep it moving forward

I have to admit to being a bit surprised to learn in the course of my research on our Top Story on local economic trends (“An in-depth look inside the local economy,” July 7) that Waynesboro has the region’s biggest economy.

It’s quite the reversal of fortune for the River City, which in 2000 had an economy barely two-thirds the size of the economies in Staunton and Augusta County.

The growth, to me, is the result of a series of wise policy moves by elected leaders and a now-ousted city-management team.

It was a bipartisan City Council that tapped the untapped resource that was our Lew Dewitt-Rosser corridor in the early part of the 2000s decade and transformed a quiet interstate interchange into the center of economic activity for the Waynesboro-Crozet-Stuarts Draft triad.

That same bipartisan spirit was a key foundation for the effort that brought the Town Center to Waynesboro. I remember interviewing Jim Bailey, who represented the Beverley Manor District on the Augusta County Board of Supervisors, upon his retirement from the Board in 2007. His answer to my rote question, “What was your biggest accomplishment/biggest disappointment in your time on the Board?,” was immediate. That the county wasn’t able to get what became the Town Center development one interstate exit up in Fishersville, he said.

Along a concurrent course, the city, for the first time in generations, took steps to begin paying on long-ignored infrastructure needs – our aging stormwater system, for instance, and plans were made to finally build the West End fire station that had been promised to residents of that part of town 25 years ago.

And we began making commitments to investments in quality of life – a library expansion, the Wayne Theatre.

The unfortunate turns at the polls in the last two city election cycles has swept out of office the progressives that were part of the bipartisan consensus toward moving forward and the city-management team that was helping keep the ship on the right path.

Hard as it will be to keep an eye on those responsible for making and administering city policy the next two years, we must do so. We simply cannot afford, literally, to take steps backward given the long run of forward momentum that we have working for us right now.