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

DATE: SATURDAY, January 22, 1994                   TAG: 9401240248
SECTION: CURRENT                    PAGE: NRV-3   EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
SOURCE: By STEPHEN FOSTER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

PUBLIC TO GET IN ON GOAL-SETTING

The New Century Council is ready to take its broad canvas of goals to a public forum, and New River Valley residents will get their chance to suggest paint-strokes next week.

Thursday, the council released the results of five months of work: a list of seven swooping goals calling for the region to become a model in terms of higher education, quality of life, partnership and infrastructure during the next two decades.

Now the council wants the public to speak up at a hearing Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. at New River Community College.

``It's important to take ideas, visions, thoughts, strategies, all directly to the public,'' said Darrel Martin, assistant to the president at Virginia Tech. ``Ideas are not the province of any one group or any one sector.''

Among the things that he expects to be discussed are roads - the proposed Interstate 73 that has communities all over clamoring, the envisioned TransAmerica highway from Norfolk to Los Angeles, and the ``smart'' road.

He also is looking for talk about job training and retraining, entrepreneurial assistance and the all-encompassing question of how to get governments and agencies working together.

``It's a method of casting a net out'' for ideas, Martin said.

Cooperation is the name of the framework around which this council wants to build its plan for progress.

``This is where the hard sell is going to come,'' Blacksburg Mayor Roger Hedgepeth said. ``Somehow or other we've got to convince all these folks that we're bridging the assets of the two valley.''

The council, made up of more than 100 Western Virginia business, industry and government leaders, is like many economic planning and visionary groups, in that it ``always results in a certain degree of suspicion on the part of the general public,'' Hedgepeth said.

But, ``the final plan will have to be thoroughly understood by the public,'' and they will have to ``give it their blessing,'' if it's to work, he said.

``When you do some blue sky work, eventually you have to get down in the trenches,'' Hedgepeth said.

by CNB