The 12 Plagues of Radford

The speaker is addressing the audience, introducing himself as the "cold hard truth" and discussing the various issues plaguing Radford, such as the loss of water sales to Montgomery County and the financial struggles of the city. He mentions that Radford is "dead broke" and highlights the potential devastating impact of the new Cogen facility being built by Radford University. The speaker promises to discuss all twelve issues in future episodes of the podcast. You don't know who I am, but I know all about you. I've come to talk to you tonight, about the things I've seen you do. I've come to set the record straight. I've come to shine the light on you. Let me introduce myself. I am the cold hard truth. That's old George Jones, the possum, with the cold hard truth. I like old George. We're going to tell a few cold hard truths today, I'm afraid. So come on with me, let's get in the ring. I'm your host, Keith Marshall, and let's go one more round. We will make America great again. If I say something and you don't want to listen, don't listen. One more round. Hey, welcome to One More Round Podcast. I'm your host, as always, Keith Marshall. And I'm glad to have you here today in the ring. Today we're going to be talking about the 12 plagues of Radford. I know, if you're like me, the first thing your mind goes to are the 10 plagues of Egypt. And I am not comparing the two. That's not where I'm going today. Nor am I saying that the things that's happened to Radford over the last five or six years are of biblical proportions. Though, I have to be honest, I'm shaking my head a little bit and scratching my head. And I've talked to some other people. And we're all wondering, what in this world could have happened to bring Radford to this point? And how can all of these things be happening here at the same time? Now, I'm going to talk about each topic, all 12 of them. And I'm going to try to answer some of those questions about how it happened or what is happening. But there will not be answers to everything. Some plagues, of course, can certainly be man-made. Some of them, we just don't have an explanation for. You can call it bad luck. You can call it what you want. Maybe we can uncover some of that as we go through these episodes. Now, there's 12 separate items here. So, I'm not positive that this isn't going to run into two episodes. In fact, it probably is. We'll just call it a part one and a part two like we've done in the past. But we're going to jump in there and we're going to go through some of these issues. Most all of these, in some form or another, I have covered in a previous podcast. And I'll try to mention the podcast if I can remember off the top of my head which one it appeared in. So, you can go back and listen. And hopefully, maybe I can update and bring us a little closer towards the current date on some of these issues that's come up. And as I go through these issues, I won't necessarily say that I have them in the order of importance. They're just as I sat down and I was going through some of these. And there's more, by the way. There's more than 12 that I could mention, which is so amazing about this, so astounding. And I mentioned that I've had people say things to me like, hey, Keith, what in this world? What is going on in Radford? And everybody has their opinions. A lot of them are similar. A lot of it springs, I believe, from the leadership. And we'll get down to that a little further along. A lot of it does. Like I said, some problems you can cause on your own. And some feed off of other problems. Some that you cause, some that you didn't cause. Some that you didn't react to properly when they come around. So, we're going to get into those. And I'm not going to waste a lot of time because, like I said, there's a lot of choices here. There's 12. And I'm going to start with one that probably may surprise you a little bit. It's not one that I've covered in a podcast episode. Although, I did cover it on my Facebook page before I even started the podcast. It was kind of a running post that I was putting updates to. And that is the loss of water sales to Montgomery County. Let me tell you a little something about Radford City. And you already know this if you think about it. Water is an amazing resource that we have. We have the river that runs the length of most of the city. And, you know, it's an awesome thing. People come. They use it for recreation. It's great smallmouth fishing. Now, good musky fishing, which is actually hurting the smallmouth fishing. But that's another story. But it's a great waterway, the new river. It's a special part of Radford City. But it also provides an endless supply of water. Radford City has an excellent water department. I know I toured the water department many times when I was on council. And they do just a bang-up job. They've been doing it for years. We have, you know, the guy that was running it before, he's retired. He did a great job. And now we have new people. And they've carried on the tradition, in my opinion, to the best of my knowledge. And they're doing a great job. And one thing that's good for us, what we want to do, we want to sell water. Because, like I said, we're not going to run out of it. We treat it and we send it on. And one of the things that we did for many, many years is we supplied Radford City water to a good section of Montgomery County, the Plum Creek area, and down that corridor that runs outside of Radford. You know, when you go out Rock Road and you head down and you hit Radford Road and out that section. But also down Tyler that runs out by two, now two hotels, several businesses there. And then culminates in the big prize, which is Korea and the New River Valley Medical Center, the hospital, which uses tons of water. So that was a big boon for Radford City. And for many years, we've enjoyed the revenue of selling that water there. You know, it kept our guys busy. It kept the plant running. Like I said, it provided extra revenue. And we've lost that. Montgomery County, over the years, made a decision to extend their water lines out to that point from their facilities to spend that money, which is, you know, millions of dollars, I'm sure. They decided to do that. And they cut their tap on and they cut our tap off. And quite literally, it's a tap. I mean, it literally was metered and we sold it to them from a certain point at the edge of town, right into Montgomery County. And we lost those sales. Now, over the years, you say now, okay, that's a plague. That's a loss of money. Is it our fault? Well, yes and no. Yes and no. I know over the years I was told that they attempted to negotiate some of the prices that we were, you know, for what we were selling them. And I'm not an expert in that area. I was told that we didn't negotiate with them. We kept our price the same. That may or may not be correct. So I'm not going to die on that hill because I'm not sure. But I will say this. The loss of those water sales hurt Radford City. It's just a little piece. It's one of the 12. That was a blow to us. And this happened just in the last few years. As a matter of fact, mail was sent out to the customers that, you know, the way it worked is a lot of customers, they thought they were on Montgomery County water all the time. They paid their bill to the Montgomery County Water Authority, just like we paid to Radford City. They paid to Montgomery County. They didn't know that the water was actually coming from Radford City. So they were informed of that. I know I was told that the hospital had to make recalculations with their equipment that they, you know, sterilized things with because it was a new water source that was going to be provided. So they were given notification of that. So, you know, they basically, in the last year and a half or so, cut the tap off slowly and then completely. And now they're providing their own water down that corridor. That's a big loss to Radford City. And that's point number one. Point number one in the 12 plagues of Radford. Now, I wish I had some numbers to give you to tell you exactly what financially that cost the city. I don't know. I don't know what that amount was. I know when I brought this issue out, there were a lot of denials. And the fact that they just recently raised their water rates, and by the way, you're going to see continued increases in your water and sewer rates in the years to come. One of the reasons they said they did it is they were replacing old equipment and all this tripe. But in my opinion, the truth is they increased those rates because they lost a significant income in those water rates to Montgomery County. Now, let's go on to plague number two. Now, I told you that as we go through these plagues that I have not put them in a particular order. But if I could put one, or I could put a couple, let's say, but if I could pick one specific happening that is one of the most debilitating things that is about to happen to Radford City. So, I want you, let's keep all this in perspective. Radford City is out of money. And we've talked about that in many of the other episodes. Like, for example, will Radford remain an independent city? And talking about Radford's poor and broke, you know, five steps to turn things around. I have a couple podcasts that talk a lot about that. But there's no way around it. Radford City is dead broke. We're dead broke. So, number two, I want you to put it in the right context. It hasn't happened yet. And of all the 12 plagues, financially, this one could potentially be one of the most devastating, if not the most devastating, happenings that's coming. And it hasn't happened yet. So, when you put it in perspective, the financial situation of Radford City, understand this. The biggest hit we know is coming. We can see the punch. It's in the air. Our jaw is right in line with it. And it's going to nail us. And it's going to hit us hard. And that is the new Cogen facility that Radford University is building to provide all of the electricity on campus for Radford University. Cogen started with a large grant in the state budget from the state of Virginia, over $20 million or some different figures, $20 to $30 million, somewhere in that range. That's going to fund not only the construction of the facility to generate their own power, but also the switchover and all the equipment that's needed to make that happen within the university. So, they'll be providing their own power. And they will not be buying it through Radford City. Now, there was a recent, I think WSLS come out with a little blurb. They may have done a live news report, too. But this was something that I saw on their Facebook page. And, by the way, pretty disappointing news sources, WSLS Channel 10. They seem to just carry the water. The politician tells them what they want them to show, and they just put it out there. They don't do their own fact-searching. They don't do their own research on things. They just put it out. And this little article on Radford University was a big one. I think it kind of exemplifies their practice of what they call journalism. And they put this out on February the 6th, I have, of this year. And, basically, it sounded like they just carried the statement that Radford University put out without any proof that would back it up or explain it or would show the factual nature of what was said. But it said, Radford University contributes millions of dollars to the Commonwealth, according to a new economic impact study. It shows that the school brought in $421 million in 2022. University leaders said while the final numbers were surprising, their goals are even bigger. You know, I got a