The Augusta Free Press marked its six-year anniversary on July 2.

On July 3, the publishing company announced its flagship print publication, The New Dominion Magazine, will shift to a monthly schedule beginning in January.

“Response to the magazine this year has been wonderful – even in tough economic times,” said publisher Crystal Graham. “With a rebound of the economy expected in 2009, it only makes sense to make the shift to a monthly publication.”

The magazine is currently published quarterly, with the next issue due out on newsstands this month. The Summer 2008 issue features stories on Revolution Church, a 2025 Vision for Greater Augusta, vineyards in the Valley, a Valley League baseball promotion, genealogy and more.

The final issue of the year will hit newsstands in October. Space reservation for advertising is due Sept. 10.

Ten thousand copies of each issue are printed and distributed for free in Waynesboro, Staunton, Harrisonburg, Charlottesville, Lexington and surrounding areas. Copies are available at area retailers and dining establishments and by subscription.

Beginning in January 2009, the magazine will be available on the first of every month. Media kits for 2009 are now available along with an editorial calendar for the upcoming year. To request a copy, contact Augusta Free Press at (540) 949-6574 or freepress@ntelos.net.

Here’s what is coming in our Summer 2008 edition of The New Dominion magazine - set to hit newsstands in July!

A religous Revolution
Shane Lam felt the calling. He had to come back home, even though it would risk opening up some old wounds that had taken years to heal. But if that was all that he had to risk, the reward - the spiritual rebirth of his old stomping grounds - was well worth it.

2025 Vision
What does the Greater Augusta area look like in 2025? We asked a group of people who will have a lot to say about that to share their perspectives. And there is no shortage of opinions, you can rest assured.

Vineyards in the Valley
The wine industry east of the Blue Ridge has been thriving for years. Now the industry is taking root in the Shenandoah Valley. Join us for tours of new vineyards in Augusta County and Rockingham County and learn more about what locals are saying is the Next Big Thing in Valley agriculture.

Around the Valley in a baseball daze
Jerry Carter had this wild idea. There are 11 baseball parks in the Valley League. What if he made it a point to go to a game in each, and invite fans to go along for the ride? AFP editor Chris Graham caught up with Carter at two of his stops and caught Valley League fever himself.

The L Word
It’s tough losing an election. The AFP’s Chris Graham shares his thoughts about his unsuccessful run for Waynesboro City Council, and asks Creigh Deeds, Bruce Elder and Tracy Pyles how they dealt with the sting of losing themselves.

Who am I?
AFP contributor Elizabeth Geris takes us inside the world of geneaology to answer the age-old question.

Book ‘Em promotes literacy, crime prevention:
AFP contributor Faryal Zubair catches up with Book ‘Em founder Mark Kearney to discuss plans for this year’s Waynesboro book festival.

50K and counting at the Wildlife Center
Wildlife Center founder Ed Clark talks about how far veterinary medicine has come since the center opened in 1982, and about common loons.

History by fabric
An inside look at the upcoming Quilts: Past, Present and Future exhibition.

Story by Chris Graham

It was hard enough getting Kitty Lough to go into an independent-living facility, harder still to get her to accept the change in her lifestyle.

She never would have guessed back then that she’d miss it as much as she does now.

“She’s finally gotten over the stage of saying, I just don’t understand what’s going on, I don’t understand why this all had to happen,” said her son, David, talking about his mother’s forced departure from a retirement community in Waynesboro, in January.

Kitty Lough, 89, was asked to leave after a dispute over the degree of independence that she wanted to be able to maintain.

I wrote about Kitty’s independent streak several years ago when I was on the staff at The News Virginian after meeting her one day at the Waynesboro YMCA. She never had a driver’s license, but she didn’t have trouble getting around town, going on treks to the Y, the post office and the Kroger grocery store from her home in the Tree Streets every day.

It was her walking that had begun to cause concern for administrators at her former home community, which in the fall asked the family to agree to put Kitty through a mental-health evaluation to determine whether or not she might need to be moved from independent living to assisted living within the community.

After some back-and-forth on that issue, the facility asked Kitty to leave or face possible eviction.

And so it is that Lough is now living across town with her daughter, Kathie Kincheloe, who has had to change her routine to accommodate her new roommate.

“We take walks around the block so she can get some exercise. Actually, it’s been good for me, because I wouldn’t be out there doing that otherwise,” Kincheloe said.

Kincheloe works outside the home, though, meaning mom is left to her own devices for hours at a time. And though Kincheloe’s home is probably two miles, if that, from Kitty’s old digs, it might as well be on the other side of the world to get there.

“I miss my friends. I have so many dear friends there, and I don’t get to see them that much anymore,” Kitty said.

“And I don’t call. It’s so hard to hear, and it’s hard for them to hear me.”

***

The first thing that jumped out at me was learning that the family felt there was basically no recourse for them once the decision was made to turn their mother out onto the streets.

My gut told me that there had to be some kind of mechanism in place for families to turn to in these kinds of situations. And in fact there are ombudsmen who are empowered by the state code to review cases like these, I found out after making a couple of quick phone calls. Only, there are so few of them out in the field that it is really hit-or-miss at best as to whether you can get one to give you a few minutes to plead your case.

Which led to my next moment of clarity. Maybe I’m just scratching the surface of the problem here, it occurred to me. Maybe this is bigger than just not having enough ombudsmen to review disputes between administrators and nursing-home residents.

I said something about this to the Lough family, and it made me feel better that they agreed that this was where they wanted the story about their mom’s plight to go.

“This point needs to be impressed. This population is growing, and it’s only going to get worse. This kind of situation is going to come up more, more and more - because this is a growing population,” David Lough told me.

So I had my mission. Should I choose to accept it, it would involve me learning everything that I could about senior living in Virginia, what challenges are on the horizon as the Baby Boom generation advances into their senior years, what the state is doing to address the already-existing gaps in service with an eye to the future, and what else will need to be done to get our senior-care infrastructure ready for the Senior Boom.

***

Virginia’s senior population is growing rather substantially - overall, the 60-plus population in Virginia has grown more than 60 percent in the last decade, and the fastest-growing age demographic in the Commonwealth is 80 and over.

And it can be said that it is growing twofold - both from within and from without.

“We’re clearly becoming a retirement destination, if you will. Certainly retirement is a growth industry where I’m from in the Williamsburg area and in the Shenandoah Valley out where you are,” said Tony Conyers, the commissioner of the Virginia Department of Social Services.

Native Virginians have their own set of issues to deal with, but most at least have family somewhere nearby to provide care when it is needed.

“But when people who moved here to retire aren’t doing as well from a health perspective, and their families are farther away, their families can’t offer the kind of assistance that would have traditionally been the norm in Virginia and the rest of the country,” Conyers said.

It’s harder today for even native Virginians to get help from their children when they need it, as it turns out. About 80 percent of senior care in Virginia and the United States has traditionally been provided by families, but with divorce breaking up more and more families, and more women being employed alongside men in the workforce today than in past generations, “the dynamic has just changed,” said Andy Carle, the director of the Assisted Living/Senior Housing Administration program at George Mason University.

