Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 15, 1991 TAG: 9103150809
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A/10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The hoopla of hurrahs was, obviously, premature. What was trumpeted as "Peace at the Battle of Peters Creek" in a joint publication of the American Bar Association and the National Association of Attorneys General in June has turned into Malevolence of the Mud Lick Road Muck-up. If last Monday's stormy City Council meeting is an indication, the dispute is raging out of control, possibly with more damaging force and loss of good faith than before the mediation began.
This episode has had more twists and turns than Appalachian back roads. As briefly as possible, though, this is how it's come to a juncture where some residents are branding city officials as liars, backstabbers and curs:
As part of the "consensus agreement" that was mediated last year, the Greater Deyerle Neighborhood Association agreed to drop its opposition to the Peters Creek Road extension project. In exchange, the city's negotiators agreed to adopt certain measures to discourage the extension highway's traffic from overflowing onto the neighborhood's streets. One promised measure was a sign prohibiting left turns from Grandin Road onto Mud Lick during the weekdays' early morning hours.
But the no-left-turn sign, which went up in June, spelled trouble. Accustomed for years to wheeling Grandin-to-Mud Lick to get into town, scores of drivers, including many residents of Roanoke County, were irate to be de-routed. Residents in an adjacent neighborhood complained the sign had diverted unwanted traffic onto their streets. A petition opposing the sign gathered nearly 300 signatures. And after the city's traffic engineer concluded that it was causing more problems, including public-safety problems, than it was solving, City Manager Bob Herbert ordered, in December, that the sign come down.
And all hell broke loose.
Neighborhood representatives charged that Herbert had betrayed them by reneging on the terms of the consensus agreement. A suit was filed, aimed at getting City Council to ratify the agreement and put the sign back up. A judge said the association first should take its fight to City Hall. Herbert argued that the much-touted consensus agreement was non-binding, that it had not obliged the city to keep forever in place a pesky sign. The association said the public-safety issue was a red herring, that Herbert had jerked the sign because some politically influential residents were among those it had inconvenienced.
City Council members, on Monday, supported the city manager's position, and then - fueling the controversy - said it could not discuss the merits of the agreement because of the pending litigation. Angry - very angry - association members threatened to try to unseat the council members.
Whew. And to think that just six months ago these same players were credited, in the bar association article, with ending "the spiral of unmanaged conflict," with forestalling "a breakdown in community relationships," and with pioneering a consensus mediation that would be the model for the rest of the state and many other states.
A number of questions present themselves, including:
Roanoke's traffic engineer was among the city's representatives when the consensus agreement was negotiated. Did he have no inkling that the no-left-turn sign could cause safety problems and push traffic into adjacent neighborhoods? If not, why not? That's his field of expertise.
Or did public pressure more than public safety figure in Herbert's decision to take the sign down?
Did the Greater Deyerle Neighborhood Association, whose presidents include attorney Jonathan Rogers, jump to file papers without taking time to see if a compromise could be worked out with Herbert?
Why didn't the city say clearly during the mediation process that the agreement was non-binding? Why didn't the agreement include a provision for returning to the bargaining table if the need arose to change a traffic-control measure?
The answers to these questions aren't obvious. (Maybe a mediator could help resolve them.) What's clear for now is that a delicate peace agreement, intended to avoid this very sort of scene, couldn't have been bungled more had it been put in the hands of Larry, Moe and Curly.
What's clear is that a promising mediation technique, as an alternative to litigation, has been unnecessarily compromised. All parties need to return to the negotiating table, and some lessons must be learned if this technique is to become a model.
What's clear, too, is that some Roanoke residents feel they no longer can trust city officials. The issue isn't so much about the no-left-turn sign. It's about this principle: A deal is a deal.
by CNB