PLEASE NOTE:
The story below ran in the March 8, 2006 edition of The Farmville Herald.
Reprint permission courtesy of The Farmville Herald.
March 17 Editorial
Civic Center Proposed
By KEN WOODLEY, Editor
FARMVILLE—Representatives of the Longwood Real Estate Foundation want area leaders to consider the merits of an off-campus civic center able to seat 5,000 to 6,000 for basketball and 7,500 to 8,000 for concerts.
“Can we move it off campus and do a civic center concept that could be an economic generator and catalyst for Southside Virginia?” asked Foundation president Otis Brown during a meeting Friday on the proposal.
The alternative to a civic center would be a far less ambitious on-campus basketball arena/convocation center necessary for LU’s rise from Division II to Division I athletics but unlikely to have anything like the regional economic impact of a civic center constructed off-campus.
“If it’s built on campus, its use in the market place has got to be limited,” Brown said, citing parking issues and other concerns.
A civic center could attract concerts by major artists, perhaps the ODAC basketball tournament, trade shows, conventions, as well as provide space for local high school graduations.
From Lynchburg to the Hampton Roads community along the 460 corridor, said Ken Copeland, executive director of the real estate foundation and economic development for LU, “there is no place to assemble as many as 5,000 people. No place. So that was the genesis of the thought process.”
Reaction to the proposal by Brown and Copeland—and it is just that, their proposal—was immediate and positive.
“It’s a great concept,” said Farmville Town Manager Gerald Spates, describing it as what the area needed “to make us stand out.”
Farmville Mayor Sydnor C. Newman, Jr., compared a civic center to the Farmville Regional Airport in terms of positive impact on the economy.
“You need it to attract businesses, to use it for economic development,” Newman said. “I think it would be very nice.”
Where an on-campus basketball arena would be constructed with state funds, an off-campus civic center would require a variety of funding sources—federal, tobacco commission, for example—and would be approached as an economic development project.
An example of how local government might contribute would be an addition to Farmville’s lodging tax, paid by out-of-town travelers, dedicated to the project.
The proposal also drew praise from Danny Fore, executive director of the Commonwealth Regional Council, the region’s economic development organization, who cautioned only to “make certain we don’t build it too small.”
Though Brown stressed that the civic center proposal has not been officially sanctioned by either Longwood’s Board of Visitors or the real estate foundation, it was vigorously endorsed by LU President Dr. Patricia Cormier on Friday.
Rather than build a new basketball arena on campus, Dr. Cormier said, “we’d like to be able to give something back to the community. The only way to do that is if we can structure this in a way that makes it a community enterprise, so the town benefits from this, the county benefits from this, the surrounding areas benefit…
“The key here is, can we make it a community enterprise?” she asked.
Copeland certainly believes the project can succeed. “We’re 20 miles, give or take, from the geographic center of the Commonwealth of Virginia,” he’d said during his introductory remarks, “why wouldn’t the concept to build a (civic center) work?”
If the concept seems worth pursuing, Copeland said, then discussions could unfold regarding how the community “can work together with Longwood in some capacity and make this thing a reality.”
The real estate foundation has allowed Brown and Copeland the option of working on the civic center project and Longwood’s Board of Visitors has agreed to have the duo report back on the project. “They said they’d be willing to listen,” said Brown.
Any facility built on campus would cost Longwood about 25 percent more and take far longer to construct because of the state procurement bureaucratic process.
“I pay 25 percent more for anything I build. That’s absolutely the case,” Cormier said. “Every (college) president will verify this for you across the whole Commonwealth.”
And, Cormier noted, construction involving the private Longwood Real Estate Foundation, as opposed to the state, “moves the project along. We would not be where we are with the condominiums downtown right now if we were doing this through the state. I’d still be waiting for plans to be checked…The 35th piece of paper that has to be signed.”
Brown said the civic center could be accommodated by a site of about 15 acres but said no site selection process has begun because the proposal is merely a concept now.
“The site thing, we really have not pursued it. Obviously, we can find a site (but) we haven’t even focused on sites. That’s something that’s got to materialize. It’s the concept first,” said Brown, who formerly headed Atlantic Rural Exposition, which has the State Fair of Virginia as its signature event.
Brown had a model of the kind of horse shoe-shaped stage-at-the-open-end civic center design viewed as the premier multi-use civic center format. “The new John Paul Jones Center at UVA is the exact concept,” Brown said.
“If the concept works and you think it’s something that people can believe and get the ball going,” Brown said, “then I think the sites (will come).”
Personally, Brown said, “I just think it would be an economic catalyst. You’ve got something to market, something to talk about, something for the community to have pride in.”
