Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, January 11, 1994 TAG: 9401110185
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: MARTINSVILLE LENGTH: Long
When leaders of this layoff-wracked industrial city learned last week that their cultural "crown jewel" wants to put its long-dreamed of expansion in Roanoke County instead, they reacted as if they'd just taken a sucker punch from a friend.
The news would have hurt no matter how it was delivered, but finding out that talk of merging the Martinsville-based Virginia Museum of Natural History with the Explore Park had gone on for at least six months - and that Roanoke Valley politicians already were lining up support for the action - only heightened the sense of betrayal.
Those emotions were evident Thursday at what normally is the most unemotional of settings, a meeting of the community's Economic Development Board, where the museum's executive director hurriedly appeared to explain what she had done and why.
Did you study museum management in college? the board's chairman, Martinsville business leader George Lester, pointedly inquired.
"No," Museum Director Connie Gendron replied, "I studied political science."
"You're a master at that," Lester grumbled.
The next few weeks and months may tell just how much of a master she, or anyone else connected with the museum-Explore merger plan, really is.
If there's one thing that's clear so far, it's that the proposal - to study putting Explore under the museum's umbrella, with the Martinsville museum staying open but its envisioned $16 million expansion going to Explore instead - got off to a bad start politically.
Martinsville legislators were briefed Dec. 22 by Del. Richard Cranwell Cranwell, D-Roanoke County, and state Sen. Brandon Bell, R-Roanoke County, about the proposed short-term merger - but not the part about the museum's longrange expansion being redirected to Roanoke.
They felt blindsided.
For the record, Cranwell will say only that he'd "brainstormed" a simple museum takeover of Explore, nothing more.
If the talk had stayed just on that, the Martinsville legislators didn't seem to have much objection.
However, the museum's leadership had privately viewed that merger as the springboard to redirect its expansion away from a proposed site in Martinsville and put it instead on Explore's 1,300 wooded acres astride the Blue Ridge Parkway - even going so far as to scout the park for possible sites.
That wrinkle was the idea Bell heard about and began championing - and it was that wrinkle which came across in Martinsville as a Roanoke attempt to "steal" the city's museum. "Rape, pillage and burn," was how Lester angrily described the way Roanoke's legislators were treating Martinsville.
No wonder that Martinsville legislators immediately started squawking that they might be against any study, period, if it's simply a first step to ratifying the museum's Roanoke plans.
"You can count me out," declared Del. Ward Armstrong, D-Henry County.
As a result, some Roanoke Valley legislators now blame Bell for talking too openly about the museum's long-range plans (at one point, he had considered calling a news conference in Roanoke with the museum's board chairman to outline the scheme) instead of keeping his mouth shut the way Cranwell had when confronted with reports that a mere merger deal was in the works.
"You have to work on a sub rosa basis," said Del. Clifton Woodrum, D-Roanoke, who employed the old metaphor about lawmaking being much like sausage-making to explain why secrecy was essential. "You don't need to know what's in the sausage to enjoy it."
So what does Woodrum think of the plan? "Let me say the words Brandon needed to say: `No comment.'"
But the finger-pointing doesn't stop there. It's already reached Richmond - and beyond.
The state's secretary of conservation and natural resources weighed in last week, taking time out from an environmental conference in Maryland to find a telephone in the hotel lobby and make sure folks back home knew where she stood.
Elizabeth Haskell, who's from Martinsville and whose secretariat oversees the museum, blamed the merger scheme on Explore backers in Roanoke who covet the museum as a way to "rescue the financially failing project."
Haskell made it clear she doesn't have much use for Explore.
She noted that when Explore Park Director Rupert Cutler came to her in September seeking state funding for the living-history park, she not only sent him away empty-handed, she followed up with a letter chastising him for even asking for state funds in the first place.
But in the sharpest cut of all, Haskell also derisively labeled Explore a "theme park," an image it's been trying to shake for years as Cutler has reshaped its original Disney-like design into something more educational.
But mostly, Haskell blamed Gendron. "I'm baffled with the museum director and why she would do this," Haskell said.
She's not the only one in Martinsville.
The flashpoint is the secrecy with which Gendron has pursued both the plan to merge with Explore and the added plan of putting the museum's expansion somewhere other than in Martinsville - secrecy that Gendron says was not only essential, but appropriate.
The merger plan came to light before Christmas, when a member of the Martinsville-Henry County Economic Development Board warned she'd been told by a "reliable source" that the museum might be moved to Roanoke.
But Gendron, contacted by the Martinsville Bulletin, described such talk as "general gossip" - a phrase she now admits was a "poor choice of words" - and the subject was dropped, at least publicly.
Over the next two weeks, though, Bell and Gendron collaborated on his legislative initiative to study a merger, and the museum's executive committee violated the state's Freedom of Information Act by holding an unannounced meeting via telephone conference call to agree that they'd support Bell's resolution.
By the time the full scope of the plan broke in the Roanoke Times & World-News on Jan. 6, Bell and Gendron were laying out the details, with plenty of numbers to back up their contention that Martinsville isn't a good tourist draw for the museum's proposed expansion.
Now the museum's 25-member board of trustees is in turmoil, with some trustees (mostly the handful from the Martinsville area) claiming they were kept in the dark by the director and the seven executive committee members who held the conference call.
These board members pledge to make the board's Jan. 25 meeting in Richmond a lively session about both the director's action and the museum's future. But Gendron crisply - and correctly - points out that the museum's future is now no longer just a board issue. With Bell planning to introduce a study resolution, "it's a General Assembly issue," she said.
Gendron says her obligation is to protect the state's interest in the museum, not Martinsville's - and by quietly exploring the museum's expansion options in Roanoke, she's doing just that.
Nevertheless, she said, "some people have reacted emotionally. It's my job to take the heat." She's had to take it on an intensely personal level, too.
Gendron grew up in Roanoke, a particular point of interest on the Martinsville grapevine. Recently divorced, Gendron has put her house on the market and intends to move back to Roanoke because she says "for personal reasons" she'd rather commute to Martinsville than live there.
As a result, she's had to endure stinging talk in Martinsville that this is all part of a personal agenda to move back to Roanoke and take her museum with her. Or, as Gendron puts in, in Martinsville "I'm Darth Vader."
Sunday, the Martinsville Bulletin joined the outcry, with an editorial calling for her resignation. "We believe Gendron's handling of this whole thing has damaged - if not destroyed - her trust and credibility with area residents, including potential contributors and volunteers," the newspaper said.
What happens next? That depends on how Bell's call for a study fares in the General Assembly, and how actively the Martinsville legislators oppose it.
"We may never get it past the emotionalism," Bell says, likening it to another merger idea he once championed, without success. "It may be like [city-county] consolidation, you never get it past the emotions."
by CNB