THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, May 31, 1996 TAG: 9605310004
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A14 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: By BRAD FACE
LENGTH: 86 lines
This is the second half of an essay arguing the case for regional action to address common Hampton Roads public challenges. The first half was published yesterday.
The concept of regionalism in Hampton Roads is an old idea that has never caught on. And we have paid the price for some 300 years. In the first part of this commentary, we reviewed the descent of Hampton Roads from its 17th century position as a dominant economic and political force in the New World to what 20th-century author Paul Wilstach called an area significant largely as a memory.
This depressing history was not lost on the people who were actually witnessing our catastrophic decline. In his 1853 book on our area, William Forrest described the circumstances as ``humiliating'' and ``mortifying.'' He lamented that ``the people of this section . . . have seemed quite willing to wait and calmly submit to the sad result of delay.'' But the main cause of this area's undoing, according to Forrest, was what he termed the ``astonishing'' commercial policy of our elected officials here and at the state Capitol.
We have had some good ideas. But too often we have been unable to follow through on them. For instance, in 1832, a company was organized to build a canal connecting the James River and Hampton Roads to the Ohio. This canal would have provided shipping then using the Erie Canal with a shorter, cheaper, ice-free route to our port and the Atlantic. It was never completed. An anonymous essayist was still hoping that it might be in the 1850s when he wrote: ``When Virginia's great Central canal shall have been completed . . . Norfolk will spring up into the New York of the South.''
But you see, our leaders just couldn't agree. They couldn't decide whether to build an east-west transportation system to serve Hampton Roads using canals or railroads. So, in what has become a time-worn tradition in our part of the world, a compromise was struck to serve the ends of competing political interests, not to accomplish the task at hand. The compromise: Half the canal was built, and so were about half the railroads needed to do the job.
The source of our continued political failure was clear to Robert Lamb, who edited a book on Hampton Roads in 1888: It was the bickering among our local cities, towns and counties. Until and unless they were unified, Lamb reasoned more than 100 years ago, we could never reach our enormous potential. Lamb, however, was confident that our local governments had finally learned their lesson. He predicted: ``(We)e hope soon to see the time when the union between them . . . shall have become so perfect that, all jealousy and rivalry buried forever, we shall have one corporation with absolute identity of interests covering the shores of our beautiful harbor.
Editor Lamb was wrong in 1888. Many others over the centuries who saw one of the continent's greatest cities rising here have been wrong. And they will continue to be wrong until we have the courage to change the way we govern ourselves.
Our local-governmental structures evolved from an edict by an English king and the once-insurmountable geographic obstacles that separated us for centuries. Well, the king is dead, and the rivers, the harbor and even the Bay have long since been spanned. Our area is now one economic union withering for want of a political union.
It is not for us in the Future of Hampton Roads Inc. to determine exactly what our political union should look like. Many of us believe that an innovative structure for regional decision-making should be our goal. But with the future of our community on the line, no rational concept should be beyond serious discussion, regardless of the short-term political consequences.
Hampton Roads can still gain its rightful place among the great metropolitan areas of the world. Our national advantages of location, climate and our spectacular harbor, of course, remain. And we have already proved that we can work together and that we can all profit by doing so. The unprecedented success of our united ports is but one outstanding modern example.
The goal of our hoped-for better self-government should not be a bigger metropolis. It should be to give us all a better quality of life. It should be to combine our efforts to do the things that we have not been able to do separately and that we can only do together, like solving the transportation problems that no jurisdiction can handle alone and working together in economic development and getting us all water to drink.
All of this is ultimately achievable. The only thing standing in our way is our inability, or our unwillingness, to make the decision to do it. MEMO: Brad Face is chief executive officer of Face Industries in Norfolk
and president of Future of Hampton Roads Inc., a nonpartisan, a
political organization committed to a vision of Hampton Roads as ``a
place that enjoys the benefit of an innovative political union invested
with the power to represent effectively the citizens of the entire
region on issues of common interest.'' Mr. Face makes his home in
Smithfield. by CNB