Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 30, 1993 TAG: 9311240270
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It's not as if this is anything new for the place. The same thing happened two years ago, drenching shelves of fiction. Mostly just novels.
And what can you expect from an outdated building that originally housed a construction-supply store?
Is Montgomery County's Board of Supervisors really prepared to commit itself to a bond proposal to renovate the library? Are supervisors really going to risk getting out ahead of the citizenry?
OK, so library renovation and a new health-and-services building in Christiansburg are ranked as the county's top capital-improvement needs. We're still only talking about basic local-government services.
These library workers must be whiners. So what if the building leaks? If it barely meets the fire code. If it's noisy. If it's stuffed to the rafters with books. If its clientele has doubled in the past couple of years.
What's the big deal? A few more thunderstorms, and the staff would have many fewer books - and patrons - to worry about.
As for that human-services project, why the need to bring do-good functions under one roof? Really, how many citizens would ever need services from more than one agency?
OK, so the health department's current facility can get a little busy on clinic days, when waiting mothers with sick babies are crowded into the hallways and lines of patients stretch into the street. Hey, everyone's got to wait at their doctor's office, right?
County voters, don't forget, defeated bond-financing proposals for these two projects in 1990, albeit at a time when the national economy was in a downspin and voters weren't thinking much beyond their next payday.
OK, so maybe voters haven't always decided well on bond issues.
So maybe they wouldn't have rejected bond financing for new industrial- development sites, for instance, had they known the county would lose out to North Carolina this year on getting a new fiber-optics manufacturer and its 600 jobs.
Who knows - maybe the fact that the county lacked a ready-to-go site had nothing to do with the lost opportunity.
And, anyway, the supervisors, to their credit, have taken steps to acquire more land and to begin developing a new industrial park. If any business prospects also want to check on whether basic government services can keep pace with growth, there's an obvious solution:
Don't let them visit the library. (Cutting back the hours some more would make this easy enough.)
It's not as if industrial prospects ever have to know about the voting patterns in the 1990 referendum, in which the bonds won approval in Blacksburg but got the heave-ho elsewhere.
If they heard about that, they might wonder whether Montgomery has a split personality that pits jurisdiction against jurisdiction and works against the county's own best interests.
They might also wonder if this dysfunctional split extends to the governing board. Better not broadcast the fact that the board deadlocked 3-3 last week on whether to put the $1.9 million library bond issue on the November ballot, and also tabled the $2.9 million health-and-social-services project.
Both issues are scheduled to be discussed again today when Supervisor Jim Moore, who missed last week's meeting because he was out of the country, presumably will be available to break the impasse.
OK, so sooner or later these projects will need to go forward. And sooner might be better (with bond financing) than later (with a tax increase or by diverting current tax revenues from other needs).
So what? Meantime, librarians can put pails on the floor to catch the rain.
If there weren't another sharply divided vote today, county voters might get the idea that the Board of Supervisors actually supports the bond proposals. They might be shocked by the exposure to a new way of governing, called leadership.
by CNB