Collegiate Times

With Election Day coming up on Tuesday, Nov. 8, the Collegiate Times caught up with the candidates running for seats in the Blacksburg Town Council to hear their thoughts on some of the biggest local issues.

The seven members of the Council serve staggered four-year terms and are the legislative body of the local government. The Council passes new ordinances, makes rules about land use and long-term planning, and sets all tax rates.

This year, five candidates are running for three open spots. Of the candidates, John Bush and Leslie Hager-Smith are incumbents. Melvyn Jay “Mel” Huber, Paul Lancaster and Michael Sutphin are the candidates who do not currently hold Council seats. Huber was unvailable for comment.

Each day this week, the CT will feature one question posed to all candidates, so readers can compare their answers and learn more about them. Today’s question deals with the relationship between the town of Blacksburg and Virginia Tech:

What do you think is the biggest problem or cause for contention between the town and the university, and how will you remedy this?

Paul Lancaster

One, of course, is the issue we have when rental units with students in some neighborhoods get overzealous in their partying. The neighbors have problems with that, so there is the usual Friday and Saturday night police calls. I’m not sure how to remedy that. It’d be nice if there were more on-campus housing available, but Virginia Tech has decided that it’s not going to increase housing.

The other issue is the collection of the food tax on campus. It’s collected here. If I ordered at Gillie’s a $5 meal, the town would get $0.30 tax; if I walked down to Au Bon Pain and ordered a $5 meal, the town gets nothing. Now, that just doesn’t seem fair. I think Tech is worried that if we get the food tax, then we’ll go after an admissions tax to university football and basketball games, but it’s not on my agenda. We’re happy to get the food tax.

John Bush

I think what may be the most pressing issue is the health of the town neighborhoods that exist along the downtown edge. I will list those neighborhoods: the Bennett Hill-Progress Street neighborhood off of Progress Street, the old 16 squares downtown neighborhood, Wharton, Penn, Lee and Roanoke streets where some of the fraternity and sorority houses are located, and perhaps McBryde Village across from Cowgill Hall and the parking lot known as the B Lot.

Because they’re rental units — quite often student rentals — means there’s inevitable lifestyle conflicts between students, who live in a different way from middle-aged people that go to work at eight in the morning and go to sleep at 10 at night. You have that sort of difference of how people want to live, so that going to have inevitable conflicts.

Michael Sutphin

The biggest contention would be over occupancy types of issues. (There are) neighborhoods where a lot of students have moved into, but they’re next door to locals. Their different lifestyles and families have caused a lot of
contention. 

(The town of Blacksburg) doesn’t have effective ways to regulate things like over occupancy, for example, I live over on Progress Street, and there’s not a good way for the town to tell if more than three people who are unrelated who are living in a house on Progress Street, something like that.  

Something that the town could do is create a task force that tries to deal with the situation like that. If you’re talking more the University proper, a point of contention with the town of Blacksburg, the biggest issue is the meal tax issue on campus.

Leslie Hager-Smith

I would say that the biggest rub right now is the fact that the university declines to collect the meals tax. 

But I do want to say that that I don’t think that should summarize the entire relationship. 

There are ways in which the university and the town work very nicely together. I feel like in some regards, Virginia Tech doesn’t represent its constituents, its faculty or its students well.

I want to repeat that I feel it is a mistake to allow the tensions to override the positive aspects of the relationship. 

It is a very complicated relationship with lots of facets, and we can all name really excellent ways in which the university and the town cooperate.

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A version of this article appeared in the Nov 1 issue of the Collegiate Times.