Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 28, 1993 TAG: 9303010244
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
POLL: RESIDENTS THINK VALLEY'S LEADERS JUST DON'T GET IT
THE NINTH ROANOKE VALLEY POLL shows that people are fed up with the region's slow-growth economy and expect local officials to do something about it - but aren't confident they can.
The latest Roanoke Valley Poll reveals a potentially dangerous divide: The people and local elected officials are out of step on what to do about what both agree is the most critical issue facing the valley - creating more high-wage jobs.
They have conflicting visions about the kind of economic future the valley should seek.
They have conflicting ideas about how to create the types of jobs they'd like to see in the Roanoke Valley.
Most significant of all, the public has little confidence in local governments to create economic growth - and a smoldering frustration that local governments seem unable to work together on the most important issue of the day.
One economist who studied the poll said its findings suggest the valley is ripe for a rebellion against local officials, in much the way Americans last year ousted an incumbent president who was perceived as out-of-touch on economic issues.
"It tells me the elected officials have no idea how frustrated people are by the lack of opportunities and what they see as economic decline and how they don't see anyone taking positive steps that can correct this," Mary Houska, a Hollins College economist, says.
`High level of frustration'
This is the ninth year Roanoke College's Center for Community Service has surveyed the Roanoke Valley for the Roanoke Times & World-News. This time, the questions dealt almost exclusively with what people think about the valley's slow-growth economy and what should be done about it.
The center also surveyed local elected officials, mostly on the Roanoke City Council and Roanoke County Board of Supervisors, on many of the same questions.
To interpret the poll's findings, the newspaper called on a dozen people - from academia, from business, from politics - who were familiar with both the Roanoke Valley and the economy.
Their analysis was unanimous: The poll shows people love the Roanoke Valley, but are worried about its economic future. Many also say the poll of elected officials suggests the valley's leaders may be out of touch with the people - and economic realities.
The deep-seated concern about the valley's economy - 70 percent say their biggest gripe about the Roanoke Valley is a lack of job opportunities - shows the public is remarkably united, says Darrel Martin, who once read polls for a living as one of the state's most successful Democratic political operatives during the 1970s and '80s. By political standards, they're landslide numbers, he says. Why are they so large? That's a question the poll can't answer.
Hugh Keogh, head of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, says he suspects there's always been a certain level of frustration in the Roanoke Valley because it's big enough to have some high-paying jobs, but not a lot.
"Roanoke is in a difficult position of being a moderately sized metro area that has a rather sophisticated professional sector, which has raised expectations in people's minds," Keogh says. "That has created tension."
Keogh suspects those tensions may have increased the past decade, as one of the valley's biggest and best-paying employers - the railroad - reduced its work force and other corporate headquarters departed the city.
Harry Wilson, the Roanoke College political science professor who directed the poll, suggests the poll also reflects national concerns about a sluggish economy. He says Roanoke Valley citizens are sending the same message that their counterparts across the country tried to send in the November election. "This is a vote for change," Wilson says.
One significant difference, several who studied the poll say, is that citizens' frustration with the valley economy is clearly directed toward local officials, not state or federal ones:
The poll shows people clearly look to the valley's local governments to solve the region's economic problems - and they expect those local governments to work together.
Yet people express little confidence in local elected officials to lead the valley into the 21st century.
Moreover, people saw "ineffective government" as the biggest threat to the valley's future.
And when asked what would improve the quality of life in the valley, the most popular choice was "government cooperation."
Several analysts saw in the poll's results a tremendous frustration welling up among citizens.
"What the poll is showing me is that in the city, county and Salem, residents want the same thing - they want better jobs - and they feel the governments need to cooperate and aren't," says Mary Carter, a Republican political operative from Henry County. "Because they aren't cooperating, there's a feeling they aren't capable" of solving the valley's economic problems.
In that respect, the poll should serve as a warning to local officials, says Houska, the Hollins economist. The people clearly expect them to solve the region's economic problems, she says. The irony is that most members of City Council or the Board of Supervisors didn't seek office on an economic development platform.
