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Concordia: Ploy to run roughshod over people's representatives?

Date published: 10/30/2002

IT HAS NEVER BEEN EASY being the public. When it comes to local government and the public's involvement, an element the Founding Fathers thought crucial to a democracy's survival, the public is a genuinely confused and beleaguered body.

For instance, take the supposed public information session on the Town at Chancellorsville project. When Spotsylvania County Supervisor Jerry Marcus finally got around to answering a few questions from the public, he chastised them for "coming late to the table" and not having been involved sooner. He, of course, had invited them to this meeting in the first place, and now he stood before them and said they were too late. When one man spoke up and said he had been there from the beginning, Jerry Marcus shrugged his shoulders.

Jerry Marcus shrugged his shoulders. That could be our epitaph.

And, of course, the public has always been urged to "Get out there and vote!" Voting is, after all, our civic duty. By voting we endow our elected officials with the mandate needed to act in the public's interest.

And yet, in Fredericksburg, that, too, apparently isn't good enough--especially for those who this time around were not the object of the public's voting affection. In Fredericksburg, it seems, if you lose an election and you happen to think you should still run the city anyway, you pay to create your own council--a shadow government of unelected but paying personalities. Then you call it government by the people, even though not one was ever voted into office; you exclude the duly elected governing body from participating, and you bully the city into accepting the resulting so-called leadership. It could be beautiful, unless, of course, you happen to be "the public."

Concordia, a private consulting firm which specializes in planning, has been invited into Fredericksburg by certain private interests to operate separately from the existing City Council. Concordia's mission to somehow create a plan for the city's future is a transparent attempt to co-opt the public will and to ostracize our current city leadership into irrelevance. Not only is it almost un-American, it is, like Jerry Marcus' alarming admonition of the public he had invited, insulting and unacceptable.

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Date published: 10/30/2002