Civics? What's Civics?

I spent 30 years trying to explain the difference between a town and a county.

That basically sums up my career writing for small, local newspapers. I wrote about government. Mostly I wrote about local government, but sometimes state or federal government made laws or enacted legislation that had a local impact, so I wrote about that, too.

What I learned in those 30 years is that many people have no idea how government works, not even at the local level. Even people who lived in towns had no idea how their town worked, or what it could or could not do as far as say, raising taxes or having its own school system.

The differences between a community, a village, a town, and a county are vast but lost on the population. The biggest differences are legalistic, but along with that legalistic jargon comes power.

A community has no power, except whatever power a group of people who band together might give it. Daleville, for example, is a community - a very large community, to be sure - but it has no power. It's not a legal entity, and there is no way for citizens in that area to petition for redress of grievances to something called the Daleville Town Council. There isn't one.

Daleville, as a community, is overseen by the county, so only the county wields power over that area. And all of those people (about 6,600) are represented by a single person on the county board of supervisors.

Fincastle is an incorporated town, and thus it has a town council, and power. It can tax. It can and recently did annex a part of the county to make itself larger, though it required the county's permission to do that (the county has more power). Those citizens in the town are still county citizens and subject to county laws, but they also now have a layer of town laws to abide by. If the county says it's okay to have chickens in your yard but the town says otherwise, you must take your complaint to the town council, not the county, if you want chickens. The town can have its own zoning laws, its own taxes, and its own rules - provided they are rules and laws that have been granted to them by the state through its municipal charter.

The county holds another set of powers. It can tax. It can set zoning laws. It can do everything a town can do (except annex another county with permission, but even that has some wiggle room, as Botetourt and Roanoke County "reset" boundaries in the Hollins area in the last 20 years. I remember writing the story.).  The county can only do what the Virginia legislators allow it to do. The county cannot tax, say, cigarettes, because Virginia law doesn't allow counties to do that. It does allow cities to do that.

Cities generally have more power than counties. So the pecking order, by lack of power, is community, town, county, city, state, federal.

Virginia is what is known as a Dillon Rule state. This means that Virginia legislatures delegate powers to localities through the Virginia constitution, via municipal charters or by statute (the Virginia Code). A charter can be viewed as the "birth certificate" or "articles of incorporation" of the municipality. And the General Assembly may amend municipal charters at any time. They have done this in recent years to allow towns to change their elections from May to November, for example.

The Dillon Rule is why Botetourt County can't decide to open school after Labor Day. The Virginia legislature has set a time frame for when schools can operate. It is why Botetourt County doesn't set the speed limit on roads. The state has held that power for itself. You can go to your county board of supervisors and complain about speeding on your road, but all they can do is pass it along to representatives of the state highway department, who will then do an investigation and see if the speed limit needs to be changed or if the road needs to be off-limits to truck traffic, or whatever the issue might be. Roads are not in the county's pack of powers.

Now you may be wondering why I am writing about this today. I don't know. It is on my mind because I'm watching things go on that seem wrong, not just in my community but in communities across the state. I'm watching people sit in trees to protest the taking of their land for a natural gas pipeline. The state gave this private company the right of eminent domain and is letting it take people's land - land that has been in some folk's family for generations - so they can put in this natural gas line that is for the private company's profit, at least on the face of it. But a state judge ruled it was in the public good.

I happen to know that judge personally and am not at all surprised she ruled for the company. From my observations of her, it is my opinion that she believes in privatizing everything, so she would agree with the corporation. I don't think anyone but a government entity should be using the right of eminent domain and I fear this sets up a terrible precedent. Actually the precedent was already set up here in Botetourt County when the State Corporation Commission agreed to give a private company the water rights to a large swath of Botetourt County. This would have taken in our farm but we argued against it and the farm was cut out of the final decision. Or at least it was supposed to have been.

Anyway, I think what gets me is how little people know about government, but yet how much they think they know. If you don't know the difference between a town and a county, and you really have no idea how a federal law is created, then how can you make an intelligent decision at the voting booth?

You can't really.

And now I know why I'm writing this. It's because I realize that this utter failure of knowledge, this lack of civics, this total breakdown of information about what it means to be a good citizen and practice citizenship, is why we have arrived at the place we are today.

And where we are today is the era of the Cult of Personality. People do not vote for representatives because of ideals or a desire to make laws or do away with laws or whatever. Some of that is there, of course, but I have found that people generally have only "notions" about what they really want and no vision as to what it will look like in the end. Doing away with regulations to help corporations may sound great, but when your kid is dying of asthma because of the pollution, or has cancer because of something in the water, you might wish you had given that more thought.

So instead of thinking, people vote for personality. I knew Bob McDonnel was going to be governor of Virginia one day when I first met him. He had personality. I knew, instinctively, that Mr. Trump had a chance, despite his outrageous attitude, because he has a personality. A pretty horrible personality, in my opinion, but a personality all the same, and an attitude that many people admire. I get that because people don't think for themselves anymore. They wanted a daddy to do it for them.

Today is election day in Virginia. It's a day that most people eligible to vote in these elections ignore. This is an election for towns and cities. Roanoke's city council is up for grabs today. This doesn't affect me where I live but it does affect me because my husband is a city employee. The votes of a few - maybe 10 percent of eligible voters - will have an impact on how the city works, and that will impact my husband and me.

I have met a lot of candidates, winners and losers, in my 30 years of writing for newspapers. I've met every governor from Doug Wilder through Bob McDonnel. (I retired and never met McAliff.) Over that time, I failed to see the change-over from electing a person for good reasons - because of what he or she stood for, his or her morality, etc. - to the Cult of Personality. For the first 20 years of my career I could reasonably predict who would or would not win an election.

I haven't been able to do that since 2000, when Al Gore won but George Bush became president. Even at the local level, I am stymied, because I don't operate via Cult of Personality. I have no idea who is going to win the seats for council in Roanoke today.

This is a great big world and it isn't going to end unless we blow ourselves up, which we may very well do. My goal is always to leave things better than they were. When I was writing for the paper, that was my hope - that I'd impart knowledge and leave the county better than it was.

Did I do that? Or did I fail? Was it all a wasted effort because no one was reading it?

I honestly do not know.