ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, December 4, 1996 TAG: 9612040055
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRISTINA NUCKOLS STAFF WRITER
National Park Service officials are driving up and down the Blue Ridge Parkway in Roanoke County this week checking out the views.
But unlike the tourists they share the road with, the federal officials are taking notes.
It's all part of a mapping and inventory project the park service plans to do for the full 470 miles of the parkway over the next couple of years. Right now, they're working on about 70 miles, including the portion running through Roanoke County and the area around Asheville, N.C.
Gary Johnson, chief of the division of resource planning and professional services for the park service, said land along the parkway is steadily making the transition from agrarian to urban. Although the federal government owns a corridor of land along the road, the view in some places on a clear day reaches 60 miles or more. Since an estimated 400,000 acres can be seen from the parkway to some degree, park service officials want to start setting priorities on what are the most important scenic overlooks.
The park service hired a design research group from North Carolina State University to create maps showing what areas are visible along the parkway. The maps are color-coded, with red indicating areas that are most visible to parkway travelers. As the visibility decreases, the colors "cool" to yellow, green and finally blue.
With those maps in hand, Johnson and researchers from N.C. State are traveling along the parkway documenting what types of land use - from houses to farmland - exist in the "red zones." The process was expected to take most of Tuesday and today.
What to do with the information once it's collected could be controversial, Johnson said, because some of the highly visible vistas include privately owned property.
Jay Tomlinson, director of the N.C. State research group, said the maps can be used to encourage developers to plan projects so they blend in with the landscape, much as was done with the Wilshire and Wolf Creek developments in recent years.
"We admit that change is going to happen," Tomlinson said. "This isn't an attempt to stop development in Roanoke County."
In other cases, Tomlinson said, a piece of property might be identified through the mapping project as so important that it should be purchased or protected through a land trust.
The information also will be given to every county that touches the parkway, Johnson said.
"It's not our intent to force every county to have zoning," he said.
Johnson met with Roanoke County planning officials Monday and gave a presentation to the Planning Commission Tuesday afternoon.
Terry Harrington, Roanoke County's director of planning and zoning, said the maps could be a useful tool as the county develops its comprehensive plan, due to be completed at the end of 1997. He said the maps could be manipulated to help county officials study the impact of any proposed cellular towers on ridge lines near the parkway.
The park service also is working on an economic development study to show how much money tourists from the parkway pour into individual counties.
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