FROM THE EDITOR: The 540 Is Undergoing a Significant Shift in Leadership
Deuntay Diggs and Megan Jackson represent a new generation of leaders. Tired of national politics' toxicity, and welcoming those who have changed our landscape, they shoulder a heavy burden.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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While the elections of new chairs and vice chairs of the Stafford County Board of Supervisors and the Spotsylvania County School Board earlier this month didn’t land with the “shock and awe” of the picks for cabinet positions in the new presidential administration, they have shaken up the way government business is being done locally.
The elections of Deuntay Diggs in Stafford County as the new chair of the Board of Supervisors, and Megan Jackson as the new chair of the Spotsylvania County School Board sit in the vanguard of the future of our region.
Both are new to politics, relatively inexperienced on their boards, and demonstrate a strong streak of independent thought. They represent a coming changing of the guard in political leadership that will usher in the next generation of growth in the 540.
Voices for the New Counties
Both Diggs and Jackson have already brought noticeably different perspectives to their roles.
Though Diggs ran as an independent who carried the Republican endorsement and Jackson is an independent, both have perspectives that are noticeably less driven by the national politics that have torn at both the Stafford Board of Supervisors and the Spotsylvania County School Board over the past few years.
These new perspectives, however, are not simply about politics. They’re about demographics, as well.
Cultural and political changes rarely turn on a dime — they’re the results of years of work and shifting demographics. And both Stafford and Spotsylvania counties have undergone significant, culture-shaking change over the past quarter century.
Consider the demographic makeup of Stafford in 2000, which is mapped below in the county’s population pyramid. These track populations by age and gender in a graphic that allows one to easily identify shifting patterns in aging.
What jumps out are the very low numbers of people over 60, and the very high concentration of people in the 30-44 year-old range. The bulge this age group creates on the pyramid is the result of immigration to Stafford as the Washington, D.C., economy was accelerating and people were tracking south to find affordable housing.
The other bulge is in the 5-15 year-old range. Young adults buying houses were fueling a birth boom in the county.
By 2023, however, things had changed markedly.
The 2000 pyramid looked like two triangles set atop one another. The 2023 pyramid has a more-rounded shape. The people in their 30s and 40s in 2000 are now in their 50s and 60s, which is clearly reflected in the longer lines for those age groups. The percentage of the population in the 30-39 age group is shrinking. And the number of children being born is shrinking — from 14.9 live births per 1,000 people in 2000 to 11.4 in 2020.
Those who were moving into Stafford at the turn of the millennium and later were not in a position to exercise much political authority. They were younger, raising families, and hadn’t been in the county long enough to build the political muscle necessary to run for office. Further, a considerable portion were working in Washington, D.C., thus further distancing them from the politics of the community they lived in.
Now, those turn-of-the-millennium immigrants are gaining control. And there is naturally going to be tension between the Stafford County that they experienced — relatively affordable bedroom communities, wealth-creation thanks to higher-paying jobs further north, and increasing diversity — and the community of those who preceded them — more rural, large landowners, and a decidedly more homogenous community.
Diggs reflects this newer group of people who moved into Stafford. He came to the county in 2008, and though his work kept him local, his interactions with the growing minority presence in the county and with the challenges facing younger people are frequent themes in his work.
When he was running for office, for example, Diggs came on the New Dominion Podcast and talked openly about his difficult upbringing, his being a gay Black man at VMI, and the trying work that he is engaged in with the Stafford Sheriff’s office.
What came through clearly, however, was his commitment to service for those people he interacts with.
He said that when he got to Stafford in 2008, “[l]earning the community was my focus… I fell in love with the communities that looked like what I grew up in. … A lot of times I’m dealing with people on their worst days,” and as a result, he’s built up a lot of trust in the community. But he “wanted to see some things change. I wanted to see more engagement with the youth …. I wanted to see the schools treated better.”
In Spotsylvania, the population has undergone very similar types of shifts to those in Stafford, and the tensions between older Spotsylvania residents and newer ones is similarly apparent.
While the conflagration that drove the School Board arguments with the election of Kirk Twigg and then Lisa Phelps, as chair are rightly described as political, they were also demographic. Both Twigg and Phelps represent and reflect an older Spotsylvania County that is being eclipsed by new immigration since the turn of the millennium.
Jackson can’t be called a new immigrant, as can Diggs. She lived in Spotsylvania a couple years when she was very young, and grew up in Fauquier and Stafford, before moving to Spotsylvania in 2010 with her family. However, she doesn’t carry the baggage of Old Spotsylvania vs. New Spotsylvania.
Both Diggs and Jackson are — demographically speaking — new types of leaders. But they’re also a new type of political animal. More bound to independent thought than to party affiliation.
Voices for the New Politics
Over Jackson’s first two meetings the most noticeable change has been the relative calm that has played out.
The Board chair’s primary responsibility is to run meetings in a way that is fair and equitable. Jackson has pulled that off so far; Twigg, Phelps, and Lorita Daniels were not able to do this.
