ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, February 22, 1997 TAG: 9702240044
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BUCHANAN
SOURCE: MATT CHITTUM STAFF WRITER
BUT HOW THE TREES came to be cut down can't be answered as simply as you might think.
The trees are gone - that's the only clear-cut part of the matter.
That's the trees that used to border the lot where the new Meadville Forging Co. plant, to be called Virginia Forge, is going up in Buchanan.
The same trees the company, as part of its rezoning request in March, promised to "retain and maintain" as a visual buffer to hide the plant from highway traffic.
The same trees a good many folks seem to have become dependent upon to find the intersection of U.S. 11 and Virginia 625. The gnarled stumps that are left just aren't serving the same purpose.
Jim Link, marketing director for Meadville, was driving north on 11 toward Buchanan to visit the automotive wheel parts factory site when he noticed. Or, more correctly, didn't notice. He couldn't find his own plant.
"Drove right by it," he said. "So did the architect."
"The biggest complaint I've had is people can't see where the turnoff is," Buchanan Mayor Rex Kelly said.
The trees, mostly scrub locusts and some cedars, have been a point of some consternation around town the last few weeks. At least a few people have called the mayor out of concern that Meadville had broken its promise.
But there's no easy answer to that.
It wasn't the company that buzzed down the trees. And what's more, the company may have been out of bounds in making promises about the trees in the first place.
The saw-wielding culprit in this story, it turns out, is the Virginia Department of Transportation.
The VDOT man who cut down the trees "thought he was doing us a good turn," Link said. "But he wasn't doing a good turn. ... We wanted the trees."
But VDOT officials said the trees were on state right of way, and they had every right to cut them.
They were just "junk stuff" covered with vines causing a visibility problem and were shading the road so much ice wouldn't melt, VDOT Spokeswoman Laura Bullock said. The branches were hanging in the road in the way of trucks and buses.
"We came in there to take care of a safety problem in our right of way," Bullock said. "We would be remiss if we didn't remove them."
So Meadville may have made a promise it couldn't keep, because the trees really belonged to someone else.
"Well, not all of them," the mayor said. Some were in fact on Meadville's property, he said, and VDOT reduced them to stumps anyway.
"OK," Bullock said. "We didn't take a survey crew out there, but I think we're talking inches here."
Perhaps one or two of the 20 or so trees removed were on Meadville property, she conceded. But they were still hanging over the road, were still part of the problem, and therefore VDOT was within its rights to deal with them.
"Safety is our number one priority here," Bullock said.
All parties involved agree the place will likely wind up looking better in the end, anyway.
VDOT will remove the stumps that are left, and the company and VDOT have worked out a deal to plant a row of 8-foot white pines along Virginia 625 - on company property.
"In reality, most of those trees weren't any good anyway," said Cliff Hoppe, who lives next to the plant site and opposed its location there.
"It just makes a more panoramic view of Purgatory Mountain," he said, "if you don't concentrate on the building too much."
LENGTH: Medium: 74 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ROGER HART STAFF. Meadville Forging Co. said it wouldby CNBkeep the trees next to a new factory being built along Virginia 625
in Buchanan. But the trees weren't Meadville's to keep. color.