Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 22, 1995 TAG: 9501200118
SECTION: ECONOMY PAGE: 11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Sound intriguing? Several hundred Western Virginia residents believed it was and volunteered to help create the largest think tank this region ever has seen.
For more than a year, 26 citizen committees have been mulling over things such as how to prod and promote acceptable growth. That is, how to keep the farms while adding high-tech jobs.
The effort was orchestrated by a business-driven group, the New Century Council, and represents a region that is home for 400,000 residents. Botetourt, Craig, Floyd, Franklin, Giles, Montgomery, Pulaski, Alleghany and Roanoke counties are included, as are the cities of Covington, Clifton Forge, Radford, Roanoke and Salem.
An office was established with Roanoker Bev Fitzpatrick, a former banker and former Roanoke City Council member, as executive director. Consultants were hired to help the futurists develop the strategy to get them "visioning."
The idea was that, when it was all done, there would be action plans written that could become realities by 2015.
Ideas discussed in the committees have included:
Since the Roanoke Valley Resource Authority oversees the trash train and the landfill, why couldn't it also pick up the trash?
Should the area have a quality-of-life tax district that would provide funding for the arts?
Could funding for tourism development be on a regional basis?
Even though these issues have come up, none may emerge in the final report, which is still a few months away. On Tuesday however, the New Century Council will begin the first of a series of briefings on specific issues. The sessions, labeled as programs for media representaties, are described as "an deducational process that conversts information into knowledge, knowlegde into understanding and understanding into results" that are fundamental to the council's role.
Tuesday's session will meal with the region's future jobs and will include a panel of Carl McDaniels of Virginia Tech, Marjorie Skidmore of the Virginia Employment Commission, Abdul Turay of Radford University and Glynn Loope of the Alleghany Economic Commission. The session begina at 1:30 p.m. in the Central Fidelity Bank board room, 111 Franklin Road, in downtown Roanoke.
Oct. 12 marked the first anniversary of the New Century Council effort. The 26 committees are to complete their recommendations by Jan. 30. The recommendations will be reviewed by committee leaders who will have to combine similar proposals and prioritize items, and then get a final report to the steering committee by May 1.
The steering committee is made up of representatives of chambers of commerce and economic development groups and the Roanoke Valley Business Council. That group should be through with the material by June 1, Fitzpatrick said.
The process also has meant nearly 900 people have contributed to the drafting of ideas that may affect the region's future in coming years. We asked a sample of those people for their thoughts on what's ahead for Western Virginia. Here are their replies.
Steele envisions a monorail system that would connect the Roanoke and New River valleys. He said his idea would link the areas and create a thriving and united economy for the valleys.
Robert Fetzer, a general contractor from Roanoke, said his committee looked at ways to improve housing. Fetzer believes that better housing would give more people a reason to stay in Roanoke and would improve the city's future and quality of life.
"I think we were all looking at ways to re-energize the urban area," said Fetzer. "The city has a problem with housing deterioration."
He said that he thinks the city is losing the battle against substandard housing.
The committee talked about ways to help the elderly keep up their homes and to encourage property owners to maintain property.
\ Carole Terp and her husband, John, own a publishing company in Roanoke. They joined the leadership-regional communication team and the infrastructure team.
Carole Terp said the diversity of skills and expertise of the people on each committee impressed her the most.
"All of the people we came in contact with want the region to prosper through the years ahead and have all forms of communication, health education, transportation and economy accessible to all people and businesses in the New Century region at equal rates and reasonable costs," she said.
\ Beth Taylor, a loan fund manager with the Virginia Water Project Inc. of Roanoke, said the eagerness of the business people who worked together overwhelmed her. She did not expect to see about 900 volunteers.
She learned of the opportunities available through future communication systems and was impressed by the presentation on the information superhighway.
Taylor said she enjoyed learning how regional water systems affect people in rural areas and that we should focus more on those systems.
\ Keenan Pawley, a lawyer from Troutville, said he saw the council as an opportunity to have a voice in the valley's future. He thinks there are too few chances for the public to participate in decisions about communities' goals and direction.
Pawley learned most in his committee on education for grades K-12. He said he learned what is available, what is being tried and what programs hold promise.
But Pawley said he is not a fan of strategic planning, so he was somewhat frustrated by the process.
"It is not as valuable as people selling it make it out to be," he said.
The council will come up with more specific proposals than it has offered so far, he said, but they will be more vague than they should be. Still, Pawley said he thinks the council deliberations were a very good start.
\ Norman Rice of Clifton Forge called the council "a very positive addition to our area," noting that his area was late in joining the New Century effort.
Rice, who is retired but serves on the board of the Alleghany Highlands Chamber of Commerce, said the council's aims and goals are beneficial to people from the New River Valley, the Roanoke Valley and the Alleghany Highlands.
He found "intelligent and hard-working people trying to promote the area." He said the vision will be offered to outside industries "to come into our area to increase employment."
\ Emily Keyser, acting director of Roanoke's public libraries, said she wasn't too sure in the beginning how the council participants would mesh.
"There are so many of us, from so many walks of life, but that turned out to be good," she said.
Teachers, housewives, retired businesspeople, economic developers and others pitched in to talk about the use of computers in education.
"We all challenged each other's thinking," Keyser said. A group composed strictly of educators would not have come up with the same ideas.
The group came up with the idea of setting up computer centers at places such as libraries and schools. At these centers, with the help of experienced people, students could learn, workers could get training and companies could receive business information.
"Bricks and mortar won't be that important anymore," Keyser said. "It will reduce the effect of the mountains, reduce our isolation. It will make us part of the world."
\ Vicki Kapp, a certified financial planner in Roanoke, would like to see more investment in small businesses in Southwest Virginia. Larger companies could share expertise and work more closely with small firms, Kapp said.
For instance, one company offers free inspections of furnaces and electrical wiring for small firms, one-person businesses, cottage industries and others who might not otherwise afford it, she said.
Or large firms could chip in with small companies to buy products that come in mass quantities, which small businesses alone could not afford, she said.
"If we could all just work together" to help the many small companies out there, Kapp said, the region could grow at a comfortable pace. She's afraid that too often, big businesses come into a community and don't really care about or invest in the quality of life there.
She saw such a thing happen in her hometown of Flint, Mich., where General Motors Corp. pulled up stakes years ago and left the community in disarray.
\ Pete Johnson Jr. lives in Boones Mill and describes himself as a "communitarian." He acts as a consultant to businesses, such as food cooperatives, in setting up organizational systems of computers and people. But people are his main focus.
"We've got to use our social energy, not just our economic energy," Johnson said. He envisions a Southwest Virginia where urban neighborhoods and even suburban subdivisions become communities in the traditional sense - people helping each other, participating and getting involved in local government and education.
One way this could happen, Johnson said, is for communities to set up centers - a person's home, a storefront, a public gathering place - where people can gain access to computers and online services. But, more important than connecting to the information superhighway, they would connect with each other - a technological version of the wood stove at the general store, so to speak.
He's impressed with the New Century Council as a vehicle to empower people to create and produce their own future in Southwest Virginia. "This is really grass-roots," he said.
\ Peggy Davis of Fincastle said she's optimistic that the New Century visioning effort will produce positive change if the localities will get behind it. Davis, who once was an aide to former 6th District Congressman Jim Olin, served on a committee looking at ways to improve regional governmental cooperation.
People serving on county boards of supervisors and city councils will benefit from the acquaintances they make if they agree to work together, Davis said.
"I can't say how successful it will be; but I do believe whenever people know each other and can talk casually together ... that will be valuable to the area," she said.
\ Don Drapeau of Blacksburg said he sees a regional arts park in the New Century region's future. Such a park - the boundaries of which would be set by regional cooperation and scheduling, rather than geography - could be a major tourist attraction, he believes.
Drapeau, head of the theater arts department at Virginia Tech, was a participant in the quality-of-life segment of the New Century visioning effort.
The visioning process gave people who are interested in a broad spectrum of artistic endeavors - from bluegrass to ballet - a forum they never had before, he said.
With arts funding under attack on federal, state and private levels, it's important for arts groups to work together, Drapeau said.
A unified approach will help draw public support and get the word out about the wide range of entertainment opportunities available in the region, he said. A regional arts agency could publish regional entertainment calendars and establish common box offices.
The broad choices of entertainment available in the region could be marketed as an arts park, where tourists could have a quality art event to attend every night of their stay, he said. To make it work, money to fund better performance venues and to move events around the region, taking the arts to the people, may be needed, he said.
\ Rebecca Ellis, whose quality-of-life visioning group focused on people and environmental issues, worries that what is good about the region may be lost if quality-of-life issues aren't kept at the forefront of planning as the region grows.
Ellis, director of food and nutrition at Community Hospital of Roanoke Valley in Roanoke, said her hometown does a lot of things well, such as maintaining good neighborhoods and keeping down the crime rate.
"As we grow, that could get away from us," she said.
The region also needs to develop a world view. Her group concluded that, with today's technology, the region no longer can operate in a vacuum.
"We have to realize there's a big, wide world out there," she said. "If we don't have a clear vision of where we're going, we might miss opportunities."
