ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 13, 1996 TAG: 9610120014
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
HERE, AN additional $150,000 for curbing and sidewalks.
There, $30,000 for tables, benches, trash cans, bleachers and soccer goals at athletic fields.
And so on: $25,000 for new fencing and backstops at eight city parks; $60,000 to paint and repair the Mill Mountain Star; $85,000 for an update of the 14-year-old Parks and Recreation master plan.
A lot of small items, in other words - not one of which, we'd bet, made any Roanokers bolt upright in astonishment as they read the City Council story in their morning paper the other day.
But taken together, the city administration's proposals for how to spend a $3.4 million surplus left over from the 1995-96 fiscal year may have more significance than is immediately manifest. For one thing, they help make a useful point in this cynical age: Elections matter.
Elections matter not just for determining who'll hold public office. If candidates and administrators are listening, elections also influence public policy.
Nearly $1.3 million - more than a third of the money - is for projects that would directly benefit neighborhoods. Most of the rest is for nuts-and-bolts maintenance and spruce-up projects throughout the city. That's in accord with themes expressed during the campaigns for this past spring's municipal elections - expressed by voters as much as by the candidates themselves.
There's work to be done in Roanoke's neighborhoods, the voters said, and work to be done in improving the general appearance of the city.
On voters' minds, too, was a snow-heavy winter - and the city's snow-removal performance that may have merited good grades for effort but won only so-so grades for effectiveness. Included in the administration's proposals: $135,000 for snow-removal equipment, including "pre-wetting systems" to prevent snow from sticking to streets.
At some point, increased attention to neglected city parks in particular may become the priority it deserves to be, instead of something to do with left-over money. But the hint anyway, evident in the divvying-up of surplus funds, is of a renewed focus on neighborhoods and on what some might consider the more mundane details of civic life.
This is not unique to Roanoke. Throughout America, there is growing recognition of how much the well-being of society depends on the health of life at the neighborhood level. Increasingly, the important civic action is going on within neighborhoods, as well as at the regional level.
Neither level coincides with the scope of municipal government. But municipalities need to encourage and help along regional and neighborhoods' unbureaucratic, collaborative tending to quality of life. Otherwise, governments are at risk of getting in the way.
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