MAN ABOUT TOWN: A Web of Intrigue

By GEORGE SOUTHERN
Falls Church Times Columnist

August 30, 2010

Before the days of the Internet, getting “published” wasn’t that easy. Sure, you could pay a vanity press to privately print your work, but that didn’t mean anyone would read it. Today, though, any Tom, Dick, or Harriet can write a blog accessible around the world.

This seems like a useful innovation, but how does one separate fact from fiction? Truth from garbage? That’s one thing not even Google has figured out.

In little Falls Church, news sources are limited. For two years now we’ve had the Falls Church Times, but as a volunteer organization, this online newspaper doesn’t pretend to be able to cover all the local news of import. So we’re still often left with the News-Press, which recently set a record of 1,000 continuous weeks of publication.

Unfortunately, the News-Press, having over the years become accustomed to holding the only key to local publication, recently committed an egregious triple sin: First, it reported as “news” a couple of sentences posted anonymously on an obscure political blog. Then came an editorial bemoaning the “news.” Finally, the editor’s henchman laid out an action plan in reaction to the “news.”

If your reaction is “so what,” allow me to connect the dots. The News-Press editor remains in shock after the election of a mayor he opposed. First he petulantly reported that Mayor Baroukh had declined a request to congratulate the newspaper on its thousandth edition. Then, when it came time for the annual “State of the City” interview with the mayor, he handed the job off to an assistant.

It’s clear that the News-Press editor, along with his henchman, the ex-mayor’s husband, want very, very badly to see the end of Mayor Baroukh. Since Baroukh is a federal employee, and under the Hatch Act is not eligible to run in a partisan election, the ploy is to institute partisan elections for City Council.

Read more

MAN ABOUT TOWN: School Daze

By GEORGE SOUTHERN
Falls Church Times Columnist

August 23, 2010

Two more weeks of “freedom” before our children are returned to their educational cages.

Looking back on my 16 years in the public school classroom (including four years spent on the other side of the desk), I can say they were the most stressful years of my life.

But at least I was spared the agony of the current educational fad. Two of my daughters, both graduates of George Mason High School, were not.

I speak of the dreadful “block” schedule. Surprisingly, this form of torture has yet to be instituted at Guantanamo Bay. That it is visited on our children is, I feel, a travesty.

If you are over the age of 30, you may not have personally experienced the “block.” I know it only vicariously, through my daughters’ laments. But as a former teacher (and a former student) I can well imagine the agony.

Young people have short attention spans. We all know that. They are also restless – they need to move around frequently. In fact, the whole concept of confinement in a classroom is unnatural to a young person, which is why we prescribe so much Ritalin.

At GMHS, students have only four classes a day – one normal, 50-minute class, and the rest, grueling hour and 40-minute-long tests of endurance for the students and, no doubt, the teachers as well. Read more

MAN ABOUT TOWN: Top-to-Bottom Talk

By GEORGE SOUTHERN
Falls Church Times Columnist

August 16, 2010

Falls Church City’s longest-serving Council member and current vice mayor, Dave Snyder, writing in this week’s News-Press, has called for a “top to bottom, all-inclusive community discussion” of matters that could affect the sustainability of the City.

“We urgently need a community discussion of what constitutes ‘fiscal responsibility,’” says the vice mayor. The Man About Town agrees. And in fact, if you start with the vice mayor and end with me, that pretty much defines “top-to-bottom” doesn’t it?

Wait, I forgot about the community. Roughly 10,000 residents, of whom 1,000 vote in local elections, and maybe 500 read about such City matters as “top-to-bottom” discussions. Of those 500 readers, perhaps 100 actively participate. That’s about what we had for the budget town halls earlier this year.

So far, in response to Snyder’s piece, there have been six online commenters. Two are anonymous and so don’t count for much. The remaining four are former mayor Robin Gardner, former vice mayor Sam Mabry, one Richard Donnely who mutters “damn lies and statistics,” and one Robert Loblaw who writes in full: “David, Robin, and Mike, y’all are too cute for words.”

I think there’s room for a few more words, and not too cute. The subject is “the long term sustainability of the City, and indeed its very mission,” to quote Mr. Snyder. I’ve been criticized for dwelling too much on the City’s sustainability (actually, unsustainability), so I’m happy to see the vice mayor raise the issue.

To recap my thesis: Falls Church City is too small, and too hedged in by other high-density municipalities, to remain sustainable. The fault is the state of Virginia, which established a unique model for “independent” cities that conspires against our Little City. The problem is exacerbated by the outstanding reputation of our City schools, which is drawing disproportionate numbers of parents to settle here. Read more

MAN ABOUT TOWN: Still Wearing No Clothes

By GEORGE SOUTHERN
Falls Church Times Columnist

August 9, 2010

Hopefully the statute of limitations has run out on the following true story:

Freshly out of college, I was a copy editor for a Charleston SC newspaper then known as the News and Courier, although it was often called the “Newsless Courier.” With the 1976 film release of All the President’s Men, romanticizing how the Washington Post took down the Nixon administration, every available newspaper job in the country suddenly had a thousand college grads trying to land it. The News and Courier realized they could get some hard-working kids at next to no cost, and they hired a few.

One of the new reporters was a whiz kid named Peter who came out of Princeton, which shows you how strong the buyers market was. I’m not sure Peter had ever ventured south of the Mason-Dixon other than in a jet plane bound for Florida. But he found himself in the South Carolina Lowcountry, assigned the City beat for outlying municipalities such as Summerville and Moncks Corner.

Peter took his job mighty seriously, and while studying a road map he spotted a town within his beat that no one had ever mentioned to him. Its name was Lincolnville, founded in 1867, population 904. True to its name, the “Newsless Courier” had never reported the news of Lincolnville.

But Peter would change all that. He found out when the town council was meeting, asked if he could come, and showed up of an evening. Oh, they made a fuss over him! What an honor to have a bona fide newspaper reporter from the big city of Charleston attend their council meeting! He was recognized by the Mayor, asked to address the assembly, and generally treated like royalty. When the mayor gaveled the meeting to a close, everyone shook Pete’s hand and said they hoped he’d come back next time.

Peter walked out to his car, sat down, and decided to expand on his notes while his memory was fresh. So he started writing his report in the parking lot. And he wrote. And after a while he noticed something strange: not a single other person had left the town hall! Having dispatched the dignitary, the town council was now deliberating the real business of the day. Bemused, Peter drove back to his office, having learned something not taught in journalism class at Princeton University.

We’ve come a long way from those days, when it really was hard to know what your mayor and his cronies were up to. Now, at least in Virginia, any meeting (meaning any business discussion) of three or more elected officials must be public. Even better, we can watch those meetings at our leisure on the Internet.

And yet – watching the most recent financial reports to City Council, I almost felt like I was in Lincolnville. Read more

MAN ABOUT TOWN: Gone With the Windfall

By GEORGE SOUTHERN
Falls Church Times Columnist

August 2, 2010

I could have watched the entire “Gone With the Wind” last Thursday night in the same time I spent watching three and a half City Council members rehearsing the line, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Yes, that’s 3.5 members – one exhibiting a split personality causing him to vote both ways, in the process making the night’s labor meaningless.

Those 3 ½ members clearly don’t give a damn about the City’s precarious financial state, despite warnings from both the City Manager and the City Attorney. Apparently they, the elected part-time officials, know better than the full-time professionals they pay to administer the City. And that’s not all – they also ignored the advice of the chairman of the Long-Range Financial Planning Working Group.

That’s what you call arrogance – an arrogance that you might have thought was washed away by the May election. But no – one of the newly elected members seemed as cocksure as the rest of them. Call me sucker-punched.

Maybe it’s our proximity to Washington DC that breeds a cavalier attitude toward deficits. In Washington, if you need more money you just borrow it. If you exceed the debt ceiling, you raise it.

