THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 4, 1996 TAG: 9602040093
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MARGARET EDDS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHESTERFIELD COUNTY LENGTH: Long : 179 lines
Here, in the cozy den of a fashionable home in one of the state's wealthiest suburbs, A.C. ``Mac'' McNeer is explaining how he has come to feel a kinship of interests with the residents of Richmond.
``I think it's protecting my position as a middle-class person, protecting my property values and my property rights,'' says McNeer of his tentative willingness to consider cooperative ventures with the city.
``If by some way we could raise the city, which rarely if ever happens, if some way could be found to raise the level of the city, and I know we're talking pie in the sky, then that also protects me.
``That's what they have to give me for me to be amenable to talking to them.''
In this room, where a handful of Chesterfield County residents have gathered to explain their skepticism of anything smacking of ``regionalism,'' there is evidence aplenty of Virginia's city-county divide.
Here, conviction runs deep that the problems within Virginia's cities are largely self-made; that any crisis is one of values, not money; that anyone with determination ``absolutely'' can make it in America; and that those who are appealing to the suburbs for help want one thing: a handout.
As Faye Palmer puts it, ``I don't think the city wants you to tell them anything. I think they want our money.''
But there is also in this room a hint of the reason that a 2-year-old movement of civic, political and business leaders to bolster Virginia's cities through regional cooperation is finding unexpectedly fertile ground in the 1996 General Assembly.
In a legislative session where - for once - plowshares seem as plentiful as swords, the Urban Partnership's plan to reward cooperative ventures on everything from schools to taxes to libraries to industrial recruitment has sailed through committees in both chambers. A similarly easy vote is expected Monday in the Senate.
While the proposal may face a greater test on the House floor, and while the real challenge is getting the $200 million the Urban Partnership eventually wants in funding, the reception thus far has been nothing short of stunning.
``I couldn't believe it,'' exulted former Gov. A. Linwood Holton, the partnership's lobbyist, after a unanimous vote in the Senate Committee on Labor and Commerce last week.
If the legislation continues its brisk march to passage, Holton and others believe it will be a landmark step toward easing a city-county divide that is more rigid in Virginia than in any other state. Only in the commonwealth are all cities totally independent of their neighboring counties.
That sink-or-swim attitude is hastening an urban decline that puts Virginia at an economic disadvantage with states such as North Carolina, the Urban Partnership argues. Among its most ballyhooed statistics: Between 1970 and 1990, earnings per private-sector employee increased an average of 6.7 percent in North Carolina, where cities are also part of county governments. The growth in Virginia was 1 percent.
In the 1980s, ``in Virginia the income disparities between older central cities and newer suburban cities and counties were generally substantial and growing,'' wrote two urban planners at the University of Virginia, William H. Lucy and David L. Phillips, in an analysis conducted for the Urban Partnership.
In contrast, ``North Carolina's cities were all growing and were comparable, on average, to suburbs in income of residents in both 1980 and 1990.'' That makes North Carolina cities a more appealing place to locate, they argue.
Holton's folksy analysis is that central cities such as Norfolk, Richmond and Roanoke ``are just like the hole in the doughnut.''
If there's deterioration in the core, he said, ``it's going to spread into the doughnut. . . . If you don't do something to create real economic development in the core, (problems) can't do anything but get worse, and it will cost you more.''
Neal Barber, a former state housing official who is directing the Urban Partnership from a headquarters at the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, calls that ``the self-interest'' argument.
Essentially, he said, there are three rationales for counties to come to the table with cities:
The moral argument, that it's the right thing to do to help distressed neighborhoods. ``Typically that only gets you so far,'' Barber said.
The economic argument, that an entire region's economic strength diminishes without cooperation. This is the theory bolstered by Lucy's statistics.
The self-interest argument, that if urban problems aren't stemmed they will migrate into the counties.
`` `Out here with my pine trees and oak trees and almost totally white schools, I'm so comfortable,' '' said Warner Dalhouse, chairman of the board of First Union National Bank of Virginia, offering his view of a typical suburban attitude.
Dalhouse, one of a group of prominent businessmen whose support has lent an urgency to the Urban Partnership's message, continued: ``But those $250,000 homes are going to be the target of burglars who come out of that city. . . . I don't believe we can have a healthy Virginia if we have sick cities.''
