Flock Falls Across the Region, Wawa Lands in Salem, and Roanoke Builds a Wave

Full Transcript

Intro

Alex: Welcome to The Roanoke Weekly. I’m Alex.

Morgan: And I’m Morgan. This is your locally curated, AI-narrated look at what happened around the Roanoke Valley this past week, and what’s coming up in the next one.

Alex: Everything we bring you comes from local newsrooms doing the actual reporting. The Roanoke Times, Cardinal News, WSLS 10, and WDBJ7. If a story here matters to you, go read their version of it.

Morgan: It’s Labor Day, so we’re landing a little later than usual. This week there’s a story where a whole region seemed to make up its mind all at once.

Alex: And a couple of smaller ones where nobody can agree on anything at all. Plus a Saturday that is genuinely overloaded.

Morgan: Let’s get into it.

The Lead: The Region Pulls the Plug on Flock

Alex: We’ve been following the Flock camera story since the spring. This week it stopped being a string of separate local votes and turned into something closer to a regional decision.

Thursday night, Lynchburg City Council held a special meeting and voted to begin ending the city’s contract with Flock Safety. That’s fifteen license plate readers. Council had already suspended use of them last month. Council member Stephanie Reed said they were joining other localities because concerns that weren’t there when Flock was first approved are very much there now. The Roanoke Times and WSLS both covered the vote.

And Lynchburg wasn’t alone. The sheriff’s offices in Amherst and Bedford counties stopped using the cameras immediately, pointing to discrepancies they want to go over with the company. Montgomery County’s sheriff paused use and is forming a review committee.

Morgan: Can I put the other side of this in? Because police departments are not quietly going along with it. Lynchburg’s own transparency portal logged four hundred thirty-five license plate hits over thirty days, and those fed into searches for wanted fugitives and people accused of drug and sex crimes. Departments still call it one of the most effective tools they’ve got.

Alex: That tension is the whole story, honestly. Cardinal News put a number on the scale of it: at least twenty Virginia localities have stepped back from Flock since July. WDBJ7 counted twelve of those in a three week stretch. Campbell, Appomattox, Charlotte and Wythe counties, plus the town of Wytheville, all made moves earlier in the week.

Morgan: Here’s the part I think is actually new, though. It’s become something candidates run on. In the Montgomery County sheriff’s race, Democrat Tim Brown reversed his earlier position and now says he’d take down the office’s four cameras if he’s elected. His reasoning was blunt. Public trust has to come first, and he doesn’t believe people trust Flock. His Republican opponent, interim Sheriff Robert Page, still calls the cameras a valuable law enforcement tool.

Alex: Close to home, the picture hasn’t changed. Roanoke’s gunshot detectors are gone. The twenty-four license plate readers are still running, and they were never part of the repeal vote.

As for why all of this is landing right now, Virginia Tech professor Cayce Myers reads it as part of an emerging politics around digital rights, the same current running underneath the data center fights. He expects it to turn up in the midterms.

The Rundown

Morgan: Okay. Rundown time.

Alex: Roanoke City Public Schools eliminated a hundred forty-eight jobs before this school year began. Cardinal News got the final number, and the school by school breakdown, through a records request. Sixty-four of them were teachers, spread across all twenty-four city schools. It closes a fourteen million dollar budget gap.

Morgan: Where did it hit hardest?

Alex: William Fleming lost nine teachers. Round Hill Elementary lost six. Crystal Spring, Morningside and Wasena lost none at all. Division spokesperson Claire Mitzel said cuts on this scale haven’t happened since the 2008 recession.

Morgan: So Wawa is here. The first one in the Roanoke Valley opened Thursday on West Main Street in Salem, and the preview the day before pulled about a hundred fifty people, a good number of them in Eagles and Phillies gear. Salem’s mayor, Renée Turk, put on a chef’s hat, built the ceremonial first hoagie, and got named an honorary Philadelphian for her trouble. That’s from the Roanoke Times and WSLS.

And it’s just the start. Daleville and Lynchburg open before the end of the year, a Roanoke store on Orange Avenue breaks ground for a 2027 opening, and Wawa is aiming at sixty stores along Interstate 81 over the next decade.

Alex: Sixty is a lot of hoagies.

Morgan: Sixty is a lot of hoagies. They’re also partnering with Feeding Southwest Virginia.

Speaking of things arriving, the in-river park is on schedule. Just upstream of the greenway bridge between Wasena and Vic Thomas parks, crews are working inside a cofferdam, building a wave that paddlers can surf and tubers can float over, with calmer water off to the side for wading. Katie Slusher, the city’s parks projects manager, told the Roanoke Times the five point six million dollar project should wrap by the end of this year. It’ll be the first of its kind in Virginia.

Alex: First in the state is a real thing to be able to say.

Morgan: It is. Slusher’s point was that these are common out west and basically absent on the East Coast, and the goal was river access you can walk to. Jeff Todd, who runs Roanoke Mountain Adventures, just moved his shop next to it at Black Dog Salvage, and he sees that whole greenway district coming together.

Now, over in Franklin County, a supervisor resigned and then decided he hadn’t.

**Alex:**Sorry, what?

Morgan: Mike Meredith stepped down from the Board of Supervisors at the August eighteenth meeting, after what he told the Roanoke Times was a closed session where it was suggested he resign. Two weeks on, he wrote the board to say he never submitted anything in writing, and knows of no recorded vote accepting what he said out loud. So in his reading, no vacancy ever existed, and he’d like to finish his term.

