The lady at Blue Ridge Restaurant this week wanted to know why I write what I do.

"Why must you be so critical?  There are so many nice things to write about here in Floyd," she said.

Yes, many parts of Floyd deserve mention and attention and I try to talk about those things as much as possible: the music, the culture, the people, the heritage and more.

But I’m a journalist who subscribes to legendary Chicago reporter Finley Peter Dunne’s adage that "it is the role of a newspaperman to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

I can’t help it. It’s in my genes. Always has been. Always will be.

Citizens Telephone Cooperative, Floyd County’s largest private employer, is strapped for cash and talking layoffs, cutbacks and trouble for the future.

At a recent company meeting, Citizens executives told employees that the company must raise revenues or it will cut staff, salaries and services.  The situation is so bad that Citizens is considering taking sales personnel off salary and putting them on commission and sending a strong message to others that they might want to think about seeking employment elsewhere.

Over the last few months, Citizens has quietly outsourced many of its services that once were local. Many service calls now go to a call center in Montana, the company switched its web hosting domain registration to GoDaddy, a Scottsdale, Arizona, computer giant and its cell phone service, launched with fanfare a couple of years ago, is actually rebranded from Verizon.

Citizens’s problems stem from too-rapid growth, expansion into counties outside its traditional service area and a general slowdown in the economy. The company spent far more than anticipated in deploying fiber optic lines throughout Floyd County and on a wireless broadband service in the New River Valley.

As a cooperative, Citizens is supposedly owned by its customers but the customer-owners have not been told of the company’s recent problems and employees were advised to avoid discussing the situation with the very people they actually work for. Those same employees have endured cutbacks in benefits from a company they feel cares more about the bottom line. Some disgruntled employees have filed suit and their cases were settled, quietly, out of court.

Floyd Countians pay more for most telephone services than residents in more populous areas like Montgomery and Roanoke counties. Our DSL Internet service, while extraordinary for a rural area, is more expensive than faster service in urban areas.

As customer owners of Citizens, we deserve more information about the company’s problems. Citizens needs to be open and honest about the uncertain future it faces. We own the company. We need to know.

Floyd’s "let somebody else take the risk" town council is at it again, demanding unbelievably high letters of credit from each town business participating in the grants that help fund the downtown rehabilitation and trying, as usual, to avoid taking any real risk itself.

From behind closed doors, which is the way the government likes to conduct its business, comes word that the Town Council has decided to demand the letters of credit which, in effect, says they want business to bear most of the cost and the risk for the strategy.

This places such onerous requirements into the deal that only a fool would want to participate.

We’ve seen this crap before from the Town Council. I remember an early meeting on Floyd’s downtown revitalization project. Rob Shelor, council member  and probable mayor to follow the resigning Skip Bishop, whined about the town having to invest $100,000 in a program that would bring $1 million to the community in grants and loan programs.

Todd Christianson, the state official charged with getting the grant through the system, told Shelor that if he didn’t want the money he lots of other communities standing in line to invest in their town’s future.

Shelor finally gave in but he continues to be a thorn in the side of any business that wants to bring tourists to Floyd.

Many business owners put their homes and future at risk to borrow the money to take a chance on Floyd’s iffy business environment but the town government wants to avoid risk and claim the credit.

Hopefully, those who want to see a farmer’s market in Floyd will proceed without the town’s involvement, leaving the town council where it belongs — out in the cold.

To say Town Government can be duplicitous is kind. It is exactly this kind of double dealing that has long plagued both the Town of Floyd and county government.

Details, of course, are sketchy because the Town Council uses one of the many loopholes in Virginia’s antiquated Open Meetings Act to conduct its business in executive session — in other words, secret.

In this election year, voters are calling for change on the national level. Last year, voters in Floyd County registered their anger at county government by sending two incumbent supervisors and the sitting Commonwealth’s Attorney to the showers.

Maybe it’s time to for the voters of the Town of Floyd to consider a similar house cleaning.