Kate McConnell
Radford Resident
Over the last several weeks, city council has held special sessions focused on the city budget, which includes the school budget, for the upcoming fiscal year. The school budget was presented for first reading and public comment at the April 14 meeting; the second meeting on April 21 did not include public comment, and the council moved expeditiously to pass the entire FY2026 budget. Even though the work of passing a budget for FY2026 is complete, questions remain. And while these questions may make some uncomfortable, they are asked with genuine concern and a desire to fully understand how we arrived at our current predicament so that a similar crisis can be avoided in the future.
Budget shortfalls and fiscal challenges are not new to Radford. Just nine months ago, the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development’s Commission on Local Government rated Radford as the 11th most fiscally stressed municipality in the Commonwealth, based on FY2022 data. Running the same calculations using any of the more recent data (FY2023-2025) would likely have Radford much higher up on this unfortunate ranking, perhaps even chasing first place. Why? Because beginning in FY2023 and through our current fiscal year, Radford grossly overestimated its revenue projections to the tune of $9.6 million.
Egregious as the total number may be, it is even more disturbing when you take into account that the city’s projections got worse each year. For FY2023, revenue projections were off by $2.4 million, but by FY 2025, the projected revenue was off by a whopping $3.9 million. These figures beg several questions: Why would Radford “double down” for two more years on its rosy revenue projections after missing the mark in FY2023, and then again in FY2024? Where were the checks and balances? Where were the quarterly reports and spreadsheets showing projected versus actual revenues and expenditures? The city is required to submit to an audit at the end of each fiscal year—what did the auditors have to say about the city’s approach to finances?
After passing the FY2026 budget Monday evening, council offered vague assurances for better fiscal management in the future, which—although encouraging—is not sufficient given what happened. Putting aside promises for enhanced future fiscal management, we still need to question past practices and decisions. It is wholly unacceptable that the answer to how Radford got to this place is currently a resounding “We don’t know.”
The first step for city council now that the budget is settled is to take proactive, public steps to account for how we found ourselves in such a financial crisis. City council—as each of its members is aware—is the fiduciary steward of the city. Council alone is responsible for hiring and—critically—supervising professionals who staff city offices and offer their expert advice to city council, so that it can then make sound financial decisions on behalf of Radford’s citizenry. Mistakes have clearly been made; not understanding when, how, and why these mistakes were made so they can be avoided in the future is irresponsible. It has been intimated over the course of the last two weeks by council members themselves that they were caught off guard by the current fiscal crisis. That everyone on City Council seems to have been blindsided by the extent of Radford’s fiscal stress is deeply concerning and suggests a lack of true oversight and supervision of city staff, including the city manager position, that goes back at least three years. This aspect of Council’s work—the hiring and supervising of a city manager—is particularly salient as Radford is actively searching for someone to take on this job full-time.
By all accounts the interim city manager, Craig Meadows, is a skilled professional who adroitly led Radford through the crafting of its most challenging budget in years. But his tenure is short with the city. By reputation, Mr. Meadows is a “fixer”—he helps cities that find themselves in similar dire straits create a path forward. We will not have Mr. Meadows and his professional counsel at our disposal much longer. It would be helpful to know how council will do things differently supervising this key position moving forward.
The second step is to repair what appears to be an antagonistic relationship with the Radford City schools. The Commonwealth of Virginia is an outlier when it comes to how school budgets are handled. In most other states, school boards have the authority and ability to raise taxes to support their schools directly. In Radford as in all other Virginia localities, the school budget falls within the overall city budget—indeed, it is often a city’s largest expense. Given the tone and tenor of the April 14 meeting that included the presentation of the Radford City Public Schools (RCPS) budget, it would do us all well to remember that RCPS as well as our city council are comprised of our friends and neighbors. During that session, Council rightfully admonished that ad hominem attacks on individual council members would not be tolerated. I would respectfully suggest that moving forward council follow its own advice regarding the preservation of civil discourse, and pivot from the defensive tone and tenor demonstrated throughout the meeting to being open to questions, receptive to alternative ideas, and humble in responding to citizens.
Beyond tone, the substance of some of the council’s questions raised concerns as well. Many of the questions posed to the RCPS superintendent suggested a complete lack of knowledge on the part of the council regarding the different funds and lines of revenue that comprise a school system budget, never mind how these funds can—and, importantly, cannot—be spent. Council seemed unclear regarding its two largest responsibilities: the LCI and the LRM.
