"City of Schools and Churches" - About Staunton with Mayor Claffey

What are the councilmembers actually doing in the council chambers just opposite the Eastham Center? What are the major issues facing the Queen City? And where do you go if you want to contribute to Staunton’s development? The Stuart Hall Spectator team decided to schedule an interview with the Mayor of Staunton, Stephen W. Claffey, to find out more about the local government. 

Upon entering council chambers on a March morning, Mayor Claffey greeted us with a wide smile, setting the tone for a friendly talk about all things Staunton. That’s one of his roles as mayor, though, “strictly a figurehead,” as he puts it— representing the council and handling its official business, like meetings or this interview. The mayor is chosen by the council from among themselves after each election, which happens every two years, with three or four of the seven council members elected anew. At the end of the day, however, it’s neither the mayor, nor the council that handles day-to-day business. It’s up to “the permanent employees, the city manager, the attorney, and the other ones that are here every day,” as Mayor Claffey put it. This is also why the council is elected on a staggered system, to avoid the prospect of “an all-rookie staff that wouldn’t know what’s going on.” Basically, the members of council are there “as the representatives of the electorate to give direction.”

Still, the council has work to do. The new body elected in November finished a two-day so-called “retreat” at Woodrow Wilson’s birthplace to find a common denominator regarding the main questions of the city. After they did so, they turned to the city manager with their plans, who is preparing a budget accordingly. Getting to the final version is a lot of work nonetheless: “We meet twice a month, on the second and fourth Thursdays. In April, we will meet four times, every single Thursday, to have a budget session,” detailed the Mayor, along with his main goal to bring the property tax rate down from 92¢/100$ to around 85¢, as property values went up by 29% from last year as per the assessment this January. He warned that “this doesn’t mean that the tax bill will go down, it will go up, but your tax rate will go down.” If anyone is curious about the details and the debates, the council meetings are public, and records are kept. 

The only exceptions, for which closed meetings are required, are personnel and real estate matters, the former in cases like interviews for commissions, the latter to prevent speculation at the expense of taxpayer dollars. A propos commissions, Staunton has 25 of them, ranging from sewers to the library, and every member of the public is encouraged to serve on these in their area of expertise. The Mayor was particularly proud of the library: “We are a city of 25-26,000 and we have 20,000 library cards in circulation. It’s phenomenal.” The Library Commission also happens to be the number one requested among applicants.

So the library is doing good, but then what are the issues facing the city? Well, the water supply, for example. “The water system they put in a hundred years ago allowed Staunton to grow and was one of the keys to the city,” the Mayor began, “and it’s worked forever but we need to sink some money into it and get it back up to the 21st century.” However, there is hope on the horizon. “After the COVID crisis, the federal government released a lot of money to cities and localities in a thing called ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funds. If we didn’t have this ARPA money, it would have been the local taxpayers’ money. This is one of the reasons why we had to put things like this off for so many years. Now that we have this money, we can take that and put it into infrastructure needs,” Mr. Claffey explained.

Besides the water system, there are other uses to ARPA for the city. “We are restocking the fire department; we have vehicles that are over 20 years old. A truck costs a million dollars and it went up almost 20% in the last two years.” Also, some pump station works and the renovation of the baseball field is included in the plans. So there is always something to put money into, with one important caveat. “When the ARPA money came out, [...] they actually put the stipulation in there not to use this money for personnel needs,” Mr. Claffey said. Just imagine you hire someone with that federal grant and then you can’t hire them the next year because the money has run out. This would essentially mean cutting services, and losing support from citizens as a result, which no elected official would want. Therefore, ARPA is specifically intended for one-time infrastructural expenses, such as the ones mentioned above.

Of course, as a school paper, we couldn’t leave education unaddressed. In fact, it turned out to be a rather different beast than many other affairs. The school system is not managed by the council; there is instead a separate, elected school board that oversees that area and there is a special arrangement between the city and the school board. “The City of Staunton provides the school system a set amount of money and then as more tax dollars come in, we share the revenue,” as Mayor Claffey explained. This is to encourage continuity of staff, although the school board also regularly receives a substantial sum from the state board of education.

There is more to Staunton than its public schools though, as we all – perhaps too well – know. Mr. Claffey, for one, painted a pragmatic picture of Stuart Hall’s and Mary Baldwin’s relation with the city. “I’ve often heard Staunton described as a city full of schools and churches [as for the churches, definitely true! I can count seven just by looking from different parts of the campus – S. R.], and realize that none of these produce a dollar of taxes. This puts an even higher dependence on real estate and the residences in terms of budgeting.” Since STU and MBU are private entities, they also don’t have a whole lot to do with the city government in terms of official business, as they are independent of its control.

So what would he like to see more of, other than schools and churches? “More high-paying industry” is his answer, understandably. There are dangers to that pathway however, as shown by Waynesboro. “Waynesboro had DuPont [giant American multinational chemical company - S. R.], and DuPont dominated Waynesboro. They struggled mightily when DuPont went out: they were basically a one-horse town, with one thing fueling everything. They’ve done an interesting job at recovering: they’ve gone away from DuPont and they’ve gone into retail.”  Staunton, for one, doesn’t have much retail, either. The Staunton Mall that was torn down was not actually in Staunton. When Staunton annexed part of Augusta County, the county persevered in keeping the mall for themselves. “At that point, the mall deteriorated, and I’m glad it’s their problem, not ours,” commented the mayor in his characteristically pragmatic fashion.

What about the future, then? “We want to make sure to leave Staunton in a better place than we received it, that’s my simple answer.” However, you need people for that, and keeping them here is no simple task, as the Mayor readily admits, mentioning the example of the “Hillbilly Highway” from West Virginia. This is a figurative term used to describe the exodus of educated young people from the Appalachians to more industrialized regions of the North and South. Yet there are plans. “We are trying to get higher-paying jobs here,” Mayor Claffey maintained. “The medical field continues to pay well with MBU’s Murphy Deming campus inside the hospital. We have a zone on the east side of Staunton, which is 275 acres of development, and we are desperately trying to attract better paying jobs there, too.” Good news for internationals as well, if Staunton has taken their fancy: “We’re open to all,” the Mayor said, “as a city, we don’t discriminate. If anything, if people do come from overseas, they actually bring fresh funds to the valley.” After all, if we look to history, that’s part of how it all started for Staunton and the Shenandoah region.

Overall, it was a very pleasant and unique experience to talk with the Mayor for 50 minutes, even though he insisted he is only one of the seven members of council. Politicians are people, after all – and if we trust Mr. Claffey’s financial acumen, Staunton is in good hands for the next two years.