By any measure – and with 32 years of public service to his credit – Roanoke County Circuit Court Clerk Steve McGraw is the longest serving elected official in the Roanoke area, and he’s up for re-election to a fourth term on Tuesday, but this year’s contest has been decidedly different.
After narrowly losing his first bid for elected office – the Catawba seat on the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors – at the age of 29 in 1979, McGraw won the seat four years later and has gone on to win every election since then – serving two terms on the Board and three terms as Clerk, and there have been some hard-fought battles along the way.
However, nothing in the past compares to this year’s contest between Clerk Steve McGraw and lawyer Tom Roe, who is spending an unprecedented amount of money and receiving financial and political assistance from two local U. S. Congressmen and a member of the Virginia House of Delegates.
While McGraw has waged his typically positive, upbeat campaign, spending countless hours putting up signs, knocking on doors and talking to voters with the assistance of a number of dedicated and hard-working volunteers, Roe has mounted a continuously negative attack on the incumbent via numerous expensive, full-color, slick mail pieces and numerous radio ads with the assistance of a highly paid staff. It is estimated that Roe’s campaign will probably outspend McGraw by a three-to-one margin.
Lawyer Roe has resorted to old-style, say-anything, do-anything tactics, using his surprisingly negative, over-the-top mailers to intentionally distort the truth about the operations of the Clerk’s office and to call into question McGraw’s work ethic. Roe has intentionally ignored the fact that the Clerk’s office has always operated under budget, returning tens of thousands of dollars to the county and state annually while receiving excellent state audits year after year.
Roe also uses photos of older microfilm machines still in operation in the record room to make it appear that the Clerk’s office is not up to date with its computerization and technology when the opposite is true. These older machines are still in use for those who wish to view microfilm instead of computer images, and for researching pre-1968 records. Not only is the Roanoke County Circuit Court Clerk’s office one of the leading such operations in Virginia technologically, it also helps to instruct other nearby Clerk’s offices in the newest innovations.
No other Clerk’s office in the Roanoke area offers the combined features of paperless filing, E-filing of civil cases, and secure remote access to real estate documents and civil and criminal case files. All of this has been accomplished with the use of fees and funds derived from the operations of the office, not from the pockets of Roanoke County’s taxpayers.
What’s really in it for Roe? At the age of 56, why would a reportedly successful attorney – who claims 30 years in a lucrative law practice – want to be a clerk? What deals have been made? Is he angling for a judgeship or other appointments? We may never know the answers to all those legitimate questions, but Tuesday’s elections will be very interesting for many reasons, known and unknown.
– Susan Cloeter
Roanoke
