With declining revenues, tight budgets and little relief in sight, Chesterfield County administrator James J.L. "Jay" Stegmaier isn't shy about asking for help.
But he's not just looking for hints and suggestions. In a winding conversation he labeled "probably a little more philosophical" than normal, he said he would be happy if the people of Chesterfield involved themselves in the process more often.
The question for 2011, he said during the Thursday morning interview in his office, is "if we're going to be a democracy and if we're going to rely on citizens, how do you effectively engage citizens so that they have a substantial knowledge base that grounds their involvement in the decision-making process?"
He's not alone in trying to answer that question. In the past three years, the Board of Supervisors has made public engagement one of its priorities.
"An informed, educated citizenry is essential to the success of a great government," said Dale District Supervisor James M. "Jim" Holland. "We need to continue to find and use modes of communication that can inform and enlighten them."
Midlothian District Supervisor Daniel A. Gecker, the current chairman of the board, said the county's website was a good example of the evolution of engagement.
"It was a serviceable but not user-friendly site," he said. "So we as a board pushed to improve that, and we created an award-winning site."
In the past year or so, the county has also begun airing its Board of Supervisors meetings live online, started an electronic newsletter and ramped up its schedule of public forums and meetings, particularly around the county's first attempt at a comprehensive plan since the 1980s.
Last year's budget forums, Stegmaier said, attracted 100 or so people at a time. "Which is a lot more than we normally [attract], with a much deeper level of information on what's happening," he said. "But now in the grand scheme, if we reached 1,000 citizens that way" — and they didn't, he said, because some people showed up at all of the meetings — "that's still a fraction of a percentage of the total population of the county."
On Thursday night, fewer than 50 people showed up at L.C Bird High School for the first public presentation of the draft version of the new comprehensive plan.
The plan is also available online and in county libraries. The crowd included Gecker, whose district hosts the next meeting on the plan, Thursday night at Midlothian High School.
"I'm hopeful we can go into more detail," Gecker said. "The people in this district are accustomed to being able to ask questions, so we'll change the format some."
Getting people's attention, no matter how, is the goal, Stegmaier said. But it's also quite a challenge.
"We are currently struggling with how do we build interest in, and access to, some of the electronic forms of information?" he said. "For example, the live streaming of board meetings, that's an access to information that wasn't always available. But when you have 165 channels to choose from and an endless supply of YouTube videos, why would you tune into a Board of Supervisors meeting?"
The problem, he said, is that expectations are out of line with reality.
"We have a couple of generations growing up being told they can have whatever they want from their government and somebody else will pay for it," he said.
"And the realization that we're beginning to come to is, the somebody else was always a future generation. We have reached the end of our capacity to slough off on future generations the liability for absorbing those costs.
"In that context, we have to make the very difficult decisions about what's important, what we're going to continue to do and what we're not going to continue to do so we can bring the cost of services in line with what people are willing to pay without pushing the cost of services on future generations.
"What that means is, going to the people and saying, 'This is a difficult decision we have to make.'"
The immediate need for the year, he said, is to "develop a consensus vision of what an excellent school, excellent public safety services look like."
But he said other issues couldn't be pushed aside. From the financial crisis in Europe to the need for better landscape design in Chesterfield, he said, everything is connected at some point, and ignoring one facet places others in peril.
"We're at a fork in the road," he said. "Which direction are we going to go? I'm optimistic. But it's time for an honest discussion."
His offered his thoughts for dialogue on:
Economic development
"How do we sustain and pay for a high quality of life in a desirable community? In that area, what we need to do is develop a much more precise and targeted economic development strategy and within that strategy develop goals that will ensure a balanced tax base that you need to support a high level of services without overburdening homeowners.
"We haven't been precise in defining what kind of economic development is the best kind for our community. Economic development that is capital intensive has a different impact on your community than economic development that is labor intensive. … Capital-intensive economic development generates a lot of tax revenue without necessarily adding substantially to population growth. If you have labor-intensive economic development, you're also going to have to find places to put that labor growth, and you're going to have costs associated with that labor growth.
"I'm not saying which is right and which is wrong, I'm just saying it's time to have a very honest and very open discussion."
Revitalization
Most of the county's growth occurred in the 1970s and '80s — Chesterfield increased from about 70,000 people in 1970, when Richmond annexed part of the county, to more than 210,000 by 1990; it has since increased to more than 300,000 — meaning many of the neighborhoods and commercial corridors have reached the age when they begin needing substantial care.
"It's almost like a fork in the road," he said. "Which way is this neighborhood going to go?"
He said it was the county's responsibility to spur revitalization to keep those neighborhoods from declining.
"We need to take advantage of those opportunities that exist in the older areas of the county," he said.
Governing in election year
"The election year atmosphere will cut both ways," he said. "There will be a tendency to avoid issues that are highly controversial. But there will be opportunities to increase the level of engagement beyond what it might be outside that. It's like anything else. Circumstances like that are neither good nor bad; your decisions on how you employ those circumstances make them so."
The future of The Diamond
"What everyone realizes around issues like the ballpark is, it's very difficult to talk with your citizens about funding a facility like a ballpark before we resolve some of these others things, like what are we going to do to ensure that we have the best quality education for our kids, to have a community where people feel safe. That's going to have to be resolved to a higher level" before talk of a ballpark begins.
The 2011 assembly session
"Stewardship is not just balancing the books. It's ethics. It's being honest with the people. Being honest with the public about what level of service you can have at what cost, [I think] in this region the local governments, like Chesterfield and Henrico and Hanover, have done a good job on that. The federal government deserves a big, red F. The state government is somewhere in between.
"There's a lot of things we can talk about like cash proffers and funding for education and so on and so forth, but what I think local governments in Virginia are well-positioned to do this year is increase the level of openness and honesty and raise the level of discussion around this question of what services are most critical, what level of service to do we want and what can we afford?
"As we go through this session of the General Assembly, we have to keep raising that issue and not allow this false promise that the people can have whatever they want and don't worry about it, somebody else will pay for it. Do not allow that to be the false promise that is communicated to the public.
"The bigger issue in this era is increasing the level of honesty about the fiscal situation we're in as a society."
zreid@timesdispatch.com
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