Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 3, 1993 TAG: 9301040151
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Staff
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
THE ROANOKE VALLEY'S TOP TEN NEWS STORIES OF 1992
The demise of Dominion BankRumors had been flying for months: Would Dominion Bankshares Corp., Roanoke's flagship banking company, be taken over by a larger, healthier competitor?
In September, Chairman Warner Dalhouse announced that the company he had inherited a decade earlier would become the Virginia outpost for First Union Corp. of Charlotte, N.C. A hungry company, First Union is amassing an empire stretching from Florida to Washington, D.C.
The toll: 850 of Dominion's 2,200 workers in the Roanoke Valley will lose their jobs when the acquisition is completed in March. All told, 1,288 jobs systemwide will be cut from Dominion's 5,000-person work force.
Dalhouse and his key lieutenant, President and Chief Operating Officer David Caudill, will remain, their futures guaranteed by hefty payouts should they lose their jobs anytime in the next three years. Other senior executives will receive payouts, a few of more than $750,000.
Others won't be as fortunate.
It turns out that Dalhouse and his board ally, James A. Webb Jr., engineered the Dominion's sale to First Union in hopes of saving Dalhouse from an opposing board faction angling to fire Dalhouse.
It worked.
At the same time, federal regulators threatened to increase their pressure on the company's board of directors. A faction of the board, in part worried about its increased vulnerability to fines and other penalties, turned up the heat on Dalhouse.
The result: Dalhouse sold the company. Then, a few days before Christmas, shareholders voted another hometown company out of existence.
2. Crisis at the VA hospital
The actions of a government employees union drew much attention to the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Salem. Coupled with the discoveries of patients' bodies - one a patient who had been missing for 15 years - the quiet 220-acre complex was thrown into a storm of public controversy.
In February, the union came forth with claims of mismanagement, low employee morale, stressful work conditions and deteriorating patient care. The VA central office in Washington dispatched teams of inspectors. Some of the claims were substantiated. Some were not.
But that did not prevent the departures of the medical center's three top administrators. Then-Director Clark Graninger was reassigned to the VA's Eastern Regional office in Maryland. Chief of Staff Larry Edwards was fired. Mary Jenkins-Lummus, chief of nursing services, opted out for a VA medical center in the Midwest.
A new director, John Presley, known for his troubleshooting talents - was appointed to lead the medical center out of the fray. All was well, at least in the public eye, until December, when the body of a 60-year-old medical patient was found frozen to death on medical center grounds, 16 hours after he had been reported missing.
One person who figured prominently in the turmoil has emerged unscathed. Not only did Alma Lee, president of the American Federation of Government Employees local at the medical center succeed in efforts she had been pressing long before they became public - she was elected president of the National VA Council, a branch of the AFGE, in November.
3. Changing of the guard at City Hall
The biggest change in political leadership in Roanoke in two decades occurred when Noel Taylor's long reign as mayor ended. Taylor, the city's first black councilman and mayor, decided not to seek re-election after 17 years as mayor because doctors found he had prostate cancer. In an emotional news conference in January, he fought back tears as he announced he would retire.
The fight for the Democratic nomination pitted two veteran councilmen - David Bowers and Howard Musser - in what amounted to an indoor primary. Nearly 2,000 people packed into the William Fleming High School gym for the party's mass meeting. Bowers prevailed, thanks in part to strong support from labor unions, some of whom bused in members.
After that, the May election was something of an anticlimax. Republicans fielded a former mayor from the early 1960s, Willis "Wick" Anderson, but Bowers won easily with 57 percent of the vote.
4. City Hall under siege
Mayor David Bowers had little time for a honeymoon with voters when the first of two controversies that shook City Hall hit less than six weeks after he took office.
In August, the Roanoke Times & World-News reported that Roanoke City Council had voted to give itself and top administrators the most lucrative municipal pension plan in Virginia. Council members later revoked the plan, but did not take away the so-called "2-for-1" benefits that they and top administrators had accumulated.
Finance Director Joel Schlanger, the architect of the 2-for-1 plan, sparked the second controversy when the newspaper reported that he had charged more than $1,000 in personal phone calls to taxpayers. Schlanger, who had been one of council's most trusted and talented administrators, was forced to resign in December after he provided council members with misleading accounts of his phone records. To cushion his fall, Schlanger will be eligible for a $60,000-a-year city pension - thanks to the 2-for-1 plan he authored.
5. Hotel Roanoke
Another year, and the $42 million Hotel Roanoke deal still wasn't done.
Now there's a new developer, Faison Associates Inc. of Charlotte, N.C., and new plans and an operator for the facility should it reopen. Still lacking, though, is the money.
Officials still are millions short three years into planning the resurrection of Roanoke's most prominent landmark. A $5 million fund-raising campaign, Renew Roanoke, was kicked off in mid-November; large gifts by prominent donors put the drive at the $3.42 million mark by year's end.
Patience and tempers are wearing thin among planners from Virginia Tech and the city. Even if the fund-raising campaign reaches its goal, the project could still be $15 million short.
City Council already has committed $18 million in bonds and federal loans to the project; Tech's private foundation has agreed to provide another $4 million. A $10 million loan from a consortium of banks operating in the Roanoke Valley still has not come through, sources say, raising questions about project's viability.
Officials at Tech, the hotel's owner, plan to reassess the project this month. With $1.5 million already spent on security and maintenance, Tech officials are increasingly jittery about holding the property indefinitely.
6. Gainsboro fights back
After a quarter-century of quiet frustration, Roanoke's Gainsboro neighborhood finally got the city's attention. Residents cried foul when city officials said they wanted to put a four-lane downtown traffic loop there - the second one for the historic community.
People with Gainsboro roots reminded the city that two adjacent black neighborhoods, Kimball and Commonwealth, were destroyed to build the Roanoke Civic Center and surrounding developments, and that Gainsboro has lost scores of homes and businesses since the late 1960s. The roads were the last straw.
The city conferred with residents and came back twice with new plans - first a shift in the Wells Avenue loop to save 10 of the 12 homes initially threatened, then a promise to give housing rehabilitation, job training and other programs to Gainsboro people, along with the road. Those overtures split some of the neighborhood's leaders, but when City Council approved the road plan Dec. 16, those most opposed to the roads vowed to go to court, if they must, to stop construction.
7. Mr. Goodlatte goes to Washington
The Roanoke Valley got a new congressman in 1992, and this time it was a Republican. The retirement of Rep. Jim Olin, D-Roanoke, after 10 years in Washington set off a year's worth of political fireworks, although most of those who got singed were on the Democratic side.
First, the Democrats slugged their way through a bitter three-way nomination fight that wasn't settled until the fifth ballot at the 6th District convention in Lynchburg - a classic political brawl that likely will be talked about for years. Then, nominee Steve Musselwhite spent much of the campaign under fire for once asking a judge to go easy on two friends convicted of white-collar crimes.
By contrast, the Republicans were much like their candidate - cool, calm and exceptionally collected. When the year began, Bob Goodlatte was a little-known figure beyond GOP circles. But as the year ended, the one-time aide to former Rep. Caldwell Butler was the landslide winner, as the district reverted to its Republican roots. Goodlatte's success could have repercussions into 1993 - it has emboldened Republicans to find a challenger to the valley's Democratic kingpin, Vinton Del. Richard Cranwell.
8. Layoffs mount at large employers
The Roanoke area is living up to its long-standing reputation as a community that slides into recessions later and pulls out later than many parts of the country.
When much of the nation was trying to measure the extent of recovery from the slump during the past year, Roanoke suffered the closing of the Grumman fire engine plant taking 270 jobs, followed by an announcement of a sale and move of the Gardner-Denver Mining and Construction Division and its 400 jobs, notice of the massive loss of 850 Dominion Bank jobs and transfer of 125 Blue Ridge Transfer drivers and mechanics to Martinsville.
Partially offsetting the losses in a seesaw economy are expansions at Valleydale Foods in Salem and Vitramon in Roanoke that promised to add about 320 jobs in the next year. Valleydale will hire 120 and Vitramon plans to employ at least 200 more. In addition, Yokohama Tire in Salem has grown steadily to about 850, a five-year Army night-vision goggles contract for ITT has been renewed and General Electric's Drive Systems operation in Salem won a $50 million Chinese contract plus other international business guaranteeing future work.
9. Kids with guns
Little has changed since 1991 when the Roanoke Times & World-News ran a series revealing that kids and guns are a volatile mix that has turned Western Virginia children into murderers and morgue statistics.
In 1991, 14 juveniles died from gunshots in Western Virginia - more than in the previous three years combined. The number of juvenile deaths from guns ran at nearly the same level in 1992 - 13 by mid-December.
Of those 14 who died from guns in 1991, three were homicides, eight committed suicide and three died in accidents. In 1992, the breakdown was four from homicide, five in accidents, two suicide and two undetermined.
Despite the carnage, little has been done in Virginia to stem the flow of guns into the hands of children, or anyone else, including criminals. Although Virginia received compliments during the presidential debates for having computerized background checks on gun purchasers, the state still serves as a candy store of guns for big-city criminals from Washington, D.C., to New York.
Gov. Douglas Wilder has proposed that individuals be banned from buying more than one handgun a month, but few observers give his proposal a chance of becoming law. And as more guns fall into the hands of kids, more schools across the state are being forced to install metal detectors or conduct random searches to keep guns out of schools. One middle school in Roanoke even built a wall this year to keep gun-toting teen-agers away from middle school students.
10. Scotty Wimmer lost and found
The search for a 5-year-old boy who disappeared for more than 30 hours in mid-March - at the same time neighborhood parents' fears abounded over a child-watching "stalker" - ended happily when the boy was found hiding under a lean-to in a Southwest Roanoke alley.
Scottie Wimmer had last been seen getting off a school bus the afternoon of March 12. Police, Wimmer's relatives and local residents scoured the neighborhood, until he was found around 11 p.m. Jan. 13 by a woman who had gone outside to look for her cat.
Wimmer told police he feared a neighborhood stalker who had been harassing schoolchildren in the area. Teachers had warned children to beware of the man earlier that day.
In April, a law went into effect that made stalking - pursuing people in a way that makes them fear for their safety - a crime. Wilder had mentioned the Wimmer case while pushing for quick enactment of the law earlier that month.
\ Among the stories that came close, but won no cigar:
In February, the city's police academy graduated its first multicultural class of cadets, a follow-up to the 1991 controversy over the Police Department's hiring and promotion practices.
In April, yet another flood drenched the Roanoke Valley.
In May, Roanoke School Superintendent Frank Tota announced he will retire in 1993.
In August, Roanoke lawyer Frank Selbe, already serving time for tax evasion, went on trial for fraud. He was convicted, and his friendship with Democrat congressional candidate Steve Musselwhite became a backdrop to the fall's campaign.
Sale of Dominion Bank ultimately will cost the valley 850 jobs.\
Keywords:
YEAR 1992