ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, September 24, 1996 TAG: 9609240051
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-3 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
MEMO: NOTE: Shorter version ran in Metro edition.
If the Commission on the Future of Southwest Virginia has its way, every school, college and university will be linked electronically, localities will recruit new industry through the World Wide Web, and the Blacksburg Electronic Village will be duplicated in towns and counties throughout the 9th Congressional District.
Other recommendations adopted Monday by the commission, established in mid-1995 by Rep. Rick Boucher, D-Abingdon, include changes in federal strip-mining laws, a tourism summit to decide how to market the region to visitors, incubators to help small businesses get started, and an endorsement of the four-lane "smart" road between Interstate 81 and Blacksburg to support intelligent-vehicle research and economic development, although no route is recommended.
Boucher told the commission, meeting at Virginia Tech's Donaldson Brown Conference Center, that his office will support action needed at the federal level and that a meeting will be set up by early winter with state legislators from Southwest Virginia to explain the recommendations.
A united front is important to implement the recommendations because of population shifts away from Southwest Virginia and toward more urban parts of the state, he said. "Every 10 years, our congressional districts also become larger and moved farther toward the east."
"Fairfax County has more legislators than all of Southwest Virginia combined," said Darrell Martin, manager of advancement at Virginia Tech.
Electronic communications linking students with teachers, patients with doctors, clients with businesses and industries to localities figured heavily in recommendations by many of the subcommittees, all of which have been meeting for the past year. A second set of recommendations from each committee will follow a year from now.
The recommendations include:
* Accelerating a fiber-optic educational network which links 26 of the region's 86 schools so far, easing its funding disparities by offering advanced classes through electronic hookups between a teacher and a number of classrooms in different localities. The commission is recommending that the state pay the monthly $1,500 cost per school of leasing fiber-optic lines. Jean Luker, director of Washington County's technology and gifted school programs, said more than 100 instructors have been trained to teach on-line and that 31 schools should be linked by next year;
* Increasing the educational levels of Southwest Virginians to exceed the state average by 2002, by establishing an Office of Adult Literacy at Radford University and seeking state funding for a Southwest Virginia Adult Education Consortium to devise ways of achieving that goal. Wytheville Community College President William Snyder said 40 percent of the region's adults age 25 or older have no high school diploma;
* Full funding by the state for a Southwest Virginia Virtual Governor's School, with students from throughout the region attending electronically at their home schools. Rachel Fowlkes, director of the University of Virginia Continuing Education Center in Abingdon, said the region's geography and size prevents students from traveling to and from a fixed Governor's School. She said the goal is to have students starting with the virtual program a year from now, with the proposal going to the 1997 General Assembly;
* More access by health care providers to computer networks and full-motion video tele-medicine links for long-distance diagnosis, continuing education, consultation services and research. A tele-psychiatric link already exists in the region, said David Wine, chief executive officer with Advanced Health Care Inc.;
* Every county and city in Southwest Virginia developing a home page on the World Wide Web with industrial sites, shell buildings and other assets for new industry;
* The State Corporation Commission making discount rates available for voice, graphics and full-motion video to grade and high schools, colleges and universitites, libraries and health care facilities.
Other recommendations include amending the federal Surface Mining Act to encourage mining companies to mine hard-to-reach coal using new technologies on some of the 70,000 acres of Southwest Virginia that were strip-mined before the 1977 act required companies to reclaim the acreage. The re-mining would fall under the act, and the companies would then reclaim the land.
The federal government has a fund to reclaim such "orphan land" but it has nowhere near enough money for the job, Boucher said. The recommended changes in the act would take some of that money to offer incentives to companies to do re-mining and would change the requirement that mined lands be returned to their previous contours.
Eighty percent of new small businesses fail within two years, said Ken Anderson, president of a consulting engineer firm, but 80 percent of those "hatched" in small-business incubators succeed. A recommendation is to provide such incubators on a regional basis.
Another recommendation is to coordinate the efforts of four industrial marketing organizations serving the region's five planning districts from the Roanoke and New River Valleys west. A reliable funding source for the marketing organizations is also suggested.
The commission calls for upgrading Interstate 81 to at least six lanes from Bristol north to the West Virginia state line.
It urges a New River Valley link providing alternate access to Blacksburg from the west with a four-lane highway linking the town to counties west of Montgomery.
Other highway projects to be pushed include completing four-lane improvements to U.S. 58 across Virginia.
LENGTH: Long : 101 linesby CNB