R.L. “Bob” Nicholson III (incumbent)

• Age: 58
• Occupation: Retired Radford director of public works and city engineer; Radford University’s director of facilities management
• Community roots: Lifelong Radford resident
• Affiliations: Former president and current member Radford Kiwanis Club, fourth generation member of Grove United Methodist Church, New River Historical Society, Radford Heritage Foundation, Social Services Board, New River Community Services Board, Community Foundation of the New River Valley; past affiliations: president of Radford Jaycees, charter member of The Long Way Home, chairman Founders’ Day Commission, Radford Centennial Commission, church youth leader, Explorers leader, Social Services Board, Planning Commission, other city agencies, former president of Radford Jaycees
• Education: Graduated Radford High School, attended Virginia Tech

Election index

• Other candidates in the NRV answer your questions

Why should voters vote for you?

Bob Nicholson: I’m a volunteer. I like to volunteer. I’ve been with the city before. I’ve been in city government. I’ve worked for city government. I think I have something to offer and if you would like to vote for me that’s fine, and if not I’m still going to volunteer in our community because I love our community so much.

Kim Irby, a 46-year-old school employee, asks: What are you going to do to develop the downtown retail area? What plans to you have for the vacant buildings?

BN: That’s always a challenge when you look at communities such as Radford and some of our neighboring communities. The downtown business areas are always struggling because we’ve become such a mobile society that everything seems to be wanting to toward the mall concept. And the malls are where your anchor stores are located. In fact, if you go back in time, each one of our communities — Blacksburg, Christiansburg, Radford, Pulaski, etc. — would have an anchor store. And once you have the large anchor store such as Leggett’s back in those early days, then the other stores would fill in around them. Of course, you have to understand that history. To me what you need to do is to look at the people that you can attract and we have an audience of over 9,000 students that are within walking distance. So you create an environment that’s interesting to them. Now, you don’t want to make it totally a university focused business district. Looking at the east end business district, my thinking there would be keep focusing on the types of shops that would attract a fair number of the university participants, audience, shoppers. From there, once people start seeing activity, of course, they say it must be something exciting. I want to go see it. Then you start having not just the specialty kind of shops, the unique boutiques, etc., but also the restaurants that can accommodate you. I was visiting in Roanoke the other day down on the Market [in the Square]. It was on a Saturday and the hustle and bustle of all the excitement there — you had all the market, the outdoor market shops, were gong on. You had the individual shops and the boutiques, but there were also restaurants. You had the Roanoke Weiner Stand, but you also had the fine dining with the linen table cloths restaurants and you could see people in each one of the tops of restaurants. Where they could go in and casually get something to eat and then they could go back out and do some shopping also go into some of the arts centers. My idea is look where your audience is coming from. Don’t try to force something, but look from that perspective. I think you should look into central and west Radford as far as the business district. I think idea of what A.C. Wilson is creating with a new restaurant, I think that has potential of creating a environment where you’re going to see people on the streets and then you can maybe establish some unique shops that will blend with that type of afternoon and evening with people going to restaurants. But look where the audience is coming from. Don’t try to force a shop that no one is interested in. And forget the idea of an anchor store. It isn’t going to happen.

What are your plans about recycling, reusing and green building?, asks Nicci Cramer, a 21-year-old Radford University nursing student.

BN: Well, I’ve always been interested, from the early beginnings of the concept, with reduce, reuse and recycle. In fact I do a fair amount of taking my household recyclables out to our 17th Street facility. I know some people have talked about doing something that would be more of a curbside pickup. I don’t think we’re at that point right now but that maybe something that could occur. I know, when I worked at Radford University, we tried programs that would encourage site locations that would be closer the buildings. And then recycling went in the buildings. So maybe something we could do around Radford, maybe instead of having to come to 17th Street we could have some regional sites, more regional to the various neighborhoods. I know Radford does receive a lot of credit for its recycling with what the industries are recycling. And that’s good to see. People are now becoming more educated in the concept of recycling. When recycling first came into being I thought it was rather interesting because the older generations, although they understood it and participated in it — and if you go back to a period of time, even World War II — recycling was something that people really focused on, but there was a war effort that was going on. So you recycled with the idea there were materials that could be used for the process. Today — we went through a period where we were a throwaway society — but you start with the youngest generation, the children in kindergarten. And you teach them the idea of recycling and now those early students in kindergarten and they are now the college students of today. They have brought forward the idea of recycling. And they want to recycle if we make it available to them. So make available to them as much as we can, but also look at the cost factor involved.

Charlene Jordan, a 34-year-old nurse, asks: What can you do about energy cost?

