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Cracker’s Neck has been a challenge for city council at least since September, when bikers on the property came across some people target shooting. That’s when Councilwoman Laurie Buchwald suggested council should come up with a plan for sharing the 200-plus acre tract Radford owns in Montgomery County.
It had been mostly for hunters until Pathways of Radford built some biking and hiking trails there that opened last summer. City council appointed a committee to work things out. Tracy Howard, the city registrar, chairs the committee. He told council Monday that the committee has just about wrapped things up.
“We are 85 percent through a recommendation,” Howard said. Howard said he expects to bring that recommendation to council March 23.
“Our goal was to have that recommendation before council before turkey season,” Howard said.
Spring gobbler season opens April 11.
— Tim Thornton

Radford is gearing up for the launch of CodeRED, a citywide emergency notification system. In theory, if you’re a Radford resident with a land line telephone, you’re on the city’s list of  numbers to call when there’s an emergency. But some people, City Manager Tony Cox is one of them, like to be sure. So they sign up, just to be sure. You can also sign up cell phones and other numbers if you want to be reached that way when there’s an emergency in the New River City.
When there’s something that affects the whole city, everyone on the list will get a notice. When the problem is more localized — a broken water pips in a particular neighborhood, for instance — only people in that area will get the call.
There’s an optional system that will alert Radford residents to severe weather.
For questions particular to Radford’s system, you can contact Becky Hawke at rhawke@radford.va.us or 731-3603. To sign up, visit the city’s Web site.
— Tim Thornton

A lot of places closed on Monday, when all the snow came down. But Radford University irritated a few people with the way it closed down.

By phone and email, people complained that the university said it was opening at 10 a.m. Then, at 9:30 a.m., word went out over the alert system that the campus was closed. Actually, the text went out at 9:29 a.m. No doubt many folks were on their way to campus when they got the news, if they got the news before they got to campus.

A phone message went out with a number to call with any questions. The number was "XXX-XXX-XXXX."

The vice president for student affairs sent emails to folks with a university email address at 8:16 a.m., but that didn't get the information onto the campus alert network.  So anyone digging a car out of ice and snow probably missed that.

This is the second time this year this has happened, according to one caller who didn't want to be identified for fear the administration would extract some sort of revenge.

-- Tim Thornton

At least two dogs have been caught in leg traps recently while walking with their owners at Cracker's Neck, the hunting-biking-hiking-birding site Radford owns in Montgomery County. In at least one of those cases, the trap was reported to be on the edge of one of those hiking-biking-birding trails.

The committee that city council appointed to work out how all those interest groups can happily share the 250-odd acres out by the interstate won't begin meeting until later this week. So city council made it clear at Monday's meeting (Feb. 23) that they all feel strongly that they must do something in a hurry to keep people and pets safe until the committee can come up with a long term plan.

City Attorney Jim Guynn told council that since the city owns the land, it can say what's allowed to happen there. So, for instance, if council didn't want trapping going on at Cracker's Neck, council could decide trapping won't be allowed there.

Instead, council decided to put up new signs, alerting anyone using the land to all the activities that might be going on there, including trapping.

Councilmen have been talking among themselves about this for more than a week. We've officially requested copies of their emails so we can tell you more about what they said.

-- Tim Thornton

At an open "town hall" meeting held by Virginia Tech earlier this week, an audience member asked what place energy savings will have in the university's attempts to trim its budget. While Tech has already addressed some issues about energy efficiency there remain plenty of opportunities for energy savings the university has yet to take advantage of.

Sherwood Wilson, Tech's vice president for administrative services, said the university is in the early stages of a comprehensive energy initiative on campus. It's sent out RFP's for ESCOs, he said Thursday.

In non-acronymese that means the university is looking to hire an energy-service company. The basic goal of these companies is to coordinate and implement energy-savings strategies for businesses, localities or universities. They then get paid based on the savings their clients receive as a result of their work. Read more »

The environmental story getting the most notice today will likely be about a ground hog in Pennsylvania or the mess that remains after a winter storm. But there are other stories out there.

For instance, a quick check of the internet looking for updates on the big coal ash sludge disaster in Tennesee didn't turn up much. But the Tennessean, Nashville's newspaper, is still on the case. Not surprisingly, some folks are turning to the courts for satisfaction. The Tennessee Valley Authority is telling people that if they hire a lawyer, the TVA won't be able to even talk to them. At least one woman said she's talked with the TVA. The utility's representatives said they'd get back with her within five days. That was two weeks ago.

"I've not gotten an attorney yet because I hear once you get an attorney TVA won't talk to you," the Tennessean quoted the woman. "At the same time, I'm not getting any communication from them now."

Meanwhile, tests conducted by Duke University researchers working with an environmental group, show elevated levels of toxins, even though the TVA is reportedly spending $1 million a day on the clean up.

Speaking of money, two Tennessee congressman are trying to get $25 million from the economic stimulus package working its way through Congress to go toward cleaning up the TVA's mess.

As always, you can find our previous blogging here and here.

Reporting on the Giles County coal ash project is here.

