Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 10, 1994 TAG: 9410110001
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Well, maybe not the actual practice of regional cooperation and planning. But the incessant talking caught on.
Indeed, since a commission headed by Hahn introduced the idea in the '60s, the rhetoric of regionalism has been a mainstay for nearly every state and local politician, and the concept has been promoted by statewide study commissions too numerous to count.
Today, the Hahn Commission's legacy officially resides at 21 regional planning-district offices, including the Roanoke-based Fifth Planning District Commission. Trouble is, a new state report says, Hahn's ideas have never ruled the PDC roost.
The report, by the General Assembly's Joint Legislative and Review Commission (JLARC), essentially says this: If state and local lawmakers are finally, no kidding now, serious about promoting regional approaches to regional problem-solving, they might do well to revisit the PDC concept as Hahn originally proposed it.
PDCs have over the years provided valuable services. As JLARC observes, they do good research, for instance, and can offer expert technical assistance to local governments lacking big planning staffs of their own.
But in large part because they get most of their funding from local governments, and many local-government officials have been less than keen (except rhetorically) about regionalism, the PDCs have not aggressively focused, as was the original intent, on regional planning.
Nor, suggests JLARC, has the commissions' mission been helped along by state government's ``lack of commitment to regionalism,'' as evidenced by ``lack of funding for regional initiatives,'' ``lack of state policy on the use of PDCs,'' and ``lack of state oversight and coordination.''
Alack and alas, the whole country has paid little more than lip service to regional planning. The JLARC report quotes a national government-policy researcher as saying that regional-planning organizations, in their inception, "were thought of principally as comprehensive planning agencies. Few are thought of that way today ... . They have become very entrepreneurial and, in the process, they have shifted their programs from regional planning to services of the type they can get paid for, either by local governments or by a rag-tag set of miscellaneous federal services programs.''
The JLARC staff thoughtfully provides options for state lawmakers: They could dump the PDCs on grounds that they're not working as envisioned, that regional approaches are really not a priority, or that state legislators have better ideas for pursuing regional problem-solving. Or they could redirect the PDCs to concentrate on the mission for which they were intended, and beef them up with ample state support to get the job done.
The latter course would be best. Regional cooperation is clearly happening, across a range of issues, in the Roanoke and New River valleys and elsewhere. But there could be a lot more of it. And of regional planning, there is very little - even though the need for it has become more urgent in the face of regional challenges not even around in Hahn's heyday.
In the PDCs, we have a potentially excellent resource. They should be reconfigured to match truer boundaries of regional economies, supported more seriously, and tapped to the fullest.
by CNB