Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 20, 1994 TAG: 9402240007
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: F3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
- a world leader in public and private education
- among the most desirable places in the world to live and work
- renowned as the safest and healthiest place to live and work
- a region in which the infrastructure system links the Region and the world
- a diverse and globally competitive economy
- a partnership of governments investing in tomorrow
- a model for America in leadership, regional identity and creation of 21st Century opportunities
\ EDUCATION:
VISION: The New Century Region is a world leader in public and private education.
STRATEGIES:
1. Lifelong Learning
-- Create a lifelong learning system in the New Century Region that is market and needs driven with an emphasis on flexibility, adaptability, accessibility and retraining in a safe environment.
-- Expect students who demonstrate competence in required fundamental knowledge and skill at age 16 to make a commitment to one of three advanced areas: college prep, tech-prep, or apprenticeship. Develop these programs to be competitive with other industrial nations. Assist young people in understanding the work place and determine their opportunities in the job market.
-- Instill a sense of curiosity, enjoyment and love of learning that prepares people for a literate and fulfilling life in the New Century Region.
-- Provide affordable access to higher education for all qualified students.
-- Utilize the New Century Region's public facilities for a wide range of community activities and educational opportunities beyond traditional school hours.
Educational Support Network
-- Expect and encourage families and community organizations to instill discipline, teamwork, responsible citizenship, leadership and entrepreneurship in the region's young people.
-- Create an atmosphere that involves families in the education of their children and in educational support groups.
-- Emphasize early childhood education.
-- Identify and support at-risk students early.
-- Create strong alternative programs for drop-outs.
Business and Industry Involvement
-- Create supportive partnerships between each K-12 school and local business.
-- Encourage and assist in training and retraining business and industry employees .
-- Ensure that Virginia Tech is widely recognized as one of the top 25 national universities.
-- Enhance Radford University, Ferrum College. Hollins College, and Roanoke College to rank in the top quartile of Southern Colleges and Universities .
-- Facilitate further development of New River Community College and Virginia Western Community College as institutions fully integrated in the lifelong learning system of the New Century Region.
Continuous Improvement and Support
-- Continuously implement services and structures to ensure a globally competitive learning environment that uses innovative approaches throughout the New Century Region.
-- Generate a continual exchange of ideas and resource~ between the New Century Region's school systems with constant emphasis on knowledge transfer and being customer and market driven.
-- Provide funding and leadership to empower all K-12 schools in the region to provide a globally competitive education without funding disparity.
-- Create an expectation that elected officials will provide active and continual support for educational funding to ensure the global competitiveness of our schools within the New Century Region.
Technology and Distance Learning
-- Expand the global village concept so that schools, libraries, the work place, government and homes are electronically linked within the New Century Region and then to the world.
-- Expand access to technology to make the New Century Region the place for world class research that supports existing business and that is the basis for creating new business and attracting business to the region.
-- Develop the Roanoke Conference Center into a globally recognized and responsive educational and training facility.
\ QUALITY OF LIFE
VISION: The New Century Region is among the most desirable places in the world to live and work.
STRATEGIES:
Recreation, Arts. and Culture
-- Nurture diverse high quality arts, cultural and recreational activities.
-- Develop carefully planned access to the New Century Region's rivers with improved recreational opportunities, while protecting the sources of water supply as a competitive advantage for the Region.
-- Develop comprehensive recreational programs for all ages.
-- Move minor- league sports up a class, support New Century Region's college and university teams, and push for major league sports activities.
-- Develop the Explore Park and all regional and state designated cultural attractions.
-- Preserve the region's beauty, natural resources, and countryside.
Community
-- Encourage neighborhood development while instilling a sense of community and caring in the neighborhoods.
-- Create a positive regional identity.
Growth
-- Create zoning ordinances that are logical, ensure enhancement of the quality of life, protect the environment and promote growth.
-- Create sustainable development while planning and coordinating growth to enhance the Region's quality of life.
-- Maintain the New Century Region's reputation as a low-cost living area.
