The BlueRidgeMuse has an article that pretty much sums up most of my own thoughts on the move of Christiansburg Lance Terpenny to Floyd. (See the Article) While there has been a great deal of fervor over the performance of Mr. Terpenny in the Town of Christiansburg, one particular item keeps getting masked by all of that smoke.
The Mayor and Town Council are ultimately responsible. Simply replacing the Town Manager will not accomplish anything unless you are very fortunate in finding a replacement willing to stand up to Town Council if they are wrong about something. “Simply Following Orders” should be the flag Mr. Terpenny is carrying around.
It is the role of the Mayor and Town Council to put someone in as Town Manager. Then, it is their role to monitor performance, give direction, and make changes as necessary. This requires that Mayor and Town Council learn a little bit about the processes involved.
If any Town Council hires someone to do a job and doesn’t know enough about the job itself to monitor job performance, then they have failed the public.
Personally, I imagine that Mr. Terpenny will do quite well in Floyd where you have a very different sort of base of elected officials. I just don’t see Floyd doing the hands off approach that the Town of Christiansburg government has done. Floyd officials are more likely to ask questions and expect answers. They may not try to ‘run the show’, but they will be asking questions and expecting answers.
The elected officials of the Town of Christiansburg seldom ask questions, and when they do, are far to quick to take answers such as “I think” or “I believe”. Is it Mr. Terpenny’s fault that this is not done? Absolutely not! With such vague responses, the Mayor should have followed up with asking for more details.
There are a few of the council members who do try to ask questions and push to get answers, if you watch the video recordings you will see a pattern of the majority of them simply ignoring the issues presented by the few.
While sitting in Council chambers on Tuesday evenings, I frequently get this vision of ostrich butts sticking straight up in the air. It is easy to get the feeling that many of those elected officials have an attitude of “just do what needs to be done and don’t bother me with details”.
Being a competent elected officials is not about delegating all authority to someone else. It is not about dressing up to look good and simply voting based upon recommendations or the voices of a few residents. I certainly do not expect them to make decisions based upon what I write here or what I say in Council Meetings. I just want them to do the job of leadership. Listen, learn, ask questions, and make the best possible decision that they can while asking for all of the information that they can get.
The Council should not sit back and make decisions based upon what developers, citizens, business owners, or anyone else say. They should be using the resources of the Town such as:
- the Planning Department (of course, that would require that the Council knows what questions to ask of the Planning Dept. or to have people in Planning who will voluntarily provide all relevant information),
- the Town Attorney (in my opinion, the Town Attorney should be an active participant in discussion, providing Council with information that is needed to make decisions including relative State and Town Codes),
- the Finance Officer as to the current financial status of the town and projected revenues before investing money in a project)
- the Police Chief for current traffic and crime stats and projections based upon proposed projects
- The Fire and Rescue Chiefs for information concerning access to areas where development is to occur and response times.
It is likely that some of the Council members may have information from those individuals but does it ever get to the rest of the Council or become accessible to the public? No.
For example, much of this type of information would be useful at the Planning Commission stage of things. Recent discussions concerned sidewalks and walking trails in developments. Where is the input concerning crime rates? I did a bit of looking around and it appears that sidewalks tend to decrease crime while trails going through people’s backyards tend to increase crime. Although I did not look around long enough to come up with anything definitive, isn’t it worth the time to look? Was there ever any consideration given to those features? What about emergency access to someone should an accident occur on a trail?
Listen to some of the Planning Commission Meetings and you will hear a lot of phrases that indicate that a particular Planning Commission member does not like something, but they are not appointed to represent their values and beliefs. They are appointed to look at the impact of decisions on the whole of the Town. The Planning Commission should be comprised of a variety of people, representing the variety of citizens. Adding more members would allow for younger voices to be heard, to include more variety in race, sex, education, and socio-economic status.