"They see themselves more concerned about bricks-and-mortar, or the budget," says Houska, who recently completed a study of the valley's economic development efforts. "They don't really see economic development as their primary responsibility." Instead, both city and county governments have staff people in charge of economic development; and the elected officials, she says, "hope that it all will run itself."
But Houska believes the poll shows conditions exist for citizens to start holding elected officials personally responsible at election time for failing to create more high-wage jobs in the valley. It's much like dry weather creating the conditions for a forest fire: There's no guarantee a conflagration will break out, but all it takes to start one is a single, well-placed spark.
The poll shows the valley is such a tinderbox, Houska says. When citizens think something as nebulous as government cooperation will do more to improve the community's quality of life than something more concrete and closer to home - such as better schools or better parks - "this bespeaks a very high level of frustration."
Or does it?
Former Gov. Gerald Baliles was more generous toward local officials in his reading of the poll. He says the public's call for more government cooperation isn't surprising; that's a mom-and-apple-pie answer. The key, he says, "is to find out how far they're willing to go to achieve government cooperation."
The poll shows people aren't in the mood for radical change, Carter says, especially any changes that might run the risk of raising taxes, increasing the population or speeding up the pace of life. Certainly, Baliles and Carter agree, the defeat of the 1990 referendum on consolidating valley governments shows people aren't prepared to tamper too much with existing structures of government.
Baliles says that's why more polling is necessary to determine just what kind of government cooperation people have in mind. "Are you willing to consolidate different levels of services? Economic development? Police?" Carter, however, contends this poll already contains enough clues to persuade her that the people may be willing, if not eager, to see Roanoke Valley governments consolidate their economic development departments.
That proposal has been advanced several times - most recently by County Supervisor Harry Nickens in January - but has never gone anywhere. However, Carter, who sits on the consolidated economic development board that serves Martinsville and Henry County, says the poll suggests "if governments came together with a single economic development office, they would have the public behind them."
Even if governments don't go that route, the poll suggests they need to do something visible to show they're working together on economic development and have clear goals in mind, Carter says.
Yet the poll also suggests one flashpoint could come over a strategy that local governments have adopted - tourism.
`Tourism is not a good sell'
There's a glaring gap between what the people want done about economic development and what their leaders are doing. "That's a worry," says Paula Brownlee, the former president of Hollins College.
Both city and county governments have made tourism projects their No. 1 economic development priority. In the city, it's the Hotel Roanoke and adjacent conference center. In the county, it's the Explore Park. Furthermore, the elected officials surveyed rank tourism as more important to the valley's future than attracting manufacturing jobs.
But the poll shows the public has little enthusiasm for making tourism a priority. It's not that people oppose tourism. On the contrary, the poll shows people overwhelmingly agree the valley has the potential to be an important place for tourists to visit. It's just that the poll shows the public expects elected officials to place the highest priority on more traditional forms of economic development - specifically, attracting manufacturing jobs.
"Tourism is not a good sell," Virginia Tech geographer Susan Brooker-Gross says. That's probably because the public tends to think of tourism as producing only low-wage, seasonal jobs, she says. And if there's one thing the poll makes clear, says Carter, the Republican campaign strategist, it's that the public wants not just more jobs, but high-paying jobs.
Also, Brooker-Gross says the poll suggests that people are skeptical of too much emphasis on tourism because they fear tourist traffic will disrupt the valley's peace and quiet.
Yes, the Roanoke Valley has rallied to the cause of the Hotel Roanoke. But the poll suggests "the reason people support it is not because it's tourism, but their attachment to downtown and their attachment to the hotel itself," Brooker-Gross says. That's something the elected leaders who push tourism should keep in mind, Brooker-Gross says, lest they read too much into the success of the hotel's fund-raising campaign - and not enough into the poll.
With that in mind, many of those who analyzed the poll warned that the valley's elected leaders are pursuing a politically risky strategy by focusing so much on tourism.
But, it should be noted, not everyone read the poll that way: Baliles wasn't so concerned by the gap between the people and their leaders. If the people spent as much time studying economic development as the political leaders, he says, they'd understand that tourism is an area where the Roanoke Valley has catching up to do.
Regardless, Reginald Shareef, who teaches organizational behavior at Radford University, says the poll numbers show that leaders haven't explained to citizens why tourism is important. They need to, he says, "so the people will buy into the idea."
