L to R: Onassis Burress, Andrew Crane, Dick Harshberger, Forrest Hite
The four candidates for the Radford City Council took part in a virtual forum Tuesday night sponsored by the League of Women Voters of Montgomery County and the Montgomery County-Radford City-Floyd County Chapter of the NAACP.
Onassis Burress, Andrew Crane, Dick Harshberger and Forrest Hite each answered six questions posed by forum moderator Karen Jones.
Each candidate began the forum with a two-minute opening statement.
Onassis Burress said he chose to make Radford his home. He reviewed his background in business management and his record of community service that includes serving as president of the Radford Chamber of Commerce. He said he saw the city council as “a chance to give back to the city.
Andrew Crane, who has lived in Radford for five years, said he was running because he believed in good government. He said his engineering background gives him the tools to serve the city. He graduated from Clemson University with a degree in mechanical engineering. Crane said he saw serving on the city council as “his duty” and he wanted “to hear our citizens, to be their voice.”
Dick Harshberger is seeking re-election to the city council “because the city is in wonderful shape and I want to go on to help build a better Radford.” He noted that the coronavirus pandemic has resulted in “a huge hit for the city’s revenues” but he wanted to be on the council to take what he called “a big challenge. I’m a fiscal conservative and a social liberal, but right now we need to take every dime we have to help our city recover and prosper. I have experience at Virginia Tech working with grant applications,” Harshberger said to illustrate his experience in working with budgets and finances.
Forrest Hite has lived in Radford for the last ten years. He said his dad was in the Air Force, so he moved around a lot over the years. But now he is a newlywed, having married his wife, Tatiana within the past year. “This is where we want to live,” he said. He is the Administrator/editor for the HeartCry Missionary Society, a Christian non-profit service organization located in Radford. At the society, Hite said, “I work overseeing projects. Working with words and numbers has been my life, which will prove invaluable on the council.”
After the candidates’ opening statements, Jones began the posing of the six questions.
Question No. 1: Are there things the city council can do to help small business and restaurants stay in business during these tough times so the city can revive itself and recover when the pandemic has passed?
Andrew Crane: The council has already talked about deferring some expenses and payments across the next few months. We can do our part to encourage everyone to use our local businesses and services that are still operational. It is difficult to work anything such as tax incentives into the budget at this point. The forecast is that our budget will eat up a part of our reserves, but since we have those reserves, the city is in relatively good shape. My hope is we come through this thing pretty quickly.
Dick Harshberger: I’ve proposed that we make an effort to help our local businesses through a gift certificate campaign. We pay them ahead of time, which will help their revenue while they’re closed. We can then be first in line when they reopen and get money to them right away. This has drawn lots of interest. It gives our businesses some revenue right away and keeps some money flowing through these tough times.
Forrest Hite: Facebook advertising by the city helps get the word out, especially with our local restaurants that are open and going take-out and deliveries. We can continue this and get the word out to the public.
Onassis Burress: It’s all about resources and how we allocate the dollars that are out there. The city can serve as an information conduit and facilitator for our businesses, connecting them with such efforts as the Paycheck Protection Program and loans that are available through local financial institutions. This way our restaurants, for instance, that have been able to remain open and serve food can know what help is available for them. We can use this as a time to give back, to be a voice for our community.
Question No. 2: Considering the changed circumstances since our voters guide was put together several weeks ago, would you change any of your answers?
Dick Harshberger: I did mention some things to help us through, revenue wise. We must do all we can to get all the aid we can to our people so we can get them back to work. Our number of unemployed has gone from eight to 350. We must take advantage of every program that is available to our citizens. Our budget is better than I thought it was. We won’t be saving any money, but I don’t think we’ll have to borrow money either. In every storm, there is a port. Our city is strong, and that gives us a competitive edge.
Forrest Hite: I wouldn’t specifically change anything. I listed economic development and moving with caution as the two biggest challenges then, and now this has been multiplied by the pandemic. We need to be careful with our response to the pandemic as a city. We can’t increase taxes on our citizens, and it looks like we won’t have to, which is a very good thing right now.
