Editorial: Bring on the Market Mediator: Roanoke's Hiring of a Neutral, Consensus-Building Party to Mediate the City Market Debate is a Wise Move

Say what you will about the $6,300 fee, the City Market is important enough to Roanoke to warrant hiring an outside mediator to quell the uproar over a proposed market makeover.

If Frank Dukes, director of the Institute for Environmental Negotiation at the University of Virginia, can fashion a meeting of the minds, then by all means, bring him to the table and cut the man a check.

The melee over Center in the Square's plans to create a more visible presence for itself in the market area has boiled over to the point where stakeholders -- Center, farmers market vendors, business owners, Downtown Roanoke Inc. -- cannot see eye to eye.

Dukes has experience in building consensus where conflict is present, or where conflict is anticipated.

The institute, according to its Web site, helped people from Virginia's tobacco farming community and public health community reach agreements about uses of tobacco company settlement funds.

The two were on opposing sides: Tobacco farmers viewed public health advocates as trying to put them out of business; the public health community viewed the tobacco interests as complicit in unhealthy living.

"After a period ... they actually started to see that they had some common ground and that there were some things they were able to work on, and then feed that into the policy process," Dukes said in a 2003 interview.

That was a seven-year process. The City Market debate certainly shouldn't require that lengthy a mediation, but its future is of no less importance locally.

The reasonable expectation is for Dukes' hiring to produce results.

The city surely would not have considered moving in this direction if it didn't have high hopes for a successful outcome.

Success may take some doing; at the moment, there appears no middle ground and conflict is firmly in place.

Discord was only fueled by Mayor Nelson Harris' decision last month to shut out the public by moving discussions behind closed doors. Wisely, the mediation process will include three public meetings, possibly more.

For Roanoke to pay someone to infuse peace and harmony in the City Market debate may seem an extravagant expenditure of public money, particularly to people who have watched Roanoke spend thousands on studies and consultants' reports only to throw them on a shelf to gather dust.

We hope the mediation process is not a repeat of wasteful efforts. The City Market's future is at stake.

Consensus-building? Bring it on.