Officials: Data showing holes in Waynesboro core will help fill gaps.

Among his ideological brethren, many of whom reside in this town, Frank Lucente’s rasp is coated with cordiality as a safeguard against giving offense and taking it in response to criticism. These contrasts in tones frequently are heard here from Waynesboro’s vice mayor in the aftermath of this space being occupied with an assessment of the city’s shortcomings. And so rise conundrums.

If you believe The News Virginian (“Time to do what works,” Nov. 8) and others, you would think that a successful downtown is all that is needed for Waynesboro to survive into the future. Wow. That seems easy enough. After all, there are a few empty buildings downtown and if they had small businesses in them, we would all prosper! New businesses like Ruth’s Renovations and the Wine Emporium are the latest additions to downtown, but they cannot survive without the patronage of the community.

Kimberly Watters gazes at PowerPoint images depicting her former city’s regeneration, and she is stirred to a kind of sunniness seen here with ecliptical irregularity, which is to say, not often. “It happened there,” Watters says, “it can happen here.”

Waynesboro’s ‘Wall of Shame’ continues to mar downtown as officials, merchants work to dissolve the decades-old barrier.

$1.5M sewer project will impact traffic

Through summer’s sleepy days, the Waynesboro City Council has been an island of languor in a sea of monotony. Blades of grass are more restive than most council officials. But ennui has lifted. Once-familiar acrimony has been roused over the absence of activity on the streets outside the stretch of West Main running between the Wayne Theatre and the aging building formerly known as the home of The News Virginian.

STAUNTON – Following impassioned pleas from downtown merchants to allow sandwich boards on city sidewalks as advertisement for businesses, the Staunton City Council agreed at its meeting Thursday to direct the Planning Commission to revisit the ordinance that currently prohibits them.

I see that tourism is doing quite well in Staunton. I commend them for all of the hard work, creative thinking, good leadership and vision and especially the drive to carry out their vision. I see tourists in Waynesboro also – but mainly to ask directions to Staunton.

Astronomers say that somewhere in the great beyond is a great void the breadth of which measures almost 1 billion light years and the existence of which scientific theory cannot explain. In another realm, in that strange place outside our door, there are voids which logic cannot explain. Politics, through which light seldom travels, perhaps provides answers, all of them cavernous and unsatisfying.

On any given day, Staunton’s downtown is teeming with people dining, shopping and taking in a play, but officials there say it was not an overnight success story.

Julie Markowitz, executive director of the Staunton Downtown Development Association, said the city has been fortunate to have preserved many of its historic buildings.

Excitement these days in Waynesboro is rare and fleeting, which perhaps explains the recent mild euphoria generated by piffle. This takes vague shape in the decision to purchase a $7,000 modular trailer to house the Rockfish Gap Tourist Information Center in a new home to open this summer atop Afton Mountain.

Waynesboro’s steep inclines expected to draw speed lovers