Carle talks about senior care being a three-legged stool, with the first leg being “time,” “which has already collapsed, because women entered the workforce 30 years ago - appropriately, long overdue, but, you know, for hundreds of years it was the daughter or daughter-in-law that took care of the elderly parent. So now with both spouses in the workforce, they don’t have as much time - they go over on the weekend. In fact, the most recent studies show that 44 percent of the caregivers are now actually men - so it’s almost 50-50, which is really cool,” Carle said.

“The problem is that they have less combined time. Instead of the daughter being home all week, and grandma living in the house, or down the street, they go over on a Saturday, the son mows the lawn and pays the bills, the wife goes in and sets up the pills for the week and puts little frozen meals in Ziploc bags and puts them in the freezer. They take mom out to dinner, and they go home - because Sunday, they’ve got to take care of their stuff and get back to work,” Carle said.

The second leg of Carle’s stool is proximity. “About 20 percent of those 34 million live on average about 500 miles or more away. And probably another 20 percent are a good hundred miles away. For centuries, we were born and lived and died within 50 miles of where we were born, but nowadays we’re all over the country,” Carle said.
“The third leg, which I think is going to collapse soon, in the next 20 years, is what I call energy. People are living longer. If your mom is 100, how old are you? I mean, you’re 80. So you’ve got your own problems. Even if your mom’s 85, you’re 65. Who’s going to do the two-person lift? It’s really hard work,” Carle said.

***

Richard Lindsay, a member of the Commonwealth Council on Aging and the former head of the Division of Geriatrics at the University of Virginia, is among those who use the term “aging tsunami” to describe the coming Senior Boom.

“Pretty soon, we’re going to have one in five Americans over the age of 65, which is a lot of people. And the point you’re making of course is, Is the country prepared, is the real question. And I think it depends somewhat upon the parts of the situation you’re looking at,” Lindsay said.
“I come from the standpoint of the part that has to do with manpower. That’s the piece, in my mind, that we’re the least prepared for - and the reason that I say we’re the least prepared is it takes such a long lifetime to produce trained people to deal with an aging population,” Lindsay said.

“It isn’t like you and I sitting here today can say, We both agree that there’s this huge increase in elderly population coming down the road tomorrow, so let’s just put all the people in place to take care of it. If you’re talking about training nurses and doctors and so forth, the lag time you’re talking about is five to eight to nine years, sometimes even more, to produce increased numbers of people,” Lindsay said.

And let’s face it, jobs in the senior-care industry aren’t the most lucrative ones out there.
“The wage scale is lower than it needs to be for some of the jobs that people have to perform, and as a result there’s a tremendously high turnover in the level of personnel where the rubber meets the road, like nursing assistants and those kinds of people in nursing homes. They give most of the care, but they do it at a relatively low wage scale, and with very few benefits. And so as a result, it’s an industry that has trouble keeping and attracting personnel,” Lindsay said.

“My concern is that you have to declare it a crisis now in order to even get this manpower pump primed for eight to ten years down the road,” Lindsay said.

***

We recognize the problems, and they are legion.

But, and I hate to have to even write this, isn’t it usually true that we tend to wait until some sort of crisis comes up before we do anything?

Think about the myriad issues with our mental-health system, for example. We knew that there were things that needed to be done to address our shortcomings there for years, but it took 33 people losing their lives at Virginia Tech last spring to get us moving in the right direction.

“We’ve actually discussed that, too, that same scenario. Because this year what we’re seeing is the General Assembly is focusing on the mental-health issues. And as far as the aging community goes, other than the fact that older adults vote, there hasn’t been a lightning rod,” said Bert Waters, the program manager at the Virginia Center on Aging at Virginia Commonwealth University.
“And actually, what’s happened is over the last five to seven years, whenever there’s been a budget shortfall, agencies receive cuts, and they receive percentage cuts. And something like the Virginia Department for the Aging, which also receives federal funds, they had to cut - and they couldn’t cut through their area agencies on aging, and they chose not to cut programs like Meals on Wheels, but they did have to make some substantial cuts, and once those cuts were made, a lot of them didn’t come back,” Waters said.
“So actually the state monies are getting smaller while we’re getting more and more older adults and more issues involved with seniors,” Waters said.
“You’re right on the button with how we had this one issue with Virginia Tech, and now the state’s focusing on it, but really there’s not going to be a specific issue with aging,” Waters said.

“We’ve been too laissez-faire - that it will just happen. And yet when you have just the sheer numbers that we have, that isn’t a very logical assumption,” said Karen Roberto, the director of the Virginia Tech Center for Gerontology.

“The government has its head completely and totally in the sand,” George Mason University’s Andy Carle said. “They don’t want to know. They’ve got enough to deal with, frankly, with Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security, which as you know are such hot-button issues, and they don’t even like to bring them up, because nobody has an answer. They have not even pretended to address the collapse of the three-legged stool or what’s going to happen in this country. No one is even talking about it, because either they don’t know, which is possible, or they simply don’t want to.

“The basic position of the government is, Well, the family members will just keep providing this care, like they always have. And it’s a flawed assumption. It’s not a realistic assumption,” Carle said. “It has nothing to do with whether or not sons and daughters love their mommas and papas. It has to do with the three legs of the stool that I’ve been talking about. But the government’s attitude is that 80 percent of the care has always been provided by family members, so 80 percent of the care will be provided by family members in the future.”

***

There are efforts being made locally to get some kind of solutions to the Senior Boom crisis worked out ahead of time. I talked with Paul Lavigne, the executive director of the Valley Program for Aging Services, a Waynesboro-based nonprofit that works with local governments in the Shenandoah Valley to provide services to seniors and runs several senior centers in the region, and learned that there is a campaign under way to get local leaders to begin planning ahead for the Senior Boom.

For instance, the Central Shenandoah Planning District Commission and the Shenandoah Valley Partnership, which coordinate regional planning and regional economic-development activities in the Central Shenandoah Valley, have integrated senior-care planning into their lists of long-range planning and development objectives, Lavigne said.

“I noticed about four years ago that there was nothing in there about the aging population, so we proposed a strategic objective be added that basically says something like, We recognize the changing demographics and the increase in the population of people aged 60 and over, we see the opportunities and challenges of that, and should address that,” Lavigne said.

“They don’t add too many of those objectives every year, but they do circulate them to a wide audience, to the 10 jurisdictions that work with them, and the nonprofits and those that work with them in the private sector. I thought it was important to get something in there that said, and it did resonate. They said, Yeah, let’s put that in,” Lavigne said.

At the state level, the governor and General Assembly have their attention on 100 different other things. But Tony Conyers feels the bureaucracy is properly focused on the Senior Boom challenge.

“The awareness is there,” Conyers said. “I think throughout Virginia and throughout the country, people in the human-services business are aware of the issues and the problems. We are confronted with unprecedented challenges in terms of having to deal with issues with young children, mental-health issues - there’s simply a lot on our plate today. And yet another issue that we have to put on our plate, and is a little more complicated, has to do with seniors.

“I can name you, just within our secretariat, three senior leaders, including myself, who are dealing with these issues every day when we go home,” Conyers said. “I have an 86-year-old mom. So this is not just an academic or professional exercise for me. And many of our other folks in this administration find themselves in the same position. What that means is we are aware of the issues and the problems. That doesn’t mean that we’re putting the resources there today to solve them. But I certainly think the awareness is there.

