By Heather Michon
Correspondent
The June 4 Fluvanna County Board of Supervisors meeting began with goodbyes.
Martha Gatlin served as administrative assistant to the sheriff since early 2006. Her last day was June 1.
Sheriff Eric Hess and former Sheriff Ryant Washington were both in the audience as she was presented with a plaque honoring her years with the county.
Tim Hodge (Palmyra), who worked in IT for the county before becoming supervisor, told Gatlin, “It was always so good to see your smiling face when I came to the sheriff’s office.”
“You will be missed,” added Tony O’Brien (Rivanna). “Now, go have some fun.”
Sherri Stader, who spent many years as the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office’s victim witness coordinator, is also retiring.
“I’ve been so grateful to work in the community where I live,” she said. “It’s just been very humbling.”
Gesturing to Commonwealth’s Attorney Jeff Haislip and Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Amanda Galloway, County Administrator Eric Dahl said, “You have some folks up there that are going to miss you dearly.”
“I miss them already,” said Stader.
Case Management System
Haislip returned to the podium later in the meeting to request funding for a new case management system for his office.
The system currently in use is almost 15 years old. In a world of cloud-based computing, it still lives on aging county servers. It cannot be accessed remotely, and when one person is using a file, nobody else can access it.
As Virginia moves inevitably towards requiring all legal material to be shared electronically, “we’re doing it with disks and thumb drives,” said Haislip.
A company with a robust, cloud-based, thoroughly modern content management system is trying to expand across the South and wants Fluvanna County to be its first Virginia client. They are offering to convert all existing data for free.
“It is the difference between a flip phone and an iPhone,” Haislip said of the new system.
With Mike Sheridan (Columbia) away for the evening, supervisors voted 4-0 to approve $27,000 for the initial system setup and moved $24,000 to the department’s budget to help cover the next steps.
Historic Courthouse
Dahl gave a quick update on the renovations of the historic courthouse, saying work was on track to begin in October.
Consultants had recently decided that only Buckingham slate from the nearby Arvonia quarry was a viable option for replacing the current roof.
Because the supplier needs a long lead time to produce the slate tiles, Dahl told supervisors, “we’re going to be doing a sole-source purchase” to get it on time for the project.
Earlier this year, the county received $785,000 from the Department of Historic Resources to repair and renovate the 1830 courthouse. The entire project is expected to cost $1.5 million over the next five years.
Land Use
As they have for the past several meetings, Palmyra residents Patti and Don Reynard pressed supervisors over land use valuation, a special assessment method used to tax specific types of land based on usage rather than market value.
Landowners with acreage set aside for agricultural, horticultural, and forested land benefit from a sharply reduced tax bill for keeping land undeveloped. Land use helps keep Fluvanna rural, but it also reduces the county’s tax revenues each year.
To Patti Reynard, this is unfair taxation. “A lot of tax money is left on the table,” she said. About 30 percent of Fluvanna residents live in subdivisions with quarter-acre lots that are ineligible for land use valuation. “That is subsidizing everyone else to pay less taxes. There’s nothing fair about that.”
She said she would continue pressuring the county to hold a forum or town hall to discuss land use and why the county manages the way it does. “All I am asking for is fair taxation for all taxpayers.”
Don Reynard echoed many of her concerns.
He noted that social media fills up with complaints every year when the tax rates are announced. “Well, there aren’t but two people at normal meetings that complain, and that’s my wife and I,” he said.
If citizens are upset about local taxes, “come on down,” he said. “We’d enjoy the company.”
