Radford's financial troubles trace back to a structural problem: more than half its land, including Radford University and a federal arsenal, is tax exempt. To make up the shortfall, the city got into the electricity resale business. That system started falling apart when its biggest customer, a foundry on West Main Street, closed for good at the end of 2013. Mayor Bruce Brown warned the council in April 2017 that the city was on an unsustainable path, the budget passed anyway, three to two.
What followed was a cascade of missed chances. The foundry, Grede, had defaulted on a state grant tied to job creation, but the responsible agency never recovered the money and Radford never pursued its own matching share. A watchdog report that year found the agency had operated for over 20 years without proper fraud protections, with nearly half its funded projects failing and millions never recovered.
From 2019 through 2024, auditors flagged the same material weakness every year: the treasurer's office, city offices and school division ran on incompatible accounting systems, making reliable financial statements nearly impossible without heavy manual work. It was the first time an outside auditor had ever called the city's books unreliable and the finding just kept reappearing, renumbered each year.
By fall 2023, Radford took out a $4 million short term loan meant for brief cash gaps. Its gap wasn't brief. A Virginia Municipal League official said he'd never seen a locality use that kind of note this way. The reckoning came in April 2025: the council passed its largest tax and fee increase in recent memory, raising the real estate rate from $0.69 to $0.82, along with hikes to personal property, meals, lodging, water, sewer and trash fees. City employees went a third straight year without raises and council members even cut their own stipends.
A year later came the reveal: retiring city manager David Ridpath had submitted overly rosy revenue projections for 14 years, papering over a structural $4 million annual gap. The former finance director and the audit firm said nothing.
No single villain caused this, it was a chain of a once reasonable revenue plan, an unenforceable grant program, repeated unsustainable budgets, ignored warnings and a state that waited for a breaking point. That point came in fall 2025. Under a fiscal distress law passed after Petersburg's near collapse, Radford's score hit 88.33 in November 2025, nearly double the 45-point alarm threshold, triggering state intervention. By March 2026, auditors recommended formal state oversight, revealing Radford was over four months behind on a $6.5 million bill to Appalachian Power for electricity it had already resold to residents.
Brown's 2017 warning was seemingly right all along, vindicated nine years too late, based on records that were public the whole time. It's a reminder that transparency without follow through doesn't prevent a crisis, someone has to actually act on the warning signs. Not a great past indicator of reliable leadership here, but perhaps a good sign moving forward.
