D. Michael Barber (incumbent)

• Age: 60
• Occupation: Assistant vice president of First Virginia Bank in Radford
• Community roots: Christiansburg native
• Affiliations: Kiwanis Club, Christiansburg Presbyterian Church, Christiansburg Finance Committee, Christiansburg Water and Sewer Committee, Rosa Peters Playground board member, town-appointed board member of the New River Valley Development Corporation
• Education: 1966 Christiansburg High School graduate and 1969 graduate of Roanoke’s National Business College. Completed degrees offered through the Virginia School of Bank Management at the University of Virginia and the School of Banking of the South at Louisiana State University.

Election index

• Other candidates in the NRV answer your questions

Why should voters vote for you to serve on the Christiansburg Town Council?

Mike Barber: I have been a member of council for eight years. I think I bring a wealth of experience, not only from my time on council but from my activities and community involvement that I’ve had over the last 40 years. I am accessible. I have always been accessible by phone, e-mail, stop me in the grocery store. That was one of the things that I promised eight years ago, that I would be accessible. I think I’ve lived up to that promise and I also promised to pursue the aquatic center which everybody wanted. I think we’ve been successful there to this point. But being a native — and I may be the only native that’s lived here their entire life that’s on council —I’ve seen it grow from a 3,400 resident town to 18,000 or 23,000, depending on which census report you get. I have a good feel of what I would like to see happen in Christiansburg. I’ve always said this is my hometown. I don’t think there’s anybody out there that loves Christiansburg any more than I do, and serving on council and serving the citizens through council is my way of giving back.

First-time voter Sarah Hamed, 18, asks: “When will the town ever put in sidewalks uptown? The area is inaccessible for pedestrians.” Coreen Mett, 60, also wonders about foot traffic around the New River Valley Mall area: “My question is how soon are we going to be able to cross [U.S.] 460 as a pedestrian?”

MB: If things go the way it’s supposed to go with the Huckleberry Trail, there’s going to be a pedestrian crossover. As far as the sidewalks go, I don’t know that they’ll ever see sidewalks here. I mean, I think it would be great, but again you’re looking at development that 20 years ago when this thing started developing, it was felt that the sidewalks weren’t going to be a part of that plan. I’m not sure that it would ever be safe for foot traffic out through here. There’s an awful lot of cars. So are you ever going to see them [sidewalks]? I don’t know that you ever will, but if you do, at whose expense is going to be? Is it going to be the property owners’? Is it going to be the town’s? Is it going to be a combination thereof? Which maybe that’s the most feasible way to do it. But if you look, there’s not a whole lot of really good, safe places that you can build sidewalks. With the number of cars that travel [U.S.] 460 every day and the number of cars that travel [Virginia] 114 every day, I’m not sure that I would want my kids or my mother trying to cross that street out there.

Doris Oliver, 74, has a follow-up question to a recent news story about Christiansburg’s failure to follow open meeting mandates in the Virginia Freedom of Information Act: “Do you intend to acquaint yourself with FOIA rules prior to taking office?”

MB: I’m already in office and, yes, I will do a much better job. If I read — and I have read the Freedom of Information Act — it is not a town councilman’s responsibility to post public notices. It is the management of the town and our designees. We’ve crossed this bridge before in a couple of forums. I just came out with “You caught us once, shame on us. You catch us again, shame on me.” Yes, I have asked for the people who are going to be charged by council to make that sure this is done properly. Yes, I have read up on it [FOIA] some and there are some gray areas. There are gray areas that you could read it one way or another. Have we always been as open as we need to be? No. Are we going to be in the future? I certainly hope so. I’m going to see to it that we are.

Ryane Doyle, 23, is a Florida native who has lived in Christiansburg for the past 1½ years. She asks: “Do you intend to continue attracting retail growth in Christiansburg? What could be done to attract business to the downtown area?”

