Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, February 25, 1992 TAG: 9202250179
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
BOWERS GAVE OLD WORRY A NEW SPIN
Billy Bova thought he saw Roanoke's old order crumbling Saturday morning, steamrolled by an outpouring of working-class folks determined to make David Bowers their next mayor.Bova, office manager for a health products company and a key Bowers organizer, couldn't help but gloat as he watched Bowers' campaign machine deliver voters to Saturday's Democratic mass meeting by bus, by van, even by Franklin County Speedway pace car.
"There are only a couple families that control things - the Cartledges, the Hancocks," Bova exclaimed. All that would be different with Bowers as mayor. "He's not controlled by big business, the banks."
The anti-establishment mood was clearly running strong Saturday, where an unprecedented union organizational effort pushed Bowers over the top and put two other labor-backed candidates on the Democrats' three-person slate for city council.
Yet the odd thing about the meeting wasn't how much the Bowers' supporters railed against Roanoke's business establishment, but how much they sounded just like it.
Truck driver Gloria Stinnett voiced sentiments typical of the masses sporting blue Bowers stickers (with the obligatory union label in the corner).
"My son's a laborer," she said. "He's working for $5 an hour. He's been working for that ever since he got hired. . . . There's nothing to hold the young people in the valley."
Sound familiar?
It should.
Since the mid-1980s, there's been a loose, ongoing discussion in Roanoke business and political circles about growth - or lack thereof. Call it The Conversation.
Basically, The Conversation goes like this: Roanoke's population growth hit the wall and flattened out in the 1980s, while other large cities in the South kept growing. The inevitable comparisons to Charlotte follow. The point isn't simply Charlotte Envy. It's that Roanoke's flat population means young people are leaving town because they can't find good-paying jobs here.
This is where The Conversationalists search for solutions.
Former Roanoke City Manager Bern Ewert's search led him to devise Explore, a multimillion-dollar Disney-like park he hoped would make Roanoke so world-famous that corporations would clamor to locate here just like they have at Orlando.
Ewert, and the Roanoke business leaders who got behind Explore in the late '80s, relentlessly pushed the concept of the park as a magnet not only for tourists, but the top-paying, high-tech jobs that were eluding Roanoke.
Many of those same business leaders also embraced the proposed "smart road" to Blacksburg, which they hope will make Western Virginia a miniature Silicon Valley for space-age highway technology.
And then there was the proposed consolidation of city and county governments, which business leaders touted as the best way yet to spur growth and attract the high-paying jobs that would keep young people at home.
It was no accident that the consolidation petition drive got started through the Roanoke Jaycees, whose leaders saw their ranks depleted by fellow members moving away in search of better-paying jobs.
The jobs angle, though, was almost always presented in white-collar terms. High-tech this and high-tech that.
Bowers, who won his first City Council campaign in 1984 on a consolidation platform, contends that's why the merger was crushed in the 1990 referendum.
The Jaycees who headed the merger drive ran a "yuppie Republican" campaign, Bowers said in a merger post-mortem, and never put the proposal in terms working people could relate to.
So how does this relate to what happened Saturday? Blue-collar workers have been left out of The Conversation. But they certainly understand Roanoke's economic problems as keenly as any captain of industry, just from a different perspective.
While Jaycees have been losing members to Charlotte because a thirtysomething sales rep can make more money there, some Roanoke Valley construction workers have been commuting hundreds of miles because it's the only way they can find jobs, period.
Rodger Chattling, a member of Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 491, hasn't worked a construction job in Roanoke since 1971. "Radford, Covington, Danville, West Virginia, Pearisburg," he said, ticking off the places he's worked. He was driving to Richmond until he was laid off in December.
"I myself have had to work in West Virginia and all over the country,"said C.W. Toney, the head of painters' union Local 891 and the fellow who orchestrated the big labor turnout for Bowers on Saturday.
Even when he can find painting work in the Roanoke Valley, he said, "the jobs here pay only $6 and $7 and $8 an hour, with no benefits, no hospitalization, no pension plan. I just can't feed my family on what they pay."
That's why unions, in particular, were so galled by the use of out-of-town (and non-union) labor on the Dominion Tower and the new Norfolk Southern building downtown.
Here were the two of the most celebrated construction projects in a decade. Ecstatic business leaders proclaimed "The Future Is Now." Yet many of the construction jobs went to workers from North Carolina and Mexico.
What good is economic development, unions asked, if it doesn't create jobs for local workers? The Dominion Tower gave union leaders a 20-story stack of talking points they took into working-class neighborhoods to galvanize turnout for Bowers.
Chattling's father, Noel, echoed a fear many Bowers supporters repeated Saturday: "That Hotel Roanoke, if they don't watch out, they'll do the same way."
Granted, there are many other factors why union workers haven't been able to find jobs in Roanoke - Virginia is, after all, a right-to-work state.
But the main point is that not being able to find a good-paying job in Roanoke isn't simply a phenomenon that afflicts college-educated suburban kids who majored in biochemistry.
Bowers hasn't really been a participant in The Conversation, at least as it's been conducted so far by the bankers and business leaders. But he won the mayoral nomination partly because he was able to give voice to The Conversation from the working-class point of view.
"C.W. Toney told me the main thing he was able to sell was jobs," said Tommy Jordan, a former railroad union official who worked on Howard Musser's unsuccessful campaign. "David has been able to galvanize the support of people who feel the need for change even if they don't know what the change is."
Come this spring's mayoral campaign, Roanoke might be in for a very interesting conversation, indeed.
Keywords:
POLITICS