SUNDAY, MAY 29 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C7
in the process of un-incorporat-
ing,” wrote the business owners,
most of whom live outside town
limits. They demanded a forensic
audit to see whether past rev-
enue had been mishandled.
By early this year, the council
could not even meet because too
few members were showing up.
CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE“Those local officialsfailed to understandthat the function of localgovernment is toprovide services, andsafety, and it just wasn’thappening. It just wasnot a good look for thetown.”
House Majority Leader Terry
Kilgore (R-Scott), whose district
covers part of PoundIn Kennedy’s first meeting as a
member, back in November, the
new town attorney quit, two
council members stormed out
and 16 of the town’s roughly 24
businesses submitted a letter in
which they refused to continue
paying taxes.
“There is no real reason to
make a payment to a town that isAssembly to dissolve the town’s
charter.
That threw Pound’s fate into
the hands of one of the most
powerful members of the Gener-
al Assembly, House Majority
Leader Terry Kilgore (R-Scott),
whose district covers part of
Pound and whose family wields
enormous influence in that part
of the state.
“Those local officials failed to
understand that the function of
local government is to provide
services, and safety, and it just
wasn’t happening,” Kilgore said
in an interview. “It just was not a
good look for the town.”
When the legislature con-
vened in January, Kilgore intro-
duced a bill to dissolve the
charter.
Kennedy and Short drove the
six hours to Richmond to beg
legislative committees not to
pass it. State law sets out a
process for annulling a charter,
and residents are supposed to
vote on it. Kennedy, a union
organizer and lobbyist who has
tussled with Kilgore, and Short,
in his customary denim overalls,
argued that killing the town
would set a dangerous prec-
edent.
A handful of lawmakers, Re-
publican and Democrat, were
sympathetic. But most deferred
to Kilgore. The charter-killing
bill passed by wide margins, and
Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) signed
it into law last month.
“I don’t think we’re setting a
precedent,” Kilgore said. “This is
a very, very rare occasion where
the General Assembly would step
in. We’re not going to step in
when towns are arguing or
there’s a disagreement. But when
there’s no services, or paying bills... we need to step in.”
Kilgore made one concession:
If he feels the town is making
progress, he will come back next
year and ask his colleagues to
restore the charter.
“I want them to succeed,” he
said. “I think this was a wake-up
call.”
Fight on
The immediate impact was the
opposite; even the threat of the
Assembly’s action had thrown
the town into a death spiral.go ahead and step on outta here!”
The audience cheered, and the
supposedly illegal meeting tum-
bled into chaos for another two
hours.
Videos of Pound council meet-
ings became tawdry municipal
reality shows — people would
tune in for the sheer cringewor-
thy spectacle.
“Sometimes you can only
laugh,” said Trivett, the Ashland
mayor, who learned of Pound’s
plight from someone at church
who is related to a council mem-
ber. “But I thought, it’s a shame
to find humor in things that any
of us in our towns would find
terrible. So they shouldn’t be a
laughingstock.”
Kennedy and Short found lit-
tle humor in what was going on.
Kennedy had begun taking an
interest in the council when her
yard filled with sewage and made
her husband sick. Her com-
plaints were brushed aside, she
said, but the problem cleared up
when the county took over the
water system and fixed a leak.
Short, a council member for a
single term that ended in 2018,
could not turn away from the
place where his family had lived
for generations. Retired on dis-
ability from the state highway
department and caring for his
elderly parents, Short began de-
voting almost all his time to
monitoring the council and its
problems — taking video of
meetings, talking with members,
trying to broker some kind of
peace.
The cousins worked together
last year on a campaign to get
Kennedy elected to town council.
“My husband said, ‘no, you ain’t
doing that,’ ” said Kennedy, who
has enough on her hands with a
full-time job at Verizon and an
elderly mother and sick friend to
care for. But she and Short
knocked on nearly every door in
town seeking votes.
By the time Kennedy won her
seat, the Wise County Board of
Supervisors had gotten fed up
with Pound’s antics. The town is
part of the county, sharing its
school system and constitutional
officers, such as the sheriff and
commonwealth’s attorney. The
supervisors voted shortly before
Election Day to ask the Generaltown government from scratch.
