Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 5, 1993 TAG: 9302050414
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
RALLYING BEHIND THE HOTEL ROANOKE
SKEPTICS now have learned what a lot of Roanokers believed all along: that the Hotel Roanoke's reopening, next to a new conference center, is too important a project not to succeed.Too important in its own right, as an economic-development enterprise with broad public benefits. And too important to the spirit of a community reeling from announced job losses, drifting without regional leadership, and receptive to the shot in the arm that this can-do achievement affords.
Boosting the rallying effect is the range of partners and contributors to the $40 million undertaking. These include the Virginia Tech Foundation, which owns the hotel; and Norfolk Southern Corp., which donated the hotel to Tech and which this week announced a $2 million contribution.
Also: the city of Roanoke, which is ponying up $12 million in bonds for the conference center and $6 million in federal loan money; and a group of local financial institutions providing $6.5 million in mortgage loans.
And, of course, the "Renew Roanoke" campaign, a community fundraising effort fueled by wide affection for the hotel-rehab idea.
"Roanoke has truly prevailed," said Mayor David Bowers this week, announcing completion of a financing package not easily pulled together at a time when practically no one wants to invest in hotel construction.
"Not easily" is an understatement. Three years in the making, success was never assured.
But it was made possible - by hard work, generous involvement, frustrating negotiations, prodigious persistence and farsighted vision by city and Tech officials, community leaders, and a large supporting cast of contributors.
Success also came via - what else? - public-private partnership, to which even the state is contributing. (State transportation funds will be used for a skywalk over the railroad tracks connecting the hotel with the City Market. This will free up $2 million, originally appropriated for the skywalk, which will enable the city to buy land around the hotel from the Tech foundation.)
Success was driven, too, by planners' recognition of the alternative: a future with inadequate meeting facilities; with no headquarters hotel; with a Gainsboro neighborhood further undermined by a wasteland of empty, unused buildings. And with important opportunities lost: to attract more visitors, to boost the downtown, to create jobs and revenues, to cement ties with the university.
What has been achieved so far, of course, is only the financing. If long-term returns on the hotel's operations were assured, financing might not have required so much innovation - or so much help from contributors lacking equity. There are public risks in a project deemed too important to be allowed to fail.
But there are also public benefits that won't show up on the balance sheet. For now, even without knowing how it will all come out, word that rehabbing will begin soon is worth celebrating. The hotel finds its value in Roanoke's heritage, in its character and sense of place. Nostalgia opened some wallets.
But financing was achieved, in the end, not by a desire to save the past so much as a determination to protect and enhance the future. That's good news in a region that, right now, can use all the good news it can get.