The Northern Virginia Daily

Article date:  May 28, 2008

Front Royal council votes to remove funding for EDA

By :Ben Orcutt

FRONT ROYAL — The Town Council's unanimous approval of its fiscal 2009 budget was overshadowed Tuesday night by an amendment to the spending package.

On a motion by Councilman Stanley W. "Stan" Brooks Jr., the panel voted 4-1 to amend the budget to include taking out $30,917 in funding for operating expenses for the Front Royal-Warren County Economic Development Authority and placing the money into a contingency fund.

The vote on the amendment was 4-1, with Councilman and Mayor-elect Eugene R. Tewalt casting the opposing vote. Vice Mayor Timothy W. Darr is recuperating from kidney surgery and was not present at Tuesday's meeting.

The fiscal 2009 budget of $35,715,985 comes in nearly $3 million less than this year's $38,435,315 package, and the Town Council voted unanimously to approve the new budget on second reading.

However, Brooks referred the panel to a recent vote by the EDA as an example, he said, of why the Town Council needed to reign in the agency. Brooks said he was not directing his remarks at incoming EDA Executive Director Jennifer R. McDonald, who worked for the authority as property manager for nine years, ending in 2004, and who will begin work June 1.

McDonald attended Tuesday's meeting, but did not wish to comment on the council's decision, saying she was not full-time with the EDA yet.

"Personally, I could not vote to fund the EDA any more than they're already funded," Brooks said. "Over the last few years, there has been a lack of accountability, a lack of checks and balances, and the EDA has been heading off in kind of a different direction ... without any guidance or direction from the town or the county for the most part."

Brooks said when he first made a motion at the council's May 12 meeting to cut the EDA's operating funds out of the fiscal 2009 budget, he did so with an open mind.

However, Brooks said a May 15 vote by the EDA convinced him that he was right in his original assessment that the EDA needed more oversight. Brooks said he attended the May 9 EDA meeting during which the panel voted 5-2 against purchasing theater equipment from Wayside Theatre until another organization would commit to leasing or buying the equipment that Wayside had used when it put on productions at Royal Phoenix.

"Six days later, four of the members had a special meeting," Brooks said, and they voted 3-1 to purchase the equipment for $65,000, knowing that three of the members who had voted against the purchase would not be able to attend the meeting, including the town's two representatives.

Brooks said if the Town Council had done that, its members would be "tarred and feathered."

"What we're talking about though is the process and how this was ramroded through without any representative from the town at all and without three members who were on the opposite side of this," Brooks said. "Had they had to bring this to the town council, I doubt seriously in my conversations with the council whether the council would have approved of this project. ... That reaffirmed my belief that we need to do what we can do to build accountability and checks and balances into the EDA."