By Joel Rubin
The year Jim Spore arrived in Virginia Beach from Garland, Texas was when I left WAVY TV to start what is now Rubin Communications Group.
Jim was 47, I was 38 in 1991, but it wasn’t long before our paths crossed. One of his first major assignments was the 76-mile Lake Gaston pipeline, a project that had begun nine years earlier and would cost, when finally completed, $150 million.
“They told me when I arrived that it should be wrapped up in three or four months,” Jim told me. “It took seven more years.” And during that time, development stopped. “We had to impose a construction moratorium for seven years because we didn’t have the water.”
The City Attorney’s office hired me to help with the public relations challenges. It was a memorable time, working with Jim, councilmen Louis Jones and John Baum as well as Mayor Meyera Oberndorf and the public utilities department and outside lawyers to keep the public informed and the region at peace.
“I have to give the political leadership a lot of credit for sticking it out,” said Jim. “There were plenty of times when we considered packing it in because it looked like the world was against us.”
Eventually all the regulatory agencies, from the EPA to the Corps of Engineers, from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to the U.S Fish and Wildlife Service, signed off on Virginia Beach’s plan to draw 60-million gallons of fresh water a day out of a lake on the North Carolina border with Virginia. “Today we have all the water we need,” said Jim, so much that Chesapeake is not yet using its share.
Virginia Beach has grown from a city of 394,000 in 1991 to over 450,000 today, thanks in part to water availability. And because the city prudently put money aside during the moratorium from water fees, it paid for the pipeline with cash. “There was no debt on it, a great accomplishment and we went from the highest water rates in the region to the lowest.”
Plus Spore said all the envioronmental and economic concerns raised by opponents have failed to materialize. “Lake Gaston hasn’t gone down an inch,” he says. But timing was everything. “If we had to do that today, I don’t think we could have pulled it off because regulations have changed.”
For me, it was a heady experience, being in the middle of what was truly a game changing period in the history of the city in which we continue to work and live. Jim Spore retires as the longest-tenured city manager in Hampton Roads this December. His work ethic, good humor, vision, integrity and loyalty to the community will be missed.
