On Monday evening Republican Greg Habeeb met his Democratic opponent, Ginger Mumpower, for their sole joint appearance of the abbreviated campaign to succeed Rep. Morgan Griffith in the Virginia House of Delegates: a candidate forum sponsored by the Salem PTA. While education was the primary topic of the PTA-sponsored forum, Ms. Mumpower’s record on taxes became the most hotly contested issue of the evening. It’s not uncommon for candidates to experience election-year “conversions” on unpopular issues, but Ms. Mumpower’s about-face on tax increases at Monday’s forum revealed a candidate so unprepared to serve that even the liberal editorial board of the Roanoke Times could not bring itself to endorse her.
As reported when first nominated by 8th House District Democrats, Ms. Mumpower, a prominent Roanoke Valley entrepreneur, is running on her business background and record of service on the Radford City Council. Mumpower claims that during her term on council, she was able to expand the city’s services without raising taxes. Citing this as an example of her fiscal conservatism, Ms. Mumpower continued to trumpet her low-tax message at Monday evening’s Salem PTA forum—until the truth of her record got in her way. “I think that with the economic times we’re in right now, there’s no way we could suffer a tax increase and I would not support that.” The problem for Ms. Mumpower is that, despite her campaign-year amnesia, she actually has.
According to city council minutes and newspaper articles compiled by the Habeeb campaign, during her single term on the Radford City Council between 1984 and 1988, Ms. Mumpower voted to increase and/or create four, separate taxes: a two-cent real estate tax increase, a two percent meals tax, a 3.8 percent electric tariff and the creation of a tax on local telephone service. Contrary to her campaign rhetoric of fiscal conservatism, when the City of Radford’s budget was unbalanced in the spring of 1986, then Vice-Mayor Ginger Mumpower made the motion to raise the city’s real estate tax by two cents per $100 of assessed value (MinutesRealEstateTax). The only fat trimmed from that budget was $5,000 of a request for $25,000—for the Radford Founder’s Day Committee. Also that year Ms. Mumpower voted to create a new two percent meals tax to be levied by all establishments selling food within the city limits (MealsTax). When the going gets tough, Ms. Mumpower has a history of raising taxes.
When, at the Salem PTA forum, Ms. Mumpower was called on her true record of raising existing taxes and creating new ones when needed to balance the city’s budget, she denied ever voting for tax increases—even in the face of Mr. Habeeb’s indisputable evidence to the contrary. “I know I did not vote for tax increases.” Ms. Mumpower’s election-year amnesia on her record as a serial tax-hiker simply demonstrates that Ward Armstrong’s Democrats selected a weak candidate who was ill-prepared for prime-time and unfit to succeed a conservative giant like Morgan Griffith.
