Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 9, 1995 TAG: 9507100026
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Leaders of the massive project say the effort was worthwhile. Their 250-page report is not perfect, they say, but it does a pretty good job of charting the futures of the Roanoke and New River valleys and the Alleghany Highlands area.
Those who are supposed to be guided by its findings - including the region's elected leaders - say they are eager to see what the group came up with.
The unveiling begins at a 3 p.m. news conference at Hotel Roanoke. The meeting will concern only those sections of the report related to the economy and infrastructure. Other sections, dealing with schools, government, the environment and health and public safety, will come out July 17 and 24, to be followed by a party on July 31.
The council's main job - to write its report - is now done. Involving more than 1,000 area residents, the council began work in October 1993 and had a budget of $600,000 in state funding. About $200,000 will be used to tell the region what the report says and how to implement it.
Change will not be easy.
Executing the recommendations will be harder than hatching them, said Ken Anderson, a Blacksburg consulting engineer who was chairman of a committee on infrastructure.
``Making them work is going to be tough. You're dealing with human beings, who want to do different things. What it's saying,'' he said of the report, ``is we should all, in certain kinds of things, be marching in the same direction; and there needs to be consensus, and consensus is hard to get.
``We are on a journey. We are not at the destination.''
Indeed, the report was prepared without regard to the cost of turning it into reality. That troubled Susan Jennings, executive director of the Arts Council of the Blue Ridge and a member of a committee on arts and culture.
``We were told to think big and not worry about the funding,'' Jennings said. ``I understand why we were told to do that - so you wouldn't limit yourself by saying there's not enough funding to do this - but one of the critical issues when it comes to the arts right now is funding.''
As a result, she said, her committee spent some of its precious meeting time discussing ideas that are financially impractical. And when discussions drifted to funding solutions and good ideas came up, the fruits of those discussions could not go in the final report, she said.
Council leaders, including executive director Beverly Fitzpatrick, have stressed that the committee set financial considerations aside to be truly free to dream up the best future for those who live in the New Century region. Free to dream, participants came up with ideas that will turn some heads.
Then there is the natural reluctance of those in elected office toward taking input from outsiders.
``I will receive it with an open mind,'' Vinton Mayor Charles Hill said. But Hill can't turn a deaf ear to his constituents. ``As far as I am concerned, the citizens of the town of Vinton, they are the ones I look to for direction.''
The bane of report writers is that their work sometimes goes on a shelf rather than into action. One who is aware of the risk is Corinne Gott, superintendent of social services for the city of Roanoke and head of a subcommittee that considered human needs. She said she has no idea how the New Century Council report will be received.
``It depends a lot on too many factors,'' she said. ``If we have a recession, sure, it's going to stay on the shelf. If we have a favorable environment, then some of the pieces of it will be implemented.''
Either way, committee members can take a bow, Gott said. ``We were asked to do a task and did it.''
Janie Barnette, chairwoman of the Alleghany Highlands School Board, is taken by the idea that a citizens group that includes business leaders has ideas for improving schools. After all, schools and industry need to work together more closely to produce the labor force of the future, she said. But, like Mayor Hill in Vinton, she has to compare the council's recommendations with goals already set by her school district.
``If this report shows us a better way to do things in the best interests of the students, that's where we want to go. But you have to evaluate what comes out. So we are interested in reading about it and seeing what they have produced,'' she said. At this point, ``we haven't been that involved in it. I don't know that much about it.''
The region represented by the business-driven New Century Council is home to 400,000 people. Included in the region are Alleghany, Botetourt, Craig, Floyd, Franklin, Giles, Montgomery, Pulaski and Roanoke counties and the cities of Clifton Forge, Covington, Radford, Roanoke and Salem.
Some recommendations ``are going to be controversial. But there's been a tremendous number of really smart people from different backgrounds and different parts of the area involved, and they have come up with some outstanding ideas,'' said Jay Turner of J.M. Turner & Co. Inc., who headed a subcommittee that considered higher education and economic issues together.
The possible grounds for objection? It costs too much. Or recommendations that consolidate agencies or efforts ``might impact somebody's turf,'' Turner said.
Moreover, some may resent not having their city or county chosen as the site of major infrastructure and other construction projects recommended in the report.
Turner suggested resisting the temptation to pick up one's proverbial bat and ball and go home if one is not picked to pitch: ``We need to look as this as a region. If it happens in Radford, it's going to have a beneficial effect throughout the region. That's the concept. If we are going to succeed and do well, we do need to take a regional approach.''
If the report ultimately is judged by the amount of hard, intensive debate invested in writing it, there is little reason to doubt its findings will spell progress. The volunteers met often, sometimes for sessions that lasted several hours. Anderson, the Blacksburg engineer who led the infrastructure committee, recalled how the participants at one meeting, bearing name tags and cups of coffee, huddled around small tables in a room at Radford University. ``Everybody was an individual and had their right to speak,'' Anderson said, describing the exchanges he witnessed as ``freewheeling openness.''
Almost 1,000 people took advantage of the opportunity to shape the blueprint. The actual number of regular participants was less, but council leaders point to the figure as providing evidence that the report was a grass-roots effort.
``It was without question a heroic effort,'' said Bob Denton, who headed the subcommittee on leadership and communication.``It still came down to, in my case, a few people who were regulars and really gave of their time and effort.'' He guessed that about 100 people stayed with the process to the end.
Denton, the head of communications studies at Virginia Tech, called the results extraordinary. Marketing and other professionals on his committee did a media and public relations plan that would have cost $10,000 to $25,000 if purchased from a consulting firm, he said.
And the hard work will pay off, he and others predicted. Even if not all of the ideas come to fruition, the region is better off just because people from different parts of Western Virginia got together and thought hard about the future and about regionalism's potential benefits.
``It got people working together and thinking together,'' Anderson said. ``That's not an easily defined or articulated benefit, but ... it was probably as helpful as almost anything that came out of this.''
To be sure, many thank Anderson and his counterparts for their efforts and expect good things to come from it.
Fuzzy Minnix, chairman of the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors, said he and fellow board members ``are anxious to hear what they have come up with, because it is in the best interest of the Roanoke Valley to have Blacksburg and Montgomery County and Christiansburg and that area involved with us in some way - if we can possibly pull it off.''
by CNB