ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, December 3, 1995 TAG: 9512030006
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BRIAN KELLEY STAFF WRITER
PEOPLE EITHER TOUT or discount the supposed economic benefits of the "smart" road. It comes down to whom you believe.
Linda Vaught and her husband, Gary, can sit on their back porch in the summer and listen to the gurgling of Den Creek and the hooting of owls. Some day soon, she worries, those pleasures of country life will be replaced by the roar of traffic.
The proposed "smart" highway between Blacksburg and Interstate 81 would run 500 to 600 feet from the front door of their trailer.
Linda Vaught is one of many Montgomery County residents skeptical of the project's supposed economic benefits, which Virginia Tech President Paul Torgersen last week compared in potential impact to Motorola Inc.'s plans to bring a new plant and 5,000 jobs to the Richmond area.
"I think it's just a ploy by the politicians and Tech officials to try to convince people that it's going to do wonders," Vaught said. "I can't see how a five-mile stretch of road that's going to cost a hundred-plus million dollars, I don't see how it's going to benefit this area at all."
Then, there's Ray Alcorn. Few things make him hotter under the collar than someone who complains about the possibility of the New River Valley becoming another Northern Virginia.
"The alarmists who moved in two, three or four years ago from Northern Virginia to save us from ourselves, it just upsets me," the Blacksburg developer said.
He is an unabashed smart-road supporter who sits on the Montgomery County Planning Commission. He applauded last week's retraction of a Nov. 20 county Board of Supervisors decision that would have blocked the project.
"Reason dictates that if you're going to have the type of services everyone wants, something is going to have to pay for it," he said.
Vaught and Alcorn stand on opposite sides of the long-running debate over the need for the 5.8-mile highway, a debate with relevance to the Montgomery board's decision. One of the factors the board must weigh is whether the road would provide a service in the most "economical and practicable manner."
On one side stand people who say the smart road will give the region and Virginia Tech a spot on the ground floor of a developing high-tech industry that could create hundreds of new jobs and enable young high-school and community college graduates to stay in the region rather than become economic refugees to urban areas.
Opponents, including those concerned about the pace of growth in Montgomery County, view the smart road as an example of pork-barrel spending and that will degrade the Ellett Valley.
In between stand other people uncertain of whom to believe.
For years, smart road advocates have cited the project's economic potential. The current figures include an estimated $100 million in direct smart-road research funding split between Tech and the region's private sector and another $300 million in estimated long-term spinoff development, said Ray Pethtel, the former state transportation commissioner who is interim director of Tech's Center for Transportation Research.
The center, with 14 on staff and 19 doctoral and master's students listed on its roster, is the heart of the university's smart-road effort and one of three federally designated research centers for intelligent transportation systems, or ITS.
Tech also is one of 48 associate members of the National Automated Highway System Consortium, composed of nine auto, defense, academic and government members. It received a $160 million federal grant a year ago to research ITS technology and matched it with $40 million more.
But to date, financially speaking, Tech is a bit player in the consortium: It has received just $48,000 to prepare a concept paper.
The consortium has no plans "to fund any portion of Virginia Tech's smart highway project," said Celeste Speier, a public affairs official with the Michigan-based consortium. "I wouldn't rule it out, but again I think that they're kind of putting a little bit of wishful thinking in there."
The consortium already has a demonstration project planned to open in August 1997 on high-occupany vehicle lanes on Interstate 15 in San Diego, she said.
That makes it all the more of a leap to bringing in $100 million in research or $300 million in spin-off to the region. But Pethtel said his numbers have been checked two ways.
"One was a look at the total transportation industry and the ratio of the intelligent transportation systems portion of that," he said. "The other ... is a general guideline that's been developed by several economists on the economic benefit of major transportation facilities. ... I know that it runs about 3 1/2-to-1, so you spend $100 million, and it comes to a $350 million investment."
As transportation commissioner and since joining the Tech center in May 1994, Pethtel has been a visible salesman for the project.
Before him, former director Antoine Hobeika and Larry Hincker, Tech's director of university relations, have made the case for the smart highway to local civic and business groups.
"There are other models that you can use," Pethtel said. "But we were satisfied that those are the numbers that fairly represent the benefit."
Hincker said the $300 million estimate initially was a "back-of-the-envelope" calculation made by Hobeika to project an economic impact for the project over 20 to 25 years.
"I don't think it's unrealistic when you look at the rest of what the university is doing" in research, Hincker said.
Smart-road opponents say the numbers are smoke and mirrors to sway business and political leaders wary of the project's $103 million cost. On the one hand, the ethereal estimates sell the smart road politically; on the other, the political support gets Tech access to research grants, opponents say. They liken it to a house of cards.
