THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, November 6, 1995 TAG: 9511040196
SECTION: BUSINESS WEEKLY PAGE: 04 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: Ted Evanoff
LENGTH: Medium: 87 lines
Norfolk's year-old maritime museum, Nauticus, has been called a costly blunder. City taxpayers must shell out almost $1 million a year in extra subsidies, all because the forecasts were wrong. Tourists haven't come in droves.
Yes, we've heard all about Nauticus' finances. But consider another viewpoint, the one from alongside the museum on the green expanse of lawn known as Town Point Park.
The warm wind smells of rain. A pagoda stands nearby, an earthy contrast to downtown's sleek, impersonal buildings. What catches your eye is the water. Norfolk has cleared the shore at Town Point to open long sight lines on the Elizabeth River.
The water looks deep and gray. A hefty yacht, the ketch Peregrine out of Boston, powers with the floodtide. Her crew steers past a green cliff, the container ship TS Gallant, then a hulking gray freighter, the Cape Race, and reaches the river fork, where the black bulk of the merchant vessel Overseas Washington towers above the haze of marine cranes, barges, and U.S. Navy ships in drydock.
You could stand in a thousand cities and never duplicate this scene. This is distinctly Tidewater. Some 800,000 people in Hampton Roads have jobs and more than 200,000 of them are in the Navy, work for the Navy, or work for the shipyards and companies that service the Navy and merchant fleets. This is a working seaport.
Stand at Town Point and you can see the unmistakable signature of modern Norfolk. No sight in the city gives such a sense of place. What better to build here than a museum of ships and the sea?
Perhaps the old days have an appeal, when the Elizabeth was lined with piers and taverns, warehouses and passenger ferries. At least they paid property taxes. Vast swaths of Norfolk are off the tax rolls today.
Nauticus, Town Point Park and Harbor Park baseball stadium are government-owned and pay no property tax. Old Dominion University and Norfolk State University are government too, as is the single largest enterprise in Hampton Roads, the Norfolk Naval Base, which covers about 25 percent of the land within the city limits.
Other prominent institutions in Norfolk off the tax rolls include Norfolk International Terminal, Eastern Virginia Medical School, DePaul Medical Center, Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, Children's Hospital of the King's Daughter.
These institutions employ thousands of people. In fact, Norfolk, the state's largest city after Virginia Beach, has 244,000 jobs within its borders, more jobs than it has population.
What Norfolk doesn't have is the sizeable tax base. Of the $445.3 million in the Norfolk municipal budget last year, general property taxes accounted for 30 percent of the revenue, or $135.9 million.
Having to pay an additional $1 million for Nauticus rankled many taxpayers, especially because the tax rate, set at $1.38 per $100 of assessed value in '93, will rise to $1.40 for the current budget year. That'll bring the tax owed on a $75,000 house to $1,050, a $38 increase of which, conceivably, a portion would fund the museum shortfall. Is Nauticus worth it?
Tidewater's national treasures - Jamestown, Colonial Williamsburg, the original Portsmouth shipyard, Yorktown, Fort Monroe - date back to a way of thinking unrecognizable to modern Americans.
The country early on thought of itself as isolated and self-sufficient, principled and steadfast compared to Europe. You see this in Colonial Williamsburg. People hand labor at small trades.
We're no longer an agrarian country, haven't been since the late 1800s, when the United States became a manufacturing nation. America, a new world power, armed itself with a bluewater Navy and stationed a good part of the Atlantic fleet on the Elizabeth River.
Nauticus may not be what you want it to be. There are no grizzled mariners, no displays of shipboard life the way Jamestown recreates the colony.
Nauticus conveys the notion of Tidewater as the proud center of a modern maritime nation. Exhibits allow visitors to manipulate machines. You can stand on a ship's bridge, steer a ship, examine navigation tools, serve on a Navy warship.
Nauticus is unique. If marketed correctly, it can attract tourists. And that is what Norfolk's diminished tax base needs. Norfolk's local sales tax produced $20 million last year. Nauticus can boost the amount by drawing visitors from out of town.
And better they visit a monument to the sea and ships on the Elizabeth River, a real working seaport, than some place like Boston Harbor, where condos obscure the view. by CNB