Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 6, 1993 TAG: 9305060467
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-17 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RAY L. GARLAND
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It was the undoing of President Bush and may be the undoing of President Clinton. If we aren't careful, the politics of envy will cause a national nervous breakdown.
In searching for a miracle cure, Virginians at least know better than to look to Washington. They look a few hundred miles south, to Charlotte, N.C. In recent weeks, both the Richmond and Roanoke newspapers have devoted reams of space embellishing the basic theme, "Why can't we be more like Charlotte?"
Is governmental fragmentation the core problem?
Local governments in Virginia developed on the unusual principle of building a wall of separation between cities and counties. In most states, that wall doesn't amount to much: City residents remain county residents. Expanding city boundaries is relatively simple, because counties don't really lose citizens or tax revenues.
Under Virginia's system of "independent" cities, annexation in the age of suburbia became increasingly adversarial. When court-ordered busing for racial integration arrived in the early '70s, annexation in Virginia became a matter of bitter, protracted controversy. Not long afterwards, the General Assembly stopped involuntary annexation for the state's larger cities and left them to stew in their own juices.
As recent censuses passed more and more legislative power to suburban counties, the prospect that cities would gain meaningful relief has diminished almost to the vanishing point. The boundaries that Richmond, Roanoke, Norfolk, Portsmouth, Hampton, Petersburg and Danville have are the ones they're likely to keep.
Charlotte, meanwhile, kept chugging along. It has expanded its boundaries 25 times in the past 33 years and will soon do it again. Its population, roughly the same as Richmond's in 1970, is now twice as great. Within 20 years, some say, Charlotte will annex all the remaining unincorporated area of Mecklenburg County.
But it isn't just a matter of Charlotte and Mecklenburg. Local leaders have apparently succeeded in forging a regional alliance joining 12 nearby counties and six smaller cities having a total population of 1.6 million.
"One of the realities I've seen," says Charlotte Mayor Richard Vinroot, "we really do need to function as one . . . . The bottom line is creating jobs."
If the airport is now the chief barometer of economic vitality, then Charlotte is truly soaring. In 1992, Charlotte's airport served 18 million passengers compared with just under 1 million for Richmond.
But these figures may be somewhat misleading. Many of Charlotte's passengers were likely just changing planes in that strange ritual of modern aviation whereby those desiring to fly from Roanoke to Norfolk must go by way of Charlotte or Baltimore, leaving magnificent new airports in places like Roanoke served mainly by tiny commuter planes.
Let's hope the airlines soon discover that one of the reasons for their huge losses can be found in their hub-and-spoke system that makes it difficult and expensive for people to make short flights.
Having already snared a major-league basketball team for its new coliseum, Charlotte has set aside 30 acres downtown to build a $142-million stadium if it gets a National Football League franchise. It is also building a colossal convention center of 850,000 square feet - six times larger than the Richmond Centre and Coliseum combined!
Not everyone in the Queen City is so brimful of optimism, of course. "The problem now," says dissident Charlotte Councilman Don Reid, "is that the glory days are over. This ever-expanding tax base has come to a screeching halt and now we're faced with paying for all of these expensive projects . . . ."
My, my, our old neighbor has come a long way from the days when people spoke condescendingly of North Carolinians inhabiting a valley of humility between two mountains of conceit (Virginia and South Carolina). But the Old Dominion is still a considerably richer state than either of the Carolinas. In 1991, we had a per-capita income of $19,976, compared with $16,642 for North Carolina and $15,420 for South Carolina.
But a large portion of our advantage can be explained by the tremendous wealth of Fairfax County. As go-go as the Carolinas of late have become, they still have no resource quite so rich as the Northern Virginia suburbs. Remove that from the Virginia calculation, however, and we might discover the rest of the commonwealth is falling behind. If a Clintonized defense materializes, we may really be singing "Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina."
Virtually every state and local government in America is crying "jobs, jobs, jobs," and offering to throw in everything but the kitchen sink to get business to look its way.
When United Airlines imperiously invited offers for its proposed $800 million maintenance hub, almost everybody got in the act, including Virginia, which offered a generous package of inducements. But Indianapolis promised UAL $295 million in state and local aid and "won" the nod.
When it comes to big-ticket expansions, that's the game we must expect to play until Congress or the federal courts call a halt on grounds that these bidding wars impose an unfair burden on interstate commerce - as should be done.
Well, this is no more than a bird's-eye view of problems facing Virginia's core cities. Modest proposals for dealing with them must await next week.
Ray L. Garland is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB