Category: Louisa Government

Board of Supervisors and other local offices

FY 2022 Budget Request for Outside Agencies

The Louisa budget for July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022 is being planned right now, in the winter and spring of 2021. Please look over this chart showing the fiscal year 2021 request, the FY 2022 request and the change. I’m sorry, you’ll have to rotate it.

You’ll find a much more complete document at FY 2022 Outside Agencies Requests. It would be fantastic of every one of us would look this over and share your thoughts about it. I will be sharing mine in blog posts soon. We have time to influence these numbers!

Louisa Budget Request FY2022 – Outside Agencies

Jim

 

Let local firm compete for fiber

I have fiber-optic cable to my home. I get continual high-speed broadband service. And, I live in Louisa County.

I didn’t get this wonderful service from the Louisa County Board of Supervisors. I got it from iWiSP. They approached my property owners’ association with an offer to provide fiber to the home to all our members for $75 a month at a minimum of 30 megabits per second, with no limits, caps or hidden costs.

iWiSP came to us years ago and provided the only wireless internet service on the Louisa side of Lake Anna. Wireless was not without its difficulties (disruption from lightning strikes, storms, leaves on trees, heavy use, etc.) but it was way better than dial-up modems or hot spots (since it was way cheaper). For the past eight years the Louisa County Broadband Authority has been trying to move more citizens into the broadband age, but with limited success.

Now iWiSP is working to complete fiber to the home in our community. Again, we are the first to get this much higher level of service. Another nearby association may piggyback off our services with no reduction of service level for us after it is completely installed.

Will the county be able to convince the electric utilities to offer this service with just $15 million “reserved” for this effort? Rappahannock Electric Cooperative forecasts it would cost $500 million (or more) to provide this to their 12,000 customers. Earlier this summer I listened in on a call with the chief executive officer of REC, who said at that time they had reservations about providing this service except as a carrier along existing routes. Getting to the home was not viewed as part of their strategy, since existing wiring cannot be used and additional fiber-optic cables must be installed from the street to the home.

So, why not get local businesses more involved? Why limit the partnership to just the electric company and the county government? iWiSP operates around Lake Anna. Why not include them in the planning for fiber to the home? I’m loving my fiber-optic internet service. Why shouldn’t more of Louisa County have the same opportunity?

Larry Zemke Mineral

[CV]

Business park plan is ‘sloppy and disingenuous’

I was unaware of the Aug. 17 presentation to the Louisa County Board of Supervisors by Timmons Group on the Shannon Hill Business Park study and was glad to read The Central Virginian’s report.

Timmons expressed great confidence that the kinds of buildings they propose for the property will be in high demand in an era of increased e-commerce. Are they not aware that abandoned malls and other failed commercial sites, already complete with infrastructure and utilities, are practically begging Amazon and others to repurpose their locations for their fulfillment and data centers?

And what about costs for us to provide the same?  Along with Andy Wade, Louisa County’s economic development director, what Timmons was selling on Aug. 17 is more of the same fantasy they have sold to our county through this whole expensive fiasco.

To start, if you place the building layout published in the CV from that meeting next to a topographic map of the property, it will reveal a good bit of fantasy. The single largest building, labeled Logistics and Distribution, located far from the park entrance, is directly on top of the steepest slopes of the property, with elevation changes of at least 25 feet throughout. What will it cost to get that site flat enough for a million-square-foot building plus parking on narrow ridge terrain? The rest is not better. You wonder about the costs of working through the state Department of Environmental Quality for the dozens of large culverts and maybe a bridge or two needed to span the 25-foot-deep creek bottoms for tractor trailers.

Timmons says Louisa needs to spend $18 million to bring water from Ferncliff to a new “elevated” water tower. Water to be supplied by a source with as yet no location, no budget and no permit. The design cost for the water tower is more than a third of the total cost of Timmons’ current contract. It is nearly three times the total amount budgeted for “master planning.”

To my knowledge there has been zero outreach to the public in the development of these plans. The original contract called for two “stakeholders’ meetings.” The first included only one Louisa County person. A second was set well before the COVID-19 crisis but was canceled without notice or explanation. In the contract, Timmons was to “share results of preliminary master planning” and begin the preliminary engineering report which would be the guide for at least three alternative master plans.

Timmons has proposed only one “final master plan” as outlined on Aug. 17. No preliminary engineering report or any other report has been published, much less reviewed, by the public.

