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

DATE: THURSDAY, June 24, 1993                   TAG: 9306240487
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A12   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

ROANOKE BUILDS ICONS OF FAILURE

ROANOKE is in a state of emergency with regard to future growth and development. This is exemplified through the fleeing of recent college graduates, who have to leave their families to pursue worthwhile careers. The city's administration needs to break old habits of attempting to stimulate growth through renovated hotels (Hotel Roanoke), and status-quo buildings of glitter. The Dominion Tower is the icon of the city's failure to provide insight for growth. This building was constructed as an attempt to bring Roanoke into the 21st century at the same time banks hastily consolidated nationwide to restore their financial strength. Predictably, Dominion Bank lost 800 employees.

How can the city justify its lack of opportunity in career fields of the future, such as the computer industry, engineering, communications and financial services? Especially when Virginia Tech is a hop, skip and a jump away, offering excellent education in all of these fields. How can "the old boys' club" sit back and watch the skills of the future evacuate and not focus on attracting business or premises that are substantial?

Nature parks (such as Explore), ostentatious structures of the capitalist ideal and restored hotels of nostalgia offer little for the remaining victims who continue to work in vanishing blue-collar industries and the paltry doldrums of the telemarketing, retail and temporary world. Give your posterity opportunity through tangible means rather than obsolete dreamscapes retrospective of the financially negligent '80s! STEVE L. WILLIAMSON GERMANTOWN, MD.

by CNB