The Bill Came Due (Part 2 of 2)

This is part two of a two-part series by Tommy Turner, originally published by Cardinal News. ← Read Part 1

Radford had backed its budget into a corner. Unable to tax enough of its own land — more than half of which is exempt, including Radford University and the federal arsenal — the city had gone into the electricity business and run its government on the markup from reselling power. Its largest customer was a foundry on West Main Street, and when the foundry closed for good at the end of 2013, that income stream began drying up. In April 2017, Mayor Bruce Brown read the whole mechanism into the council minutes and voted against the budget, warning that the city was on a trajectory it could not sustain. The council passed it three to two. This is what the nine years after that warning looked like.

After April 2017, the remarkable thing about Radford is how ordinary the next several years look from the outside, and how clearly the record reads from the inside.

The institutions built to catch a city like Radford each, in turn, looked away. When Grede walked, it left behind a state grant and a job-creation promise it had not kept, and the agency that wrote the grant spent years trying to claw the money back. The money never came back. The city never sued and never pursued its own $600,000 share. A legislative watchdog report found the agency had run for more than two decades without a formal process to protect the state from fraud and loss, that almost half the projects it had funded had failed to meet their terms, and that of $22 million owed back by failed deals, it had recovered $7 million.

The budgets keep passing. The reserves keep drawing down. In March 2020, three months past its legal deadline, the city files its annual financial report for 2019, and on page 144, there is an entry labeled Finding 2019-001, a material weakness. It says the treasurer's office, the city's offices and the school division keep their books on accounting systems that do not talk to each other and that the gaps make it impossible to produce trustworthy financial statements without heavy manual patching. It is the first time in the city's modern history that an outside auditor has said, in writing, that Radford's books cannot be relied on. The same finding appears every year through 2024.

In the fall of 2023, the city takes out a revenue anticipation note for $4 million — a short-term loan against taxes it expects to collect. When a reporter asks the Virginia Municipal League about it, a longtime official says he has never heard of another locality in the state using such a note this way. He does not say it is illegal. He says it is unprecedented.

In April 2025, the council passes the largest tax-and-fee increase anyone in Radford can remember. The real estate rate jumps 13 cents, from $0.69 to $0.82. Personal property up 11 cents. The meals tax up a point. Water, sewer, and trash all up. City employees are told there will be no raise for the third year running. The council members vote to cut their own modest stipends by a tenth.

A year later, sitting council members will tell a reporter that the city manager who ran Radford for 14 years, David Ridpath, had been bringing them revenue projections that were too optimistic and that those projections had hidden a structural gap of about $4 million a year. Ridpath, who retired at the end of 2024, does not answer on the record. Neither does the finance director who worked beside him for 18 years. Neither does the audit firm that wrote the same finding into every report since 2019.

It would be cleaner if there were a villain here, someone who took the money or cooked the books. There is not. The record names a system instead. A revenue decision made years earlier that had made sense at the time. A grant program that could not enforce its own contracts. A council that voted for an unsustainable budget and then did it again, year after year. An audit that flagged the same failure every spring and set off no consequences. A state that held the power to step in and waited until the ratios crossed a line on a spreadsheet. No single hand. A machine, built wrong, running exactly as it was built.

The line on the spreadsheet was crossed in the fall of 2025.

Virginia had given itself a new tool the year before. After the city of Petersburg nearly collapsed, the General Assembly passed a fiscal-distress statute. The threshold is 45 points. On November 12, 2025, the auditor notified Radford that its score had reached 88.33, nearly double the line, up from 70 the year before.

On March 26, 2026, the auditor sent a second letter, a formal recommendation that the commonwealth step in. By spring, the story was everywhere in Virginia. Cardinal News reported that the city had fallen more than four months behind paying Appalachian Power, and that the unpaid balance had reached $6.5 million.

Bruce Brown was right. That is the plain finding of the record, and it is a strange kind of vindication, because being right cost him a three-to-two vote in 2017 and changed nothing for nine years. He had stood in a nearly empty room and read the mechanism of the city's undoing into the minutes, and the council had thanked him and passed the budget.

The foundry is gone now. The buildings on West Main came down, and the land — 130 years of poured iron and the lead and PCBs that soaked into the ground beneath it — was deeded to the city for a dollar. It has been a federal cleanup priority since the year of the explosion. The city is betting that the same ground that broke its budget when it emptied can be scrubbed and filled again with tenants who pay taxes and draw power, and it has a $3.5 million grant to try. Part of the parcel sits in a federal floodway. It is a real bet and a slow one, and even if it pays, it does not on its own close the $4 million gap.

What the foundry took, in the end, was more than three lives in a basement in 2000 and more than 200 jobs in 2013. It took the quiet arrangement that let a small place on the New River wear a crown it could not otherwise afford. Brown watched the stone fall out. He said so, in an even voice, to a room that wasn't listening, and the saying of it is still there in the minutes, in sequence, waiting the way it has waited all along for someone to read it in time.

Every quotation, vote, figure and date is drawn from public records published by the City of Radford, the Virginia Auditor of Public Accounts, the Federal Audit Clearinghouse, and the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry, and from contemporaneous reporting by The Roanoke Times and Cardinal News.