The 12 Plagues of Radford Part 2

Just a good old boy, never meanin' no harm He's all you never saw, and ain't trouble worth a lawn Since the day they was born Raisin' them terns, plantin' the hills Someday the mountain might get a little longer Makin' their way, the only way they know how That's just a little bit more than the long of the line One more round podcast where we straighten the curbs, flatten the hills, and stay one step ahead of the city's boss. I'm your host Keith Marshall, and let's go one more round. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Tear down this wall. We will make America great again. If I say something and you don't want to listen, don't listen. One more round. Hey, welcome to One More Round Podcast. I'm your host as always, Keith Marshall. If you can't laugh a little bit, what's wrong with you? We're going to have fun today, even though our topics are not a lot of fun. We're going back into the series of the 12 Plagues of Radford. I only made it through 1 through 5 the other day, so we've got a tall order ahead of us to get through the final 7, I guess it is. Final 7. And we're going to start right off the bat. We're not going to waste any time. By the way, though, I will say this. I've got a lot of comments, and I've got a ton of private messages and just likes and all those things from the previous episode, Part 1. If you haven't seen that, the Plagues of Radford, the 12 Plagues of Radford, Part 1, please jump in there. You can listen to them in either order. It really doesn't matter. But jump in there if you would and listen to those first 5 that I got down. I think they will make a lot of sense to you. They kind of spell the direction that we're going, what's been happening to us over the last 5 or 6 years. And it kind of is the roadmap to how we got to where we are, why we're having this kind of problems financially and in a lot of areas. And number 6, I'm going to get into one that's not financial in nature. At the start, it's not anyway, but I think it's led to a lot of the problems that we have now. And that is number 6, excessive partisanship. Now, you may say, wait a second, Keith, aren't you partisan? And you know, I am. I have grown that way in the city of Radford over the last 5 or 6 years. And I've done so, in my opinion, out of a necessity, not a desire, but a necessity. You know, in 2010, I ran for city council. And I went all around the city knocking on doors. I knocked on, I think, every household in the city. Now, I may have missed a few of the Radford University student housing locations, which makes sense, right? Doesn't now, but it made sense then. And I ran as an independent. Now, I haven't changed. I was conservative. I was a Republican. But I was bound and determined in my mind and in my heart to represent the citizens of Radford in a bipartisan way. Now, doing it in a bipartisan way doesn't mean you throw away your conservative principles. No, no, not at all. That goes with you, your personal beliefs, the fact that I was a Christian, the fact that I, you know, believed and had a strong belief in righting wrong and telling the truth and doing things the right way. That wasn't going to change. But I didn't run to be just a Republican council member. I ran to be a Radford City councilman. And I tried my best as I was appointing people and doing things to make sure that I looked at the merit of that person and what they brought to that particular board or commission or whatever it was, irregardless of what party they were in. And I carried that through my second term when I was elected to council the second time. I guess that was 2014. But when I ran for mayor in 2018, everything changed. And I have to be honest, I didn't expect it. That is where, that is the point. If you're looking at a North Star point, if you're looking at a seminal time frame in the city of Radford, when everything changed, I think you will point back to 2018 and the election that year. And I talk a lot about that under my series of how to rig an election. And I believe the title of that, yeah, here it is, Letting the Wolves in the Gate, the Radford City election of 2018. And I released that on January the 11th. You can go back and listen to that and you'll get a lot more information about what exactly happened in 2018. But just to give you the cliff notes on it for my point, to put a fine point on my point for number six. We had a situation, especially in the mayoral race, but it filtered down and actually strongly affected who won and lost throughout all the council races for the 2018 election. We held those in May at the time. And what happened was you had the Radford City Democratic Party get heavily involved in that election, and it was the first time in a local election like that, to my knowledge, that either party had ever gotten involved. You specifically had strong involvement from the Radford University College Democrats. They held rallies on campus. They put out posts and disseminated the information. There was voting drives. There was a group that came in out of San Francisco affiliated with the Democratic Party called Next Gen America. And they had booths on campus to sign up kids to vote. They worked with the Chris Hurst campaign, Democratic campaign, who had just previously won in the November 2017 election when he won, at the time he won a delegate spot representing Radford and the surrounding area. And they used that core group and that information they had derived from that other election to go out and recruit Radford University students and also to go door-to-door within the community with members of the Democratic Party in order to just kind of bring everybody in under 110 and say, Hey, Republican Marshall over here bad. He's a Trump guy. Democrat over here Horton, he's good. He's our Democratic candidate. And, you know, that's very effective. And what we have seen since then in 2018, what we've seen since then is both parties getting involved and actually recruiting candidates and endorsing candidates, spending money on candidates, getting more involved. And I fear, I fear that we have forever divided the city when it comes to local elections, whether they be school board or city council. We've divided ourselves into Republicans and Democrats. Now, you may say I'm a strong Democrat