Sign-Gate Hits Isle of Wight Politics

Rountree's sign scandal is bigger than just this year's election

In recent weeks, the District 1 (Smithfield) Board of Supervisors election has gone from a ho-hum, unchallenged race to an unmitigated disaster. The issue that broke this wide open was Smithfield’s Sign-Gate scandal, but the impact will likely long outlast November’s election.  

Let’s start with the Sign-Gate. You can read local media reports about it here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. However, if you haven’t read the official police report (all 15 pages, not just the criminal complaint), you really should read it for yourself. Smithfield Police took this issue seriously and seemed to understand the gravity of the situation more than Renee Rountree and her family.  

If you don’t want to click on any of the links above, here is the rundown. Renee Rountree was running unopposed for the District 1 (Smithfield) Board of Supervisors seat until Chris Torre started a write-in campaign days before early voting began in September. The Torre campaign claims they were having issues with signs going missing for a while.  So much so that they placed an AirTag on one of the signs. AirTags are small Bluetooth-enabled trackers that will report their position to an app as long as they are in the range of any Apple device. Yes, your iPhones and iPads are helping strangers track stuff all the time. The advantage of a Bluetooth-enabled tracker over a GPS-enabled tracker is that it can be more accurate in a small form-factor and can be tracked without visibility to the sky. Where it doesn’t work is in the crawl space of someone’s house, but we will get back to that.   

On October 4th, the Chris Torre campaign placed an AirTag on a new sign at an entrance to the Cypress Creek neighborhood (where Renee Rountree lives). The sign was among numerous other political signs at the entrance. On the morning of October 8th, the campaign noticed the AirTag had moved to the vicinity of Renee Rountree’s address and at some point, stopped beaconing a position. They reported the information to the Smithfield Police along with a second sign (that did not have an AirTag) that went missing in the vicinity of the Cure Coffee and Isle of Wight Museum.

Police went to the Rountree residence on the morning of October 9th, explained the situation and were granted permission to search the property for the missing AirTagged sign by Rountree’s husband. As they were searching the home’s exterior and then the garage, Rountree’s husband informed the police that she said the signs were inside the crawl space access. Once the signs were removed from the crawl space, the AirTag started beaconing a position again. Who knows if Rountree knew about the possibility of an AirTag and that is why she put them in the crawl space. It seems weird that she would need to hide the signs from her family and friends, and storing things in a crawl space seems even more odd.

After the police recovered the signs, Rountree called Chris Torre to inform him that she “had put the signs in her garage to keep them safe… (and) claimed that her son-in-law was performing a public service due to the signs being in the right of way.” Rountree also stated her intention was to drop the signs off behind the Treasurer’s Office, but she had not had time before leaving town for Town Council business. Rountree’s son-in-law admitted to the police picking up two signs in the vicinity of Cure Coffee that were “kinda in the middle of the road” (video from Isle of Wight Museum only showed him picking up one sign and there was a Rountree sign between the Torre sign and the road).  

She lays the blame on her son-in-law, who she tries to pass off as somewhere between a well-meaning, misguided Cousin Eddie bringing her opponent’s signs home like Randy Quaid’s character brings Chevy Chase’s boss to him on Christmas Eve or a modern Barney Fife, bumbling his way through enforcing Smithfield’s right of way ordinances via altruistic vigilantism. If Renee had integrity, she would have immediately sent him to return the signs, called her opponent to explain the situation, and ensured the signs were returned immediately. Instead, she hid them in her crawl space, only turning them over when confronted by the police. Then she calls her opponent to lie about the circumstances, doesn’t bother to apologize, and releases a statement “refuting the allegations against her and her family” but offering no other details on the “advice of counsel.” Certainly, she did not anticipate Smithfield Police releasing their report on the matter, which immediately rendered her official statement callous and disingenuous.

At best, Renee Rountree’s behavior and decision-making during this fiasco have been poor and foolish.  At worst, it exposes deep character flaws for someone in a position of public trust. Rountree has numerous factors in her favor: better name recognition, being the only name on the ballot, and electoral history (she was #1 of 4 candidates in the 2020 town council elections, Torre finished #6 of 6 in the 2018 town council elections). So, only a fool would engage in a sign-stealing scheme to try to better their chances in an election like this. Most likely, this wasn’t part of a grand conspiracy to remove Torre signs across Smithfield, but a series of terrible decisions. At any point up until the police were involved, she could have put a quick end to this. Instead, Rountree employed one deceit after another, while deflecting responsibility for any of the events.

As mentioned in the beginning, this goes deeper than Sign-Gate. This county already has an undercurrent of distrust regarding development and government actions. You can bet every time a controversial project is approved with a Rountree vote, people will look back on these sign shenanigans not as dirty politics or a dumb prank, but as evidence of a system (real or perceived) that supports corporate interests at the expense of individual citizens. Most of the current Board of Supervisors have worked hard to overcome years of extremely questionable decisions such as the Stoup property, the Norfolk water deal, and trying to bring a juvenile jail to Windsor.  Rountree being elected under these circumstances will reset that effort as soon as any controversial item comes up for a county vote. 

During the candidate forum a few weeks ago, it was clear there is not a development, solar farm, warehouse, or any other speculative tax revenue-producing scheme she won’t support. Repeatedly, she referred to the Mallory/Scott Farm developer, John Napolitano, by his first name as though they were life-long friends. She explained how we should be thankful to the developer because if Smithfield hadn’t acquiesced to his demands, Mallory /Scott would have been carved up into multiple developments. Soon after the forum, she defended her support for The Grange at 10 in a post on her candidate Facebook page, saying, “Two words: Smithfield Foods.” After she received some criticism for pledging fealty to Smithfield Foods, she quietly deleted the thread; peasant opinions be damned.  The few noisy “from here” rubes disagreeing with her are just too dumb to understand. Doesn’t matter; they are just an annoying bump in the overcrowded road to a Suffolk-like sprawl in the northern end of the county and an industrial hellscape encircling Windsor.

Unfortunately, the most likely outcome is she will be elected because write-in campaigns are hard to pull off, especially this late into our almost two months of early voting. Her election will lead to a further erosion in many people’s already tenuous trust in local government. If she is willing to deceive this much over $20 in signs for an election she was already going to win, one can only imagine what she would do when a real test of ethics comes along, especially if the test is delivered with a corporate stamp of approval.