Allen signs in for duty

The man who changed the face of the City Council began guiding his pickup truck through Waynesboro at 6 a.m. Wednesday, retrieving the signs of his success.
Supporters such as Tom Reider rode with Bruce Allen in the councilman-elect’s well-worn red Sierra GMC, dents in its side, stopping numerous times, picking up the “Allen for Council” signs, also tossing in those advertising council ally Frank Lucente.
Allen, 55, joked that Lucente – seven years his senior – was getting too old to be picking up his own signs.
Those two, along with Councilman Tim Williams spent late Tuesday celebrating after a landslide election victories. Allen and Lucente hauled in more than 61 percent of the vote in a pair of three-way races. Williams ran unopposed.
Their wins gave the fiscal conservatives majority control of the council. Mayor Tom Reynolds, whom Allen will replace, teams with Vice Mayor Nancy Dowdy and Councilwoman Lorie Smith to form the current majority.
More than a dozen times Wednesday morning, Allen took calls from supporters offering their congratulations on his decisive win for the Ward B seat. At several of the stops, Allen chatted up supporters as well. Still basking a bit in last evening’s glow, Allen said he’s ready to get to work.
“I see us as going forward,” Allen said.
Allen talked fondly about his childhood growing up poor yet not thinking that way, his family making the best of what they had.
Stopping to pick up signs along East Main Street, Allen said he’s going to get experienced people to help him, and he pointed to nearby buildings praising two, soon-to-open businesses as examples of what he sees happening in the city’s future – people working hard, without expectations, being entrepreneurs.
Reider offered impromptu praise for Allen as a man who could relate to all types of people.
“One for the common man, baby,” Reider shouted in the warehouse to another supporter while unloading signs.
“The work starts now,” Allen said.
Responding to another ring on one of his two cell phones, Allen told a caller, “I look forward to getting some positive things done with the city.”
He continued making the rounds, more than 25 miles worth crisscrossing the city, fetching signs – his phone chirping along with the birds in the mid-morning, when it was still cool enough for older folks to do yard work – as some were.
Political battles to come already loomed in his mind.
As a city lifer, Allen said he knows the people here, and knows that in hard economic times, many who would never want – or be able – to go to the Wayne Theatre, would rather have the option of making private donations or helping out with restoration efforts.
Like Lucente and Williams, Allen disagreed with the council majority’s decision to invest $300,000 in tax money in the theater rehabilitation project. He supports the theater and has volunteered there, but he opposes pouring taxpayers’ money into refurbishing it.
Allen said he plans to honor current obligations to the Wayne – the city signed off on an incentive-laden agreement calling for another $700,000 for the theater. But if the city’s budget was tight, Allen strongly consider not giving it more money.
He stopped to talk to someone while out picking up signs, offering help to someone with health problems. It’s the type of thing that others who know Allen say he’s done quietly for years.
It’s his familiarity with the people in the city, Allen said, that he believes put him in office.
“I had one guy – one of the opponents was talking to him, and he said something about, ‘Well, you shouldn’t vote for him just for that reason,’” Allen said. “He said, ‘Ah, I wouldn’t vote for him just for that reason. I’m going to vote for him because I’ve known him all my life.’”
Calls from well-wishers poured in to Allen – even from supporters who are on vacations in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Mexico. Dowdy and Smith also called. So too did City Manager Doug Walker, to let Allen know there was now a box for him at the Yancey Building.
Allen was prepared Tuesday to make calls of his own from a post-election party at Reo Distribution. He was prepared to call opponents Chris Graham and Greg Bruno to concede.
At a warehouse off Race Avenue that serves as his office, Allen, who works for River Town LLC and Good Faith LLC, started Wednesday afternoon to catch up on work he had put off in the last two weeks of his campaign – billings, mailings, returning calls. The rest of the signs will wait – at least temporarily.
He pondered tough choices – council meetings fall on the same night as ones for the Fraternal Order of Police. He said he wouldn’t consider having the FOP meetings moved just for him. He also pondered the difficult choices to come once he steps onto the council.
Sitting in a creaking chair, as a freight elevator whirred nearby, Allen expressed his displeasure with post-election comments from his two opponents frustrated by the outcome.
“On the other hand,” Allen said, “that makes me that much more determined that at the end of the next four years, people are going to say, ‘Man, this council, look where they got us to,’ because in doing that, it’s going to show these people they didn’t know what they’re talking about.”
He hedges on that last part, then says he hopes – in two years, not four – to see progress in Waynesboro. That would be another sign of success for the man whose election win already has stirred the power balance in the city he’s called home for a lifetime.