Is this because what Timmons persuaded the county to buy will be enormously expensive to develop? Under the contract, Timmons must provide “likely” professional “cost considerations” to build any project they design. The huge extent of those likely costs would have been evident to anyone who has seen the property. The contract says that the County, not Timmons, was responsible for convening and running the scheduled stakeholder meetings. They bailed.

This is not responsible leadership. It is not careful stewardship of our money, resources and credit. No one, certainly not Timmons, should be paid for work this sloppy and disingenuous.

Surely, we can do better.

William Hale

Louisa

[CV] Hale Business Park Letter

What’s that sound?

So why did the Board of Supervisors call for special meeting earlier this week with less than 24 hours notice? Was there some reason it couldn’t have waited until their regular July 6th meeting?

Was it really to “discuss broadband services in Louisa County with Rappahannock Electrical Cooperative?” Since their own minutes, show the county had yet to respond to several letters REC sent to the county asking for a timely response to several questions, which as far as I can tell were never answered.

What happened was not a simple disagreement between the county and service provider, it’s was a situation where “there’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.” What is clear is that people are rejecting the board’s ideas.

They are tired of a government that is only interested in being the enforcers of crony capitalism. Where the inequality, and lack of opportunity we see today, is all about sustaining the structures of power. A situation not unlike the root causes behind the Black Lives Matters protests. And like BLM, the people of this county have lost faith in a government that doesn’t promote the common good.

The key to any successful social change is to discredit the ideas used to prop up the ruling class with alternative ideas and language. Once the old vocabulary looses it’s currency, the power elite are finished. Opening the way for voters to dismiss their minions and demand a government independent of, and not subservient to corporate power.

Of course people are free to think like Dan Braswell and dismiss these words as “inappropriate” and “delete them” from their minds, or they could say “It’s time we stop, Hey what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.”

Jon Taylor

Originally published in the Central Virginian and published here with the permission of the author.

Water Board Should Be Replaced

To the editor:

I attended the James River Water Authority meeting last week. At the meeting in March in Louisa about 100 people came and 50 spoke against situating the water pumping station on top of Rassawek, the principal town of the Monacan Nation.

This project has been plagued with problems of mismanagement and has frittered away millions of our tax dollars. A pipeline was built before a permit for a pumping station was issued. Even a preschooler setting up her wooden train set knows that you must have a starting and ending point in order to determine the route in between

The archaeological consultant hired was found by the state to be unqualified to make recommendations after a whistleblower filed a complaint in October 2019 about destroying artifacts. I wonder when we will be reimbursed for the fees paid to that firm.

At the March meeting the JRWA board heard from local people, experts at Preservation Virginia and the Southern Environmental Law Center and, most important of all, the Monacan nation, the largest tribal community in the Commonwealth. All unanimously supported stopping the plan to destroy their historic capital of Rassawek and instead to choose any of several alternatives.

Then the Army Corps of Engineers invited public comments on the matter. Over 12,000 individuals and groups commented against the destruction of Rassawek. I went to the June meeting to ask the board how it feels to have 12,000 people unanimously tell you that you are wrong. I bet it feels pretty bad, and it should. The meeting was held in Fluvanna and despite being in the middle of a pandemic, no virtual option was offered. Only three people spoke and all opposed obliteration of sacred Monacan burials.

I was appalled when the attorney for the JRWA, Justin Curtis, admonished citizens for daring to exercise their First Amendment rights and criticize the record of the board. Our tax dollars are paying him to deride myself and others for braving the health risks of a pandemic to remind the board of what at least 12,050 people have already said to them. Mr. Curtis stands to gain financially no matter the course of this project, as he continues to bill us for his time. He accused citizens of being against development and the water pipeline, when that is not true. The way forward is simple: Build the pumping station in an alternate location. It will cost more now, but that is the fault of the board. If they had done it right, they would not be in a bad spot now. Still the board voted to continue on the same destructive path.

The JRWA has not been a good steward of the taxpayers’ money. They have not demonstrated empathy or respect for others’ cultural heritage. It is literally the very least we can do, literally to do nothing, to not disturb Rassawek. This board does not represent me. It does not represent Louisa or Fluvanna counties. According to the 2018 U.S. Census, both counties are composed of over 50 percent women, yet there is no woman on the board. Where are the women? For reasons stated above, I ask that each member of the JRWA board do one decent thing and resign, effective immediately. We will turn to our respective boards of supervisors and work with them to appoint a more representative, effective, and transparent JRWA board.

Aleta Strickland

Louisa

Originally published in the Central Virginian and published here with the permission of the author.