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The man who wants to develop Virginia's Explore Park won't say exactly what his version of the park will be. But he will say what it won't be. "Much to the chagrin of probably 80 percent of the 10-year-olds in the greater Roanoke area, it will not be Six Flags over Roanoke," Larry Vander Maten said. In a nearly hour-long interview Wednesday, Vander Maten talked about what he wants to do at Explore and why he wants to do it. "I'm a businessman," Vander Maten said. "I find it interesting. I like history. I like the challenge of taking a project which has not been successful and being able to make something out of it." Vander Maten has made something out of several companies: an accounting firm, a nursing home management company, a real estate business. "I'm an entrepreneur. I've always been an entrepreneur since age 11," he said. That's when he began working two paper routes for the Des Moines Register, according to his resume. "I enjoy business. I enjoy the business of business." But now the 58-year-old is semiretired, living near Orlando, Fla., and says he's looking for projects where his experience and skills might be useful. "Although there may be some financial rewards for me ... my focus is not on seeing how much more money I can make," Vander Maten said. Vander Maten has never completed a project like this before, but that's no reason to think he can't pull it off, he said. "I think you have to break it down into its component parts," Vander Maten said. He divides the operation into entertainment, accommodations, food service and construction. He's built projects valued at more than $200 million; his nursing homes serve more than 6,000 meals daily; and they care for up to 10,000 people each year. That leaves entertainment. And Vander Maten said he's willing to spend the money necessary to hire expertise in that field. "When Walt Disney started off the development of his Anaheim animation studios, he walked in with nothing more than the sketch of a mouse," Vander Maten said. "I'm walking in at least with a pretty big check." The lease requires Vander Maten to invest $20 million in Explore Park. When Vander Maten considered a similar project in Colorado in the late 1990s, he hired a former head of marketing for Disney World to help him develop a plan. "We're probably going to use some of those concepts for what we're going to develop here," Vander Maten said. But he's not willing to share those concepts with his potential customers yet. "Creative concepts and strategies are very jealously guarded," he said. "It's not a case where they are automatically tossed out for everybody to pick through ahead of time as to what they like and what they don't like." While some people, including state Sen. John Edwards, D-Roanoke, have questioned the wisdom of giving Vander Maten's company the rights to publicly owned land before anyone knows its plan, Vander Maten said that's the way it should be. "It's not reasonable nor practical for somebody to go ahead and spend what conceivably could be three or four million dollars on development studies, drawings, architectural renderings only to have somebody pick through it and say, 'Gosh. That may not be what we want.'" His concept of Explore is not very different from the original, Vander Maten said. "My understanding is that it was supposed to be a driver for economic growth and tourism in the area. That's what I'm focusing on," he said. "I'm looking as though the object is not necessarily to provide a local attraction, but to bring tourism from outside the marketplace to Roanoke." |
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