little issue with that. And here's my question. Either this statement is fudged, which means all you have to do is drive through a city if you're an RU graduate and you get credit for everything the city's doing, which is, from what I've learned past that, that's kind of what this little study showed. I mean, if you graduated from RU and you built a house in a community, well, whatever you did, whatever taxes you paid, they're taking credit for it. You know, just kind of crazy stuff. They didn't do all that. Either the statement's a lie or they're the worst neighbor in the history of all neighbors. Because this university that's created, according to this article, $421 million of revenue and growth or whatever across the state of Virginia resides in a city that is living in adjunct poverty, can hardly pay their bills, and simply are struggling just to do the day-to-day operations of the city. And on top of that, on top of this, this university that's created all this wealth and all this greatness for the state of Virginia, they are taking away the lifeline of Rafford City by building this co-gen facility, which is designed, as I said, to provide all the power for Rafford University, now and in the future. The cost of Rafford City, you ask? It's estimated to be somewhere between $1 million and $1.5 million per year in revenue. $1 million and $1.5 million per year in revenue. How does that relate to you? How does that break down in cost to the citizen? Well, that's equal to about 15 cents worth of real estate taxes in our city. Fifteen cents! What if your real estate taxes need to go up 15 cents per $100 of assessed value in order to cover that? That's what we're looking at from a loss like that. And I don't believe it was done by accident. I don't believe those who made the decision at the time, I know we have new administration at RU now, but I don't believe those that were in the administration at the time were just blindsided by this fact. I believe they knew it. Matter of fact, I know they knew it, because I've heard those threats before passed around. If you don't do this, if you don't do that, we may just have to build our own electric facility. They bullied us. And at some point over the last five and six years, that process started, and council people and city officials sat on their hands and kept it quiet when we could have created enough, or we could have stood up, or we could have got our state representatives involved, or we could have potentially stopped this state funding for Radford University to build this facility to cut our own throats. So plagues happen. Sometimes you have no control. Sometimes you just sit on your hands and you watch them come, and you're too afraid or too obligated to the source that's doing this to stand up and fight for the citizens of Radford. And I believe, with all my heart, with all my heart, I personally believe that our city officials, both elected and non-elected, that knew about this are culpable for not standing up and letting this information get out and waiting until it was already in the process where it couldn't be turned around or seems to be turned around in order to say something. In fact, they never would have said anything. I said something. I put the information out, or I don't believe they still would have told us, quite frankly. In fact, keeping on this neighbor theme, there's hardly anything worse that Radford University as a friend or neighbor or however you want to call it could have done to Radford City than to build this facility. Electric power sales for Radford City is a lifeblood for us. It's very important. We have an excellent electric department. They are good employees. They're experienced. They do an awesome job. You've heard me talk about them before. And this is a travesty. There's a good chance it could wind up costing some of those guys their jobs. It's certainly going to cost us a large stream of revenue. Now, it hasn't all shaken out yet. There's some nuances of it. I encourage you. I did an actual episode on this specifically. It was called, it was on November the 9th. You can search back through that. It's who is looking out for us is the name of the episode. And you can, and all of these, by the way, all these episodes that I mentioned, you can find under the website, One More Round Podcast-KM. One More Round Podcast-KM. If you search that, you'll find it. But I also put these out on my Facebook page. But if you want to go a little more in depth on this co-gen, check out that episode. And, you know, I think they're still talking now about, you know, who's going to provide backup power and what that cost is going to be. Not sure they've made a lot of progress there. But we may find out about that a little later. But number two in the plagues of Radford, co-gen by Radford University, probably would be at number one, probably would be at number one, at least as far as the hit on Radford City because of it. All right, we're going to go on to number three. I'm making pretty good time here. I'm kind of surprised. But we're going to stay on the RU theme for number three. And this one is the Radford University removing properties from the tax rolls, buying up properties around the city and removing them from the tax rolls. And, by the way, if you want to check that out on my episodes, that is from October the, oh, where is it, October the 26th. That's in 2023, of course. And it's called The Taxing Dilemma of Radford University. What I outline there, and I'll go into some very specific figures in that episode about the amount of property that's off the tax rolls in the city, the cost of that, how much of that belongs to Radford University. We're going to go, it will go through a lot of those things. But here's the gist of it. There's been a pattern, a pretty strong pattern over the last five or six years, and even going back further than that, of Radford University pulling properties off the tax rolls. And, you know, I understand that, you know, universities expand and they get bigger, but there's a particular area that I think has really been harmful to the city, and it ties to a couple other areas and a couple, you know, other plagues that, you know, that bounce off of that. And that's the fact that they made a decision a few years back. That not only their freshmen would have to live on campus, but also their sophomores. Now, at the time, they had a little higher enrollment. But what they did, though, and you can verify this yourself. I encourage you, when you go out to eat the next time, when you get done and you're riding, and you're getting ready to go back home, make a drive through the campus, all right? Make a drive through the campus and take a look at some of the apartments that are around campus. What Rafford University did was, they went out and they purchased a good number of off-campus housing units. They purchased them to house their students in. They made an announcement recently that they were going to tear down Mews Hall or they were going to discontinue it. I'm assuming they're going to tear it down, at least that's what I've heard. Which was a place that they housed a lot of Rafford University students in that location. But they went out, outside of campus, off-campus, and purchased a large number of these apartment housing units. What happens when they do that, they pull those units, you know, Rafford University is tax-exempt. They don't pay taxes. So when they buy a building in Rafford City, whoever owned that building before was paying real estate taxes to that location. They were paying sometimes other taxes as well. You know, possibly business personal property taxes and other things. But when Rafford University buys that property, boom, it's off the tax rolls. And there's estimates, I think it was around $17 million worth of property, I think it's much more than that now, that they've pulled off of the tax rolls. If you'll drive around, as I said, and you'll take a look, here's how you'll know. If you'll look at those units, you will see a tag on those units. It will be red and black if it's owned by Rafford University. It'll be red and black. It may not say, are you on it? But it's red and black. They're colors. Which, by the way, if you wonder where the thing red over black comes from, black always represents the Bobcats. We're black and gold. Red is Rafford University. But that's a side point. I'll get to a couple of those issues later. But if you'll drive around, you will see those tags. And it'll say, it'll have the red and the black, and it'll have the address of the unit inside of that sign. So when you see those, and they're outside of campus, realize that those once were privately owned. They paid their taxes in Rafford City, and now they don't pay taxes in Rafford City anymore because they belong to Rafford University. And there's a lot of them. When you start looking, you'll be surprised, and you'll kind of see where we've seen that. They've also purchased some old bank buildings, some old convenience store properties, some other things along and around Rafford University, taking those things off the tax rolls. And when that happens, we lose our base of taxpayers. I mean, when you're struggling and you only have a finite amount of money coming in, your goal is to grow and increase the value of properties in the business sector and in the private sector in order to bring in more revenue. That way, the costs are spread over a larger number of people and businesses instead of concentrating them down. And as more and more property comes off the tax rolls, the burden gets more and more concentrated on the existing private businesses and residential locations. It hurts us. So that has been a big plague on the city. Number three was Rafford University removing properties from the tax rolls. Now, I mentioned just a few seconds ago about the red over black. I have a whole series of podcasts called Red Over Black, and there's actually three of them. The series is one, two, and three. And start with one because it kind of breaks things down and it'll explain things as you go. And this pertains to number four on the list of plagues in the city of Rafford. The first Red Over Black come out on November the 16th. The second one was November the 30th. And the third and final episode on that series was December the 7th in part three. And that leads to number four on the list of plagues in Rafford City. And I called it treachery. And here's why I called it that. And when you listen to those podcasts, it'll make more sense. Rafford University came in and they built, along with the Rafford University Foundation and some other partners, the Highlander Hotel, which is located on Tyler. Beautiful hotel. Nice hotel. But as part of that process, they sought incentives from the city of Rafford. Incentives in order for them to do the construction. And it was a little odd to me as I went through this. And I learned that, you know, there was some pressure being put on people in order to increase the incentives to give them more. And what I did, what One More Round podcast did, was we FOIAed all the information relating to anything dealing with Rafford City and the Rafford University Foundation, its partners, Rafford University, anything dealing with that hotel. And I got, and I described it in those episodes, a Sears and Roebuck catalog full, full of information. Text messages, emails, just things back and forth, documents, you name it. I got it. It took a long time to sift through that. We learned in that process that Rafford City gave up $500,000. Now, this is a city that's broke now. I mean, get this, keep this in perspective. They gave up $500,000 in utility