Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 18, 1995 TAG: 9506200017
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WYTHEVILLE LENGTH: Long
It was the biggest public turnout for a Wythe County Board of Supervisors meeting that anyone could remember, some 900 people packed into a high school auditorium Feb. 1 with something to say about a proposed private prison near Wytheville.
But they didn't get the chance to say anything that night, because the supervisors voted 4-3 to take public comments only after the board had made its decision.
The decision, by that same vote, was to welcome a 1,500-bed medium-security prison that would be built by Corrections Corporation of America, if CCA gets a state contract to house prisoners.
Since then, prison opponents have tried to remove three of the four prison-supporting supervisors by petition drives, a court proceeding and the elections process. The score so far: supervisors, 4, prison opponents, 0. But the future of two supervisors could change, come Election Day.
All four supervisors say that, even if they'd known what unpleasantness lay ahead, they would not have changed their vote. "I believe [the prison is] in the best interests of the county," said Supervisor Charles Dix.
"I don't believe anybody truly believes that they feel that way," said Linda Butt, a member of Citizens Against the Prison. "We would really like to know what made the supervisors vote the way they did."
Prison opponents, who wanted an advisory referendum, say the public was cut out of the process. The board also voted down the referendum request Feb. 1, again by a 4-3 vote.
Speakers got to voice their objections that night only after the crucial pro-prison vote - a vote that later would be cited by Gov. George Allen and state Public Safety Director Jerry Kilgore as Wythe County's official position - despite anti-prison petitions with thousands of signatures. However, the supervisors had heard those objections at length at two previous meetings.
Olin Armentrout said he didn't cast his vote lightly. "I really and truly didn't know what I wanted to do about it," he said, before talking to community leaders in Cleveland, Texas, about the effects of a CCA prison there.
Board Chairman Mark Munsey had appointed Armentrout and Dix to visit a CCA prison community elsewhere. Armentrout said he told his wife he knew whatever recommendation he brought back would upset people on one side of the issue or the other. He and Dix ended up reporting favorable reaction in the Texas community.
"I can't say that I ever imagined that the opposition would be as vicious as it is," he said. "Fact of the matter, they've just about harassed the board."
Butt said any harassment is coming the other way. "They're saying that there are so many people who can't come out for the prison because we'd harass them," she said, but she said she knew people whose jobs would be in jeopardy if they expressed their anti-prison views.
If the supervisors are getting harassing calls, she said, the anti-prison group will pay to equip their telephones with caller-identification devices. "We'd welcome that," Butt said. "But the people who are against the prison are just clean-cut, hard-working citizens."
Supervisor Jack Crosswell has supported the prison since he attended a meeting Oct. 31 in Abingdon that was arranged at CCA's request by Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, between CCA officials and representatives of several local governments in the region.
A CCA representative subsequently visited Wythe County to look at possible prison sites and meet informally with town and county officials. Although none of those meetings were public, CCA did offer to provide space for Wythe County prisoners at its facility, which would save the county from having to build a $4 million jail.
CCA announced at a Dec. 5 media conference in the Wytheville Municipal Building that it had secured an option on a site near Wytheville and made its prison plans public. Crosswell and Sheriff Wayne Pike were called on to talk about how the prison would benefit the county.
The 300-plus jobs and economic impact of the project, and the agreement to house county prisoners weren't the only advantages, Crosswell said recently. Also attractive were CCA's more recent agreement to return some 400 acres around the prison to the county, which could be prime industrial acreage, and the prison's advanced communications requirements, which, Crosswell said, could make Wythe County a hub on the information superhighway.
Those arguments haven't swayed the prison's opponents.
"If we were desperate for jobs here, everybody would think differently about it. But we aren't," Butt said. She said residents should have had more say in the prison decision because "they are the people who are going to live with whatever it brings."
She said CCA originally announced it would break ground on the prison early this year, then decided to wait until the state made its proposal. CCA announced recently that it had renewed its option on its original prison site, then decided instead to take an option on a different site even closer to Wytheville.
"You can't believe anything they're saying," she said. "They've ripped this whole county apart."
A vote Jan. 23 on the advisory referendum had deadlocked 3-3, so it was pretty well known how six of the supervisors would line up on a prison vote. Carleton Rose had missed that meeting because he was ill.
Rose voted for the prison and says he would do so again.
Prison opponents in Armentrout's and Dix's districts began petition drives to remove them, charging that they disobeyed Munsey's instructions about which CCA site to visit and broke state law by accepting air transportation at CCA expense from company headquarters in Nashville, Tenn., to the site they did visit.
In Dix's district, petitioners got enough signatures to force a court hearing where Dix had to show cause why he should not be removed. It turned out that he and Armentrout had not ignored their chairman's instructions - Munsey had not specified a particular site - and Circuit Judge Willis Woods ruled that evidence failed to show any misuse of Dix's office.
Dix and Rose don't face re-election this year, but Armentrout and Crosswell do. Democrats refused to nominate Armentrout at a mass meeting last month; he is running as an independent. Crosswell, a plain-speaking former U.S. Treasury agent, switched to the Republican Party, where he had no trouble getting the nod to run.
Armentrout, a former mail carrier who headed the national rural carriers' association, has taken time to write as many as four letters a day on several pages of yellow legal-size paper responding to letters protesting his vote.
"I still get some surprise support from some people whose opinions I value," he said. "If the decision had to be made today, I'd still support it [the prison] ... I never tried to avoid the unpopular decisions that needed to be made. Not to say I don't care, but at my age, it's not my intention to do things to get me re-elected."
The outcome of the election may have no effect on the prison. By next year, the state may have decided whether to accept CCA's proposal.
"I'm ready for it to come on one way or the other," Crosswell said. "If we don't get it, we don't get it. But if we do get it, we have to plan for it."
Bill Cimino, with the state public safety office, said private prison companies must respond to the state's request for prison proposals by June 30. "Obviously, we would like to get a good turnaround, because you want the prisons to come on line," he said, but there is no way to know how long the selection process will take until the bids are seen.
"We expect a 60- to 90-day turnaround," said Dana Moore, CCA's business development director. CCA also will bid on building and operating a 1,000-bed minimum-security prison at a site in Lunenburg County in south central Virginia, she said.
Moore said CCA fine-tuned its proposals Friday and would have both of them in Richmond before the deadline.
by CNB