After cuts, real work

The Grim Reaper’s blade has been dulled, but not before making some bloody cuts. Tax bills in Waynesboro almost certainly will go up, driven by the reassessment and a sharp factional splinter for which Vice Mayor Frank Lucente might be privately thankful. Lucente still is feared as the reaper, but a drawing of lines by the school board and the movement left of Mayor Tim Williams restrains the swinging of the scythe, for now.

Lucente, a maker of deals, apparently dealt himself into a corner on the subject of city money for schools. He brokered a deal several years ago to provide the district with 42.5 percent of city money from real estate, personal property and sales taxes and other discretionary money. The aim was to stabilize city money to the district and eliminate a point of intense debate. School officials bit.

But they refused to do so when Lucente proposed deferring to next year $600,000 in city money. That move would have allowed the city to reduce its tax rate to offset a reassessment increase that will drive tax bills higher, the kind of development Lucente vowed during last year’s council campaign to fight. So here comes Williams, a wandering lamb and perhaps a sacrificial one.

He opposes lowering the tax rate and cutting the budget further. Without the deferment, the city would be forced to slash an additional $558,000 on top of $1.4 million whacked away already from last year’s budget. Because both Williams and the school board have balked, Lucente and Councilman Bruce Allen, who remains solidly in the conservative faction’s camp, are free to vote for a reduced tax rate without confronting its implications. A minority has its privileges.

And an onus shifts. Councilwomen Nancy Dowdy and Lorie Smith, along with Williams, must confront the long lines of agencies spattered by red ink from proposed cuts and tell them whether those cuts will remain or be shifted to someone or something else, sparking an outcry in another corner, or, gulp, taxes will be raised further in an attempt at the impossible, satisfying everyone.

No one has suggested a rate increase, which leaves cuts as the only option. There is sure to be pain in this. Under the budget proposed by City Manager Mike Hamp, city money would be eliminated for Blue Ridge Legal Services, the Valley Alliance for Education, Valley Hope Counseling, the Boys and Girls Club, the Augusta Free Clinic, the Daily Living Center and New Directions. The Waynesboro Heritage Foundation and Waynesboro Downtown Development Inc. would face steep reductions.

Dowdy proposes folding WDDI into the Economic Development Authority, a move that makes sense to us. Lucente suggests tapping some of $155,000 in regional grant money to restore city money to nonprofits cut from the budget. That also makes sense. But no one on the council will be able to spare all from the hardship. Those who expect this expect too much.

So while Lucente wears the reaper’s garb he shares the role now with the other four council members and Hamp. Theirs is an unenviable task but a larger, more important one begs to be seized: rebuilding downtown Waynesboro and establishing a South River gateway into the city.

The problem today is lost tax revenue. The struggles the city has faced and yet faces in shrinking the budget cast a light on a better path. The best way to increase revenue is not by increasing taxes but by spurring economic growth. Once the budget has passed, quieting the invariable howling from the ostensibly slighted, the council needs to climb from the pit of funding minutiae, shed the reaper’s robes and get to work on a downtown makeover. Find out what that will require and present a plan to the people. It’s time.