or I'm a strong Republican. Well, I'm glad they did that. I really want Republicans to run. Well, I get that. And there would be a part of me that might tend to agree with that, except for the nastiness that comes with it. And there's a lot of nastiness. And I think we can all agree on this. There is nothing civil about politics when it involves party. It's one thing for a guy on 3rd Street or a guy on 10th Street or Forest Avenue or wherever you live to run for office under your name and say I'm, you know, John Smith. And I work, I work for Carillion or I work over at the Foundry. Well, I can't work at the Foundry now, can you? That's part of my youth and you would always remember that. Or you can say wherever. I work at, you know, one of the local businesses in the city. And I grew up here or I moved here 15 years ago. And here's the issues that I'm concerned about. I'm concerned about funding for our schools. And I want to generate more private business in the city. And I want to increase our industrial, whatever it is. You run on those list of things. And you represent yourself and your reputation within the community, your abilities that your friends have noticed, and the people that will speak for you. Those were the qualities in the past that you would run on, that you would win or lose on. And it was about you, not about the party. Well, now, unfortunately, it's about the party. And that bipartisanship that we used to have has been lost. You know, when you get on council now, it's very clear who the Republicans and who the Democrats are. And that is a problem. And I think anyone on council, if they were honest about that, would admit that that has become a problem and has prevented us from making good decisions, from getting good. And I'll tell you what it's really preventing now. And that's getting good people to run. Not because they're not a Democrat or not a Republican. Maybe they really are one of the two. Or maybe they're somewhere in between. But they do not want to get into the nastiness and the labeling that happens when you run into that. And we're going to get back in. One of my plagues will deal with leadership today. And we're going to talk about that. But one of the things that it produces are poor leaders, I think, at times. Sometimes you'll find out that the—and this isn't true for all of them, so I am not labeling our current elected officials under this category. Please don't. That is not my point. But I think you can see how only the most partisan and only the most—I don't know—only those that really, really want to put themselves in a situation where they're out front and where they're noticed and where they're important. You wonder if you don't get some of those kind of narcissistic individuals to run in that case. And I'm certainly not applying that label to all of our city officials at all. But I think you can see how that would run. So I think overall, for our politics for the city, as we elect these offices—and by the way, you have to run as an independent in Virginia. A lot of people wonder why there's not a Republican or Democratic label on the ballot when you choose your school board or your city council. That's because, according to state law, they have to run as an independent. The party can endorse them on their own, but there will not be an endorsement on that ballot. You will not see that. It will have to be done privately and separately from the ballot. Everyone has to, by state law, run as an independent. But unfortunately, we're not running as independents in the city anymore. We're running as Republicans and Democrats. And oftentimes, it takes away the common sense and the camaraderie and the local kind of patriotism about the city of Radford that happened when we could run and we could do things that would be best for the city and not necessarily for the party. So number one today, which is number six overall for the plagues of Radford, that is excessive partisanship. Now, the next one, I'm going to take a swing. We're going to go in another direction. We're going to flip a little bit. It's not going to be a related topic. And I told you before when I did these originally in part one, I do not have these in a particular order. Although, Cogen was one of the largest and toughest plagues that's yet to come that I mentioned in the first one. But these are not necessarily in a direct order, just as I wrote them down. The next one, number seven, is growing poverty. You know, I think you will not find it more evident anywhere else in the city than in our public schools, growing poverty. And I want to point this out because, you know, I don't want to put a stigma on people that are below the poverty line or that are struggling. Because I guarantee you there's probably a couple points in my life, though I didn't know it, I probably was below the poverty line. When my wife and I first got married, I mean, we didn't make anything. We were both working for just a little over minimum wage and renting a little house and just having enough money to put gas in our cars and, you know, eat beans and rice or something every now and then. So we might even fell below the poverty line. I don't know. But, hey, people that are working and they're moving themselves up and they're working hard and they're moving up to the next level, you've got to love and pray for those people. I mean, it's tough to get started, especially nowadays with the cost of buying a home, with the cost of just, you know, a jar, a can of whatever, a jar of peanut butter or a pack of bacon or whatever you're buying at the grocery store, much less trying to buy a car to get to work with or any of those things. The deck is stacked against people starting out. It's really a sad thing that we're seeing now. But it is a growing problem within the city. And a lot of that is our fault. And what do I mean by that? It's not our fault necessarily that the people are poor. It's our fault because we have literally thrown out a drag net to bring more in. Now, what do I mean? Well, number one, many years ago, and this is before this council took, you know, the last couple of councils, just many years ago, we built a lot of this Section 8 housing. And that obviously, you know, if you build it, that's one of the cases where, it's one of the rare cases