THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, July 22, 1994 TAG: 9407220768
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: VIRGINIA BEACH LENGTH: Short : 46 lines
Marshall Coleman paused Thursday in the Senate campaign tit-for-tat with Oliver North on who's got the biggest Republican supporters to call on incumbent Charles S. Robb to show his top Democrat.
``Bring Bill Clinton to Virginia Beach and ask him as president of the United States to take action'' to resolve the Lake Gaston impasse, Coleman said at Mount Trashmore.
Robb has said he expects Clinton to campaign for him. But Coleman, an independent who ran twice for governor as a Republican, said Robb should call on his fellow Democrat in the White House to visit the city whose Lake Gaston water supply project has gotten snarled in a maze of environmental reviews.
Coleman said Robb - ``part of the Democratic establishment'' - needs only to place a call to Clinton to get regulators to move things along on the Gaston pipeline.
However, he refused to say whether Republican Sen. John Warner, a chief backer of his campaign, should have done the same thing for the pipeline before President Bush left office less than two years ago.
``I think all of us believed that the project was coming to a conclusion'' then, Coleman said.
Bert Rohrer, a spokesman for Robb, said more progress has been made on the pipeline in the last 18 months ``than the two preceding administrations made in eight years.''
Both Robb and Warner support the project. Its chief opponent is North Carolina.
Later Thursday, Robb's office released a letter from Virginia Beach Mayor Meyera Oberndorf supporting Robb.
``No one can blame you for the inertia caused by administrative stonewalling that we have been particularly vexed with of late; however, it is only through your efforts . . . that we have moved ahead,'' she said in the letter to Robb.
KEYWORDS: U.S. SENATE RACE VIRGINIA CANDIDATES
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