Editorial Cites Need for Help from VA Beach area

(Following is an Editorial from The Danville Register and Bee 01-09-08)

Local governments throughout Southside - and the people they represent - spent years bitterly fighting Virginia Beach’s plan to pump 60 million gallons of water a day from Lake Gaston.
But that’s ancient history to the environmentalists who today oppose the mining of uranium ore at Coles Hill, a site six miles northeast of Chatham. In an effort to keep that uranium from being mined, Delegate Clarke Hogan, a Republican who represents Halifax County, has called on an unlikely ally: Virginia Beach.
“We need all the friends we can get downstream. We need Virginia Beach, and we may have to hire our own lobbyists,” Hogan told a meeting of Southside Concerned Citizens, The Gazette-Virginian newspaper reported.
Making uranium mining an issue for Virginia Beach and Chesapeake (which gets some of that 60 million gallons) may be the toughest part.
To do so, the residents of those two cities would need to be convinced of the environmental worst-case scenario that Southside Concerned Citizens is making. They would also need to understand that part of their drinking water comes from a lake that’s fed from a large area that includes the streams and rivers near Coles Hill.
That’s really two hurdles for Southside Concerned Citizens, but if they’re able to make those points, they will have some influential new friends. Virginia Beach is our state’s largest city, and Chesapeake is the third-largest. Together, they have an estimated population of nearly 650,000 people - 8.5 percent of Virginia’s total population.
Hogan also told Southside Concerned Citizens that they will, “have to be loud,” the key to killing any uranium study this year would be the correct legislative committee and, most importantly, while Halifax County residents are against uranium mining, public opinion in Pittsylvania County was more evenly divided.
Hogan is probably correct about that last point - people in the Dan River Region are more evenly split about the uranium mining issue than in Halifax County.
But Southside Concerned Citizens may need Virginia Beach’s help to stop uranium mining in Pittsylvania County.