SYMPOSIUM HEARS NEW RIVER PROTECTION PROPOSALS

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

DATE: FRIDAY, April 16, 1993                   TAG: 9304160306
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-2   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WYTHEVILLE                                LENGTH: Medium
SYMPOSIUM HEARS NEW RIVER PROTECTION PROPOSALS
A representative of the National Committee for the New River outlined some initiatives Thursday for protecting and using key areas along the river in the New River Valley.
Most land-trust organizations concentrate on saving what needs to be saved, said Randi S. Lemmon, the committee's Blacksburg-based land-trust director. But these projects also have an emphasis on building what needs to be built.
Lemmon spoke at the 1993 New River Symposium, a three-day gathering of people presenting papers on various aspects of the river. The symposium started Thursday in Wytheville.
He said the national committee was formed in the 1970s to fight Appalachian Power Co.'s plans to dam the river for a hydroelectric project, but has done little since it won that battle until recently.
He said the group became reactivated because of ungoverned development along the river's banks in North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia that could spoil it.
The river also is being used more than ever as a public water source, he said, at a time when it is becoming increasingly polluted by agricultural, industrial and chemical wastes. The land-trust component of the committee was set up to find ways to protect it, he said.
Already 65 percent of the river's tributaries show high- to medium-level pollution, he said, the highest of any watershed in Virginia.
He said the land-trust component, drawing on assistance from graduate students and data at Virginia Tech, is seeking ways in the New River Valley to protect scenic river acreage but still find ways of using it.
At the former AT&T site at Fairlawn bought by Pulaski County for future industrial park use, he said, the group is working on ways to preserve its two miles of river frontage.
"Let's make it a model of how industrial parks ought to be done," Lemmon said.
A greenway planning demonstration project in the Castle Rock area of Giles County is being undertaken with graduate students and landscape architecture aid from Virginia Tech, he said.
The land trust is looking into keeping the river bridge at Pembroke in state ownership, he said - not as part of the Department of Transportation, because it is not safe for all vehicles, but as part of the state Parks Division if the bridge can be integrated into a park.
"That's a big if," he said.
It also is looking at housing and a restaurant-lodge complex in Giles along Walker Creek, which leads into New River.
Lemmon said 74 percent of all Giles County building permits since 1984 have been for mobile homes or double-wide trailers, so affordable housing is an obvious problem. Such housing should be planned as compatible with the scenery, he said.
Three miles downstream, another project is planned with the Virginia Outdoors Foundation, a state organization set up after a chemical contamination problem in the James River, he said.

by Bhavesh Jinadra by CNB