As always, the buffet comes before the dancing; arrive at Pound Town Hall too late and you’ll miss out on the cornbread, not to mention the homemade blueberry delight.
But by the time the band strikes up “18 Wheels and a Dozen Roses,” the town council chamber has become a makeshift all-ages dancehall, with musicians on the dais and flat-footers dodging the speaker’s lectern.
For years, Pickin’ at the Pound has been a Thursday night tradition in this Wise County town, a chance to gather for a meal and music and neighborhood news. Anyone can eat, anyone can bring a fiddle. The meal is free, but a chance to win a dessert in the cakewalk is $3.
What’s priceless is the fact that there’s still a Pound Town Hall to host the weekly gathering — that there’s still a town of Pound at all.
In early 2022, the town, population 877 and falling, was facing an existential crisis, brought on by years of infighting and dysfunction. A top General Assembly member — the region’s own delegate — had threatened that the state would yank the town’s charter. He was tired of seeing stories in the local news about how town council members couldn’t get along, about fiscal improprieties, polluted water, misplaced drugs and guns in the police department.
If Pound didn’t get its act together, the legislature declared, it would cease to be a town.
Today, Pound’s leaders are making plans for the future, although they haven’t let go of their distrust of those who would have dissolved their town.
“I don’t think we’ve just shocked Pound, and I don’t think we’ve just shocked Wise County, and I don’t think we’ve shocked just Virginia,” said Leabern Kennedy, who was elected to the town council in 2021 on a platform of changing the status quo, and who is now the vice mayor and a driving force behind Pound’s revitalization.
“I think we have shocked the world, because I don’t think anyone expected us to come back,” she said, and let out a small laugh. “I’m OK with that.”
Since Del. Terry Kilgore, R-Scott County and then the House majority leader, first threw down the gauntlet in Richmond, the town has chosen a new mayor and has replaced half of its council members. It paid off almost $9,000 in debt and hired a part-time clerk-treasurer. The town’s police department embarked on its first overhaul of policies and procedures in more than 30 years. Pound has a new neighborhood watch, a new kids’ leadership program, a new kayak launch. Town leaders have forged partnerships with regional nonprofits to seek grants for revitalization and arts projects.
That’s not to say that Pound has become Mayberry.
The town hall needs hundreds of thousands of dollars of structural work. There’s still work to be done to address a 2015 landslide that destroyed part of a hillside downtown. Grant money can be hard to come by, thanks to the town’s prior financial problems.
And uncomfortable questions linger about how things got as bad as they did, and whether the people responsible will ever face any real consequences.
“You don’t create such a mess in a short period of time. It took a lot of years for this to get to this point,” said town police officer Cindy Mullins, who was hired in 2021. “So it’s going to take some time to pull back out of this and to really fully function again, at the level that we would like to see.”
Launching new programs and paying off debt is a good start, she said, and all of that progress no doubt persuaded lawmakers in Richmond to rescind their threat. But the town can’t rest.
“It goes back to the trust of the people, the trust of the community and other communities at large to be able to look at us and respect us,” she said.
* * *
As the Pickin’ musicians were warming up in the town council chamber, Mullins was meeting just down the hall with members of Pound’s nascent neighborhood watch group.
She’d been coaching them on how to keep an eye on their community — safely, and without becoming vigilantes, as she reminded them several times.
“If you see something — ” she paused.
“Say something,” came the chorus.
“But not to them,” she warned. “You have my phone number, you call me.”
And they do. A while back, a resident phoned her to let her know that someone was trying to steal bicycles. She rolled out of bed and arrived in time to catch the would-be thief, bolt-cutters in hand.
“I have people now who feel comfortable, they come up to me and talk about issues in the community. That didn’t happen at first,” she said.
She’s particularly determined to reach Pound’s kids. She’s a former high school English and Spanish teacher and the mother of a teenage daughter, and she worries about drugs, about what kids will get into when they don’t have better options.
So as the neighborhood watch meeting wound down, a half-dozen tweens and teens joined the group to talk about Mullins’ newest initiative: Future Leaders In Pound, or FLIP.
“You’re intelligent, you’re motivated because you’re here,” she told the kids. “Hopefully the things that you guys learn you can carry on through life. Be a leader. Be the people that are going to take this town by storm.”
Over the following months, the group would go on to hold classes on cooking and finance, plant a container garden and stage a mock trial that Mullins later said was so good she could hardly believe it. Along the way, a handful of adults joined the group as well.
Mullins wants the community to feel empowered and connected. But there’s also a practical reason for her outreach efforts: Even after the town hired another officer this fall, the Pound Police Department still has just three employees. She doesn’t mind taking calls when she’s off duty, but there’s only so much a tiny department can do.
