Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, August 21, 1993 TAG: 9308210199
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
And Roanoke Finance Director Joel Schlanger's $1,800 bill for personal long-distance calls at work . . .
And big raises for the four highest-ranking city officials . . .
And news that the city aims to build two four-lane roads through its oldest black community . . .
Have people been so hopping mad at the inhabitants of the Roanoke Municipal Building.
By the thousands - 2,500, at a public relations chief's last count - people have dialed a Roanoke Gas Co. hotline to protest the city's possible takeover of the private company's operations in the city.
At week's end, Mayor David Bowers' secretary, Joyce Sink, had fielded 518 calls about it. Only three or four, she said, backed the city keeping open its option to buy the company's Roanoke assets - a question City Council takes up at 2 p.m. Monday.
A city hall secretary nearing retirement age said Friday she'd never taken so many rude calls.
People are livid.
"I think if they keep on, we need to put [up] a sign saying `Welcome to Little Siberia,' " said Mary Sue Ayers, 64, a retired Holiday Inn hostess in Northeast Roanoke. She's one of 60 people who called the newspaper to say they oppose the deal.
"To me, it's just like communism . . . Look at what happened to bingo," she said of the city's regulation of the popular game a few years ago. "The prices have gone up ever since they took that over. I think they're greedy and selfish."
"I just plain don't believe in the government taking over private enterprise," said Connie Sullivan, 67, a retired railroad secretary.
The city's proposal has enraged people even though it dangles two of the most alluring words in politics. Reduce taxes is what the city says it might do, if it could just acquire the gas company.
The whole mess is fascinating political scientists at Western Virginia colleges and universities.
Harry Wilson of Roanoke College cautioned that, despite the outpouring of calls against a takeover, many people may be sitting home quietly relishing the idea. "People who support something are much less likely to come out in force."
Bill Hill, his colleague at the college, brought up an overlooked fact: the city of Salem has been running its own electrical system for more than 100 years. There, he said, "That bit of municipal socialism seems completely popular."
Frank Turk, Salem's head of utility collections, said the city makes "only a few hundred thousand" dollars off the system, and its rates parallel those of Appalachian Power Co. The main advantage, he said, is the quick, personal service it can give customers in the small community.
In most places, utilities aren't much more popular than governments, maybe even less so. "If people had to rank 10 things on trust, I don't think utilities and government would be very high on the list," said Virginia Tech political analyst Bob Denton.
But when Roanokers like Bernice Johnson, an 82-year-old retired housekeeper, talked about Roanoke Gas this week, you'd have thought they were talking about an old friend.
"I like it like it is," she said. She's even prayed about it.
Roanoke Gas Vice President Robert Glenn said everywhere he goes, people cheer on his battle with the city, even when he and his wife went to a Chinese restaurant.
"Sherry and I went out to eat last Saturday night and had just a parade of people by our table," he said. Not a one was on the city's side, he said.
Maybe the city's venture would have gone down better if people had heard it before - from the city, not from the gas company's preemptive strike, its Friday-the-13th news conference alerting the public that the city might swoop down and take it.
"A year they've been working on this?" asked G.N. Horton, who retired to Roanoke from a Fortune 500 company in Los Angeles. "They could have been educating the people as they went."
"The ordinary people like myself do not have any voice at all," Sullivan said. "Everything seems all set beforehand."
That galls Richard Ericson, too. He's 66 and a retired railroad accounting worker.
"Maybe if they'd had an open forum: `This is one way we can raise money. What do you think of it?' They could have had a town meeting a long time ago. We would have understand why you need this." Instead, he said, "This was completely out of the blue."
He's so mad, he may go to Monday's council meeting and call for City Manager Bob Herbert's resignation.
City spokeswoman Michelle Bono, three months pregnant and wearing white sneakers all during this public relations week from hell, has scurried to match the gas company's media assault.
Even with the city's $16,000 public relations fight with Roanoke Gas, she could muster only four phones for a bank in the city hall basement this week. She said, judging from TV shots, the gas company had a lot more.
All week, city dispatchers, firefighters, secretaries and even city Utilities Director Kit Kiser have sat down in the basement, taking the often blistering calls. No one, Bono emphasized, earned any overtime pay for doing it.
"Some people have been very hostile," Bono said. "Some people have been less than pleasant."
By Thursday, she said, when mailings giving the city's side of the story were arriving in city homes, people were beginning to listen to her crew.
"The tone, the tenor, of the calls changed. Then we got the first calls saying `keep the city's options open.' " She said that was a great relief.
"People have the idea that if it's the gas company today, it's going to be Wal-Mart tomorrow," she said. Her people have told callers that companies like that have no franchise to use the city's right-of-way, as do Roanoke Gas and a few other companies, so the city isn't going after them.
Counting all the calls, from all over the Roanoke Valley, she said, most people were still against any takeover.
But among the city residents they talked to, Bono said, nearly half on Thursday and Friday said they were at least willing to let the city think about it a while.
Don Piedmont reviewed the public relations circus this week from the comfort of his home. After 44 years in media relations in New York City, Roanoke and other places, he retired last spring from Norfolk Southern Corp.
He didn't like the city's mailings and advertisements - sounding the theme, "What Roanoke Gas Company Isn't Telling You . . . "
"That's very sinister," he said.
He is on the side of Roanoke Gas. "It's a tax-paying private enterprise, and government at any level doesn't have any business meddling with it," he said. "I think it's a ridiculous thing to do."
by CNB