There is absolutely no reason for firetrucks and ambulances to be repossessed. This is fiscal insanity, and the tar and feathers should come out.
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.