ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, June 2, 1996 TAG: 9605310072
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JEFF STURGEON STAFF WRITER
MORE than 300 acres of farmland sit near Buena Vista, right off the main road into the town's central business district and across from a short row of homes.
Cows have the run of it now. But civic leaders see change coming in the form of industrial development.
On this quiet spot, they hope jobs will become as plentiful as, well, cowpies.
This is not just another story of developers paving over rural America, however. To be sure, if all goes as planned, concrete will be poured by the ton where orange wildflowers wave in the breeze this spring. Hills will be flattened. Tranquillity drowned out.
It will look like a typical industrial park, yet, the planning behind its development is almost revolutionary. The planned industrial park is to have three stewards: Rockbridge County, within whose borders the land sits; Buena Vista, the closest city; and Lexington, six miles away.
The vast majority of the publicly financed industrial parks in the state belong to a single town, city or county, said Morgan Stewart, spokesman for the state Department of Economic Development.
But in the Rockbridge area, all three communities plan to share. They will split the costs of buying the land and installing utilities and roads for industry. All three will divide the money from the sale of parcels for factories, offices and warehouses. All three will share property taxes paid by the businesses that occupy them. And they assume the jobs will be taken by people who live throughout the region.
The unusual arrangement came about because no single government has the land and could easily afford to create a park of this size.
This kind of phenomenon could become more common in the future, because the General Assembly this winter began an effort to simplify government cost and revenue-sharing arrangements. The law is supposed to make it easier for communities to team up to do joint industrial parks but also joint fire stations, libraries or to provide any other public service need. The state's voters will be asked to vote the change into effect next year, but elected leaders would then need the approval of voters in their respective communities before proceding on specific joint projects.
The Rockbridge project was in the works before legislative action, but it is the type of cooperative venture supporters of the legislation anticipate.
It also provides an example for Roanoke area leaders, who are being urged by those with an eye on the future health of the region to explore the benefits of cooperation to a greater degree in economic development projects. The thinking is, if the region is serious about building larger industrial parks - big enough to ensure space is available far into the future for new jobs - local governments must pool their money and resources, such as land.
"It can be done here," said Beth Doughty, executive director of the Roanoke Valley Economic Development Partnership. "There's been general interest in doing that - loose conversation - that it might be a good idea."
Despite support for the concept of jointly owned and operated business parks, the concept has been almost universally ignored as Virginia's cities and counties have struck out on their own time and again. In the New River and Roanoke valleys, such solo creation of sites for industry includes:
Roanoke County launched ValleyTech Park west of Salem for a company that never came; the site instead drew R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co. of Chicago, which plans a book factory. Montgomery County is creating the 165-acre Falling Branch Industrial Park in Christiansburg to lure new high-tech jobs to the New River Valley. Roanoke in 1982 bought the initial 300 acres of the Roanoke Centre for Industry and Technology to expand its base of industrial sites. The park, since expanded to 140 acres, is partially filled.
The one example that stands out as perhaps the most recent candidate for joint development is Botetourt County's plan to develop during the next 10 to 15 years a 750-acre office and industrial park. But it turns out Botetourt has the ability to develop the area alone and no impetus to cooperate with other area localities.
County officials said they have or can get the $11 million to pay land and development costs of the business side of the project, called Botetourt Center at Greenfield. The development also will feature a school and recreation facilities on 922 acres along U.S. 220.
Involving multiple local governments would mean lengthened negotiations to sell or lease space to companies, said Gerald Burgess, Botetourt's county administrator. In the lightning-fast world of corporate deal-making, he said, delays can scuttle deals.
A joint industrial park was done here - once.
Roanoke County and Botetourt County own the region's only existing jointly administered industrial area, the Jack C. Smith Park off U.S. 460. They built it to accommodate a company that ultimately opened what is now Hanover Direct Inc.'s apparel warehouse. The site for that building straddles the border dividing the two counties.
Under their agreement, Roanoke County collects the taxes and gives half to Botetourt County. Roanoke County could deny Botetourt County its share of the money without fear of legal recourse, so the deal is built on mutual trust and cooperation. A state law includes a restriction that prevented the two governments from signing a binding agreement when they created the park in 1988.
But that could change with the legislation coming out of Richmond, which gives voters a chance to enhance the powers of counties.