***

Andy Carle and Richard Lindsay offer us two competing visions for dealing with the Senior Boom.

First to Carle and his Golden Triangle.

“We need to consolidate the staff that we have, because we’re going to have a labor crisis in this country,” Carle said. “We’re going to be 2 to 4 million nurses aides short of what we need to take care of the seniors - so we’re mathematically eliminated from having the human labor. So the first thing we’ve got to do in the Golden Triangle is consolidate the human labor that we have into centralized locations - obviously assisted livings and retirement communities. Because the most inefficient thing you can do is send one nurse’s aide to spend half the day looking at her windshield driving around house to house. She could have seen three times as many people if the people were consolidated.
“The second thing is to consolidate and congregate seniors in housing,” Carle said. “My passion there is to make sure that we build housing for them where they want to live. You know, the reason that people are so terrified about leaving their homes is that they don’t want to go to a nursing home. But as it turns out, and what we’ve learned, is if you build them a really nice home, and some of these assisted livings are way better-looking than my house - you’ve got the baby grand piano and the fine dining with linens and nice china, and activities and this and that - so what we’ve learned is it wasn’t so much that they didn’t want to leave their homes as the alternative was a nursing home. But if we can continue to build nice homes for them, then they will congregate into their homes.
“The third part is what I call nanna-technology, technology for your nanna - where even if we congregate seniors, even if we consolidate the human labor, quite frankly it’s still not going to be enough. So we’re going to need technology that’s going to be able to make one nurse’s aide in the future as productive as three are today. And so we’re going to need robots and sensors and these kinds of monitoring and surveillance technologies and things that can send us data and make it more efficient,” Carle said.

So Carle is in favor of centralization - of seniors into central facilities, of nurses and doctors into providing care in these facilities, and using technology to make the whole system hyperefficient.

I said Carle’s and Lindsay’s visions were competing.

“The way to do it is to depend less upon paid care and use more training of family members,” Lindsay said.

“In other words, what you do is you try to get family members trained up to a level where they can do most of the things that a nurse’s aide or anybody else can do. And to do that, you have to have eductional programs and somehow get them so they can get there - in other words, they may be involved in caregiving, so it may be hard to get them to some place to train them.

“The point is, 70, 80 percent of the long-term care today is provided by families. That’s a huge percentage, at a tremendous cost. But were we not to shore up that system in some way, then the country would be facing the cost of the care that these people are providing, and that’s a huge bill. And the country couldn’t sustain it,” Lindsay said.

***

No banner proclaiming Mission Accomplished need be tacked up here.

We’re still a long, long, long way from solving the Senior Boom.

If we ever do.

I reported back to Kitty Lough and her family before sitting down to write this article. I had learned that there should have been some way for them to have raised issue with the way their mother had been treated, I told them. The problem isn’t in the people who are in place to fight those battles, but rather in how few of them there are to do the fighting.

And in the availability of senior-care options that are out there, or rather not out there, considering the situation.

I heard back from the family that they had taken Kitty off the waiting list at another local home.

“This is the solution, for now,” Kathie Kincheloe said to me, her mother at her side.

“At least until she doesn’t need more in the way of care. And then we might have to revisit things,” David Lough said to me.

“It’s up to Mom. Mom’s here as long as she wants to be,” Kincheloe said.

“It’s up her,” Kitty said a half-second later.

“Kathie is so good to me taking me in. But I don’t want to take advantage of her,” Kitty said.

“This is where we are,” Kincheloe said.

‘Tis, indeed.

Listen to a special edition of “The Augusta Free Press Show.”

Andy Carle from George Mason University, Karen Roberto from Virginia Tech and Richard Lindsay from the University of Virginia join New Dominion editor Chris Graham in a series of discussions about our readiness to deal with the coming Senior Boom.

Show Length: 46:24.

Story by Chris Graham

She wasn’t trying to be Rosa Parks.

“We were just tired of the separate-but-equal thing. Because it certainly wasn’t separate-but-equal,” said Rita Wilson, who is retiring from Staunton City Council on June 30 after 16-plus years on the job, and who a generation ago made her first foray into public life by rather casually visiting the principal at Bessie Weller Elementary School to talk to him about enrolling her eldest daughters.

“I went to Bessie Weller like I didn’t know anything, and I went in, and all the white mothers were standing around, and the lady said, May I help you? And I said, I came to enroll my girls in school. And they said, Where do you live? And I said, On Jackson Street. And she said, Your children should go to T.C. Edmonds on Johnson Street. And I said, I think you’re mistaken, because my next-door neighbors go to this school, and if my next-door neighbors go here, my girls should go here, too,” Wilson said.

“So the principal said, Why don’t you go home and write a letter telling us why you want your children to go to a different school than the one they’re assigned to? And I said, I didn’t hear you ask anybody else to write a letter. He said, Well, I’m asking you,” Wilson said.

Nearly a decade had passed since the United States Supreme Court had handed down its decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case that had set about the process for desegregating schools - but Virginia, under Massive Resistance, was taking “all deliberate speed” to the echo of the whistle.

Wilson herself had attended Staunton’s all-black high school, Booker T. Washington High School - so she knew what she was saying when she talked about separate not being equal.

“None of the black schools in the city had a cafeteria,” Wilson said. “They had built that back part onto Booker T., and they were bringing the food over from what is A.R. Ware to feed them. And the other part of the school was T.C. Edmonds. And when T.C. Edmonds got full, instead of integrating the schools, they added some more onto Booker T., the new section, and the kids went to school in that section, and the high-school kids went in the old section.

“And Bessie Weller was relatively new then. So when I saw the conditions at the school, and the kids wanted to go to school with their friends, that’s what I did,” Wilson said.
“Nobody had a meeting or anything. But you heard, Oh, the Harrises put their kids in Beverley Manor. Oh, this one put their kids in Lee High. None of us were on a personal level with each other. It was just, Oh, they did it, too,” Wilson said.

“It’s different when you see your own kids having to go through it. When you see the neighbor’s kids going to this nice school, and my kids have no cafeteria, and they’re bringing in food from the white folks’ school, and they get everything secondhand, and it’s way below standard, and they’ve got a nice school right over here where the neighbors’ kids are going … Why? Why?”

***

Wilson is known to some in Staunton as the African American member of Staunton City Council. Implied in that statement is that Staunton’s African American population is powerful enough to do what is necessary to get one of its own elected to city council.

“Now, let me tell you something. How many black folks do you think there are in Staunton? About 10 percent. So how did I get elected four times? So I’m compelled to represent everybody,” said Wilson, who announced in February that she will not seek a fifth term on city council.

Wilson is the only African American woman to ever serve on the city council in Staunton. She was appointed to the council in 1991 to fill out the last six months of an unexpired term, then surprised everyone but herself and a few close friends and supporters by winning a full four-year term the following May.

“I think at the time Rita filled a gap that needed to be on there,” said former Staunton mayor John Avoli, who was a member of the city council that voted to appoint Wilson to the unexpired term, and later was elected mayor with the support of Wilson.

