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Jennifer Humphries, a firsttime candidate for Buena Vista City Council, says she is a “caring, concerned citizen of Buena Vista. I have the time to serve and I want to serve my community.”
If elected, she said she is going to try “to keep Council focused on real issues that are important. The streets need repair desperately. I realize public works is working on them as fast as they can but if there are only five people working then perhaps we need to look at getting them some help.”
Also, she continued, “the middle school needs repairs, the wastewater treatment plant desperately needs repairs, the signs on half of the streets are faded to the point that you don’t know which street you are on unless you are a Buena Vista native.”
She acknowledges the challenges of Buena Vista continuing to afford its own school system but thinks it would be a bad idea for the city to consolidate with the neighboring divisions. She said she’s heard people say that Lexington consolidating its high school with the county’s “has been the worst thing ever. It is overcrowded. There have been fights and incredible episodes of bullying.”
Rockbridge County High School, she said, “isn’t built to handle the students they already have much less adding ours to the mix. The cost to Buena Vista to consolidate would be astronomical. Unless the county lets us become Rockbridge East and keep our schools, but of course we would still have to pay a good portion to the county budget for administration, transportation, etc.”
She concludes: “I don’t believe that consolidation would work for us. I think we would end up worse off than we are now. Buena Vista is moving in the right direction to get debt down. We are working on it. It may take some time and we may have to do some thinking outside the box.”
As for whether Buena Vista can continue to provide basic services to its citizens while holding the line on taxes, Humphries commented, “We need to look at what the city is responsible for doing and what is the most important – what we can get grants for, [what] we have to do, what things are in the budget that don’t need to be there.”
She said she wants the city to pay attention “to our entrances to our downtown corridor. We need to take care of our park. The people that work [at] our park need to be assigned to the park only – not to other places around the city. They need to work on the trails in the park, making them passable. [They] need to work on the areas around the river for fishing, enhance our outdoor recreational activities.”
Humphries attended Lexington High School and graduated from Parry Mc-Cluer High School. She attended Southern Seminary and graduated from the Stonewall Jackson Hospital School of Nursing. In her first job, she said, she met her husband Bill, who works in public safety at Washington and Lee University. She has a daughter who attended the Buena Vista city schools and graduated from Mountain Gateway Community College and Southern Virginia University.
