Letter to the Editor: Calls for Charles City leaders to rethink interim county administrator appointment

Charles City County’s government is in crisis.

The county quietly froze spending this summer before urgently borrowing $5 million in August to pay its bills. To date, the county has refused to provide any explanation of the problem. The most benign explanation for their silence is that they don’t understand it themselves. Meanwhile, audit red flags, evidence of questionable deals with a developer, a non-competitive sale of county land to a friendly entity, and a massively over-budget pet-project have come to light. The county administrator announced that she is taking leave- for health reasons.

Two of the three members of our board of supervisors voted to appoint Bill Coada, a recently retired board member, to act as interim county administrator. This might seem reasonable, except that Mr. Coada oversaw the creation of the current administration, ignored the audit red flags for years, participated in questionable developer deals, acted as cheerleader for the non-competitive land sale, and provided the county administrator, with whom he did all these things, an unusual five-year contract, binding future boards.

I do not have proof that anything more nefarious than mismanagement has taken place, but there is reason to be suspicious that it has. And so, I and others have pointed out to the board that Mr. Coada cannot serve to dispel our suspicions, because his ties to the administration create too much incentive for him to cover up or downplay problems that he took part in creating.

And so, I call upon the two controlling members of the board to hire an outside and unbiased administrator, arranged through the Virginia Association of Counties, to right the ship and give us a fair read on what has been going on with our government.

Robert Tyler
Charles City