that if you build it, they will come. You build low-income housing, low-income individuals will come live in that housing. That's a promise. They're going to come. And we built it and they came. Now, we could handle that then because the city was doing very well. That was before the Foundry closed. And I've mentioned some of that in another podcast. But that's before the Foundry closed and things were going a little better. We had a better financial base here in the city of Rapid. Hospitals here, several other things. But we've continued that practice. And I know when I was on council, I voted against numerous new housing projects that were being built in East End. Now, they were being built to house Rapid University students. But the problem was, as they were being built, and they were asking for special use permits and things like that, as it was being built, the population of students was falling. So the argument to me was just clear. It was obvious. And I asked the question, why in the world would you build new student housing when you already have more housing than you do students and the population of the students is falling? Well, I'll tell you why they built it. And I'm not faulting the developers. This is not an attack on them. They built it because they knew they could rent it. It was going to be new. It was going to be closer to campus. It was going to be more modern. You know, that's capitalism. They knew they could build it. But here's the part where good governance comes in. You can't blame someone that's in the business of building apartments for wanting to build them and wanting to make more money and to be a capitalist. You cannot blame them. But good governance means you take a look at the situation, and if it's legal for them to build it, and they can build it on their own without any say from you, then fine. They get to do that. But if it's zoned improperly and they've got to come to you to have it rezoned in order to build it, you have to take a hard look and say, okay, is it a good idea to rezone this property so they can build more apartments? Is that going to have an ulterior effect on the city in some way? And it was going to have that. Here was the effect, and this is exactly what has happened. When you already have too many apartment units for the number of students you have, and you build new, more modern apartments, some of them even real close to campus, well, those students and the future students, which apartments do you think they're going to pick? Well, they're going to pick the new ones. I know I would. They'd pick the new ones. So they fill up. But the ones further away from campus that aren't quite as nice, that are already starting to deteriorate a little bit, they're going to start having vacancies, more and more and more vacancies. And it's only a matter of time, in order to keep their bills paid, those apartments that are going vacant, they're going to have to rent to low income. Now, remember what I said? If you build it for low income housing, they will come. Well, they came again. In this case, they didn't have to build it. They just had to repurpose it. So what we're seeing on East End, particularly around the university, around the older apartments, the ones that are across on the other side of Main Street as well, and the housing, the small housing units where people once lived that worked at Burlington and other places. We are seeing those units and those houses, they're going low income. So our poverty numbers are rising. What happens when poverty numbers rise? Well, there's a lot of things that happen. Number one, your cost for social services goes up. And that's wide ranging. Your cost of public schools goes up. Your trouble and your problems within the schools go up. Because unfortunately, and it's not true, for I think all of the low income families, or most, it's probably not true. But they do increase the numbers of problems with students acting out or students with other problems. They're not fed properly. They're coming to school in bad shape sometimes. And it causes problems within the school system. Those problems cost money. It makes it harder to keep teachers. It makes you have to have, you know, we're having to pay for officers to come in the school for a wide range of reasons, not just low income, other things too. But we're having problems and it costs money within our schools. It costs money within the police department. It requires more visits from police officers, from fire and EMS and other things. All of that grows when your low income grows. It's just, it's a fact that nobody likes to talk about. And it's easy for someone to point a finger and say, well, you're being cruel or mean. I'm not. I'm just trying to get the facts out about what really happens when that section grows. And it happens. And like I said, that there's all kinds of issues that come up from that. And it grows the cost. And it is. Growing poverty is not only a plague on those that are poor. It's a plague on the city that they're in because it hurts the bottom line of the city. And it makes financially life tougher for the city and all the other citizens that are within the city. Now, keeping going, and I'm going to have to keep moving because I'm talking too much. But number eight dovetails with the growing poverty. It's just another element of that. And that is homelessness. Homelessness is a growing plague in the city of Radford. And you will find, if you check my podcast, I did do a pretty good podcast, I think, on that called The Homeless of Radford. And I'm looking here to see if I can find the date that I did that. Oh, I don't see it. Oh, there it is. December the 21st, I did an episode on The Homeless of Radford. You should check that out. There's a pretty crazy story in there that I think you're going to hear about something that happened to a friend of mine in regards to one of the homeless people in Radford. But if you'll notice as you ride around town, if you'll look into some of the wooded areas, you can see the remnants of camps or actually camps that are out there. And I don't want to point out where they are or where I saw them. I had a law enforcement person give me a few tips about where to look, and I actually went down and I found some of those camps. I encountered a homeless man