BN: I think Radford — and I don’t want to be critical of any of the other electrical systems that are out in the counties and even throughout the state, but I think Radford is rather unique. There are other communities that have their own electrical system. Of course, it’s very obvious. We buy electricity at a wholesale rate and sell at a retail rate and that allows us to generate some revenues. A portion goes toward keeping our taxes low. Of course, there’s a debatable issue there as to whether it should go toward reducing taxes or whether it should go toward capital expenditures and you know there’s that ongoing debate. But that’s a totally different subject. The revenues that we generate, a good portion of that goes back into the electrical system itself. So we can fine tune it, constantly keep it fine tuned. If we have electrical outages, sometimes out in the rural areas their power would go out and it would be out, I don’t know, a day, two days, three days, a week, 10 days, 12 and it just keeps going. And you don’t see that within Radford, and in other communities, too. Radford is rather quick to respond to that because our service area is not so large as someone who’s trying to cover an entire county our a region of several counties. We can address it on a rather quick basis. As for fine tuning, if you study electricity, if for example, in your transfer stations and etc., if you have loose connections, you can lose energy there. You can have line loss. There are any number of ways that you could have a loss of energy — energy that’s coming through your lines that no one ever gets the benefit of because it’s lost. And if you’re constantly fine tuning, that’s a saving within itself. And so, from the electrical I think Radford receives great benefits, not just for the revenue that we generate in order to keep taxes low, but just for the system itself that provides energy at a pretty constant level, even in outages. Outages are very rare. When they do occur, they’re very limited in time. I think some of the things you’ve heard the council talk about are things that we can do with the vehicles we buy. Maybe there is some things we can do as a community on ride share and programs of that nature. I think there’s some potential there. We’re still a very oil-dependent society, so I think we need to start looking at some other things. I know in Germany non our last visit I saw a tremendous number of windmill farms. That was fascinating to see. They’re not as offensive as some people think they are. I can understand the opposition, but at the same time, we need to look at some alternative energies. We have the high mountain peaks. Maybe we need to start looking at some of that. You know, Radford with its own electrical system, maybe we could benefit from that.

What about plans for more sidewalks, more green space, public transit, Jordan also wants to know.

BN: I remember as a child growing up, we did have a public transit system that circled the entire city. It passed within a half a block of where I lived and I cold get on the bus and I could ride for one hour and get right back off at the same location. You got a wonderful view of Radford because it would just ramble along and pick up people and drop off people and you’d get to see people. We eventually got rid of that system because ridership was down considerably. Of course, we have become a very independent, mobile society. We want our own car. Next time you’re driving down any of the roads, take a look at the opposing cars coming toward you. It’s basically one drive and no passengers. I think with fuels getting to the point where they are – I don’t think people are at the point where they’re going to say, “I’m going to quite driving.” They’ll say it, but they won’t quit. But we’ll eventually get to a point where public transportation is probably going to be a very appealing approach. And maybe we will start generating that ridership once again and establish some type of mass transit. I’d like to see some type of mass transit, whether it be a bus system or a monorail system or something like that that would start linking our New River Valley communities. Can you just imagine a monorail that link Radford to Christiansburg and Blacksburg and then start expanding out into Pulaski and even beyond. Or quick rail. Or something like that. Or small rail. Whatever type of system you want. But I think mass transportation — even the taxi services, etc. — they have a place. But there is that potential, if you start looking to some other communities. I think so often, if we’d look to people in Europe, they’re looking more on that mass transportation and less that individual approach. But we Americans, we are very independent. We want that independent approach. I think we are making a fair amount of effort in green space, with the park system that we have sprinkled around Radford. I think if you look at communities the size of Radford, and if you just take the make and mark in green wherever we have a park and look at it, I think we’ve done a remarkable job. And it seems like other people are creating small green spaces, even within their own neighborhoods. Even if it happens to be an adjacent lot next to a house, it creates kind of a little neighborhood park, even if it’s not city-owned. Sidewalks, I like the idea of expanding sidewalks, especially in the concentration of the residential neighborhoods because that helps encourage people to use those. I want to make sure that our walks are something that is safe and convenient and will actually connect. To have a sidewalk that starts at one location and it runs a couple of blocks and then just ends. The encouragement is you want to use that sidewalk but when you get to the end, you shoved out into the traffic. And to me there needs to be a pattern, not to just create a sidewalk because it’s that two-block strip and there’s nothing on either end. I think there needs to be a pattern. I think there needs to be something that connects to on both ends. And I do support that concept of making that continuation of the sidewalks and sidewalks being truly beside the street and then the walk paths and etc. that we’re now making with the walking, biking, hiking trials. Help those interconnect with our shopping districts, with our schools, with out residential districts.