The pressure for more cooperative industrial parks comes from the New Century Council, a regional planning organization that said it has tapped into the needs and desires of the citizens in the nine counties and five cities of the Roanoke and New River valleys and Alleghany Highlands. The council last summer wrote a 20-year economic plan for the region's communities and recommended the joint creation of several industrial parks, each 2,000 acres in size.
Here, the benefits of joint development are more clear. It is hard to imagine one community financing a park of that magnitude, and the New Century Council plan envisions such a project being opened to all regional governments.
At this point, the council has not followed up all of its written recommendations by pressing officials to act. Although engineer Ken Anderson of Blacksburg was named last November to head a committee most likely to take the lead on the proposed joint industrial parks issue, the committee has not yet met.
But the New Century Council said the need for action is clear. Beverly Fitzpatrick Jr., the organization's executive director, said a shortage of developable industrial sites is the greatest threat to this area's future.
Lack of ready industrial sites cost the area serious consideration by Motorola Inc. for its $3 billion computer chip factory, which is now planned for Goochland County, near Richmond, economic development officials have said.
A developable site must be flat or capable of being graded without undue expense. It must be easily connected to utilities such as water and electricity and lie along roads that lead to interstate highways. Some companies also need railroad track.
Most lacking in the Roanoke region are large such building sites; Motorola chose a 230-acre site, 40 percent larger than the biggest site the Roanoke area had to offer.
Members of city councils and boards of supervisors have discussed for years how they could lock arms and solve the site-shortage problem. But there are no current plans for joint parks in either the Roanoke or New River valleys.
Land is but one major ingredient for a joint industrial park. The other is cooperation.
In the Rockbridge area, both were available, though the cooperation gelled only in the past few years.
Robert Berkstresser, chairman of the Rockbridge County Board of Supervisors, described the old thinking like this: "It was just kind of an unwritten law: You just don't work together."
But today, he said, "People realized we would be better off if we worked together."
For example, he said, Rockbridge County and Buena Vista needed a month to work out a jointly funded sewer line extension that will serve a county housing project and a shopping center in the city.
A few years ago, a devastating plant shutdown focused the issue of the communities' common fates.
In 1992, the Blue Bird Corp. closed a school bus factory in Buena Vista. That action threw 220 people out of work, most of them Rockbridge area residents. The company also left vacant a building of 241,000 square feet - too large for most any company likely to come to Buena Vista - surrounded by 78 acres of land.
Elected leaders and top administrators in the three communities wanted a new company to replace Blue Bird and make up for the lost jobs. They agreed that only as a team could they afford to buy the former bus factory and sell or lease it in smaller units better suited to the needs of available industry.
As it turned out, the joint industrial development authority formed for that purpose isn't needed to carve up and market the Blue Bird site; a prospect is considering taking the whole site, said David Kleppinger, executive director of the Rockbridge Area Economic Development Commission. Because that company hasn't signed the deal, he isn't identifying the firm.
The communities, instead, have turned their attention to development of an industrial park and, later, a research center near Lexington.
Who would lead a similar effort in the Roanoke Valley? some concerned with economic development have asked. Is there any immediate reason joint industrial parks should now be planned? And finally, where among the peaks and valleys would such a park or parks go? The answers are unclear.
Area economic developers failed to come up with much of a list of potential sites when they studied the issue a few years ago. But Fitzpatrick of the New Century Council has said he believes closer inspection will reveal extremely large tracts that don't require extensive grading.
Phil Sparks, Roanoke's municipal economic development chief, said a large company holding the promise of new jobs could prompt local governments to finally team up and create an industrial park or site specifically for the company. No such prospect has been identified, however.
Doughty of the economic development partnership said it makes sense for her organization to lead a future effort to form a regional industrial park. Past discussions "might be resurrected again," she said, but a nagging problem is likely to be where to put it.
But she doesn't see joint parks as replacing those financed by individual governments, which she said are wise investments for the communities that can afford them. "The future for it is more in being able to achieve things together that can't be achieved individually," Doughty said.
LENGTH: Long : 188 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ARNE KUHLMANN/Staff. David Kleppinger, executiveby CNBdirector of the Rockbridge Area Economic Development Commission, is
spearheading the effort by Lexington, Buena Vista and Rockbridge
County to develop a joint industrial park. He's at the site of the
proposed park near Buena Vista. color. Graphic: Map by staff.
color.