ROANOKE CITY'S LIST OF CRAZY IDEAS

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

DATE: TUESDAY, January 5, 1993                   TAG: 9301050443
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short
ROANOKE CITY'S LIST OF CRAZY IDEAS
IT SEEMS that another neighborhood is going down the tubes as our city fathers have seen fit to run a four-lane road through the middle of Gainsboro. This is another on the long list of crazy things that the city administration has seen fit to do.
I agree that the traffic on Campbell Avenue is awful. But, what caused it? The closing of the viaduct. This created a real monster. To correct this problem, a road to reroute traffic is needed. But if the viaduct had been left alone, this problem with traffic would have never happened.
Did this city really need the Dominion Tower? With the bank talking about laying off 800 or so people, I really do not think that this space was needed. The talk when the tower was proposed was of creating jobs within the valley. Well, I would like to know how many people I saw working on it were not from this valley. I think most of the labor was from out of state and more than likely from out of this country. This was just another smoke screen laid by out city fathers.
All of this talk about a conference center: Do we really need it? Why can't the civic center be used for conferences? It sits idle more than half the time. I can recall that the big issue - when the city was pushing voters to approve a bond issue for the civic center - was conferences. That is one of the reasons that the exhibition-hall part of the center was built. Whatever happened to utilizing something that you already have? Government needs to be operated like a business and unless this is started quickly all of us are going to be broke. ROGER D. SINK ROANOKE

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB