At Wednesday night's Augusta County Board of Supervisors meeting, an issue that had caused some fireworks at the work session two days earlier came up for a vote ... the county's hiring of a consultant to study how to attract businesses to the county to the tune of $147,000.While Pastures Supervisor Tracy Pyles was pushing the idea, Middle River Supervisor Gerald Garber questioned the wisdom of using taxpayer money on a study and called Pyles on it during the work session. At the time it appeared Chairman David Beyeler was also against it.
Why, then, did the proposal to hire a consultant pass 6-0 (North River Supervisor Larry Howdyshell was absent) at Wednesday's meeting?
Mr. Pyles, irritated that he had been questioned on his recommendation, went on a long tirade about how he had been tapped last year by then-Chairman Nancy Sorrells to investigate this matter, how much time it had taken including a vacation day from work, and then he stacked the booklets of information on the desk top that he and Wendell Coleman had read to educate themselves in the process of reaching the final results.
The consultant's job is to study how to attract and retain industries to the area. Here's a clue: Don't drive away a five-star business like Toyota.
Augusta County had the rare -- rare -- opportunity to see a top-notch industry like Toyota come to the county and it was shot down by loose-lipped supervisors who leaked the news to the media, and a group of citizens who lived at the opposite end of the county who pulled out dozens and dozens of people at every BOS meeting to talk endlessly -- often the same people every meeting -- about their opposition to such an industry. That industry would have provided jobs in the midst of an aging Augusta County population ... white and blue collar jobs that would have offered the opportunity for our youth to find great-paying jobs and stay close to home at a time when many are leaving the area to work.
After spending almost half-a-million dollars on consultants studying that business possibility only to see it rejected (as the anti-Toyota activists hyped it as the "megasite"), now the county is spending another $147,000 studying how to attract business.
What is wrong with this picture?
Today's Waynesboro News Virginian has an editorial about this in today's paper that also questions the expenditure. It concludes:
Pastures Supervisor Tracy Pyles, the idea’s leading proponent, cites the mostly desolate Mill Place Commerce Park as cause for a consultant’s further review. Taxpayers’ wallets will be as empty as the industrial park if supervisors continue throwing money at consultants.
Middle River Supervisor Gerald Garber initially resisted hiring Moran, Stahl & Boyer but eventually climbed aboard, voting with his fingers clasped to his nostrils. Garber worried that the consultants would produce a mostly redundant document, providing the county with little new information and using staffers’ time to help do the work. He favored simply hiring an economic development director, something the study might well recommend anyway.
Even as he sided with Pyles, Garber said, “I still have a great disdain for studies.” Unfortunately, the sentiment is not shared. The county has plunged plenty of taxpayer money into thick studies thin on results. The latest study appears bound only to replicate previous waste.
County supervisors should slam the brakes on runaway spending on consultants. The dividends do not appear to be worth taxpayers’ investment.
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