Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 28, 1990 TAG: 9003280131
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOE KENNEDY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
When it works, going for blood brings the sweet taste of victory to one side, the bitter sting of defeat to the other.
Compromising may enable both sides to share the sweetness - or it may leave one side feeling it has given up too much.
Susan Yoder likes another approach. Her philosophy is that it is better to forget the emotions of negotiations and concentrate on the issues. That way, people on both sides can reach an agreement they can live with. They may even feel good enough about the result they can work together again in the future.
When married people split up, neighbors spar or landlords and tenants go to the mats, Yoder's specialty, mediation, may enable them to get past their hostilities and solve problems to their mutual satisfaction.
Yoder, director of training at the non-profit Community Mediation Center of Harrisonburg, said she has seen mediation work in 85 percent of the cases the center's 25 or so volunteer mediators have handled.
Recently, it worked in Roanoke, when representatives of the city government and the Virginia Department of Transportation met four times with residents of the Greater Deyerle Neighborhood to resolve the Peters Creek Road dispute.
The disagreement was clear-cut. The city and the transportation department wanted to extend the road from the northwest quadrant of the city into the southwest. The Greater Deyerle residents feared that terminating the four-lane extension near their neighborhood would bring more cars onto their streets.
For four years, the sides had been at odds. Distrust, hostility and frustration blocked communication. Pressure from business and construction interests and city council added more stress.
Robert Herbert, the Roanoke city manager, thought the dispute begged for mediation, a process he embraced several years ago after reading the book, "Getting to Yes - Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In."
Having practiced such negotiations regularly in other city matters, he felt that he could step in and mediate the issue himself.
"But," he said, "I had several things working against me."
One was that Herbert lives in the Greater Deyerle neighborhood, and thus might not be viewed as impartial.
Another was that the problem had dragged on for years, creating pressure to get it resolved.
"Sometimes I tend to decide things too fast," Herbert said, "and that can be a strategic error."
Herbert knew a city manager in Austin, Texas, who had used mediation to resolve a highway dispute he inherited when he took the job. He called him for advice and information. Ultimately Herbert understood that any good mediator would do. The task then was to find one.
Herbert asked the state transportation department for help. Initially, his offbeat idea failed to impress the officials here and in Richmond.
"You know the old saying: `We've never done it that way here, Bob.' They kind of didn't know what we were talking about."
But, he said, "They begrudgingly began to at least listen to our request."
Eventually the department agreed to hire Yoder and pay for the process - the first time it had done so in a dispute of this kind.
Five meetings were held, beginning in January. Bill Clark, the city's director of public works, led the municipal team. Jonathan Rogers, a lawyer who is president of the Greater Deyerle Neighborhood, led the residents.
State transportation officials sat in to provide information and technical data. Jim Phillips, an assistant state attorney general, attended the meetings, too. He handles transportation issues in this part of the state, and, more important, he has been trained as a mediator.
By the end of February, after lots of talk and many ups and downs, the matter was settled. Neither side claimed total victory. In fact, the residents sounded a little sour about having to give up ground.
But the 2.5 mile Peters Creek Road extension - first planned in 1963 - has at least reached the point of going before the state transportation board for approval. For now, the residents and the city have something they both can abide. And, Yoder said, the best part is, they came up with the deal themselves.
The settlement
What the residents will have to live with is Peters Creek Road terminating at Aerial Way Drive and Brandon Avenue, making their streets a tempting shortcut to Virginia 419 in Roanoke County.
But the city will prohibit turns from Brandon Avenue onto Deyerle Road during peak traffic hours. The city agreed that if traffic on certain roads increases by 25 percent over this year's volume at any time, other control measures will be sought.
And the city promised to expand Brandon Avenue from two lanes to four to better handle the extra traffic brought by the Peters Creek extension.
The expansion is supposed to be completed by the time the new leg of Peters Creek Road opens.
A lot of talk went on in the work sessions, which were closed to the news media. Residents disputed transportation department statistics and computer models, challenging officials to use their common sense about probable traffic flow.
At the outset they forcefully stated their distrust.
"The city swore they were open-minded about everything," Rogers, the neighborhood president, said. "And the strange thing was that after saying all that . . . it became apparent that they were really, earnestly trying to do what they could."
Rogers sounded pleased and surprised. When asked what Yoder contributed, he sounded slightly puzzled.
"What Sue Yoder did is almost mystifying," he said. "You could sit down and say, `What did she do?' She didn't have any ideas. That's not one of her functions."
What Yoder does, he said, is "sits up there and keeps things moving. The other thing is, she has energy. When you start losing yours, she keeps things moving. She gives breaks at appropriate places. She's gentle. If somebody is talking too much, or getting off track too far, she'll get it back on track.
"Other than that, the process takes its own course. Sometimes you wonder why you need the mediator, [but] she gets you started, keeps it together. She was important."
`Attacking the problem'
The smell of fresh paint lingers in the offices of the Community Mediation Center in Harrisonburg, which the group has occupied since last fall. It's an orderly place, with partitions separating neat desks downstairs and, upstairs, three meeting rooms brightened by skylights.
The offices are in the same building as the Red Apple market, a convenience store and Chevron station, a few blocks from the town square.
In her navy skirt and white blouse, the fast-talking Yoder sketches the history of the center - it started in 1982 in the basement of the Community Mennonite Church - and the goals of its programs. In one program, non-violent conflict resolution is taught to youngsters in area schools.
Volunteer mediators are trained at the center periodically throughout the year. The basic course is 20 hours long.
Then, usually in pairs, they work to help people through disputes of all kinds - between businesses trying to work out contract problems, between couples trying to divide property or arrange child custody in a divorce, between tenants trying to get improvements from their landlords. Charges range from $10 to $80 per hour, depending on the client's ability to pay.
Conflict, Yoder said, is a natural thing. At the center, "we change the focus from attacking the people to attacking the problem."
At its best, mediation enables people to avoid expensive, bruising court battles that may result in lasting enmity. Many clients are referred to the center by judges. And many court service units across the state offer mediation as an alternative to lawsuits.
Divorce and child custody fights can be the most bitter of all. Often, when the combatants come to the center and take seats on the same side of a table, they won't look at or talk to each other.
There are a few rules: A person can't interrupt while another is speaking. Physical violence is forbidden.
"It is very intense," Yoder said, "You are frequently in a room with people who don't want to be there with each other. At first the air is very thick. You feel very stressed."
At some point, the people begin to communicate directly. And usually, after perhaps four two-hour meetings, an agreement will result.
In general, the sessions go best when people get things off their chests and feel they've been heard.
At the Roanoke meetings, "I mainly sat back and let them talk," Yoder said. "This was not a hard group to do that with. No one held back on either side."
If the participants weren't clear in the end what role she had played, she had done her job well. Not that it was easy.
"The best mediator gives no suggestions," she said. "That's hard, because you often see the perfect solution."
. . . But it worked
Though proven effective, mediation still suffers from an obscure public image. Yoder says that to some people sent to the service by the courts, it's "like going to the moon."
Public service announcements for the Harrisonburg agency have called it both a meditation and a medication center, she said.
A former psychiatric nurse who also taught psychology at Eastern Mennonite College, her alma mater, she likes the technique partly because it enables unlikely people to speak from their hearts.
In the Roanoke sessions, representatives from both sides felt more comfortable once their suspicions had been aired.
In the end, the neighborhood group agreed not to fight the road project but would not express support for it. Still, Rogers said, the city "gained our respect by initiating this process and listening, and by humanizing the whole process."
Some skeptics remain, of course.
"Basically, what was addressed were the same concerns that we had been saying for four years," said Danielle Rand, one of the hard-line property owners. "If the city had really been interested in doing anything, they could have done this four years ago, without all the publicity and shenanigans, and without a negotiator."
The problem, Herbert said, is that much of people's training, including his, is toward the win-lose, rather than win-win, philosophy.
"We knew the answers, we thought," said Clark, the director of public works, "but we weren't communicating well with the neighborhood. I hope we had our eyes opened and made some good decisions here."
Phillips, the assistant attorney general, agreed. "I believe personally that the process is a valuable one and that its use in satte and local government should be explored."
Robert Morris, the assistant state location and design engineer for the transportation department said mediation - or, as he preferred to call it, facilitation - may be used again.
"From a time frame, and having to keep projects moving, you certainly wouldn't want to have to do this on every project," he said. "I think it had its place there and worked well.
Yoder said the center in Harrisonburg received $3,000 for her work, paid by the transportation department.
The residents should give her something else, Herbert said.
"They ought to give her a plaque that says, `Congratulations. We don't know what you did, but it worked.' "
by CNB