THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, August 29, 1996 TAG: 9608290001
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A17 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: PATRICK LACKEY
LENGTH: 72 lines
In an intriguing and perhaps even gutsy move earlier this month, a team of seven Virginia Beach city department heads suggested that City Council members change their view of the region or risk the city's economic health.
Team members didn't use the ``R word,'' regionalism. ``We were careful not to use that word,'' said Louis Cullipher, team member and city director of agriculture, ``because it has connotations like win-lose.'' But the team's clear message was that intercity cooperation, not competition, is needed if Virginia Beach is to prosper, because Virginia Beach cannot prosper alone.
Team members didn't use the ``N word,'' Norfolk, either. But their message was clear: Hampton Roads cities for too long have viewed the region as a solar system, with Norfolk as the sun and other cities rotating around it, always aspiring to replace it, or certainly to shine brighter.
What's needed, said team member E. Dean Block, the city budget director, is a new model for the region. He suggested Olympic rings, each one representing a different city, but with the rings partly overlapping. The overlapping parts would signify areas of shared interest, like tourism and transportation.
To identify those shared interests, City Manager James K. Spore suggested that Virginia Beach go to other cities in the region and say, ``This is what we want, what do you want? What can we do together? What can we help each other with? What do we need to do alone?''
Seems like a super suggestion to me.
The team's full name is Economic Vitality Strategic Issue Team. (Can you say EVSIT?) For a year its members have thought strategically about ways to make Virginia Beach prosper.
On Aug. 13, City Council members traveled by trolley away from City Hall - symbolically away from traditional thinking - to the Virginia Marine Science Museum, where EVSIT made its report, with a slide show.
One naturally wonders how much regionalism is possible if city department heads are leery of saying the word aloud before the council and the ``N word'' also goes unspoken.
Still, team member Don Maxwell, director of economic development, summed up part of the team's message this way: ``What's good for the region is good for our city, and vice versa. If there's one weak link in the area, that hurts the whole region. For when someone is looking at moving a firm here, he looks at all the cities in the region.'' To a visitor, he noted, one city's crime reflects on the whole region.
Team member Mac Rawls, city director of museums, said that when one Hampton Roads city gets high-paying jobs, the other cities should applaud, because the whole region wins. ``What one city loses,'' he added, ``we all lose to some degree.''
The kind of thinking that has to be put behind us, he said, goes like this: ``If I get in a deal with you, I have to get more out of it than you get.''
Instead, he said, deals should be worked out between cities so both sides benefit.
If one side wins more, fine. Maybe have multiple deals, so different cities win more on different deals, but all cities win. Hampton Roads cities' true competition, Rawls said, is not with each other; it's with other entire regions.
One EVSIT slide showed that Virginia Beach has a higher population than Miami, Atlanta, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh and Minneapolis. Another slide showed that the Hampton Roads Metropolitan Statistical Area has more people than these MSAs: Indianapolis, Milwaukee, Orlando, New Orleans, Charlotte and Jacksonville.
We may have more people, but we have far lower wages and a lower rate of employment growth. We don't have a major-league team.
Virginia Beach, alone, can't compete with churning economic engines like the Charlotte region, any more than Norfolk or Newport News could.
It's time for the ``R word,'' with care taken to ensure everybody wins: Hampton, Newport News, Suffolk, Chesapeake, Portsmouth, Virginia Beach and the ``N word.'' MEMO: Mr. Lackey is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB