Lofton Lake raises political questions

Amid the tempest over Doug Walker’s looming departure from City Hall emerge bedfellows and politics strangely familiar and curiosity freshly stirred.
The council majority in waiting attempted a quiet separation from Walker, the city manager since 2003 and a subtle foil of the conservative bloc for much of the time since. Those hopes were dashed shortly after Councilman Tim Williams offered Walker two singularly unappealing options in the wake of the May 6 election – quit or be fired. The administrator chose the former and sparked a storm.
Walker and Councilman Frank Lucente, the leader of the council’s conservative wing, have declined to elaborate on the affair, but the sentiment driving it is commonly known. Lucente considers Walker an ally of the conservative bloc’s council foes, Vice Mayor Nancy Dowdy and Councilwoman Lorie Smith along with Mayor Tom Reynolds, whose tenure ends with Walker’s on June 30. City managers frequently are sent to the exile of the want-ads by perceptions, whether steeped in fact or fiction.
The air in which such officials operate is infused with politics. Part of their task, and it can be a daunting one, is to avoid inhaling the stuff. When administrators fail in this, they take vocational risks, which frequently follow with the payoff of post-election visits from newly empowered political decision makers.
Whether Walker ventured from the bureaucratic realm into that of politics is unknown beyond City Hall’s walls, and perhaps even to Walker himself. Nonetheless, the vague form of an allegiance may take definition in a report today by The News Virginian’s Jimmy LaRoue.
Walker is one of a dozen partners who own a 220-acre slice of Augusta County lakefront property and buildings valued at $1 million under the auspices of a limited liability corporation known as Lofton Lake. The place is a retreat for some of the city’s more prominent figures, including Wayne Theatre Alliance chairman and developer Bill Hausrath, who said he showed Walker the site several years ago and helped facilitate the administrator’s entry into the partnership.
Close followers of local politics recognize significance in Hausrath. So too do those involved in the business of area real estate. Hausrath is a successful agent with Montague Miller & Co., a powerhouse land firm based in Charlottesville. He also is a political power player who managed Smith’s campaign two years ago and contributed money and support this year to the candidacies of Chris Graham and Jeremy Taylor, the chosen opponents to Lucente’s conservative bloc.
Relentless politicking has been a central element in Hausrath’s controversial effort to renovate the Wayne Theatre with the aid of taxpayer money. He has secured $300,000 from the city and a matching $300,000 in federal money and has acquired performance agreements stipulating that the city provide an additional $700,000 over the next decade. All of this met virulent opposition from Lucente and Williams.
In his ordinary duties as city manager and at the council majority’s behest, Walker administrated the city’s funneling of money to the Wayne. So what does it mean that he and 10 others are part of a land partnership with Hausrath? Quite possibly nothing. On its face, there is nothing remotely untoward in Walker’s part in Lofton Lake. Walker’s personal business by right is his own so long as it does not conflict with the city’s.
Nor does Lofton Lake necessarily mean that Walker fell under the political sway of Hausrath. Walker declined to talk about it, but Hasrauth described the relationship as purely business. But questions over politics are intriguing. Few people in Waynesboro are more active in turning the city’s political screws than Hausrath. That is in accordance with his right, but for political appointees subject to removal on majority whim, even the most innocent of connections pose hazards.
If a coincidental link to Hausrath was among the undercurrents that heaved Walker out of City Hall, it’s regrettable. An administrator ought to be able to do business with whom he pleases, so long as he abides the bounds of ethics and the law, and there is no indication Walker did otherwise. Legalities aside, if the Lofton Lake partnership is an indicator of an allegiance with real rather than perceived political implications, Walker would prove to be the maker of the bed in which he lies.