THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, July 16, 1995 TAG: 9507140230
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: RANDOM RAMBLES
SOURCE: TONY STEIN
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
Sometimes, when I'm mowing the lawn on a hot summer day, I consider ripping out the grass and replacing it with plastic turf. It would stay neat. It would stay green. And it wouldn't grow, which would be fine because growth can be a hassle.
That's why it's too bad you can't do cities the way you do artificial turf lawns. I mean, wouldn't it be nice if we could create a city exactly the size and shape we want and have it remain eternally just so?
No way. Cities grow. Well or badly, they grow. Watching from the sidelines as the politicos grope for the right direction, I hark back 24 years to when and why my family moved to Chesapeake. We were living in Norfolk in a house that once was bordered by an open field. Rabbits and quail were our neighbors on that side. Good neighbors. Never held wild parties. Never borrowed a tool they didn't return.
Then the bulldozers rumbled in and the construction crews followed. No more field. No more rabbits and quail. Instead, a shopping mall with noise and traffic. We're outta here, we said, and my wife suggested moving to Great Bridge.
In 1971, it was the boonies, a quiet little pit stop between Norfolk and North Carolina. There were a few small shops and a lot of woods and farm land. If 10 cars a day passed my house, that was a busy spurt.
The, in the early 1980s, the building boom edged over from Virginia Beach. Suddenly, Great Bridge was a hot location. Too hot. A lot of us could see the problem coming. What's more, we said so. Almost from the first issue of The Clipper in 1982, there were columns and editorials saying ``Look over your shoulder, City Council members and planners. Look at the mess in Virginia Beach.''
Those were the days when growth was a magic word. I remember a leading Chesapeake real estate agent telling me that growth was good without qualification. Because Great Bridge was considered an eye-catching location for real estate ads, she also told me that the boundaries of Great Bridge extended all the way to Hickory. There's a parallel in Norfolk. The area identified as Ghent was and is so desirable that advertisements have edged its boundaries ever outward.
Finally, the realities came home to roost, first in Virginia Beach, now in Chesapeake. Residential growth does not pay for itself. Schools, roads and utilities cost money. Lots of money. And they take time to put in place.
So here I am in 1995, a Chesapeake resident who moved here to my little piece of the boonies. Boonies, no more, my friends. The traffic that streams past my house is so heavy that I sometimes have to wait to back out of my driveway. And if you want to make a left turn onto Battlefield Boulevard, put in a reservation for next Tuesday. It may take that long.
I see portable classrooms at the school my granddaughter attends. I hear constant talk of city services stretching to meet ever-increasing needs. Stretching thin. There's something else. Something less definable by the numbers. It is evidenced by the strip shopping centers that line Battlefield Boulevard where the trees and farmland used to be. There is a quality, an atmosphere, that is dying around me.
Maybe that sort of change is inevitable. I don't know. Nor do I have any quick and easy answers. That's good, because it's been said that the quick and easy answer is usually the wrong one. One truth is that well-managed development is healthy for a community, but that didn't happen in Virginia Beach. It didn't happen in Chesapeake. Oh, there have been a lot of words on the subject over the years, but, somehow, we've ended up with the portable classrooms, the crowded roads and the stretched services.
Bottom line, Chesapeake can't go on with the kind of snowball-rolling-downhill growth of the past. But who puts on the brakes and how do they do it? City Council just said no to a citizen vote, so the ball is in your court, council members. If you're saying that city policy is your responsibility, take that responsibility as it applies to controlling galloping growth.
As a first step, how about a sensible growth summit meeting of citizens, council members and developers? There are smart heads available. They need to get serious about the problem and throw sensible ideas instead of rhetoric at each other. Not even Solomon could come up with an answer that will make everybody happy, but maybe, somehow, serious searchers can find the Promised Land of Compromise out there somewhere.
I sure hope they do. I want to see my city thrive, but I miss the trees, and I hate growing old waiting to make left turns on Battlefield. by CNB