DATE: Sunday, May 11, 1997                  TAG: 9705100118

SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON   PAGE: 09   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Letters 

                                            LENGTH:   76 lines

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR - VIRGINIA BEACH

Last week I received my bill from the city treasurer for my real estate and also for my personal property taxes.

The envelopes for remitting payment were color coded to facilitate sorting I presume - yellow, purple, blue and green. This is a great idea if I put the blue personal property tax remittance in the proper envelope and the yellow real estate tax in its proper envelope.

Someone should be commended for thinking up this system. It puts a little more color into the taxpayers' lives.

However, in this litigious society, I am watching the newspaper for an EEOC suit by someone claiming it discriminates against the color blind. You can't win trying to save the taxpayers money.

H.T. Cook

May 6 City needs master plan for retailers on Laskin

The last five blocks of Laskin Road are a shopper's nightmare. Five lanes of traffic run between the two rows of stores. Angled parking, prohibited for many years in any new project, is a fender-bender happening routinely. There are no public sidewalks. The power poles lie between cars and sometimes in the pedestrian pathways. There are no trees, flowers or shrubs. The shops are virtually invisible to the visitors on the Boardwalk.

The potential for high quality, small-scale retailing in that area is tremendous. Laskin Road lies between 20,000 visitors each summer day and the higher income residential neighborhoods north of Laskin Road. Merchants Square in Williamsburg, with the same visitor profile but fewer of them, has store revenues, rents and tax receipts four times those of Laskin Road.

There are four issues currently simmering that affect that 10-block area. First is the Oceanfront parcel owned by the Development Authority that many people feel should be a park.

Second is the Pacific Avenue study, which recommended beautifying Pacific Avenue and changing traffic patterns to ease the flow on Laskin Road and the intersection of Laskin Road and Pacific Avenue.

Third is the purchase by Harris Teeter of land along Baltic Avenue. After the grocery store portion is complete, there are still sizable pieces available for development that have been the topic of wrangling between Harris Teeter and the city.

The fourth piece is the state's interest in finishing the rebuilding of Laskin Road.

The merchants in the area are in a tizzy at the thought of relocating any car traffic or parking. There is no plan available to show them where it might be relocated to, or why, or how, or when. The landlords and land owners have not been heard from.

As long as there is no comprehensive plan for the 10 blocks, which could link all four of these issues together, the area will be packed to death by ducks. Each of the four separate issues will clunk along to its own muddy resolution and the sum will be less than the total of the parts.

The city is a major force in each of the four pieces, and has an obvious broad interest in supporting one of its major revenue producing areas. It should prepare a plan that would please tenants, landlords, shoppers, traffic planners, landscape designers, park interests, visitors and residents.

Roger Newill

Architect

April 21

(Editor's note: Newill is the former chairman of the Resort Area Advisory Commission.) Grandparents thank man for his anonymous deed

I would like to thank the man who was a Good Samaritan to our granddaughter April 17, when her car stalled on Route 44. He stopped and used his cellular phone to call us and when the battery went dead got off the interstate and called from another phone.

We are eternally grateful because she was very upset and the outcome could have been different had he not been caring and considerate. We do not know his name but, he knows and we do appreciate his efforts.

J. Copeland

April 19

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