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For the record

Posted on April 26, 2007 by Staff

Thanks students

Even the most curmudgeonly among us know that this community always gets a boost from the enthusiasm brought in by the young people attending the university.

This week they buckle down for exams and next week they prepare to bid us adieu. The year has not ended well, first with the sudden loss of Jason Ray, a beloved member of the cheerleading team and the man in the Ramses suit. Within weeks they were mourning again in tearful solidarity with their counterparts in Blacksburg.

This class of students has also shown an intensity not seen for a while. The administration’s conduct of the Iraq war has raised the stakes and fueled a fervor with which our conventions and decisions are questioned.

And we have seen a focus on town life and issues as well, thanks in part to the leadership of Student Body President James Allred, a native of this community. To address safety issues in the downtown area, the students recently sent the town a check for $80,000 and a plan for increasing lighting and installing emergency call boxes.

The students also are raising funds and awareness on environmental issues, and decided to hike their own fees to help pay for initiatives to reduce greenhouse gases and lower energy use and costs on campus.

While the engagement of the student community with the town seems to ebb and flow from year to year, this seems to be an era of greater engagement and pursuit of common goals driven, perhaps, by the hard facts of an unpopular war, concern for the planet and the knowledge that we’re all in this together.

Fresh air

Congratulations to WCHL 1360 AM for putting on another community forum. Each year, the station opens up its microphones to dozens of community voices to try and sort through, in depth, the issues of the day.

This year, more than 60 local leaders stopped by to talk about subjects like Town and Gown relations, improving local schools, public safety, economic development and the arts.

With a new format that allowed for two hours of roundtable talk instead of the one hour of years past, the conversations delved even deeper.

We salute the local focus of the station and its premier yearly effort to remind us that not everything in the electronic media is driven by sound bites. We hope you’ll visit the station’s website and listen to their podcasts of the panels or tune in when they rebroadcast the segments.

Good for the goose

Putting a giant Navy practice field next to one of the state and nation’s greatest ecological treasures never did make sense. But for years now, it’s been full-speed ahead for the Navy’s plans for an outlying landing field in Washington County on the Albemarle peninsula. The field would sit not far from the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, putting it right in the middle of an important spot on the migratory flyway for hundreds of species, including the vast flocks of geese, ducks and swans that have used the flyway for centuries.

It always seemed like a dangerous thing for the pilots as well as the birds, and the Navy’s solution, which involved massive bird kills, proved that they just didn’t get it.

Fortunately, the farmers, bird lovers, hunters and environmentalists did understand the impact and pressed their case with local and state politicians. The opposition is now broad, bipartisan and firmly against any plan for the area.

And finally, the Navy appears to be getting the message and is working with the state to look for another site.

The victory, if it does happen, will have a sour taste, though. It’s hard to imagine a greater way to waste money in a time of war than pressing ahead with an unwanted and ill-conceived project.

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