Malachi, our 12-year-old student reporter, met with Dumfries Mayor Derrick Wood at town hall.
He got a lesson in small-town politics and heard from a long-time public servant whose been working to make Virginia’s oldest, continuously-chartered town more than a dot on a map.
“I don’t want people to just drive through here,” Wood told Malachi. “I want Dumfries to be a place where everybody knows your name.”
Malachi asked Wood about his service in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he worked as an accountant.
“I wanted to go into the Marines as a cook, and [the recruiter] sold me on the idea of going to school,” explained Wood. “If I cook, they told me I would have to work long hours and that I wouldn’t be able to go to school.”
So, Wood signed up to serve as an accountant. The catch — he would only have 10 days to ship out for boot camp in Parris Island, S.C. “At that point, the military’s got me,” he said.
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Prior to the military, Wood worked in a restaurant as a busboy. When he got out, he started his own barbecue business.
“My whole life has been about service,” he told Malachi.
Now as Mayor, he’s working to improve traffic flow in the town by securing $44 million to design, and relocate utilities for a project to widen Route 1 — the town’s main thoroughfare — from four to six lanes. It’s a project that’s been talked about since the late 1990s.
The lanes of Route 1 south, Main Street will be shifted to run alongside the northbound side of the highway, called Fraley Boulevard, when the project is completed.
That’ll mean less traffic on Main Street, and that will allow for the creation of a “lazy” Main Street where people will be able to casually stroll down a sidewalk. Wood hopes this will attract new street-side businesses and restaurants to give the small town a sense of place.
Before the interview was over, Wood encouraged Malachi to take time to explore his ideas and to take the time to make his ideas into a reality.
Wood is in the second year of his first four-year mayoral term. He was first elected to the town council in 2012.
The 41-year-old is married with three children, ranging in ages 13 to 18.
