Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 12, 1993 TAG: 9301120141
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
FINDING $5 MILLION? NO PROBLEM
THEY SAID the community couldn't come up with $5 million - not between Thanksgiving and New Year's, not amid a struggling economy and not in Roanoke. But this was for Hotel Roanoke. Shows what "they" know.
You did it, Roanoke.
The $42 million Hotel Roanoke project now is $5 million closer to reality, thanks to 2,800 donations, 300 of them made by businesses ranging from one-person operations to the largest hospital corporation in Virginia.
The fund-raising blitz raised more in seven weeks than the River Foundation raised for the Explore Park in eight years; it scraped up more than the $4.7 million the United Way of Roanoke Valley raised last year in a campaign supported by 40,000 donors.
So, to mark the occasion Monday, organizers of the Renew Roanoke campaign threw a made-for-television victory party, complete with balloons, banners and rousing renditions of a song called "Take Me Back to Roanoke."
Three TV reporters, each ready to broadcast live from the Roanoke Civic Center's Exhibition Hall, played their roles in the media circus. The celebration, it turned out, had been scripted to the second, leaving little doubt of the organizers' intentions.
"It is obviously designed to make it very hard not to take it live" on the 6 p.m. news, Jim Kent, news director for WDBJ-7, said in an interview before the announcement. "We're not going to turn over the air for an indefinite period of time."
They didn't.
Still, it was a show. There was William Fleming High School's magnet choir, its jazz band and its Air Force junior ROTC color guard. Partyers toasted their mutual success - Roanoke's success - with non-alcoholic champagne and later munched pretzels and potato chips.
It was quintessential Roanoke. Then, too, it wasn't: A community numbed by layoffs and the acquisition of its largest hometown bank proved it could meet a tight deadline and put its money where its heart lies - behind the century-old Hotel Roanoke.
"They made it," City Councilman James Harvey mused. "I'm thankful, but not surprised. I knew the people of Roanoke would rally around this project."
To be sure, the scripted celebration was no time for acknowledging the private misgivings some campaign organizers admitted on Nov. 19, when the drive to raise $5 million by New Year's was announced.
Carilion Health System President Thomas Robertson, the campaign chairman, had his doubts then. He didn't Monday: "I've been absolutely amazed by the grass-roots support," he said, waving a folded check for $500. "I'm still getting checks."
Today, though, Robertson and other key officials will head to Norfolk for a meeting with Norfolk Southern Corp. Chairman David Goode in hopes of landing a generous gift for the project. In 1989, the railroad donated the hotel to Virginia Tech, which then announced plans to renovate the hotel and build a conference center alongside.
Help for the deal from Norfolk Southern appears certain. Goode said as much last week to the Roanoke Regional Chamber of Commerce. The only question: How much?
With the $5 million in community donations now in the bank, hotel planners still - officially - are $15 million short of the money needed to start work on the project. But $10 million in loans from banks and Shenandoah Life Insurance Co. likely could be announced anytime, several knowledgeable sources said, leaving a $5 million funding gap.
"We're looking at anything and everything to make the project go," City Manager Robert Herbert said. "Virtually nothing is being ruled out," including a city appropriation to the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority. The authority, in turn, could then lend the money back to the hotel project.
But Monday, talk focused on celebration and pleasant surprises for folks like Cynthia Dillon, a small-business owner who helped make calls for the campaign. Would-be donors balked, she said, especially in the early weeks; unsure about the drive, they waited for signs it would amount to something.
It did. Roanokers of all kinds helped in their own way:
Eric Friel and Bob Bryant, both Virginia Tech graduates now working for NationsBank, pulled two-hour shifts at Renew Roanoke's downtown headquarters because the hotel was, well, The Hotel.
"I stayed at Hotel Roanoke with my father when I was 16 and looking at schools," said Friel, who seven years later is in management training with the bank.
And then there was the guy from out-of-town Bryant remembers. He "ran in and tossed down a dollar" - one of the $5,006,000 raised to help reopen Hotel Roanoke.
"They said it couldn't be done," Tech President James McComas quipped, "but it's done."
Staff writer Sandra Brown Kelly contributed to this report.