It's conceivable that some in this forum would want to see the report that 
I'm distributing widely this morning concerning Virginia's latest steps 
towards deleting the historic Chesapeake Bay sense of place at Fort Monroe. 
Thanks.


Report for true friends of Fort Monroe (and for others too)

Virginia’s leaders and others are further cementing America’s loss of Fort 
Monroe’s four-centuries-old Chesapeake Bay sense of place. Details appear 
below the dashed line. This sacrifice of precious public land to private 
special interests will continue today, Thursday, Dec. 13, in two public 
meetings at Fort Monroe’s Bay Breeze Center: a 12:30 Fort Monroe Authority 
board meeting and a 6:30 general public meeting. Virginia’s deliberate, 
permanent suboptimization of Fort Monroe will extract economic and other 
costs from this national treasure’s actual citizen owners, and from 
posterity for a thousand years. Today’s further downward steps come just as 
the country marks the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. 
That document evolved following political events that enterprising Black 
self-emancipators conceived and bravely set in motion at Fort Monroe and 
elsewhere. Edward L. Ayers has called those Fort Monroe events the greatest 
moment in American history. Virginia’s leaders call the landscape of those 
events a fitting place for condos.
Steven T. Corneliussen
Co-founder, Citizens for a Fort Monroe National Park (though no longer with 
that dedicated but public-excluding small committee – and certainly no 
longer with its recent unwisely calculated timidity in standing up for our 
founding principles)
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/

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The slides for today’s “Sasaki Master Plan Presentation” – an outline for 
cementing the loss – were circulated last night. Sasaki is the prestigious 
Boston consulting firm that is risking its well-deserved international 
reputation by complicity with Virginia’s leaders’ narrow, costly 
parochialism. The slides show that Virginia’s leaders have still not 
undergone the civic-responsibility epiphany that some continue to hope for 
despite more than seven years of harsh evidence.

Virginia’s leaders’ grim intention remains to continue cementing Fort Monroe 
primarily as a “thriving, mixed-use community,” as the slides put it, and 
not as a national treasure that contains a thriving but boundary-limited 
mixed-use community on the side away from the bayfront historic landscape.

Today’s presentation slides carry no hint of acknowledgment of what Fort 
Monroe’s actual citizen-owners and the region’s leading daily newspaper, the 
Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, see as the central issue: unification of the two 
disconnected parts of the bifurcated Fort Monroe National Monument. The 
missing, sense-of-place-defining land is shown in red at 
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/ – and is shown at various levels of 
condo-ization in the slides.

The slides confirm that Virginia’s leaders’ grim, cynical strategy for 
evading their national stewardship responsibility remains what it has been 
all along. Here are that strategy’s main components:
* Frame the whole issue merely as a local and state economic redevelopment 
opportunity, albeit with a mildly distracting national history accent.
* At all costs, protect this framing from public questioning. At all costs, 
keep the public believing that Fort Monroe is by rights a development plum 
for one city.
* Evade responsibility for aggressively invoking substantial national 
ownership and responsibility for all of the most important parts of the 
historic landscape, even though almost all of it was designated a national 
historic landmark a half-century ago.
* Act like there’s no chance of America taking real ownership and 
responsibility for what belongs to America and to the world, and not to 
back-room people in Hampton and Richmond who are beholden to the real estate 
development interests that bankroll Virginia politics.
* Falsely portray the National Park Service, rather than politicians, as the 
deciders on national stewardship.
* Ensure that the National Trust for Historic Preservation, with its 
understandable fear of going too far against powerful entrenched interests, 
never forgets that those private interests will absolutely not tolerate NTHP 
opposition to the sacrifice of Fort Monroe’s sense of place.
* Steer other organizations from outside Tidewater, for example Preservation 
Virginia, toward either shallow misunderstanding or deliberate scanting of 
the landscape-stewardship stakes.
* Nurture the complicity of certain unskeptical Virginia journalists, 
especially at the Newport News Daily Press, but also to some extent at WHRO 
(NPR and PBS in Tidewater).
* Sustain a stone wall of silence against the views of the editors of the 
Virginian-Pilot and against overwhelming public sentiment for unification.
* Seek by nearly any means to silence any forthright citizen opposition that 
cannot be rechanneled or diluted.
* Most importantly: Within the seven-years-old false and irresponsible 
misframing of post-Army Fort Monroe as merely a local and state project, 
emphasize that the financial challenges are tremendous.

Within that misframing, it’s easy to make the financial situation look 
difficult. It’s easy because our leaders have indeed brought Fort Monroe to 
a point where, lacking a sensible level of national involvement at this site 
of the greatest moment in American history, the financial situation truly is 
difficult.