Alex: And the board is in the middle of replacing him.

Morgan: They’re taking applications right now, and nobody on the board will say where this leaves them legally. What’s underneath it is that Meredith had disclosed information possibly covered by a nondisclosure agreement between the county and a data center developer.

Alex: Staying with elections. In the sixth district, the one that takes in the Roanoke Valley, Congressman Ben Cline and Democratic challenger Beth Macy can’t agree on how to debate. Macy proposed a series. Cline answered by announcing a schedule without coordinating with her, which Macy called a slate of candidate forums rather than actual debates. Whether they meet at all is unsettled.

Morgan: Macy’s the writer, right?

Alex: She is. Roanoke author, best known for Dopesick, her book on the opioid crisis that became the Hulu series. This is her first run for office. Worth being straight about the math: Cline won last time with about sixty-three percent, so this is a Republican district. Early voting opens September eighteenth.

One more. A new forecast from UVa’s Weldon Cooper Center projects Virginia loses about eighteen thousand jobs this year, a second straight year of contraction, even as the economy grows slightly. The labor force has shrunk by roughly sixty-eight thousand people since early last year, which is part of why unemployment has stayed near three point nine percent.

Morgan: Does that track with what people here are seeing?

Alex: It does, and that’s what makes it ours. WSLS took the numbers to employers around Southwest Virginia. Derek Harper, who runs a plumbing company, said he’s short staffed for the simple reason that there’s nobody to hire. Cardinal News adds a caveat worth holding onto: a lot of the state’s growth is tied to data center construction, so the moratoriums spreading across Virginia could pull at that.

The Week Ahead

Morgan: All right, the week ahead, and there is a lot of it.

Tuesday, the Roanoke Civil War Round Table meets at seven at the chapel at Friendship North. Five dollars, free if you’re a member. The talk is on the Battle of Sailor’s Creek, three days before Appomattox.

Thursday, Justin Moore plays the Salem Civic Center at seven thirty.

Friday is the twenty-fifth anniversary of September eleventh, and there are commemorations all over the region. WDBJ7 pulled together the list. Close to home there’s a memorial stair climb in Roanoke, a wreath laying in Salem, and an event in Vinton, with ceremonies in Montgomery County and Radford nearby. Two we have firm times for: a memorial walk at the Buchanan Fire Department at eight thirty in the morning, and a wreath laying at the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford at eleven. Most of the others don’t list times in our sources, so check locally.

Alex: Football, too, and it’s spread across both days. UVa hosts Norfolk State Friday night at seven, coming off that thirty-four to eight win over NC State. Virginia Tech hosts Old Dominion Saturday at noon at Lane Stadium, week two of the Franklin era.

Morgan: And the one you can actually walk into. Roanoke College hosts Greensboro College Saturday at two at Salem Stadium. Ten dollars in advance, fifteen at the gate, and students and kids five and under get in free.

Saturday is where everything piles up. Olde Salem Days runs eight thirty to four thirty on Main Street in Salem. It’s the Rotary Club’s craft festival, second Saturday every September, well over three hundred vendors filling Main Street and the side streets, and it draws thousands.

Then that evening, Symphony Under the Stars. Seven thirty at Elmwood Park, free, and it’s the Roanoke Symphony opening its season outdoors. Bring a lawn chair.

Alex: Which means Saturday is a craft festival, a kickoff at noon, another game at two, and a symphony at seven thirty.

Morgan: It’s a lot to stack. On weather, Saturday looks warm, around eighty-six and mostly sunny, but there’s about a forty percent chance of showers through the middle of the day and scattered storms into the evening. Sunday’s the clean one, ninety and clear.

Two more. The Blue Ridge Bee Festival is Saturday, ten to four thirty at Falling Creek Park in Bedford, and it’s free. Fifty-plus vendors, honey tasting, live music, food trucks.

And the Beaver Dam Farm Sunflower Festival runs Friday through Sunday in Buchanan, ten to five on Saturday and Sunday. Eleventh year. This time they’ve added a Field of Heroes tribute for the anniversary.

Alex: So if the rain does show up Saturday, the sunflowers are still there Sunday.

Morgan: That’s the move.

The Closer: J.J. Redick Comes Home

Alex: To close this week. Years ago, a basketball coach at Cave Spring High School named Billy Hicks said that if a certain kid kept working and kept listening to his family and his coaches, the sky was the limit for him.

That kid was J.J. Redick. He went on to be a McDonald’s All-American, a two-time national player of the year at Duke, fifteen years in the NBA, and he’s now the head coach of the Los Angeles Lakers.

Last Wednesday, after thirteen years away from the Roanoke Valley, he came back. He spoke to more than five hundred Roanoke County students at the Summit Sportsplex. The Roanoke Times and WDBJ7 were both there.

The event came together through Kevin Connelly, who co-founded Summit and played a season alongside Redick at Cave Spring. And Connelly was clear that it had less to do with knowing J.J. than with what a morning like that could do for the kids in the room.

Redick told them to find their own dream and work at it over and over, and to learn to love failure, because eventually you stop being afraid of it.

Morgan: Coming from the guy his old coach called it on. That’s a good week to end on.

Close

Alex: That’s The Roanoke Weekly. Thanks for spending part of your day with us.

Morgan: If it was useful, send it to somebody else who lives here. That’s how people find us.

Alex: We’ll see you next Monday.