ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, April 20, 1997 TAG: 9704220114
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SERIES: Rocky Mount Low: First in an editorial series
Nepotism, amateurishness and closed doors for too long have characterized the small town's government.
ROCKY MOUNT is a blue-collar town of 4,100, pleasantly perched amid the mountains of Franklin County a half-hour's drive from Roanoke. Residents worry about declining industry and rising crime, but their town remains a fine place to live.
The problem is their government.
Something is rotten in Rocky Mount, and the smell is wafting from town offices. There:
Nepotism and favoritism run free.
Through all his political maneuverings, Councilman Arnold Dillon hasn't neglected family or friends. His son, James Dillon, got a job with the water department. His daughter-in-law, Rebecca Dillon, was hired in the finance department - over the objections of the finance director. His business partner's girlfriend landed a job in the same department.
Town Attorney John Boitnott says there's no policy against nepotism. That's an excuse?
In allocation of services, too, town officials have shown more favor than fear. Town Manager Mark Henne asked the finance director to abate without public notice the water bill on one of Councilman Bobby Cundiff's rental properties. A refrigerator was bought, with federal funds, for Dillon's mother. The town improperly landscaped a property owned by a woman friend of council members. And so on.
When Henry Adams observed that a friend in power is a friend lost, he wasn't writing about Rocky Mount.
Town officials make no distinction between policy-making and administration.
Several years ago, Rocky Mount's council entered the modern municipal era by voting to convert from a strong-mayor to a council-manager form of government. Council hired a town manager and spent more than $10,000 to have a new charter and code drawn up. But the documents were never filed in Richmond.
With Dillon or one of his allies perhaps hoping to inherit the powers enjoyed by former Mayor and longtime Rocky Mount political boss A.O. Woody Jr., council this year quietly tabled the managerial charter - leaving the town manager at council meddlers' untender mercies. Council even hires town staff, including entry-level workers.
And Arnold Dillon isn't the only councilman accustomed to mixing it up with administration. Posey Dillon, no relation, wears a council member's and the fire chief's hat, making him at once Henne's supervisor and subordinate.
Posey Dillon has helped assemble a gold-plated volunteer Fire Department beyond Rocky Mount's needs - including a ladder truck that wouldn't fit in the firehouse - but not without extra cost to taxpayers and a further blurring of the line between overseers and staff.
Unsatisfied with controlling council, the troika of the two Dillons and Cundiff would turn every day into Amateur Day in the attempt to micromanage town affairs.
Council members mock the public's right to know.
Rocky Mount's council in recent years has held hundreds of closed meetings - more than any other government body in Western Virginia.
So-called "executive sessions" sometimes are convened with good cause under exemptions written into Virginia's Freedom of Information law: to discuss a sensitive personnel problem, for example, or a land transaction.
But in Rocky Mount, closed-door meetings have been a routine way to discuss town business - to heck with the public interest and, at the very least, the spirit of the law. For years, council agendas simply listed the four most frequently cited legal reasons for executive sessions, no matter what was actually discussed. Just as routinely, Town Attorney Boitnott abetted the violation.
In recent weeks, council has started meeting more in the open. But Arnold Dillon's stated reason for doing so is hardly reassuring. It isn't that residents are unfairly excluded from decision-making. It's that information from executive sessions is leaking out. He wants the leaks, at least the unfavorable ones, plugged.
So what? Doesn't this kind of thing go on all the time in small towns?
Maybe, to an extent. But small towns shouldn't be patronized or held to lower standards just because they're small. Their residents have as much right to good government as anyone else.
Behaviors evident in Rocky Mount town offices suggest a disregard for norms that is as corruptive in a rural county seat as in any big city. And even small wrongs, cumulatively if not individually, may hint at bigger problems beneath the surface.
When a town employee, according to colleagues, is chastened for bringing a state law to a council member's attention, notice ought to be taken.
If the odor grows strong enough, eventually it becomes intolerable.
LENGTH: Medium: 93 linesby CNB