By Virginia state policy, local municipalities must have skin in the game when it comes to school funding. The Commonwealth produces a “Composite Index of Local Ability-to-Pay” for each budget cycle. This Local Composite Index (LCI) is calculated using three indicators of a locality’s ability to pay: (1) true value of real property (weighted 50 percent), (2) adjusted gross income (weighted 40 percent), and taxable retail sales (weighted 10 percent). Each locality’s index is adjusted to maintain an overall statewide local share of 45 percent and an overall state share of 55 percent.
Through this calculation of the LCI, the state affords the City of Radford significant grace in the amount of funding it must contribute. For this budget cycle, the city’s LCI has fallen to a mere 16.6 percent, down from approximately 23 percent in the last state budget cycle. As a point of comparison, Montgomery County’s LCI is the highest regionally at approximately 40 percent, the City of Salem’s is 36 percent, Roanoke County’s is 36 percent, Roanoke City’s is 34 percent, and neighboring Pulaski County’s is 33 percent. This figure is yet another indicator of Radford’s poor financial health and high ranking for fiscal stress. To put it bluntly, this means Radford an outlier community deemed so economically needy that tax dollars from across the Commonwealth will cover 84 percent of the school system’s budget.
Beyond the 16.6 percent required of the city, there is an additional expectation of municipal funding through the Commonwealth’s calculation of the Locally Required Match (LRM). In Virginia, communities are required to provide a local match in order to access certain state funding, particularly for programs like the Standards of Quality (SOQ) and other incentive programs. The specific amount required varies, but typically, localities must contribute a portion of the total cost, with the state covering the remainder. Radford’s City Council initially balked at contributing to the LRM, jeopardizing such things like additional special education and tutoring programs, the city’s preschool initiative, and other resources for the most vulnerable students within RCPS. Make no mistake—these students will still be members of the RCPS community, but RCPS would no longer have all the necessary resources at its disposal to actually educate them if the city refused to fund the LRM.
There is much to celebrate when it comes to RCPS. RCPS has demonstrated significant financial prudence as well as creative problem solving to help mitigate the effects of being a relatively poor school system, under the leadership of two different superintendents. Notably, RCPS’s overall student population now stands north of 3,000, thanks not only to out-of-district tuition students paying to attend RCPS, but also the large contingent of virtual students from across the state. RCPS has increased the number of seats available to high-achieving students in math and the sciences at the Southwest Virginia Governor’s School and is in talks with Radford University to establish parallel programming for the region’s students focused on the arts and humanities. The high school’s move to block scheduling affords RCPS the opportunity to increase both career and technical education offerings as well as upper division, AP and/or dual enrollment courses. Last, through its own fiscal prudence, RCPS amassed a reserve of approximately $500,000, meaning it has a “rainy day” fund for certain categories of possible expenses. Rather than hold onto that money, however, RCPS instead relinquished it to the city to help balance the FY2026 budget.
City council needs to start seeing RCPS as an incredible resource for and potential driver of economic development. But you can only take blood from a stone so many times. It does not matter that none of sitting council currently have students who attend city schools; the economic development case for investing in RCPS alone should warrant their attention and support. We need council to work with the school board to move from a model of minimally funding the city’s schools to one of investment. In a city where nearly half of all properties (e.g., government/social service buildings, Radford University properties, and churches) are not on the tax roll, the recruitment of tax-paying residents must be the centerpiece of economic development, with the schools themselves the focal point of such efforts. While we passed a budget for this year, headlines about Radford’s financial crisis—and its minimal support of its crumbling schools—are likely a red flag to potential home buyers during the current spring real estate season.
Moving forward, council members need to get comfortable with and commit to being more actively curious. Curious about budget projections. Curious about quarterly reports regarding actual collected revenue versus targets. Curious about the minutia, not just the big picture, of city financing, including state policy around school funding. Curious about the disconnect between their view of the school system and the broader community’s view of the school system, with an eye toward reframing their understanding of RCPS. RCPS can and should be cultivated as the heart of future economic development initiatives in this small college town. City Council needs to start to see RCPS as worthy of protection in hard times and increased investment as finances improve.
Finally, each member of city council must commit to being curious enough to ask tough questions and to hold themselves to a higher standard of accountability. No more surprises. Radford citizens deserve no less.