“What I appreciated a lot about her was that she brought a different perspective. We were all males on that council, and at times, how can you best say this, males sometimes have a tendency to be narrow-minded in their view of the city. She brought the perspective of the family and what the families were going through, along with an interest in the older population and children and the underprivileged,” Avoli said.
“The council relationships at the time - there was something of an internal war going on at the time. And of course, a lot of things were hard to get done because of some internal conflicts - and not agreeing, disagreeing. And one of the facts of life that you’ll learn yourself, hopefully, is that you’ll appreciate that you can agree to disagree. And at the end of the day, you’re still colleagues, and you’re still there for the same reason,” Avoli said.

That all sounds good now, but it wasn’t easy for Wilson back in the day.

“I caught my share of flak,” Wilson said, telling how she ruffled feathers early on in her tenure by raising issue with the plan of fellow city-council members to give a substantial monetary bonus to a group of higher-ups in City Hall who had done some extra work following the sudden resignation of the city manager.

“That didn’t make any sense to me. I mean, they were just doing their jobs,” said Wilson, who soon developed a reputation for working hard at her new job of city-council member.

“I don’t think she was respected as she should have been starting off. But she began to show them what she could do. And that when she suggested something, she meant to get it done,” said Ophie Kier, who served as Wilson’s campaign manager for each of her four runs for city council and is now running himself for a seat on the council in the May 6 city elections.

“She just started acting to make things happen,” Kier said. “She was instrumental in the Booker T. Washington Community Center not being sold, because at that time they did just want to get rid of the building. And because the neighborhood that she lived in was overlooked as far as street cleanup, she started bringing out everybody every spring and fall to do a community cleanup in the Johnson Street area,” Kier said.
“This is what she did. She showed people that everybody wants to live the same,” Kier said.

Avoli said Wilson’s work in the Johnson Street cleanup will be “her legacy.”

“When I look at that Johnson Street area, especially the work with Habitat for Humanity, I think everybody knew it was there, including myself. But it needed that little sparkplug, fireplug, that little explosion to say, Hey, guys, let’s look at this from a different perspective,” Avoli said. “I knew we had a problem there. Everybody knew it was there. It was filled with every nasty thing you could possibly imagine. And now you look at it, and you see, my gosh, Habitat is in there, and it’s filled with homes and families, and they’ve just cleaned the whole darn mess up.

“That may be the biggest part of her legacy, that she did draw attention to the need to do something about that neighborhood,” Avoli said.

Wilson herself feels that her work on the Johnson Street issue could be a double-edged sword for her.

“When I was working on the Johnson Street issue, I heard it from white folks. You’re a one-issue candidate. All you want to do is get Johnson Street fixed up. And I used to say, I’ve got diabetes. And I take care of my whole body, and I wash and clean up. But if I get a sore on my foot, that’s detrimental. I might lose my foot. So I’m going to take special care of my foot. And that’s the way I feel about this. Because it’s pulling down the community. It’s pulling away taxpayers’ dollars,” Wilson said.

***

Ask Wilson about her legacy, and she recalls a chat she had with a resident after a recent city-council meeting.

“I saw a lady downtown the other week, and she was at the council meeting, and hadn’t ever been down there before for anything. And I saw her, and she hadn’t said anything, and the meeting was almost over, and I said to her, Why did you come down here? Did you want to say something? And she said, There was something, but y’all just voted and went on. I sat here through the whole meeting, and now you’re almost done,” Wilson said.

“I said, This lady wants to speak. She didn’t want to make Baldwin Street one way. That’s what it was. That was a concern. So I hadn’t seen her there before, and she came for something. So I wanted her to be able to say something,” Wilson said.

“I saw her the next day, and she said, I would never come to another city-council meeting. She said, I don’t know how you do it. And she said, You are the only common person on that council. And I said, What do you mean, common? And she said, Like me. You pay attention. You asked me why I was even there. You were the only one who asked me,” Wilson said.

Wilson said part of her will miss city council - to the point where she has joked to long-time City Hall haunt Baldwin Jennings, who rarely misses council meetings, and opportunities to speak his mind on the issues of the day at the meetings, to “save me a seat, because we’re going to give them hell.”

But if she were to talk to Avoli about life after city council, she would find that it probably won’t be all that hard to let go.

“I made a determination to back out completely. I’ve not gotten involved in anything whatsoever at all,” Avoli said. “If someone asks me a question, I may give them an answer, but I think for me, me personally, and I can’t speak for anybody else, but when a new council or new mayor comes on board, it’s a new coach, you know? And you have to let them deal with that.

“Do I miss all of the extra time involved? No. Do I miss the people, do I miss my colleagues on council, the great staff that the city has? Yes. There’s no question. You can’t go into something like that for 16 years and not miss the relationships - not only here in Staunton, but the relationships in Richmond and Washington,” Avoli said.
“I’m sure Rita will go through some of those similar things. But by the same token, I call myself a recovering mayor. And I’m recovering nicely,” Avoli said.

Wilson, for her part, already seems to be heading toward that perspective, if she isn’t there already.

“I think there’s two ways of looking at. I think it’s really sad that I’m stepping down. And I’ve shed some tears, because it’s such a part of my life. And I’m thinking, Oh, what am I going to do?” Wilson said.

“But then I’m thinking - because people think you only go to two meetings a month, but Monday night I was at a meeting, yesterday at two o’clock I had a meeting with the city manager, because he meets with the council members before the meetings on Thursday night, and there was a nominations-committee meeting yesterday, tomorrow night I have the council meeting. There’s meetings all the time. And if you serve as the liaison to other committees, there’s always something. And this phone rings all the time. Somebody’s always disagreeing with something.

“I like to deal with everything, even if I have to say, I’m sorry, but I don’t know what I can do to help. But I like to at least get back to people. But on the other hand, I think it will be a relief,” Wilson said.

Story by Elizabeth Geris

“Mary Baldwin College Bookstore, this is Elizabeth.”

It was all I could do to answer the nearby phone at this 166-year-old private school’s only campus bookstore, while apologizing to the 23-deep line of extremely patient young women that started at my cash register – young women whose arms were struggling to contain their own individual towers of burdensome, outrageously expensive textbooks.

On the other end of the phone was yet another student enrolled in the college’s statewide, updated version of the correspondence-style of higher education known as the Adult Degree Program.

The caller wanted to order textbooks for her off-campus classes before the official start of the fall semester. I was sure I had already answered at least 10 other almost-identical phone calls that day. Just how many students are there in this ADP, anyway? I never bothered to find out before changing jobs and soon retired the memories of those two years of working at the bookstore, which are resting comfortably in the halls of my fondest memories of being twentysomething.

Well, according to the college’s website, and only to my partial surprise, there are 1,268 men and women presently enrolled in this off-campus program, compared to the 807 all-female, traditional students on campus. It took me five years from my informal introduction to this higher-education alternative for working adults to decide that those 1,200-plus students must have tapped into something great; I applied and enrolled in the ADP in the spring of 2005, and shortly thereafter, I declared my major in communication. It continues to be a wonderful experience, with dedicated instructors, demanding, yet life-enhancing classes tailored for independent study, and a current faculty advisor who takes her responsibilities very seriously and is always there when I or anyone else needs her.