Jackson’s success is likely owed to several factors.
One is her stated public frustration with the chaos that has defined — and embarrassed — this Board for several years now.
In an interview with the Advance last July — six months into her first year on the Board — she made her frustration known. Asked about whether the Board was working in the best interest of students, Jackson said:
Sometimes I think it’s become more about the fight of the School Board. Frankly, I’m sick of talking about adults’ behavior at School Board meetings when we’re supposed to be talking about students.
Every meeting it’s just trying to find ways to curb behaviors, whether it’s taking a recess or something else.
She’s also come to the role of chair with a willingness to try and understand what the frustrations are that have torn the Board into two camps. Asked how much the history of tensions between Phelps and Gillespie on one side, and Nicole Cole and Daniels on the other side, affect the Board, she responded:
It affects it a lot. Some board members have been guilty of saying, “Over the last two years….” I’ve tried to encourage them to stop saying that, because in my opinion it doesn’t help us move forward. It hasn’t been the easiest to work with this Board all around.
Belen and I have our own opinions, and we are independent thinkers, and we’re not here to vote in a bloc one way or another. We’re not going to vote the same all the time, and we’re not going to be pressured to vote the same.
This approach has allowed her to build a relationship with Phelps and Gillespie, while also being able to talk with the Board’s more-progressive members.
This is not to suggest that any of these relationships are perfect. But she is at least in conversation with all parties.
Further helping her is her stated political independence. Since announcing for office, she has assiduously avoided anything resembling partisan politics.
Diggs, who ran as an independent but had the Republican endorsement, is more engaged with a party, but he is far from a person who falls in line with someone just because they have an R behind their name. In fact, some of his tensest engagements since becoming chair have been with conservatives Crystal Vanuch and Meg Bohmke, who look to be unhappy with the way Diggs is moving things.
Consider the jab that Vanuch took at Diggs during his first meeting as Board chair, when she tried to add a requirement to the code that would mandate county staff to submit leave when attending “any board of supervisor meetings, activities, work, or constituent outreach and submit that leave request to the county administrator for public review.”
The change would have most directly affected Diggs as a full-time member of the sheriff’s office. He responded by saying: “I find it rich that every time something on this Board doesn’t go someone’s way that this keeps being brought up.”
“It does not bode well,” he continued, for his demand that the Board work as a team, “when we create doubt in the minds of the citizens.”
At the January 21 meeting, he also did what Vanuch and Bohmke refused to do — he publicly apologized on behalf of the Board for the treatment that Mary Beclia endured when she was improperly removed from the Central Rappahannock Library Board and branded as having engaged in misconduct — an unfounded claim.
His sensitivity for putting people before politics was also on display a bit later in his opening remarks when he both acknowledged and congratulated Donald Trump on his inauguration, and at the same time recognized Martin Luther King Jr.
“As I sit here today in this esteemed position,” he said, “I’m acutely aware that the same inequities that Dr. King fought against still linger in communities across the nation.”
Breaking into a New World of Leaders
Whether Diggs and Jackson prove successful in their tenures by getting local politics back to fixing problems, and not dragging the toxicity of national politics into board chambers remains to be seen.
These types of changes don’t come easily, and there is sure to be pushback and disappointments and missteps along the way.
But Diggs and Jackson are different types of leaders compared with what we too often have seen in our region the past half-decade.
And they are not alone.
Clint Mitchell, though not an elected official, is a reflection of the way Jackson and others on the School Board in Spotsylvania see leadership. Pragmatically focused, solutions-driven, and service-oriented.
That approach paid off big for him in approaching the school district’s deficit shortage in a new way that, so far, is finding favor with the Board of Supervisors in Spotsylvania.
And in Stafford County, the School Board there — split along party lines — has found a way to put the toxicity aside and work in a way that places the needs of the students they’re responsible for over any personal political squabbles they may have.
Fredericksburg is similarly facing a changing of the guard in its upcoming elections this November. The decisions of Jon Gerlach and Tim Duffy to step aside is creating space for new voices to step forward. Whether they do, and whether they ultimately join political novices Will Mackintosh and Jannan Holmes, who last year were elected to the Council, remains to be seen. However, there is little doubt that Fredericksburg’s politics are also in flux — just as the politics in the counties are changing.
For now, the change that Diggs and Jackson are bringing is refreshing. It also comes with risks and challenges each surely feels.
Understanding that you are in such an era of change, however, does matter.
Winston Churchill expressed that in his 1946 Iron Curtain speech, which many take as a passing of the torch of world leadership from Britain to the U.S.
“The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American democracy. With primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. As you look around you, you must feel not only the sense of duty done but also feel anxiety lest you fall below the level of achievement.”
The burden on the shoulders of Diggs and Jackson isn’t as great as that which Churchill placed on Harry Truman in 1946, but it is a burden nonetheless.
Thus far, they show signs of carrying it well.
Updated January 27, 2025, at 12:57 pm to reflect that Deuntay Diggs ran for supervisor as an Independent but held the Republican endorsement.
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