Kennedy, newly put in as vice mayor, knew her city was dying. Like different locations in Appalachia, its coal-based financial system is gone, its tiny inhabitants getting older and declining. But that’s simply the beginning of Pound’s issues.
Last fall, most of Pound’s remaining enterprise house owners determined to cease paying taxes as a result of the city’s funds are in chaos. Every city worker give up or was fired. The cashier was convicted of embezzling from the general public account. When the police division disbanded, the native prosecutor dismissed all 31 pending prison circumstances as a result of proof was so mishandled.
Now Pound is actually dealing with a demise sentence. After a lot dysfunction, the General Assembly greater than 350 miles away in Richmond has taken the weird step of voting to revoke the city’s constitution over the objections of its residents.
The transfer has shocked native government advocates round Virginia. “The things that have gone wrong in Pound — those same risks exist for every town,” mentioned Steve Trivett, mayor of the city of Ashland in Hanover County. If the General Assembly can merely step in and make troublesome cities vanish, he mentioned, “this could set a precedent …[of] short-circuiting the citizens right out of it.”
State lawmakers insist Pound is a particular state of affairs — so profoundly troubled that there’s nearly nothing left to save lots of. But simply in case, they pledged to rethink the constitution — set to run out Nov. 1, 2023 — if the city reveals indicators of getting its act again collectively.
For Pound’s roughly 900 residents, that presents a dilemma: Take a stand, or let it go?
In a nationwide local weather of political division and lack of religion in establishments, Pound is just about a worst-case state of affairs of government gone mistaken. Yet it additionally reveals what’s at stake when public methods are actually, actually threatened. For some, that is house, and dealing to defend the frequent good is price slightly threat and sacrifice. So Kennedy, 55, and a handful of others have determined to take a crack at rebuilding the city government from scratch.
Several volunteers, moved by their plight, are pitching in to assist — akin to Andrea G. Erard, a lawyer who serves as legal professional for 5 cities across the state, together with Ashland.
On a latest Wednesday night time, Erard guided the council via a two-hour coaching session, by way of Zoom, on the fundamentals of city government. Then she referred to as Kennedy at house, they usually spent one other half-hour lamenting the infinite record of issues.
“Well,” Erard mentioned on the cellphone, and paused. “It’s gonna get better.”
Kennedy took a weary drag on her cigarette. “Well,” she mentioned, “I’m praying for it.”
Along Main Street on a spring day — the encircling mountains simply starting to blush with inexperienced and sprayed with purple redbud blossoms — there may be solely a lonely suggestion of the place Pound as soon as was. In the Nineteen Forties, coal miners swarmed from close by Kentucky to drink within the city’s 11 bars. There had been shops, parking meters and taxi cabs. Now a lot of the storefronts are empty, some only a facade in entrance of a collapsed roof.
Pound — some name it The Pound — has all the time been a tricky place. It is alleged to have been the primary space settled in Wise County within the 1700s, however was the final to include as a city, in 1950. The origins of the identify are cloudy however in all probability related to the pounding mill that when stood alongside the river.
Terry Short, a former council member and Kennedy’s cousin, remembers serving to his dad clear squatters out of the household’s motel when he was a grade-schooler — wielding a shotgun at age 11.
“Everybody in this area has fought for what they’ve got and struggled for what they’ve got,” mentioned Short, 55.
Kennedy went to elementary faculty within the constructing that now serves as city corridor (in between, it was a funeral parlor) and lives a brief stroll away, simply previous the Magic Spray carwash. She graduated from Pound High School, which is being torn down.
“It used to be a booming place here. Everybody got old and just died off,” mentioned Ronnie Roberts, 67, who runs a small engine restore store beside the previous ironmongery shop. He labored on the retailer for 30 years till it closed within the early 2000s.
“I’d like to see it do better, but I don’t know,” Roberts mentioned, fixing a tractor tire. “They had so much trouble over there at town council.”
Sharp declines in coal-tax income have crippled many components of Southwest Virginia, however Pound made issues worse via poor administration. Last year, the underside fell out.
One of its most beneficial property, a multimillion-dollar wastewater therapy system, fell into such disrepair that the state ordered Pound at hand it over to Wise County’s water authority. A price range reckoning and personnel clashes led the city to fireplace its legal professional, who was additionally a detective, and shutter the police division — which led to the proof disaster. The cashier pleaded responsible to embezzling about $1,700.
But the deepest drawback of all — the one which fueled all the remainder — was that members of city council couldn’t appear to face each other. There had been walkouts, lockouts, shouting matches and lawsuits.
By December 2020 — to take only one instance — the city was three years behind on annual monetary audits. It was 5 months previous that year’s deadline to undertake a price range. Residents complained that the police division was gobbling up greater than $380,000 of the city’s roughly $580,000 annual spending plan.
On Dec. 7, three members of council joined greater than 40 residents in submitting a petition to oust Mayor Stacey Carson, whose long-term relationship with a council critic generally known as Chickenman had made her the item of ire. The next day, Carson convened a crowded public listening to on the price range, led the Pledge of Allegiance, then mentioned the assembly had not been correctly marketed and was unlawful.