Several volunteers, moved by
their plight, are pitching in to
help — such as Andrea G. Erard,
a lawyer who serves as attorney
for five towns around the state,
including Ashland.
On a recent Wednesday night,
Erard guided the council
through a two-hour training ses-
sion, via Zoom, on the basics of
town government. Then she
called Kennedy at home, and
they spent another half-hour la-
menting the endless list of prob-
lems.
“Well,” Erard said on the
phone, and paused. “It’s gonna
get better.”
Kennedy took a weary drag on
her cigarette. “Well,” she said,
“I’m praying for it.”
Tough times in the Pound
Along Main Street on a spring
day — the surrounding moun-
tains just beginning to blush
with green and sprayed with
purple redbud blossoms — there
is only a lonely suggestion of the
place Pound once was. In the
1940s, coal miners swarmed
from nearby Kentucky to drink
in the town’s 11 bars. There were
department stores, parking me-
ters and taxi cabs. Now most of
the storefronts are empty, some
just a facade in front of a col-
lapsed roof.
Pound — some call it the
Pound — has always been a tough
place. It is said to have been the
first area settled in Wise County
in the 1700s, but was the last to
incorporate as a town, in 1950.
The origins of the name are
cloudy but probably connected
to the pounding mill that once
stood along the river.
Terry Short, a former council
member and Kennedy’s cousin,
remembers helping his dad clear
squatters out of the family’s
motel when he was a grade-
schooler — wielding a shotgun at
age 11.
“Everybody in this area has
fought for what they’ve got and
struggled for what they’ve got,”
said Short, 55.
Kennedy went to elementary
school in the building that now
serves as town hall (in between,
it was a funeral parlor) and lives
a short walk away, just past the
Magic Spray carwash. She gradu-
ated from Pound High School,
which is being torn down.
“It used to be a booming place
here. Everybody got old and just
died off,” said Ronnie Roberts, 67,
who runs a small engine repair
shop beside the former hardware
store. He worked at the store for
30 years until it closed in the
early 2000s.
“I’d like to see it do better, but I
don’t know,” Roberts said, fixing
a tractor tire. “They had so much
trouble over there at town coun-
cil.”
Sharp declines in coal-tax rev-
enue have crippled many parts of
Southwest Virginia, but Pound
made things worse through poor
management. Last year, the bot-
tom fell out.
One of its most valuable as-
sets, a multimillion-dollar waste-
water treatment system, fell into
such disrepair that the state
ordered Pound to hand it over to
Wise County’s water authority. A
budget reckoning and personnel
clashes led the town to fire its
attorney, who was also a detec-
tive, and shutter the police de-
partment — which led to the
evidence crisis. The cashier
pleaded guilty to embezzling
about $1,700.
But the deepest problem of all
— the one that fueled all the rest
— was that members of the town
council could not seem to stand
one another. There were walk-
outs, lockouts, shouting matches
and lawsuits.
By December 2020 — to take
just one example — the town was
three years behind on annual
financial audits. It was five
months past that year’s deadline
to adopt a budget. Residents
complained that the police de-
partment was gobbling up more
than $380,000 of the town’s
roughly $580,000 annual spend-
ing plan.
On Dec. 7, three members of
the council joined more than 40
residents in filing a petition to
oust Mayor Stacey Carson, whose
long-term relationship with a
council critic known as Chicken-
man had made her the object of
ire. The next day, Carson con-
vened a crowded public hearing
on the budget, led the Pledge of
Allegiance, then said the meeting
had not been properly advertised
and was illegal.
Angry council members told
her to ask the town attorney. We
don’t have a town attorney, Car-
son replied. Not true, council
members said. The audience be-
gan to shout.
“I don’t need to talk to you
since you have a petition against
me right now,” Carson snapped
at a council member, “so you can
POUND FROM C1
Mismanagement, infighting threaten shrinking Va. town
EARL NEIKIRK FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTGREGORY S. SCHNEIDER/THE WASHINGTON POST GREGORY S. SCHNEIDER/THE WASHINGTON POSTCLOCKWISE: Pound High
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