Grundy Ready for Rebirth

By Debra McCown
Reporter / Bristol Herald Courier
Published: July 14, 2008

BY DEBRA McCOWN
BRISTOL HERALD COURIER
GRUNDY, Va. – The four-lane snakes through the mountains to the seat of Buchanan County, tripping over falling-down communities along the way, with houses set into hillsides that would be considered nearly impossible anywhere else.

Grundy used to consist of whatever buildings could be crammed along the road and the Levisa River on the few flat spots its location has to offer, places that periodically flood.

Soon the floods will stop, and U.S. Highway 460, still lined with boarded up Depression-era storefronts, will open up into an oasis of modernity where Grundy has literally moved a mountain to make way for its future.

As the town’s flood control, highway and downtown moving project reaches its 10-year mark this August, the new Grundy is poised for launch.

“Good, slow, steady growth is the key to success, and Grundy has a wonderful future ahead of it,” said Chuck Crabtree, who served as town manager and industrial development authority chairman during most of the project. “They have an opportunity that most small communities in the United States would absolutely die for.”

Through an unprecedented partnership with the Virginia Department of Transportation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, this community of about 1,000 people is nearing completion of its goal: a brand new, flood-proof downtown complete with a highway.

With a total price tag of more than $250 million, the project will be completed with about $250,000 having been spent for every man, woman and child in Grundy.

They say it’s worth it.

“It’s important to me because the survival of Grundy was at stake,” said U.S. Rep. Rick Boucher, who got involved with discussions on the project soon after he took office in 1983. “You can’t really put a price tag on the life or death of a community.”

The latest sign of progress is the strange peace that has settled over the town in recent weeks; the blasting that’s been going on for years to make way for the road and the new downtown has stopped – although transportation officials say it’s not over yet.

For children who have grown up with the periodic tremors, it may seem a departure from normalcy. But then, there’s nothing normal about the recent history of Grundy.

In 1977, the town suffered a massive flood when 16 inches of rain fell in one day upstream, drowning not only the physical downtown but also its economy.

“If you’ve seen a building blown up in a war zone and it’s just rubble standing there, that’s what it looked like,” said Crabtree, who now is semi-retired in North Carolina but continues to consult on the project.

“The first day after the flood ... it didn’t have anything to do with the future or what we do next; it was just survival,” he said.

Without the money to rebuild, and with added government regulation making it impossible in some cases, business owners simply shut their doors and left the town’s commercial buildings full of mud to rot.

Many of those businesses not wiped out by the flood itself succumbed to the rapid economic decline that followed.

It wasn’t long before people started looking for a solution to the flooding problem that had killed the town. Crabtree said the project – while it officially began in 1998 – has been going on for more than 25 years.

“It wasn’t just someone coming up with an idea. It took years of research and development to devise a plan to work,” he said. “Grundy sits in the bend of a river, and you’ve got two mountainsides and a railroad track and a river, and you’ve got Route 460, and it’s hard to figure out a way to flood-proof an area like that.”

There was also another obstacle to the project: the cost.

Boucher, who represents Southwest Virginia in Congress, helped bring together different groups to devise a plan that would accomplish multiple objectives.
The Virginia Department of Transportation was under federal mandate to finish Highway 460 through or around Grundy. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers was looking at a flood-proofing project. Grundy officials wanted to rebuild the commercial district.

“There was a clear understanding that at that time, something had to be done in order to address Grundy’s flooding problems,” Boucher said. “It was not clear what should be done.”

What was devised was a solution that involved cooperation among federal, state and local governments to overlap the projects – and, thereby, cut the total cost in half.

Town Manager James Keen said Boucher has been “a driving force” behind seeing to it that project funding has continued to come each year.

Joe McAllister, manager for the Grundy project for the Corps of Engineers, said the agency has spent about $77 million in federal funds on the town so far.

“The redevelopment site’s the biggest block for the project. That was completed several years ago. ...We also built a bridge to the redevelopment site. ... We also relocated their fire station and we are going to relocate their city hall,” McAllister said.

Most of the floodwall to protect the courthouse and other historic buildings is mostly complete, he said. The highway is being built atop the levee.
He said 2010 is the expected completion date for downtown.

