Board of Supervisors’ election sent a ‘don’t rock the boat’ message, but left leadership issue unresolved
By James P. Gannon
In the wake of Tuesday’s election that will bring two new members to the Rappahannock County Board of Supervisors in January, some important questions hang in the air.
The first: What message did the voters send in choosing Mike Biniek over Tom Junk in Piedmont District, and Chris Parrish over Terry Dixon in Stonewall-Hawthorne?
The second: Now that the five-man board will have two rookie members and three veterans, who will emerge as the leader? Seniority would put Ron Frazier, the outspoken populist conservative of Jackson District in the chairman’s seat, but others on the board might be more comfortable with a leader less prone to confrontation and controversy. Will this trigger a struggle within the board?
There are no clear answers to any of these questions now, and anyone’s interpretation of the election and what it portends for the future are as valid as my own. But here’s the view from one who has closely watched the board operate these past few years, and gotten to know the personalities and issues involved.
This election was unusual in several respects. It was the first held under the county’s new staggered-elections system, in which only two of the five seats were up for a vote; this system is aimed at providing continuity on the board, so that all five seats cannot change in one election.
Unlike many other recent supervisor elections, this was a true contest. Too many elections in the past have offered voters no choice, as candidates (usually incumbents) ran without opposition. Those aren’t elections–they are coronations. Whatever you may think about Tom Junk or Terry Dixon, they served the public interest and democratic values by offering the voters a choice. It’s unfortunate that the same did not happen in the two School Board elections held Tuesday, in which incumbent Aline Johnson and newcomer Elizabeth Hilscher ran without opposition, offering no choice.
Third, this was the first contest in recent memory in which national party labels became an issue. Dixon, who is chairman of the county Republican Committee, and Junk, whose yard becomes a display grounds for GOP candidate signs in every election year, both ran with the official endorsement of the Republican Party.
Local office candidates in Rappahannock traditionally have run without party label in a non-partisan election. The active involvement of the local GOP apparatus on Dixon’s and Junk’s behalf gave the county’s zealous Democrats (and they are numerous and highly vocal) a strong motivation to oppose the two Republicans and to assume a high moral posture on what an outrage it was to have partisanship rear its ugly head in local contests.
One wonders if these voters would have raised such a fuss if the local Democratic committee had decided to endorse candidates; one suspects the outraged letters to the editor might have emanated from another corner. But put that aside: the fact is that the GOP label became an issue, and to some unknown extent probably a negative, for Dixon and Junk. One might hope that this failed experiment would discourage party labeling in the future.
However different this election may have been, it boiled down to a question of continuity vs. change. Parrish and Biniek represented the status quo–keeping things pretty much as they are, along with the prospect that both would fit in comfortably with the generally amiable “good ole boys” atmosphere and style of the Board of Supervisors. They were the “Don’t rock the boat” choice.
The candidacies of Junk and Dixon, on the other hand, offered more uncertainty and possibly more confrontation. They are definitely boat-rockers who would have been less inclined to go along with the status quo in local government and school management. They would have demanded more scrutiny of county spending, especially school spending and school management, and might have pressed harder for property tax cuts or efforts to raise county revenues from other sources. They represented change, not continuity.
Junk has been challenging county school budgets for two decades, and more recently had founded the Concerned Taxpayers’ association to press for more scrutiny of county and school spending and argue for keeping property taxes down. Dixon, a GOP leader, ran on a no-new-taxes pledge and would have been a strong ally of Junk.
The threat that Dixon and Junk raised to the get-along/go-along style of government lay in their possible alliance with Frazier to form a new activist-conservative majority on the board. In my view, it was this threat to the comfortable status quo that drove a majority of Piedmont and Stonewall-Hawthorne voters to their opponents, Biniek and Parrish.
Probably the most active and influential lobbying group in the county consists of the large group of citizens who have a big stake in the public schools–teachers, non-teaching staff, parents of school kids, school sports boosters, Headwaters Foundation leaders and others. The public schools, after all, are the largest single employer in the county. Any threat to school spending, or tougher oversight of the School Board and school management, triggers the active opposition of this formidable force. Junk and Dixon were that threat.
So the election’s outcome promises no radical change on the Board of Supervisors, but it does raise a question about leadership. With strong leaders like the late Chairman “Pete Estes” and the retiring chairman Bob Anderson gone from the scene, where is the leader? From this vantage point, he is not clearly visible on the horizon.
It’s traditional, though not required, that the chairmanship of the board be awarded to the most senior member. That is Ron Frazier, who has a couple of years’ seniority over Wakefield District’s Roger Welch. I believe both Frazier and Welch would like to be chairman. Perhaps they can resolve this potential conflict between them before the issue comes to a vote at the January meeting where the board reorganizes and elects officers and parcels out responsibilities. These things are usually sorted out behind the scenes, and likely will be, but it may not be easy.
Frazier, who tends to be irascible and sometimes confrontational in pressing his issues at board meetings, would bring an edgy style of leadership to the board, though he might try to modulate his manner if he were chairman. Welch is more easy-going, less prone to rock the boat. Whether that’s good or bad depends on whether you think Rappahannock’s boat needs to be rocked a bit more.
Whether the board would consider elevating any of the less-senior members–veteran S. Bryant Lee of Hampton District, or newcomers Parrish or Biniek, to the chair seems doubtful, but not impossible. Might this be the compromise between Frazier and Welch? I don’t pretend to know, but it will be interesting to watch.
This being Rappahannock, it will all happen in some quiet place at some unannounced time, and we’ll see only the decision, not the process.
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