Standing outside the entrance to Fridays After Five at a table marked “Dredge Now,” Charlottesville City Council candidate Bob Fenwick was soliciting signatures for an on-line petition calling on local authorities to turn down a proposal to build a new dam for the Charlottesville area water supply and instead dredge the current reservoir to make it bigger.

Fenwick ran for City Council two years ago on much the same platform he advocates today:  dredging, “saving McIntire Park,” and bringing an independent voice to the city's legislative body.

According to Cvillepedia, Fenwick placed third in the 2009 City Council election, with 3,293 votes, or 20.2 percent, in a race that also included two Democrats, incumbent Dave Norris (6,300 votes) and Kristin Szakos (5,083 votes), as well as independent Paul Long (1,214 votes).

Daunting task

In an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner on April 15, Fenwick expressed how daunting it is to run for office in Charlottesville against an entrenched Democratic party.

“Two years ago I ran against Dave Norris and Kristin Szakos.  Dave is the most popular mayor we’ve had in this town probably since Frank Buck, and he may even be more popular,” Fenwick said, “so he did a really good job.”

Charlottesville Democrats, he continued, have “an amazing party.  I’ll give them their due.  They are the strongest political party in Virginia, I think.  From the results alone, they have this place locked down.”

The Democratic ticket in 2009, he explained, “spent probably $30,000 on their campaign; I had $6,000 to spend.”

Looking back on that campaign, Fenwick described himself as a “basic rookie,” adding that “in a way I still am.”

For his 2011 campaign, he said, the “difference will be, I’ll try to get more money raised for lawn signs [and] for handouts, and just pound the pavement, just really dedicate myself to door to door” campaigning.

Hypocrisy and trickery

What motivated Fenwick to run again in the face of such strong odds is his belief that the party in power is hypocritical, failing to live up to its own principles.

“They have a beautiful plaque right outside City Council chambers,” he pointed out, which “lists about ten things, and at least five of them, they couldn’t care less about.  They talk the talk but they do not walk the walk.”

He noted failures as “everything from open and honest government” to “something as basic to a progressive city as taking care of the people who can’t take care of themselves.”

He criticized City Council for freezing the budget on social welfare programs but appropriating money to build a new “dam out at Ragged Mountain that we won’t need for forty years.”

Fenwick associated what he considers a misdirection of resources with “this deep hypocrisy in what they say they believe and what they do.  That just sticks in my craw.”

The independent council candidate is also concerned about rising real estate assessments and the way they hide property tax increases.

City Council members, he said, “will come out every year and tout the fact that they do not raise the real estate tax rate and yet they’ll go around and raise the assessments in the teeth of the worst recession that I’ve seen in my lifetime, and I go back to the Carter-Reagan recession.”

That, he explained, “is nothing less than a backdoor tax increase.  It’s trickery of the worst kind, you know, because it’s treating us all like saps.”

Independent eyes

Fenwick believes that having an independent member of City Council will offer a fresh set of eyes that can look at issues differently.

He would be able to look “at the budget, at the schools, at [whether] programs work or not.”

There are, he said, “just so many things that an independent can look at and bring to the Council’s attention and, hopefully, sway them on a couple of things.”

Fenwick suggested that voters interested in contacting his campaign should visit votebob.net and look for an email link on that web site, which he used during his 2009 campaign and which will be updated soon to reflect this year’s circumstances.

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