Those assembled in Faye Palmer's den say the issue is more complicated than suburban selfishness.
``If things don't improve at the grassroots level, it's going to continue to deteriorate,'' said Virginia Hickey, who sees stronger families as the key.
Hickey is an accounts manager for a Maryland-based promotional company and past president of a civic league that represents 10 Chesterfield County subdivisions. The homes in those neighborhoods are on 1- to 5-acre lots; the residents are middle class to very rich.
Hickey acknowledges that she and her neighbors were accused of being ``snobs and high-falutin' '' when they fought zoning changes that would reduce lot sizes last year. What they were trying to do was preserve a pristine area of an increasingly populous county, she said.
And she laments the racial edge that she sees in fears of regional ventures. ``Absolutely, no question about it, and everybody would (say so) if they were honest,'' replied Hickey when asked if there is a racial thread to the concerns.
``There are some people that live in the West End (a relatively well-to-do section of Richmond) that will never go downtown, `I don't care what they do to that place,' and it's unfortunate,'' said Hickey, who has clients in the inner city and who once taught in Brazil and worked in Africa, as a college student.
But Hickey and her husband, Tom, who grew up in a poor city neighborhood in Bridgeport, Conn., believe that solutions to poverty are more individual than collective.
``If you have the drive and ambition to make something of yourself, you can make anything that you want of yourself,'' said Tom Hickey.
Such views are echoed on the governing boards of many of Virginia's suburban counties and cities.
``Until such time as I learn what the Urban Partnership intends to do and how it does it and the impact on our city, I remain skeptical,'' said Harold Heischober, a city councilman in Virginia Beach. ``If it's equalization of tax rates and inter-relationship of school systems, I remain skeptical.''
The Virginia Beach City Council voted informally last fall to stop contributing money to the Urban Partnership. Holton is scheduled to meet with council members this week.
Bob Johnson, a Roanoke County supervisor who was on the losing end of a 3-2 vote last year to join the partnership, said, ``I just see it as back-door annexation.''
Meeting at the Hot Springs resort last November, the board of the Virginia Association of Counties voted to oppose the draft recommendations of the Urban Partnership. The chief concern, members said, was whether counties would be paying more and getting less from the proposed $200 million fund than cities.
Lucy of the University of Virginia agrees that revenue sharing is the philosophical sticking point. In places like Charlotte, where city and county governments blend, the regions do share resources. ``Revenue sharing is one of the necessities,'' he said, arguing that the Urban Partnership proposals are ``very modest steps'' in that direction.
City-county government structures are only one of several factors that determine the economic health of a region, he acknowledged, citing, as others, the presence of interstate highways, state-of-the-art airport facilities, and strong educational resources.
But when a region is weak in a few areas, regional cooperation takes on extra importance, Lucy said. South Hampton Roads, for instance, has fewer interstate connections than any other major urban area in the Southeast.
``If the central city is much poorer than the surrounding areas, newcomers want to avoid the central city, and some (longtime) residents want to move out, so you set up a process of continuing decline in the core,'' he said.
Then, Lucy said, a vicious cycle sets in: Crime and poverty move into the older suburbs, middle-class residents move farther and farther from the core, small towns are enveloped, and no one is satisfied.
Mac McNeer can already glimpse the problem.
A few years ago, he and his wife shopped regularly at a mall just outside the Richmond city limits. Today, he said, they avoid it because of reports of muggings and knifings. ``That's what's happening because the people from the city are beginning to come out,'' he said.
McNeer, a retired state government manager, said he remains suspicious of the Urban Partnership and ``unalterably opposed'' to regional government. But his attitude toward regionalism is evolving, perhaps reflecting the mood of the General Assembly.
He was taken with a recent speech to his civic association by Richmond Mayor Leonidas Young, McNeer said.
``What he said was that the city is dying on the vine and that unless there is regional cooperation, the counties are going to inherit the problem. . . . He said that unless we get together and decide how we, not me, are going to solve this problem, it's going to take a toll.''
KEYWORDS: REGIONALISM VIRGINIA by CNB