As great as the last three academic years have been, there’s only one nagging problem – the cost. OK, make that two nagging problems – the cost and my shocking ignorance of the monetary bind financing such a stellar education would put me in. Now, this may seem obvious to many, but despite the years of hearing that boring, yet persistent societal resounding chorus of “college is expensive,” it never seemed to stick with me. Surely, my earnest desires to better myself and arm my resume with such prestigious academia would somehow magically vaporize any unreasonable demands on my wallet. I was confident that Sallie Mae would look at my GPA, settle for the five payments I’ve already remitted and give me an “A” for effort, calling off my hefty financial obligation. Or better yet, I would win six or seven (instead of one – don’t get me wrong; I’m still grateful) of the 20 or so scholarships for which I applied and not need the loans in the first place.

No? Wow, tough crowd.

Well, then surely my closest friends and peers who have already attained a four-year degree or better were fiendishly shrewd with their academic costs and avoided owing Sallie Mae as much as I do by earning grants and scholarships, or better still, redeemed that “college fund” all good girls and boys have that was started by saving-savvy grandparents before their little darlings were old enough to walk. Or, at least if not that much, I’m sure none of my friends made the same honest and sometimes inescapable mistakes I made concerning loan deferment eligibility while still enrolled. After all, college graduates drive BMWs, live in four-story houses, make sound financial decisions and display all the other obvious signs of fairly-earned wealth that their parents, grade-school teachers and guidance counselors promised, right? I think we both know the answer to that question.

***

The stark-naked truth is that a four-year degree alone can mean precious little in terms of that worn out expression “dispensable income.” Even those lucky individuals who go straight from high-school graduate to gainfully employed holder of a bachelor of arts or science degree within the span of four tidy years oftentimes find themselves drowning in a sea of steep living expenses right away.

“I wish I had worked in college and started paying back my student loans while in school instead of waiting until I got out. Every little bit would have helped, because it would have been going directly to the principal, which would have reduced what I owed after college,” confided Chanda McGuffin, financial-services manager and founder of the Multi-Cultural Youth Leadership Conference, who received her bachelor of science degree in business administration from James Madison University. “I am paying for them dearly; the cost of college is still with me even after being out of school for about 15 years.

“My impression was my parents were going to pay for it, and I was going to be off the hook,” McGuffin said.

OK, so maybe I wasn’t the only one who has ever been in blissful denial about being solely responsible for a college education, but this is cold comfort to someone who already accepted the loans, pays rent and utilities, needs a new car and is fiercely committed to contributing her share to the domestic expenses in her marriage. But what do I expect? I consciously choose to shell out big bucks to help realize my goals of becoming a writer – a profession that, let’s be honest, doesn’t always translate into lucrative earning potential.

“Hey, I’d love to have a degree in American literature or the art of writing poetry, but I’m a realist, and I want to make a living, also,” said Cindy Packer, advanced practice registered nurse, psychiatric nurse practitioner and psychiatric clinical nurse specialist.

“I became four months pregnant after (high-school) graduation and gave birth to my son approximately one year after graduation. His birth was the real impetus to pursue some sort of training so that I could support him and myself. … I made a very practical decision to enter an 18-month licensed practical nurse program. I knew that … I would be able to earn a reasonable income and have plenty of opportunity to advance.”

Advance, she did. After completing the 18-month LPN program, Packer steadily progressed through more specialized training, achieving licensing as a registered nurse, as well as a bachelor of science degree in nursing, a master’s degree, post-master’s degree and two semesters of a Ph.D. program. As Packer and many others have already discovered, nursing is a very rewarding field of work, with no exception in the earnings department. After all, as someone once bluntly told me, there is unshakeable job security in nursing, because “there will always be sick people.”

I can’t say I haven’t thought about it, but thanks to consistently disappointing performance in chemistry class and a very weak stomach, I thought better of pursuing a nursing career. After all, who wants a nurse who can’t even watch “Dr. 90210″ without turning paper white, let alone stitch their child’s forehead gash?

Still, there is much to be said for tenacity. It is possible that I could force myself to stop yielding to those paralyzing fears of, say, being responsible for the care of patients involved in terrifying emergency-room scenarios and just jump into a nursing program with both feet; but that would require an overhaul of my perception of what a career is supposed to accomplish in life. Then again, maybe that is just what I need to make my academic journey pay for itself.

“I think that I’m lucky, because my earning potential outweighs the debt I’ve acquired,” said Packer. “I think that all potential students should be somewhat pragmatic when considering their options, unless of course they are independently wealthy, and ultimately earning power doesn’t matter.”

Who couldn’t benefit from such advice? Well, a part-time adult student who has already invested thousands in her artsy dream, I suppose. The harsh reality I ultimately accept is that the die has been cast for this college student; there’s no time or money to start over now. However, there are plenty of college-bound kids of various ages who could take away something from the hindsight and mistakes of their elders.

“Young people need to utilize their middle- and high-school education years to their advantage,” said McGuffin. “There are many, many options for young people to start career planning and working towards those goals during their high-school days. They can take advantage of a free education that can afford them a great foundation. Therefore, if they decide not to go on to (college), they will be employable right out of high school.”

True, we often forget that students can responsibly turn down the opportunity to complete a traditional four-year degree and still go on to competitively earning careers, but these adolescents should make some conscious, sound choices before adulthood arrives. McGuffin, whose second annual Multi-Cultural Youth Leadership Conference is slated for July 30–Aug. 3, 2008, devotes an entire day hosting a college fair replete with financial aid guidance. However, she also acknowledges the opportunity for success without the university diploma – providing this choice is taken just as seriously as investing in higher education.

“Young people can’t say they don’t want to go to college and end it there,” McGuffin warned. “They need to have a plan of action for not going to college.”

Conversely, McGuffin cautioned against complacency once the goodbyes have been said to mom and dad before the beginning of Freshmen Week. “Young people who have the desire to go to college need to be prepared for going … and not waste time and money trying to find out what they want to major in before getting (to college). Yes, they can go an extra year or extra semester, but that drives the financial burden even higher.”

Don’t remind me. I spent many a year at Blue Ridge Community College finding myself, and yet I had only about 45 credit hours to show for it when I finally transferred to Mary Baldwin.

“I suggest to students now to know exactly what field they are most interested in and follow a higher-education plan that is best suited. For example, if you want to be a nurse, then go to a trade school for nursing. Don’t go to a four-year institution if it’s not necessary for the career path that you choose,” said McGuffin.

The higher-learning advice McGuffin offers her youth seems pretty sensible, and yet I don’t ever remember hearing a lot about this when I was in school. Was I absent that day? Not paying attention? And what about those scholarships I kept hearing about? I vaguely remember my 12th-grade guidance counselor handing out various scholarship applications to my English class, but I don’t recall much beyond watching her paper-filled left fist shake in the air as she announced the names of various available awards. I suppose it couldn’t have hurt for me to ask someone to explain these mysterious scholarships, but looking back I simply lacked the confidence to speak up and inquire about how students win this financial assistance.

Packer specifically recalled that the topic of alternative tuition assistance was notably skipped over altogether during her high-school experience.

“I knew nothing at that point of scholarships, grants, et cetera, and unfortunately the staff at my school did not take the initiative to inform me of my various options or to attempt to empower me or advocate for me. I see this as a real failing on the school’s part, and I believe that this type of scenario still frequently occurs. I had always dreamed of becoming a journalist or psychologist, but no clue how to even begin working toward these lofty goals,” said Packer.

