Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 9, 1993 TAG: 9301090037
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: DUBLIN LENGTH: Medium
TRACK DETRACTORS
They may be blasting and scrubbing tiger paw prints off the road in front of Tabb High School in Yorktown, but nobody's planning to mess with the yellow cougar tracks in the road at Pulaski County High School."I would prefer that they not be there and I've scolded the school on it, but I'm not going to go out there and mark them off the pavement," said Dan Brugh, resident transportation engineer.
The road by the school is officially designated by road signs as Cougar Trail, honoring the name of the school football team, which has had enthusiastic public support even before it won the state championship last year.
According to the Associated Press, state transportation crews started scrubbing painted tiger paws - the symbol of Tabb High School - in front of that school on Tuesday.
"The state must have a lot of money," said Lois McCarthy, parent of a Tabb High student.
"Maybe we'll see how much money they have when people go out and paint them over again. If it takes eight people to get rid of a tiger paw, I wonder how many it takes to fix a pothole?"
"I agree, we could be spending our money in other places, but this is something that has to be done, too," said resident engineer Quintin Elliott.
He estimated that the work costs about $100 per paw, considering labor and equipment use.
Some paw prints that had been repainted several times took an hour and 15 minutes to blast away, said spray operator Gary Cardin.
The Transportation Department termed the dozens of painted tiger tracks hazardous vandalism and ordered their removal.
Paw-painting has been a tradition of the Tabb High Athletic Booster Club for more than a decade, and parents have spent $500 each year on traffic paint.
Elliott has threatened to prosecute anyone caught repainting the tracks.
He said that crews won't remove about 18 prints covering the high school's front driveway, which also is state-maintained.
The painted paw prints in Pulaski County have been there for 12 or 14 years, estimated Kenneth Dobson, who was county school superintendent at the time they appeared and who is one of the football team's assistant coaches now.
He said that no permission to paint them ever was sought, but that Cougar boosters tried to keep the paw prints small enough so the Transportation Department wouldn't object. "They've seen them and never made us take them off, and I appreciate it a lot," Dobson said.
"Sometimes I think the less said about these things, the better."
If they covered a lot of the road, Brugh said, he would have some concerns.
"Paint on pavement is extremely slick, and that's the danger in it," he said. "That's why we quit painting the great big arrows at the end of exit ramps, because when they get wet, they're slicker than ice."
When some Virginia Tech symbols were painted onto U.S. 460 three or four years ago, Brugh said, "I received a monumental amount of calls" complaining about them. "There must be a lot of UVa people up here," he said.
But he has received no complaints about the tracks at Pulaski County High.
He said he wrote the school a letter asking that the cougar tracks not be repainted when they had faded from the road, and agreed that they still look pretty fresh. But he did not think they were big enough to pose a safety problem and did not intend to push the matter.
The Christiansburg High School Blue Devils have their symbol painted on the road outside their school, too, but those are on town streets rather than those in Montgomery County.
In any case, Brugh said, they pose no problems either. "They're very small too," he said, "and I'm sure the town doesn't mind them. I wouldn't get upset about them myself if they were in the county."
The Associated Press provided some information for this story.