Open Letter to Montgomery County Board of Supervisors

Where I tilt at windmills once again. All politics is local and I try to use my economic position in the community to give hard facts to our leaders.


Dear Montgomery County Supervisors:

I am writing you as both a parent of upcoming 7th and 4th graders and as a medium sized business owner in the county. I want to encourage all of you to vote for plans to bring all Blacksburg strand students back to the area as soon as is feasible and to vote for a tax increase and bond issuance to construct new high schools in Blacksburg and Auburn.

My company, from which I write this email with contact information below, has a gross income of over $5,000,000 annually, growing at a rate of about 40% each year with a history going back well over 10 years. This is a high tech company with over 30 employees, paying county and town of Blacksburg taxes. We are located at the CRC and are in a newly built out office space just across from the school of osteopathy. Due to the apparent lack of will to invest in education in this county, I am now forced to look at moving my company to either Albemarle or Culpeper counties. I know personally of two other companies of similar size who have moved to Salem due to the better school system there before the collapse of BHS. I know of other similar companies in Montgomery county and individuals looking at the same. I simply cannot continue to grow in this area and recruit and retain talented individuals if the answer to the question "how are your secondary schools" is "we have no high school and/or middle school".

This issue is not about the cost of raising taxes, but rather the cost of not investing in infrastructure. As the issue stands, the county will lose much more money in "bright flight" than it will in the cost of building these schools. With the same population, Albemarle County raises almost 3 times the tax revenue of Montgomery County. That fact is noticed by business investors like myself. I know the median income in Albemarle is more: about $64,000 for a family as compared to about $47,000 in Montgomery, but this difference does not account for their extraordinary contribution to education.

Historically, my largest hurdle to growth in Montgomery county has been transportation. This issue is usually about 5th on the list of importance for myself or any potential hire, well after 1) income, 2) educational system, 3) quality of life, 4) safety. I cannot imagine how this area expects to prosper with the educational system taking such a tremendous hit while the perception of the county being willing to fix this problem is perceived as nonexistent.

As a parent I have been appalled by both the process and attitude behind all of this discussion. I have made well known my disappointment that the school board and administration did not begin a planning process for BHS students in March or April before they had the engineering reports - you ALWAYS plan for the worst and hope for the best. I am still disgusted that the decision was to disrupt two student bodies and not just one. I have come to be appalled by the conditions in Auburn and wonder why I had not known of them sooner, perhaps this is my fault. I am frankly stunned to find this county in the situation it is in and wonder how you can justify the serious gaps in safety (why was the BHS gym roof not inspected along with others on a regular basis?) and planning (how could you not let revenue for the county grow when the economy was going so well to set aside money for a stormy time like we find ourselves in now?).

For school solutions: let me state that I am for repairing the current high school if it can be done swiftly to get all students back into their home strands (although I may be in the minority on this issues because I know so many parents who do not believe the main structure can be made safe). The progress made on OCMS should be lauded, but the distance to the school and the fact that students have tiny lockers for supplies, no lockers for gym and have to haul almost everything they have from building to building and going outside during winter weather is hardly a school to point to and say- here's our fantastic long term BMS. If it can be done before next school year, you should fix BHS. But I could not, for a minute, understand justification for rebuilding the BHS gym. That expenditure would be a complete waste- there is a community center that is under used across the street that high schoolers already use for swimming activities. Gyms, unlike schools, actually are not needed as core to giving students an education.

For tax solutions: first of all you must consider how many people you will lose without taking proper action. People, businesses, perhaps even educational institutions. Second of all, why only look at a property tax increase? Why not consider an exemption for increase for lower income households? I know almost every parent in Blacksburg would gladly pay double a $.12/$100 increase on property tax if we knew it would go toward school construction. And not just for construction in Blacksburg, but for Auburn as well. I would happily go out to dinner more to pay a 3%-5% special tax on meals if I knew it would be properly invested. There are many other avenues you could explore and the good faith and future growth in the county could be restored, vastly offsetting any hardship (little as it would be) to any short term tax increase.

Thank you so much for your time and consideration,


Doug Garnett-Deakin