Sunday, July 11, 2010
Metro columnist Dan Casey: W.Va. park an Explore model
Dan Casey is The Roanoke Times' metro columnist.
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Dan Casey
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Larry Vander Maten, God bless him, folded his tent five years after he finally realized his $200 million family vacation resort fantasy for Explore Park could never succeed.
Buford Overstreet's dreams for those 1,100 acres along the Blue Ridge Parkway are far more pedestrian.
He's a retired real estate developer who lives in Southwest Roanoke County. But his retirement hasn't eased his passion for the subject of Explore Park and what it could be.
The essence of Overstreet's dream is a low-key state park-like Explore, under local control, which would provide needed recreational venues for residents of the Roanoke Valley.
"We've wasted that resource for five years now," Overstreet told me.
He has more than a dozen big and small ideas on that subject.
In many ways, they're patterned after aspects of Pipestem Resort State Park in West Virginia, a 4,023-acre public park in the state's southeastern corner that's perched above Bluestone Gorge.
Last summer, he and I journeyed down there so he could show me what he was talking about.
Overstreet would like to see a public golf course at Explore (in the wake of Countryside's demise) and vacation rental cabins the average blue-collar family could afford.
Those would be named after people who donated funds for their construction -- the Taubman, Via and Dalhouse cabins come to mind.
The park itself would be renamed Explore Memorial Park. Many other amenities would be funded by memorial donations.
He envisions stables and a blacksmith shop to serve equestrians, a large swimming pool and recreational sports area for valley residents and visitors from afar and expanded hiking and biking trails.
A camping area would serve RVs and tents. A country store/restaurant leased and operated by a private contractor could provide on-site food.
Explore could have, perhaps, an outdoor rink for winter skating when the temperatures are low and a natural amphitheater for summer-season concerts.
It would be developed incrementally, in stages, as funding and/or donations became available.
There would be no big hotel complex, though, like Pipestem has, and like Vander Maten dreamed of building.
One thing sets Overstreet apart from the Bern Ewerts, the Vander Matens and the others who have dreamed big about what Explore Park should be.
He understands his ideas are merely his. He firmly believes Explore is doomed to fail if any single vision gets rammed through into any kind of reality.
"We have to do something down there," he said. "And the people of the Roanoke Valley have to decide what that something is.
"The prime reason to further develop the park is for our use and enjoyment," Overstreet said. "[Out-of-town] visitors would just be icing on the cake."
To that end, Overstreet says some entity ought to conduct a statistically valid poll.
What amenities would valley residents want to see there? What would they spend their money on, repeatedly? What would draw them like the living history museum never did?
As far as I can tell, those kinds of questions have never even been asked.
Back in the late 1980s, when the "Explore Project" was still envisioned as a gargantuan, $350 million Lewis-and-Clark-meets-Walt-Disney tourist trap, only a bare majority of valley residents were in favor.
In the 1986 and 1987 Roanoke Valley polls, roughly 7 percent of residents who had heard of the project "strongly supported" it, while another 49 percent indicated support.
Even then, however, it was a question seeking respondents' reaction to somebody's else's vision.
The question was, "Would you like this?" not "What would you like?" or "What would you support?"
Fred Anderson, the chairman of the Virginia Recreational Facilities Authority, which oversees Explore, noted that so far, all we really know is what folks around here won't support.
"The residents of the Roanoke Valley voted with their feet when we were open as a historical park," he told me.
Later this month, the Explore Park board expects to review some smaller-scale ideas for the park's development.
Shouldn't we first find out what valley residents will support there?
Dan Casey's column runs Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday.