MB: Obviously, our goal is to continue to attract retail business. That’s why we are the shopping hub of the New River Valley and Southwest Virginia. We’ve done a pretty decent job in bringing business here, but I don’t know that that’s the town’s success. The fact that we’ve provided some pretty decent areas. We’ve provided a good mall. We’ve provided several other shopping plazas. But the people that own these particular things are as involved in attracting new business as the town is. We offer incentives if we need to for people to come here. But I think we have enough big box stores here. I like the smaller family-owned businesses. I’m not sure they can survive out here in the mall area. When you go to downtown Christiansburg, we as a town don’t own any buildings down there. So our efforts would be to try to get people in here through marketing. But when you have absentee owners, and there are a lot of buildings downtown that the owners don’t live here, it’s kind of hard to say, “Yeah, we’re attracting.” We’re trying to do all we can. We’re certainly going to beautify downtown to make it a lot more visually enhancing for someone to come. ... But it’s a joint responsibility. People ask, “What’s town council doing?” Well, we’re doing all we can through tourism and through our industrial committees that work with the town and the counties. But it still gets back to the fact that there’s got to be something more than an absentee owner sitting back and maybe not being accessible. I’m sure they have property managers, but a lot of them aren’t willing to do anything to their properties until they’ve got a lease and then you have somebody who may not be willing to sign a lease until somebody does something to their property. It’s a catch-22. I’d love to see downtown flourish like it was when I was growing up, but it won’t happen. The object of any business is to make a profit and to make a profit, they have to go to where the traffic is. … There are a few empty buildings downtown that I would like to see filled. I see the CVS building is filled now and there’s a couple more down there and I’d like to see them filled. I think that is going to be more of a government-based area. I think it’s an ideal place for attorneys’ offices and accountants and this type stuff. But there’s not enough traffic to support a lot of good retail businesses. We have some nice little unique antique stores and that’s been a good addition to downtown. You have a couple of nice little restaurants and coffee shops and things that are nice and fulfill a need downtown, but when you look, I don’t know where a lot of retail business and what type of retail business could go down there. To enhance the look of it is the first step and I think we’ve done that, although not as fast as a lot of people would like to have seen it done, but it will be done. And I understand that the grants are in place to do the other end of town and we won’t have to do the paving because those streets were all taken care of at one time. We don’t have to rip up all the Main Street like we had to do on the other end.

“Will Christiansburg raise real estate taxes as the county plans to do? Is there some way to maintain tax relief for the elderly citizens?” asks William June Smith, 70. On the subject of taxes, 21-year-old Danielle Akers wants to know if the town “will consider expanding town limits to increase revenue taxes?”

MB: As a member of the finance committee, I have asked them to prepare a budget that does not reflect a real estate tax increase. What I would like to see us do is like we did last year. We will most likely have to look at dropping our real estate tax rate in order to be a true no increase. That worked last year. Can we continue to do this forever? I don’t know. I mean, there’s a lot of demand for services that are provided out of real estate taxes. And real estate taxes are not our highest income figure. The meals tax brings in probably close to $2 million more than real estate taxes do. If there’s going to be any type of increases, I’m a proponent of user taxes. If you smoke cigarettes, then you pay a 20 cents per pack tax, and that’s the only tobacco product we can tax. Can’t tax chewing tobacco, can’t tax snuff, can’t tax cigars. And the meals taxes and lodging taxes are others because these are people that use our streets and use our facilities and use our town and our roads as much as our citizens do. Can I sit here and tell you, yes, the meals and lodging tax are definitely going to go up? No, because that’s not been voted on yet. It’s not been discussed other than that one little meeting that we had. User taxes are the most fair tax out there I think. If we go out and annex, there’s not a lot of benefit to that. If we expand — I’m not saying this is where we’re going to go — let’s say we went out to the Mudpike and we took all of the Mudpike. Well, the increases in real estate taxes that you’re going to get off of that would not pay for extra police protection because then it would come out of the county into the town, the garbage trucks, the street maintenance and plowing the streets. I don’t think that’s the way we need to do to increase revenue taxes. Increased revenue taxes would be the user taxes. That’s the way to do it and that’s fair for everyone. If I increased your real estate tax rate to where it was costing you $50 more a year for your real estate taxes, then instead of increasing that if we increased the meals tax by 1 percent, you’d have to go out and spend $5,000 in eating out to reach that $50 level. If you’re one that doesn’t eat out a lot, you’re affected better by us leaving your real estate taxes where they are and getting the people that go out to eat and the visitors that come here and go out to eat. So it’s a fair tax. Is there some way to maintain tax relief for elderly citizens? We go through that every year. We make accounts based on personal property and income. We have a set figure that we do every year.