Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 23, 1995 TAG: 9501230024
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WYTHEVILLE LENGTH: Long
Several routes have been proposed, and one even endorsed by the state Transportation Board, but none has been chosen. Still, people along the suggested routes have different ideas on what such a highway through their area might mean.
What have previous interstate highways in Virginia meant to the areas through which they passed? Has Interstate 77, with its final link through Bland, Wythe and Carroll counties completed in 1987, lived up to the economic boom predicted for it?
Well, yes - and no.
Highways are arteries for the circulation of economic development, but utilities are necessary to get it pumping. They are not fully along that highway yet, but are on the way.
Where they exist, development has happened.
Kentucky Derby Hosiery Co. bought a 56,000-square-foot shell building in the Carroll County Industrial Park along I-77 near Hillsville last year and projected 200 employees in less than three years.
County Administrator Billy Mitchell said that plant and the others that have expanded nearby put Carroll at the point where it would practically have to import residents to handle any further development for now - an uncommon situation in Southwest Virginia.
The town of Hillsville extended water and sewer utilities to the industrial park in 1986, under a contract with the county, to take advantage of the interstate potential for industry. The investment is now paying off.
A nine-mile stretch of six-lane highway in eastern Wythe County where Interstates 77 and 81 have a common six-lane route was expected to be the segment that developed most quickly.
When Wythe County Administrator Billy Branson was on the Mount Rogers Planning District Commission staff in 1971, he remembers planning studies projecting major activity for that corridor between Wytheville and Fort Chiswell.
Some has happened. Truck stops and restaurants have been built, the Fort Chiswell Factory Merchants Mall opened in 1990, and most recently an option was obtained on a site for a proposed private prison. Wythe Countians have been divided over whether the prison is good or bad.
``It's been development kind of at some cost to the environment, because they put in these package treatment plants,'' Branson said. ``The lack of a good sewer system has slowed it down some.''
Now, the federal government has approved a grant-loan package to build a sewage system there. It could be complete by 1997. Branson and Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, who worked on getting the funds, expect it to be the final catalyst needed for the long-awaited development in that corridor. Branson even predicts that its development will compare with the city of Roanoke in the next 40 years.
``Wythe is poised for growth,'' he says. ``You can't have two interstates, and talking about a third, without people coming through it.''
The third is the proposed Interstate 73, the Detroit-to-Charleston, S.C., highway that Wythe highway boosters argue should follow the existing I-77 path to keep costs down. Even some boosters of the state's preferred route - through Giles, Montgomery, Roanoke, Franklin and Henry counties, along U.S. 460 and U.S. 220 - agree that through traffic from Michigan to South Carolina would likely take I-77 rather than detour through Roanoke.
``We feel that, when people look at the map, they're going to see that it's the most direct route,'' says Carl Stark, a former Wytheville mayor who is president of the Great Lakes to Florida Highway Association.
``If the engineers make the decision, it'll come right down Interstate 77,'' current Wytheville Mayor Trent Crewe has said. ``If the politicians make it, then Lord knows where it will go.''
Roanoke Valley politicians say they want I-73 not so much to serve Michigan-to-South Carolina traffic as to create new traffic between Western Virginia's largest metro area and the Greensboro/-Winston-Salem metro area.
The decision on the route will be up to Congress.
Interstate 73 is one of a system of ``priority roads'' that Congress is supposed to have laid out by Sept. 30. It would be an interstate in the sense that it would go through different states, although it might not be built to the standards of Interstates 81 and 77. In some places, it might not even be a new road at all, but simply a widened and straightened version of existing roads.
Whatever type of road it is, Wytheville supporters believe it'll help them if it comes through town. ``It'll make the economic climate a whole lot better,'' says Jimmy Smith, owner of Smith Jewelers & Silversmiths in downtown Wytheville. He said 81 and 77 around Wytheville did not hurt his business when they opened, and that business has grown since then.
But Gene Warren of Central Drug believes ``a result of all that has been a noticeable decline of business downtown.'' He says downtown businesses moved out to the interstate exchanges where 40,000 vehicles a day go by.
Boucher predicts a major development in the next five years on 2,500 acres of land along the joint 81-77 corridor owned by J.C. Weaver of Clearwater, Fla. It might not be the Disney theme park that Boucher pitched to Disney officials after they decided against building in Northern Virginia last year, but he says it will be something almost as exciting.
So far, the junction of two interstates has brought mostly restaurants and motels to Wytheville.
``We hoped for a little more but I think it's pretty much on target,'' says Stark, who succeeded Jim Williams as president of the Great Lakes highway booster organization. ``It's opened Wythe County, and it's become a center for Southwest Virginia.''
Even though industries have not located in a big way right on the interstate, Wythe has still nearly filled its industrial park north of Wytheville - and closer to town utilities - and officials at plant ribbon-cuttings always cite the nearby interstates as one reason for locating there.
Williams, 87, who died Dec. 23 after an incapacitating illness, had founded the association during his more than six decades with the Southwest Virginia Enterprise, Wythe County's newspaper. In the paper he barraged state officials with editorials and letters on highway developments.
He was among those instrumental in getting I-77 routed through Bland, Wythe and Carroll counties even though it meant tunneling through Big Walker Mountain, rather than following Virginia 100 through Giles and Pulaski where Boucher is now pushing for I-73 to go.
Speakers at his funeral suggested an effort to have I-77 named for Williams.
Bland County, on the northwestern end of the Virginia stretch of the interstate, has suffered from a lack of infrastructure even more than Wythe, but is working on a getting a water line from West Virginia for both industrial and residential customers now relying on wells or small local systems.
The line will come right through another I-77 tunnel, this one under East River Mountain on the Virginia-West Virginia border.
The county has welcomed some new industries already, the most successful being pharmaceutical manufacturer General Injectables & Vaccines Corp., which opened in Bastian in 1984.
Interstate 77 and its link to I-81 was a factor in its location, Vice President Willard Lester says. ``GIV could not be located where it is were it not for the interstates."
by CNB