www.roanoke.com

Roanoke's Victory Stadium sits on a flood plain next to the flood-prone Roanoke River. So when Tropical Depression Jeanne last week inundated the watershed, the stadium - surprise, surprise - flooded.

Which led Brian Wishneff, who rode to a city council seat last spring on a tsunami of save-the-stadium nostalgia, to castigate ... city officials. The councilman is irked because City Engineer Phil Schirmer told the citizens' committee studying the stadium issue that flooding would have occurred even if the U.S. Corps of Engineers' 30-year-old Roanoke River flood-reduction project were completed (assuming, that is, it ever is).

But the project is flood-reduction, not flood-prevention. If Schirmer, after consulting with Corps officials and analyzing the data, concluded stadium flooding likely would have occurred anyway, he would have been remiss not to say so.

Wishneff was irked, too, because city officials informed the committee that current building codes would have to be adhered to if renovations amount to half or more of the facility's assessed value. By getting the stadium designated as a state historic structure, the councilman said, the requirement could be waived.

But the stadium has not yet been so designated. And if it is, the question would remain: For a public facility like a stadium, how many code requirements should be ignored even if they could be legally?

Floodproofing, adhering to code - such things cost money, which gets at the central question in the stadium issue: Would what the city gets be worth the cost?

Interestingly, Wishneff and Sherman Lea, also elected last spring on the save-the-stadium platform, have backed away from earlier claims that the job could be done for $10 million or less.

So, more than $10 million for a 20,000-plus-seat stadium suitable only for sports events, mainly high school football games that seldom draw more than 1,000? It doesn't compute any better after Jeanne than it did before.