Meanwhile, VDOT has built a new road through the town and is currently working on the intersection of U.S. Highway 460 and state Route 83.
“We’re moving Riverside Drive, and there was bridge-replacement work plus the work to take down that rock facing,” said Michelle Earl, spokeswoman for VDOT’s Bristol District. “It’s just been a major undertaking, especially under traffic.”

Earl said it’s the first project in which the district is helping to move a town.

The road project is being done in three phases. The first phase, which is currently under construction, includes 0.72 miles downtown and has a planned completion date next year. The second phase, scheduled to begin this fall, includes 0.84 miles leading out of downtown, and the third phase includes 1.18 miles.

“The reason it’s moving forward is because of the ARC [Appalachian Regional Commission] funds,” Earl said, explaining why the project is moving forward despite a statewide lack of transportation funds.

Town officials say a new Highway 460 atop a new floodwall is part of the town’s path to economic development on higher ground.

With highway construction well under way and the flood-proofing project almost complete, negotiations are taking place with a private developer for downtown construction, and a deal could be just days away. Hopeful town officials say the new downtown may be completed in 2010 as well.

The new commercial district, with its planned center around a two-story, 500-car parking deck with a Wal-Mart Supercenter on top, will undoubtedly reflect an era when the automobile and the mega-store rule the roost.

But building up is not a new concept here, in a county where flat land is scarce.

A mountainside was blasted away to create the 13-acre site where Wal-Mart and other businesses will locate, across the Levisa River from the old downtown.

The dirt and rock removed here has been transported to a nearby hollow, where town officials hope it can become another flat building site.

“It’s definitely a change of course,” said Bob Carpenter, who works with troubled youth in Grundy. “I had an office here when the flood came through. Of course, the courthouse had water six feet up the walls ... so it’s going to change things.”

One change he’s eagerly anticipating is the arrival of jobs that will give teens an opportunity to earn money while making productive use of their time.

Outside of the immediate downtown area, private developers are blasting away at sites of their own, which they hope to use for additional retail.

“Now you’ve got people reinvesting millions of dollars back into the town of Grundy,” Crabtree said. “You jump-start it and let the private sector take off with it. That’s the key to the whole thing.”

Of course, the downtown project has always had its naysayers. As the project nears the 10-year mark, some complain it has taken too long.

“It’s obvious what’s going on here. It’s a bunch of nothing,” said Jason Sparks, 28, a lifelong resident of the town. “I think it’s taking way too long. They need to do something about the highway.”

Stevie Justus, also a lifelong resident of Buchanan County, said the project is a good idea, but he thinks VDOT could do a better job of managing the traffic flow through town.

But, he acknowledged, the highway work that’s been done thus far “keeps the rocks from falling on people.”

Mayor Roger Powers had to give up his family business to make way for Highway 460, but he is eager to see the new downtown complete.

“On Saturdays, it would be hard to walk on the streets of Grundy, there were so many people,” Powers said of the town in its heyday. “It will never be like it was in the ’50s, but it will bring the business back.”

He said the main blockage to progress has been the millions of cubic yards of dirt that had to be moved before building could commence.

“Everything will be moving much faster in the next few months as far as downtown traffic and everything with the completion of the highway,” Powers said. “And I think everyone is looking forward to the completion of the downtown site.”

The project has drawn national media attention over the years and has gathered praise from around the nation.

“We’ve had people from San Diego just to look at it,” Powers said of the project.

While the scale and unique nature of the project have made it a natural tourist attraction, Powers said the town is considering laser lights to turn one of the large rock walls created by the blasting downtown into a tourism draw.

“Yes, ma’am, it would be one of the most visited towns in the country,” said Crabtree.

The downtown setting is also being planned to be attractive to visitors.

“It’ll be a pleasant type of place to go and walk, sit, fish in the river or do whatever,” Keen said of a “green area” planned along the river.

“Grundy is going to become, with the redevelopment that is going to take place on the redevelopment site, a commerce center for Buchanan County,” Boucher said. “ The community today, for the first time in modern history, is growing.”

“I think it will stimulate Buchanan County’s economy,” the congressman said, “and in the long term, prove the investment was quite worthwhile.”

| (276) 791-0701