The Koch-Waynesboro connection

The recent New Yorker story on the Koch brothers has folks in Waynesboro musing aloud about the influence of the libertarian scions on the political scene in the River City, where the biggest employer, Invista, is a subsidiary of the privately-held Koch Industries.

At first glance, it’s … interesting … to note a couple of pretty obvious things.

One, the new mayor, Frank Lucente, is an avowed libertarian. I’ve scoured Lucente’s campaign-finance reports from two years ago, and those of his compatriots on City Council, and have found nothing tying Koch or Invista to the Fab Five monetarily.

There is the odd instance of the labor union that represents workers at the plant, the International Brotherhood of DuPont Workers, involving itself in the 2008 City Council elections on behalf of Lucente and running mates Bruce Allen and Tim Williams.

News accounts of the endorsements noted that it was the first time the union had endorsed candidates in a City Council race in its history. And then there was the stated reason for the endorsements, according to the news accounts – concern over a proposed stormwater utility fee.

The New Yorker piece detailed the Koch brothers’ longstanding distaste for anything smacking of environmental regulations impacting their businesses. One has to wonder if there wasn’t some connection there.

Keep in mind that the proposed fee structure never came about. Lucente, Allen and Williams swept to victory in ’08, and the city has moved ahead with, ahem, what you have to be charitable to call improvements to its stormwater system at a bit of a slower pace than had been contemplated prior to the 2008 city elections.

I connected with the head of the union, Jim Flickinger, and we set up a couple of different times to talk on this topic, but as of yet have not been able to get together for me to address the question about the ’08 endorsements and whatever encouragement may have come from the company.

If I had to guess, I’d guess that it wouldn’t have taken any overt encouragement to get the union to come into line on the stormwater issue – just as we’ve seen elsewhere on the local politics scene. Remember, the vote to block the utility-fee structure was bipartisan, back when Waynesboro politics still were bipartisan, and the libertarian Lucente was in the minority politically.

I’d also venture to offer that the ascendance of Lucente more generally has little to do with any influence from the Koch philosophy other than the coincidence that Lucente and the Koch brothers happen to all be dyed-in-the-wool libertarians. The Lucente-led Era of Good Feelings for the local libertarian set is the result of the efforts of a successful local political machine that predates Koch’s presence in Waynesboro and has long controlled the city political scene.

We only now pay closer attention to the machine’s recent successes because local progressives have been able in recent years to form a nascent local political force that was able to win some elections in the 2000s and in the course of so doing provide a forward-thinking alternative for voters.

Still speculating here – I can’t imagine that the Kochs ever think of Waynesboro beyond whatever level of attention the Waynesboro plant needs to have from them. And nobody that I talk to, on either side of the local political divide, sees much of a long-term future for Invista in Waynesboro, as we’ve seen evidenced by the steady stream of job cuts at the plant on the other side of the South River.

The departure, seen as inevitable by quite a few, of Invista does not, to me, mark the end of the libertarian-versus-progressive struggle for control of the direction of the city – far from it. The discord over issues currently in the headlines – the efficacy of economic-development efforts, the future direction of downtown – only becomes more pronounced, in my view.

It would be convenient to try to tie this up into a nice bow and say it’s all the Kochs, and once they’re gone, those of us who have ideas about moving our city forward that involve actively addressing economic-development and infrastructure-improvement initiatives will finally be able to get things moving in the right direction.

If only it could be that easy.

Related posts:

1. Waynesboro: No I in team
2. What if … Waynesboro had another newspaper?
3. Waynesboro’s loss, Shenandoah County’s gain
4. Waynesboro nonsense
5. Gotta Change moments