incentives. That's the connection fees and things of that sort for water, sewer, electric. $500,000 as an incentive. We also were in the process of negotiating an incentive with Rafford University to provide them tax relief on their real estate taxes. Basically, there was a proposal that ended up being passed 5-0, I believe. Excuse me, no. It was 3-0. We had a couple that finally decided they would, or one in particular that recused himself, and one that did so because he should have. But basically, it was an incentive that gave them 60% off for their real estate taxes with the possibility of earning an additional 20% to make it 80% off their real estate taxes if they met some numbers in regards to their meal sales and lodging sales and things of that sort. Now, what I detailed in that was some behind-the-scenes negotiations that went on between the mayor of the city of Rafford, David Horton, and the Rafford University Foundation. Negotiations, in my opinion, that were wrong specifically because the mayor of the city of Rafford is an employee of Rafford University. And it appeared, it appeared to me, and you should go back, like I said, and you listen to Red Over Black 1, 2, and 3 and follow those along. It appeared to me that the mayor of the city of Rafford negotiated on behalf of Rafford University to get and to increase those incentives, to put pressure on employees within the city based on the conversations that he was having with the Rafford University Foundation and its leadership and based on conversations he had had with President Hemphill at the time and also the Chief Financial Officer, Chad Reed, at the time. It appeared to me that the mayor used his employment at Rafford University as a wedge to push and to kind of bully, in my personal opinion, employees within the city to provide that incentive. And I'll let you know that I heard through the grapevine that Rafford University Foundation, the hotel, did meet its numbers and we are, in fact, going to have to cut them a check for 80% of their real estate taxes back. You know, the way it works is they pay their taxes and then at the end of the year, if they've met their numbers, we give them back between 60% and 80%. Well, we will be giving them back 80% of their real estate taxes. That's the bad news. It's also bad that knowing about the $500,000 incentive that was already given in utility connection fees, knowing about how this process went, that the remaining members of council that did not recuse themselves, they voted in favor of it anyway. A check that we honestly cannot afford to write. Now, I know the pressures that was put on the threats about them pulling things off the tax rolls and things along that nature. I'm personally not buying it, but they made that decision. But I wanted to make sure this was one of the plagues because from now on, any decision that's made regarding Rafford University, you have to be concerned that the very things that happened in this hotel process, this Highlander Motel hotel process, are happening behind the scenes in any other venture where Rafford City and Rafford University is involved and you cannot have complete confidence, or I cannot have complete confidence that Rafford City and its citizens are getting a fair shake. In fact, I don't believe we are. Anytime we're dealing with a situation that's still involving our mayor and Rafford University, I just don't feel good about it. I, for one, am very disappointed that the rest of the members on council, in my opinion, did not stand up for the citizens here. I'm sure they have their own opinions on that. Time will tell who's right or wrong about that in particular, and I could be wrong about some of those decisions, but I'm certainly not wrong in my book because I read in black and white the treachery that happened in one of the plagues of Rafford. I personally don't think we could outline a greater case of a conflict of interest and how culpable everybody else within the city was to ignore it and let it happen and then put a stamp of approval on it with a vote. It's kind of disappointing to me. Well, not kind of disappointing. It's extremely disappointing to me. All right, I've knocked out one through four. We're going to jump on to number five, and that is uncontrolled spending. You know, I think of all the different plagues, this concept is probably the easiest to understand. We kind of all understand that because we all work for a living, you know, we have money coming in, we have bills that we have to pay, and sometimes we have some extra money and we can put a little back and we can save for a rainy day or something special that we want to do. But we all understand that you have a certain amount of money coming in, you have a certain, you know, your bills add up to a certain amount, and you have to make sure the money you have coming in is greater than your bills. We also understand that things happen. You know, things just happen. People use other words. I don't want to use it. But things happen, all right? When everything's going smooth and we think everything's good, we get this crazy bill or we'll get three of them in a row. They just smack us upside the head. We understand that. You know, the refrigerator will go out, the transmission on the truck will go out, your kid will need a new pair of basketball shoes. It all happens at the same time. And how we deal with things like that, how most people deal with things like that, is they maintain a savings account. And in the city's case, you would call that a reserve fund. Now, the city has several reserve funds, but two of the most important reserve funds are the reserve fund for the general fund and the reserve fund for the electric fund. The regular general fund, that's your day-to-day operations of the city. That's how they make payroll. That's how they, you know, they