Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 25, 1993 TAG: 9304230052
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
To judge by the Roanoke Valley Poll - in which 70 percent of those surveyed said the lack of job opportunities was their biggest complaint about the valley - people say the central issue facing the valley is the same one that dominated last fall's presidential race.
It's the economy, stupid.
So when people in the same poll say the Roanoke Valley has "little community vision," what they really seem to be saying is the Roanoke Valley doesn't have a strategy for creating more job opportunities.
They're right. The valley doesn't have one.
Each locality may have its own plan. In some cases, different interest groups have their plans, too. Even individual politicians and business leaders have their ideas about what to do or how. But there's no grand strategy - no overarching vision - for the entire valley that most parties generally agree on.
That last part may be the most important of all, too. For urban policy analysts, "the vision thing" isn't a hazy philosophical musing; instead, it refers to something concrete and well-defined, a long-range but precise set of community objectives.
Among them: What kind of jobs are you trying to create, and how will you do it? Or, as Tyler Norris of the National Civic League, the Denver-based group that gives the All-America City awards, puts it: "What do you want yourself to look like in 20 to 30 years in the future?" And what's your road map to get there? That's vision.
Vision is Indianapolis setting out to become the nation's capital for amateur athletics and building the sports facilities to make that possible.
Vision is Austin, Texas, deciding it wants to make a major play for high-tech jobs and setting up a research center to attract scientists and federal grants.
But vision doesn't necessarily mean a blueprint for faster population growth - an important point in the Roanoke Valley, where polls consistently show the public, by large margins, wants the population to stay the size it is.
Vision simply can mean figuring out a coherent way to replace the jobs a community is losing, says John Accordino, an urban-policy analyst at Virginia Commonwealth University. That's become a growing concern as the new rules of a global marketplace undermine one traditional employer after another.
So vision is Spokane, Wash. - a one-time railroad town dependent on timber, minerals and other waning industries - creating an $11 million research center for biotechnology and information services to lure high-tech jobs.
Vision does not have to be flashy, merely functional.
So vision is Lorain, Ohio, concluding the best thing an aging blue-collar city can do is concentrate on keeping its machine-tool companies healthy - and establishing the training and public relations programs to guarantee the industry both a reliable work force and marketplace.
In fact, Lorain specifically rejected the notion that vision requires "building a great university, or becoming a center of international finance, or creating a visitor destination of national appeal."
"We're not trying to make silk purses out of sow's ears," says Mark Kidder, the Chamber of Commerce director who headed Lorain's search for a vision. "We like sow's ears."
Finally, a community's vision doesn't even have to be well-thought-out, says Marshall University President Wade Gilley, who recently completed a study on why some medium-sized cities were doing well economically and others weren't. "Our research indicated a strategy is crucial, so crucial that even a rudimentary or partially shaped strategy is better than no strategy at all."
Consensus is vital
Ultimately, Norris says, the essential test of vision isn't how far-sighted or grandiose a community's plan is, it's how broadly it's accepted by different constituencies. Without consensus, there's no vision.
That's where the Roanoke Valley flunks. There's no lack of ideas, Roanoke Mayor David Bowers points out, about how to replace a declining manufacturing base and the steady drain of corporate headquarters.
Some say the Roanoke Valley should try to be a tourist mecca. Or a fiber-optics center. Or a health-care center. Or a mail-order capital. Or, well, you name it.
First Union executives, despite the immediate loss of 850 bank jobs in the Dominion merger, have held out the possibility that, by making this the headquarters of their growing Virginia operations, Roanoke may become a regional banking capital just as Jacksonville did when First Union moved into Florida.
The problem is forging a consensus to get any of these goals accomplished. Bowers plays off the name of this series. "The promise is we've got wonderful people with a good work ethic. The peril is everybody says we want to do certain things, but never really do it."
On a good day, these alternative visions at least don't get in the way of one another. On others, these different notions of what the valley ought to do and become collide as often as bumper cars at an amusement park.
City officials gripe that Roanoke County didn't join them in putting up money to reopen the Hotel Roanoke and build an adjoining conference center that would draw visitors to the entire valley. County officials grouse that the city didn't join them in paying for the Spring Hollow Reservoir that will provide water to meet the entire valley's needs until the middle of the next century.
It's not just city vs. county. When the state was appropriating money for the Explore Park instead of flood control, Councilman James Harvey complained that a handful of business leaders who had the governor's ear were usurping council's right to set the valley's priorities. This year, another group of business leaders made its own end-around to Richmond, persuading the General Assembly to tell Roanoke County how to spend its new lodging tax revenues - on tourism, period.
