Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 15, 1995 TAG: 9509150050
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KIMBERLY N. MARTIN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
More than 200 people volunteered their sometimes-conflicting dreams of a county with greenways, thriving economic development, farm lands and cutting edge technology.
But after months of talking "pie in the sky," the residents of Back Creek and Bent Mountain were ready to talk strategy at community meetings Wednesday and Thursday night.
"It's fine to have these broad visions, but how do we make that heroic leap from the general to the specific?" Back Creek resident Gordon Saul asked Wednesday.
From dream to reality is a question the county's visioning process intentionally left unanswered .
"The challenge was really to come up with vision statements, and we added, as an aside, `if you have the enthusiasm and the time, think about strategies and techniques''' for accomplishing the statements, said County Planner Janet Scheid.
On the county's timetable, now isn't the time for how to's. Those come in the next step, which the February citizen survey and visioning process have all been leading up to: updating the county's comprehensive plan. The county staff, with citizen input, will begin in January to update that plan, which dictates land use, planning strategies and capital projects, .
But not all of the 10 focus groups, which looked at everything from economic development to transportation to government relations, stuck with the county's timetable.
Some groups did develop those "how to's" - such as the recreation and culture focus group, which came up with strategies and even worked out who would pay for some of what they were proposing.
But you won't find those plans in the 15-page summary vision statement that the county has been handing out. They were left out to "equalize" the reports.
"The final document will include all the raw material," said Jim Sears, who chaired the visioning steering committee.
The final report, which goes to the Board of Supervisors for review in November or December, also will include the feedback from the community meetings the county has held in its 12 planning districts during the past two weeks. Thursday night's meeting was the last one.
The idea behind those meetings was to get more citizens to add to the county dream, Scheid said.
Yet during the more than two hours of discussion at Bent Mountain, only one or two dreams were recommended. At Back Creek there were none.
The other 18 or so suggestions that the planners scribbled onto a flipchart at Bent Mountain were ways to accomplish the outlined goals.
At both meetings, the goals the citizens kept coming back to were how to control development and preserve open space and farm land.
Martin Levine, who lives in Roanoke but owns property in the county, pitched ways to keep farmers from selling their land to developers, such as tax rollbacks when the land use changes.
Tammy Belinsky of Floyd proposed the flip side.
"There need to be incentives rather than penalties to protect the land," Belinsky said.
Bent Mountain's separate vision report tackles the same issues. It also suggests solutions, some of which are not legal in Virginia.
To deal with development, it proposes community planning boards, which would have to approve any development in the area before it went to the Planning Commission.
"Just because it's not permitted in the state right now doesn't mean we cannot pursue," said Eldon Karr, who spearheaded the effort to develop a Bent Mountain vision. "If it's something that will make our visions a reality, we have to pursue it."
Their report, which will be an appendix to the countywide vision, also solves the U.S. 221 debate. In its dream for 2010, all improvements to the the twisting highway have remained in the existing roadbed.
Surprisingly, a few miles down the mountain at Back Creek's meeting, U.S. 221 was one issue the half-dozen people who showed up didn't discuss during the meeting.
On Oct. 28, the visioning steering committee will present its final report, which will include both the dreams and some of the suggested ways of attaining them.
"The vision process shouldn't stop here," Sears said. "Whether you're a citizen going to a Board of Supervisors meeting to speak or a supervisor or a member of the county's planning staff, we must ask ourselves the question: `What did our citizens say three years ago about their preferred future?'''
by CNB