while I was out there. I've had numerous people send me pictures. There is an issue down in Bissett Park and Wildwood down in that area where they're camping in that area and hanging out on picnic tables and benches, getting in the bathrooms at night, and staying under bridges and other things there at Wildwood Park. So there is a serious issue going on in the city with homelessness. And like anything else, that detracts from your city when you see those things. Now, thank goodness we're not Los Angeles. They're not out on the streets where you're walking and things. And those people, God bless them, they need help. Some of them have issues with drugs or mental problems. Some of them just need a hand up, and they're trying to get that. And there are some programs that are available right now for those that will accept it to get off the streets. But they're also an element. There's some there that have no intentions of getting off the streets or out of the woods or wherever they are. So we are seeing the plague of homelessness in the city of Radford grow. Now, I'm going to keep rolling. I'm going to bounce back to Radford University. You know, one through five was pretty heavy on Radford University because some of the things they're doing and some of the things that happen have been pretty blunt plagues on the city of Radford. And increasingly, I feel less and less like we have a good, mutual, friendly relationship with Radford University. I feel a lot like they're taking advantage of us. Now, this is not necessarily has to do anything with them taking advantage of us, but it is something that we are seeing in the city that hurts us. And that is falling student numbers. You know, Radford University was approaching and had goals to reach around 11,000 students at one time. But we've seen a steady decline in that where they're falling now, believe it or not, between 4,500 and 5,000 students that are actually on campus. Now, you've got to watch when they put out their numbers. They will put them out and they will count students that are in their other campuses that are in Roanoke or they will count students that are online. You know, that's not the same. That's not the same. Someone online from Fairfax to Radford University is certainly not the same as someone living in the city, buying their groceries here, buying their gas here, doing things like that. They're certainly not the same thing. So, we've seen those numbers fall. It's just like, well, just look at it this way. You know, you own a restaurant and you're used to having a pool of 500 people that come by and eat at your restaurant every week. Well, if that pool falls in half, all of a sudden there's only 250 people around that the pool that you're drawing from. Well, obviously, unless you have a super loyal 250 people, your numbers are going to fall as a restaurant. And it's the same in the city. When we see the student numbers drop, all of the businesses that they do business with, whether you're Food Line or Food City or, you know, the Cedar Valley Gas Stations or wherever you're at, you're going to see your numbers fall. Theater downtown, wouldn't you imagine that less students are going to come out to the movies if there's half as many of them as there were? Or any of the shops along East Main Street or West Main Street or wherever they are. You're going to see the numbers fall for those businesses. And when those businesses' numbers fall, the taxes that are being paid back to the city, our numbers fall. And that hurts the city overall. Now, we haven't helped that by the fact that we've employed a bus system that ships those students for almost nothing, if not nothing, outside of the city to Walmart and everywhere else to buy their groceries instead of inside the city. We give them opportunities to go and spend their money somewhere else on our dime. Those kind of things don't help. But overall, the student numbers, those numbers falling hurt us. Now, as those numbers have fallen, and this is something that, you know, ties back to the very first or the growing poverty numbers and some other things. As those student numbers have fallen, we have seen people come into those housing units to replace them that were low income or that, you know, we're having some problems with. And we're going to get to that in a later issue. But as that come in, we've seen crime increase in those areas. So, we've lost students and backfilled it with poverty and crime. And that's a problem. So, falling student numbers within the 12 plagues of Radford, it comes in at the big number nine. All right. Number 10. Now, number 10, we have just got smacked in the mouth with here recently. And that is loss of industry. Now, I cannot blame the present council for the recent loss. If you haven't heard, Moog, which sits down on Four Lanes and Rock Road there at the end of West Radford there, they have just announced that they will be shuttering their doors and everyone there will be either relocated or laid off by the end of the year, but looks like most of them will be gone by August or somewhere in that time frame. Very tragic thing that we've seen happen. You have to feel sorry. I mean, there are families that depended on that income. We need to pray that they'll find good work and a good job and that Radford can replace that industry because that's a tough loss for the city, a loss of business, personal property taxes, most definitely a loss in electric sales and water and sewer and other things. So, that's a loss to the city. But we have seen a plague, a plague of a loss of industry over quite a few years. You know, when I ran for mayor in 2018, that was one of my key platform issues, and that was to make an industrial park over on the old foundry property or to get businesses in there as quick as possible to rebuild that industrial base. And I remember my opponent at the time kind of made fun of me, and he mentioned, oh, we've got this business, we've got Moog, and some of the others, and, you know, to kind of say that's not an important issue. That's the gist or that's the way I got it. Well, it certainly was an important issue. And I want to tell you a fact, and you will hear other people say other things, and I want to give you a fact. Well, I'm going to say it's my opinion, but I believe it has