Now, the Roanoke Valley Business Council, a coalition that includes chief executives from the valley's 50 biggest employers, has proposed to draw up its own long-range economic strategy for the Roanoke and New River valleys. The council has won the backing of five chambers of commerce and has signed up Virginia Tech to help, but the council's president - Thomas Robertson of Carilion Health System - has made it clear he won't invite elected officials as full participants.
Not everyone considers this sufficient evidence that the valley lacks vision. Hollins Supervisor Bob Johnson contends the valley - or, at least, the county - has vision but doesn't get credit for it.
"You name another community anywhere in this area that has faced and solved these problems. Number One: We have a new airport terminal and a joint commission to run it. Number Two: We have solved for the next 100 years the disposal of solid waste. Number Three: We have a pumped storage reservoir that will meet through the year 2040 the water needs of the valley, not just Roanoke County. Number Four: We have with Botetourt County built a joint fire station, a library, installed water and sewer in the Oldfields community. You tell me that isn't vision. People say vision is things of a lofty purpose. That is poppycock."
Maybe, but "Roanoke, the Community with Good Infrastructure" doesn't have the sex appeal of, say, "Durham, City of Medicine." Besides, economic development experts such as Bob Heinz of Columbus, Ohio, say industrial parks and other infrastructure are the minimum requirement in today's marketplace.
A community needs more to attract jobs of the future, says Heinz, whose company, Tech Resources, advises municipalities and utilities on economic development. But, he says, talking up the community's "quality of life" isn't it - a warning that strikes close to home in the Roanoke Valley, where leaders frequently tout the region's "quality of life" as its chief asset.
Too many communities, Heinz says, "get bogged down in `my place is the garden spot of the world' and when you have no vision, that's all you can talk about it."
"What people need to do is make themselves stand out. If you just say `it's a garden spot,' it goes in the round file. Yes, quality of life is important. But if a company can't be profitable in a certain location, they're not going to go there."
Instead, a community must be able to advertise why it's better suited for a particular type of industry than any other, Heinz says. That's why urban-policy analysts say a community needs a harshly objective appraisal of what it can become - and what it can't.
Bill McCoy, who heads the Institute for Urban Studies at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte, says even a fast-growth city such as Charlotte has reconciled itself to limitations.
"We know we can't be a big high-tech center because we don't have the educational framework to make it happen." As a result, he says, Charlotte has focused on more mundane sectors of the economy - banking, transportation, distribution.
Some limitations can't be overcome. Roanoke never will be a port city or a state capital. And unless the mountains miraculously move, the valley never will be suitable for companies that require vast tracts of flat land.
But some cities have sought to overcome limitations by laying in the infrastructure designed to attract specific types of industries - the "build it and they will come" philosophy that Austin and Spokane took when they set up high-tech research centers or Indianapolis did when it built sports facilities.
The concern about the valley's vision isn't limited to the public: More than half of the elected officials surveyed in the Roanoke Valley Poll - mostly in the city and county - said the valley suffered from little vision. They even ranked it as their No. 1 worry. "We're all in this together," Bowers says, though he adds the valley rarely acts like it. "We need a shared agenda," Vinton Supervisor Harry Nickens says.
When elected officials say there's no community vision, that's a sure sign there isn't one, warns Accordino, the VCU urban policy analyst. "When the folks who are at the wheel lack confidence, it's an alarm signal . . .
"If they say there is no vision, then you have a problem."
Why the fuss over vision?
Whether it's in boardrooms or council chambers or the White House, the search for the elusive vision is driven by the same thing - the shifting of the economy as the industrial age gives way to the information age.
"As a nation, we're going through a very significant economic transition from one era to another, and everybody would like to know what's going to happen between now and 2025," says Gilley, the Marshall president who grew up in Roanoke and once served as Virginia's secretary of education. "All the old rules are being replaced by new rules. If we knew what the new rules would be, we could be the John D. Rockefellers of the new paradigm."
He hears Roanoke's complaint about "little community vision" echoed in his new home in Huntington, W.Va., and many other places around the country. "I guess if you went to 100 metro areas of 100,000 to 250,000 people, in two-thirds to three-fourths of them you would be seeing some of the same concerns" because they're the ones hardest hit by the changing economic rules.
In some cases, these cities were dominated for years by single employers that shaped their identities.
"In Roanoke, it was the railroad," says McCoy, the UNC-Charlotte urban policy analyst. In Winston-Salem, it was RJR, the tobacco and food giant that moved its headquarters to Atlanta.
"If something happens to that one company, your system is shot all to hell." In some cases, he says, the practical effects of the loss are more imagined than real. Nevertheless, "it's the perception of loss."
That's led those cities to search for a new economic base, a new identity, a new vision of what they want to become.
"We have been forced by economic circumstances to ask fundamental questions," says Bob Matson, who works with community leadership at the University of Virginia's Center for Public Service. Meanwhile, communities have been forced by those same circumstances to look beyond their borders and recognize that, in a global marketplace, it's not enough for each locality to have its own economic development strategy.
