By Taylor Boyd
Mike Weber is seeking the Smith River District seat on the Patrick County Board of Supervisors in the November election.
Doug Perry also is seeking the post.
Long-term incumbent Crystal Harris said she will not seek reelection.
Weber said he decided to run for the position after retiring from teaching in the Henry County school system in 2017.
“I saw what was going on in the county, and I helped campaign for Denise Stirewalt (of the Peters Creek District) and Clayton Kendrick (of the Mayo River District), and that’s when I decided I would run for Smith River,” he said.
Both Stirewalt and Kendrick were elected to their respective posts on the board in that election cycle.
“I have a business background and also an educational background,” Weber said. “I’m fiscally conservative, and I believe that those values will support the citizens in Patrick County, the people who live and work here.”
Weber said he was also motivated to run because he “liked the idea of a balanced budget,” and is running as a conservative Republican.
A declaration of political affiliation is not required for local offices.
In addition to balancing the county’s budget, Weber said that if elected, his main goals would be to reduce spending in areas that can be cut and control spending to help reduce the possibility of a personal property tax increase.
“I own property like a lot of people do here in the county. There’s lots of people talking” at a recent meeting on a proposed real estate tax increase, and “the ones that are having trouble making ends meet,” Weber said. “Some have lost their jobs, and of course the announcement of the layoffs here in Woolwine and the plant closing. That’s going to cause a lot of hardship for the people here in Patrick County.”
Hansbrands Inc. recently announced its Woolwine facility will close later this summer.
“We need to look at every possible way we can cut the amount of money we’re spending each year to make sure the taxes don’t increase in the county,” he added.
Weber said his administrative background and his experience in working with a budget will be his greatest strength.
“I’ve done budgets for years. I had a landscape and irrigation business in Raleigh, North Carolina for 11 years, and I was the owner. So, we had a budget and we had to stay within the budget. I worked as an administrator, the Science department chairman at Patrick County High School for several years, and we had a budget to work with then and we had to stay within the budget,” he said.
Weber said he also has a degree in Administration and worked as an administrator in the Henry County school system.
“A few years after being an assistant principal and some other things, I ended up director of facilities in Henry County schools. I had a budget to deal with and I was in charge of all the building maintenance and things like that,” he said.
Weber said the biggest issues currently facing the board are balancing the budget and looking for additional ways to reduce spending.
“The state mandates are always unfunded. So, they logically think they need to raise taxes on the people in the county. I don’t think that’s the way to go. We need to look at ways to cut any expense that seems to be unusual or just tighten the belt a little bit to see if we can’t make sure the needs are met this year because people are going to have a hard time in this next year,” he said.
Weber said he believes that all areas of the budget are necessary, but he thinks there could be sections of each area that could be trimmed.
“I don’t know if we have excess of anything because I’m not involved in the budget system right now. I’d probably look at everything, just as I looked at everything” in my previous jobs, he said, and added “if we’re going to do budget cuts it probably needs to be across the board to keep the people of Patrick County from paying more property taxes.”
Weber said he has the experience for the position and has known a lot of people in the county for years. “I’ve been here since 1994 I taught at the high school for eight years, I coached several sports, tennis, football, and wrestling, so people know me. I think that the ones that went through the classes I taught realize that I tried to apply real world experiences to the lessons that I taught so they could actually go out into the real world with their eyes wide open and know what to expect and how to apply what was taught in the classroom to what is happening in the county,” he said.
