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

DATE: SATURDAY, December 10, 1994                   TAG: 9412300073
SECTION: EDITORIALS                    PAGE: A11   EDITION: METRO  
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WHO CARES ABOUT THE CITIES' ILLS?

The question: How do the cities convince counties and, more pointedly, the governor and General Assembly, that the entire state is feeling their pain - and has a stake in seeking remedies?

It won't be easy. The cities have tried before and, as one summit participant put it, have been dismissed as "a bunch of whiners."

But now the cities have influential allies: the Virginia Chamber of Commerce and some of the state's most prominent business leaders. The coalition, which Roanokers were influential in helping to form, is gathering evidence to buttress its case that urban woes - unemployment, crime, poverty, etc. - are hindering Virginia's chances of remaining economically competitive with other states.

The commonwealth's uniquely convoluted local-government structure, which financially isolates cities from counties and tends to pit jurisdictions against each other, is hardly the only hindrance to regional cooperation in fighting urban blight. But it doesn't help. By one estimate aired at the summit, it has proved a $6 billion liability, not just for the cities but for entire metropolitan areas.

Researchers at the Virginia Center for Urban Development at Virginia Commonwealth University extrapolated that admittedly soft figure from a comparison of job development in the Roanoke Valley and five other Virginia metropolitan areas with that of major metropolitan areas of North Carolina, which have enjoyed more flexible boundaries and more regional cooperation and planning than their neighbors to the north.

The difference over a 20-year period: 300,000 more private-sector jobs created in North Carolina - jobs that injected $6 billion into the economies of the North Carolina cities and their adjacent counties.

Summit participants nodded in agreement as speaker after speaker drove home the message:

"A declining urban core will affect the suburban communities that surround it, and the economic strength of the entire region will suffer," said Virginia Power President James Rhodes. "So when the suburbs turn their backs on the core cities, or when cities fail to cooperate with their suburbs, they do great harm to their own prosperity."

"We cannot have a competitive Virginia as long as we have cities in various stages of sickness," said Warner Dalhouse, chairman of First Union National Bank of Virginia. "We cannot be competitive, we cannot even be healthy as a commonwealth, without very healthy urban centers."

But as yet another speaker put it, "Nodding of heads won't row the boat." The challenge facing the urban-business coalition will be first to fashion politically realistic proposals, then convince a legislature increasingly dominated by suburbs that everyone has an interest in addressing cities' ills.

The coalition plans to spend the next year doing more research, defining the extent of the problem and developing recommendations to take to the 1996 General Assembly. Eventually, the partnership will have to make special efforts to bring county officials and state lawmakers to the table. On Thursday, it was mostly preaching to the choir.

Even so, the summit had the earmarks of a breakthrough event. It was an unprecedented coming together of public and private sectors to try to force an end to widespread apathy toward the ailments of Virginia's central cities. It was a good start for an important effort.