-- Tim Thornton

Another environmental group is trying to reverse the Bush administration’s reversal of the stream buffer rule. That may sound tame, even boring, but the argument is about when coal mining companies can bury streams under rocks and soil that have been blasted off mountaintops to get at coal seams.

The old rule said that surface mining couldn’t disturb land within 100 feet of a stream. The new rule does away with that restriction.

Even with the old rule – and the exceptions granted to the old rule – more than 1,200 miles of stream in Appalachian coalfields have been affected by surface mining; more than 700 miles of stream headwaters have been buried. Those numbers come from an Environmental Protection Agency study that’s about five years old.

The National Parks Conservation Association is filing a lawsuit – it was in the mail when this was written, but it may be officially filed by now – that asks the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to vacate the rule change and a Fish and Wildlife Service biological opinion that the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement used on the way to the change.

There are more than 30 pages of legal language explaining the argument, but it seems to boil down to this: The Office of Surface Mining didn’t follow the law or its own rules when it made this change, the old Fish and Wildlife opinion it relied on to make that change is “wholly inadequate,” and, since that opinion relied on the old stream buffer rule, the underlying assumptions have changed, so everything should have been done over anyway.

The NPCA asks that the stream buffer rule change be reversed and that the old Fish and Wildlife Service biological opinion be declared invalid and vacated.

A collection of environmental groups – Coal River Mountain Watch, the Sierra Club, the Kentucky Waterways Alliance, Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, Save Our Cumberland Mountains, the Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards, the Waterkeeper Alliance and the West Virginia Highlands Conservancy – filed suit against the stream buffer change last month. They attacked from a slightly different angle, arguing, among other things, that the new rule offers stream protections the Office of Surface Mining, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers have all previously described as inadequate – and none of them explained why they changed their minds.

The copy of the NPCA suit I have is a draft, so I won’t post that now, but you can find the suit that was filed in December here.

UPDATE: The SELC has put out a press release about the suit.

-- Tim Thornton

The big coal ash news might be that West Virginia Congressman Nick Rahall introduced legislation to regulate it.

The Southern Environmental Law Center -- an environmental group, obviously -- came up with its list of regulations.

Tennessee is asking more questions of the TVA.

Newspapers continue to discover that there are coal ash ponds in and near their coverage area.

President-elect Obama's pick to head the EPA has promised to investigate coal ash ponds. At least some states are getting a head start.

Our previous blogging is here.

Our stories about the pile of coal ash in Giles County can be found here.

By the way, here's a link to the company overseeing the Giles County site.

Dave Cooper has posted on Huntington Post again. And so has Erin Brokovich.

-- Tim Thornton

The day we ran a story about the Concerned Citizens of Giles County lodging another set of complaints about the coal ash site developing in Narrows, (Friday, Jan. 9) lots of coal ash news broke. First, the Associated Press came out with a good article about how much of this stuff is spread around the country and how it's disposed of. (Here are some graphics that tell about Virginia and coal ash. The interactive map will tell you about other states.)

Then came news that there was another leak at another TVA power plant. (TVA runs the plant where an earthen dam broke, covering about 300 acres with about a billion gallons of coal sludge.)

The  day before -- the day the Concerned Citizens were lodging their complaints -- the Senate committee on Environment and Public Works held a hearing about coal ash, the TVA and the big spill. You can watch the hearing, or read the key speeches, here.

Our continuing coverage of the Giles County coal ash controversy is here.

Our previous blogging on the subject is here.

-- Tim Thornton

At Tuesday night's meeting, action was taken on two of the agenda items regarding arrangements between Montgomery County and Christiansburg.

The boundary adjustment which would add 153 acres of property into the town's corporate limits passed unanimously. Town Manager Lance Terpenny estimated that this deal will bring in $80,000 of new real estate tax, in additition to a one-time sum of $355,000 from water and sewer connection fees.

The middle school will now be within town limits, making Christiansburg responsible for hiring and maintaining a school resource officer. Terpenny estimated this to cost $70-75,000, which would include salary, training and equipment.

“The real estate tax and personal property tax is not going to be a huge moneymaker for us,” Terpenny said. But it will pay for necessary expenses.

On another agenda item, the county requested a zoning permit for a mechanical garage and contactor equipment storage for property on Reading road, currently owned by Tom Poff.

County Administrator Clay Goodman spoke to the issue, desiring to "be right up front" about the county's immediate and future plans for the property.

The immediate plan is to have a storage facility for county garbage trucks, tractors and parks and recreation vehicles. Future plans include relocating the county's Public Service Authority building to the property, and constructing an emergency fuel station that the county, Christiansburg and school board would have access to should they structure a deal.

Goodman said the county and Poff are nearing a purchase agreement, but nothing would go through until he gets the town's blessing.

Bob Poff, Tom Poff's brother called the property an eyesore and felt it would be better off in the hands of the county than in its current condition.

"I'm looking forward to this myself because I think it's going to clean it up," Bob Poff said.

Council unamimously voted to approve the permit, as long as the county builds a structure to keep people out of the garage and adds landscaping to clean up the property and shield the garage from the view of neighbors, among other conditions. Since the request was just for the garage, the county would have to come before council again to address the issue of building a department building and fueling station on the property.

--Lerone Graham