Regardless, late bloomers who suddenly find the motivation to better their careers usually find some reasonable way to pay for it. For many like me, however, decisions affecting long-standing financial obligation are left to some guesswork, ultimately begging the question, “Is this worth it?” Sure it is, but it’s much easier to answer that question positively once you transcend the days of living from paycheck to paycheck.

Maybe for some, adulthood, parenthood or simply the unavoidable demand of financial independence must precede finding the proper motivation to look for economically sound alternatives to affording hefty college tuition. Planning for such expense can be overwhelming, but I found out recently, albeit personally too little too late, that there are plenty of grants and scholarships available to those who ask and adequately make room for in advance. To be considered for a grant, students must often meet certain enrollment requirements and/or maximum gross income. Somewhat trickier than grants, to be considered for scholarship eligibility, applicants are often required to hold a certain minimum GPA, minimum of semester hour enrollment, submission of letters of recommendation, and/or specific major declaration.

But for any affiliation, church, ethnicity, hobby or even gender to which you count yourself a member, you can be sure there are scholarships awarding someone just like you. All it takes is dedicating a few minutes to a web search for scholarship applications or a half-hour appointment with your college’s career center counselor, some determination and the ability to brush off rejection with renewed resolve.

This may seem time-consuming, but who knows? All those years of expense, completed scholarship and grant applications, training and paying your dues with stepping-stone job stops along the way can afford a lifetime of personal and financial reward.

Ultimately, I believe that my academic journey has been and will be well worth the time and expense if it means I get paid to do something I would do for free, and I know I’m not alone.

Story by Chris Graham

But I do it to try to make you consider something that you might not otherwise. Namely, that the whole idea rests on the notion that a Downtown Waynesboro baseball stadium could draw 4,000 fans a night, 70 nights a year, when nobody involved in the behind-the-scenes on the project has the slightest inkling as to whether even a single person will ever turn the turnstiles.

“I know that I’d like to have a firmer idea of what we’re talking about here,” Waynesboro mayor Tom Reynolds told me two weeks after the news hit the front page of The News Virginian that a Charlottesville developer had initiated discussions with city leaders to gauge their interest in locating a professional-baseball team in the downtown district.

Reynolds had told me the day before the Feb. 15 story in the local paper that he had been in on the discussions in the months leading up to that point in time, and he came across to me then as enthusiastic about the prospects for seeing the project come to fruition. Other members of Waynesboro City Council have come across the same way, most surprisingly the two self-identified fiscal-conservative members of the council, Frank Lucente and Tim Williams, both of whom told News Virginian reporter Jimmy LaRoue that they would offer their support to the effort.

“Anything that we can do to get downtown moving is a good thing,” Lucente told LaRoue. “But this is something that can work.”

“I will do everything in my power to make it happen,” Williams told LaRoue.

I was right there with them at the start, but now after doing some research, particularly talking with one of the country’s foremost authorities on the economics of minor-league baseball, Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist, well, I think we might have to ask a few more questions before we go down this road any further.

“The research on the general story of a minor-league ballpark doesn’t suggest that there’s any economic-development benefit to be anticipated just from a park itself or a ballteam itself. Sometimes the parks come along with some side development, and altogether the project might be a positive influence. But the ballpark or a team by itself doesn’t have that impact. And that goes all the way up to Triple-A. If you’re talking about Single-A, it’s even more likely to be the case. And if you’re talking about independent league, it’s even more likely to be the case,” said Zimbalist, the author of Baseball and Billions: A Probing Look Inside the Big Business of Our National Pastime, Sports, Jobs and Taxes: The Economic Impact of Sports Teams and Stadiums, and May the Best Team Win: Baseball Economics and Public Policy.

That last comment is significant because the current talk about baseball in Waynesboro involves two scenarios - one that could land a Single-A Carolina League team in the River City, and a second that would involve the independent Atlantic League, a professional league that is not affiliated with Major League Baseball.

The Atlantic League is expanding down the East Coast, with a new team coming online this spring with the debut of the Southern Maryland Blue Crabs, who will open the new $26 million Regency Furniture Stadium on May 2.

There are some interesting parallels between the Charles County project and the proposed Waynesboro stadium project. The talk in Waynesboro has been about housing its team in a 4,000- to 4,500-seat stadium that would be built for an estimated $20 million. Regency Furniture Stadium is 4,500 seats, and was supposed at the outset to cost $18 million to build, before coming in at $26 million when all was said and done.

And the Waynesboro project is being envisioned as being a public-private project, with the city, the state and the developers each pitching in a third of the costs to build the stadium. That was the financial model used in Charles County, where local officials began their most recent efforts toward landing a team in their locality in 2004, according to Gary Hodge, a member of the Charles County Commissioners’ Office, the local governing body.

“Where before we had looked at the county bearing almost the total burden of building the stadium, and that had been a general practice throughout professional sports, not just minor-league ball, but professional baseball and football and et cetera, where the host community seemed in most cases to be saddled with the burden of building the facility, and then attracting a team or tenant to the facility. But in the modern era, where there’s been quite a bit of evolution in the industry, it’s now quite common for the team to play a major role in constructing the facility,” Hodge told me.
“That’s the model that we followed here - where we have the team and the county and the state all carrying an equal one-third share of the cost,” Hodge said.
A potential hurdle for the Waynesboro project is that Virginia traditionally has not followed a similar economic-development model with regard to the construction of sports stadiums and arenas as has been established in Maryland. And then add to that the budget crisis in Richmond that had state leaders debating all winter about cutting the state budget to the absolute bone.

“And then the numbers started changing,” Tom Reynolds said in Waynesboro. “The idea of cost for this stadium at $20 million split three ways, including city, state and then private investors - what I’m beginning to pick up is that the number’s really going to be more like $30 million, and that the state is not going to be all that enthusiastic in investing $10 million in Waynesboro right now with their budget the way it is.

“But that certainly is the expectation of the investors - that the city would come up with a third, the state a third and them a third. And you know how tight things are - the state is cutting things across the board, and they’re telling localities and school boards that they’re not going to get all the money that they originally anticipated, and that sort of stuff,” Reynolds said.

That all having been said, those are potential hurdles, and hurdles can be overcome. But the leap will come, I hope, only after some sound analysis of just how much bang the city and state could each get for their six to ten million dollars apiece.

The Six to Ten Million Dollar Question, then, is, to bring back thoughts of Kevin Costner having a catch with his late father, If they build it, will they come?

“Unless a stadium attracts those fans who wouldn’t have come to the games otherwise, and attract them to stay for longer periods of time than they would have otherwise, it’s probably not going to generate any meaningful benefits,” said Dennis Coates, an economics professor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County and the coauthor of a study, “Caught Stealing: Debunking the Economic Case for D.C. Baseball,” that was published by the conservative Cato Institute.

Coates has also studied the economic impact of football stadiums on local economies, and his research and the research of others in the sports-economics field has shown that baseball doesn’t turn up well in a head-to-head comparison.

