The Wood Haven NDA, a Record Tourism Year, and Annie Dillard

Full Transcript

Intro

Alex: Welcome to The Roanoke Weekly. I’m Alex.

Morgan: And I’m Morgan. This is your locally curated, AI-narrated look at the news and events around the Roanoke Valley, pulled from The Roanoke Times, Cardinal News, and WDBJ7.

Alex: This was a week of people asking direct questions and not getting answers. It runs through most of the news half of the show, and it travels further than you’d expect.

Morgan: And then the weekend turns. After a few soggy days it looks like the first real fall weekend we’ve had, and there’s a lot packed into it.

Alex: Let’s get into it.

The Lead: What We Learned About Wood Haven

Alex: We start where we left off. On September eleventh, the Western Virginia Regional Industrial Facility Authority voted to sell the Wood Haven Technology Park, out at the I-81 and 581 interchange, and released no buyer, no use, no price. Six days later we have a name, and almost nothing else.

The name is Clearview Dynamics, a limited liability company formed back in January. WDBJ reported it first, and The Roanoke Times noted its registered agent has been linked to other data center projects.

What we still don’t have is any idea what’s going there, and there’s a specific reason. A Roanoke County spokesperson confirmed to WDBJ the county has signed a non-disclosure agreement, so officials are legally barred from saying what’s planned. The county’s statement was that it supports the proposed project as an appropriate use of the park. That’s the whole explanation on offer.

Morgan: And that’s how the neighbors found out, which is the part that stuck with me. WDBJ talked to Phyllis Jeter, who lives right across the road from the park. She pieced it together on her iPad, stumbling into neighborhood chatter about closed sessions, and by the time she understood it the vote had already happened. Her worry is grounded. Congestion, noise, a two-lane road she says wasn’t built for it. She called her supervisor and got, in her words, “a lot of chin music, but no real answers.”

Alex: Elected officials aren’t doing much better. The Roanoke Times reported that right after the vote, Vice Mayor Terry McGuire asked the authority’s lawyer for the purchase agreement, and was told he could file a Freedom of Information Act request. McGuire’s answer was, quote, “You all work for us.”

By Thursday this had stopped being a Roanoke County story. WDBJ reported both of Virginia’s U.S. senators weighing in. Mark Warner said federal standards ought to say you can’t sign an agreement that hides information from a community. Tim Kaine said it’s a good time for Virginians to put local officials and candidates on the record about it.

Then Friday, the governor signed an executive order on data center accountability. Cardinal News reported it bans nondisclosure agreements among state agencies and state employees, builds a toolkit for localities weighing proposals, and stands up Virginia’s first artificial intelligence task force.

Morgan: With one detail worth being precise about. Cardinal reported that the ban covers state agencies and state employees. Not local officials. So Roanoke County’s agreement isn’t affected by it.

Alex: Reaction ran both directions, from Louise Lucas saying it doesn’t go far enough to Clean Virginia calling it a meaningful step forward.

The one hard number anybody got this week came out of Thursday’s Western Virginia Water Authority meeting. Director Michael McEvoy said Google has told them two million gallons a day will cover its Botetourt campus, though the agreement lets them ask for up to eight. On Wood Haven, he said the authority hasn’t been contacted by the buyer at all, and doesn’t even know who’s looking at the property.

Morgan: A Roanoke resident named Julie Bivins spoke at that meeting, and she wasn’t angry, she was asking. She said, we know it’s coming. So when you get approached, can we do it differently this time. Can you involve us.

The Rundown

Morgan: Alright. The rest of the week.

Visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge announced Thursday that visitors spent nine hundred seventy-two and a half million dollars in this region last year. That’s up five point three percent, against three point one for Virginia overall, so we’re outgrowing the state.

The Roanoke Times put that at forty-seven million dollars in local taxes and about seventy-five hundred jobs. One event did a lot of the heavy lifting. July’s USA Cycling mountain bike national championship brought in three point three million on its own. Landon Howard, who runs Visit VBR, put it simply. Quote, “Our visitors pay the bills for us.”

That’s three record years in a row.

Alex: And you can watch that machine run on Saturday, but we’ll get there.

Two road items. Cardinal News reported I-81 now runs three lanes each way for about six miles, between exit 137 at Wildwood Road and exit 141 at Electric Road, through Roanoke County and Salem.

The one that hits this week is smaller, and you’ll feel it more. WDBJ reported VDOT plans to switch on a new traffic light and realigned off-ramp at northbound I-581’s exit 2N onto Peters Creek Road, overnight Thursday into Friday. It gets rid of that merge ramp. VDOT says the schedule is weather dependent, and this week is wet, so treat it as a maybe.

Early voting also opened Friday and runs through October thirty-first, at the elections office on Kimball Avenue Northeast. The deadline to register or request an absentee ballot is October twenty-third.

