Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 5, 1990 TAG: 9003052241
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The stories:
Nestled in former Gov. Gerald Baliles' proposed 1990-92 budget was a provision to force localities with very small schools to justify those schools' existence or face a loss of state education aid.
For now, nothing has come of it. After its discovery by legislators from rural Southside and Southwest Virginia, the provision was removed from the budget. Led by Democratic Del. Thomas Jackson of Hillsville, opponents struck a deal with Northern Virginia legislators. You help delete the school-consolidation provision, the Northern Virginians were told, and Jackson would withdraw a bill opposed by the Northern Virginians.
After more than three years of study by a commission he chaired, Democratic Del. George Grayson of Williamsburg introduced a bill to make fundamental changes in Virginia's annexation laws. Among its provisions: If cities of fewer than 125,000 people want the power to annex land from the counties surrounding or abutting them, they would have to give up their independence from those counties.
For now, nothing has come of this, either. The bill was carried over until next year, so the legislature's "money committees" could study its fiscal impact. But the bill, despite opposition from the Virginia Municipal League, appears to have considerable support; next year's study is to be restricted to financial questions.
The Privileges and Elections committees this year became sought-after assignments: It's a census year, and those committees next year will redraw legislative-district lines for the General Assemblies of the '90s.
The state's "urban corridor" - the swath running from Northern Virginia through the Richmond metropolitan area to the Tidewater region - has gained population since 1980. Most of Western and Southwest Virginia has not. Therefore, the corridor will pick up legislative seats after the 1990 census, and Western and Southwest Virginia will lose some.
The shift won't be dramatic, a seat here and a seat there, and crafty legislative veterans from west of the Blue Ridge will do what they can to minimize the losses.
But such craft, because of the one-man one-vote rule, can operate only at the margin. And the trend is long-term; over time, a seat here and a seat there add up.
So what's to be gathered from all this?
From the school-size flap, you just might conclude that urban-corridor legislators are not particularly averse to telling other parts of the state how to conduct their local-government affairs.
It was hardball politics, not opposition in principle, that led legislators from elsewhere to help grant rural Southwest and Southside Virginia the school-consolidation reprieve. Moreover, the urban corridor's interest in others' affairs is apt to be keenest when it appears to involve potential reductions in costs that urban-corridor taxpayers, via state aid to localities, help subsidize.
From the Grayson bill, you just might note that the population of the city of Roanoke - which now cannot annex - falls under the 125,000 ceiling. And you might be reminded of a broader point: Local governments are not sovereign entities in their own right.
Rather, local governments are creatures of the state and exist at the state's sufferance. The powers and privileges of local governments, including the boundaries in which those governments operate, ultimately are within the state's discretion to set and change.
Finally, the reapportionment issue reinforces the point, true if hardly novel, that political power depends on numbers. If Del. Jackson hadn't had the votes to pass his bill, for example, there would have been no reason for Northern Virginia legislators to bargain for its withdrawal.
In Virginia, there continues the steady shift of legislative numbers - and thus of legislative power - from the south and west to the north and east. It is a shift of power, in other words, toward legislators (a) who seem willing to require local governments elsewhere to make changes, (b) who have the authority to require such changes and (c) who might well look at the Roanoke Valley's balkanized structure of local government - and see little but a puzzling and costly drain of their own constituents', as well as Roanokers', tax dollars.
Last week, the Roanoke County supervisors joined Roanoke City Council in agreeing to submit to the voters a plan for consolidating their governments, the two biggest in the valley. Predictably, what in the plan pleases some people displeases other people, and the plan probably pleases nobody in every particular. Consolidation proponents face a tough selling job between now and the November referendum.
But at least the current plan represents the result of negotiations by elected representatives of the people of the valley. If it is rejected, the day could come when a merger settlement for the valley is imposed from above, by outsiders.
by CNB