Sunday, June 04, 2006
Look for a classy answer to stadium debate
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
- For those who have too little
- Time to gather mountain views
- Our blind spot on roads
- Following the money trail
From the RoundTable blog
I was going to implore Blacksburg residents not to get mired in a protracted stadium debate, to take a lesson from their neighbors down the mountain in Roanoke.
A decade of arguing over where their high school team should play football is a sure-fire way to earn the derision of fellow Virginians blessed to live in other localities, where the public's business is handled efficiently, where, with steely resolve, elected leaders cut through public passions to make those tough but wise choices that serve the long-term interests of the community at large.
But then I looked through the newspaper files on Blacksburg's Bill Brown Stadium and found the high school was going to be playing its final season on the field -- in 1997. Back before another controversy, over ethnic sensitivities, had been resolved and the Blacksburg Bruins were still the Indians. Way back when.
I'm a newcomer to the town's stadium agonies, but I do understand that much has changed since those heady days of decisive action a decade ago. The Montgomery County School Board, the actual owner of the high school stadium, had decided the stadium had to go. It had voted back then to renovate the old Blacksburg Middle School on Main Street downtown, a project that was going to involve the land behind the school, where the stadium is.
Is, present tense. The county ended up building a new middle school for the town off Prices Fork Road. The stadium stayed -- without locker rooms; without showers; by now, old and worn; an "embarrassment," the county's schools facilities director told town council recently.
And I understand that the town, not the county, has stalled plans for replacing the stadium, and that substantive issues -- including the fate of the old middle school -- underlie all the foot-dragging.
Blacksburg at least is not caught up, Roanoke-style, in a sentimental movement to save its version of Victory Stadium in order to preserve an older generation's memories of the past. Bill Brown Stadium is named for a beloved Blacksburg High coach, but no one has been wailing that to abandon the stadium would be a mark of callous disrespect.
To allow a new stadium next to the new middle school, as the county proposes, Blacksburg Town Council would have to approve a special-use permit that would upset neighbors worried about the noise, lights and traffic that would come with athletic events. But dealing with such opposition, preferably by mitigating nuisances, is the usual business of local government. Elected officials have to weigh the community value of every project against the imposition it will make on residents it will directly affect.
If NIMBYism were the only problem, I suspect the Bruins would have a new home.
A more perplexing obstacle to a new stadium is the old stadium -- and the effect that abandoning it would have on Blacksburg's downtown.
If the school system were no longer using the field, the county would be free to sell the old Blacksburg Middle School property, both a prime location for development and a repository for the dreams of town residents who want to preserve the building and use it as a cultural or community center -- a pipe dream, I'm thinking.
The goal is worthy enough, but the cost of renovation surely will be prohibitive.
County and town officials will be sitting down together this month to talk about the old stadium, the new stadium and the old middle school, the fate of all tied up together in a Gordian knot. To cut the knot, all parties will need to put front and center not the short-term interests of a few vocal constituents, but the long-term interests of both the county and the town as a whole.
A friend who was in college back in the early '70s recalled for me the other day a sociological theory he had learned about class in America, which likes to fancy itself a classless society. It is not, of course. But in the years after the Depression and World War II, when material goods were becoming abundant and the gap in wealth was not so wide as it is today, academics pondered what would distinguish one class from another. Fine things, after all, would be readily available to all.
One distinction was in how people in a consumer society would weigh their immediate wants against the impact their actions would have on future generations. Class would no longer be a matter of parentage or position or wealth, but of attitude. Low-class people would think only about what they wanted. The middle class would think about what effect their actions would have on their children. The upper class would be worried about the impact on their grandchildren.
I don't know if the theory has any currency these days, but I like it.
And I hope that in resolving their stadium controversy, the town and the county will show a lot of class.
