Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 12, 1994 TAG: 9407130013
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
In 1988, Congress appropriated $450,000 to study whether a visitors' information center should be built along the Blue Ridge Parkway near Roanoke. The study said yes.
Six years later, the parkway superintendent has given a different answer, and it's not one that Roanoke Valley leaders, eager to siphon more tourist dollars off the parkway, want to hear.
Forget it, he said. At least for now.
In response, Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Roanoke, and Roanoke County Supervisor Harry Nickens are gearing up for a new push to get a visitors' center built along the parkway.
There's even talk of a complex so grand it would help lure the parkway's headquarters back to the Roanoke Valley from Asheville, N.C. - although Goodlatte concedes that would be a long shot.
The quest for a visitors' center is emerging as one of the next big issues in the valley's attempt to fashion itself into a tourist draw. It's also an issue that's been lying around for nearly a decade, shining an illuminating light on how the federal government works.
\ By the late 1980s, the T-word had worked its way into the lexicon of Roanoke Valley leaders. Tourism. They wanted more of it. Specifically, they looked to a major tourist artery passing through the valley - the Blue Ridge Parkway - and wondered what they could do to lure more visitors off the road.
After all, they fretted, the parkway might be too good at providing scenic views of gorgeous countryside - an unsuspecting tourist could drive by the biggest city on the parkway and barely know Roanoke was there.
At the time, former City Manager Bern Ewert was developing plans for a $185 million Disney-like extravaganza along the parkway called Explore. But Ewert and other Explore planners said it wasn't enough for tourists to stop there; they wanted some way to direct parkway travelers to other attractions in the region.
What they wanted was a visitors' information center. So, Explore backers added the center to their wish list.
In 1988, thanks to then-Rep. Jim Olin on the House side and John Warner in the Senate, Congress included $450,000 in the National Park Service's budget to study a Roanoke Valley visitors' center. At the time, supporters saw that appropriation as the first of many.
It didn't work out that way, which helps explain the anxiety that now surrounds what otherwise seems a minor project.
For one thing, a slow-moving Park Service took four years to produce the study. It was not until late 1992 that a formal recommendation was made on where the center should be. And there the project stalled. As Olin said, "It's pretty dead right now."
Parkway Superintendent Gary Everhardt says he'd like to see a visitors' center built in the Roanoke Valley, but he also says it hasn't been a high priority.
"I don't have any time frame for it," he said, citing "the press of other matters" - such as the early retirements that have depleted his senior staff.
Everhardt also points out that two key ingredients have been missing - consensus on where to build the center and money.
In the two years since the study was completed, parkway and Roanoke County officials have quietly squabbled over the center's proposed location.
Of five sites, parkway officials chose the one that's on private land - a farm just east of Vinton owned by Al Hammond, who heads Printech, a Roanoke printing company.
Hammond's rolling hillsides have the best views, the parkway says.
But Hammond says he doesn't want to sell. That's no surprise; Explore has wanted his 275 acres for years, calling it vital to the park's plans to build a zoo. He's turned Explore planners down, too.
However, Hammond has proposed to build the center himself, then lease it to the park service.
Meanwhile, Roanoke County officials and Explore planners have pushed their favorite site - on the now-closed regional landfill, across which the parkway is scheduled to build an access road to Explore in 1996.
Their reasoning goes like this: That site is closer to Explore, now the valley's main attraction along the parkway. The parkway's own study said the landfill site was free from environmental hazards. A center there could even be used to show visitors how old landfills can be reclaimed.
Granted, even when the landfill is planted wih grass, the view won't be as spectacular as the one from Hammond's farm. But, best of all, the landfill is available - perhaps even free.
Nickens grumbles that in two years of letter-writing, the county can't get a straight answer on why the parkway won't change its mind and take the landfill site.
"On many occasions, I've asked Gary face to face, 'What are your concerns?' They were never answered. I couldn't get anything from him."
On June 6, however, county officials did get an answer, and this one was exceedingly plain.
Everhardt wrote that, of the $450,000 originally appropriated to study the visitors' center, only $180,000 had been spent.
"Unfortunately, we now find that we will be unable to resume deliberations," he wrote.
The reason: The rest of the money had been "re-programmed" by higher-ups in the National Park Service and spent elsewhere.
Everhardt said that happens frequently.
Nickens was furious; he has spent much of the time since marshaling support among valley leaders to make another push for the visitors' center.
"I think there is a broad consensus it's a high priority," said County Administrator Elmer Hodge.
Everhardt's letter saying there's no money to even talk about the center also got the attention of Olin's successor in Congress - Goodlatte.
At the opening ceremonies for Explore on July 1, both Goodlatte and Nickens used their formal remarks to call for a visitors' center.
Nickens even said the valley should organize a campaign to persuade federal officials to move the parkway's headquarters back to Roanoke, where they were located until being moved to Asheville in 1972.
Goodlatte says he's willing to make a play for the headquarters, but calls that an uphill battle at best. The parkway is still operating out of cramped, temporary quarters in Asheville, but that city's congressman just won $910,000 in federal funds to begin planning for what he anticipates will be a $14 million headquarters building there.
Goodlatte, however, says he will convene a meeting soon among interested parties in the Roanoke Valley to plot strategy on how to get the visitors' center built. "I'm sure we can keep the effort going," he said.
Already, at the Explore ceremonies, Goodlatte buttonholed Everhardt to discuss the lack of planning money. "Everhardt feels the money that was 're-programmed' for other uses can be 're-programmed' again once we have something to focus on," Goodlatte said.
Even so, that would only be enough for more planning.
What's really needed, Goodlatte notes, is someone in Congress to push for the funding to build the center.
But that may not be as easy as it once was.
Congress - or, more precisely, the Illinois Democrat who chairs the House subcommittee that handles park service funding - has effectively declared a moratorium on funding visitors' centers.
"Sid Yates is the 800-pound gorilla," said Explore Park director Rupert Cutler, who knows his way around Washington from his days as a Carter administration official in the late 1970s and an environmental group leader in the 1980s.
The problem, said Yates spokesman Neil Sigmund, is that the National Park Service has been overwhelmed by members of Congress trying to get visitors' centers built at parks in their district. "We had 30 to 35 requests from members in a given year to build these things," he said.
Yates' response has been to quash funding for all of them - unless the localities agree to pick up some of the cost. In the past two years, Sigmund said, Congress has approved just three visitors' centers. In each case, localities agreed to pay 50 percent of the construction costs.
That unofficial requirement has caught Roanoke Valley officials by surprise - especially when the minimum price of a visitors' center seems to be $5 million, not including land acquisition.
"That's news to me," Goodlatte said.
That will give valley officials even more to talk about when they meet with him. They also may find themselves talking about what might have been.
After the initial appropriation to study the visitors' center, Olin went back to Yates' appropriations subcommittee to seek a second installment - this time, $1.5 million to buy the land for it.
The committee approved the funding, Olin said, but the original study hadn't been completed and the possibility of putting the center on free land at the landfill had surfaced.
"So, I said, 'Hold on until we have an agreement on location,'" Olin said.
He then did something almost unheard of on Capitol Hill - he had the money removed from the budget bill. Olin says grateful committee members assured him he could come back the following year and get the funding.
"When I came back a year later, [Yates] said he was sorry, they were not doing that kind of funding anymore," Olin said.
by CNB