proven to be a fact, and that is this. Radford City, as we are, we will not survive on pizza shops, pizza parlors, donut shops, you know, hair salons, small businesses within the city. All those things are awesome and great, and we need them, and they are a piece of the puzzle. But we cannot survive on just that. We can't do it. In order for Radford City to survive, we need to rebuild that industrial base, because that is for your big revenue, for your electric department, for your gas, for water and sewer, for business personal property taxes, for real estate taxes. That's where the big money comes into the city. That's the big money that funds new schools. That's the big money that pays the employees to make sure we can afford to buy new equipment that we need to buy. That's where the big money comes from. Now, all the others contribute, all the little pieces of the puzzle, and they help build that up, but there's nowhere we can make up ground as quickly as by growing that industrial base. And one of the things I wanted to see immediately, and I worked on it when I was on council, and got considerable pushback, and just didn't have the votes to do it, because I was just a councilman. Most of the time, it was four to one that I was opposed. It got a little better towards the end, but I never had the votes to do it. And that was to get out there to purchase that foundry property. Nobody could have purchased that foundry property five or six years ago. It had sat idle since I lost. It sat idle, and nothing happened with it for many years. And just to give you a little back story on that, it sat idle long enough until finally the EDA, the Economic Development Authority, they decided that they were going to buy it. They were going to buy it, and they were going to get somebody on there to help the city of Radford, because no one else on council was doing that. Well, they actually got the money to do it, and was going to do it. And the way I understand it, when our mayor found out about it, that someone else was going to do it, that a new council was coming in that could be in favor of that, he jumped all over it because he wanted to get credit for it. And we're still seeing that problem. We're actually seeing it die on the vine, or just sit. Just sit for months and months and months and months. The city has purchased the land, but we're not moving it over to the EDA where they can get that done. Now, they recently voted to move that direction. Oh, I hope that they can get it done. I've got a feeling it will sit another couple months. The quicker we can get that land under the EDA, they can develop a plan and use the grants and the things that only they can do to get that moving. We need that industrial park built out, and we need to get that industrial base back and moving. We need to replace Moog on Rock Road, but we need to put three or four more Moogs in that industrial park in order to bail Radford out. You know, if you're going to bail somebody out, if you're going to bail out a boat, can you bail them out quicker with a thimble or with a five-gallon bucket? Okay, well, I think it's pretty clear we need some five-gallon buckets to bail us out, and that's a big bucket growing that industrial base. And we've seen it fall over the years. The foundry was a huge hit, and now we've seen the same thing happen with Moog. And those kind of things are sometimes just a day away. We don't know when they're coming, so you better be working on that base in the meantime. We have not done that at all for the last five years. We've sat idle in that area. We've lost valuable time, and had they worked on that and got this moving years ago, I don't believe we'd be in the financial shape that we are. But we're there, and we need to get busy. So that ends, that's number, oh, where was I at? That is number 10, loss of industry, number 10. All right, as we go into number 11, we're making pretty good progress here today. I think I kind of blew it on the last episode. I just talked too much about each one, but we're doing pretty good. We have two more topics left in the 12 Plagues of Radford. And number 11, you know, number 11 is crime. We are seeing a growth of crime, but not just, you know, we may have seen more crime in the past when we had 10,000 students here, and they were busting up all the parties and the drunks and the crazy Friday and Saturday nights that our police department have, and still have sometimes, but they really had it then. But we're seeing a different kind of crime, a very concerning kind of crime growing in the city. And one of the things that does concern me about it overall is the fact that it goes mostly unreported. You will see little blips and things about it on Facebook, about people hearing gunshots and hearing a rumor about this, that, and the other. Well, let me tell you something that is going on in an increasing fashion around the campus. And I mentioned to you about the fact that we're seeing the student numbers fall. We're seeing low income grow, and crime and poverty is backfilling the loss of students. And we are seeing an element of drugs that are growing there on the East End. We are starting to see gang activity happen with members of gangs coming down from Roanoke. We're seeing actual shootouts happen. I can't believe we have not had anybody, I mean, thank goodness we've not had any homicides from that gunplay that's been going on. But it's not an uncommon thing for, you know, them to show up after a shooting and pick up 15, 20 shell casings. Apartments, buildings, and other things are shot into, and other things, cars are shot at. Other things are happening there around campus. But there is a complete denial when you talk to someone in the city about that. You're not seeing crime reports come out in the papers like you used to see. It's, in my opinion, it's being hidden. And I understand that it's not a good reflection on the city when you see it. But it's a fact, and we need to deal with it. We're going to open our paper or cut on our phone and look at Facebook here very soon, and we're going to see a dead young man or a dead young lady from one of these gunplays. One of the officers that I spoke to not too terrible long ago was telling me about the problem with drugs and overdose and just the prevalence. And, you know, when you mix low income and crime and college students together, bad things happen. And I think it's kind of a normal thing when you start to see homelessness, you start to see poverty rising, you're going to see crime grow. It's not a specific reflection on any class of people. It's just a fact, and it's a shameful fact, and it's a sad fact. But we are seeing crime grow. And I think we need to hold our leaders to account. I think those crime reports need to come out monthly, if not weekly, but they should come out monthly. We should be able to see when and where it's happening, what exactly is happening. You cannot solve a problem that you're denying that's happening. Now, I want to say this right off the bat. It's not because of our police department. I really, in my heart of hearts, believe that we have an excellent police and sheriff's department within the city. We have good men and women that are running those, and they're working in those, and they're doing the best that they can to do a good job. Now, I know our police department has gotten a few black eyes from a few individuals over the last year or so. But, you know, I don't care what profession you're in, you have bad eggs in those mixed in as well. It's just more noticeable when it happens, you know, in a law enforcement position or a pastoral position or things like that. But we have a great police department, so I don't want to infer that as a poor reflection on them, either the PD or the sheriff's department, either one. They're excellent, excellent, and they need our support. And they're well-funded, though, I will say. They have plenty of equipment, to the best of my knowledge, and they have what they need. But I think if you could talk to them privately, they would tell you that there is a situation going on with the gangs and the drugs growing, growing there in East End. And crime increasingly is becoming a plague within the city of Rackham. Now, more evidence of that, you know, they say that crime doesn't pay, right? Well, it may not pay for the criminal, but it certainly pays for the mechanism that houses prisoners. Because we are running an atrocious bill to house the prisoners that commit crimes within the city. Most people don't realize this, but when someone is arrested, and we used to have a prison in Rackham. We used to have a jail that sat down there on West Main Street above the police department, and the sheriff's department ran it. And we had a jail, and so we would house prisoners waiting for trial often there in that jail, and we would take care of the costs ourselves. Now, I don't think Aunt Bea came by and brought the meals. No, that's not true, and I'm not making fun. Actually, I remember Sheriff Farmer ran that jail for many years, and I'm sure others before him. But it was a pretty well-run deal. But we decided at some point we were going to send our prisoners over to the NRV regional jail. And that was a state decision to save money so you're not paying each individual locality a certain amount to house their prisoners. So we sent those prisoners over there, thinking it overall would be a better situation. But, you know, it's extremely expensive, and we actually pay per day to house those prisoners. Did you know that the total for 2023 to house the prisoners that committed crimes that were arrested in Radford was over $800,000? $800,000, and it's growing. The numbers are growing. I've looked at the list of how they're working their way up, and, you know, back at the beginning of 2023, they were ranging down in the high 50s and $60,000 per month, and they're working their way up to where we're going to be paying about $76,000 in our next bill. That's per month to house these prisoners. So it's an expensive deal, and it's further proof that, hey, crime in the city is a plague. The more of it, not only the more dangerous it becomes for the citizens of Radford and for our police officers who have to deal with that on a daily basis, the more we have to put into, you know, police and EMS and things that result from crime, but also the price we have to pay to house those prisoners as they go to trial, as we wait for their turn to go to trial and whatever ends up coming from their case when they're incarcerated. So crime is a growing and unfortunate plague on the city of Radford. It just is. And hiding the numbers and denying that it's happening is not a solution, as I said before. Let's get those crime reports out. Let's talk about it. Let's figure out what's going on, where it's going on. Some of your best people to help you solve issues with crime in the community are your citizens who are watching and seeing things happen and can report things and hear things and pass it on to the police to help them do their job. Not that they need us, but, you know, other eyes and ears and witnesses certainly are often a benefit in, you know, solving crime. All right. We have went 1 through 11 so far in the plagues of Radford. And I'm going to go back and just read them to you just to jog your memory before we do number 12, we started with the loss of water sales to Montgomery County. We talked about how we were losing sales, and that was costing money. That was draining, you know, profits from the city. We went to Cogen. We talked about Radford University and the fact they're building a facility to make and to provide their own electricity, which is going to just be a nail in the coffin financially to us when it comes out, about close to $1.5 million a year. We talked about are you removing property from the tax rolls. That was number three. Number four, we talked about the treachery that went on, the treachery within the city went on when our mayor was actually, you know, working behind the scenes and negotiating on behalf of Radford University in the deal with the new Highlander Hotel, a shameful thing in my opinion. We talked about number five, uncontrolled spending. We finished it off and put the icing on the cake with this truck that they've ordered, a digger truck for $327,000 when we couldn't afford that. We talked about number six, we began today, with excessive partisanship and how everything changed in 2018 when we started getting in our little parties and how hateful and mean it's gotten because of that. We talked about the growing poverty and