THERE IS MORE THAN MOUNTAINS DIVIDING THE VALLEYS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 23, 1992                   TAG: 9202230017
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: E-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
THERE IS MORE THAN MOUNTAINS DIVIDING THE VALLEYS
It's not easy to make vision a reality around these parts. Niggling problems keep getting in the way.
Just ask the backers of Western Virginia's twin "Trust-Me" projects, the Hotel Roanoke renovation and the Montgomery County smart road. By the way, it's probably no accident that you'd find the same power brokers and activist bureaucrats behind both endeavors.
Increasingly, though, it seems like their efforts to marry the valleys - Roanoke and New River - into one community are being stymied by geography and human nature. Put another way: Altruism is fine so long as it benefits my side of the mountain.
"I think the mountains operate as a psychological barrier," says Leon Geyer, an agricultural economics professor at Tech who heads the faculty senate. "When it comes to culture, economics and life, you are our city."
Not everyone sees things that way.
Support in the Blacksburg/Tech community for the hotel project appears tepid, at best, even though Roanoke City Council continues to declare the revival its "top economic development priority."
Recent news that Tech, the hotel's owner, had dumped the developer it hired last May was sure to send "some tremors" through the Tech faculty, one administrator said privately. Faculty tend to see the hotel as a white elephant and seek constant assurance that university money isn't going to help with downtown Roanoke's revival.
The deal's a tough sell in a college town reeling from years of budget cuts and talk of more to come. Worse, if recent comments by a Montgomery County supervisor are any guide, there is fear Tech will close the Donaldson Brown Continuing Education Center when - if - the Roanoke hotel reopens. Tech officials flatly deny any such plans.
But there's a pattern here: An assumption of mutual exclusivity has crept into the public debate of these projects. Open the Hotel Roanoke, close Donaldson Brown; build the smart road or don't build the bypass-to-bypass connector.
That kind of thinking is understandable, what with all the recession-era talk of "priorities" and "declining revenues." But it also underscores the differences dividing the valleys.
New River, home to two universities and the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, worries about state and federal budget cuts, including the Defense Department's. Roanoke is more concerned with raw economic development and the continuing health of its large corporate citizens - Norfolk Southern Corp. and Dominion Bankshares Corp.
Consider, too, the "trust me" factor in all this, a label both projects' backers have difficulty disputing. Making the case for the hotel is less difficult, given the bottom-line tax figures that officials can marshal to make their case. But what if it fails?
If council keeps upping its ante, as seems apparent, the taxpayers' tab for reviving their favorite hotel could be mighty large. Of course, hotel planners are hoping it never comes to that. It may not. But it's no secret the hotel business is risky and there are cases of cities leveraging themselves for new downtown hotels - only to be stung later.
The smart road, for all the techno-wow it would bring to the hills of Virginia, is also a tough sell to the Montgomery County folks more concerned with getting past the retail bazaar on U.S. 460 than getting to Roanoke six minutes faster. And where's the groundswell of support in the Roanoke Valley, save a small but influential clique?
There are the cross purposes: Christiansburg wants one road, Blacksburg another. A complicated deal setting priorities for the projects almost fell apart last week, prodding Tech officials to meet individually with several county supervisors in an effort to quash the rebellion.
The region's chief transportation guru and would-be congressman, Steve Musselwhite, kept warning that local infighting would send the wrong message to state highway officials. That's an unwelcome message for three local governments long accustomed to sniping at each other.
Musselwhite's renewed warnings and Tech's counteroffensive worked, and on Thursday the state Transportation Board unanimously approved the project.
Meanwhile, from the Roanoke Valley there is silence. Absent from the Montgomery County courthouse confab last Monday were any of the power brokers who a few years back turned out in force to promote the smart road - a highway then, and now, thought vital to long-term economic vitality of the Blacksburg-to-Roanoke corridor.
This community building isn't easy, whatever the project.
"If you're looking for a common denominator, I don't think you're ever going to find one," says Larry Hincker, the Tech official anointed to make the public case for both projects. "And isn't that the beauty of it: Everybody can get behind it for different reasons."
Sure, and maybe that's the problem.

Daniel Howes covers transportation, media and the economy for the Roanoke Times & World-News.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB