Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Let's care for our surroundings before we lose them
New River Journal
My daughter recently threw a fit when she found an old stuffed animal in the back of my truck as I was about to head to the dump.
"But it's been lying in the basement for months," I countered. "You haven't played with it at all."
In the face of her outrage, I acquiesced that day, only to find the following week Fluffy or Samantha or whatever she had named the pink bear abandoned again in the basement.
Bye, bye, Fluffy.
There's a lesson to be learned here -- not just in family dynamics but in community planning.
Beyond the controversy they've aroused, what else do the proposed intermodal port in Elliston and the First & Main development in Blacksburg have in common?
Both involve land that was (in Blacksburg's case) or is (in Elliston's case) a community eyesore.
It's true that each had or has its scenic sections. Farmland dominates the site where Norfolk Southern wants to build its inland port, and Blacksburg's South Main Street featured several wooded acres before the bulldozers arrived to begin construction.
But the defining landmark of pre-First & Main days was Lake Terrace Motel -- an "outdated" structure, if we're being polite, whose "lake" had long ago become a muddy pond.
Book-ending the Elliston site is a shuttered meat-packing plant with broken windows and caved-in roof, and on the other side -- at the entrance to Montgomery County, no less -- a burned-down restaurant beside a couple of dilapidated mobile homes.
I won't wade in further into Blacksburg's stormy debate, but as anyone who's read this column knows, I've vigorously opposed Elliston as the intermodal site.
But where has been my vigor, my opposition, to the present state of affairs? Where has been my desire to rally my neighbors, organize meetings, petition my elected officials to improve the blight with which we already live?
It's easy to understand how an outsider, from an aesthetic point on view, might target these tracts in Elliston and Blacksburg for their projects. I can hear the corporate suits saying, "It's obvious these people don't care what happens here."
Each project would have been more difficult to justify had we -- concerned residents, property owners, local government -- taken better care of our communities.
Each project would have met stiffer resistance had we (see above) shown as much passion, as much unity for responsible growth, over the actual state of our surroundings as we have for the visualized renderings of what our surroundings may one day be.
With this lesson in mind, a group of residents in eastern Montgomery County has begun meeting to figure out ways to revitalize the too many abandoned buildings we have in Shawsville and Elliston.
Some sites are privately owned, some owned by the county. And some, such as Elliston-Lafayette and Shawsville elementary schools, won't be abandoned until 2010 when a new and merged eastern Montgomery County elementary school opens.
But the work begins now in an effort to avoid the threats that can descend on such sites that all too often collapse in a planning and preservation vacuum.
What we're left with is a state of neglect, and we wind up with the equivalent of our toys getting thrown away.
Michael Hemphill is a former Roanoke Times reporter who lives in Elliston. He serves as executive director of the Mountain Valley Charitable Foundation, which coordinates programming within the Meadowbrook Center.