pay their electric bill, where we purchase power from AEP to resell to the residents. You know, they pay whatever bills. You know, they pay for gas. They pay for, you know, different things. And then, of course, separately is the general fund reserves that is kind of that savings account like what we have, where if you have a month where you get hit in the head a couple times, you know, you have the money in the reserve funds to pull out. Now, when the previous council took their seats in 2018, that would be Mayor David Horton, Councilman Foster, and several others that are no longer on council. When they took their seats in 2018, they were handed a balanced budget and a decent amount of money in all the reserve funds. Not as much as anyone would like, but it was stable and it was growing. And somehow between 2018 and this year, everything we have is gone. It's disappeared. Well, it didn't just disappear. It didn't take a magician to get rid of it. It took uncontrolled spending to get rid of it. We know COVID come along, but there is a counterbalance to COVID, which was them receiving tens of millions of dollars in COVID relief fund from the federal government in order to compensate for any losses that they might have. Somehow they've managed, and to this date, they have not shown us, but somehow they managed to spend up those tens of millions of dollars, and we do not have a lot to show for it. Now, I know they bought a lot of vehicles, possibly. I know they built a skate park. I know they did several other things, but at this point, we haven't been able to see them show that on paper, what they spent it on and balance it out for us, how that money disappeared. But in addition to that COVID money, they spent up the entire general fund reserves of almost every account within the city. In fact, they had an audit report. I'm talking my episodes again, the great audit report of 2024 paying the stupid tax, and that was on January 25th, 2024. So that one wasn't very long ago. It showed that you could watch that episode. I watched the YouTube video of the council meeting where the audit report was happening, and you could see that ski slope. As these guys took office in 2018, you could watch it coming down at a fever pitch till we were down to about $66,000 in our account. $66,000. I'll point out in that episode, you've all got more money than that in your 401k, and that's just for you and your wife. Maybe just you. You've got a lot more money than that. Well, that's all the city had. They've spent up the electric reserves down to nothing. They've spent the general fund down to nothing, and they went through tens of million dollars of COVID relief funds. So that is a big plague to me, uncontrolled spending. Now, they've had a lot. I've kind of watched over the last few years, and for a while, I thought, you know, maybe I was wrong. Maybe they're doing a better job than I thought they could. You know, they've got all these programs. They've been in these pocket parks. They went down to East End, and they built that little intersection in the middle of the road, you know, after you go past the, oh, you know, you're heading back from West End, and you cross the Bissett Park, and you're heading down towards the East End downtown area. And they built that median. I'm still trying to figure out why they built that median. I think, or I heard that they thought they could plant flowers and do all these special things, but they didn't do their proper research and found out, because it was Route 11, and it was restricted, there were some restrictions on it, they couldn't do anything. So the good news is, we have a nice section of grass growing in the middle of the road that we can mow, and aesthetically, it didn't do anything for the city. It just cost us money, and I'm sure it spent up some of that COVID relief or reserve funds that we preciously need now. So as I said, you know, I thought, hey, maybe they're doing all right, but I think the last six months, we have learned that this was all façade. They were spending money that we didn't have, they were doing, they were kind of operating from a perspective of an old movie, Field of Dreams movie, if you build it, they will come. Well, they tried to build it, they didn't finish, and nobody showed up. Not, at least not to the degree to which they built it. And now we sit here, because of this excessive spending, because of the just poor management of taxpayer dollars, we're broke. And we're facing the fact that we could lose our independent status. Month to month, we're wondering if we can make our payroll. And you know what they were forced to do, and you'll find that in that episode where Radford remained an independent city. They went out and they borrowed $4 million. $4 million. Kind of like, it felt like a payday loan to me. They borrowed $4 million, 4.5% interest, in order to make payroll. Well, here was the problem. Before the check ever showed up in the mail, or however we got it, that $4 million, we already back-owed $4 million. So we didn't get ourselves out of a bind. We didn't get ourselves ahead. We just simply paid back the back-due money that we owed. By the time you paid the next payroll, and the AEP bill that we back-owed, and other monies that were regular payments for the schools and other things, $4 million's gone. Well, guess what? The $4 million's gone. We were told, in that meeting where that was announced, that that money would be paid off, I believe they said by June. It's either June or September. I'd have to go back. You may find it in that episode if you look. But they're already talking, and as you listen to the council meetings and the audit report and other things, you can start to figure out they're not going to be able to pay that $4 million back. I'm hearing that they're struggling to even pay the interest