THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, January 25, 1996 TAG: 9601240156
SECTION: SUFFOLK SUN PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
SOURCE: JOHN PRUITT
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines
It's no struggle to see that it's a political year in Suffolk. Every time you turn around, some City Council member is so concerned about something that a meeting's being announced.
It started about two weeks ago, with Councilman Curtis R. Milteer trotting out the police chief and the recreation and public works directors to hear from his Whaleyville constituents.
Mr. Milteer's anticipated announcement for re-election followed soon thereafter. From now until the May election, you can count on him to offer solutions to all sorts of problems identified in that meeting.
Then, on Wednesday night, Councilmen Charles F. Brown and Richard Harris joined to host what well may be one of the strangest sessions of the political season - even if it is still in its infancy.
Mr. Brown went into a tirade when the city staff presented recommended usages for the former Naval Radio Transmitting Facility near Driver, somehow interpreting rejection of his pet project as an affront to minorities.
Mr. Harris, who lives practically within the shadow of the facility's towers, knows that citizens who opposed a race track that he favored have him in their sights. Any kind of show apparently will do, even one to say Suffolk has land enough for both the usages recommended by city staff and Mr. Brown's rejected youth program.
Mr. Brown doesn't face election this year, so at least give him credit for concern from the heart - even if that does still leave unexplained his conviction that racism at least partly accounts for the program's failure to make the cut.
The agitation surfaced at last week's council meeting, when city staffers presented a report recommending three uses for the former Navy site, which was shut as part of the national base-closure and realignment project:
An environmental education center, to be run in conjunction with Old Dominion University, on 150 acres; a Little League field and a 240-acre city park providing access to the Nansemond River. An additional 240 acres would go to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to link two parts of the Nansemond River Wildlife Preserve.
The Wildlife Service, Department of Interior and the city have been vying for portions of the 597 acres of surplus land. The Navy will have final say over who gets what.
Left out of the city's recommended uses were 50 acres for YES - Youth Entertainment Studios - which wants to build a dormitory, offices and a studio in Suffolk.
YES serves inner-city youths, a categorization that apparently raised some concerns of area residents and that apparently led Mr. Brown to his belief that opposition to minorities was astir.
Huh? Inner-city youths aren't necessarily minorities, as a check of past participants in YES summer camps show. They include African-Americans, certainly, but also Caucasians.
Besides, couldn't it be that city staffers, after studying consultants' accounts of meetings about possible uses, were convinced that YES and the other proposed uses were simply incompatible?
Did they know that highly structured, three-week summer camps for 50 to (within five years) 100 students are what YES envisions in Suffolk? Or did they assume year-round residency, thus the finding of incompatibility?
Regardless, Mr. Brown - and even Mr. Harris, who expresses little regard for any staffer connected with the city he represents - should give city staffers credit for more sense than reasoning that area residents don't want minority youths coming into their neighborhood, so it's off the list for YES.
There are too many real issues in Suffolk to waste time on such baseless discord.
Comment? Call 934-7553. by CNB