Editorial
Toria Brown, newly appointed Walkers Creek District supervisor, took her seat Monday during a special meeting in which the Rockbridge County Board of Supervisors held a public hearing on the proposed fiscal year 2027 budget. No citizens spoke during the public hearing so the meeting lasted all of about 10 minutes, with most of that time taken up by Ashton Harrison, the county’s finance director, giving a brief summary of the proposed budget’s highlights.
Brown will have her first opportunity to take an official action as a supervisor this coming Monday, May 11, when the Board holds a regular meeting. Adoption of the budget is an agenda item. We look forward to having Brown act in her capacity as the Walkers District Creek representative on the Board.
Brown took an unusual path to her place among the supervisors. She was a first-time candidate in a threeperson race this past fall for Walkers Creek supervisor. She came in second place with 653 votes to incumbent Jay Lewis’s 705 and Steve Reese’s 632. Lewis was declared the winner and began serving in January what was to be his third term of office until it was discovered, in late March, that he had never taken his oath of office in the allotted time legally required.
Lewis’s reelection was deemed invalid, meaning the Walkers Creek seat on the Board of Supervisors was vacant. Choosing from applicants interested in filling the vacancy, judges from the 25th Judicial Circuit selected Brown to serve on an interim basis, until a special election can be held Nov. 3 to determine who will serve the remaining three years of a four-year term.
We believe the judges made a wise choice in selecting Brown. Not only was she vetted by the voters and runner-up in the election, she appears to us to be well qualified to ably serve the citizens of the Walkers Creek District. A business person, cattle farmer, wife and mother, she has long been active in the affairs of her community.
Here are some excerpts from a candidate’s profile The News-Gazette published during last fall’s campaign: “I want to see our country maintain its core values and natural beauty while also evolving with the times,” she said. “I want this county to be a place that I can retire, sure, but I primarily want it to be a place where my children and grandchildren can thrive professionally and personally. To me, that means a community where livable job opportunities are present and the barriers to start or expand a business are small.”
Brown said she sees the roles of economic development and zoning regulation not as opposing forces, but as a “symbiotic system” that works for “the same team: the residents of Rockbridge County. … The job of economic development is to grow the tax and job base of the county by means of recruiting business to our area and/ or encouraging the growth of homegrown businesses [by] using the economic development plan as the guideline for what type of businesses should be targeted. Zoning regulation keeps an even playing field for how different development is structured in the county so we can grow with thought and long-term planning. Both of these function to service the community’s needs. As such, they need to be working together to promote the growth the county residents need and want.”
She continued: “Economic development doesn’t have to be flashy to be functional and successful. I would like to see a push for homegrown economic development [by asking] how can we help our existing business grow and expand [and] how can we facilitate the folks with really sound ideas get them implemented? I also think we can preserve our agriculture, our natural landscape and still grow and evolve. We don’t need ‘shoot for the stars’ economic development that sounds fancy. We need economic development with a sound long term plan that is to the benefit of the collective community.”
We wish Brown well as she strives to achieve these objectives as the Walkers Creek supervisor.
