What happened to the Botetourt County Republican Committee?
On Saturday, March 23, 2024, Steve Dean won a very close election in a low turn-out party canvas to become the new chairman of the Botetourt County Republican Committee (BCRC). Unfortunately, the BCRC has been in a steady decline ever since.
At the Board of Supervisors’ budget hearing, in other venues, and online, the active members of the Dean regime have spoken to and about members of the Botetourt County Board of Supervisors with vitriol, disrespect, and false accusations. Never mind that all of the members of the Board of Supervisors are Republicans who won Republican primaries to be elected – three as recently as June 2023. Never mind that the Dean group provided no realistic or actionable reductions to the proposed budget, and never mind that the tax rate proposal by Dean and his group, based on what they referred to as a “net neutral rate,” would have degraded law enforcement and emergency services response times.
Unfortunately, the vitriol, disrespect, and false allegations by Dean and his ”committee members” led to death threats against members of the Board of Supervisors and the arrest of at least one individual for threatening to murder the supervisors.
No lessons were learned by Dean, however. On June 24, the Dean committee voted to oppose the county accepting contributions from a newly created Botetourt County Library Foundation for books or other instructional material. Their position was based on the paranoid belief that such funding would be used to purchase pornography to poison the minds of the children of the county.
Dean and the BCRC’s latest ill-conceived committee activity is a recall petition drive against members of the current Board of Supervisors. State law allows for citizens to petition the Circuit Court of the county for a recall with 10 percent of registered voters’ signatures in the affected supervisor’s district. Unfortunately for Dean and his perpetually angry supporters, the law also requires that the supervisor in question has clearly neglected some specific duty of the office of supervisor with a clear “material adverse effect.” Or that the person has committed some serious crime.
Disagreeing with Dean and his followers on how much to spend on county-needed services, or what the property tax rate should be to fund these services, is a policy difference with Dean, not a malfeasance of duty or a crime. The Circuit Court would certainly dismiss the petition as unfounded. Nonetheless, the BCRC will waste the committee’s time, the time of the voters it harasses for signatures, and the time of the Botetourt County Circuit Court. And, of course, it will cause a distraction for the Board of Supervisors as they try to govern the county.
Some of us had hoped that Jim Luddington, the BCRC vice chairman, would provide some adult supervision and a moderating influence. Alas, that is not the case. It now appears the majority of the county’s traditional Republicans and elected officials will have to put up with two years of a perpetual grievance mindset of the BCRC under Dean’s leadership, until the next party chairman canvas in 2026, assuming there is still a viable BCRC to hold a canvas by then.
John Williamson
Buchanan
