Voters sent two strong messages in the recent Smithfield Town Council election.

The first was for elected leaders to slow the pace of growth and development that’s steadily eroding their small-town way of life.

The second was for elected leadership to be transparent.

As it relates to the latter, Isle of Wight County supervisors didn’t get the memo.

Two days after the election, supervisors, who should pay close attention to a Smithfield electorate whose mood matches that of its neighbors in Carrollton and rural Isle of Wight,  retreated to secrecy on a controversial multimillion-dollar roundabout that leadership insists is needed even as it fails miserably to persuade citizens why. The Smithfield Town Council, which is being asked to pony up for the Turner Drive project, dispatched its town manager and attorney to negotiate with the county outside the public view.

Whatever was hashed out in secret will likely be foisted on a skeptical citizenry, who has seen this act time and again and, frankly, is tired of it, thus the housecleaning in the Town Council election.

Supervisors used an exemption to the Virginia Freedom of Information Act to shield their latest roundabout discussion from citizens. That exemption covers a “public-private transportation improvement project where if made public initially the financial interests of the county would be adversely affected.” This is a good time for our occasional reminder in this space that FOIA does not require government bodies to discuss certain things in secret. The law doesn’t even say they should. It simply gives them the option. Sadly, public officials too often opt for secrecy, then wonder why citizens don’t trust them.

The roundabout is a good example. Transparent would have been a joint meeting of the Town Council and Board of Supervisors where elected leaders looked one another in the eye and had a candid discussion about why it’s needed or, depending on one’s viewpoint, why it’s not. And if the majority view was that it’s needed, then have a discussion about how to fund it. And, importantly, citizens could have been invited to attend, listen and speak. Elected leaders might have built community support for a project they say is important. 

Despite some misgivings, we’ve kept an open mind about the roundabout for two reasons: It’s a rare example in this community of forward thinking on road infrastructure, and we think the world of Jamie Oliver, the county’s impressive young transportation coordinator, who worked hard to put the plan together.

But there are valid lingering concerns about spending millions of taxpayer dollars on a project to accommodate residential and commercial development that, with one exception, hasn’t even been vetted by town and county planners. Sweetgrass, the one project in the project area that has been approved, passed on a 3-2 vote by supervisors despite an overwhelming recommendation by the county Planning Commission that it be rejected.

Those misgivings, reinforced by elected leadership’s recent secrecy, prevent us from endorsing it. The Town Council should take no action on roundabout funding until newly elected members are seated and give the matter a fresh look. If that means waiting until a future round of VDOT funding, so be it.