Two Cities, One Machine: Radford and Martinsville
Two small Virginia cities ninety miles apart run the same unusual business at almost the same size under the same market pressure.
Two small Virginia cities ninety miles apart run the same unusual business at almost the same size under the same market pressure. One is now formally in fiscal distress; the other is not. Radford and Martinsville both own municipal electric utilities, both buy nearly all their power wholesale and resell it to residents, and in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2024 the two systems were close in scale. Where they diverge is the transfer. In FY2024 Radford moved $3,974,796 out of its electric utility into its general fund, about 18.5 percent of the utility's operating revenue; Martinsville moved nothing. The balance sheets record the accumulated difference: Radford's electric fund ended FY2024 with a negative net position of $433,371, while Martinsville's held $18.6 million. The general funds tell the same story from the other side, with Martinsville carrying about $5.26 million in unassigned general-fund balance near the conventional reserve floor while Radford's had gone negative. Four findings carry the analysis, the first being that the transfer, not the wholesale environment, separates the two outcomes, because the environment is identical and the outcomes are opposite. This is a comparative diagnostic, not a recommendation: it establishes that a meaningful share of Radford's distress was a decision. Radford and Martinsville are the closest structural match Virginia's independent-city set offers, both small post-industrial independent cities of similar size whose industrial base hollowed out. Built entirely from audited financial statements and the public record, with description and inference labeled separately.