“So we’re focusing on crime prevention,” she said. “In our minds the best way to deal with what we’re doing is to prevent the crime before it happens.”
That kind of making do with less, of stretching all available resources, has become a key to repairing Pound’s finances. With an annual budget of $453,700, the town counts every penny.
It didn’t used to be that way. Decades ago, Pound was a thriving commercial hub surrounded by bustling coal camps. Miners and their families would come into town to buy groceries and eat out — and, if they lived across the state line in dry Kentucky, to load up on booze — and the extraction tax paid by coal companies added hundreds of thousands of dollars to Pound’s coffers over the years.
In 2011, long after the coal boom had cooled, the town still took in $158,056 from the coal tax, according to county records. A decade later, that had dropped to $11,910.
Mining faded, businesses closed, people moved away. The town’s budget withered, and disagreements about how to spend what was left festered. Distrust and suspicion colored relationships among town employees, and between town officials and their constituents.
The ultimatum from Kilgore brought to the surface a long-running criticism that town leaders had spent money unwisely over the decades — that instead of putting anything back for a coalless future, they’d allowed the town to live beyond its means and had racked up debts that now couldn’t be paid.
Those free-spending days are long gone.
Today, Pound has just a handful of employees, most of them part-time. The town council earmarked $20,000 for a part-time town manager but hasn’t filled the position yet. For now, Kennedy said, she and other council members have taken on many of those duties.
Volunteers help fill the gaps and keep expenses low; the town saved $4,000 on a computer wiring job by relying on volunteer help instead of contracting it out, Kennedy said.
The council did hire a part-time clerk/treasurer, but she’s been paying for herself. Not only has she kept track of unpaid tax bills, Kennedy said, but she discovered more than $8,000 in town tax money that had been sitting in a county account for who knows how long. No one in the town government had bothered to claim it.
A few thousand dollars here or there might seem like the municipal equivalent of hunting for loose change in the couch cushions. But it adds up. By Christmas, halfway through its fiscal year, the town had spent less than a third of its annual budget, Kennedy said.
“There’s a lot of little things we’ve learned along the way,” she said. “That’s how we can pay off loans and things, is because we’ve tried to be really smart with the money.”
* * *
Debbi Hale stands on the muddy bank where Bad Creek meets up with the Pound River and surveys the town’s new kayak launch.
It’s nothing elaborate — picnic tables, some signage, a bear-proof waste bin — but to Hale, it’s a taste of what the town could become.
It’s a beautiful stretch of the Pound River that runs past this spot; in fact, all the way from here to the Flannagan Reservoir, in Dickenson County, it’s a designated Virginia Scenic River.
For miles, Hale says, the land along one riverbank is owned by the U.S. Forest Service and along the other by the Nature Conservancy, so there are no houses, no roads. An old narrow-gauge railroad track follows the river for a while; in the spring, it’s a riot of rhododendrons.
All of this — she waves her arm to take in the river, the trees, a trio of circling red-shouldered hawks — should be a magnet for visitors.
Developing amenities takes money. Hale, who volunteers her time to help the town, spent her career as a teacher, not a fundraiser. But in recent years, she has become adept at piecing together grants to help pay for her vision, and at building relationships with those who can help her do it. The bear-proof trash can? A grant from the state Department of Wildlife Resources. The signage and information kiosk? A grant from the Nature Conservancy, with help from the arts and community development nonprofit Appalshop.
More recently, Hale won a grant to buy four GRIT Freedom Chairs, which look something like a cross between a mountain bike and a wheelchair and allow people with limited mobility to explore off road.
She has bigger projects in her sights. She’s thinking about where the town might create an RV park to attract more tourists, and about how to finish cleaning up the river where it runs through town to create a tubing course.
She applied last year for a $25,000 grant that would’ve helped pay for trail development; she didn’t get it, but she’s been talking to the Virginia Outdoor Foundation, which manages the grant program, about how to improve her chances and she’s going to try again. Another grant, an even larger one, could help the town develop a rails-to-trails project with some primitive campsites that would be ADA-compliant.
“I’m not really good at applying. I really need some help,” she said. “They’re willing to help me. We just need to take the time to sit down and talk to them. … You can’t give up or nothing’ll happen. I’m going to hang in there.”
The nonprofit Appalachian Voices, which works with communities across Central and Southern Appalachia, also has stepped up to help town leaders navigate the funding maze.
“We wanted to do what we could to help out,” said Emma Kelly, the nonprofit’s new economy field coordinator. Pound has had its struggles, she said, but its people are strong and its history is deep. Appalachian Voices is in it for the duration, Kelly said: “We’ve planted our boots and we’re going to stay there.”
