Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 4, 1995 TAG: 9503060045
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAN VERTEFEUILLE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
When Franklin County's government asked citizens what they considered the main ingredient for a good quality of life, the No.1 answer was the county's rural environment.
By whatever measure, folks living in Roanoke like the countryside. For many of us, that's why we're living here and not someplace bigger.
Yet for that very reason, parts of the countryside around Roanoke now may be threatened.
In the Roanoke Valley, local governments are talking about the need to enact ridgeline ordinances to keep development from chewing up the sides of the mountains we cherish.
In Franklin County, where lakeshore development and Roanoke-bound commuters have combined to make the county one of the fast-growing localities outside the urban crescent, the rural environment is getting crowded. Around Smith Mountain Lake, the population expanded by almost half during the past decade.
In Botetourt County, citizens' groups are springing up, calling for curbs on the development that's turned the southern part of the county into a Roanoke suburb.
"We're talking about managing growth when for so long it's been 'There is no growth,'" says Bedford County planner Debbie Kendall. "We're switching issues all of a sudden. It's just reached a proportion where it's staring us in the face."
The Roanoke Valley thinks of itself as a slow-growth region - and, in many ways, that's true.
It just depends on what kind of growth you're talking about - and where you're looking.
When business leaders lament the lack of growth, it's usually the region's slow income growth they have in mind. Hence, all the talk about how to restructure the region's economy for the 21st century to create more high-wage jobs.
It's population growth, though, that may be the region's most misunderstood growth issue. The last census pronounced the Roanoke Valley as one of the nation's flatliners, with population growth of just 2 percent.
But that missed what's really happening. The population growth in the Roanoke region has moved beyond the traditional suburbs of Roanoke County into Botetourt County, Bedford County, Franklin County, even Montgomery County, where previously rural counties are suddenly being confronted with the pressures of suburbanization.
Nobody's talking about Northern Virginia-style population growth here, mind you. The population in the larger Roanoke region, roughly from Pulaski County to Bedford County, which is about as far as folks are willing to commute to work, grew by 6 percent during the 1980s - and is expected to continue at the same pace through the 1990s. That would be just a blip on the Prince William County screen.
The catch is, the region's population growth isn't distributed evenly. It's concentrated in a handful of places where the effects of growth are transforming the look and feel of some rural communities beyond recognition.
In the region's four "hot spots" - Smith Mountain Lake, the Stewartsville-Chamblissburg-Hardy section of western Bedford County, southern Botetourt County and western Montgomery County around Blacksburg - population expanded by anywhere from 13 percent to 45 percent.
Those are Northern Virginia-style growth rates.
Keep in mind, too, this is what happened during the 1980s. By some measures, the growth rate has been even faster in the 1990s. In Botetourt County, more new homes were built during the past four years than in the previous 10. And more are on the way: In November, a developer won approval to turn a 360-acre farm near Daleville into "Timberbrook," a massive subdivision with 227 residential lots and 48 acres of commercial development.
This kind of development comes with a price that local governments - or, more accurately, the taxpayers who support them - already are starting to pay.
Botetourt, Bedford, Franklin and Montgomery all are building new schools or expanding old ones to accommodate an enrollment boom. These rural localities also are finding themselves pressed to provide what used to be considered strictly suburban services.
Here's a look at how Roanoke's rural neighbors are changing.
For the next five days, we will examine the development taking place in the countryside just outside Roanoke - why it's happening; the effect it's having on taxpayers; and the rising debate over how, or whether, to regulate it.
by CNB