ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, February 5, 1996 TAG: 9602050024
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: CHESTERFIELD COUNTY
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER
VIRGINIA IS THE ONLY STATE in which cities and counties are separate, independent political entities. Supporters say that creates clear lines of responsibility; critics say it is killing Virginia's cities. The Urban Partnership is a group of civic, political, and business leaders looking for ways to bridge the gap.
Here, in the cozy den of a fashionable home in one of the state's wealthiest counties, A.C. "Mac" McNeer is explaining how he has come to feel a kinship of interests with the residents of Richmond.
"I think it's protecting my position as a middle-class person, protecting my property values and my property rights," says McNeer of his tentative willingness to consider cooperative ventures with the city.
"If by some way we could raise the city - which rarely, if ever, happens - if some way could be found to raise the level of the city, and I know we're talking pie in the sky, then that also protects me.
"That's what they have to give me for me to be amenable to talking to them."
In this room, where a handful of Chesterfield County residents have gathered to explain their skepticism of anything smacking of "regionalism," there is evidence aplenty of Virginia's city-county divide.
Here, conviction runs deep that the problems within Virginia's cities are largely self-made; that any crisis is one of values, not money; that anyone with determination "absolutely" can make it in America, and that those who are appealing to the suburbs for help want one thing: a handout.
As Faye Palmer puts it, "I don't think the city wants you to tell them anything. I think they want our money."
But there is also in this room a hint of the reason that a 2-year-old movement of civic, political and business leaders to bolster Virginia's cities through regional cooperation is finding unexpectedly fertile ground in the 1996 General Assembly.
In a session where - for once - plowshares seem as plentiful as swords, the Urban Partnership's plan to reward cooperative ventures on everything from schools and taxes to libraries and industrial recruitment has sailed through committees in both chambers. A similarly easy vote is expected today in the Senate.
While the proposal may face a greater test on the House floor, where the real challenge is getting the $200 million the Urban Partnership eventually wants, the reception thus far has been nothing short of stunning.
"I couldn't believe it," exulted former Gov. Linwood Holton, the partnership's lobbyist, after a unanimous vote in the Senate Committee on Labor and Commerce last week.
If the legislation continues its brisk march toward passage, Holton and others believe it will be a landmark step toward easing a city-county divide that is more rigid in Virginia than in any other state. Only in the commonwealth are all cities totally independent of their neighboring counties.
That sink-or-swim attitude is hastening an urban decline that puts Virginia at an economic disadvantage compared with such states as North Carolina, the Urban Partnership argues. Among its most ballyhooed statistics: Between 1970 and 1990, earnings per private-sector employee increased an average of 6.7 percent in North Carolina, where cities are also part of county governments. The growth in Virginia was 1 percent.
In the 1980s, "in Virginia, the income disparities between older central cities and newer suburban cities and counties were generally substantial and growing," wrote University of Virginia urban planners William H. Lucy and David L. Phillips in an analysis conducted for the Urban Partnership.
In contrast, "North Carolina's cities were all growing and were comparable, on average, to suburbs in income of residents in both 1980 and 1990." That makes North Carolina cities a more appealing place to locate, they argue.
Holton's folksy analysis is that central cities such as Norfolk, Richmond and Roanoke "are just like the hole in the doughnut."
If there's deterioration in the core, he said, "it's going to spread into the doughnut. ... If you don't do something to create real economic development in the core, [problems] can't do anything but get worse, and it will cost you more."
Neal Barber, a former state housing official who is directing the Urban Partnership from a headquarters at the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, calls that "the self-interest" argument.
Essentially, he said, there are three rationales for counties to come to the table with cities:
* The moral argument, that it's the right thing to do to help distressed neighborhoods. "Typically that only gets you so far," Barber said.
* The economic argument, that an entire region's economic prowess diminishes without cooperation. This is the theory bolstered by Lucy's statistics.
* The self-interest argument, that if urban problems aren't stemmed, they will migrate into the counties.
