The effort to remove Martinsville Mayor L.C. Jones is over, killed by the same thing that did in redistricting: a procedural definition.
With redistricting, it was the definition of what counts as an election: Did early voting count as part of the election process? The court said yes, which meant that the General Assembly didn’t follow the rules that called for holding an intervening election between the two times it passed the amendment.
With the Martinsville mayor, it was a definition of how many votes were cast in an election. You’d think that would be simple, but whoever advised the recall petition organizers didn’t take into account that in the 2022 election that elected Jones, voters were choosing two candidates, so had two votes to cast. A judge last week ruled that meant the organizers needed more signatures than they had, so the whole recall drive went poof without the grievances against Jones ever being heard in court.
Add this to the list of changes that state legislators ought to consider if they ever look at revising the state’s recall law. (Here are some others.) This is a little-used section of the state code, so it makes sense that the more we use the process, the more we’ll stumble into unintended loopholes or limitations of the law. This remains unchanged: In Northern Virginia, the white vice mayor of Purcellville remains in office even though he’s under indictment. In Southside, the Black mayor of Martinsville was suspended for a time without a trial, and with no criminal charges pending. That might be an accidental — and unfortunate — contrast, but the law as currently written has allowed for both outcomes.
The General Assembly may — or may not — take care of that.
Martinsville voters will have a chance to pronounce judgment on Jones in November: He will be up for reelection, so many of these things will get litigated in the court of public opinion, for better or for worse.
Martinsville voters may also have another task before them, if they choose to embrace it: They need to find a way for their city to produce a lot less news.
I realize that’s an odd thing for a journalist to say — we like news, the more dramatic the better — but I’m speaking here wearing my hat of a columnist who cares about Southwest and Southside.
In recent years, Martinsville has produced more than its share of the wrong kind of news.
There was the community debate over possible reversion — whether the city should give up its charter and revert to being a town within Henry County. There was never a specific referendum on that, but the results of a 2022 council election that installed an anti-reversion majority effectively killed that talk.
There was the ugly split between the New College Institute and its fundraising arm — this would be akin to the Virginia Tech Foundation seceding from Virginia Tech — that apparently defied attempted mediation by the attorney general’s office. Then there was the whole question of whether NCI should continue to receive state funding, or even exist. Those were questions that didn’t necessarily originate in Martinsville — they came from then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin in Richmond — but they still landed in Martinsville.
There was the city manager situation, where Aretha Ferrell-Benavides was fired and is now suing the city while a special prosecutor awaits the results of a state police probe. That’s a simplified version of a tangled situation that involves both a forensic audit that’s been released and a report by the law firm advising the city that hasn’t been released.
In short, it’s all a mess.
Here’s the theme that ties things together: They’re all a distraction from what ought to be Martinsville’s main business — building a new economy.
A quarter-century ago, the pillars of the city’s economy crumbled through no fault of its own — textiles and furniture all crumbled almost overnight. That’s not a situation unique to Martinsville; it’s one that many other communities face, particularly those across Southwest and Southside. The forces rearranging Martinsville’s economy were distant ones that eventually hit home; we need not debate all those now because what matters now is not the past but the future.
Every four years, we elect a president, and the candidates always promise some variation of bringing back manufacturing. They’ve all tried different things, and none of them have succeeded, because the global economy is more powerful than any president. Manufacturing jobs in the United States peaked in May 1979 and generally declined until February 2009. They’ve only rebounded slightly since then, but, with the exception of the pandemic, have been roughly even through the presidencies of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden and now Trump again. Perhaps, come the next presidential election, we should not be so trusting of what either side promises.
My point: No president is going to come save anybody’s local economy. A president might do some damage through ill-considered policies, but no president, of either party, is going to unleash some economic miracle. Not when they’re having to contend with so many forces beyond their control, many of them demographic (declining birth rates are slowing economic growth and forcing whole industries to imagine themselves with fewer workers), some of them technological (the advent of artificial intelligence means we’ve really just begun the next industrial revolution).
I’ve followed this part of Virginia on a professional basis now for more than four decades. I’ve also studied the reporting of James Fallows, the award-winning author whose recent work involves a study of what distinguishes successful communities from unsuccessful ones. For a more detailed account, see his 2018 book “Our Towns.” My much shorter version goes like this: They avoid drama, particularly drama of the sort that has plagued Martinsville of late. One way they avoid drama is by achieving a community consensus on what they’re trying to do and how they’re going to do it.
My go-to example is the Roanoke Valley. For a long time, Roanoke and Roanoke County treated each other as rivals — and Roanoke itself was riven with factionalism. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Roanoke went back and forth on key goals. There was frequent turnover on the city council and passionate community debates over what should be done with Victory Stadium and whether the city should build an amphitheater and, if so, where. The valley also had an unhealthy tendency to look to some authority figure to lead it — after the railroad headquarters left in 1982, the valley struggled with its identity. If it wasn’t a railroad town, then what was it? It was not until several things happened that the valley was able to make progress. First, the city and the county came to understand that their competition wasn’t on the other side of Peters Creek Road; it was on the other side of the world. Together, they also came to understand that no father-figure company was going to arrive to take the lead. Whatever happened would have to be done locally. And that meant getting their own house in order. Roanoke entered a period in which there was a general consensus on key priorities and there was less turnover on the council. It also helped that the region saw a new generation of leaders come to the fore, leaders who were untainted by all the arguments of the past.
Suddenly, issues that had bedeviled the valley in the past were solvable — a regional water authority was created that united the two big water sources of the city’s Carvins Cove and the county’s Spring Hollow Reservoir. It also helped that an entirely new industry was jump-started, with the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine and Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at its core. The valley was able to do those things by lowering the political temperature.
When I look around Virginia, I see lots of places that could stand some temperature-lowering. Martinsville is one of those.
That may not be possible this year. Some of the current controversies still need to run their course — the state police investigation into the mayor and former city manager, for instance. With Jones on the ballot, this fall’s election may get pulled more toward what’s happened rather than what needs to happen. Elections are like that sometimes.
Martinsville has spent a lot of civic energy lately on issues that have little to nothing to do with building a new economy. Despite all that, Martinsville has some hopeful things going for it. After five straight decades of losing population, it’s now gaining population — slightly, but still an uptick. It’s also growing younger at a time when the country is growing older. These are demographic trends to be encouraged. The General Assembly this year renamed the New College Institute as the West Piedmont Higher Education Center, which ought to clarify its purpose in the public’s mind. In the next county over, Pittsylvania County, there’s a remarkable amount of economic activity starting to happen — most notably, the Microporous battery plant has started construction, and the Stack data center project might come if the General Assembly doesn’t undo the tax abatements it’s predicated on. Together, those are 4,000-plus jobs over time. The effects won’t stop at the county line; Martinsville stands to feel them in some way.
Ultimately, it’s up to the voters in Martinsville to decide what they want their community to be — and which leaders they want to reward, and which ones they don’t. Have Martinsville voters had their fill of drama, or do they want even more? This fall’s election may tell us.
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