“Virtually every professional football game in our data was on a Sunday. One might envision that people would travel to the location on a Friday night, spend a couple of days, and then leave on a Sunday, so that they’re actually in the community for a while. With baseball, most of the games are not on weekends. There’s many games in a short period of time. So the likelihood of traveling to spend much significant time is smaller. And it’s only going to generate benefits if people are coming that wouldn’t have come before, and most of those people are going to be people from out of town,” Coates said.

Andrew Zimbalist back at Smith College has a similar point of view as Coates on the will-they-come issue.

“The only way these things generate any potential development is if it attracts people from outside the area into the area. And that’s not very likely to happen for any minor-league team. And as you go down in stature, particularly all the way down to independent league, you’re just not likely to get that. That’s not to say there’s never going to be anybody, but they’re going to be few and far between. And it’s going to cost the city money,” Zimbalist said.

“So where does the money come from? It either has to come from new taxes, or it has to come from lower services - both of which are not good for a local economy. So even if you attract an occasional person from outside the area, there have got to be enough of them to offset the budgetary affect,” Zimbalist said.

“I don’t like to pooh-pooh things. And if people feel like it’s going to be important culturally or socially to have a minor-league team there, that it will create wholesome family entertainment and do something that unifies the community in some meaningful way, then they should think about if they want to spend that money for that purpose. But it’s really a social and cultural event. It’s not an economic event,” Zimbalist said.

Allow me to insert one more “Field of Dreams” reference here, if you will.

Say it ain’t so, Joe.
“It’s different than if you were to attract, say, an automobile company,” Zimbalist told me. “You produce automobiles there, and then you sell them to the rest of the country and the rest of the world. And if I buy an automobile produced in Virginia in Massachusetts, I have to send you $30,000, and that’s $30,000 that goes into your community. But I’m not going to go down and watch your minor-league baseball team. The people that watch your baseball team are going to be locals. So you don’t get money from the outside. What happens is that money recirculates. People will go to the ballpark instead of going to the movie theater or a restaurant - and there’s no net gain for the area in that regard.
“There certainly will be jobs if you have a team there. People will work in the front office, and people will work in the stadium. But in the aggregate, citizens in the area are spending money at the ballpark that they would have otherwise spent at the local bowling alley or a restaurant or the theater. And then the jobs that would have been at the bowling alley or theater or the restaurant are now at the ballpark. It’s not a net job creation,” Zimbalist said.
The mayor seems to have been briefed on these developments as well. When we first talked a couple of months ago, he was counting down the days until the stadium could open its doors.

“I’m an old athlete myself,” Tom Reynolds said to me. “I know what sports can mean to a community. Think about it. Back in the ’80s, when the girls-basketball team was so strong, and the whole community got into it. And just recently with the basketball and baseball teams being so strong, and the whole community getting into it. It becomes something that the whole community can wrap their minds around and get enthusiastic about. And it does - it does draw the whole community together.

“But what we need to know, at least from the city’s standpoint, before we start writing checks, is what is it going to be? Let’s look at some real things here. Let’s look at some business plans. We’re invested to our eyeballs right now in infrastructure and the capital-improvements plan. We’re certainly willing to look at additional things, but we need to know what it is before we just start dumping money into it,” Reynolds said.

Listen to a special edition of “The SportsDominion Show.”

New Dominion Magazine editor Chris Graham talks in this podcast with Smith College economics professor Andrew Zimbalist about minor-league baseball stadium financing.

Show Length: 7:06

Story by Chris Graham

The Shenandoah Valley is recession-proof. Charlottesville is recession-proof.

I’ve heard people say this for years.

As the argument goes, the local economies have two big things going for them - major universities and agriculture.

Kids still go to school in recessions. And kids and everybody else still eat in recessions.

But …

Is that enough to make us recession-proof?

I thought I’d ask around to get a sense of what those who would seem to be in the know might have to say about this idea.

If I can hint to what the consensus was - well, nobody tried to talk me out of writing this story, if that gives you any indication of things.

***

The presence of the University of Virginia is very much a stabilizing force for the Charlottesville-Albemarle regional economy, said Chris Engel, a specialist in the economic-development office in City Hall in Charlottesville.

“With the university, certainly, here in Charlottesville, almost 25 percent of the jobs in this metro area are related to the university, either with the hospital or the school. That’s a big chunk of the jobs that are controlled by them, and the university is pretty stable. They grow at a measured rate. They rarely lay people off or anything like that,” Engel said.

And in fact it seems that UVa. is going full-steam-ahead with projects that are part of its ambitious $3 billion capital campaign - providing a substantial boost to the local economy in the form of contracts and subcontracts and the rest that should keep the local building community hopping, if nothing else.

“They’re extending The Lawn with the South Lawn Project, they’re building a new children’s hospital, a new cancer center, new parking decks, all that kind of stuff,” Engel said.

“I don’t want to say it’s immune to the macroeconomic trends, but it is, in a way, because it’s being generated through fund-raising efforts that have occurred and are occurring. They may see some tailing off in their fund-raising in this economic recession or whatever it’s going to be, I don’t know, but there’s a lag time with that. And they’ve got projects in the pipeline that if it’s a real short recession will get us through without even hardly noticing,” Engel said.
“There’s a huge spinoff from their construction activity over there. And there’s a lot of companies in and around this area supporting that - small companies, in a lot of cases. So there’s definitely a spinoff effect in a positive way from a lot of activity at the university,” Engel said.

James Madison University certainly plays that kind of role in the Shenandoah Valley economy.

“We really do see that, Chris. We see that we do not have the large peaks and valleys that a lot of other economies do, for a lot of the reasons that you just mentioned,” said Brian Shull, the economic-development director in Harrisonburg.

“The university certainly does have a tremendous impact on the area. I’ve been looking at some of the economic-impact analysis that they’ve provided over the years, and it really does prove that out,” Shull said.

Robin Sullenberger, the executive director of the Shenandoah Valley Partnership, which manages economic-development activities in a seven-county, five-city region in the Central Shenandoah Valley, gives us another perspective on how colleges and universities can be economic engines.

One is through tuition and fees and student-related spending and having thousands of employees on the payroll. A second way is to have colleges and universities partnering with private industry on research and development in the manner of James Madison University and its budding relationship with R&D giant SRI International.

“We have a higher-education consortium that has 12 colleges and universities as members, including three community colleges, that extends all the way from Winchester to Lexington. So the colleges and universities at every level and of every type are getting more actively engaged in business and industry activities,” Sullenberger said.

***

“It’s certainly accurate that our Valley has been fortunate to have been able to weather economic downturns fairly well. We’re never at the extremes of the peaks and valleys. In terms of why that is, I’d like to give our agricultural economy credit for that, but I’m not sure if I have the basis to say that,” said Hobey Bauhan, the president of the Harrisonburg-based Virginia Poultry Federation, which sits at the head of a nearly billion-dollar industry in Virginia that is directly responsible for 5,000 Valley jobs and is indirectly responsible for another 35,000 ancillary jobs.

“The agricultural industry that we have in the Valley has always been the center of our economy here - and does stimulate a lot of economic benefits for our area,” Bauhan said. “In economic downtimes, people still have to eat. That is one thing that we can’t do without is food - and our Valley is a significant food producer. That part of our economy is certainly affected by the economic ups and downs over the years, but that can be a stabilizing economic influence.”

