Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, July 14, 1990 TAG: 9007160179
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But that was then, when consolidation was an abstract principle. This is now, when a specific plan - amended as recently as this week - is on the table. And what's easy in principle can prove difficult in practice.
Of the latest changes, a couple amounted simply to City Council's and the county Board of Supervisors' signing dotted lines for amendments already agreed to.
One amendment makes it clear that the same level of emergency services would be provided to both the proposed urban and suburban tax districts. Another would guarantee for a while that what's now the county, with its larger school enrollment, would have six seats on the new school board to five for what's now the city.
Technically, a third change also was no more than a dotted-line signing for an amendment already agreed to. It is an expansion of the area of west county that would be given, if city-county merger is approved in November, a second vote on whether to join independent Salem instead.
This week's real consolidation news, however, was Salem's presumably final rejection of a reasonable price tag for the territory. Without a county-Salem financial agreement, no second vote can be held anyway.
The conventional wisdom holds that Salem's response was a blow to consolidation's prospects. Actually, it may have given those prospects a small but much-needed boost.
If the aim of the second-vote provision was to improve chances for consolidation's approval, it was a cockamamie idea anyway.
Opposition to merger was strongest in the Tech poll, and probably would be today, in west county. In insisting on the second-vote provision, negotiators for the county got that part right.
But if the aim was to improve consolidation's chances - rather than, say, throw up confusing smokescreens - then the logic was bizarre.
If you're a west-county consolidation opponent, why should the chance to join Salem induce you to change your vote? Elsewhere in the county, on the other hand, merger may look better without the possibility that it would mean loss of a sizable hunk of what's now county land to Salem.
Salem's turndown also might help refocus a few west-county minds.
We don't want you, that city in effect has said - at least not on financial terms remotely acceptable to the county, nor on terms a court likely would grant if west-county residents in any significant number were to petition for annexation by Salem.
With that option apparently unavailable, some west-county voters may now want to take another look at the prospective savings in tax dollars for which Roanoke City-County consolidation holds out hope.
And not just west-county voters: Above all, removal of the second-vote option removes one distracting detail of the consolidation plan. Perhaps all Roanokers, in both city and county, now can turn to the core rather than the peripheral issues.
To date, too much of the argument has been over items of minor importance; too little over the crucial issue of how the valley can better organize itself for survival in an increasingly competitive world.
To date, too much attention has been paid to what the valley and its various local-government fiefdoms have been; too little to what the valley can become.
To date, too much time has been spent worrying about this constituency or that, and how it can be mollifed; too little about how the petty bickering ultimately drags down everyone.
It's time to leave the sideshows and get to the main event.
by CNB