Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 23, 1995 TAG: 9507240004
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Joe Grissom just had to get on the phone Tuesday after reading a story in The Roanoke Times about a proposal to limit mountaintop development.
The New Century Council - a volunteer group of citizens and business and government leaders in the Roanoke Valley, the New River Valley and the Alleghany Highlands - had just unveiled its ideas on, among other things, how to protect scenic views throughout the region.
What Grissom read made him mad enough to call a reporter.
"There are these kinds of people that want to tell you what to do with your daggone real estate," Grissom said. "To tell someone what they can do with their property, is that the public good or is that taking away somebody's individual rights?"
He and his wife, Joyce, own 165 acres along a mountain ridge in southeast Roanoke County. The land is steep, no good for farming or raising cattle. But it's perfect for residential development, with stunning views of the valley below. The Grissoms plan to retire off the money from developing the land.
Those plans, as Grissom sees it, would be dashed if local leaders buy into ridgeline protection. The 46-year-old railroad worker gets shook up just talking about it.
"I've been paying taxes on it for years. Now they want to pass some laws - well, that's called stealing in my book, any way you cut it."
Grissom is not alone in his views on land-use controls.
A deep-seated sense of private property rights among many Western Virginians is likely to be one of the New Century Council's biggest obstacles to achieving its fundamental goal - preserving the region's natural resources while encouraging economic growth.
The council has suggested a variety of strategies, such as ridgeline protection, local land trusts, tax breaks for landowners who don't subdivide and development of a regional comprehensive plan.
Aside from individual property owners' resentment of land-use controls, a less than sterling record of intergovernmental cooperation in the region casts another shadow on the council's bright vision for the future.
Dan Hardy, a vice president at First National Bank of Christiansburg, was co-chairman of the council's subcommittee on growth. At first the group talked about zoning, but soon changed course, he said. The volunteer visionaries realized that one zoning law would not fit all jurisdictions.
Moreover, said co-chairwoman and Hollins College professor Terri Cornwell, the very word "zoning" carries a negative connotation in these parts. Committee members purposefully did not include the word anywhere in their eight pages of recommendations.
Instead, they talked about "influencing land use, a concept less limiting than zoning. I might also add, perhaps less intimidating," Cornwell said.
On several occasions in the past couple of years, the private property rights movement has swelled like a tidal wave to drown land-use management proposals:
The Montgomery County Board of Supervisors, after hearing from many landowners, voted down a plan to protect open spaces from development. The plan had been worked on by staff and citizens for about three years.
The county also nixed an effort to designate a segment of the Little River as a state scenic waterway. Some landowners feared the designation would restrict use of their riverfront property.
Roanoke County passed a watered-down version of an overlay district to limit development along the Roanoke River, heeding concerns of some riverfront landowners. The river corridor study that recommended the district had been a joint effort by six localities. Roanoke County is the only locality to adopt the district.
Montgomery County postponed adoption of the overlay district for further study. "I don't know when it's going to see the light of day," Planning Director Joe Powers said.
Two years ago, residents of three Franklin County districts voted 2-1 against zoning in their districts. "There's just a negative feeling that government at all levels is probably more intrusive than it needs to be," said Supervisor Wayne Angell, who represents one of the districts.
Local governments officials often don't breach the sensitive issue of zoning and land use as best they could, said Frank Dukes of the University of Virginia-affiliated Institute for Environmental Negotiation.
Too often, citizens first hear about proposals when they've already been written up as specific ordinances. "Naturally, they're alarmed and threatened by that," Frank Dukes of the University of Virginia-affiliated Institute for Environmental Negotiation said.
Citizens get a few minutes to make a statement at a formal public hearing, under a glaring light, in front of all their neighbors, and sometimes TV cameras and reporters. It turns people off to the process, Dukes said.
On that point, Joe Grissom agrees. "They have already got their minds made up. I think that the whole inner clique in the Roanoke and New River valleys, whatever they want, will pass."
Unlike Grissom, some people believe in land-use laws to control growth in a way that allows for economic development, yet preserves views, greenways, river corridors and other facets of the region's quality of life.
"Cluster development to preserve open space: Yes!" Linda Stover Barker wrote to the newspaper over the Internet, responding to the council's plans. "Virginia is known around the world for its natural beauty. Let's preserve as much as we can."
One way to preserve open space is to cluster homes and buildings onto one part of a parcel, leaving the rest undeveloped and usable for recreation.
Another reader said the New Century Council didn't go far enough in its recommendations.
"Here are a couple of things that I'd like to see you espouse," wrote Justin Askins, an associate professor of English at Radford University. "For every acre developed, an acre is put away in a permanent conservation easement.
"When a store is built," Askins continued, "then the cost of that store would include funds to tear it down ... and restore the land to its original state."
Somewhere in between the positions staked out by Grissom and Askins is where the council wants to land.
"A lot of these [recommendations] are kind of difficult to implement," Cornwell said. "I know it sounds idealistic, but that's what we were told to do."
Acting on any of the ideas will take a widespread, long-term public education effort "to let people know what would happen if you don't do something," she said. Cornwell and others worry that without more land-use controls and planning, the New Century region could fall victim to urban sprawl at its worst - cookie-cutter subdivisions, strip malls, billboards and traffic.
Powers said one reason Montgomery County hasn't gone forward with the Roanoke River overlay zone is because it will require a "major grass-roots effort to get it out there."
"You have to have a lot of meetings, listen to a lot of people letting off steam and then start to work with them."
Franklin County this spring passed its revised comprehensive plan, which the state requires of all localities. The county had to grapple with the booming development around Smith Mountain Lake, increased congestion and growth along U.S. 220, and residential growth creeping up its mountain ridges.
"These things are hard to comprehend on even a local basis," said Supervisor Angell.
Imagine doing something similar for the entire New Century region. It's what the participants on one of the committees imagined - a comprehensive regional land-use plan that considers scenic views, forest land management, historic sites and districts, urban forests and natural waterways.
"Diverse as the region is, from thinly populated rural areas to metropolitan areas, it's going to be hard to have one plan that fits all that," Angell said.
"We are not talking about a regional zoning plan," said Tom Robertson, president of Carilion Health Systems and co-chairman of the New Century Council's steering committee, "but something that would make sense to economic development prospects."
Even without the "z" word, getting the region's localities to agree on plans for growth historically has had a way of diminishing into political squabbles.
Having growth plans on a large scale is not unheard of, said the Institute for Environmental Negotiation's Dukes. Some states, including Florida, were able to transcend local jurisdictions and come up with growth-management plans.
"It's a nice recommendation, [but] it might be difficult to do anything with teeth," Dukes said.
Sometimes it's even hard for a jurisdiction to have a comprehensive plan with teeth, he said. Faced with a rezoning request, elected officials will turn to their comprehensive plans and see different things. Some interpret the plan literally, others see it as a guide that can readily be altered on a case-by-case basis, Powers said.
"We argue over what's in our own comprehensive plan. The more general a plan is, the more open to debate it is."
And at this point, no one knows what a regional plan would look like, what its purpose would be, or how it would be implemented. Would ridgeline protection be important in Montgomery County? Is limiting growth in the river corridor essential for Roanoke?
"You've got some hard questions," Powers said.
by CNB