Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 12, 1993 TAG: 9304120237
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
WHO WILL PAY FOR EXPLORE?
THE EXPLORE PARK'S governing board will meet Tuesday for a soul-searching discussion of the project's future. With the founders about to pull the plug on operating expenses, board members will have much to talk about.
The Explore Park, struggling to build even a modest version of the once-ambitious frontier history park because the big national donors expected to bankroll the project haven't materialized, now faces a cash crunch from another quarter.
Its founders.
The River Foundation - the nonprofit group of Roanoke Valley business leaders who conceived the park in 1985 and have kept the idea afloat financially - now wants someone else to pick up Explore's $450,000-a-year operating expenses.
That someone is the taxpayers, first in Roanoke County and later across the state.
For the past few months, Explore's founders have been quietly signaling their intention to cut back the amount of money they provide for operating expenses - a message that's likely to be the main topic of conversation when the state board that governs the park meets Tuesday to discuss the project's future.
The founders say they're weary of carrying the financial load alone, and believe it's time for the state to start paying the day-to-day bills for what technically is a state project - albeit one left to linger outside the normal structure of state government without regular funding.
The founders say they remain willing, even eager, to continue making financial contributions. But instead of being eaten up by operating expenses, they want to see their contributions go toward construction - something Explore so far hasn't been able to afford very much.
That's the crux of the matter: This fiscal year, the River Foundation is expected to spend about $490,000 for Explore. But the first $450,000 of that is committed toward salaries for the five-person staff and other operating expenses, leaving just $40,000 to pay mostly for the reassembly of a single barn.
The River Foundation figures that if it begins turning off the financial spigot for operating expenses, some government will step forward to keep the project alive, which in turn will free the foundation's contributions to go entirely toward construction.
Anticipating this funding cutback, Explore planners already have begun lobbying friendly governments for cash. In the short term, that's meant asking Roanoke County for $100,000. In the long term, that means asking the state to take over the park and make it a full-fledged state agency with regular funding.
What lies ahead is a year or more that Explore planners describe as a "delicate transition time."
The worst-case scenario would be that local and state governments refuse to pick up the tab, and the project sputters on - or sputters out.
But Explore's environmental director, Rupert Cutler, says he believes the state can be persuaded to start paying for Explore's operating expenses. If so, he says, that would enable Explore to use its private contributions to accelerate construction work on the $15 million first phase of the living-history frontier park and environmental education center.
Indeed, Explore's founders contend they'll be able to raise more money from outside sources once they can assure donors that the money will go toward construction instead of operating expenses.
"I know from my Roanoke College experience," says former college President Norman Fintel, the foundation's point man on the funding cutback, "people generally have more confidence giving to things like buildings. They'll give to that before giving to somebody's salary, even though they know somebody has to pay that salary."
Still, the politics of transforming Explore into a state agency - and that's what it eventually comes down to, politics - are dicey, and appear to depend largely on how strongly the Roanoke Valley's senior state legislator gets behind the move. Cutler puts it bluntly: "Dick Cranwell is the key to the whole thing."
And Cranwell, so far, isn't committing himself.
Contrary to much public opinion, taxpayers have not been keeping Explore going - although there has been plenty of tax money spent on the project.
The state and federal governments together have put in almost $24 million, although virtually all of that has gone toward two specific projects - buying the land along the Roanoke River gorge east of Vinton and building the road that by the late 1990s will connect Explore with the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Instead, from the beginning the River Foundation has footed the bill for the project's operating expenses - for staff, for office space, for many of the outside planning consultants, even for buying and moving the frontier-era farm buildings the park is now starting to reassemble. Over the years, tax records show, the foundation has raised $3.5 million in private funds to keep Explore going.
Last year, the foundation counted 110 contributors, the most ever. But much of the foundation's money through the years - there's no way of telling exactly how much - has come from just three people: Roanoke Electric Steel founder John Hancock, Grand Piano Chairman George Cartledge Sr. and Salem developer T.A. Carter, who form the core of the old guard in the Roanoke Valley's business community.
"They're the same ones you come back to every time," warns Roanoke County Supervisor Harry Nickens, who sits on the state board that governs Explore. "We as a community need to look around" to find other potential contributors, especially since Hancock and Cartledge are both now well into their 80s.
When the River Foundation was formed, its leaders said they were willing to pay Explore's initial expenses so that their proposal for a major tourist attraction would have enough time - and money - to be nurtured without having to go through political battles for government funding.
But throughout, the oft-stated plan was to turn Explore over to the state once the project was up and running.
With that in mind, Cranwell in 1986 pushed through legislation to create the Virginia Recreational Facilities Authority, the 13-member state board that is by law the park's owner and governing body.
The authority has had little to do except rubber-stamp the foundation's plans. At first, that was fine with both sides. The River Foundation felt a paternal instinct toward Explore and wanted to retain control to make sure its vision for the project was carried out. Furthermore, the authority - aside from the single state appropriation to buy land - had no money.
So in the 1988 contract that formalized the relationship between the two bodies, the state board effectively turned the park over to the River Foundation, looking to the foundation to raise the money, hire the staff, draw the plans and run the park on a day-to-day basis.
It's that contract that's now at issue.
The way the foundation sees it, the park already is open - granted, on a much-smaller scale than originally intended - and it's time for the state to take over. In the past year, workers have reassembled a 19th century farmhouse and barn. And Roanoke Valley students are now regularly trooping through the park for nature hikes and living-history demonstrations. Last year, 2,554 students visited Explore.
But it costs money to hire staffers to run this education program and conduct the re-enactments - the foundation figures about $119,000 a year. As Explore planners look ahead to next year and beyond - when they hope to have more buildings reassembled and more living-history programs under way - they see the expenses going higher. "We're in that transition, of moving from a planning-size staff with five people to a daily operations staff, which could be 20 to 40 people," says project engineer Richard Burrow.
From the foundation's point of view, it's now privately subsidizing the operations of what is by law a state park. That's the rub: "Explore ought to be looked at as any other state park in Virginia," says Joe Stephenson, Shenandoah Life chairman who heads the River Foundation.
Starting at the authority's quarterly board meeting in October, and again in January, Fintel has warned it can't count on the foundation's underwriting Explore forever. He's on the agenda to deliver the message more forcefully Tuesday - the River Foundation may serve formal notice that it wants out of the contract that requires it to raise all the operating expenses.
"It is our intent that we need to look at restructuring our role," says Stephenson.
The foundation, he says, wants to remain as the project's fund-raising arm for construction projects, much the way state universities have private foundations that do their capital fund raising.
But starting in July 1994, the foundation wants the authority to take over the responsibility for raising the park's operating expenses. After that, Cutler warns, the foundation's contributions for operating expenses "will taper off."
With that July 1994 deadline looming, Explore planners have gone first to Roanoke County, which has long declared the park its top economic development priority. County Administrator Elmer Hodge has proposed $100,000 for Explore in his budget.
Explore planners also are looking to the session of the General Assembly that convenes in January. Cutler is starting to sound out Roanoke Valley legislators about having Explore transformed from an independent state authority into a regular state agency.
There is, Cranwell notes, a precedent for taking what started as a nonprofit group and making it a state agency - the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville.
But Explore, he says, needs to hone its pitch that the park's revised mission - teaching visitors about nature and the Appalachian frontier - is one that the state ought to take on.
In the coming year, Explore may face as many pitfalls as Meriwether Lewis and William Clark encountered on their journey into the unknown.
The Roanoke County supervisors, having already spent $350,000 to widen a road to the park, are becoming increasingly skeptical of whether Explore will ever become the major tourist attraction they once counted on. Their support can no longer be taken for granted.
Gov. Douglas Wilder's top two economic development officials have lavished praise on Explore in recent months. Cutler hopes those warm words will translate into cold cash when Wilder presents his final budget in January a few days before he leaves office.
But state funding is expected to remain tight, and there's a chance that Wilder's successor could be Republican George Allen, who led a losing but high-profile move to ax the funding for Explore's land acquisition from the state budget in 1988.
Given those uncertain prospects, Explore's most vocal critic over the years, former state Sen. Granger Macfarlane of Roanoke, can't help but say, "I told you so."
"After eight long years, it's regrettable and unfortunate that more than $11 million in state tax dollars and $12 million in federal tax dollars has apparently been spent on a project that will never even come to fruition," he says.
But Cutler points to a farmstead in the wilderness and 2,554 visiting schoolchildren as proof that Explore already has come to fruition, and reason enough for the state to start financially supporting the park.
Otherwise, Fintel says, "it's going to be an orphan."
\ THE EXPLORE PARK\ WHAT'S THERE NOW\ A reconstructed farmstead from the early 1800s, with a farmhouse and barn. Explore's using this as the backdrop for its living-history demonstrations for schoolchildren about what life was like on the Appalachian frontier.\ \ Hiking trails. Foresters are giving tours to teach visiting schoolchildren about trees. The Science Museum of Western Virginia is conducting a series of twilight hikes with night-vision goggles to show what animals do at night.\ \ An endangered species breeding program. With Mill Mountain Zoo, Explore is breeding two red wolves.\ \ WHAT'S PLANNED\ The project's $15 million first phase includes:\ \ A $5 million environmental education center. This would teach visitors about the environment and make Explore the focal point for environmental education. "This will be a place where conferences are held of national and international significance," says Rupert Cutler, Explore's environmental director.\ \ A reconstructed Blue Ridge frontier town. This would include a fort, a church, a barn, a tavern, a grist mill, an iron forge and various farm buildings and Old World farm animals. Explore hopes to turn the tavern into an "upscale restaurant" and use the barn as cultural center for folk dances, art exhibitions and other programs.\ \ A re-created Native American village.\ \ A 19th-century farmhouse remodeled into a lodge for visiting scientists and teachers attending conferences at the environmental education center.\ \ A small wildlife collection in a natural setting that would serve as the basis for building a zoo of North American animals.\ \ An expanded endangered-species breeding program.