how, you know, unfortunately, some of our citizens have found themselves in that situation, but it is a drain on the economy of Radford City to try to deal with those situations, unique situations sometimes within the poverty and the crime and the issues that it creates when you have certain elements work their way into that. We talked about the homelessness of Radford. That was number eight and how we're seeing homeless encampments around the city and it's starting to grow and how sad that is and, again, the plague that it causes. Number nine, we talked about falling student numbers and how RU is, you know, their numbers are falling and that's less customers for our business. It hurts Radford City's economy overall, and we have seen that fall almost by 50% in the last few years. We talked about a loss of industry and how we lost the foundry many years ago, but we have not grown that base. We never tried to replace that foundry on that property, and the property has just sat there and sat there for the last five or six years and it's still, frankly, sitting there right now, and we just recently lost Moog and we talked about the hit that that was on the community. We just talked about crime, obviously, and I won't go back over that because it's fresh and I just covered it. So, we're going to come to number 12, and I do believe, as I talked about, CoGen would be one of the number one plagues. I believe number 12 bookends and wraps around everything and just squeezes it tight, and that is the plague of poor leadership, the plague of poor leadership. Now, you know, it may sound like right from the get-go that I'm just going to take a shot at people that are elected, and that's really not my point. I don't enjoy that. I think we have a plague of poor leadership all around the country, not just at the local level. I'm not real thrilled with our leadership throughout the state of Virginia. I'm definitely not thrilled with what's going on in the United States of America right now with the leadership of Joe Biden. I'm not thrilled with him at all, but I'm going to focus today mainly on the city of Radford because we're talking about the city of Radford, and I do not believe Radford has been led well over the last five to six years. I believe there was good intentions, but I believe there were uninformed intentions, and I believe that, unfortunately, we allowed ourselves to govern by unicorns and rainbows as far as, hey, if we do it, all these great things are going to happen. Go, Radford, we're the one. I'll tell you, all that talk does not pay bills. If you talk a great game and play a horrible game, you're going to lose. That's just a fact. I've always been enamored with people like Babe Ruth. I don't know if you've ever heard of the called shot where he walks up to the plate, and he points to the place in the outfield where he's going to knock the ball out, and the pitch comes in, whack, whack, it's gone. He knocks it out right where he says. To me, if you can talk a great game and you can follow it up and do exactly what you said, I've got to just say, wow. We all know this. Muhammad Ali was like that. Muhammad Ali talked smack, but he was, in my opinion, the greatest boxer to ever live. But when you talk that talk and you can't walk that walk, that's bad. People believe you. They want to believe you. They want to believe that you can do great things, and I believe a lot of great things were promised to the city of Radford. And I believe a lot of things, some good things have happened. I won't say that they have not. But a lot of the good things that have happened, we have figured out, have happened because we spent money we could not afford. We spent up reserves. We spent up ARPA funds. We drained the account dry and said, look what we have. And now we say, look what we have. How are we going to pay for it? And that's where we're at right now. We're stone cold broke. There's no other way to put it. Our reserve funds are drained. I was told the other day that for last month our bills were like $1.5 million and we managed to scratch in about $1.3 million, $200 in the hole. I heard that. Now, that's not a good way to go. And the reason it happened, how it happened was we had a leadership team for the last five or six years, particularly, you know, before the last council came in. We had a leadership team that simply ran through the budget and just said, hey, we're going to build a new school. We're going to build new parks. We're going to give money away for all these different things that, you know, that they could slip in and take credit for what other people were doing. And somehow, someway we got out over our skis, and I've used this analogy before, but we looked like that skier on the old Wild World of Sports thing where he goes over that jump, and I mean he is hitting the ground and his skis are going one way. I think they used to say the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. And right now we're going down the slope and we're hitting the ground. Helmet's going one way. Skis are going the other way. Ski poles are hitting us in the head as we're going. That's where we're at right now. We have crash-landed coming down the slope. And we're trying to stop the slide down the hill. That's where we're at right now. And, of course, you know, as the plague of bad leadership continues, as we're rolling down the hill, we decide we'll pick up a little more steam by buying a new truck. That's poor leadership. When the majority of council sit back and they let one person run everything and they're in fear of speaking up or coming up with another idea or just saying no, that is poor leadership. When you find yourself negotiating on behalf of your employer over your city that you're elected to represent, that is poor leadership. When there's division between the city council and the school board, and I'm not talking about now, but I'm talking about under the previous council. They couldn't get along. They hated each other. That is poor leadership. When you're giving employees massive raises in order to, I don't know, buy votes to make it look like you care more, when you know you can't even make payroll now, that is poor leadership. When you don't properly research projects, like the grass median down in East End, or the grants that you're getting where you potentially can't afford the matches for the grants, that is poor leadership. When you somehow think that you're going to grow Rafford's economy and sustain us with just pizza parlors and donut shops, and you sit on industrial land for years and years and years, and you do not develop it, for whatever reason, I do not know, don't buy it, you don't move it forward, you don't even try, that is poor leadership. When you know you have problems that are growing, like crime and other things that are plaguing the city, and you hide that information, and you lie about that information, and you get phony acknowledgments of how safe a city it is, when you know it's not true, that is poor leadership. When the city's accounts are draining dry, and you literally get to the point where you cannot pay your electric bill to theoretically keep the lights on for the city, and you don't know until you run completely out of money and realize you can't write the check, that's poor leadership. I can't put it any other way. When you build a new school to make people happy so they'll vote for you, when you do not have the financing or the funding or the money to pay for it, and you already are a small city and you owe for another school that you're a long ways from finishing paying for, and you put ourselves in a situation where it's like a Cadillac sitting in front of a shack, we've got a great school there, just can't pay for it, that's poor leadership. When you don't have the intestinal fortitude as an elected council member to stand up to the recommendations of city staff, when your gut tells you that they're wrong, you choose them over the best interest of the citizens, that's poor leadership. When you don't know how to keep the city's checkbook, and you blame your bad decisions on our constitutional officers, no doubt, it's kind of like writing bad checks and blaming it on the bank clerk because you didn't keep up with your balance. When you do that, and you blame other people for your inability to run the city, that is poor leadership. When you know that co-gen is going to happen for years before it does, you hear about it, they tell you it's coming, and you tell no one, you don't tell your state representatives, you don't tell your citizens, you don't get a plan to stop it because you're afraid that you might make Radford University angry or offended them in some way. When they're building a facility to provide their own electricity, they're not going to buy from the city anymore, and they're using our tax dollars, our tax dollars, no less, in order to do it. And you say nothing and you do nothing, that is poor leadership. And there's more, and I could go on. But I'll say this. When you celebrate and promote and seemingly support every godless thing that comes down the pike, but you won't take a few minutes before a council meeting to acknowledge our god and creator and say, thank you, that is poor leadership. And you deserve what you get sometimes when you make poor decisions. And it's your fault. It's no one else's fault, it's yours. I had an awesome dad. He was a man's man. He really was. He was a good man. He took care of us kids. He loved on us when we needed to be loved on. But he wasn't fluffy and rainbowy and unicorny, I'll tell you that right now. No, not Danny Marshall, not at all. And when Keith did something wrong, he corrected it. He didn't put his arm around me and placate me and make excuses for why I did something wrong. He called out what was wrong and he told me I was going to correct it. And here's how I was going to correct it. And I did. I've been thinking about doing an episode on raising boys. I've raised a couple. And I think people need to hear it. That's another episode, obviously. But sometimes, my point is, sometimes you need some tough love. You need to hear the truth. I'm not going to solve this problem by doing the same thing over and over. It's insanity. And when we make bad decisions at the ballot box, elections do have consequences. Obama said that elections have consequences. And he was right. They do. We all have choices. We make them and we live with them. And we've made some bad ones. Oftentimes, as voters, we make those bad decisions based on the limited information that we have. We don't get involved. We don't come to council meetings. We don't talk to people individually or find out how they really stand. We just go by a sign that looks good or we go by a Facebook post or a video that's put up. And we just take people at their word. You can't do it. You have to research it. You have to go to council meetings. You have to listen, if you care. And if not, I understand we're all busy. You will pay the stupid tax, as I've talked about in the past. You'll pay it. And sometimes it's pretty steep. It's real steep. And we may, as a city, and I think the odds are higher that we're likely to than not, we may lose our independence. Because of poor decisions we made at the ballot box, some lies that may have been told to us when we made our decisions. Because we're not involved, but because, I believe, because of the plague of poor leadership. Now, I want to thank you for joining me today. It's been a pretty good series. I've enjoyed, though, I won't say I've enjoyed them. I hate all 12 of them. I wish none of them were true, but they're here. They're true, I believe, to the best of my ability and within my heart of hearts, I believe, that all 12 of these are plagues on the city of Radford, and they're dragging us down the rabbit hole. They really are. But, hey, there's some place we can go when we're not sure who to talk to, when we're not sure where to look. And I'm going to go back to our theme verse, because it's important to me. And, as always, it's found in Ecclesiastes chapter 12, verses 13 and 14. God's Word says this. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter. Fear God and keep His commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil. Hey, I appreciate you joining me today in the ring. I hope you can come back next week. I'll hopefully have a new episode for you then. Thank you, as always. I hope God gives you a great weekend and blesses you richly. And I look forward to seeing you again here on One More Round Podcast. One More Round Podcast. www.onemoreroundpodcast.com