Amy Gilliam, a longtime critic of Buena Vista City Council, has attended meetings for years, voicing her complains about how the city does business. She said she started attending meetings in 2006 when she questioned what she believes was an “erroneous personal property tax” that used trade-in values rather than retail for assessment purposes.
She decided to run for City Council this year, she said, “Because the citizens deserve Council members who will represent them, not personal agendas or the interests of groups of people. They deserve and want Council members who will be fiscally responsible with their tax dollars. In the 19 years since I began following the doings of our local government, Council members have continued to make bad decisions after bad decisions, trusting the information presented to them without questioning or verifying it and continued the frivolous spending.”
She was incredulous this year when, late in the budget planning process, one Council member admitted he hadn’t looked at the budget yet. “I had spent hours going line by line through that budget and found this unbelievable. 2006 immediately came to mind and I decided then I was going to run. Adding on to that, the thought that our city can survive on Main Street and tourism is absurd and has resulted in a financial crisis, placing an increased burden on the citizens.”
Council, she said, continues “to make poor decisions like refinancing debt and allocating money to projects that do not benefit all citizens and transferring money to the park fund to keep it afloat – this year to the tune of $450,000. Their only thought to balance the budget continues to be raising rates on services and increasing taxes. Our basic needs are not being met – we need road maintenance, water and wastewater upgrades, a bigger tax base and better planning.”
Asked about the prospect of replacing the city’s aging middle school, Gilliam said, “I would love the faculty, staff and students to have a better learning environment and I am very interested in learning more about the possibility of using the site vacated by Mountain Gateway. Initially, it makes sense to do this rather than pursing a new build, but the most important thing is to focus on ‘what we need,’ not ‘what we want.’ I would need to know preliminary cost estimates for renovation as well as study the layout of the property to assess room for expansion, if needed. Given our current financial situation, for me, this is fact-finding time and part of a long-term plan.”
Gilliam views Southern Virginia University as more of a burden than a benefit for the city. “Life-long citizens of the city have paid the price of the university being in our community. [SVU] enjoys the services provided by the city and funded by the taxpayer – things like our emergency services. [Every City Council] has focused on what’s good for [SVU] – not the citizens and community as a whole. We should not be changing ordinances, codes, vacating alley ways, etc., to accommodate the growth of [SVU] without considering the implication to the neighborhoods and homeowners around them. Code enforcement should be enforcing codes regarding the number of unrelated people living in a home, monitoring parking, etc., but they do not. Council members who are associated with the university should not be voting on issues benefiting [SVU] …” The state of the city’s finances, she said, “is very discouraging, to say the least. More focus should be given to different sources of revenue, cutting waste and redundancies and limiting transfers from one fund to another – the constant robbing Peter to pay Paul just to keep our head above the water has to stop. If elected, I would work hard to ensure citizen’s concerns are actually addressed.”
Gilliam is a lifelong resident of Buena Vista, having graduated from Parry McCluer High School in 1990. She is married and has two adult daughters and three grandsons. She is employed as a practice manager where she manages two physician practices.
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