\ A major concern for Clara Huffine of Roanoke is that preschool teachers in the years ahead are paid better salaries and provided with health benefits.
The region has good day care, she said, but better salaries and benefits would help reduce the rapid turnover of teachers in day-care centers.
Huffine, operator of a small business and a former day-care teacher, served on a committee searching for a vision for early childhood education.
She and others in her group also would like to see a future in which of alternative education are provided.
\ Mike Ellerbrock, who was part of a group developing a vision for adult education, said that being willing and able to learn new skills and ways of doing things throughout life is going to be very important to those who work in the region in the years ahead. College, universities and industries need to work together to provide workers with learning opportunities, he said.
"I'm not sure there's a full appreciation for lifelong learning," said Ellerbrock, who is director of the center for economic education within Virginia Tech's department of agricultural education.
The development of a vision for the region's future should involve the broadest possible representation of people so that the most accurate picture of the region's problems and potentials can be developed, he said.
\ Randall Jamison likes the fact that people from all over are coming together in the New Century Council.
When a family builds a home, said Jamison, an architect, all the members must have a collective vision to pull it off. Same with Southwest Virginia.
For a long time, getting Roanoke and Salem to agree on anything was "like pulling teeth," Jamison said. So he's encouraged that localities and people appear to have found a few doors in the barriers that have separated them for so long.
He predicts growth will happen in the Roanoke and New River valleys and beyond. Whether we plan adequately for it is another matter, he said.
Jamison would like to see a blueprint for what that growth should be and how we can accommodate it but also preserve what we have.
"The picture I have," Jamison said, "is somebody living in a trailer and putting a house up behind it."
We're that somebody, and we're building a better home for the future, he says. The New Century Council may be the architects.
\ New Century meetings weren't "geared toward the working man's hours," Calvin Ashe said. So, as a railroad machinist, he didn't get to many of the education-training committee meetings.
Ashe has hoped to be heard on how the area needs better ways for people to learn trades besides auto body repair.
The Southeast Roanoke resident would like to see apprenticeship programs that would make it possible to acquire a variety of work skills. Ashe believes the areas could make better use of union workers to help teach the trades.
"I'm concerned that the jobs coming in aren't high-wage jobs," he said.
\ Ken Bondurant, a Radford native who left the area and then returned, said he believes his stay outside Western Virginia makes him "subjectively objective" about its potential.
And it has considerable potential, said the owner of Bondurant Realty, who is also vice chairman of the council's quality-of-life committee.
Bondurant especially wants to tout the New River Valley's university-oriented atmosphere, which pays special attention to education and the arts. He said agencies are eager to find more ways to integrate arts into the lives of children.
One of the nicest things about the visioning experience has been the process that brought together an "interesting collection" of people including those that see their lives in black-and-white and those that see grays, he said.
"Quantitively," it would be difficult to document what the group has done, he said. "Qualitatively, we have peeled back the surface and looked at the entire region without boundaries."
"We've seen several areas where geographic boundaries don't matter," Bondurant said.
For example, watersheds overlap, and there are instances where the Roanoke Valley and the New River Valley mutually can benefit from commercial and residential development where boundaries don't matter, he said.
\ Linda Ballin, who teaches kindergarten for children with learning disabilities, attended some meetings of the education team for grades K-12, but didn't become a full participant. Her concern, however, is that everyone think creatively about ways to deal with education issues rooted in social problems.
She even believes that school hours might need resetting to be more compatible with parents' working schedules.
"I see a greater need for teachers to work with social services to deal with the issues of poverty and lack of parenting skills," Ballin said.
She'd like to see a magnet school that was an alternative school.
Ballin's ideal program would be a residential program that would provide a stable existence for a young mother, her child and a boyfriend or husband while the family improved its skills in communication, parenting and household management.
Reteaching parents to nurture their children would give the children the boost needed to become a factor in the area's growth, she said.
\ P. David Maxwell, an account representative with Kelly Temporary Services in Blacksburg, said the council meetings broadened his vision and taught him a lot.
He said he learned primarily what the New River Valley has to offer and he was surprised at the extent of the activities. He attributed that knowledge to the wide diversity of the group of people involved in the council.
"I never knew there were so many things out there now," much less the many things that are planned, Maxwell said.
\ Richard B. Osmann of Roanoke said he was "really amazed" at the expertise and insight available in the Roanoke and New River valleys. He said he was impressed and encouraged by the quality of the people who got together to discuss the future of this area.
Osmann also was struck by how complex the issues and solutions are. He said the issues were presented from many different angles.
It speaks well for this region that people of so many talents and interests came together to discuss a vision for the future, he said.
by CNB