The river can save us
T.S. Eliot, occasionally ill at ease within himself and a chronicler of the phenomenon, wrote of the Mississippi, “The river is within us.” What then might the poet say of Waynesboro, where a river snakes and is eyed suspiciously, as if coiled and ready to strike?
For decades that section of town fringed by the South River has been the subject of a kind of neglect verging on criminal. Floods, which occur infrequently, are feared and so development is frozen, an odd thing for a place people call the River City.
It might have been noticed that the Mississippi about which Eliot mused has an inclination to pass over its banks on occasion, and without the provocation of a passing tropical storm system ordinarily required here. Among those who have persisted in blindness to the dread rise of waters are the good people of Dubuque, Iowa.
A community of some 57,000 souls situated centrally on the state’s eastern border, which the Mississippi traces, Dubuque is a bustling economic hub largely reliant upon the river within it. Along what Eliot called that “strong brown god” stands the Grand River Conference and Education Center, the National Mississippi Museum and Aquarium, the Alliant Amphitheater, the Mississippi Riverwalk, the Grand Harbor Resort and Water Park and the River’s Edge Plaza.
All of those projects have been completed since 2001, coinciding with a remarkable rise in Dubuque that even the mighty Mississippi would be hard-pressed to match. In 1982, unemployment in Dubuque County, in which the city is set, reached 23 percent, the highest rate in the country. Industries that had lined the river for almost two centuries crumbled, leaving a trail of economic death along the waterway that had once given life.
So what happened? Well, principally, people in positions to decide things, direction for one, noticed that while all else was gone, not so the river. City officials “identified the Mississippi riverfront as a significant community resource and ... targeted redevelopment in this area as a major component of its overall economic development strategy,” according to Land Development Today, a development trade magazine
Nifty thought, that one.
Working with local landowners, the chamber of commerce, a Main Street group and the county historical society, the city produced a plan in 1995 calling for a marina, restaurants, shops, a hotel, a promenade and housing along the river. Then officials did something that here would qualify as a feat extraordinaire: they implemented the plan. So now we pass from nifty thoughts to outright zaniness.
The city hooked into the America’s River Partnership, tapped state grants and other public money, partnered with private developers and – voila! — a moribund town was reborn. Unemployment plunged to 3.6 percent by 2006. Dubuque transformed itself from the kind of place that would draw looks of pity even in Martinsville to a model of downtown renewal.
Ours is a town populated by kind souls and naysayers. The latter group, sometimes mixed with the former, contend there’s precious little that can be done to lift the so-called River City’s core from its doldrums. The task of stirring development falls to private enterprise, not the city, they say. Visions are for mystics and daydreamers, they insist. Dubuque shows what and where the possibilities are, and they are real. The river is within us, and so too a future waiting to be seized.
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The point here is that if any river would be feared because of flooding, it would be the Mississippi and that if any downtown renewal would be thought hopeless it would be in Dubuque. The Mississippi’s dangers are disproportionately larger just as its benefits are.
Nowhere do we suggest buiding marinas or that the Mississippi and the South are one and the same. We’re simply pointing out what strikes us as an inspiring story of one town’s rise.
On the subject of property taxes and spending, there is a prevailing sentiment among some in this town that simply spending is good. We don’t think so. Whether the city spent or cut $500,000 more this year would draw it no closer to the kind of revival experienced in Dubuque. That happened as part of a larger plan not as part of annual fights over nickels and dimes.
Further, you might note that in Dubuque’s case, much of the money came from grants rather than local property owners’ pockets.
If the city could show us a strong, cogent plan to revitalize downtown and build on the asset that is the South River, and then show us definitively how that could return money on city tax dollars we’d be likely to support it. Private money should be a big part of the picture, which is why we urge public-private partnerships.
But that won’t happen without the city taking the lead.
The arguments from both sides over spending for the museum, for example, are from a development perspective pure piffle. The city needs a bold downtown revitalization plan in which all sides believe and to which they are willing to commit. It needs to be one that takes into account all of Waynesboro’s unique assets, the South among them; provides for major draws into the city; demonstrates real economic and revenue returns for the city; and it needs to lay a blueprint for making it all happen that city officials follow.
Everything else the city does outside of this is of secondary importance, like tightening screws on a boiler that’s getting ready to blow.
While any attempt to motivate constructive action in the community is better than not doing so, this editorial suffers from the common error of disproportionate comparison.
Having spent years in New Orleans, at which point the Mississippi River is about a mile wide, I have great difficulty comparing the South River to that mother of American rivers. The South River is what we called a creek. No marinas are likely to be built upon these shores.
It also seems hypocritical of the News Virginian to be urging the city to spend large sums of money on such projects after recently pushing for a reduction in the property tax rate that provides the wherewithal for such expenditures. You can’t have it both ways. It is easy to call practical people “naysayers”, but it is harder to tell us where the money should come from.
I do think that there are ways for the city to take advantage of the South River, but it will not be on the scale of what Dubuque has done. There is nothing wrong with the private sector funding it, either. The city’s job is to provide vision, infrastructure, planning and support an economic environment that is conducive to the private sector being able to do what it does so well.
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