It’s The Room Where It Happens
Hampton Roads comes together in a lot of places. Like Harbor Park, Busch Gardens, the VB Amphitheater, back-ups at the HRBT. But when it comes to government, it’s usually around a big rectangular table on Woodlake Drive in Chesapeake.
Mayors, other elected officials, city administrators, transportation engineers, emergency services coordinators, transit authority managers, school superintendents, police chiefs, utility directors, “coastal resilience” planners, you name it, make tracks for the Regional Building, owned and operated for all of us by the indispensable Hampton Roads Planning District Commission. “We represent 17 localities from Virginia Beach to Southampton County and from Norfolk to Hampton to James City County,” says Bob Crum, who has been executive director of our PDC since 2015 when he moved here after running the Richmond area’s for seven years.
And it’s not Bob’s only job. He also heads up our Transportation Planning Organization (TPO), a group of local elected, state and federal officials responsible for prioritizing regional transportation projects from highways to biking trails. “Our region has one of the highest number of commuters crossing locality lines to get to work in the country, and our communities understand that a road in Hampton or Suffolk is also good for citizens in Surry and Portsmouth.”
The relationships that emerge from the nearly 300 meetings that transpire annually in this conference room, the “epicenter” if you will of the region, are key. “When a department head from Poquoson (population 13,000) is at the same table as one from Virginia Beach (population 452,000), there is mutual respect and understanding that everyone’s needs must be met.” Crum is not naïve to believe an hour in his chamber once a month will produce constant regional revolutions in service and savings. “But you would be surprised,” he says. “We have PDC and TPO meetings on the same day each month, with an overlap of attendees. We schedule an hour in between for a casual lunch. That 60 minutes of networking has built a lot of important relationships.”
Bob invites me and my deputy editor Peter Shaw to these sessions, which are open to the public.
Younger types attending a recent one about transit were outspoken about the need for more routes. “It is so important that we have the right mix of people in the room,” says Crum. “And that often means not just local government employees but also ones from the offices of our Congressional representatives, US Senators, and state legislators.” Indeed the money that flows to the region comes from more places than local taxes. “It helps for instance for Senator Kaine’s legislative director to hear from a York County supervisor and vice versa so we all know what might be funded and when.”
The PDC has been front and center on offshore wind and the Hampton Roads Regional Broadband initiative, 3,000 miles of fiber that will provide us with some of the nation’s fastest internet speeds. “Much of what our governments do is very technical and requires the expertise, not of mayors, but city and county staffers who know what’s above and below the ground and the laws that we have to follow and physical obstacles we must overcome,” says Bob Crum.” And then there’s the water, including not just rivers and bays that must be crossed but also the rising seas that impact land use. “We share best practices that they can take home to their communities.”
At a recent PDC meeting, five members of Virginia Beach City Council were at the table, almost half that body to hear a presentation by the Navy on its economic impact. “That was important data, and I wanted to hear it,” said councilman Joash Schulman. “The PDC does a great job of bringing us critical information but more importantly, putting us and our colleagues in the same room to hear it. It’s time well spent.”
Joel Rubin is the Managing Editor of Forward Thinking. He owns Rubin Communications in Virginia Beach.