Onassis Burress: No, I wouldn’t change anything I said. We need to remember that while we’re in a storm, not to be a part of it. We have to stay rooted in the fact of building a Radford that is for our citizens and that includes affordable single-family housing and economic development.
Andrew Crane: Certainly the pandemic presents us with some acute problems, but we don’t need to make huge changes. It won’t be here forever. It is transitory. We’ve seen now how it will affect our budget, and we need to look down the road into the future, long term, making sure all the time that we have jobs for our people. We always need to be looking ahead, not at the right now or the past. It could be that several months down the road, we’ll be remembering all this. We don’t need to change our plans to address our problem that will one day be behind us.
Question No. 3: What do you see as Radford’s future?
Forrest Hite: We will continue to grow. The charm and the appeal of Radford is that it is a wonderful place in which to live. For instance, I’ve just bought a house here. This is my family’s home now. While there is an opportunity for growth, we must make sure that we continue to be a community that sticks together, that illustrates by love how we surround each other. For right now, at a social distance, of course. We’re a close-knit, tight family here in Radford, and that’s what we need to continue to be. That will let us grow.
Onassis Burress: In Radford, we have the resources we need to leverage growth: railway, a waterway, two exits from I-81. But we still need to do all we can to increase the availability of single-family housing in Radford. We need new businesses to develop our west end. We can use these resources I mentioned to produce more revenue for the city, and I will focus on that.
Andrew Crane: I echo Onassis a bit here. We will grow. We just need to attract people to Radford. When they see what we have here, they’ll go back home, talk about it and maybe give some serious consideration to moving here. Our greatest resource is the river. That can be our big attraction. For instance, my family likes to eat at restaurants on the river. We need more on this side that will make the river a real attraction for people who come into town.
Dick Harshberger: One of the things we can do to move into a prosperous future is to promote more public-private partnerships. One example of a success is the Radford Child Development Center. I was part of putting together the plan that built the facility without local, state or federal money. We need to continue to build and develop similar resources for our citizens. The riverfront provides us a great opportunity to do this. I have pushed for commercial plots to avoid the situation of having an environmental mess. This will attract people who will come and enjoy the quality of life we have in this city. One resource we really need to get the word about is our police department. Several years back, a federal survey said Radford had one of the top three police forces in the whole state. People are safe in this town. Our police are professionals. Part of the reason why they’re so good is training. We don’t allow them on the street for the first six months they are on the job because we spend that time and money training them.
Question No. 4: Law enforcement officers are facing increasing demands during the pandemic while working with a reduced applicant pool. How can you help the city find and keep the qualified applicants it needs?
Onassis Burress: These are indeed stressful times for our law enforcement teams. I’ve led teams as large as 500 people. I’m accustomed to evaluating and locating talent. We have a very robust National Guard force right here; people that are already trained. I would turn to them for some of the talent that we can train to use on our police force.
Andrew Crane: There is a program I ran across at a meeting several months ago that encourages young people to get into law enforcement by helping them with their college expenses and with their training. This provides a readily available pool for us to turn to that is financially and educationally ready and qualified. I would like to go back and take a second look at this program, get more information about it.
Dick Harshberger: I am a law and order man. We’ve built a state-of-the-art police station. We have a university with an excellent program in police and law enforcement science. We currently are interfacing with that program. We also work with our school resource officers, who serve as role models for our law officers. We have made salary adjustments, raised our salary scale to make it competitive with other communities, and we have been making available a tremendous amount of training for our police.
Forrest Hite: My wife served as a police officer with the university, so I’m familiar with the problems presented by small-town law enforcement. It’s a brutal job. It’s important, I feel, to establish a connection with the Dublin Police Academy. That’s what my wife did. The one with the first job offer is who gets the graduating students. If we’re ready in time with a good offer, where we show what a good thing we have to offer, then we will get the qualified officers we need.
Question No. 5: Lost revenues require a re-examination of the budget. What will your funding priorities be and what projects will you see deferred?
