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Shuryn, Vazquez to resign town council seats
The Haymarket Town Council is set to be short two members by the end of the month as husband and wife Ozzie Vazquez and Sue Shuryn plan on permanently resigning their posts.Vazquez is stationed "in the middle of nowhere" in Iraq, according to Shuryn, while she just sold the family's Haymarket house in preparation for a move to Arlington as part of her job.
Even when Vazquez returns from Iraq, which he is scheduled to do next year, the couple will not be moving back to Haymarket.
"I've enjoyed serving on this council and I'm going to miss it," said the multi-term council member Shuryn.
Shuryn said she plans to formally resign Oct. 26. Vazquez must resign his seat himself, however, but can do that via email if he chooses.
The resignations will create two vacancies on the six-member council that must be filled by appointment after candidates apply for the positions.
Typically during a vacancy, several town residents apply and the Town Council meets in executive session to candidly discuss the qualifications of the applicants. Council members then come to a general consensus and vote on whether to approve a single candidate per vacancy.
Candidates interested in filling in for Shuryn or Vazquez can contact Haymarket Town Hall staffers for more information.
Last year, Ellie Cole temporarily filled in for three months for her husband John Cole, the town's vice mayor. Like Vazquez, Cole was stationed in Iraq but returned home early after a heart-attack prevented him from continuing his tour as a civilian contractor with the Department of Defense.
He was re-elected that May, along with Vazquez, Shuryn, Bob Weir and newcomers Susan Edwards and David Leake. Mayor Pamela Stutz also won re-election as she ran unopposed.
Symposiums
In other news from Monday night, Haymarket chief financial officer and treasurer James Nardazay presented a plan for bringing business symposiums into the town. He said the series of seminars, which would likely be held toward the end of the year, could be at Town Hall or another building able to hold 40-plus people in the same room.
Ideally, he would like to bring in an attorney, a certified public accountant, a financial advisor and someone else from the professional field to answer questions from business owners and also to tell them what not to do.
"I would like to see someone come up and tell people definitively how to kill a business," said Naradzay. "'If you do this, your business will fail.'"
The plan would cost Haymarket about $1,000 to implement, with that money covering the projected $25 registration fees for any business in town that does not owe back taxes to the town.
Naradzay has already lined up support from Virginia Commerce Bank to help fund the program and is looking for other sources of funding.
"The worst that can happen is more than 40 of our residents show up for this meeting," said Naradzay.
Trolley car
Council members were also briefed by a VDOT representative on Monday about plans for the town to acquire a trolley car by the end of the year. The trolley would be designed to take commuters in and out of town to places ranging from Gainesville to Dominion Valley, though no final destinations have been mapped out.
The federal stimulus program is paying 100 percent of the cost for the actual trolley itself at $145,000.
Other federal assistance is worth $62,100. The state is chipping in $62,100 per its own aid while grants from the federal and state government are set to cover the $125,199 annual operating cost of the trolley.
Haymarket will have to match $40,555, which its council members plan on doing by raising money within the town itself and from the surrounding community.
Everything with the trolley should be in motion by the end of the year, according to Cole, because the federal stimulus money "does have a shelf life."
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