"The estimates are meaningless, because they cannot be verified," said Shireen Parsons, chairwoman of the Sierra Club New River Group. "This is a real attempt to defraud the public."
"I think that the perception of waste of taxpayers' dollars is one of the big factors for a lot of our members who oppose it," said Rick Roth, president of the New River Valley Environmental Coalition.
Joe Draper, a county Planning Commission member and head of a Blacksburg engineering company, is depending on Tech's economic-impact estimates. He said he was ambivalent about the smart road until two or three years ago.
"I have sat in on a couple of these sessions with Ray Pethtel. ... I guess I'm at their mercy. I believe what they say; I have no reason not to," Draper said. "The university needs some good news every once in a while, instead of bad news from Richmond that they're cutting the budget again."
Todd Halwas, president of the Greater Blacksburg Chamber of Commerce, worries that not jumping on the smart road opportunity could open up a chance for more populated and politically powerful sections of Virginia to snatch it away.
"The projects like this that are going to send this amount of money to the area ... we just can't afford to thumb our nose at it," Halwas said. "There are no guarantees that we're going to have an economic boom. ... But it's definitely a great shot."
The cost-benefit ratio was a clear factor in the Montgomery supervisors' initial 4-3 stand against the state's proposed condemnation of about 140 acres of private land in a county agricultural and forestal district. A week later, the board rescinded that stand by a 5-2 vote in order to seek more information from the Virginia Department of Transportation. The matter likely won't come back for a vote until next year.
Supervisor Nick Rush, a Republican, has been a consistent road opponent since his 1991 election. He represents the Ellett Valley and Den Hill Road residents who would have to live with the highway.
"The price tag for this road is way too high," Rush said Nov. 20. "Any economic development gains that this county or this region might see ... divided between the 1,000 or 2,000 or 10,000 jobs that might in the future become of this, divided into $103 million is just not cost-effective."
Yet Supervisor Henry Jablonski, also a Republican and a smart road supporter, sees the highway fitting into a larger growth picture. "We all contribute to the need for growth, but nobody particularly wants to recognize growth," he said. "We all, I suppose, would like to be the last one in a new house in the New River Valley, and then maybe no more people could move in, and ... there wouldn't be a need for any new road or any expansions of shopping centers or anything else."
Also figuring into the economics of the smart road is an issue that often goes unstated: class, the idea that educated, wealthy elites are pushing the project through a rural area where there's likely to be little organized opposition. The project that has evolved into the smart highway has been pushed publicly since the mid-1980s from the top down - proposed by political leaders in Roanoke and Blacksburg as a faster link between Roanoke, which lacks a major university, and Virginia Tech, which lacks easy access to Interstate 81 and a major metropolitan area. Tech injected the technological element into the equation in the late 1980s.
The divide was conspicuous at last week's board meeting, when Torgersen and other Tech officials showed up, clad in dark suits. Rush, a delivery driver, joked about the "suits" at the board room door. "I thought I was voting at the Church of the Brethren [precinct], there were so many politicians here."
Vaught and her husband went door to door along Den Hill Road to collect signatures on an anti-smart-highway petition before the Montgomery board's vote. The rural byway would be bridged and paralleled by the smart highway between the Ellett Valley and Shawsville area. The Vaughts sensed a feeling of powerlessness among many residents.
"That's one thing that [smart road planners] did have in their minds, that these are just a lot of uneducated, poor people, who'll think you can't fight city hall, you've just got to go with it," Linda Vaught said.
That allegation, under the heading of "environmental justice," is one of three counts in a lawsuit filed Nov. 15. The New River Valley Greens, an environmental group, is challenging the planning of the smart road.
One of Beverly Fitzpatrick Jr.'s roles as executive director of the New Century Council is to sell the benefits of regional cooperation and linking the New River and Roanoke valleys. The smart highway is a key part of that link.
Fitzpatrick said he wasn't sure if the New Century Council had effectively related the economic benefits of that connection and of the smart road in particular.
"Our citizens are crying for jobs for their kids," he said. With Virginia Tech at the lead of smart-road research, "You will have a synergy of companies that will want to locate around this kind of development."
But Den Hill Road residents and others aren't so sure. Marcie and Larry Clark live in a trailer with their 2-year-old daughter, Hannah, while they build a wood-frame house behind it. Their dream home is in the path of the road and would be taken by the state, Marcie Clark said.
"Personally, I don't think it's worth it. You've got so much money for how many minutes of travel?" she said. "We told them, and it didn't make any difference. It went in one ear and out the other. It's like this is a done deal."
LENGTH: Long : 189 lines ILLUSTRATION: GRAPHIC: Map by staff.by CNB