On the local ballot, seven candidates are running for three Roanoke City Council seats, and there are three constitutional amendment questions, on reproductive rights, same-sex marriage, and restoring voting rights once someone finishes a sentence.

Morgan: Okay, this next one made my whole day. The National Trust for Historic Preservation just inducted the Colony House Motor Lodge into Historic Hotels of America. That’s the 1959 motor lodge on Franklin Road, restored and reopened last year.

If you’ve driven past it and thought it looked like a postcard, that’s on purpose. It’s Googie style, the space-age roadside look of the late fifties. Boomerang angles, sharp rooflines, neon, all of it built to catch your eye through a car window at forty miles an hour. Only about three hundred hotels nationwide are on that list. Co-owner Lucy Farrell said, quote, “We believed this wonderfully unique motor lodge was worth saving.”

Alex: That building came close to not making it at all.

Morgan: It really did. And one more, at the opposite end of the scale. Carilion’s Taubman Cancer Center topped out Tuesday, meaning the last structural piece went in at the top of the building. Seven stories on Riverside Drive, opening in late 2027 to replace the forty-year-old facility on South Jefferson.

The Week Ahead

Morgan: So, the week ahead, and the weather cuts it in half. It rains hard through Thursday, then Friday through Sunday looks close to perfect, about twenty degrees cooler than last week.

Tuesday, the Violent Femmes are at Elmwood Park, gates at six, on their forty-five year tour. Visit VBR doesn’t list a price, so check that. And Tuesday’s forecast is a ninety percent chance of showers and storms. It’s an outdoor show. That’s all I’ll say about it.

Alex: Wednesday’s the indoor option, which helps, because Wednesday is sixty-five and rain most of the day.

Morgan: Right. Foreigner is at the Salem Civic Center Wednesday at seven-thirty on their fiftieth anniversary tour, tickets from about forty-nine fifty. And Thursday, Bearly Dead, a Grateful Dead tribute, is at 5 Points Music Sanctuary. Doors six-thirty, twenty dollars in advance, all ages.

Alex: And Thursday overnight is that Peters Creek ramp, weather permitting.

Morgan: Friday the sky clears and you’ve got three shows to pick from, all with gates around six. 311 with Beach Weather at Elmwood Park, forty-nine in advance. Priscilla Block at Dr Pepper Park, twenty-six ninety-five. Or Grandin Chillage in Grandin Village, five dollars, with food trucks.

Also Friday, the Big Fat Greek Drive-Thru opens at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church, running through Sunday. After seventeen years of the Roanoke Greek Festival, this year the food comes to your car window.

Morgan: Then Saturday. Seventy-four and sunny, four percent chance of rain, and everything lands on it at once.

Go Cross is at Fallon Park, Saturday and Sunday both. UCI-level cyclocross at the only permanent course in Virginia, riders coming in from all over. Free for spectators, with a free kids race called the Lil Belgians, plus food and beer.

Alex: Which is that tourism number from earlier, showing up in a city park on a Saturday.

On football, the big one is Virginia Tech at Boston College, noon on the ACC Network, the Hokies coming off a thirty-five to twenty-six win at Maryland. UVa hosts Delaware at six, also ACC Network, after a thirty-eight to twenty-seven loss to West Virginia. And if you want one you can drive to, Ferrum hosts North Greenville at two.

Morgan: Saturday also has Big Something at the Dog Bowl at Black Dog Salvage, doors at five. And two free fall festivals, both ten to four, the Botetourt County Honey Festival in Buchanan and the Fincastle Fall Festival downtown.

Alex: That’s a real scheduling problem. Tech at noon, cyclocross all afternoon, a show at six.

Morgan: Sunday’s the soft landing. Seventy-five and sunny, Go Cross day two, a reggae brunch at the Dog Bowl with the Lazy Man Dub Band, and free on the Parkway, Milepost Music at Peaks of Otter at two.

The Closer: Annie Dillard

Alex: One more before we go. Annie Dillard died Tuesday at her home in Massachusetts. She was eighty-one.

Most of the country knew her as a Pulitzer Prize winner. Around here it’s more specific than that. She came to Hollins College, in Roanoke County, to study English and creative writing, and wrote her master’s thesis on Thoreau. In 1974 she published Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a year spent looking very closely at the natural world along a creek in Roanoke County, near where she was living. It won the Pulitzer the following year. She was twenty-nine.

There’s a story she told in an interview years later. The press called to tell her she’d won, and asked what she was doing right then. She was washing spinach. They said, don’t you know this means you never have to wash spinach again. And she said she didn’t like sand in her spinach. She kept washing it.

Morgan: Tinker Creek is still out there. Anybody can go stand next to it.

Close

Alex: That’s the week. Thanks for listening to The Roanoke Weekly.

Morgan: If you know somebody in the valley who’d get something out of this, send it their way. That’s how it spreads.

Alex: We’ll see you next Monday.