LIKE A SAILBOAT, a city can drift,
Dr. Tomzak's mayoralty has been one with an abiding theme. Just after assuming office in 2004, he wrote a commentary for this newspaper noting the inconvenient obvious: To make Fredericksburg a more enjoyable city, with greater cultural and recreational assets, requires funding. If such funding is not to come from rising property taxes, it must come from elsewhere. "Downtown Retail Merchants Inc.," Dr. Tomzak wrote, "envisions a downtown of upscale shops, galleries, and fine restaurants. [It] doesn't want downtown to deteriorate to tattoo parlors and junk shops. The only way to accomplish this is to increase patronage."
Putting feet on the street is the ultimate aim of the incentives the Tomzak-led City Council has approved for Capital Ale House and Kybecca Wine & Gourmet to, respectively, locate and expand in downtown. Whether or not one cottons to incentives--we don't--they represent a cogent strategy to draw people to the city center and jump-start commerce there, especially at night, when Old Town is often as shuttered as a medieval village during a vampire scare.
Downtown amenities either completed (e.g., a parking deck) or in the works (a hotel) under Dr. Tomzak--in the face of county retail competition already eroding tax receipts from Central Park--form the infrastructure requisite to a healthy tourism industry, the perpetual bellyaching of the e-mail commandos notwithstanding. The mayor is persuasive: "If it were possible to freeze the Historic District in time, I would do so. It would be wonderful to live in a tourist town without the bother of tourists. There are towns like this out West. They are called ghost towns."
Admittedly, Dr. Tomzak's touch in molding his vision for Fredericksburg--bringing in the new to save the old--has been imperfectly deft. He should have pressed former Gov. Doug Wilder's planned National Slavery Museum harder for answers--or, as a medical doctor, merely for signs of life--when Mr. Wilder's underlings clammed up about that evidently now-defunct entity. Also, given the way that a previous council railroaded the vast Celebrate Virginia project into being, Dr. Tomzak and his tin-eared council colleagues should have held the hors d'oeuvres and bubbly until after informing Fredericksburgers that the city had hooked a water park-resort capable of drawing hundreds of thousands of people per year inside its incorporated limits. Moreover, Mr. Tomzak's opponent in this election, Councilwoman Debby Girvan, is correct to question the fine print in the Kalahari contract--even if this diligence comes ex post facto (see Jud Honaker's letter on this page).
THE BIG PICTURE
But city residents should imitate boxing judges, who consider a fighter's performance during an entire round, not just the last 15 seconds of it, in deciding to whom to award it. By that measure, Dr. Tomzak has piled up the points. Fredericksburg, quite simply, is a better community because of projects he has initiated or backed: from the conservation easement along the Rappahannock to the city swimming pool, from the renovation of old Maury School to the bricking of city sidewalks, from a winsome parking deck to a hotel shaped to city standards. The world is wicked, the nation gloomy. But in Fredericksburg, the quotient of civic pride, built on tangible improvements, is high in 2008.
If Dr. Tomzak has been slow to ballyhoo some of these achievements, mark that off to a personality that finds its fulfillment in working quietly for the public good rather than ambitiously self-promoting, and in forging consensus: Every City Council member--Republican and Democrat, white and black--supports Dr. Tomzak except the one after his job. Factional peace has channeled the city's political energies from polarization to progress.
Whatever the outcome of next month's election, Fredericksburg will benefit from the good-humored labors of Mayor Tom Tomzak. It would be just, however, if, rather than awaiting thanks from posterity, they were delivered by voters May 6 for a course well steered.