Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, August 21, 1995 TAG: 9508210095
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Many of the same good ideas - creating greenways, preserving natural resources, encouraging regional cooperation - emerge in both groups. This is not surprising. Many of the citizens who have committed time, talent and energy to the county's vision quest participated in the council's work, as well - including several county officials.
Turning the articulation of New Century dreams into action will require broad support among the citizenry and the cooperation of local political jurisdictions within the New Century region, identified as the Alleghany Highlands and the Roanoke and New River valleys. The council is, after all, an unelected body made up almost entirely of volunteers, with no authority to actually do anything. It must persuade others to do.
That will require deeper community engagement than the council's 1,000-plus citizen planners, impressive as that level of participation is.
Roanoke County is seeking deeper involvement, too, drawing 200 residents into discussions of what the future should look like in their specific part of the region. County staff will dig deeper still, taking the citizen reports to public meetings in each of the county's 12 planning districts to hear more ideas and opinions before they update the county's comprehensive plan.
It's a commendable effort to broaden the debate beyond the narrow special interests that can always be counted on to make their needs and desires known. The concerns of businesses and developers certainly are legitimate, but they are not the only interests that must be taken into account.
The public should take full advantage of the opportunity.
Citizens always have the right to attend government meetings and to speak out, of course. But they don't always recognize when their future interests are at stake. Rather than being mere spectators to the evolution of their community, citizens are being invited to learn what possibilities exist, maybe suggest a few that no one has yet thought of, and voice their opinions about how they want to live and what kind of community they want Roanoke County to be.
If consensus emerges among a broad base of residents, the result could be a set of useful guideposts for county officials as they make the isolated, day-to-day decisions that, together, have so much impact on the quality of people's lives - and which people seldom notice till it is past time to wield any influence.
It is too early to know if the county's visioning process will reap such rich rewards. But it is a worthy effort to try to manage growth, rather than be kicked around by it.
by CNB