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Re-elect Mayor Tomzak Date published: 4/23/2008
LIKE A SAILBOAT, a city can drift, Dr. Tomzak's mayoralty has been one with an abiding theme. Just after assuming office in 2004, he wrote a commentary for this newspaper noting the inconvenient obvious: To make Fredericksburg a more enjoyable city, with greater cultural and recreational assets, requires funding. If such funding is not to come from rising property taxes, it must come from elsewhere. "Downtown Retail Merchants Inc.," Dr. Tomzak wrote, "envisions a downtown of upscale shops, galleries, and fine restaurants. [It] doesn't want downtown to deteriorate to tattoo parlors and junk shops. The only way to accomplish this is to increase patronage." Putting feet on the street is the ultimate aim of the incentives the Tomzak-led City Council has approved for Capital Ale House and Kybecca Wine & Gourmet to, respectively, locate and expand in downtown. Whether or not one cottons to incentives--we don't--they represent a cogent strategy to draw people to the city center and jump-start commerce there, especially at night, when Old Town is often as shuttered as a medieval village during a vampire scare. Downtown amenities either completed (e.g., a parking deck) or in the works (a hotel) under Dr. Tomzak--in the face of county retail competition already eroding tax receipts from Central Park--form the infrastructure requisite to a healthy tourism industry, the perpetual bellyaching of the e-mail commandos notwithstanding. The mayor is persuasive: "If it were possible to freeze the Historic District in time, I would do so. It would be wonderful to live in a tourist town without the bother of tourists. There are towns like this out West. They are called ghost towns."
Has the good of the community as his first priority, and he recognizes the issues that must be addressed. With the backing of a solid City Council, Fredericksburg will move forward in schieving a worthy vision for 2027.
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