See part one here.
Radford had backed its budget into a corner. Unable to tax enough of its own land, more than half of which is exempt, including Radford University and the federal arsenal, the city had gone into the electricity business and run its government on the markup from reselling power. Its largest customer was a foundry on West Main Street, and when the foundry closed for good at the end of 2013, that income stream began drying up. In April 2017, Mayor Bruce Brown read the whole mechanism into the council minutes and voted against the budget, warning that the city was on a trajectory it could not sustain. The council passed it three to two. This is what the nine years after that warning looked like.
After April 2017, the remarkable thing about Radford is how ordinary the next several years look from the outside, and how clearly the record reads from the inside.
The institutions built to catch a city like Radford each, in turn, looked away. When Grede walked, it left behind a state grant and a job-creation promise it had not kept, and the agency that wrote the grant spent years trying to claw the money back. Grede’s lawyer argued the company owed nothing. Sandra McNinch, the agency’s general counsel, wrote to a colleague: “Please draft a response letter telling Ms. Williams, in nice language, that she is a moron.” The money never came back. The contract had made the City of Radford responsible for collecting not just the state’s $600,000 but its own matching $600,000, and the city never sued and never pursued its own share. A legislative watchdog report that year found the agency had run for more than two decades without a formal process to protect the state from fraud and loss, that almost half the projects it had funded had failed to meet their terms, and that of $22 million owed back by failed deals, it had recovered $7 million and had not even pursued 23 of them. The Radford foundry was one of the defaults.
The budgets keep passing. The reserves keep drawing down. In March 2020, three months past its legal deadline, the city files its annual financial report for 2019, and on page 144, there is an entry labeled Finding 2019-001, a material weakness. It says the treasurer’s office, the city’s offices and the school division keep their books on accounting systems that do not talk to each other and that the gaps between them make it impossible to produce trustworthy financial statements without heavy manual patching. It is the first time in the city’s modern history that an outside auditor has said, in writing, that Radford’s books cannot be relied on. The same finding appears in the next year’s audit, and the next, renumbered each time, through 2024. Same systems. Same gap. Every year.
In the fall of 2023, the city does something Virginia cities almost never do. It takes out a revenue anticipation note, a short-term loan against taxes it expects to collect, for $4 million. The instrument exists to cover a brief cash gap of a few weeks. Radford’s gap is not brief. When a reporter asks the Virginia Municipal League about it, a longtime official there says he has never heard of another locality in the state using such a note this way. He does not say it is illegal. He says it is unprecedented, which, from someone who has watched Virginia local government for decades, is its own kind of alarm.
In April 2025, the council passes the largest tax-and-fee increase anyone in Radford can remember. The real estate rate jumps 13 cents, from $0.69 to $0.82, on its way to $0.84. Personal property up 11 cents. The meals tax up a point, the lodging tax up half a point, water and sewer and trash all up. City employees are told there will be no raise for the third year running. The council members vote to cut their own modest stipends by a 10th.
At the hearing before the vote, residents stand at the podium Brown once read from and say the things people say when a bill they did not run up comes due in their names: That they cannot afford it, that they did not make these decisions and that the people who did should be the ones to pay. The council members answer the way people answer when they are out of room: nobody wants this, there is no alternative, next year will be worse.
A year later, after the state has finally arrived, sitting council members will tell a reporter that the city manager who ran Radford for 14 years, David Ridpath, had been bringing them revenue projections that were too optimistic and that those projections had hidden a structural gap of about $4 million a year between what the city took in and what it spent. Ridpath, who retired at the end of 2024, does not answer on the record. Neither does the finance director who worked beside him for 18 years. Neither does the audit firm that wrote the same finding into every report since 2019.
It would be cleaner if there were a villain here, someone who took the money or cooked the books. There is not. The record names a system instead. A revenue decision made years earlier that had made sense at the time. A grant program that could not enforce its own contracts. A council that voted for an unsustainable budget and then did it again, year after year, with people of good faith on both sides of a three-to-two line. An audit that flagged the same failure every spring and set off no consequences. A state that held the power to step in and waited until the ratios crossed a line on a spreadsheet. No single hand. A machine, built wrong, running exactly as it was built.
The line on the spreadsheet was crossed in the fall of 2025.
Virginia had given itself a new tool the year before. After the city of Petersburg nearly collapsed, the General Assembly passed a fiscal-distress statute that told the Auditor of Public Accounts to score every locality’s audited finances against a threshold and to sound an alarm when a place crossed it. The threshold is 45 points. On November 12, 2025, the auditor notified Radford that its score had reached 88.33, nearly double the line, up from 70 the year before. The letter listed the reasons in language that could have come from Brown’s statement eight years earlier: a structurally unbalanced budget, revenue projections too optimistic, an unusual short-term loan and growing unpaid bills to the company that sells the city its wholesale power.
On March 26, 2026, the auditor sent a second letter, a formal recommendation that the commonwealth step in, addressed to Gov. Spanberger and the chairs of the legislature’s money committees. By spring, the story was everywhere in Virginia. Cardinal News reported that the city had fallen more than four months behind paying Appalachian Power, and that the unpaid balance had reached $6.5 million, against electricity Radford had already sold to its own residents.
Bruce Brown was right. That is the plain finding of the record, and it is a strange kind of vindication, because being right cost him a three-to-two vote in 2017 and changed nothing for nine years. He had stood in a nearly empty room and read the mechanism of the city’s undoing into the minutes, the electricity subsidy and the lost foundry and the untaxable ground, and the council had thanked him and passed the budget, and the minutes had gone up on the website, and the city had gone on selling power and drawing down its reserves until the math arrived where he said it would.
The record was never sealed. Every document in this story has been on the public web the whole time. The minutes of April 17, 2017. The audit finding that repeats from 2019 onward. The budget that admits, in the city’s own words, that the transfer is necessary because more than half the land cannot be taxed. The reporting on the unprecedented note. The auditor’s letters. Nobody had to leak anything. The warning was filed, in order, where anyone could read it, and for nine years, the answer to it was a budget vote.
The foundry is gone now. The buildings on West Main came down, and the land, a 130 years of poured iron and the lead and PCBs that soaked into the ground beneath it, was deeded to the city for a dollar. It has been a federal cleanup priority since the year of the explosion. The city is betting that the same ground that broke its budget when it emptied can be scrubbed and filled again with tenants who pay taxes and draw power, and it has a $3.5 million grant to try. Part of the parcel sits in a federal floodway. It is a real bet and a slow one, and even if it pays, it does not on its own close the $4 million gap.
What the foundry took, in the end, was more than three lives in a basement in 2000 and more than 200 jobs in 2013. It took the quiet arrangement that let a small place on the New River wear a crown it could not otherwise afford. Brown watched the stone fall out. He said so, in an even voice, to a room that wasn’t listening, and the saying of it is still there in the minutes, in sequence, waiting the way it has waited all along for someone to read it in time.
A note on sources: Every quotation, vote, figure and date is drawn from public records published by the City of Radford, the Virginia Auditor of Public Accounts, the Federal Audit Clearinghouse, and the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry, and from contemporaneous reporting by The Roanoke Times and Cardinal News.
