ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 21, 1996 TAG: 9607220028
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: New River Journal
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY
"Isn't it ironic," goes the refrain from a pop music hit of earlier this year. Which brings us to the Christiansburg post office situation.
Nearly 10 years after the backdoor deal that transformed a Virginia Tech horticulture farm into the prettiest sea of neon and asphalt this side of Las Vegas (that is ironic); eight years after Christiansburg annexed much of the same area from Montgomery County, accelerating the withdrawal of major retailers from the county's two downtowns and from Radford; two years after the Christiansburg Town Council all but rolled out the red carpet for the Wal-Mart Superstore (and sealed the current fate of the empty 7-year-old former Wal-Mart building and perhaps the Marketplace shopping center itself, which has lost the second of its three anchor stores); a few people have finally realized that downtown Christiansburg may be in danger of losing the basic institutions that contribute to a sense of community.
Isn't it interesting that in this day of the overhyped electronic information revolution, it was the good old post office - the bearer of what's dismissively called "snail mail" by computer geeks - that finally provoked a few people into public action to stem, if not stop, the flow of commercial and civic life to the souless U.S. 460-Peppers Ferry Road area (home of the Roanoke Times bureau, which it should be noted, is a building that does nothing to improve the area's aesthetics).
A handful of players in town stepped in two weeks ago with a counteroffer to the Postal Service in an 11th-hour bid to keep the main post office downtown, rather than moving to a site behind the Marketplace shopping center.
Though the offer was just as abruptly withdrawn and the Marketplace-area site appears to be the winner, downtown advocates achieved a small victory.
With the help of U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher's office, they extracted a promise from the Postal Service to at least keep a stamp-and-mailing concession in the existing, cramped downtown post office. Which only makes sense. Just like keeping such a small operation in downtown Blacksburg made sense when its main post office moved to larger quarters.
The efforts of the town businessmen and women who started the ball rolling, of the Montgomery County Board of Supervisors and its July 8 resolution in favor of a downtown post office, and, finally, of the Christiansburg Town Council and its resolution of last week, should be saluted.
The next step will be keeping the pressure on the Postal Service to make the downtown facility a full-service post office, rather than a so-called "contract" office.
I only wonder what took so long for the downtown crowd to react. And that's not ironic at all.
Meanwhile, we now have clear evidence that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is no Hokie. He's even - heavens! - exhibiting pronounced evidence of a Wahooish tendencies. I direct your attention to Scalia's lone dissent in the Virginia Military Institute sex-discrimination decision, released last month. Specifically, to Footnote 4. There, Scalia notes a snide corrective to the majority opinion, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And keep in mind, Scalia is a graduate of Georgetown University and Harvard Law, not a Cavalier.
"The Court," Scalia writes, "must be forgiven by Virginians for quoting a reference to 'the Charlottesville campus' of the University of Virginia ... [UVa] occupies the portion of Charlottesville known, not as the 'campus,' but 'the grounds.' More importantly, even if it were a 'campus,' there would be no need to specify 'the Charlottesville campus,' as one might refer to the Bloomington or Indianapolis campus of Indiana University. Unlike university systems with which the Court is perhaps more familiar, such as those in New York ... there is only one University of Virginia. It happens (because Thomas Jefferson lived near there) to be located at Charlottesville. To many Virginians it is known, simply, as 'the University,' which suffices to distinguish it from the Commonwealth's other institutions offering four-year college instruction ..."
Indeed. Wahoowah, Mr. Justice Scalia.
I think it's a safe bet that there's no burgundy blazer beneath that black robe.
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