City on the brink: Petersburg can’t pay its bills and time is running out

WaPo ^ | 09-05-2016 | Gregory S. Schneider

[NRx]

...This city of 32,000 just south of Richmond is facing a financial crisis unusual for fiscally conservative Virginia — or any state. In at least the past four years, the city had spent all of its reserves and then kept spending money it didn’t have. It took out short-term loans based on anticipated tax revenue to keep paying bills.

When the loans ran out, it stopped paying. Some fire and rescue equipment has been repossessed. The city trash hauler is threatening to stop pickup. And lenders will not give Petersburg any more loans.

In his 46 years minding state ledgers in various roles, Virginia Finance Secretary Ric Brown has never seen anything like it. “As a rule, most Virginia localities are in pretty good shape,” Brown said.

What’s more, there is no mechanism in state law to help Petersburg — no provision for bankruptcy, no set way for the General Assembly to step in.

[DoughtyOne]

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...this is a general all-purpose message, and should not be seen as targeting any individual I am responding to...

[hal ogen]

The idiot voters deserve what they get.

[gunsequalfreedom]

They borrow so they can keep spending. Typical of people that don’t know how to manage finances.

[DoughtyOne]

Disgusting.

Thanks for the link, and that mentions his party affiliation.

[Billyv]

The way responsible citizens step in is with the vote and with honorable trustworthy citizens running for office. Q

[unixfox]

I’ll bet these parasites spent a lot of money on conferences, training sessions, and other “necessary” government functions.

[Oldeconomybuyer]

...then kept spending money it didn’t have...

Happens a lot. In soon-to-be crap holes.

[ClayinVA]

It’s a rough place and has an extremely high crime rate. Several times the local base has put large parts of the city off-limits.

[Thibodeaux]

the city is 80% black

there is no responsible majority to step in and step up

[XRdsRev]

This is a city that sits on the main north/south thoroughfare of the Atlantic Coast (I-95) with a National Park (Petersburg National Military Park) and major military installation (Fort Lee) on it’s doorstep.

This place should be a goldmine. I drove through it in May and it looked like Cr*P....what a wasted opportunity. Leave it to democrats to turn gold into lead.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Sounds like they made the city into a jobs project. That’s one way to get a lot of political righties not to complain too much... the employment figures look better that way — until the Doritos run out.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Surely a chap like Donald Trump could think up a better plan here.

[Topcatfl]

Petersburg has been in a decline for along time. I ran the Blue Cross office there in 79-80. Brown and Williamson tobacco exited taking 3500 good jobs around that time and the garment industry was underwater to a large extent and probably gone now. Most of the white population had moved across the river to Colonial Heights (known locally as colonial whites) so the comparison to Detroit is proper. The first day I showed up for work there was a line of people at our office. It turns out that our next door neighbor was a methadone clinic and the line was for them. So no surprises with this article and I would suspect that most of south side Virginia is suffering a Great Depression kind of economy.

[oldsicilian]

Pity. Petersburg is important historically. Lots happened there in the revolutionary war and the war of Northern aggression

[bus man]

It’s been a pit forever

That's not been my experience. I have relatives in Petersburg and have been visiting them going back into the mid 1970s. I remember when Petersburg was a fairly prosperous town, with a decent mall and a number of other shopping centers. But I also remember when things turned south, and every time I would visit, the place had gotten worse than the last time. There's only two of my relatives left there, and fortunately they both live in decent areas. (Yes, Petersburg does have a few.) But it's so very sad to see what that place has become.

For years now, I listened to stories about how the "coloreds" (yes, that's how they talked) ran the city into the ground. And for years, I was shocked by what I saw as blatant racism. Unfortunately, I've gotten older and a little wiser over time, and I'm sad to say that I now understand what they're getting at.

[Bogey78O]

Nice little rhetorical trick.

The city isn’t conservative. It’s blue through and through.

Congrats VA Dems. His is the future thanks to your electoral success.

[USMCPOP]

“fiscally conservative Virginia”. Didn’t they turn blue a long time ago?

There are pockets, BIG pockets of blue. Northern VA, Norfolk area, several of the big university towns/counties, etc. Seems as though libs have invaded, like some areas of Washington and Oregon. Too close to D.C., unfortunately.

[USMCPOP]

I believe one of the things that killed that city was that they really hit the tobacco company, Brown & Williamson, with insane taxes. B&W said “F-U”. Look it up.

[sphinx]

Petersburg’s three museums — sources of local pride, especially Blandford Church and its exquisite collection of Tiffany stained glass — were found to have a grand total of 36 visitors per day.

I heartily recommend a visit to Blandford Church anytime you pass through the vicinity. I am astonished that the visitor figures are so low. For those who don't know, Blandford was an old Anglican church that had been abandoned prior to the Civil War when the congregation moved to larger quarters. The earliest marked grave dates to 1702; the fellow was in his 80's, so he was presumably born when James I was on the throne. The building was still in good shape when the war came. It sits behind the confederate lines south of town, not far from the Crater. Naturally, it became a field hospital. Naturally, field hospitals being what they were in the Civil War, it produced a lot of dead confederates, who were buried in the church cemetery.

After the war, when the countryside was cleaned up and the dead removed from temporary graves, the Blandford Church cemetery, along with Hollywood Cemetary in Richmond, became the final resting place for the mostly unidentified confederates in the Eastern Theater who were reinterred. (Federal dead were sometimes sent home if identified or to one of the national military cemeteries established after the war for this purpose.)

Time went on. Confederates began to memorialize the war. Blandford Church, a small building, was turned into a memorial with one window for each confederate state. The idea was shopped to Louis Comfort Tiffany in New York. Though a Yankee, Tiffany loved the project, basically gave the windows at cost, and threw in a couple as his own contribution. They are truly spectacular and repay repeated visits at different times of day, as the sun brings different windows alive at different times.

The National Park Service says that Petersburg Battlefield is currently getting around 200,000 visitors a year. Something is seriously wrong with the Petersburg marketing plan if that many Civil War buffs are passing by without stopping.

Petersburg compromised its Civil War sites years ago by allowing development to sprawl over important parts of the siege lines. Forts Hell and Damnation (Sedgwick and Mahone), for example, were bulldozed to accommodate a long defunct strip mall. (Virginia's bad habits go way back.) The NPS doesn't have much money for acquisition, but the Civil War Trust is active in the area and has saved land on the eastern defense line, around the Crater, and at Hatcher's Run, White Oak Road, and the Petersburg Breakthrough area west of town. There are active preservation campaigns right now at Ream's Station and again at White Oak Road. IOW, it's an active preservation zone.

Obviously the City of Petersburg needs to do a great deal more to market itself. Petersburg does have some nice areas and some of the historic district downtown is looking up. Blandford Church is an absolute jewel. If the city can't figure out how to market it, they should let the NPS run it. At least the NPS would get people to the site.

By the way, Blandford should be on the church circuit as well as the Civil War circuit. It astonishes me that churchy people around here have never heard of it either.

[T-Bone Texan]

Hmmm, looks like the entire town, as a culture, has the Gibs, as in “Gibsnedat!”