ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, April 30, 1996 TAG: 9604300040
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WINFRED NOELL
ROANOKE municipal elections are coming soon. Education, City Council's working more closely with citizens, crime and more education seem the subjects most talked about. All are important issues. But there are other things candidates could talk about.
First, let's hit the road, the road to finishing all of the unfinished road projects in the city, such as five-laning all of Plantation Road to Orange Avenue. Thirteenth Street Southeast has never been completed to U.S. 220 south of town. Fifth Street and 10th Street are incomplete. Something needs to be done at Elm Avenue and Interstate 581.
I am sure there are others, but you get the picture. Interstate 73 and the smart road are more glamorous to talk about, but both are not needed. This money should be spent where the need is. A better economic benefit would be realized with an interstate from Roanoke to Greensboro with interstate connection to the Raleigh-Durham area. Forget Bluefield, W.Va.
Is Roanoke the stop-sign capital of the South? Stop signs are everywhere - three-way, four-way, five-way stops. People sit wasting valuable time, looking at each other, everybody scared to make a move for fear that one of Roanoke's finest is sitting in the dark just ready to write a ticket. On the northeast corner of Fifth Street and Gilmer Avenue, you can, without moving, count nine stop signs.
Running a close second is the number of no-turn-on-red signs we have. Of every 10 no-turn-on-red signs, only two or three are needed.Let's get a traffic department with a mindset of trying to move traffic along, not impede it.
While we are on stop signs: I resent my tax dollars going to raise other people's kids. All through our residential areas, stop signs pop out at you for no known reason, at little side streets where one or two cars a day may come by. It's because some old hen has chicks playing outdoors and, instead of teaching her chicks to treat the streets with respect and caution, she just calls downtown to get more stop signs put up.
Another thing you hear nothing about is the injustice in our vice department. If a genuinely female prostitute sticks her big toe up on the curb, she is run in along with everybody who looked at her. But if a male dressed as a female makes obscene gestures to passing motorists, nothing happens.
Could it be that the winds of being politically correct are blowing against "normal" prostitution and in favor of abnormal prostitution? I do not condone either lifestyle, but I always thought there was fairness in everything except love and war.
I would like to hear the candidates promise not to extend any more ballrooms from Hotel Roanoke out over the railroad tracks and call them walkways.
I would like to hear assurance from the candidates that less dependence will be placed on consultants. We pay City Manager Bob Herbert $110,000 a year; every time the street is dug up, he pays a consultant to say what bit to put on the jackhammer.
Please, someone, step forward and assure us that never again will a two-for-one retirement plan, or anything as dishonest and underhanded as that, be pulled on the taxpayers of Roanoke.
Trash, trash, everywhere. You see litter, piles of brush, pallets, garbage bags, lumber, appliances and worn-out furniture everywhere. There is litter up and down I-581 and the expressway, especially around interchanges. This is what out-of-towners see. I vote to have my tax dollars go to pay tough-looking dudes with sunglasses and pump 12-gauge shotguns standing watch over a fraction of the 200 to 300 jailbirds who sit doing nothing all day. Let's put them to work picking up this litter.
You do not hear any talk about the wasted parking spaces downtown that are not utilized. Or the spaces that are marked "no parking," but that could be used for parking if someone became innovative.
Not a word is said about our recycling program that is hurting more than it helps. It is badly planned. For instance, why wash out aluminum cans with good water? The water is worth more than the containers being saved. And don't forget the sewer charge on this water that went up at the first of the year.
The candidates will not talk about all these street people who, if they behave themselves, are no problem. But during A Dickens of a Christmas, for example, a street person had vomited all over the entrance to a downtown building on the market. Is this what tourists visiting the farmers' market want to see? Why doesn't one of the candidates come out in favor of buying people who act like this one-way cab fare to Cave Spring Corners or Tanglewood Mall?
While we are talking about the farmers' market, let's touch on the subject of those noisy, unwanted, unneeded, illegal aliens from Europe, those English starlings creating their own gooey layer of droppings for all to slip and slide in when the weather is wet. Here's your line, candidates: Let's eradicate these starlings. Yes, kill, eliminate this unwanted blight that has had its grip on downtown for so long. If Roanokers can't stomach a little mass murder, here's Plan B. Capture all the starlings, box them up real humane-like and send them c.o.d. to P.E.T.A. headquarters in Norfolk.
Come on, politicians, how about a little verbal support for Bob Zimmerman in his effort to block the Habitat for Humanity community planned for Salem Avenue near 10th Street Southwest? As I read it between the lines, Roanoke does not want to lose this commercially zoned land, but nobody has the fortitude to speak out against the project because of the wrath they would have to endure from conscience-soothers. Roanoke needs to use its finite land as wisely as it can, and this isn't the way.
Roanoke can't seem to ever come up with a plan for anything that serves all people equitably. Take the new Second Street bridge being built. There will be no means of getting on or off this thing to go to the businesses on Salem and Shenandoah avenues. Only two things were important in the planning stages: dumping tourists onto Campbell Avenue, and eliminating a road crossing for Norfolk Southern. The heck with local people, local business and marketable commercial property on Salem and Shenandoah.
I hear you, sour grapes and more sour grapes; that's all this fellow is. Maybe, maybe not. These fundamental, basic things you don't hear discussed are really some of the more complex issues we need to address.
Taking care of every problem large and small is the only way Roanoke will become what it has to become. No longer can we just brush issues like this aside, figuring on diluting the problem with a never-ending supply of land to try and try on.
Winfred Noell of Roanoke is a truck driver.
LENGTH: Long : 117 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: RICHARD MILHOLLAND/Los Angeles Times KEYWORDS: POLITICS CITY COUNCILby CNB