Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 16, 1992 TAG: 9203160076
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARK LAYMAN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"It was gorgeous; it was breathtaking," Schefsky recalls. "I said, `This is just like being in the middle of the Adirondacks or the Green Mountains.' I just knew this was it."
The Schefskys work for the Department of Veterans Affairs. They were transferred to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center here last spring from the rural Finger Lakes region of New York state.
They'd been dying to come South. "We were in New York 10 years and we wanted to move South after two," she says. "We were so excited."
They saw a "For Sale" sign on a 14 1/2-acre spread at the far end of Bradshaw Road. A house with a swimming pool. A pasture and a barn for their Thoroughbred horses. A pond with wild geese. Surrounded by pine forest. "You look down the valley and you see cows," she marvels.
There was just one problem:
It was across the road from the Smith Gap landfill.
That's exactly why the previous owner, Jim Hensley, put the property up for sale and built a house across the mountain, in the Catawba Valley. "I would still be there if there were not a landfill there," he says. "I feel there are going to be problems I couldn't live with."
The Schefskys just shrugged.
The couple used to live in Michigan, near a Dow Chemical plant and a nuclear power plant that was shut down because of structural defects before it even went on-line.
Compared to that, the Smith Gap landfill "looks pretty good to me," Kate Schefsky says.
Although she now is a vocational rehabilitation specialist, Shefsky took a lot of ecology classes when she was a student at the University of Michigan in the late 1960s. She was on a citizens advisory committee that came up with a recycling plan to extend the life of a new landfill in New York's Steuben County - a county the size of Rhode Island that has the population of Roanoke.
And the Schefskys compost their horse manure and household garbage.
So it's fair to say she knows a thing or two about landfills and waste disposal.
"So many people came to us after we bought the house and said, `Did you know there's going to be a landfill there?'" Schefsky says. "I just didn't see any great problem. I'd much rather be across from the dump than in the right of way for the airport or next to the expressway. There's a lot worse places to live. Kate Schefsky New Roanoke Valley Resource Authority member who has moved to a farm near the Smith Gap Landfill site. I'm not going to sit around all day staring at" the landfill.
Aesthetically, she says, landfills "are not what they used to be. They're not a pit with rats and bears. . . . I'd much rather be across from the dump than in the right of way for the airport or next to the expressway. There's a lot worse places to live."
Rural Smith Gap isn't an ideal site for a landfill, she says. "If I was putting in a landfill, I'd choose an industrial area."
But she has studied plans for the landfill, and she is convinced it will have little impact on nearby residents. "Fear of the unknown always looms larger than reality," she says.
She's impressed with operating guidelines aimed at protecting nearby residents' ground water and property values, limiting the dust and noise and screening the landfill from view. "It looks like there's going to be a listening ear" for nearby residents' concerns, she says.
And if there is a problem at the landfill, Schefsky will be one of the first to know. And she'll be able to do something about it.
She's been appointed by the county Board of Supervisors to take John Hubbard's place on the Roanoke Valley Resource Authority, which will own and operate the landfill. Hubbard is leaving his job as an assistant county administrator this month to become executive director of the resource authority.
Catawba Supervisor Ed Kohinke says he recommended Schefsky because, as a newcomer to Bradshaw who is knowledgeable about waste disposal, "she has a fresh perspective."
"She's a very articulate person, and she seems like the kind of person who can work with anybody," Kohinke says. "I felt we needed someone on there who was connected to the people out here."
Schefsky says she'll be a watchdog, looking out for her own interest as a nearby property owner and the interests of her Bradshaw neighbors.
"Nobody's going to pull the wool over my eyes," she says. "I'll be right on top of it."
by CNB