on the $4 million that they owe. So how's that going to shake out? Well, they're probably, at the very least, going to have to refinance the $4 million. And do not be surprised, as citizens, we don't get up one day and realize that they've borrowed more money and sunk us deeper into debt. And let me point something out, because they like to talk about this a lot. They like to say, we have a population of a certain number, 15,000, 16,000 people, and we have X amount of debt. I think it's somewhere in the neighborhood of $28 million. I'm not sure if that includes the new $4 million or not, but we have a certain amount of debt. And there's a ratio that the state has that says, okay, well, if you have this much population and this much debt, as long as you stay below this percentage, you're in great shape. Well, let me tell you, all localities are not created equal. Okay? And we're going to talk about that in the next point, which is number seven, and that's growing poverty. We're going to get into that. When 40% of your population are approaching that is below the poverty line, you understand what that means. That means that instead of the debt being covered across the whole population, it's falling on just a finite number of people that are paying taxes that are part of that tax base. I know people in all levels pay forms of taxes, and they contribute, and I'm not saying they don't. But I think you understand the concept. You know, those that own their own home, and those that own their own businesses, and those that are, you know, doing more within the city, they're paying a higher level of taxes. And the fewer are that are doing that, the more that the few have to pay. And that's what we're running into. Because of the uncontrolled spending, because of the increasing debt that we can't seem to pay, and another bad one, and I hate to say it, another bad one, I'm going to give you just a little bit of history of when I was on council. Another bad one is the decision to basically rebuild McCarg Elementary School. We could not afford that debt. I know there was a lot of voices, and when I ran for council, you know, that was probably a reason a lot of people didn't vote for me. And I heard a lot about that. We have to rebuild McCarg. It's too old. We have this problem with it, that problem with it. And I don't doubt that there were a lot of problems. There were. Kids were still getting a very good education there. I will say that. The quality of teaching did not change because the school was rehabbed. We still have good quality teachers there that are doing their best to educate our kids. New things are great, but I don't always attribute new things and new schools to better education. That doesn't always work that way. But there's a bottom line here that you have to, a fact you have to face. You know, in our own home, if you went through your own house right now, I bet you could go room to room and outside and you could point out some things that you really need to do around your house. You may need a new roof. You know, that's one of the things you may have to do first. But there's other things that you say, you know, we could use a little paint here. Carpet in this room would be nice. I would really love to redo this kitchen. This bathroom really is outdated. It's from the 70s. We need to redo that. Hey, same thing at my house. Okay, I know we all experienced those. But how many of us would decide to do them all at once when we were already stretched to the limit on our finances? Well, some do that and some lose their homes. Okay, and that's where we're at right now. We decided because we really wanted a new school. We really wanted to redo it. We're gonna do it regardless of the financial situation it puts us in. Well, I'm sorry, that's bad governance. If you're an elected official and you're so scared of losing your election that you will put your locality in a situation where they could lose their independence just so you can get elected, well, come on. You're not someone that we can trust there. When I was on council, and it was a previous superintendent, and she had a different approach to it. We discussed it with the current school board that was there at the time. And we decided that we were gonna do a pay-as-you-go approach. That was our goal. We were going to try, the city was gonna try to put in three or 400,000 a year towards that project when we could, on the years we could, we would. On the years we could not, we would not. But it would be a planned kind of thing. Hey, we got 350 this year. During the summer break, maybe you can replace the electrical in this section of the building. Maybe you can change out the heating and air the next year. That was kind of the goal that we had. It was just a concept. But one thing that I knew personally, and I think some other people knew, that we could not afford to just run out and borrow another, you know, they said it was going to be 15, then 16, then 17, then 18 million dollars. We just couldn't afford it. We didn't have the money to meet the payments. We just didn't. I don't care what the debt-to-population ratio said. We knew we could not do that. We knew we couldn't. So we did not do that. But you better believe, as soon as the previous council won in 2018, they went headlong into that and now we're reaping the bad rewards from a bad financial decision in a, frankly, an administration with uncontrolled spending and just poor leadership throughout the previous council's time for the last four or five years. And all that's a shame to me. You know, we had some decent mayors leading up to this. Tom Starnes, you know, was mayor for 30-some years. Now, did I agree with every single thing that he did? No, I didn't. Do I think some things should have been done different here and there? Well, sure. I'm sure he would have felt