A great community needs great leaders
By Christian Trejbal
When presidents deliver their state of the union addresses, they often declare something along the lines of, “The state of our union is strong.” President Obama went with “stronger” this year.
I’m no president, but for the last few years, the Montgomery County Chamber of Commerce’s Leadership New River Valley class has asked me to deliver my own version of the state of the community. I did so on Thursday, and the state of the community is meh.
Trejbal is a Roanoke Times editorial writer. Follow him on Twitter at @ctrejbal.
February 24, 2013 - 7:36 AM
Things will never get better in Montgomery County until the “Blacksburg gets everything” whine goes away. That won’t happen any time soon, as long as elected officials help perpetrate the myth. It is telling when a member of the board of supervisors stands up in an early budget session (last fall, an info and idea-gathering meeting at C’burg High), says he is not speaking as a supervisor, then talks about “rich” Blacksburg and “poor” Shawsville. Missing from the diatribe (because it would shoot holes in his rail) is the fact that below-capacity Eastern Montgomery High is the newest high school in the county. Missing is the fact that Eastern Montgomery Elementary is the second newest elementary school (right behind Prices Fork). Those schools were built with tax dollars from Shawsville, Elliston, Riner, and Christiansburg and Blacksburg. But the fact that property owners in the town limits are subsidizing county services that they don’t use (trash collection stations, the sheriff’s department, etc.) seems to be lost of those who just want to think “Blacksburg gets everything.”
Also telling was a discussion in a school board meeting last spring. The field trip line item in the budget was proposed to be cut, until it was pointed out that that category included the money needed to transport sports teams to away games. Why wasn’t that information made clear to board members? Perhaps because the board members aren’t all that good at their jobs and didn’t demand lots of budget details. Perhaps it is a failure of the paid leadership of the school system, who didn’t provide the full picture to the board.
Perhaps whatever training session that prompted this column contains some people who are more interested in the county as a whole than their own little corner. Perhaps they will demand that the current leaders produce or step aside so they can take their place. We can only hope that change comes soon.