Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, January 25, 1995 TAG: 9501250077
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WYTHEVILLE LENGTH: Medium
The size of the crowd forced the board to move its meeting to the auditorium at George Wythe High School. Speakers asked the board to support the scheduling of an advisory referendum on the prison.
Supervisor Tom DuPuis moved that the board go on record as supporting legislation introduced Monday in Richmond by Del. Thomas Jackson, D-Hillsville, to authorize the nonbinding referendum. Chairman Mark Munsey and John Davis joined him in voting for it, but Jack Crosswell, Olin Armentrout and Charles Dix voted no. A seventh supervisor, Giles Rose, was ill and unable to attend.
Munsey said that he, as chairman, would call a special meeting on the prison issue next week, and another vote on holding the referendum would be taken.
Bill Smith, a prison opponent, said more than 2,000 people have signed petitions asking for the referendum, and copies of the petition are still being circulated. Jackson had promised to seek a referendum if he got 1,200 signatures
On Monday, representatives of United States Corrections of Louisville, Ky., attended a meeting of the Bland County Board of Supervisors and said they were seeking a site for a 500-bed prison for short-term inmates.
The board decided to hold public information meetings with company officials before a decision is reached on that project.
Richard Phillippi, a Wytheville businessman who is on the county Industrial Development Authority, told the Wythe supervisors that that is what should have been done in Wythe.
Phillippi recently visited Clifton, Tenn., where Corrections Corporation of America has a prison similar to the one it hopes to build near Wytheville. He said he went as a private citizen and talked to law enforcement, welfare and other representatives, and urged the supervisors to do the same.
``I think, when you do, you'll come back and you'll feel exactly like I do, that we do not need a prison in Wythe County,'' Phillippi said.
CCA president David Myers has already announced that the corporation will break ground on the prison within a few months. Since the county has no zoning, the supervisors really have no way to stop it, even if an advisory referendum shows most citizens opposing it.
``I don't like the way it sort of came in the back door here, and I think you all are remiss if you don't take a stand, one way or another,'' Phillippi told the supervisors.
by CNB