the same if I was the mayor. But I know this. He was fiscally responsible for the city's money. He left the city in a good financial position. And likewise, Mayor Brown. I mean, he and I, you know, Mayor Brown and I didn't see, I don't have a lot of issues. I have, I had, and I have a lot of respect for him. But he left the city in good financial shape. He did. He did not, in my opinion, lead us in a direction of fiscal irresponsibility. That's not true now. In my opinion, that is not true now. And you know, as I've watched the last few weeks in particular, with high hopes that we would start to turn things around, that a sense of urgency would kind of fall upon the existing council, no matter which side of the aisle that they're on. They pull together and make some hard, tough decisions in order to right the ship to make the cuts that you have to make you know, to just bail the water out of the boat to keep us above the shoreline. But you know, I listened to the council meeting last night. Just last night. And they approved a purchase of three, I think it was $327,000 for a new digger truck for the Electric Department. And I've expressed to you my high regards for the Electric Department and its people. But I have to tell you this. If ever there was a bad time to make a decision to buy a vehicle like that, it was now. And I'm wondering if the people making that decision that made that vote, the 5-0 vote, if they did their due diligence about that truck. I mean, do you know how many miles were on it? Do you know how many hours it had? I do, by the way. Did you figure that out? Did you find out when exactly in the truck's lifespan that hydraulics are replaced? You know, we're only about halfway there. Did you figure out exactly what problems it has? How bad is it? Could we repair it? You know, the company that makes that truck has on-site repair people that will come to the site and repair things. There's actually a facility for repair in Roanoke and in Mount Airy to get that done. Did you check on that, about the possibility of spending $10,000, $15,000 to get the thing in top shape to last another 5 or 6 years in order to weather this storm? Did you think about those things? I don't know if they did or not. Maybe they did do their due diligence and they made that decision. I'm a little skeptical, though, and I certainly believe that that $327,000 could be well used somewhere else. In fact, if you want to just do the math, what's that worth? You know, I was talking about what is it worth for that $1.5 million we're losing because of RU's co-gen facility, and it was about $0.15. Well, that truck, I hope you like it, because it's worth over $0.03 on our real estate taxes that we could save. But I've got to wonder, I've got to worry that we're just going to pass on decisions like that to the citizens to open up their pocketbooks, people that can't afford it, to cover for bad decisions, continued bad decisions. You know, I'm bringing this to a conclusion. I'm going to finish here with this one being my last one for this episode, the uncontrolled spending. But I have a deep suspicion, and I'm beginning to put my fingers on it, but I have a deep suspicion that there's been a catastrophic decision, financial decision, somewhere in this process that the citizens haven't been informed of. A serious accounting error, a mistake in regards to maybe one of these grants that the citizens are not being informed about. And I'm going to work hard, I guess I'm going to have to work hard to provide that information. I want to find out. I want to know what exactly happened to get us in this situation. I want to know what happened to all those ARPA funds. I want to know how all the reserve funds were spent. You could just come out and tell us and not force me on the One More Round podcast to work through and find that information to tell everybody. I shouldn't have to do that. Citizens should get that directly from their elected officials. But I guess I'm going to have to. I think we'll have to dig deep into these grants and just take a look at the grants, the matching funds, the other things that were part of this process. Somewhere, millions of dollars disappeared. And there's not an accounting for it. Now, I don't think anything illegal happened. That's not what I'm even insinuating. It's not what I suspect. It's not. But I think something along the lines of just poor management and poor accounting happened. And I think we're going to get to the bottom of it. I think we're going to have to. We're going to have to get it out. We're going to have to expose it and make sure it doesn't happen again. All right. I think that's where we're going to finish up today. I have made it. Let me see how far I made it. One through five, if I called the numbers out right. I believe I have six through twelve to go in the next podcast. And we'll just call that the Twelve Plagues of Radford Part Two. Now, there's a whole week between the two podcasts if I do this one next week. So there's plenty of time for number thirteen. Let's hope that there isn't a thirteenth between now and next week when I can dig a little deeper and get into these other twelve. But to finish out, I'm going to do as always, I'm going to read my theme verse, and it's found in Ecclesiastes chapter twelve, verses thirteen and fourteen. And God's word says this. Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter. Fear God, and keep His commandments. For this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil. Hey, thanks again for joining me here in the ring today. I appreciate you taking time to listen to me and trusting me with some facts that I'm working really hard to provide you. I hope to be back next week with a new episode. Until then, I hope God blesses you richly, and I hope you have a wonderful, wonderful week. Take care.