SELF-HELP PLAN SPRUCING UP WILLIAMSON ROAD

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, April 12, 1993                   TAG: 9304120263
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: C2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
SELF-HELP PLAN SPRUCING UP WILLIAMSON ROAD
NOT ONLY downtowns age. Commercial strips do, too. They also can decline. Williamson Road merchants have, to their credit, done a lot in past years to improve their shopping district. Now they want to do more, and the city of Roanoke should help them.
It is reasonable to believe that more consumers might gravitate to the three-mile commercial strip if it had a more appealing face. Many stores and services are concentrated there, including ones not easily found elsewhere.
A product of the auto age (in which we're still living), Williamson Road was once a main thoroughfare leading in and out of Roanoke on U.S. 11. It still is, but is now bypassed by interstate travelers and truckers who have switched to I-81. Merchants worry it is often bypassed, too, by local shoppers, who trek regularly to the big malls on both sides of the valley via 581.
To help revitalize the strip and make it more competitive, Williamson Road merchants and numerous property owners along the 50-block stretch have proposed a self-help plan. They're asking City Council to raise their taxes (not anyone else's). The pooled funds would then be used by the Williamson Road Area Business Association to clean up and spruce up.
It could use a facelift. The road isn't pockmarked by massage parlors and adult bookstores, as it once was. But neither does it have many of the niceties - shrubs and other greenery, for instance - that shoppers find inviting. Nor does it have the kind of rhyme and reasoning that seem to pull together businesses in other shopping areas, ranging from Vinton to Salem to Downtown Roanoke's historic market area.
What it does have are eyesores - unsightly vacant lots, a jumble of commercial signs - and, along part of the stretch, a turn-off reputation as a route where young people cruise late at night.
Turning around Williamson Road's image would benefit not just merchants, but also residents in the pleasant neighborhoods on both sides of the road. And the entire city.
The merchants propose that City Council create a special service district, similar to one established for downtown Roanoke in 1986. The upshot would be that Williamson Road businesses and property owners would pay extra taxes, amounting to more than $50,000 a year.
Those funds would be used by the business association to eliminate eyesores, to develop a more positive and vibrant shopping atmosphere, and to hire a director who could arrange special promotional events that the business association now can't afford.
There will be naysayers. There always are, when higher taxes are involved. But City Council and the affected property owners need to recognize the reality: Either work to revitalize the district, or watch it decline into not-so-genteel shabbiness.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB