What the Foundry Took
What the Foundry Took is a narrative account, drawn entirely from the public record, of how the City of Radford, Virginia reached its 2026 state fiscal-distress designation.
What the Foundry Took is a narrative account, drawn entirely from the public record, of how the City of Radford, Virginia reached its 2026 state fiscal-distress designation. It opens with Mayor Bruce Brown's April 17, 2017 budget statement, in which he warned that the city was on "a trajectory that is not sustainable" — nine years before the Commonwealth reached the same conclusion. The piece traces the West Main Street foundry, the site of a fatal explosion in 2000 and the largest customer of the city-owned electric utility, and shows how the loss of that single industrial account hollowed the utility margin Radford had used to fund its government. It then follows the nine years between Brown's warning and the state's action: a recurring audit finding, an unprecedented revenue-anticipation note, the 2025 tax-and-fee increases, and the November 2025 distress determination. The narrative is the companion to the author's options analysis, *Fiscal Crossroads*, and is built from the City of Radford's budgets and audited financial reports, council minutes, Auditor of Public Accounts correspondence, the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry record, and contemporaneous reporting by The Roanoke Times and Cardinal News.