Elkton: Can't we all just get along?

THIS POST WAS WRITTEN BY: D.F.E

I've been lurking on the Elkton election thread for a while now,
waiting for a voice of reason to emerge, but to my dismay, no one has
stepped up to offer a balanced explanation of what's going on in my
beloved home town. Despite that the rest of Rockingham thinks we can
wall off the town and have it declared an asylum, there are good
reasons for the election results and everything that lies behind them.
I want to outline what I think they are.

I also, and most of all, want to correct the record about Wayne Printz.

Much of what other people on this blog have been saying about Mr.
Printz I can shrug off as the rantings of sore losers, but I've learned
that a lie told often enough and left unchallenged takes on the varnish
of truth, if no one will expose it for what it is.

I've known Wayne Printz for many years, and for many years I've counted
him a friend. In all the time I have known him, from the years he
served on the town council, to his volunteer work in many capacities in
town, to his devoted mentoring of Lucky Sigafoose's son, I have known
him to be a thoroughly good man. Not a perfect man, but an extremely
good man. Every time I've read some nasty snide remark about Wayne, I
think of him putting together a 9/11 Memorial Service, or pitching in
to help in some project, or bringing flowers or food to a neighbor who
needed the cheering up. Good works aren't sexy, they don't get a lot
of attention, and they're easy to overlook, but they are real, and
anyone who has lived in Elkton for more than a year or two has
certainly run across Wayne in private life quietly doing something good
for somebody.

You might say, okay, so he does community service, so what? It's not
that he does community service, it's that community service is an
extension of the way he conducts his life. Anyone who knows Wayne
personally knows that he's genuine, honest, and works hard for the
public good. His heart is thoroughly in the right place. In his
previous years of public service, he's brought these ethics to
government, but recently they have been ignored in the firestorm that
has swirled around him.

It began, as it so often does, with inaccuate media coverage. When a
reporter under a time constraint gets only part of a story and runs
with it, when a reporter new to an area makes a bad impression on the
locals and the locals won't bother talking to him or her, that coverage
is going to be slanted. Since then, with the media guiding perception,
it's only gotten worse.

Two years ago, Elkton elected a divided, but balanced, council. Even
that election was a little underhanded, as some of the candidates
counseled their supporters not to vote for a full slate, but only for
one or two candidates. Thus, two councilmen, Mr. Snow and Mr. Workman,
were elected by slim margins in an election whose voting totals were
peculiarly skewed. It was legal but it was slick, and many Elktonians
weren't expecting that kind of strategy. To many of us, it didn't bode
well for the future.

Then Lucky Sigafoose passed away, and the council selected Mr.
McDaniel, who is also a good person, but who never ran for office,
never attended a council meeting before he was put in office, and whose
vision for Elkton was about as far removed from Lucky's as it's
possible to get. The result was a council that was weighted heavily
towards business interests. When Mr. McDaniel joined the council, Mr.
Dean, who works for Mr. McDaniel and who before had voted as an
independent, fell into line with Messrs. McDaniel and Snow, both of
whom envisioned the Kite property as a golf course and were willing to
do almost anything to make it happen. (I want to be very clear on
this: all of these people are decent. I know all these men, and I
believe they were doing what they thought was best for the town, their
opinions strengthened by the fact that it was also what they wanted to
see happen.)

Add to this a political town manager with ambitions of his own and a
developer offering that very thing that the new majority of councilmen
wanted so badly in exchange for more than doubling the town population,
something that resonates well with businessmen, and you have the mess
that is Elkton today.

At first, the council tried to run over the mayor with their votes and
the pressure of their majority status. When he wouldn't be run over
without putting up a fight, they castigated him in public, accusing him
of being power-hungry, reactionary, divisive, and the puppet of a vocal
minority of old ladies and fuddy-duddies. Talk about projecting your
own faults on your opposition! When Wayne tried to preserve the office
of mayor as he had received it, when he refused to let the office be
eviscerated, they branded him as power-hungry and accused him of trying
to pull an unprecedented power grab, when in truth, that was the very
thing they were trying to pull off with the town charter fiasco. If
the charter that was first submitted to the legislature in Richmond had
passed, this past election would not have been held, and the old
council would have remained in place for another two years, long enough
to have achieved its aims.