But even as people will always need to eat, there is also an obvious impact on the stability of the ag economy from macroeconomic trends.

“We’re seeing significantly higher feed costs, and that has been caused in part by the amount of corn that is now going toward the ethanol industry as well as just the world demand of corn. That has driven up the cost of corn the past couple of years, and corn is one of the major input costs for the production of poultry, as soybeans are as well,” Bauhan said.

“Those are not costs that the industry can just immediately pass on to its customers - so it tends to go against the bottom line. The other cost factor going against the industry, as with other sectors of the economy, is energy, as energy costs have gone way up, as has been the case for other sectors as well,” Bauhan said.

“Balance in supply and demand has allowed price strength. But production is forecast to increase, and that will put downward pressure on price. And with increased production costs, that tends to stress profits. That’s what we’re facing on a macroeconomic level going into the near term,” Bauhan said.

***

We all want more industry and manufacturing jobs. The world revolves around how we all want more industry and manufacturing jobs. But, and it’s a mixed blessing, maybe part of our immunity, if you will, to economic downturns comes from our relative paucity of industry and manufacturing jobs.

“We have, unfortunately, significantly less manufacturing employment here than we did five, ten, fifteen years ago. That’s a national trend, though. And those tend to be more sensitive to the ups and downs of the macroeconomy,” said Michael Harvey, the executive director of the Thomas Jefferson Partnership for Economic Development, which coordinates economic-development activities for the Greater Charlottesville region.

And even though efforts to attract industry and manufacturing jobs won’t stop because there’s a downturn or recession or whatever it is that’s happening right now, they will slow down, if only because that’s what we see when times get tight in the short term.

“We still have strong interest from people looking in the Valley, but when we go through tougher national economic times, we just notice the timeline seems to extend out a little bit,” Harrisonburg economic-development director Brian Shull said.

“It takes a little longer for those decisions to be made. I think a lot of that comes down to financing issues - it takes a little bit longer for them to work through all those issues when the credit crunch is a little tighter,” Shull said.

“What we’re basically seeing right now is a lull period. And we would anticipate that would be anywhere from six to eighteen months long,” Shenandoah Valley Partnership executive director Robin Sullenberger said.

“There is a good side to that from an economic-development perspective - and that is that it’s an ideal time to prepare for the next economic upturn. And we do many things to work toward that - and the primary thing that we’re working on right now is advancing our workforce skills. Because we do think that the economy will be more geared toward technologically advanced job opportunities, and our workforce certainly needs to be nurtured to get to that level,” Sullenberger said.

***

So what’s going on out there, anyway?

I’ve been sidestepping the answer to that question, but it might not hurt us to know what is going on in the world at large, whether it ultimately affects us or not.

“My take would be that we have entered a slowdown - and I’m avoiding using the word recession at the moment,” UVa. economics professor Peter Rodriguez said.

“I think we can expect that to endure for another couple of quarters, and I think that the remainder of ‘08 is going to be one of flat to no growth. I’m not exactly confident that we’re going to experience a classic or textbook recession where we actually have the economy shrink, but we certainly have entered into a notably slower period for the economy. And I expect that to remain through ‘08,” Rodriguez said.

And what does the academic think this will mean for our local economy? Does he agree with the developers and ag producers and university leaders and the rest that we’re going to emerge from the slowdown pretty much unscathed?

We’re all waiting breathlessly for the final verdict, aren’t we?

“It’s certainly true that none of the local industries are in any serious threat of long-term decline. So I think that the underlying base for the local economy is quite solid. And what I mean by that is if you think of this as a very high-growth construction area like, say, Las Vegas, or a manufacturing area like the Detroit area, those places are in long-term decline, and I think that the underlying base there threatens those economies. But for us, that’s not a concern,” Rodriguez said.

“The flip side of that is, no one is completely exempt, and with a little less confidence around the economy, you’ll feel it. You’ll feel it no matter where you are and how strong your base is,” Rodriguez said.

“But I don’t expect that there will be a pronounced fallout locally like I expect it will hit major cities - and in particular some high-growth areas of the East Coast and the West Coast,” Rodriguez said.

You can exhale now.

Story by Chris Graham

Your first instinct during a recession is to cut back on extras like eating out, going to the theater, going on vacation.

Or is it?

“The recent press has amplified a growing anxiety that is out there about home finances. But for the most part, Americans tend to see their leisure time and vacations almost as a birthright. So it may change a little bit, but it won’t be something that they would give up quickly,” said Mark Shore, the director and CEO of the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau.

And where things might change locally for those in the local entertainment sector is in terms of the people who will be turning the turnstiles.

“Typically there does tend to be a little bit of a shift in terms of where people end up going. But mostly it tends to be a shifting of their activity. Virginia tends to be heavily visited by other Virginians. And the D.C. market for Charlottesville is a very strong market, and still is just a two-hour drive away,” Shore said.

“You may want to go to Charlottesville, you may want to go hiking. You want to go to the Frontier Culture Museum, you want to go to the Woodrow Wilson Library. You want to see what Mary Baldwin College looks like. You want to come to the American Shakespeare Center. We have a great opportunity now in these economic times to really capitalize more on what Virginia’s destinations are. And to really mount a campaign to get ourselves on the map,” said David Dreyfoos, the managing director at the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton.

So it seems that what will be happening in the next few months is that the industry will be changing its focus in terms of the traveler that it wants to attract, at least in the short term, until the economy gets back on a solid footing again.

The good news is that many players in the industry will do OK with that new short-term focus on more local travelers. But there will be some pain and agony, particularly in the hotel sector.

“So often, we try to measure things in the tourism industry by room nights - the lodging establishments and their reported tax revenues and this kind of thing. And when you have folks coming in for those day trips, you don’t really get that measuring stick that you get from the hotels, who report on how many room nights and how much taxes have been generated in a specific jurisdiction, and those kinds of things,” said Brian Ososky, the executive director of the Shenandoah Valley Travel Association.

And what that does is affect how local governments budget for tourism-related expenses - including putting money toward tourism advertising and promotional materials and activities.

“And if the economy is difficult, it also makes it harder for the governments to provide grants, so it becomes a little tighter there, because their budgets get squeezed by the legislators,” said Kim Edward Renz, the executive director of Theater at Lime Kiln, a nonprofit theater based in Lexington.

“The legislators say, Well, the economy is bad, so we have to cut back. And unfortunately one of the areas that gets cut back really quickly and very often larger than some others is arts - because they consider it to be extracurricular, et cetera. Those of us who work in it understand it a little differently.
“About 20 percent of our funding comes from grants,” Renz said. “Probably close to the same amount, maybe slightly smaller than that, comes from sponsorships at this time. We’d like to increase that. But the squeeze is not just on us - it’s also on our sponsors. Because if people are not spending their dollars coming to them, for whatever reason, the squeeze hit them, too.”

There’s still hope across the spectrum that the talk about the squeeze on donors and government finances and travelers is just that, just talk.

“I’m going to stick with what I’ve been saying about this all along. I think the industry is resilient,” Ososky said. “People will always want to be entertained in some way, shape or form. And I think when it comes to their weekend escapes, their day trips, their family vacations, I think those decisions may be made differently about where people go, but I think people are still going to make time to do those sorts of activities.”