Orange County official fired
Published: July 5, 2009
ORANGE — A local official who suggested a different location for a Wal-Mart Supercenter than a proposed site near a Civil War battlefield in Virginia has lost his job.
Orange County Administrator Bill Rolfe was fired Friday night after supervisors met in a closed session.
Wal-Mart is seeking the board’s blessing for a store near the Wilderness battlefield. Historians have loudly complained about the location.
The Arkansas-based retailer maintains the store will not disturb the battlefield.
In an e-mail sent to supervisors June 15, Rolfe said it would be in the county’s best interests to broker a deal with the retailer to move the proposed store somewhere else in the county.
County planners have recommended approval of the Wal-Mart store.
A public hearing on the proposal is scheduled for July 27.
The hearing is the final step before the Board of Supervisors, which has the final say, takes up the issue.
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Oh Virginian, calling someone a fool, rather then answer a tough question is just a cop-out.
You know there is no “sin” in building on a non-battlefield, so your “guilt” words don’t work. Thus, the truth, as I said before, is really the “haves” not wanting the “have-nots” to have something they want.
Whatever is said here will make no difference. I made the mistake of commenting. I should have remembered Mark Twain’s comment, “Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference.“
May you get your wish.
Oh, good try with the conspiracy theory. Of course, if you don’t get your way, somebody(ies) are on the take.
Now, please, you may have to get it in your own short-sighted head, that there are too many of us who disagree with your ‘sacred ground’ theory too. Now, just be real here for a minute, exactly what defiling has to be done on this ground to make it such a horrible sin?
Your tries at guilt won’t work. There’s nothing wrong with the Wal-Mart, just like there’s nothing wrong with the 7-11 etc…
Tree hugger? No. Defiling the Wilderness Battlefield by a snuggling Walmart offends the opponents of this Walmart. I think that there must be some behind=the-scenes money changing hands that would allow yet another Walmart in such close proximity to the existing ones.
Simply because there’s not a Walmart already in Orange County is irrelevant.
And a couple of $40-$50K jobs do not make up the bulk of the Walmart employees. Retail is a notorious low-paying job and Walmart not only gets their goods from sweat shops around the world, it pays local residents less than a living wage.
If the county planners were creative they would entice businesses or corporations with well-paying jobs to the county so the county residents wouldn’t have to jam up the north bound highways to support their families.
Short sighted people whose desire for the convenience of driving around the corner to shop at a cheap box store seem to be driving this Walmart store at Wilderness. That’s just wrong.
The quite a few I know from here into WV are making between $45-$50,000 a year.
Virginian, well why didn’t you just come out and tell us you were an anti-growth, tree-hugger person? Cloaking your real reasons in history etc…?
Perhaps I should have said it wouldn’t matter if the earth fell into the sun. Whatever. The point is that Walmart does create jobs. LOTS of good jobs. The ones that pay $8.25/hr. Yeah. That’s a great job.
I think in this case it boils down to people who love malls and corporate America and all the things money can buy and people who love nature and want to preserve the beauty that will be lost for our lifetimes every time another shopping center is built with the attendant infrastructure and sprawling housing to support the menial labor that serves them.
“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot…“
Extremely happy? Stockholders won’t want to hear that. They only want employees to be satisfied with their pay. If they are “extremely happy” with their pay, that would indicate they are paying too much. So, how much are your acquaintances getting paid?
To Virginian and Normal…If Disney was here, we’d already have new roadways, so there would be no parking lots on I-66. So you got what you wanted, without caring for what the next generations could have used and enjoyed. You are the short-sighted one.
Wal-Mart has not ruined any communities either, which has nothing to do with North Korea, so your little “scare” tactic didn’t work.
North Korea doesn’t want to bomb us. They want us to bomb them. So we’ll come in and give them billions of dollars and re-build their country with our tax dollars too. They’ve long seen the benefit in “black-mailing” us in to a war.
I happen to know quite a few Wal-Mart workers who are extremely happy with their jobs, their pay and benefits, so you’ll have to take that myth somewhere else too. There are no consequences to pay for my children and grandchildren, which I already have…except for your desire to hold them back from having what you have had.
The short-sightedness of people never ceases to amaze me. In the grand scheme of the universe it doesn’t matter a bit whether Walmart is erected near the Wilderness battlefield. Nor does it matter whether we’re nuked by North Korea, either. However, this is the only life each of us has and making the world a better place in the short term is more important to me.
I don’t have to reiterate what Normal said, merely consider that your children and your children’s children will live with the consequences of decisions made today.
More low wage jobs are not a good thing for a healthy, growing community. Walmarts help keep people from having well paying jobs so that will afford them the ability to shop elsewhere.
To “Observer” if that Disney park had come to Haymarket I-66 would be a parking lot on most days…wait..it is now, imagine that traffic nightmare avoided. The simple fact is this. Wal-Mart destroys communities. Their cheap, sweat-shop made goods drive local business into oblivion. There are already 4 WalMarts within 25 miles of this site, including two super centers. There is ONE Wilderness battlefield anywhere! Orange County planners are just pimping this land.
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