Now, some of those people who don't like the results of the May
election and don't like the composition of the new council, for example
on this blog, are blaming all the bad decisions the previous council
made on the mayor. They're blaming him for the town being so deep in
debt, but the fact is, the old council dug the hole so deep, and over
the mayor's objections. They say he's a lousy negotiator, but forget
the the council tied his hands, undercut his authority in public and
gave every indication they didn't care what they had to give away in
return for attracting growth, especially for attracting a golf course.
(You folks in Harrisonburg know something about this--it's one of
those, "how often do we have to say no?" kind of deals.) I think it's
entirely possible that the council willfully stuck us in a no-win
situation, so that, if they could not see the golf course development
through personally, they could justifiably say that getting out of the
deal is prohibitively expensive, which is the same thing that happened
with Harrisonburg's golf course and almost happened with Elkton's
near-disastrous Rockingham Street makeover.

On this blog both Mr. Corbo and "Jeff" have challenged Wayne's
assertion that he supported the town buying Miss Kite's property to be
nice and because she has selflessly given so much to the town. Well,
folks, it's true. It's the way things happen in Elkton, and anyone
who's lived here for any length of time will tell you so. For more
than a century, Elkton's been ignored and/or disrespected by the rest
of Rockingham. We've grown to like it that way. It's made us a tight,
self-sufficient community. We even enjoy our bad reputation--we say it
keeps the riffraff out.

The fact is, Elkton is not like anywhere else, and it doesn't want to
be like anywhere else. Now, I don't know whether the Angler deal is a
good one or a bad one. I don't know. No one does. I can tell you it
hasn't been sold to the public well, and most people know almost
nothing about it.

I can tell you what it sounded like to the average Elkton resident: it
sounded like Mr. Snow's voting bloc was getting ready to turn Elkton
into the next Manassas or Fairfax. And anyone who voted against their
interests was either ignorant, rednecked, or plain stupid. The people
in Elkton didn't want to be the next NoVa community, and they didn't
appreciate being treated so disrespectfully.

The fight in Elkton has gotten very personal and very mean. Throughout
the election and in the public forum the rhetoric has generated more
heat than light. I think a lot of it has gone unanswered because the
people who won are busy getting ready to guide the town out of the
disadvantageous mess that's been left to them. And it's a pity,
because it shows good people in a terrible light (and I know and
personally like all of the players in this drama,) and because I know
that words put out in public, over time take on a life of their own.
It goes down hard with me that so many good people have gotten into a
situation where others with extreme views, bad tempers or only part of
the story are making or breaking their reputations at large.

I believe that the old council was doing what it thought best, but it
forgot to consult the public. It believed its opposition was confined
to a vocal minority. The council members forgot who they were working
for. They didn't ask the public what it wanted. They assumed they
knew better. The Angler deal may be the best thing to come down our
way this century, but if the only thing the public hears about is a
golf course that almost nobody wants and if almost nobody trusts the
builder's intentions, it doesn't matter how good the deal is--the
public's wishes will rule.

This election was a definitive statement from Elkton. Here's what I
think it said: We like our town the way it is. We like our community.
We don't want our town to be like anyone else's. Maybe that's a
stretch, and maybe I'm misreading the situation, but I don't think so,
and here's why:

Folks from Elkton are, by and large, modest, hardworking people with
deep roots in the community and a strong sense of pride. The fourth
grade at Elkton Elementary sponsors an annual heritage day. Through
the whole year, the kids learn about Elkton's own history; they learn
about our culture, they learn who we are. Elkton is not the same as
the rest of Rockingham County; whether our isolation, or the long
experience of being the County's "bad side," or the absorption of
people from off the mountain when the Shenandoah National Park was
built, or for whatever other reason, we see ourselves as different. The
public is not opposed to the future, but in the last election, I think
they saw our sense of self being sold on the cheap, and they said no.

They also saw a council that wasn't listening to them and wasn't
respecting them, and so they elected new leaders to do the public's
work and look after the public trust. We all know each other. We all
work together. It wasn't personal--it was about the future of Elkton.
May the new council do its job well. It's time for those mean spirited
people whose interests don't accord with the majority to suck it up and
deal with the fact that they are in the minority, and to recognize that
good people can disagree on issues and remain civil. Every time you
accuse others of underhanded or unethical motives, you say much more
about yourself than you do about them.