Benjamin Woods, Roanoke City Council Candidate, Answers Our 9 Burning Questions for 2024

Ahead of Roanoke’s municipal elections on Nov. 5, The Rambler once again sits down with each of the candidates — this time with a twist.

Three candidates for mayor and seven City Council candidates agreed to videotaped chats as we probed them on Roanoke’s past, present and future. To distinguish our questions from those frequently asked of the candidates, we focused on budgets, segregation, climate, housing and more. (Of course, we also had to touch on where they like to go out for dinner.)

For mayor, Vice Mayor Joe Cobb is running as a Democrat, Councilwoman Stephanie Moon Reynolds as an independent and former mayor David Bowers as a Republican. For City Council, the candidates are Democrats Terry McGuire, Phazhon Nash and Benjamin Woods; independents Evelyn Powers and Cathy Reynolds; and Republicans Jim Garrett and Nick Hagen. Voters can choose up to three Council candidates.

This interview features Woods, a 32-year-old Montgomery County native who lives in Raleigh Court. Woods works as a consultant for political campaigns and on renewable energy projects. This is his first run for public office.

Candidates did not receive copies of the questions beforehand. Transcripts of the interviews have been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

View the candidate's full video interview here:

Why do you want to serve Roanoke as a City Council member?

I think that it's time for some turnover on Council. I think there needs to be a new generation that goes into Council with a fresh perspective. I think one member is a millennial, technically. It’s just you have a whole different point of view for how the city should run, how they should communicate, how it should respect its citizens. It shouldn't just all be legislating and then going home. It needs to be educating people of why you have done what you're doing, or what the issues are going to be going forward.

I don't think I'm anything special personally, but I was just sitting, I was like, I think I could do better than that, and that's why I decided to run. I believe in brutal honesty, and I believe that people have been having a difficult time the past few years. And, you know, property taxes have absolutely skyrocketed, and you have a lot of people on fixed incomes in this city or that are hovering right above that line to where they could get help, like easement on taxes, reduction or forgiveness from the treasurer's office, and they can't get that because they're right above that poverty line that the city operates off of. So every time the valuation skyrockets and taxes go up, you know, it just increases the likelihood that people are going to be placed out of their homes. And I wanted to address that issue.

Let’s talk policy priorities. If you’re elected, what’s one of the first actions you would push for City Council to take?

One of the first actions is, I know that, you know, once I'm elected, it will be a large Democratic majority on Council. And, you know, lowering tax rates is usually not something that is broached when it's just Democrats on Council. So I would want time to do that in a smart way, to make sure that the budget implications are minimized, that it's, you know, leveraging against future projections, you know, not going as high, as fast, as they have.

So the first actual thing is I would want a moratorium on any increase in real dollar value that people pay to the city so they could catch up to the skyrocketing valuations. So it's going to continue to be an issue. And so I think that is one of my first priorities, is to get that under control.

A main priority of Council is overseeing a roughly $380 million annual budget. What do you want to see happen with the city’s budget over your four-year term?

Well, the budget is going to increase every year unless there's, you know, another 2008 around the corner that just crashes everything. I want to see it managed more efficiently, and I want to see every department be transparent in what they need. Because whenever you could cut down on overhead costs and increase the free room in the budget, you could give city employees much needed raises, better benefits, you could, you know, fund the pension that's needed and be responsible on the other end with taxpayers and be able to get something back to them, rather than just letting everything continue to raise and raise and raise.

You know, the city had a $16 million surplus last fiscal year that they did the plan. And, you know, my view from it is, if you can't plan to spend the money, then the money should go back to the citizens.

Roanoke’s residential neighborhoods remain highly racially segregated. What role should city government play in dismantling that legacy?

That’s a good question. The opportunity has to continually be there for people to move up in the world economically. Whenever you do that, you start to see the racial gap dissipate in real time. Because now what you have is, you don't just have, you know, the railroad tracks splitting a segregated city with African Americans living on the north side, the white residents mainly living on the south side. It's also in opportunity and in value of homes, because there has not been enough good paying jobs come into the region. There hasn't been enough focus on economic viability of a base to fund not only the city government, but to provide opportunity for people to work for a living. And you know, a lot of those people live in Northwest Roanoke or Southeast Roanoke that just need economic opportunity. They need access to a good paying job.

You can't feed a family anymore. You can't feed a family of four, working a retail job where you're making $35,000 a year, and right now, that is the vast majority of jobs open in the city of Roanoke and the Roanoke Valley. So that is the biggest thing that the city government can do, is focus on lifting everybody out of poverty, if you can. That's the long term goal of government, is zero poverty, right? And that's how you desegregate. That's how you integrate communities, because it removes that last barrier of affordability and it lifts every neighborhood when it does that.

How would you work to implement the city’s climate action plan? Or do you disagree with its recommendations?

I think that most of the Climate Action Plan, I mean, it was designed to do the right thing. It was enacted for the right reasons. One of the things it needs with that and overall Parks and Rec is, you know, some additional funding to get under control. You have the heat desert up, you know, especially in Northwest Roanoke, where just the tree canopy isn't there.

You need to fund, plant the trees, get them in the ground, get the underbrush, grow them responsibly. Plan for the maintenance is the first and most immediate thing that the city can do, then they could plan. And there's grants available. I would love to look at hiring some more grant writers for the city, because there's a lot of huge nonprofits out there that want to fund places like Roanoke, be environmentally friendly and have more of a conservation view of things.

When it comes to the overall reduction, I think that's the main thing that we can do, is get some tree canopy up, increase public transit when we can, so there's less cars on the road.

You’re on record opposing current policies that ended exclusively single-family zoning. What’s your solution to encouraging the development of more affordable housing?

The reason that I oppose it is because the neighborhoods are already established. And you have, you know, entire streets that go up that cannot hold, you know, 10, 20 more apartment buildings. We have some great examples of how those neighborhoods can exist, especially in South Roanoke and Grandin Court. But those exist while single-family zoning exists. And the solution to the problem is, I want to see redevelopment and policy go towards starting with high-density corridors where we can increase and improve public transportation because the affordability issue and transportation and parking, those are the issues that are brought up when it comes to housing.

If we focus on the transportation arteries around the city, and that's where we need to develop first, and then we need to get public transit right. We need to get our bus system right. We need to make it easy to use. We need to make it safe to use for everybody that wants to use it. We need to make it encourage other people to use it that don't use it now. And I think that that will alleviate a lot of the overcrowding concerns and neighborhoods that have an issue with it.

We also have a lot of derelict housing and abandoned units or houses across the city for landlords, you know, people die and their family never addresses it because it kind of sits there. And I would love to advocate for state action on that issue, to get the city, you know, one or two more tools to get those lots back to the city, to where we could redevelop those kind of lots for, you know, some small, multi family units to address the overall the overall unit shortage.

But when it comes to affordability, the ending single-family zoning is not the solution to that, because even in the city's own words, when they go around and have held these meetings, they're talking about developing housing for over $80,000 to $90,000 in median income, for people that make that amount or more. That is not going to be affordable housing. That's going to be upper middle housing is the term that they're going to use for it, and their solution for it is that people that are now under-renting units are going to now occupy those more expensive units because they want something nicer than what they're living in. But there's a glaring issue just with that. People can move in the city, right? Like, because now you build 10 $400,000 townhouses, and somebody from Botetourt wants to live in the city, those 10 people that could afford that are still in that housing, because people move in.

One of your drivers to run for council is to reduce the real estate tax. You touched on this, but what would you want to see it cut to?

I want to see the moratorium placed on the real dollar amount, the valuations that's going into the coffers now, because we need time to look at a way to fix the issue going forward. You know, the state statute says that real estate has to be evaluated at a fair market price. That's a lot of flexibility of what fair is and isn't. And I think that the city could create a system where it caps how much it is lowered or raised in any given year.

To me, it's more about respecting the money that people are paying into it and getting it under control now. If I was sitting on Council when they had a $16-million surplus, I would have probably, you know, ask for $4 million or $5 million to go back to taxpayers. That's not going to be a lot of money to each individual, but it's something, and it shows that you care about how affordability has gone in your community, and that you respect every cent that they are paying into the city.

You've talked about expanding transit, lifting people out of poverty. Obviously, this is going to cost more money. If you keep taxes as they are, you know, don't grow the budget, how do you—?

It doesn't just have to come from the city spending. You see businesses, from international companies, advanced manufacturing jobs, coming to the valley. They're just not coming inside of the city because of the attitude that the Council has given the past 10 years that, you know, we've lost Advanced Auto’s international headquarters and Norfolk Southern’s international headquarters. They paid a lot of taxes in the city. It doesn't mean that you have to lay out the red carpet for anyone who comes along, but you have to start talking about those issues and make sure that those needs are being addressed when it comes to long-term economic development. And so it's public, private partnerships. It's, you know, doing things to work to expand the Medical institute and the school, which would be a humongous economic driver, just with the impact that it has itself on bringing people in, more researchers, and then you’re going to have more services to address the needs of those schools.

You’re going out to dinner in Roanoke. Name one place — where do you go?

So I like the buffalo chicken dip at 202 [Social House].

What books are on your night stand? What are you reading currently?

I cannot remember the author, but it is my second Ulysses S. Grant biography this year. And then there was also one called The Middle Kingdom, and it's about, like, Central European, late Middle Ages to medieval history. You don't see a lot of post-Roman history from Central Europe, you know, like up and down the Rhine or west of that in Germany. So it just gets into that, a lot of Holy Roman Empire stuff.