Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 1, 1995                   TAG: 9509290055
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: G-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SLOWLY

In the New River Valley, both Giles County's New River Greenway and Montgomery's Huckleberry Trail have gotten important boosts recently:

Two grants totaling $100,000, from a local business and the state Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, will help develop "pocket parks" at several riverside communities in Giles. These parks are to be part of a New River Greenway system featuring hiking and biking trails as well as protected river-access areas.

While strolling this week along the Huckleberry Trail's route, Virginia Secretary of Transportation Robert Martinez announced that various regulatory and bureaucratic hoops have been jumped through, freeing up federal funds for construction and perhaps completion of the trail by the end of next year.

To be sure, the Giles project - too modest to begin with - was started five years ago. Progress to date has been way slow.

That is so in part, though, because of the misguided fears of landowners and the equally misguided reticence of the county's Board of Supervisors.

Greenway advocates have had to work hard and creatively to build partnerships and seek funding - and their work is starting to pay off. The county's largest employer, Hoescht-Celanese Corp., recently gave $50,000 to help develop greenway parks along the river.

Efforts to preserve and make use of the county's extraordinary natural beauty and its extraordinary natural resource, the New River, are long overdue.

To be sure, too, state and federal regulatory hold-ups - prominently over, of all things, environmental issues - have delayed work on the Huckleberry Trail almost two years.

But a part of the trail has been developed, and Martinez says construction on the next phase can begin soon. Not only will the Huckleberry, via an old railroad corridor, link the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg with the New River Valley Mall in Christiansburg. It also will preserve historic and scenic sites along the way, and usefully connect such facilities as a retirement village, the Blacksburg library and elementary schools.

It's a fantastic project.

Meanwhile, greenway planning efforts continue in the Roanoke Valley. They've made a later start than in New River. Will they prove quicker getting trails on the ground?