Angry council members instructed her to ask the city legal professional. We don’t have a city legal professional, Carson replied. Not true, council members mentioned. The viewers started to shout.
“I don’t need to talk to you since you have a petition against me right now,” Carson snapped at a council member, “so you can go ahead and step on outta here!”
The viewers cheered, and the supposedly unlawful assembly tumbled into chaos for an additional two hours.
Videos of Pound council conferences grew to become tawdry municipal actuality reveals — folks would tune in for the sheer cringeworthy spectacle.
“Sometimes you can only laugh,” mentioned Trivett, the Ashland mayor, who discovered of Pound’s plight from somebody at church who is expounded to a council member. “But I thought, it’s a shame to find humor in things that any of us in our towns would find terrible. So they shouldn’t be a laughingstock.”
Kennedy and Short discovered little humor in what was occurring. Kennedy had begun taking an curiosity within the council when her yard stuffed with sewage and made her husband sick. Her complaints had been brushed apart, she mentioned, however the issue cleared up when the county took over the water system and glued a leak.
Short, a council member for a single time period that led to 2018, couldn’t flip away from the place the place his household had lived for generations. Retired on incapacity from the state freeway division and caring for his aged dad and mom, Short started devoting nearly all his time to monitoring the council and its issues — taking video of conferences, speaking with members, making an attempt to dealer some sort of peace.
The cousins labored collectively final year on a marketing campaign to get Kennedy elected to city council. “My husband said, ‘no, you ain’t doing that,’ ” mentioned Kennedy, who has sufficient on her arms with a full-time job at Verizon and an aged mom and sick pal to take care of. But she and Short knocked on almost each door on the town looking for votes.
By the time Kennedy received her seat, the Wise County board of supervisors had gotten fed up with Pound’s antics. The city is a part of the county, sharing its faculty system and constitutional officers, such because the sheriff and commonwealth’s legal professional. The supervisors voted shortly earlier than Election Day to ask the General Assembly to dissolve the city’s constitution.
That threw Pound’s destiny into the arms of some of the highly effective members of the General Assembly, House Majority Leader Terry Kilgore (R-Scott), whose district covers a part of Pound and whose household wields huge affect in that a part of the state.
“Those local officials failed to understand that the function of local government is to provide services, and safety, and it just wasn’t happening,” Kilgore mentioned in an interview. “It just was not a good look for the town.”
When the legislature convened in January, Kilgore launched a invoice to dissolve the constitution.
Kennedy and Short drove the six hours to Richmond to beg legislative committees to not go it. State regulation units out a course of for annulling a constitution, and residents are presupposed to vote on it. Kennedy, a union organizer and lobbyist who has tussled with Kilgore, and Short, in his customary denim overalls, argued that killing the city would set a harmful precedent.
A handful of lawmakers, Republican and Democrat, had been sympathetic. But most deferred to Kilgore. The charter-killing invoice handed by broad margins, and Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) signed it into regulation final month.
“I don’t think we’re setting a precedent,” Kilgore mentioned. “This is a very, very rare occasion where the General Assembly would step in. We’re not going to step in when towns are arguing or there’s a disagreement. But when there’s no services, or paying bills … we need to step in.”
Kilgore made one concession: If he feels the city is making progress, he will come again next year and ask his colleagues to revive the constitution.
“I want them to succeed,” he mentioned. “I think this was a wake-up call.”
The quick influence was the other; even the specter of the Assembly’s motion had thrown the city right into a demise spiral.
In Kennedy’s first assembly as a member, again in November, the brand new city legal professional give up, two council members stormed out and 16 of the city’s roughly 24 companies submitted a letter through which they refused to proceed paying taxes.
“There is no real reason to make a payment to a town that is in the process of un-incorporating,” wrote the enterprise house owners, most of whom dwell exterior city limits. They demanded a forensic audit to see whether or not previous income had been mishandled.
By early this year, the council couldn’t even meet as a result of too few members had been exhibiting up. So one member, Clifton Cauthorne, took what he referred to as the “kamikaze option” — he give up, dropping the council’s membership low sufficient {that a} native choose was required to step in and appoint three new members.
“I kind of forced their hand, because we were at a standstill,” Cauthorne mentioned.
The job earlier than the brand new council is large. The city has no paid clerk/treasurer, no paid legal professional and solely a part-time police chief. Tax receipts and payments alike are piled in workplaces at city corridor. No one is bound who owes taxes or how a lot income to anticipate for the approaching year.
Kennedy spends Fridays and Saturdays at city corridor, going via paperwork. She by no means is aware of what she would possibly discover when she opens a drawer. Once it was $20,000 in checks, one other time a $15,000 unpaid invoice for the city’s insurance coverage coverage.
