Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 1, 1994 TAG: 9405020014
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
What if they threw an election and no one came? Roanoke may be about to find out.
At many of the neighborhood question-and-answer forums this spring, the seven City Council candidates and their campaign workers have outnumbered the ordinary citizens who bothered to show up.
At least one session was canceled for sheer lack of interest.
It's not as though Roanoke voters have always been so uninterested in their city's government.
In the past few years, City Council has been rocked by one controversy after another that sent angry citizens packing council chambers to vent their opinions:
On the 2-for-1 pension plan for council members and top administrators.
On the forced resignation of Finance Director Joel Schlanger after it was discovered he was running a private business out of his city office and had rung up more than $1,700 worth of personal long-distance calls at taxpayers' expense.
On the short-lived effort to study taking over the Roanoke Gas Co. lines within the city.
Yet now, in the first municipal election since those controversies erupted - an election in which four of council's seven seats will be up for grabs - few voters seem to care who's on council.
What gives?
Simple, Republican candidate John Parrott says: Nothing. "There's no raging controversy out there that anybody can take a big stand on," he says.
Keep in mind that Parrott, as a Republican, is one of the challengers - council's current lineup is 5-2 in the Democrats' favor. When even a candidate from the party out of power says there's no big issue on which to wage the campaign, you know things are quiet.
To be sure, some of the candidates say they still can feel reverberations from the 2-for-1 plan as they campaign door-to-door.
"A sour taste in the mouth," is how Democratic candidate Nelson Harris puts it.
"I think there is resentment out there," fellow Democratic candidate John Edwards agrees, "but it hasn't come up a whole lot."
Why not?
For one thing, Harris says, "People got a lot of that out during the [Democratic] primary because in the primary you had two candidates who stood to benefit from 2-for-1, Mr. [Jimmy] Harvey and Mr. [Jim] Trout."
They both lost.
Perhaps the results of the Democratic primary really did put the issue to rest, as Harris suggests.
It also deprived Republicans of what would have been their campaign theme: It's time for a change.
Many Republicans had hoped Harvey and Trout would win Democratic nominations because their presence on the May ballot would have set up a clear contrast between the Democratic "ins" and the Republican "outs."
Instead, almost all of the candidates on Tuesday's ballot can claim to be outs.
Five of the seven are making their first bid for elected office.
The sixth, Edwards, is in the enviable position of being both an incumbent and a council newcomer. He was appointed to council five months ago after Beverly Fitzpatrick Jr. resigned to head a regional planning group. That means Edwards can honestly claim both experience and a fresh perspective, whichever suits the moment.
The only true incumbent is Democrat William White, who was not prominently identified with the 2-for-1 episode - or any other council controversy, for that matter.
If events of the past aren't an issue, neither are the anticipated events in the city's future.
For instance, the candidates generally agree the city needs to build a trade show center, but not until after the Hotel Roanoke conference center is up and running.
And they all agree that citizens should get a chance to vote on whether the city scraps its present method of electing council members citywide in favor of some version of a ward system.
Fact is, there's been precious little they've outright disagreed on.
For a while, the two candidates seeking to fill the remaining two years of Fitzpatrick's term - Democrat Linda Wyatt and Republican John Voit - showed signs of striking sparks.
Voit accused Wyatt - who won the Democratic primary with strong support from labor unions, teachers, gays and Gainsboro neighborhood activists - of being captive to "left-wing, special-interest groups."
He took particular exception to her pledge to don a hard hat and go onto the Hotel Roanoke construction site to "count noses" to make sure the city's hiring goals for minority and female contractors and subcontractors were being met. A "confrontational" approach that will scare off potential employers, Voit called it.
Wyatt stuck by her stand on affirmative action but refused to strike back, and there's been little action on that front since then.
Instead, in a crowded field where voters can mix and match, the candidates have mostly concentrated on winning favorable notice for themselves and for the particular issue they're pushing.
For Republican Barbara Duerk, that's more emphasis on quality-of-life topics. For Edwards, that's a strategic plan for economic development. For Harris, that's more attention to teen pregnancy and Victory Stadium. For Parrott, it's calling for the city to focus more on helping local businesses expand. For Voit, that's urging the city to "privatize" some government services. For White, that's stressing his experience and level-headedness. For Wyatt, that's calling for more attention to education.
To be sure, if you listen closely, you can still hear allusions to the 2-for-1 and other flaps. Wyatt laces virtually every campaign talk with calls for "open and responsive government." During the primary, those were powerful code words to remind voters that Harvey had backed the pension plan. They may be less clear now.
In many ways, the candidate who most tries to tap into the city's vein of populism is none other than the Republican from affluent South Roanoke - Duerk.
She's a candidate who defies easy labeling. On the one hand, the neighborhood activist accuses City Council of operating by a "good ol' boy" mentality that's grown out of touch with the citizenry.
"I've been before City Council the last few years and many of my ideas are not treated responsively," she says.
On the other hand, Duerk is hardly a classic populist. She may be trying to harness voters' disenchantment with city government, but she's trying to channel it into support for quality-of-life issues such as recreation.
That's not exactly the lower-taxes-and-better-services pitch that mobilized populist-minded blue-collar voters in past elections.
Duerk's big example of council's closed-mindedness? When council rejected her call for cops on bikes, she made a lobbying trip to the Police Department, which eventually embraced the concept.
Duerk is an anomaly in another way: Here's a Republican who's trying to drum up populist sentiment against the biggest business to come Roanoke's way this year - the proposed Wal-Mart superstore.
Probe deep enough, and you'll find some of the candidates are in fundamental disagreement with one another, although those disagreements are rarely highlighted in the candidate forums.
For instance, five of the seven candidates say City Manager Bob Herbert is doing a fine job. But Harris calls Herbert's performance "fair" to "poor," faulting Herbert for mishandling the Roanoke Gas takeover attempt and being inattentive to social issues.
Duerk, meanwhile, says Herbert is probably doing a good job doing what he's currently assigned - but she'd want to change his job description to include more emphasis on quality-of-life matters.
There also are hidden disagreements on regional cooperation. White takes a hard line, saying suburban Roanoke County must pitch in to help pay for the city's social problems before the city joins on other cooperative ventures.
But Parrott blames the city, saying Roanoke's government leaders too often give the impression they don't care what happens outside the city limits. He insists the city must take the lead in showing it's willing to cooperate.
In the campaign's closing days, both sides have tried to stir some enthusiasm among city voters. Republicans have brought in Gov. George Allen and Attorney General Jim Gilmore, hoping to capitalize on the popularity of the new administration in Richmond.
Democrats have warned that GOP candidates Voit and Duerk would endanger the city's public schools by their willingness to consider "vouchers" that parents could cash in at private schools.
Duerk may have gotten the most attention, though, when she attacked the risque Girls, Girls, Girls nightclub, calling it an embarrassment to the city.
Yet these issues don't necessarily speak to the "unease" and "angst" that some of the candidates say they've detected among voters.
"There's a restlessness out there in the body politic," Edwards says. "The demand for change we saw in '91 [in state legislative races], that we saw again in '92 [during the presidential election], and that we saw again in '93 [during the governor's race] is still there."
How they express restlessness on Tuesday could determine the makeup of City Council from now until 1998.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB