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

DATE: THURSDAY, October 6, 1994                   TAG: 9410060053
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

STRIKE FORCE PRESENTS ITS SUGGESTIONS

Virginia should change the name of its hunting-and-fishing agency to the Department of Wildlife Resources, sell the state-owned yacht and pass private-property-rights legislation, say some citizens in search of a better state bureaucracy.

Other ideas: cut off the Virginia Museum of Natural History in Martinsville, now supported by $2 million in state money, and lift the requirement for annual auto inspections, which cost citizens about $60 million a year.

Renaming the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries and the other ideas may be among the hundreds of recommendations presented to the Governor's Commission on Government Reform, also known as the "blue ribbon strike force," which meets in Richmond today.

The panel of 56 citizens hand-picked by Gov. George Allen, plus four state officials, will give thumbs up or down to a slew of recommendations from 10 issue-oriented committees, including one on natural resources.

Allen created the strike force earlier this year to shake up and shuffle things around in state government to achieve a more user-friendly, efficient organization. The committees have worked most of the summer, talking with bureaucrats and the public, to come up with their recommendations.

"We think it's a sham," Andrea Trank, a lobbyist with the Virginia Chapter of the Sierra Club, said Tuesday. The organization, along with Virginia Citizen Action, held a news conference Tuesday in Richmond to denounce the strike-force method.

Trank said the natural-resources committee has avoided public scrutiny by meeting secretly and classifying documents as working papers of the governor, which are exempt from the state's Freedom of Information law.

She agreed the state should sell the state-owned yacht, called the Chesapeake, "and give the money to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation."

But Trank and other environmentalists fiercely oppose any form of private-property-rights legislation, which would compensate landowners when environmental regulations devalue their property.

The natural-resources committee released a list of 43 preliminary recommendations last month, but no background to explain their ideas. That documentation should be made public today, said Bruce Meadows, spokesman for the strike force.

Those nixed by the commission "will be gone," Meadows said. The rest will go to public hearing, starting in Roanoke, Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the auditorium of Virginia Western Community College.

by CNB