Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 18, 1993 TAG: 9308180184
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
A letter was hand-delivered to the county Board of Supervisors just before a hearing on the Greenbrier Medical Group Inc.'s request to rezone property for construction of a 100-bed, $3.5 million facility.
The letter "said that they were withdrawing the request due to negative press and the fact that the county's unwillingness to shortcut its schedule made it impossible for them to meet their time lines," Supervisor Joe Carpenter said.
The Greenbrier group is composed of James Clowser, former West Virginia deputy mental health commissioner, and a group of Virginia stockholders, including Covington ophthalmologist Krishna Sankar, who owns the land on which the group planned to build the facility.
The plans drew opposition from residents of the Alleghany County community of Low Moor. Some expressed relief Tuesday that the proposal had been scrapped.
The facility "would have been 200 yards from my house, 100 yards from two widow women," James Downey said. "I just didn't think it was an appropriate place for something like that."
Under Greenbrier's proposal, the prisoners would have spent two months prior to birth at the facility, had the baby at Alleghany Regional and remained at the center for three months to bond with their infants.
Carpenter said it would be difficult to predict how the board would have voted on the rezoning.
"There were questions that remained unanswered - about the size, who the contract was actually with, the relationship with the federal prison system," Carpenter said. "Just things that we still needed answers to."
Clowser had said the facility had been unfairly labeled a prison rather than a center for trusty-type inmates incarcerated for nonviolent, white-collar crimes.
"We weren't trying to knock them," Downey said. "We just didn't want it in our neighborhood."
Memo: ran on C1 in the State edition