Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 31, 1993 TAG: 9306010217
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ERIC TRETHEWEY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
To the right, Tinker Cliffs are visible in the distance. Pastureland dotted with grazing cattle flanks the mountainside up to the roadbed. A file of trees below marks the course of Catawba Creek. Beyond is a patchwork of cropland and pasture, with here and there clusters of houses and farm buildings. The largest of these, directly below, is an experimental farm belonging to Virginia Tech.
On the far side of the valley, rising above the trees, you can see part of the main building of the State Hospital for Mental Health And Mental Retardation. The panorama is gloriously bucolic, a reminder of rural America as it once was, a network of small farming communities living close to the land, the seasons, the cycles of the sun and moon.
Like so much of rural America, this relatively unspoiled landscape is about to be botched.
Because the large Tech farm is public land, it remains a constant temptation for government bureaucrats who have no end of ideas about how their particular agency might put it to better use than farming. A few years back, someone had the bright idea to put a prison there.
On that occasion, several of us circulated a petition, the community rallied, and the project was derailed.
Now, another project is afoot, this time with the blessing of Roanoke County and our own representative to the Board of Supervisors, Ed Kohinke. The Virginia Department of Transportation is interested in establishing a training facility for operators of heavy highway-maintenance equipment: snowplows, graders, dump trucks, etc.
Driving along 311 down Catawba Mountain, you can see paved segments of the old switchback road that 311 replaced. The old road crosses Catawba Creek - the old bridge is still standing - and runs beside the Tech farm, joining Virginia 779 just beyond it. VDOT wants to lease this land from Tech and, among other things, use it and the old roadbed to practice operating these large machines.
In March, representatives from VDOT and Roanoke County visited Catawba to present their proposal to the Ruritan Club. They were doing this, they reiterated, because they did not want to be where they were not welcome. They wanted, they said several times, to be "good neighbors."
Not a member of Ruritan, I was at first gratified to have the opportunity to participate in a public forum engaging an issue that concerned me. But I became disenchanted when I discovered this was a forum in name only, several members of the club having made up their minds already and invited the VDOT people only to assure them of the foregone conclusion that the community would welcome the project.
Other club members had not even heard about the issue. As things turned out, the vote after heated debate was 14-8 in favor of the VDOT proposal. Undoubtedly, some members of the Catawba Ruritan Club, not all of whom reside in Catawba, favor having taxpayer dollars spent in Roanoke County, even if it does mean threatening a community and destroying the peace and beauty of an irreplaceable natural resource such as the Catawba Valley.
The most eloquent moment came when a Ruritan member who voted against the proposal asked: "Has anyone here ever seen one of these Department of Transportation training facilities?" No one had.
Well, he had lived next to one before moving to Catawba. It looked and sounded, he said, like "a massive, permanent construction site."
I left the meeting sick at heart about the future of the community, and annoyed at the presumption of an organization that would speak for that community with so little knowledge of or care for what most of the residents actually thought. My next-door neighbor, for instance, is a lifelong resident of Catawba who owns approximately 200 acres and who vehemently opposes the VDOT plan. But she wasn't consulted.
In fact, the only women at the meeting were those who prepared and presented the meal. None were members of the organization, none participated in the discussion, and none voted.
The next day, several people in the community began to circulate a petition. Apart from the Ruritan members who had voted to welcome the VDOT proposal, we could discover no one in Catawba who was in favor of it. Opposition was overwhelming.
Indeed, when a story about the issue appeared in the Roanoke Times & World News - a story misrepresenting (perhaps inadvertently) both the size of the proposed facility and local opposition to it - I received a spate of telephone calls from citizens offering support in our efforts to oppose a project so obviously counter to the well-being of the community.
Try as they might to minimize the impact such a facility would have on the environment and the community, VDOT officials and county administrators cannot convincingly deny that a number of very large, heavy machines would incessantly lumber across good farmland within clear sight and hearing of passers-by on 311 and hikers on the Appalachian Trail.
These machines would make a constant noise, unavoidably tear up pastureland, and unavoidably pollute the soil and the creek with diesel fuel. Numerous small streams feeding into Catawba Creek would begin dumping silt instead of clear water.
The Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries has already requested the State Water Control Board to designate Catawba Creek "endangered species waters." Because of this, Catawba Hospital has been required to alter its waste-treatment procedures.
Even with the best of intentions on the part of its operators, such a facility as VDOT proposes, using land in the drainage basin of the creek and a road that crosses it, could not avoid negatively impacting the environment.
A genuine commitment to being "good neighbors" - to the natural environment, to the residents of Catawba, and to the many members of the general public who hike the Appalachian Trail - would lead the Virginia Department of Transportation to look elsewhere for a training-facility site.
Eric Tretheway, a resident of Catawba, is a poet and professor of English at Hollins College.
by CNB