I can be a media guy, I can be a politics guy, but I can’t be both

I’ve been straddling a line the past couple of years, dating back to my decision to run for a seat on City Council in 2008.

By day, and honestly, by evening and overnight, I run a media, marketing and design business. On my loose hours in between, I’ve been a largely ineffective political activist, falling well short in my run for City Council and failing to get even a sniff in my bids to win appointments to city boards and commissions of interest, notably the Economic Development Authority.

Stubbornly, I’ve maintained efforts in the activism arena, assuming that my 15 years of toil in local journalism covering the goings-on in City Hall, state government and Congress could maybe be of benefit to my hometown.

A conversation with a friend has me thinking differently to that end. The gist was to reinforce something that had been part of a whisper campaign against me during my run for City Council in ’08. That I somehow have a “conflict of interest” issue in running a media, marketing and design business that, say, a person interested in public service who runs a food business wouldn’t have, or a person who is an insurance agent wouldn’t have.

The way I understood the argument against me two years ago, and which is circulating again today, it would be assumed that my first inclination upon coming across something juicy in a meeting or otherwise conducting public business would be to run back to my computer and share what I’ve learned with the world at large. I never hear what I think could be another argument against me, that I might run up support for whatever my position might be on an issue of the day by using my well-read news website and print magazine and other nefarious means to influence the general population, but, well, now that I’ve put it out there for thought, you can use that one against me, too.

I could argue that I’ve served on the board of directors of the local United Way for the past two years, and yes, we’ve had some controversy there, and no, you haven’t read any of the gory details on AugustaFreePress.com or in the award-winning New Dominion Magazine, but I’ve come to realize something. There’s no point in me arguing. I come from the Southern school of politics that has it that if you’re explaining, you’re losing, so I’m done explaining.

I think I’m well-qualified to serve on any city board or commission and down the road on City Council. I have a degree in American government from the University of Virginia. I’ve spent the bulk of my professional time the past 15 years learning about and trying to make sense of local, state and federal governments on the front lines of journalism. The past eight years have had me learning the finer points of starting and running a moderately successful small business and weathering the harshest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

And more to the point, I care, and I want to roll up my sleeves and be a part of a wider effort aimed at getting our city moving forward. I have a good feel, I think, for what our problems are, specifically here in Waynesboro. A high number of kids in our city school system qualify for free and reduced lunches. Unemployment is uncomfortably high as we continue to struggle with the transition from a manufacturing-based economy to one that is more and more largely retail and commercial in nature today. We’re going to struggle to be able to pay the bills for the foreseeable future all the while putting more and more pressure on our tax base just to be able to keep up.

I have some ideas for how we can approach that. First we need to shore up our retail and commercial sectors by investing in our road network out on the Lew Dewitt-Rosser corridor and by investing in our downtown core so that we can build a cultural economy that can serve as the basis for a wider-scale economic-development effort. That wider-scale economic-development effort involves acting recruiting and facilitating the location of high-tech industry in our industrial park and in the developable land that we have at Exit 96 off Interstate 64 just 22 miles from the University of Virginia.

I get tired of hearing from the consultants that we have trot in here every couple of years who tell us that Waynesboro can’t be what it was in the past, that we need to let go of the past. Waynesboro was once the economic jewel of Western Virginia, and if we set our goals toward being that again, then that is what we will be. We were the manufacturing capital of the Shenandoah Valley for much of the 20th century, and we can be the technology capital of the Valley in the 21st.

I’ll get off my soapbox now. It’s been made abundantly clear to me that the perception is there that I can be the media, marketing and design business owner, or I can be the guy who beats his head up against a brick wall playing politics, but I can’t be both.

This one isn’t hard. As hard as the economy was to slog through in 2009, in particular, it still beats losing City Council elections in a landslide.

Now, to holding the feet of those in City Hall to the fire, to comforting the afflicted, to afflicting the comfortable, to speaking truth to power, and the rest.