THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, April 27, 1996 TAG: 9604270004
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A11 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: Glenn Allen scott
LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines
Some of the candidates for Norfolk City Council see Norfolk as a declining city. The contrary is true. Norfolk is a far-more-desirable urban center today than it was a half-century ago. That's when a businessmen's ticket was elected to City Council with a mandate to purge city government of grubby politics, inept leadership and police corruption.
Norfolk's slums were infamous back then. Millions of soldiers, sailors and Marines who passed through Norfolk during World War II remember it as squalid and inhospitable.
Norfolk could have become a cesspool. It didn't. Now it's the financial/commercial, cultural, higher-education, medical and cargo-handling center of Hampton Roads. Half of South Hampton Roads' jobs are in Norfolk. MacArthur Center, the $300-billion superregional shopping mall projected for downtown, promises to add 1,500 temporary construction jobs during the next few years and 3,000 permanent jobs thereafter while generating millions more in tax revenue. The existing City Council, to its enduring credit, unanimously supports the public/private partnership formed to make the mall possible.
Some council candidates regard MacArthur Center as a monstrous folly destined to add to taxpayers' burdens. They also contend that the emphasis on downtown development shortchanges basic services in the neighborhoods.
Whatever the truth in that charge, it is fast dwindling. City Hall is increasingly responsive to neighborhoods' pleas and demands and - thanks to conservation and redevelopment projects from downtown to Ocean View - the city can count on more and more tax revenue to spend on the neighborhoods.
With the encouragement and spirited cooperation of civic leagues, City Hall last year sharply stepped up code enforcement to counter physical blight; 45 dilapidated structures were demolished in 1995, and thousands of other structures were brought into compliance with city codes. Code enforcers will sweep Norfolk again this year, starting in July.
City Manager James B. Oliver Jr.'s proposed $487.8 million general-operating budget for fiscal-year 1997 specifies increased funding for recreation and libraries, funding for 700 additional streetlights and upgrading of hundreds of others, and accelerated street, curb and sidewalk repairs - all beneficial to neighborhoods. The city manager also recommends full funding of the School Board's request for public education. All this without any increase in the real-estate-tax rate.
The charge that downtown development is a drain on the taxpayers is in error, even when you include the $1 million a year the city pays out to service the Nauticus debt. Downtown development is a plus for taxpayers. It should be an even bigger plus when MacArthur Center opens for business, presumably in 1998.
A Virginian-Pilot analysis not long ago found that downtown yearly generates $7.4 million more in municipal tax revenue than the city spends on the area. Because of its high commercial/office-occupancy rate, downtown will generate more tax revenue for the city in FY97 than in FY96.
The citywide Police Assisted Community Enforcement program has contributed significantly to a marked decrease in crime in recent years. There's still too much crime, of course. But all candidates for City Council praise PACE, which mobilizes community resources to combat criminality.
Some of the candidates imply that Norfolk is hemorrhaging population and businesses, and it's true that Norfolk's population is way down from its high of 305,000 several years ago. Many newcomers to Hampton Roads pass by Norfolk to settle in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake because they perceive the schools in those cities to be better (read: fewer poor, low-achieving black schoolchildren), crime rates to be lower (true) and living less costly (which it is for many).
But there seems to be less than meets the eye in Norfolk's 8.9 percent population loss between 1990 (261,250) and 1994 (239,900). A decrease in Navy personnel stationed but not necessarily resident in Norfolk explains roughly two-thirds of the drop.
There is reason to suspect population loss has slowed or reversed: Enrollment in the public schools was up by more than 300 (to 36,378) in September 1995 over 1994 and may rise by 700 when the 388 units of new Benmoreell housing (alongside Hampton Boulevard) are occupied by Navy families next year.
Meanwhile, despite much turnover, businesses in the city number around 9,500 year after year.
Successive post-World War II city administrations strengthened Norfolk's tax-and-jobs base, brightening its prospects. This was no minor achievement, considering the city's heavy concentration of poor. Norfolk's median household income ($28,713) is second-lowest in South Hampton Roads (Suffolk's is lowest). Sixty-four percent of Norfolk schoolchildren qualify for free or partly subsidized school lunches. But the number of recipients of Aid to Families With Dependent Children has fallen by a couple of thousand in recent years.
Norfolk has its problems. But they are being addressed - to happier and happier outcomes. That's good news not only for Norfolk but also for Hampton Roads. For, as anyone who's been paying attention knows, the healthier and more prosperous each of the region's components, the healthier and more prosperous the region. MEMO: Mr. Scott is associate editor of the editorial page of The
Virginian-Pilot. by CNB