But Houska says the poll numbers suggest the public may never buy into tourism.
"I think the communications problem is the other way around," she says. "The public has this strong feeling that the economy needs stimulating - with good jobs - and the elected officials don't seem to realize the strength of those feelings at all. People's attitudes toward the conference center seem to be `OK, I'm willing to go along; yeah, we'll give it a chance; but that's not what's really important.'"
`Economic literacy is nil'
What people think are important, the poll shows, are manufacturing jobs and high-tech jobs.
In many ways, say Bob de Voursney of the University of Virginia's Center for Public Service and Wade Gilley, president of Marshall University, the poll shows people are ahead of their leaders on what the valley's economic strategy should be.
Government officials across the state have become fixated on tourism, de Voursney says, because they see it as a quick way to increase sales tax revenues without having to spend tax money on schools and other services.
But de Voursney thinks it's short-sighted for valley leaders to focus so much on tourism. "You have a leadership committed to big projects in Roanoke, like Explore, and that takes a lot of leadership energy. I have every good wish for tourism, but great reservations about making that the cornerstone of everything. It's cyclical, it's low-wage, and it's dead-end. As a matter of policy, I don't want to make people into chambermaids."
Proponents would argue that tourism still is desirable for other reasons - not only the quick fix of tax revenues, but also the public relations benefits that tourism might bring.
Regardless of the merits or demerits of tourism, there's still this gap between the people and their leaders.
Just about all the poll analysts agreed this disparity between the public's yearning for industrial jobs and government's focus on tourism points up another communications problem - and blamed elected leaders for creating, or at least not fixing, it.
It's understandable, they agreed, that the public pines for manufacturing jobs, a sector of the economy that's been shrinking. After all, an industrial economy is what Roanokers - and most Americans are most familiar with.
But the poll numbers are a danger signal, warns Shareef, the Radford organizational behaviorist. "If people are still talking about manufacturing jobs, that's a tell-tale sign you don't have good leadership in the city," he says.
The first duty of leaders, Shareef says, is to educate people about the economic realities of the 1990s and beyond. The jobs of tomorrow will be based on intellectual labor, not physical labor, he says. Elected leaders need to make this point clear to people, he says, so they'll support the investments in education necessary to create a well-educated work force.
Others who analyzed the poll and also work in economic development agree that the public is wrong to bank on a revival of old-line manufacturing jobs.
But they say the poll shows that people, in wanting to emphasize manufacturing, may be closer to the economic truth than their leaders are - although they may not have reached that conclusion for the right reasons.
If the nation is to regain its economic strength, Gilley says, it must rebuild its manufacturing base. But the manufacturing jobs of the future, he says, will be high-tech, in which even assembly-line workers may need degrees in computer programming.
These aren't jobs that will be confined to the Silicon Valleys and Research Triangles of the world. Former Gov. Linwood Holton cites Magnetic Bearings Inc. in Roanoke, which manufactures a new type of bearing, and Keogh cites Consolidated Glass & Mirror in Galax, which uses computers in its glass-cutting plant, as prime examples of the industries of the future.
Both plants are in growth industries - Magnetic Bearings, which employs 46 people, has seen its sales double in two years. Consolidated Glass & Mirror started with eight workers in 1980, now has 300 and talks of expanding to 1,000 someday. Both are dependent on higher education for its technology or training its workers.
For that reason, Gilley says, the most disquieting finding in the Roanoke Valley Poll is one on which both the people and their leaders agree. Neither emphasize the need for closer ties between the Roanoke Valley and Virginia Tech. Given a list of ways to promote economic development, both the people and their leaders ranked "closer ties with Tech" a distant last.
Science, Gilley says, "will be the driving force for economic development in the next century," which is why it's critical for cities the size of Roanoke to be linked with research universities such as Tech.
In the late 1980s, Gilley conducted a study that looked at 100 mid-sized cities and how they were faring economically. The ones doing well all shared common traits - they had a diverse economy and they had a university.
That's another reason many of the poll analysts said it's the duty of elected leaders to educate themselves - and then the public - about where the economy's headed.
"Economy literacy in this country," de Voursney says, "is nil."