Fort Monroe's Actual Owners: Please Speak Up

June 7, 2008

Now is the time to speak up about Fort Monroe's future.

Comments are being welcomed this month by both the Army and the Fort Monroe Authority. Officially, that's the "Fort Monroe Federal Area Development Authority" -- jargon spiked with this presumption: that this national treasure automatically needs ordinary development no matter what its actual owners think.

But things are improving. Those actual owners, declared Fort Monroe Authority chairman Preston Bryant recently, are "the American people." At FMFADA.com, the state panel has posted not a development plan, but a reuse plan. The panel will accept public comments online until June 15.

At Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park, we're delighted with much in the plan. True, it's only a placeholder for byzantine federal base closure. But although it's setting good precedents, it's also cementing bad ones. So it merits scrutiny.

We've long believed that Fort Monroe should become "a vibrant and economically self-sustaining, publicly accessible place where people live, work, and visit." The quoted words came recently from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the National Parks Conservation Association, the Civil War Preservation Trust, and APVA Preservation Virginia.

We think the reuse plan shows progress toward such a Grand Public Place. Some examples:

* The plan mainly recognizes that all of Fort Monroe -- not just the moated stone fortress -- is a National Historic Landmark. It appears to respect the public's clearly expressed wish that pieces not be sold off.

* It calls for increased green space. It tables development of the land northeast of the fortress that's crucial for respecting Fort Monroe's essential Tidewater character and setting. Some Hampton leaders had sought to blanket that land with upscale houses -- a gated neighborhood without the gate.

* By showing that environmental cleanup is cheapest by far for reuse featuring green space, it acknowledges that to ask Americans to pay for maximum cleanup -- as the plan unfortunately does -- is to ask them to subsidize development that we believe isn't even desirable or economically necessary.

* It corrects past overstatements of the Army's departure's temporary negative economic effects on Hampton. It shows that Hampton's taxpayers need to avoid shouldering unnecessary financial liabilities. It acknowledges that although Hampton's unique stake requires respect, this opportunity and challenge confront all of us.

Great stuff. Yet the plan still disrespects the vision expressed nearly unanimously by hundreds of Fort Monroe's actual owners who commented earlier this year to the Army. Some key problems:

* The plan leaves long-term jurisdiction unclarified. And though Virginia law calls for studying National Park Service involvement, the plan leaves that unmentioned -- even though those four nationally respected preservation organizations, adopting our longstanding view, recently observed that the NPS "could be a significant partner" and endorsed San Francisco's Presidio example for study.

* By mischaracterizing and undervaluing the slavery-era "Contraband" story, the plan lacks vision concerning Fort Monroe's international importance. Fort Monroe's future involves America's very meaning as a new kind of nation founded not on ethnicity, but on ideas like liberty and equality.

* The plan scants the issues of viewsheds -- visual settings -- and the cultural landscape.

* It continues to kowtow to a few Hampton leaders' unjustifiable sense of city entitlement.

* It envisions development for development's sake. In our view, any new construction should instead answer carefully established economic necessity for Fort Monroe's self-sustenance.

Unaccountably, those four preservation organizations aren't yet opposing the plan's development-for-development's-sake. But last week, Fort Monroe Authority executive director Bill Armbruster told Channel 13's Mike Gooding that the panel doesn't want any more development than is "appropriate to make Fort Monroe economically sustainable."

Moreover, serious economic estimates are beginning to validate the potential for a self-sustaining Grand Public Place that would enrich Hampton and the region in multiple ways, including financially. We continue to think the best mechanism is an innovatively structured national park.

At our Web site (CFMNP.org), we'll be saying more about the reuse plan and the Army's separate comment process. We hope Fort Monroe's true friends will seize these opportunities to speak.

Corneliussen is a vice president of Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park. E-mail: Contact@CFMNP.org