Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 1, 1992 TAG: 9203010124
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DOUGLAS PARDUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: JONESVILLE LENGTH: Long
"It's beautiful, isn't it?" Montgomery says. "But we need more than pretty country.
"We need jobs.
"We need new folks.
"We need more kids in the schools.
"We need to stabilize the economy.
"We need good, clean industry."
What Lee County needs, Montgomery says, is a prison.
In most communities, talk of a prison would spawn a storm of angry protests. People would fret over falling property values, worry about wild-eyed escapees raping, pillaging and murdering.
But in Lee County, almost no one objects.
In November, voters agreed - almost three to one - to a $3 million bond issue to get a federal minimum- and medium-security prison started. And if all goes as planned, the prison will open in 1995.
"Normally, we can't even get people to back bonds for schools down here," Montgomery says.
Montgomery is president of the local Farmers & Miners Bank. The bank's name is perhaps the best indicator of why the county wants a prison.
"This county has a little bit of farming and a little bit of coal and neither of 'em has a future," Montgomery says.
The county of 25,000 about 200 miles southwest of Roanoke has been steadily losing people, unemployment is in double digits and the schools are running out of students.
The prison would bring 250 jobs with average wages of $25,000, a $60 million initial investment and a $15 million annual payroll - not to mention service and supply business for local companies, and motel and restaurant business from families visiting the 1,000 inmates.
For one of the few times in anyone's memory, Lee County politicians - better known for blood feuds and tainted elections - pulled together and agreed that something had to be done to save the county's economy. They even agreed a federal prison is a good idea. And they managed to get Democratic Rep. Rick Boucher and Republican Sen. John Warner to join forces.
"That shows you how bad it is here," Montgomery says.
The rest of the state's coal counties also are grappling with near-depression economies.
Coal used to fuel periodic economic booms, but that's changed. The state's coal industry is producing at record rates, but mechanization has cut local employment to a fraction of the more than 20,000 who worked the mines in the early 1970s. And little of the profit from coal remains in the coalfields.
During the late 1980s, Lee County and some of the other coal counties began looking for economic stability in the industries few other communities want: prisons and landfills.
Bruce Robinette, former regional planning director for Lee, Scott and Wise counties and the city of Norton, says landfills drawing out-of-state garbage would have also brought big money and could have been environmentally sound.
But, he says, such landfills were voted down in virtually every coalfield county because coal companies promoted them. People simply didn't trust a coal industry that has raped the land and polluted streams for decades, Robinette says.
Prisons began to seem like a better idea.
Buchanan County was the first to try it.
In 1990, the state opened the Keen Mountain Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison holding nearly 800 or the state's most dangerous criminals.
The prison, isolated atop a 2,000-foot-high mountain, cost more than $49 million to build and employs some 300 people.
The annual payroll is more than $8.5 million.
What Keen Mountain gives Buchanan County is one of its few stable industries. It is recession-proof, with decent-paying jobs.
County residents were so happy about the prison that when it opened, more than 7,000 showed up to tour it during an open house.
Keen Mountain was so successful that Dickenson and Wise counties are now trying to get the state to build a prison on Red Onion Mountain - an old Clinchfield Coal Co. strip mine near the boundary between the two counties.
In Lee County, Sheriff R.V. Chadwell read with envy each newspaper story about Keen Mountain.
In the early 1980s, he had urged Lee County to go after a state prison as a way to get some recession-proof jobs. "No one listened then," he says.
As Keen Mountain went in, however, Lee County's hearing improved and community leaders decided to push for a prison, too.
But they didn't want just any old gray, maximum-security fortress like Keen Mountain. They went after one of those federal prisons that critics call country clubs - a campus-like prison where the government locks up crooked lawyers, judges, congressmen and other assorted white-collar crooks.
That's what the government is going to put in as soon as the correct site is selected. Of course the inmates will include a fair share of drug dealers, bank robbers and other unsavory criminals, and the college-like campus will be surrounded by a double chain-link fence topped with coils of razor-sharp wire.
That doesn't bother Lee County, which has come up with five possible sites the government can pick from. The most likely sites are just west of the county seat of Jonesville near U.S. 58, the Daniel Boone Heritage Trail. The highway, scheduled to be four-laned, and a proposed 4,000-foot airport nearby are among the lures Lee County used to attract the prison.
The main lure was the simple fact that Lee County wanted it - a pleasant change for prison officials.
Among the only objections were from a retired couple who moved to Lee County from Fairfax County, where they had lived near Lorton, a jail holding inmates from Washington, D.C. They didn't want to deal anymore with fear of escapes, warnings to lock their homes and helicopters roaring overhead with searchlights.
Such fears trouble few others in Lee County.
Even Circuit Judge Joseph Cridlin, whose country home is directly across the road from one of the most likely prison sites, supports putting in the prison.
"I've never objected to it. . . . Whatever is good for Lee County." He's not concerned that he'd been living within spitting distance of criminals, and jokes, "I might be able to see some of my old friends."
Jamie Smith, 72, also lives across the road from one of the prime sites. She's not worried, just a little sad. The land had been in her family for years until she sold it a few years ago after her husband had a stroke and couldn't work it anymore.
There's a bright side to the prison for her, she says. With all those guards, administrators, counselors and others coming in to work, "maybe we can sell our house and move."
Mike Sexton and Jack Morrison work with the Virginia Department of Transportation. They say they've rarely done anything that pleases them as much as staking out the road-widening that would be necessary if the prison goes in.
"It'll bring in a lot of jobs, and we know a lot of people who would work if they could. We know we're the lucky ones; we've got jobs," Sexton says.
Jerry Short is one of those without a job.
He used to be a prison guard with the state. He loved the work, but gave it up because it was ruining his health and marriage.
"I missed my family real bad," Short says.
There were no prisons near Lee County, and his job required him to drive halfway across the state to Powhatan prison near Richmond, 300 miles away. He'd stay at the prison 10 days and come home for five. It's what a lot of men from the coalfields and Lee County have to do to find work. Many of them leave forever.
Short says he and a guard buddy once sat down and counted the number of Lee County men they knew working in the state's prisons.
"We counted 67."
He'd rather see a state prison built in Lee County, but doesn't mind the federal prison. "Maybe some of them 67 can come home."
About the only thing standing in the way of the prison is Mother Nature - in the form of a rare type of clover, an endangered cave-dwelling, blind, shrimp-like creature and a unique grove of cedar trees.
Conservationists worry that at a couple of the prime sites, the prison might encroach on the clover and cedar and eradicate the usdagalum - the blind, shrimp-like creature that may live only in one watery cave in Lee County.
While the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service tries to determine if the prison and usdagalum can live together, federal prison officials are expected to select the preferred site within a few weeks.
Chadwell, the sheriff, has no sympathy for the plight of the endangered usdagalum.
"What good are they?" he says. "You can't eat 'em."
Montgomery agrees, but tempers his sentiment with a banker's view. "The most endangered species down here," he says, "is the Lee County worker."
by CNB