Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, May 15, 1993 TAG: 9305150249
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO NOTE: BELOW
SOURCE: DANIEL HOWES STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The Roanoke Valley didn't get a piece of the Tour DuPont this week, and some local leaders want to know why.
Friday, city and county officials bombarded by two days of media coverage were asking why the international cycling event pedaled from Lynchburg to The Homestead in Bath County one day and resumed in Blacksburg the next - never to grace the Star City.
"I have to tell you, the Tour DuPont should have come through Roanoke," Roanoke Mayor David Bowers said. "I think this points to a greater need for our regional community to share in the responsibility for marketing" the Roanoke region.
It doesn't take a network executive to realize that air time in 70 countries and coverage in more than 1,200 newspapers and magazines can prove invaluable to a Western Virginia city hoping for some free advertising.
Fuzzy Minnix, chairman of the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors, asked Economic Development Director Tim Gubala - also a director of the Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau - why the tour bypassed the valley. "I said, `Fuzzy, it never came to us. We never saw it,' " Gubala said.
While the cyclists headed south for North Carolina under sunny May skies, valley leaders talked of how the event could have snaked through the valley's many localities, giving it a truly regional flavor.
"It really would be ideal for an area like this," said Carey Harveycutter, director of the Salem Civic Center. "There's a lot of media exposure, and it doesn't cost a whole lot. It's quick and clean and . . . doesn't leave a lot of trash behind."
Harveycutter, also a director of the Convention and Visitors Bureau, played a key role in wooing college football's Division III championship game - the Amos Alonzo Stagg Bowl - to Salem from Bradenton, Fla. "Had we been more acquainted with [the Tour DuPont] we would have made an attempt to secure it."
Make no mistake: The valley's Convention and Visitors Bureau considered making a bid, said Martha Mackey, executive director. But requirements calling for 400 complimentary hotel rooms and free food and beverage service were deemed too expensive by a joint city-bureau committee.
More importantly, many of the valley's key hotels were booked with conventions that neither the bureau nor the hotels could afford to displace. "We've got groups in here that have been reserved for several years that we have contracts with," she said, explaining that litigation over broken convention contracts can prove devastating to a region's convention business.
"What you really bring is media time. When you're full, you're full. It's not that we'll never have the Tour DuPont here," Mackey said, suggesting the bureau likely would reconsider bidding for a leg of the tour.
Still, the fact remains: The Tour DuPont cycled all around Western Virginia's largest city - but not through it. And that's the rub for a valley struggling with what some call "an inferiority complex."
"We do have a tendency here in the city to react instead of act," City Councilman James Harvey said. "You've got to make some of the people realize economic development is more than just creating jobs and building buildings. Economic development is a broad spectrum of things, including events like the bicycle race."
In the past a backer of minor-league hockey and semi-pro football in the valley, Harvey said he would "go so far as to earmark part of our staff" to market sporting events for the valley.
Mackey said the convention bureau, increasingly focused on lining up convention business for the reopening of Hotel Roanoke, would like to devote staff time to sports marketing. But limited resources, despite dramatic funding increases from the county and, especially, the city, make such a move difficult.
The Tour DuPont's blow through Western Virginia - but not the valley - "proves to me that a lack of common focus has let the thing go through Buchanan instead of Salem and Roanoke or Vinton and Roanoke," said John Clarke, a managing director of Catawba Capital Management Inc. who also helped organize the 1991 Metro Conference basketball tournament in Roanoke.
"The spinoff from having Roanoke, the Roanoke Valley in USA Today . . . brings you a lot of goody points in the coming months and years," he said. "You got to get on the lead mule sometimes. If you don't, the view ain't ever going to change."
by CNB