People
-- Work to create an atmosphere that provides the New Century Region's citizens with a world view and enables them to freely communicate within the international community.
-- Foster an open society that is friendly, hospitable. welcomes newcomers, and encourages each person to reach their maximum potential.
-- Involve governmental entities in sharing responsibility for solving regional social problems.
-- Reduce the region's poverty rate to one-half the national average.
-- Develop a vibrant support system for human services in the New Century Region, including providing accessible child-care programs and reducing the drug, alcohol, and weapons problem.
Housing
-- Ensure that affordable housing exists throughout the New Century Region.
-- Create and implement housing assistance policies that result in less need for concentration of low-income families.
-- Provide shelter and assistance for the homeless.
-- Develop market-rate housing in downtown areas throughout the New Century Region.
\ HEALTH AND SAFETY
VISION: The New Century Region is renowned as the safest and healthiest place to live and work.
STRATEGIES:
Safety
-- Reform our law enforcement/criminal justice system to ensure it is effective and affordable.
-- Develop. implement and promote effective programs against drunk driving, enhancing the region's image as a model of transportation safety.
-- Reduce substance abuse and related accidents to the lowest in the United States.
-- Plan and coordinate disaster response in advance of need.
Health care and Wellness
-- Create a health-care system that is based on wellness and prevention.
-- Expect and encourage all citizens in the community to assume personal responsibility for high levels of wellness.
-- Maintain high quality and readily available medical and emergency services.
-- Improve health status for New Century Region citizens.
-- Provide a nationally recognized training and continuing-education center for health care.
-- Encourage health providers and the business community to interact together to maximize the benefits of health-care reform.
-- Expand and promote the public/private partnerships to ensure health-care access for all children from birth.
-- Reduce the Region's teenage pregnancy rate by 50 per cent.
\ INFRASTRUCTURE
VISION: The New Century Region's infrastructure system links the region and the world.
STRATEGIES:
Build infrastructure that provides the New Century Region with competitive advantage while attracting and promoting development.
-- Develop the information highway in cooperation with the private sector, public utilities, college/universities, and government agencies to provide a competitive advantage .
-- Identify and protect the water supply to provide competitive advantage for the future of the New Century Region.
-- Design and develop a transportation network integrating all modes of transportation, including highway, rail, air and mass transit in order to provide a transportation hub for the population centers of Virginia, the Eastern and Midwestern United States, and link the New Century Region and its people to the world.
-- Encourage local governments to build regional industrial parks in the New Century Region and share in the revenues.
-- Develop a regional civic center and supporting facilities capable of handling 25,000 people.
-- Provide waste disposal, drainage systems and reliable low-cost energy.
Post welcome signs for the New Century Region at the airports, all communities and other entry points. Use these and other mechanisms to influence people moving through the region.
Identify opportunities for privatization of infrastructure development.
Develop alternative means of transportation for people and goods within the New Century Region.
Make smart road, Transamerica and 1-73 a reality.
Expand the region's traditional rail infrastructure.
Create the means to ensure that governmental jurisdictions share resources and create regional financing mechanisms to provide anticipatory infrastructure to enhance the quality of life.
Integrate a trail system with the regional transportation system.
\ ECONOMY
VISION: The economy of the New Century Region is diverse and globally competitive.
STRATEGIES:
Strategic Products and Services
-- Aggressively improve higher education and research centers to provide the driving force for the New Century Region's global competitive advantage.
-- Enhance the New Century Region's manufacturing industries global competitive advantage through application of technology, quality, skilled work force, capital investment and productivity.
-- Make the New Century Region a world center for technology products and services including: fiber optics, agribusiness, transportation, information service, communications, and environmental/engineering services
-- Develop the distribution/transportation system to make the New Century Region the hub of the Eastern and Midwestern United States, providing linkage to the important market places of the world.
-- Organize and aggressively market the New Century Region's natural, recreational, cultural and attraction resources as an integrated destination for tourism. conventions and retirement.
-- Expand national and regional headquarters in the New Century Region by expansion, entrepreneurial start-ups and relocations.
Technology Transfer
-- Develop a process to capture technology from the research arena for commercialization in the New Century Region.
-- Create a strong business/education partnership to ensure that Virginia Tech leads Virginia's manufacturing technology extension service.
-- Develop high-quality research parks within the New Century Region that facilitate technology transfer and link the New Century Region to the world.
Exports vs. Imports
-- Maintain exports at a level greater than imports of goods and services between the New Century Region and the rest of Virginia, the United States and the world.
-- Create in the New Century Region the proper mix of economic components to provide global competitive advantage and productivity.
-- Develop a world-class global studies program at Radford University.
High per Capita Income
-- Create jobs to ensure each member of the work force is employed at his/her optimal skill level in the New Century Region.
-- Increase the New Century Region's per capita income above 105% of the U.S. average.
Business Climate
-- Strengthen the pro-business attitude throughout the New Century Region.
-- Stimulate small-business development in the Region.
-- Make creative and innovative financing and capital available as programs for entrepreneurship and expansions develop throughout the New Century Region.
Economic Development
-- Develop the New Century Region as an economic entity through a balanced program of retention, expansion, relocation and creation of new business enterprise.
-- Provide regional incentives for job creation within the New Century Region.
-- Focus on economic development that exports goods and services outside the New Century Region.
\ GOVERNANCE
VISION: The New Century Region's governments are partners investing in tomorrow.
STRATEGIES:
Regional
-- Establish a New Century Region council of governments that meets regularly and provides continuous opportunities for communication and leadership among governments and their citizens.
-- Bridge the assets unique to each area to produce a regional asset base more valuable than the sum of the assets of the individual areas.
-- Encourage New Century Region governments to work in partnership with the private sector to implement shared vision.
-- Develop regional coordination on policy issues important to the whole Region, while maintaining a balance between regional and local government control.
-- Make tax credits, tax increment financing and revenue-sharing between local governments available to finance capital improvements in the New Century Region.
-- Encourage the federal government to identify the New Century Region as a metropolitan statistical area. (MSA)
Philosophy
-- Encourage participation by everyone in a system of open government that is pro-active, accessible, honest and accountable.
-- Make government investments with long-term horizons that are regionally and vision oriented.
\ LEADERSHIP
VISION: The New Century Region is a model for America in leadership, regional identity and creation of 21st Century opportunities.
STRATEGIES:
Advocacy
-- Encourage our leaders to be the catalyst for linking the New Century Region and its resources to the state. nation, and world and making our shared vision a reality.
-- Develop strong New Century Region advocacy with the local, state and federal governments.
-- Promote a widely accepted name for the Region.
-- Establish the New Century Region as the gateway to Western Virginia s future.
-- Solicit private/public sector participation in governmental decision making.
-- Expect local government to make timely decisions that benefit all citizens of the New Century Region.
Development
-- Create an atmosphere of partnership in which business and government understand and complement each other.
-- Develop a New Century Region leadership institute.
-- Develop New Century Region volunteer and leadership recognition awards.
-- Create a program to develop youth leadership.
-- Create an environment that encourages qualified people to run for public office.
Communication
-- Promote business and social interaction in the New Century Region.
-- Add geographic areas to the New Century Region as appropriate.
-- Establish a regional telephone service without long distance, served by one telephone directory.
-- Use the electronic-village concept for communication among the citizenry and Ieadership .
-- Establish an annual report card to assess progress on selected indicators.
\ Editor's Note
The New Century Council is a group of New River and Roanoke Valley residents who have met several times to develop a "vision" for what the region could become in the 21st century, and to identify strategies for how to get there.
The statement reprinted here, outlining seven "visions" and ideas for achieving them, is a draft version that was presented recently at two public meetings. On the basis of comments at those meetings, the council is considering some revisions. A final draft is expected soon.
Plans call for forming seven conmmunity task forces in March and April to figure out how to realize the vision.
by CNB