Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 21, 1994 TAG: 9403210049
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MICHAEL STOWE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Trumbo feared that Martinez - a Washington insider at the end of the Reagan-Bush era and a former planner for Norfolk Southern Corp. - would overlook the needs of Southwest Virginia.
"Yeah, I was worried," the Fincastle Republican said. "He's lived around Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, so I didn't know what to expect."
Trumbo's concerns were put to rest in January when he sat in on a meeting between Martinez and a group of local business leaders who went to Richmond to lobby for the smart road.
Virginia's 38-year-old transportation chief was familiar with the proposed link between Blacksburg and Interstate 81 even before the local group Martinez made its pitch.
"I was really pleasantly surprised at his knowledge of the transportation projects in this part of the state," the senator said.
In his first three months in office, Martinez has done far more than bring himself up to speed on the region's major transportation projects. He has been surprisingly vocal in his support of the smart highway, as well as a proposed Interstate 73 route that would roughly parallel U.S. 460 and 220.
Martinez even said state money will be used to build part of the smart highway if a partnership between Virginia and General Motors wins a $150 million federal research grant.
Such talk is all part of the governor's promise to make economic development a top priority in Virginia.
"And we can't have economic development without efficient transportation," Martinez said.
Those are welcome words to smart-road backers who have been saying for more than five years that the link would spur economic growth and tie Roanoke closer with Virginia Tech.
"This helps immensely, there's no doubt about it," said Brian Wishneff, Roanoke's director of economic development. "We can cheer all we want; but in the final analysis, there's very little we can actually do" without state backing.
In the past, state support for the smart road has seemingly been mostly ceremonial.
If asked, former Transportation Secretary John Milliken would say he supported the smart road, but he never took the initiative to help complete the road. His boss, former Gov. Douglas Wilder, vetoed a 1992 bill that would have included a $28 million bond issue for the road.
The five-mile highway gained federal approval last year, but no money has been allocated for construction.
Martinez, with Allen's backing, promised that the state would fund the first two miles of the road if a consortium including Virginia and General Motors wins the federal grant to build a prototype automated highway.
"When we have the opportunities, we have to pursue them," Martinez said. "The smart road can make Virginia a national leader in intelligent vehicle systems."
Daphyne Thomas, a Democratic appointee from Harrisonburg in her second four-year term on the state's transportation board, said that while Martinez's economic development focus is on track, it won't be easy to implement - especially when it comes to the smart road, a project environmentalists have opposed from the start. "[Martinez] has set that as a priority, but that doesn't mean it won't still be controversial," she said. "I see getting money as the biggest obstacle."
Martinez concedes that it will be tough and holds out no promises to use state money for the link if the federal grant partnership with General Motors falls through.
"It's hard to say what we would do," he said.
Despite Trumbo's praise, Martinez admitted he still has a lot to learn about Southwest Virginia.
"I've been in and out of Roanoke a million times in my life, so I know the city well," he said, "but, quite frankly, I've got a lot to learn about areas west of there."
Nevertheless, Antoine Hobeika said he has high hopes that the smart road will make progress under the Allen administration.
"Martinez strikes me as very intelligent and knowledgeable," the director of Tech's Center for Transportation said. "He skips the fluff and gets right to the meat."
Focused - that's the word most often used to describe Martinez by his peers.
James McClellan, vice president of strategic planning for Norfolk Southern Corp., said his company hated to lose Martinez when he accepted a position in Allen's Cabinet.
"We certainly had him marked for bigger and better things here," he said. "He's very intense and well-disciplined."
Martinez earned a Ph.D. in political science from Yale in 1984.
After six years as assistant executive director of the Business Roundtable, a national group of business leaders based in New York, Martinez took a position as deputy administrator in the Maritime Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, in 1990. In 1992, he established the department's office of intermodalism as part of the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991.
His Washington career was cut short by the election of President Clinton. It was then that Martinez joined NS as a strategic planner. A lifelong conservative, Martinez said many of his ideas and values were shaped by the methods of "deceit and demagogy" that were forced on his native Cuba by Fidel Castro.
Castro came to power in 1959, promising to restore a democratic government destroyed by dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Martinez spent his first four years on a sugar plantation in Havana. He says he is still haunted by memories of a day more than 30 years ago when Castro's men forced his father to turn the business over to the government.
It was then that his family decided to escape.
Posing as vacationers, the Martinez family left their belongings behind and headed for Miami.
The transportation secretary - the first Hispanic ever to be included in a Virginia governor's Cabinet - still has not strayed from his roots. Only Spanish is spoken in the Richmond apartment where he lives with his wife, Christina, and 3-year-old son, Javier.
To this day, it is his disdain for Castro that drives Martinez to follow through with projects he believes in. "I think it's very important for political leaders not only to have good ideas, but to act on them," he said. "We're going to do our very best to do that."
But that won't be easy, no matter how good the intentions are, his former boss, McClellan, said.
"It's a big bureaucracy, much bigger than the railroad," he said. "I know how darn hard it is to get things done in the executive branch."
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