by Kerry Dougherty

If you were in Virginia Beach on Wednesday morning, November 8, 2022, you could almost hear the sighs of relief.

That collective exhalation came from the cronies on city council who would no longer have to deal with Councilman John Moss, who came in second in a three-way race for the newly created District 9.

The other members would no longer have to squirm when the Republican pointed out that his colleagues deceived the public when they boasted that they’d held the line on property taxes by keeping the RATE static. Rising real estate assessments in the city meant taxes WENT UP for most residents, he always pointed out.

Holding the line would mean lowering the rate.

Moss was right, of course. But it seems you really can fool most of the people most of the time.

Beyond that, city council would no longer have to deal with a budget wonk who was skilled in monetary matters. He was not content, as they were, to let city staff cook up spending plans with excesses that necessitated the falsehood about taxes staying the same.

Year after year Moss accused the city budgeteers of deliberately funding vacant positions, using the loot as a slush fund for their pet projects.

And year after year, Moss’ “revenue neutral” budget proposal died with little or no support from his colleagues.

Beyond that, the local newspaper often ignored Moss, sometimes treating him as a kook, adding to the perception that he was simply a gadfly who’d managed to steal a seat on this body filled with friends of powerful developers and entertainers.

Truth was, Moss had served the people since he was first elected as part of a good government slate in 1986 with a mission to slow down the rampant construction of homes that were springing up in a hodgepodge fashion around the city. Uncontrolled growth contributed to the flooding crisis that the city experiences today.

Ironically, city council blames flooding mitigation for their inability to cut taxes now.

And so it goes.

I sat down with Moss in late August to talk about the upcoming election.

He had a sense, I believe, that forces who wanted him off council were shoveling money into not one, but two opponents, yet Moss shrugged and said he had never tried to spend his way onto council and wasn’t about to start.

In the end Moss was outspent more than fivefold by the winner, who raised most of his money from real estate and development interests, according to the Virginia Political Access Project.

VPAP reports that the winner, Joashua F. Schulman, spent $152,858. The third place finisher, T. J. Morgan Jr., spent $83,898.

By contrast, Moss spent just $26,715.

If my abacus is right, every vote costs Schulman $25.50. Every vote Morgan garnered came with a $16.92 price tag.

Each Moss vote cost the incumbent just $4.73.

Moss barely hung onto his seat in 2018 after a last-minute smear campaign saturated the city, launched by two PACs: one for the Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce, the other for the Virginia Beach Education Association.

An unholy alliance if ever there was one.

More than two months before the election Moss seemed philosophical about his political future. If the voters replaced him, he told me, it would give him more time for his family and his passion: the Boy Scouts, where he has volunteered for decades.

The man I liked to call “the conscience of city council” is no longer serving the public in elected office.

Make no mistake, the big loser in November’s election wasn’t John Moss. It was the people of Virginia Beach.

This column was first published in Kerry: Unemployed and Unedited.  It is republished here with permission.