Cape Charles Mirror Report – Wayne Creed
Since the town of Cape Charles has announced plans to spend $1 million dollars to complete the Cape Charles Community Trail, which, once it extends south to Peach Street could eliminate over 25 parking spaces in the commercial district, it may be helpful to look back on the historically fraudulent and marginally illegal activities that have led to the implementation of this project. Given the many needs our community faces, funneling these funds into what on all accounts appears to a pet project favored by a cloistered few, seems highly questionable. At a local level, the trail project has been hampered by poor decisions, basic incompetence, and fraught with waste and abuse, however, none of this could have occurred without the knowledge, and tacit approval of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources in Richmond.
While the bumper sticker slogan of the VDHR is historic preservation, the landscape and environment they provide appears to be nothing more than trough of corporate welfare for dubious entities to belly up and feed on, using historical tax credits as the slop. What they generously refer to as revitalization, is actually nothing more than scaled gentrification. The important thing to note is that, of all the millions of dollars the VDHR has doled out to private developers, we have not been able to find one instance where tax credits have been used to revitalize a building that would benefit the public, such as revitalizing a library or community center that would remain in the public domain. Here in small town USA Cape Charles, they were alerted that the Trail Project, as well as the Old School Project, was not preserving anything at all, but instead actively destroying it. While they are providing a robust feeding trough for developers, they did so by taking assets away from the poor and underserved.
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