As many of my local readers probably already know, the City of Roanoke has recently launched the Creative Communities Leadership Program, and is seeking 30 volunteers to serve as Creative Connectors during the 12 month campaign. I believe this represents an opportunity for the Roanoke Valley to take an important step forward in our ongoing [...]
There’s a controversy brewing in my hometown about the practice of opening city council meetings with a prayer. It began a couple of weeks ago when our vice mayor opened the regular meeting with a prayer that made reference to the son of God. Keep in mind, council meetings around here have always opened with [...]
I wrote a brief post last Friday suggesting a number of possible new locations for a downtown food court that would serve the needs of the Market Building tenants and their customers. Relocating the food court vendors would allow them to continue doing business without interruption, and would clear the way for the Market Building [...]
Other than election day, ordinary citizens don’t have very many opportunities to make their thoughts known to their elected representatives. Even though the City of Roanoke provides numerous opportunities for members of the public to speak at council meetings and other forums, these gatherings do not attract a true cross section of the voting public. [...]
The debate over the future of the Market Building has been long on criticism and short on ideas. Even the public input session intended to collect ideas for the future of the building amounted to nothing more than a pep rally for the food court vendors. Other than the initial proposal unanimously rejected by the [...]
I attended the public forum on the Market Building last night, and to sum it up as succinctly as possible, I would describe it as a complete waste of time. The session was promoted as an opportunity for the public to share their thoughts with city officials, but since only a handful of council members [...]
The headlines following the city council meeting on Monday were all about the acrimonious debates over Countryside and the Reserve Avenue amphitheater site. There were several other items on the agenda that day that received little to no media coverage. Among them was my application for a vacant seat on the Economic Development Authority.
I have [...]
I hadn’t planned to write anything else on the Market Building controversy, but I received a nasty dissenting comment on a previous post this morning that changed my mind.
Oh yes Chris, blame the tenants for the disrepair, not the landlord. That makes perfect sense. Yes it is Chico’s fault that the city has shown [...]
Much of the debate over the future of the Market Building has focused on the fate of the existing food court vendors. Our mayor has even gone so far as to state that the concerns of the vendors should take precedence over any other aspect of the building’s rehabilitation. “When Chico is happy, I will [...]
“When Chico is happy, I will be happy”. That was the response from Mayor David Bowers to the recently rejected proposal by the Coalition For The Roanoke City Market to renovate the historic Market Building. The mayor was referring to the owner of Chico’s Big Lick Pizza, a long-time tenant of the food court. The [...]