Dick Harshberger: Our city manager has won awards for his expertise and budgeting abilities. We have a tight budget, but we can’t start any new projects until we can increase our revenue flow again and right now they’re taking a big hit. We’ll hold on to what we’re going now, but we’re not in a position to start up new projects.
Forrest Hite: Our city manager has given us a good budget. It’s stripped down and scaled back as much as it can be. We remain committed to the McHarg Elementary School project. An increase in our hotel tax would help with revenue. We’re looking at little things to do whatever we can. No money can be wasted.
Onassis Burress: I echo Forrest here in the need to be fiscally responsive and the idea that a hotel tax increase would be a source of some additional revenue. We also have one of the lowest cigarette taxes in the area. We could raise those taxes. I don’t really know of any cutbacks we can make right now. We just need to look carefully at the length of some of the projects we have now and space the dollars out in phases so we don’t have one large lump sum.
Andrew Crane: We have a tight budget for the upcoming fiscal year; it’s been squeezed. We can’t afford any big new capital projects, but projects that are under way, such as McHarg Elementary, would result in a big waste of money if we delayed them. I don’t know what else can be squeezed out of the budget. It’s so tight that projections are that we won’t be putting money into our reserves but taking money out of them.
Dick Harshberger: Raising the cigarette tax is a real good thought. Spreading out the projects does mean spending more money, so shortening the time required for our projects is a good idea.
Question No. 6: We’re all optimistic about Radford, but what do you see as the problems the city has and how we are to address them?
Forrest Hite: Internet access for our citizens is one problem. This has to do with economic development. We need to see more progress on the east side of Main Street where businesses come and go. The west side also needs more to be done. We still have lots of room for growth, and I believe increasing the number of our citizens who have access to the Internet will help that growth.
Onassis Burress: The issues I see are the need for more single-family houses and more economic development. While economic development is the key and we can focus on new business, we don’t need to ignore the existing businesses that are the backbone of our economy. We need to assist these businesses as much as we can. I will work with local developers to find tips that can drive development and construction, which will help our tax base.
Andrew Crane: The pandemic has revealed some disparities in our community. Our teachers have found that some students don’t have access to the Internet. That means they’re locked out of a lot of opportunities in our modern, electronic age. That’s an economic issue that isn’t just peculiar to us. It’s a problem everywhere. A subset of our citizens feels forgotten.We need to take care of all of our people, and Internet access is one way to do that.
Dick Harshberger: The need for single-family housing is our top issue, and we have some top-notch developers who have the resources to help out. We can partner with them to develop more housing. I agree that the other big issue for the city is the Internet. We have problems with it, but we are partnering with Montgomery County in a grant that is aimed at eliminating the inequities in the city and the county.
To close the forum, the candidates were allowed two minutes for a closing statement. They all began their statement by thanking the League of Women Voters and the NAACP for sponsoring the forum.
Forrest Hite: Even with the pandemic, we see tonight that the world hasn’t stopped. All four of us want the same thing for Radford: to move our city forward so that it thrives. I’ve tried to show my vision for this. I will be honest and approachable if I am elected. I want to hear from the citizens, and if I am elected, I will have much to learn and you can help teach me.
Dick Harshberger: I am thankful for the quality of these candidates for this office. I’ve been on the city council for “quite a long time,” and I try to stay knowledgeable and to use that knowledge to move the city forward. It’s been a please to be here tonight and to serve the city for that “quite a long time.”
Andrew Crane: I urge the citizens of Radford to reach out to me with your questions. I have a Facebook page, a website and an email address. Ask me a question. Post on my page. I want to know what issues concern you. Communication is important to everybody, especially a city councilman.
Onassis Burress: I want our citizens to remember that what we’re going through is for the short term. This, too, will pass. I want to serve this city. I have a heart and a passion for service to Radford. My financial background will serve our city well. I’m practical and pragmatic. I’m here to serve anyone and everyone. Use my email and my Facebook page to ask me your questions. I am accessible.