"Out here with my pine trees and oak trees and almost totally white schools, I'm so comfortable," said Warner Dalhouse of Roanoke, chairman of the board of First Union National Bank of Virginia, offering his view of a typical suburban attitude.
"But those $250,000 homes are going to be the target of burglars who come out of that city. ... I don't believe we can have a healthy Virginia if we have sick cities."
Those assembled in Faye Palmer's den say the issue is more complicated than suburban selfishness.
"If things don't improve at the grass-roots level, it's going to continue to deteriorate," said Virginia Hickey, who sees stronger families as the key.
Hickey is an accounts manager for a Maryland-based promotional company and past president of a civic league that represents 10 Chesterfield County subdivisions. The homes in those neighborhoods are on 1- to 5-acre lots; the residents are middle class to very rich.
Hickey laments the racial edge that she sees in fears of regional ventures. "Absolutely, no question about it - and everybody would [say so] if they were honest," she replied when asked if there is a racial thread to the concerns.
But she and her husband, Tom, who grew up in a poor city neighborhood in Bridgeport, Conn., think solutions to poverty are more individual than collective.
"If you have the drive and ambition to make something of yourself, you can make anything that you want of yourself," Tom Hickey said.
Such views are echoed on the governing boards of many of Virginia's suburban counties and cities.
"Until such time as I learn what the Urban Partnership intends to do and how it does it and the impact on our city, I remain skeptical," said Harold Heischober, member of the Virginia Beach City Council. "If it's equalization of tax rates and interrelationship of school systems, I remain skeptical."
The Virginia Beach council voted informally last fall to stop contributing money to the Urban Partnership. Holton is scheduled to meet with council members this week.
"I just see it as backdoor annexation," said Roanoke County Supervisor Bob Johnson, who was on the losing end last year of a 3-2 vote to join the partnership.
Meeting at the Hot Springs resort last November, the board of the Virginia Association of Counties voted to oppose the draft recommendations of the Urban Partnership. The chief concern, members said, was whether counties would be paying more and getting less from the $200 million fund than cities.
UVa's Lucy agrees that a more equal division of resources is a major benefit for cities such as Charlotte, N.C., where city and county governments blend. "Revenue sharing is one of the necessities," he said, arguing that the Urban Partnership's proposals are "very modest steps" in that direction.
City-county government structures are only one of several factors that determine the economic health of a region, he acknowledged, also citing the presence of interstate highways, state-of-the-art airport facilities, and strong educational resources.
But when a region is weak in a few areas - South Hampton Roads, for instance, has fewer interstate connections than any major urban area in the Southeast - regional cooperation takes on extra importance, Lucy said.
"If the central city is much poorer than the surrounding areas, newcomers want to avoid the central city, and some [longtime] residents want to move out, so you set up a process of continuing decline in the core," he said.
Then, Lucy said, a vicious cycle sets in: Crime and poverty move into the older suburbs, middle-class residents move farther and farther from the core, small towns are enveloped, and no one is satisfied.
Mac McNeer can already glimpse the problem.
A few years ago, he and his wife shopped regularly at a mall just outside the Richmond city limits. Today, he said, they avoid it because of reports of muggings and knifings. "That's what's happening because the people from the city are beginning to come out," he said.
McNeer, a retired state government manager, said he remains suspicious of the Urban Partnership and "unalterably opposed" to regional government. But his attitude toward regionalism is evolving, perhaps reflecting the mood of the General Assembly.
He was taken with a recent speech to his civic association by Richmond Mayor Leonidas Young, McNeer said.
"What he said was that the city is dying on the vine and that unless there is regional cooperation, the counties are going to inherit the problem. ... He said that unless we get together and decide how we, not me, are going to solve this problem, it's going to take a toll."
LENGTH: Long : 164 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Chart: Urban partnership. color. KEYWORDS: GENERAL ASSEMBLY 1996by CNB