ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, June 24, 1996 TAG: 9606240094
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: & now this...
How many Polish sausages can Bob Herbert wolf down at one sitting?
How many Virginia city managers does it take to change a Polish light bulb
How do you say 2-for-1 pensions in Polish?
No, those are not weak attempts at ethnic humor.
Rather, the city's top administrator is in Poland teaching local government the Roanoke way of doing things.
Herbert left Wednesday on a 19-day "working trip" to Opole, Poland. He's part of a Virginia contingent of local government officials traveling to that country on an information exchange program. He will return July8.
The trip is sponsored by the United States Information Agency. None of the money comes out of the city budget.
"In our terms, it's not our money," said Michelle Bono, a city spokeswoman.
Opole, a city of just more than 100,000 people, is in southwestern Poland near the Czech border.
It's the capital of the Opole region, which is roughly equivalent to an American state.
The city actually has a "sister city" relationship with Roanoke County. County Administrator Elmer Hodge was scheduled to go along with Herbert but couldn't make it because he has too much work to do, said Anne Marie Green, a county spokeswoman.
Hodge did visit Opole in 1994, along with Green and some other county officials on another USIA trip. Opole officials, many of them holdovers from Poland's overthrown communist regime, visited Roanoke County last year, Green said.
Local governments in Poland are facing some hard times during the transition from a communist to a capitalist economy.
In 1994, "they had no idea of real estate assessments or taxes over there," Green recalls.
Opole officials had their eyes opened over here, she added.
"They were fascinated by the [government] openness here," Green says. "And they could not believe the newspapers would not write what I told them to write."
- DAN CASEY
Vision Report summaries printed
Roanoke County residents who participated in last year's vision process will be receiving a souvenir in the mail soon.
It's more than a souvenir, though. The glossy Vision Report, titled "The Changing Century - Roanoke County 2010,'' summarizes the results of community meetings and a 500-person survey, then explains what's next as work continues on the creation of a comprehensive plan this year. A comprehensive plan maps out goals for the county's future, addressing such issues as land use and infrastructure needs.
Planner Janet Scheid said county officials wanted all participants to have something that shows the results of their work last year, but it wasn't practical to mail all of them copies of the anthology, which contains all focus group reports, meeting notes and background materials.
"It's a large, rather cumbersome document," she said. "It's about six inches high."
Instead, county officials designed a fold-out document summarizing the process. They've printed 5,000 copies, about 500 of which are in the mail to vision participants, civic league presidents and members of county boards and commissions.
Anyone who doesn't get one in the mail can find copies at county library branches and at the Roanoke County Administration Center.
Copies also will be distributed this summer during public meetings on the new comprehensive plan. Since the documents have been designed with portability in mind, county officials hope recipients will bring them along as a reference at all county government meetings.
The county recently won two awards from the National Association of Counties. One was for the vision process; the other was for work done to implement a scenic protection plan for the Blue Ridge Parkway in conjunction with the subdivision proposed by developer Len Boone.
- CHRISTINA NUCKOLS
LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Herbert.by CNB