The state gives few, if any, formal assets to assist cities akin to Pound — no coaching for newly elected council members and no mechanism to flag issues or present assist. For cities below 3,500 in inhabitants, there isn’t any state requirement for audits or for battle of curiosity disclosures by native officers. Pound’s audits had been voluntary or, in some circumstances, to fulfill banks that had offered loans.
Next door in Lee County, the city of St. Charles has dwindled to fewer than 100 residents and stopped holding council elections. Kilgore sponsored a invoice this year to rescind that constitution, as nicely — noting that St. Charles was by no means included by the General Assembly, however quite had a uncommon constitution granted by a choose. As of July 1, St. Charles will grow to be an unincorporated a part of the county. No one is contesting.
Not everyone seems to be satisfied it’s price combating to save lots of Pound.
“Let it go back to the county,” mentioned one former service provider, who spoke on the situation of anonymity for concern of retribution over the deeply emotional topic. “We don’t have any benefits from the town.”
The Kingsport Times-News, a Tennessee newspaper that has chronicled Pound’s travails, proclaimed in an August editorial: “It’s time to abolish the town of Pound.”
Even those that want to see it preserved are now not certain that’s attainable.
“I don’t want to see my little town go away,” mentioned David Williams, 59, who has owned a TV restore store in Pound for almost 30 years. He didn’t signal the no-tax pledge, however Williams mentioned he can perceive why some would possibly wish to give up the constitution.
“It’s a mess,” he mentioned. “It’s a nice little community here, it just sorta fell apart since we don’t have the coal business we used to have.”
Others say there are sensible causes to struggle. With mountain communities separated by geography and custom, many in Pound specific little religion in Wise County to look out for his or her pursuits. Exhibit A: the demolition of the native highschool, which compelled college students to journey over the mountains to a brand new county faculty.
“They couldn’t care less what happens to the town of Pound,” mentioned Harold Greer, 70, a retired retailer who now works part-time at Fielder’s Choice, an antiques/sporting items/cut price store within the ramshackle constructing that was the ironmongery shop.
“If we lose [the charter], we lose the ability to control our own zoning and planning,” he mentioned. An unincorporated group can be unable to cease the county from plopping down a giant polluting trade, Greer mentioned. As a city, “we control our own destiny.”
Lingering distrust and a looming deadline
So sympathetic volunteers are lending a hand.
“They really do want to be a town, they just need some help to get back to being functional,” mentioned Michelle Gowdy, government director of the Virginia Municipal League. The VML has agreed to assist chart a course ahead, making connections with officers in different cities and counties who can lend experience, akin to legal professional Erard.
Linda Meade, a retired city clerk, has volunteered to pitch in at her outdated job. Lawyer Greg Baker is stepping in briefly as city legal professional, freed from cost. Nearing retirement and recovering from most cancers, Baker, 62, mentioned he feels obligated to assist.
It’s rudimentary stuff. Four of the 5 council members are new, and Carson — who as mayor solely votes in case of a tie — is shaky on parliamentary process. Call the roll, Baker reminds them firstly of April’s month-to-month assembly. No, you don’t want a second roll name after a public listening to. Make a movement. Now vote on the movement.
When bickering flares up, Baker — whose booming voice can drown out the entire room — cuts issues off shortly. “Y’all sound like y’all got a lot of personal issues with each other,” he thundered at one level within the assembly. “I’m here for free. I’m gonna walk out that door. I’m tired of all this stuff.”
Baker is aware of the work to save lots of the city will fail if the spirit fails. And that’s the place each he and Erard are unsure, as a result of components of the distrust that acquired the council into this mess nonetheless linger.
Particularly between Kennedy and Carson.
Until just lately, Pound’s mayor usually served as its paid city supervisor, an association not unusual in small Virginia cities. But after Carson received the seat in 2020, nobody appeared all for letting her do each.
Carson, 55 and initially from Kansas, mentioned she seems like an outsider — slighted by the brand new council and stripped of energy at each flip. To maintain her floor, Carson has seized on the difficulty that the companies introduced up once they refused to maintain paying taxes: that Pound wants a forensic audit. It has grow to be her mantra at conferences.
Kennedy argues that they can’t do a forensic audit till the city catches up on the previous three years of normal audits. That will take cash, so that they want the companies to pay taxes once more.
But they received’t pay taxes, Carson argues, till the audits reassure them that the cash is being nicely spent.
And so, with a June 30 deadline looming to get a city price range handed, Kennedy and Carson are circling each other in stalemate.
Early this month, the council held a price range workshop. After just a few minutes, Carson and Kennedy started to conflict over the audit. Back and forth, for almost an hour, till lastly Kennedy had had sufficient.
“I think we need a few minutes,” she mentioned, then took a drink from her water bottle, stood and walked out.
“Okay,” Carson mentioned. “We will recess until 8:30.”
A couple of months in the past, the assembly might need ended there, one other breakdown, one other walkout.
But after 10 minutes or so, Kennedy got here again. The session resumed. Next merchandise: police price range. And on they went, step by painful step, trying to rebuild their city because the clock continues to tick.