But why do these council members think they can allocate money like the U.S. Congress? Read more

MAN ABOUT TOWN: Can’t Take the Heat?

By GEORGE SOUTHERN
Falls Church Times Columnist

July 26, 2010

This is getting ridiculous. First, just six months ago, we get Buffalo NY-like snowstorms, and now we’re getting Miami-like heat.

Back in the day, people moved out to Falls Church for the summer to escape the Washington heat.

But how could it be any worse in Washington than here?

As I write this on a Sunday afternoon, we finally got a brief but powerful rainstorm. Normally, those kind of summer storms drop the temperature a good 15 degrees.

But at 5 p.m., according to the TJ Elementary weather station which I get over the Internet on Weatherbug, the temperature is still 96 degrees. Before the storm it was 98. Yes, in the shade.

Worse, the storm caused a tree to fall on my daughter’s boyfriend’s parents’ house in Broadmont.  The damage is even worse than it looks — and all for just 2 degrees of relief.

– — –

Read more

MAN ABOUT TOWN: Gone Fishing

By GEORGE SOUTHERN
Falls Church Times Columnist

July 19, 2010

Just back from the Eastern Shore, I crawled under the basement stairs to my keepsakes chest to retrieve a column last published 30 years ago in the Charleston Post-Courier and first published a few years before that in the Clemson Tiger. Thought maybe it was good for one more run . . .

A Little Boy who loved the sea walked hand in hand with his father down the beach. Laughing gulls flew over him, but he was watching a sandpiper sidestepping the waves. Just before a wave would overtake it, the bird would run for safety, only to again dart back into the foamy wake of the wave’s retreat. Further down the beach a husband and wife fishing team faced into the wind and maneuvered their lines. The Little Boy loved the sea. He heard the cry of the waves:

Follow us!
Go where we have been, and come where we are going.
The ocean is the universe;
Listen, and we will show you.

The Little Boy kept walking, hand in hand with his father. He looked away from the waves, up the beach to where the sea oats grew, tall and yellow in defiance of the wind. The swaying stalks stuck out like pins from the sand dunes, forming a spindly barrier.

Beyond the dunes was the beach highway, black and hot, painful to run across with bare feet. And beyond the highway were the tourist cottages, the real estate offices and the restaurants. Once more the Little Boy turned toward the sea and listened to the cry of the waves: Read more

MAN ABOUT TOWN: Too Small to Fail?

By GEORGE SOUTHERN
Falls Church Times Columnist

July 12, 2010

What a difference a year makes. On July 9, 2009, the City’s “newspaper of record,” the News-Press, editorialized that

The Falls Church City Council is now considering an ill-advised proposal to establish a Fiscal Affairs Advisory Committee, ostensibly to be composed of volunteer citizen talent, to weigh in on matters pertaining to the annual budget process.

The News-Press also reported that City Council members Hal Lippman and Dan Maller opposed forming an advisory committee, while Dave Snyder strongly supported it.

Today, Lippman and Maller are no longer on the Council, Snyder is vice mayor, and the Long-Range Financial Planning Working Group is a reality. Under the leadership of Richard Sommerfeld, the group has already shown itself to be invaluable.

Two more big changes: Ira Kaylin, retired chief financial risk officer at the Inter-American Development Bank, was elected to City Council, while coincidentally (?) the City’s chief financial officer, John Tuohy, resigned precipitously “to pursue other opportunities.”

I felt bad when I heard about Tuohy because he is such a nice, earnest fellow. The kind of guy who, with his white beard, fits in naturally with the Civil War reenactments he enjoys. He was always ready to answer my questions orally (although the City Manager muzzled him when it came to responding to my emails).

I think Tuohy found himself in an impossible situation. While he had long warned that the City’s fiscal future was on shaky ground, he had neither the planning staff nor the political clout to adequately make his case. When the “perfect storm” arrived concurrently with an election, Tuohy was effectively sandbagged along with the existing Council leadership. Read more

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