"... has been let go"

Between the Page News and Courier and the “LurayVa” blog (link below) I try to stay up-to-date with how things are going in the County. It just seems to me that Page County’s small community (the 2000 Census reports the County population as 23,177 – as compared to Alexandria City’s 2000 population of 128,283, for example) has taken the economic shock much harder than other places in Virginia. And that’s why I spend a lot of time researching the situation and writing about it here on the Hawksbill Cabin blog.


Although the County passed an increase on property taxes last year, there was still budget pressure this year. The Board of Supervisors have just gone through a round of reconciling the budget to a figure of about $58-million, but along the way faced some tough choices. Some of the controversial ones were the closing of Grove Hill Elementary School, stopping construction of a new cell at the landfill, and decisions on levels of funding for the Economic Development Authority.

Another significant decision was to retract the offer of the County’s CTO position to Dave McClure, who had been working as an IT consultant. The offer was made by the past county administrator Tom Cardman, without consultation to the BoS. Stopping the hiring action subsequently became a high priority.

There have been reports about layoffs of County personnel – and there has been a lot of discussion about the justifications of past and current decisions being made on this account. Sometimes the press and discussion seems to be arguing more about the people in these positions rather than about the need for these positions…I think this is a response to the arbitrary decision-making and lack of transparency of the past, something the current BoS seems to be correcting.

However, for two weeks running, over on LurayVa, there has been a post headlined “… has been let go” – it will be good to finally see us turn the corner on this difficult economy.

The LurayVa blog is at http://lurayva.wordpress.com/ . There is typically a good discussion associated with each post there.