The group connected the town with a program through the Department of Environmental Quality that will catalog Pound’s abandoned buildings and then come up with a redevelopment plan, complete with funding opportunities. A group of residents started to inventory the needs last month; Kelly said a plan should be in place by spring.
Pound also will be part of a larger Appalachian Voices-led effort, funded by a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency, to help communities build economic, social and environmental resiliency. The budget for that is being negotiated right now, Kelly said.
And Appalachian Voices is helping the town apply for a grant from Monuments Across Appalachian Virginia, an initiative housed at Virginia Tech that will fund up to 10 projects about Appalachian people whose stories haven’t been told, according to its website.
Pound wants to focus its project on labor, Kelly said, and the grant offers a lot of latitude: The money, which would total close to $300,000, could be used for a play, a park, a working space — whatever the community decides.
Applications are due Jan. 10, and Kelly thinks the town has a good chance.
A collaboration with an established nonprofit like Appalachian Voices gives Pound access to grant-writing expertise and valuable connections. But even with that help, some funding streams are unattainable, like what Kelly called a “very basic grant” from the the state Department of Housing and Community Development for community outreach.
“Even that was out of reach,” she said.
Despite how far it’s come over the past year, Pound is still dealing with some issues that send up red flags for state and federal grant programs, Kelly said. One problem is capacity: Much of the town’s work is done by a handful of volunteers, including town council members.
“It’s a lot on the plate of a few people,” Kelly said.
Another challenge: the town’s fiscal history.
“Nobody really wants to put money into us when they don’t know what our financials look like,” Kennedy said.
The town’s books haven’t been audited in more than four years. It’s not that the newly reconstituted town council doesn’t want the scrutiny. But the 2021 embezzlement conviction of a town employee makes potential auditors wary — and raises their rates. And every year that passes without an audit makes it harder to find anyone who will take on the job at a price that the town can afford.
In 2022, the town put out a request for an accounting firm to conduct years’ worth of audits. It got zero responses, Kennedy said. Since then, she’s talked to a couple of firms who have quoted a price of $20,000 to $25,000 per audit.
Kennedy has wrestled with the choice: Spend limited funds on an audit, or on something tangible for the town.
This summer, she’d thought that the town might be able to get by for the time being with an audit of just its most recent fiscal year. It might be enough to make Pound eligible for grants, she’d hoped, and to start the money flowing for some of the improvements she’d like to see.
But even that kind of limited-scope audit might not be an option. The town has been working with Delores Smith, Wise County’s treasurer, to get its bookkeeping brought up to date, and Smith has told them that an auditor might not be able to catch up all of Pound’s audits and might have to make a declaration to that effect, Kennedy said.
The town might just have to move forward from there, she said.
That wouldn’t please the residents who still harbor suspicions about the municipal embezzlement and about the town’s earlier free-spending ways. Kennedy said she’d love to be able to provide answers, but she has to be realistic.
“I know that is not what people want, but I’m not certain that we have an option,” she said. “We shall see in the months to come.”
Both local and state law enforcement spent some time looking into the doings in Pound a few years back. Chuck Slemp, the county commonwealth’s attorney from 2015 to early 2022, put it bluntly a year ago, during the charter-related ado: He’d spent more time dealing with “the drama of Pound” than on any single case during his time in office.
With the exception of the embezzlement case, which was investigated by Virginia State Police, none of the complaints turned out to be anything more than rumors or innuendo, according to Slemp, who’s now the state’s chief deputy attorney general.
There will be some people in town who will never be able to move past those problems, no matter how much forensic accounting is done, Kennedy acknowledges. But despite what she calls “a select group of naysayers,” she thinks attitudes are changing.
“People are coming around, because they do see a difference,” she said.
* * *
Kennedy has a wish list.
She’s talked about a splash pad for the town’s kids. About the town taking over the old Pound High School property from the county and turning it into something vibrant — maybe a park, maybe a farmers market, maybe a site for businesses. She heard about a company that builds outdoor fitness courses and was intrigued, until she learned that it would cost $175,000.
She’d like to find a way to increase the town’s housing stock, ideally with financial help from a program like the state’s Abandoned Mine Land Economic Revitalization Program. She’s optimistic about the work that the town’s reconstituted Economic Development Authority has been doing.
A bakery, Sweetie Pies, opened downtown over the summer. A restaurant is coming sometime after the first of the year, Kennedy said. Several cannabis-related shops also opened in town, although one was raided by police in the fall and hasn’t reopened.
The town has been talking to a number of other businesses that are interested in opening in Pound; the biggest problem, she said, has been finding a location for them, since the condition of many available buildings is “less than ideal.” She’s hopeful that the work the town is doing with the Department of Environmental Quality will help them turn some of the dilapidated buildings into usable properties.
“We can be anything we want to be,” she said. “We just have to decide what that is.”
She’s not sure whether residents have grasped the possibilities; when you’ve been in a hard spot for so long, it can be difficult to look forward. Plus, she says, the town’s population is aging, and some folks are set in their ways.
She’s looking under rocks for revenue ideas — maybe bring liquor by the drink to Pound, and then tax the booze. Maybe figure out how to tax vaping.
“People are hollering, ‘You’re going to tax everybody to death!’” she said. “Well, yeah, but you people are coming in from outside of town limits and you’re eating here, and you’re going to buy your cigarettes here, and you’re going to buy your vape here. So, yeah, I’ll take your money. Especially if it’s going to alleviate some of the real estate and personal property taxes on the actual residents.”
Some businesses had stopped paying their town taxes in the middle of the turmoil, arguing that they weren’t getting any town services worth paying for. Most have come around now, Kennedy said.
“The business owners kind of have to come to the realization that it’s not the town’s responsibility to make them thrive,” she said. “We’re there to support them. There’s lots of ideas out there to make things better, but they have to open up and be willing to listen, too.”
So was Kilgore’s threat a mean trick or the push that the town needed?
Cindy Mullins leans toward the latter.
“My parents and grandparents, and all the generations they lived here, grew up here … they didn’t want to lose their town,” she said. “They didn’t want to lose the identity that they had worked so hard for. … In a lot of ways, he helped us to rein it in. He put it all in perspective for a lot of people.”
Fred Luntsford, who represents Pound’s district on the Wise County Board of Supervisors — which supported Kilgore’s call for the charter revocation — takes the same view.
“Pound got to a very very low point,” he said last spring. “I think what Terry Kilgore did, and what the Wise County Board of Supervisors did … was a blessing in disguise because it allowed the good people in Pound to regroup and to take a step back and say, OK, who are the real people here in town who really care about Pound? Who’s willing to step up and to bring this town back and to regain our charter?”
And that’s exactly what happened, he believes. “I’m so very, very proud of the fact that they’ve managed to accomplish all that they’ve done in this short period of time,” he said.
But Kennedy disagrees, and strongly. So does Terry Short, a former town council member who’s an old friend of hers and who spends much of his time volunteering for the town.
“Nothing that Kilgore or the General Assembly did was a direct cause of what Leabern and them have done over there,” Short said. “They have not provided anything. Leabern and them would’ve had to have done the same thing they’re doing — they haven’t changed anything.”
Both believe that Pound was already healing itself — Kennedy, with her platform for change, had been elected to the town council before the mess in Richmond started — and that the uncertainty over the charter only made that work harder.
“There’s a lot of things that we’ve held off doing because we didn’t know where we were going to be,” Kennedy said. “We’ve got ordinances that need to be revamped and updated. We haven’t done those things, just waiting on things to kind of settle and get us where we needed to be.”
She’s been hesitant to ask for much outside help, she said. She’s not sure why, she said, but then she paused and offered a theory.
“Maybe it’s a mentality thing of, fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice shame on me, you know?” she said. “I just never would’ve believed that the county would go in and do the resolution to take our charter. I’m not a very trusting person at this point. …
“I think I’ve lost a lot of respect for a lot of people along the way. It is what it is. During the toughest times, you find out who your friends are.”
One source of help during the turmoil, and still today, was the Virginia Municipal League. Its executive director, Michelle Gowdy, spoke on Pound’s behalf during legislative hearings over the town’s future. She and her team have helped Pound’s leaders get trained on budgeting, Freedom of Information Act compliance and other municipal matters.
She gives them credit — all of them, but especially Kennedy — for persevering.
“She really put her heart and soul into volunteering at town hall and cleaning it up and figuring out where the missteps lie and really trying to make sure that she garnered a relationship with the board of supervisors and trying to get the credibility with the citizens in the town,” Gowdy said.
There was no mechanism in place to help Kennedy and her allies when the hammer was coming down in Richmond, she said. “They asked for help really early on,” she said. “And it was hard to find the right resources.”
VML will continue to work with the town, she said.
“Now that they’ve gotten on their feet and they know that they’re going to be able to maintain their town status, next is starting some sort of a strategic plan,” Gowdy said. “It doesn’t have to be a long, drawn-out strategic plan, but figuring out what are the next things that they’re going to do to kind of improve and ensure that they’re going to be successful.”
Kennedy said she’s feeling good about the town’s chances.
“One of the things that everybody has told me from the get-go is, ‘Leabern, baby steps. You just got to take baby steps,’” Kennedy said. “I’m OK with baby steps, I just need my baby to move a little faster.
“But I think we’re getting close. My baby’s moving a little bit faster, I think, than what everybody thought it would.”