Increasingly, communities are turning to regional strategies and visions - from the Rust Belt, where Ohio rivals Lorain, Elyria and Lorain County have put aside years of feuding and united behind a single economic development agency to staunch the flow of industrial jobs, to the Sunbelt, where the 13 counties around fast-growing Charlotte are beginning to talk jointly about their future.
After all, it's not just a matter of neighboring jurisdictions fighting over whether a factory will locate here or there. Now the emphasis is on entire types of industries rising and falling - and whole regions scrambling to be either the next Silicon Valley or avoid becoming the next Fairless Steel Works.
"That's why you need vision," says Heinz, the Ohio economic development adviser. "You need people who not only understand where the economy is going in my little patch of real estate, but where is the national economy going? The global economy?"
That's also why vision requires consensus. A study commissioned by fearful California leaders concluded that the main reason Austin threatens Silicon Valley's dominance in high-tech isn't that Texas has lower wages and shorter commutes. Instead, the head of the San Jose Chamber of Commerce warned that Austin's main advantage is that the Texas city boasts "`community spirit,' which unites government, business and university leaders around common goals."
Among cities large and small, among those overwhelmed by hypergrowth and those suffering from population drains, among those that seem to be doing well but think they can do better, this search for "vision" has become the vogue. Cities typically adopt snappy titles to describe their program, often incorporating a futuristic-sounding date from the next century. With 2000 so close at hand, the preferred year now seems to be 2020, which provides a nice double meaning. So there's Vision Tempe 2020, Central Oklahoma 2020 and San Antonio 2020. There's Vision Indianapolis Tomorrow, the MetroVision Partnership in New Orleans, and McAllen Vision in McAllen, Texas. Roanoke went through its own "visionary process" in 1985 and is starting to update the 102-page "Roanoke Vision" book that grew out of it.
So many cities are claiming to be creating a "vision" that the term has become debased, says Accordino. Just because a city is engaged in what it calls a vision process doesn't necessarily mean the city really has a vision, he says.
So how do you know?
First, urban policy planners agree, everybody in the community has to know what it is - and generally support it. If the vision is a planning document that only people in city hall know about, such as "Roanoke Vision," that's not a true vision, Accordino says; instead, it's a fancy name for another government report.
Even if a community's government planners, elected officials and business leaders agree on what its goals should be, that's still not a vision.
Norris at the National Civic League has developed a test to determine whether a city has vision: Ask a cab driver. The cab driver, on the way from the airport to downtown, should be able to give a business prospect the same pitch about a community's hopes and fears as the chamber of commerce.
The mistake many community leaders make in drawing up their long-range plans, he says, is they forget to tell the public what they're doing, and why. "It doesn't work if it comes out of the Chamber of Commerce, or government, or a small group of business leaders," Norris says.
Part of this is psychological. But more importantly, there's a practical reason why the general public should be so involved, Norris says. When it comes time to vote on spending money for certain projects, elected officials must feel confident - or feel the heat - that this is what the public wants.
The second test of whether a community has vision is more complicated: Just because everybody knows about a community's plans and agrees on them still doesn't mean a vision exists.
A community's vision must be based on analysis of long-range trends, not a single, grand act that might be momentarily popular, Accordino says. "Let's say city council says, `We'll build the world's largest amusement park.' You could then do a poll and it would show, `Oh, yes, we have a vision.' But that amusement park may have as much chance of being built as a ladder to the moon. So that sentiment may not reflect reality."
Too often, he says, governments latch onto high-profile but ill-conceived projects. "Oftentimes, it's the sexy thing that substitutes for good vision," Accordino says.
He cites the example of Richmond's ill-fated Sixth Street Marketplace, a "festival marketplace" of shops that was supposed to save retail shopping in downtown. "If in Richmond in 1985, you had asked, `What is your vision?,' they'd say `Sixth Street Marketplace.' But two years later, there were a lot of questions and four years later, it was a big embarrassment. If someone had said, `What are the forces shaping downtowns today and how will they continue over the next 10 years?,' then I don't believe they'd have built Sixth Street Marketplace."
A real vision, Accordino says, crunches numbers and then outlines scenarios based on where the trend lines point - or where they might point if circumstances change.
A real vision will think what many consider the unthinkable, such as the departure of corporate mainstays. "If Roanoke had done this 10 to 15 years ago," he says, "you would have said, `OK, what happens to us if the railroad leaves? If the bank leaves?' "
Vision then would have meant anticipating the inexorable push to consolidate the nation's railroads and pondering whether the advent of interstate banking would do the same to the banking industry. The key is to figure out what visionary questions Roanoke Valley leaders ought to be asking themselves today.
by CNB