Difficult, but also enormously convenient for achieving the goal of deleting 
sense of place from the historic landscape. As 2013 arrives, Virginia’s 
leaders are probably correct to believe that they can now just poor-mouth 
the rest of the way. They can do so in the probably valid hope that much of 
the world has already been fooled into believing the Big Lie that Fort 
Monroe is already nationally stewarded anyway.

For examples of the Big Lie, please see especially two pages at the Web site 
of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has been 
distressingly complicit from the start in the misframing of Fort Monroe and 
in its mishandling as a national treasure. The pages are:
http://blog.preservationnation.org/2011/11/01/president-obama-creates-new-national-monument-at-fort-monroe/#.UK2fT4YRBkw
http://blog.preservationnation.org/2011/11/24/thank-you-a-letter-from-president-stephanie-meeks/#.UK2i9YYRBkw

On the first of those pages, Robert Nieweg states falsely that “President 
Obama created a new National Monument within the National Park system: Fort 
Monroe in Hampton, Virginia.” In fact the president only made parts of Fort 
Monroe a national monument, as shown in the illustration at 
http://www.fortmonroenationalpark.org/ .

On the second of those pages, National Trust president Stephanie Meeks 
refers falsely to “President Obama’s recent decision to designate Virginia’s 
Fort Monroe as America’s newest National Monument.” A photo caption at the 
top of her “Letter from President Stephanie Meeks” reports falsely that 
“Fort Monroe was recently named a National Monument by President Barack 
Obama.”

The Big Lie has circulated publicly elsewhere as well. It pervades, for 
example, coverage at the Washington Post. It has helped cement the public 
misimpression that Virginia’s leaders are meeting their Fort Monroe 
stewardship obligations.

Here are some key things to note in today’s Sasaki presentation:

* The slides contain almost nothing about stewardship of a national 
treasure – and nothing whatsoever about Fort Monroe’s international 
significance in the history of human liberty or about the historic landscape’s 
qualifications for World Heritage Site designation.

* There’s no mention of the unification issue. In the presentation’s 
“Summary of Community Input,” the only information is on 
public-participation headcount. Sasaki and Virginia’s leaders routinely 
dodge engagement of unification. They evade their obligation to report that 
participants in the public discussion insistently and overwhelmingly demand 
unification of the fake, absurdly split national monument/park.

* There’s no acknowledgment that big ambitions for extensive new 
construction conflict directly with rising awareness of the rising risks 
imposed by rising sea level. (Cathy Lewis at WHRO, are you noting this? Or 
do our leaders continue to get a free pass, with Fort Monroe all but 
excluded from civic discussion of sea-level rise on your FM 89.5 talk show?)

* The presentation says, in a series of slides near the end, that three 
versions of the five earlier land-use plans are being examined, and that 
“Wherry Park” leaves the biggest structural deficit ($4.8 million) – that 
is, it’s the most expensive of the three. (“Wherry Park” means the red spot 
on the illustration cited earlier, though that weak phrase deliberately 
avoids connoting any sense of unification under national stewardship.) The 
structural deficits for the other two land-use approaches are $4.5 million 
and $3.3 million. The purportedly least costly approach is “Waterfront 
Community.” Surprise, surprise. Our leaders want to build condos on the 
waterfront, same as they did when former Hampton Mayor Kearney talked about 
it way back in 2005 – and same as they did when Robert Nieweg of the 
National Trust, serving on an official committee in 2006, voted to blanket 
Fort Monroe with condos under the plan of Dover-Kohl, Sasaki’s discredited 
predecessor.

* One slide carries the headline “RESIDENTIAL: NEW DEVELOPMENT: NEW 
WATERFRONT DEVELOPMENT IS A DESIRABLE PRODUCT.” Another says at the top, 
“RESIDENTIAL: CREATE CRITICAL MASS: A MINIMUM NUMBER OF UNITS IS NECESSARY 
TO CREATE A SENSE OF PLACE.” Needless to say, there’s a rich irony in the 
phrase “to create a sense of place,” since Fort Monroe’s public, historic, 
Chesapeake Bay sense of place is being deleted for private benefit and 
profit. Maybe that choice of phrase is sarcasm from overdevelopers who now 
see their way clear to defeating all who have called for responsible 
stewardship of this national treasure.

* On the “DRAFT OBSERVATIONS” slide near the end, note the combined effect 
and implication of observations #3, #4 and #6:
- “Cost transference to private sector is critical in the short, mid, and 
long term to financial sustainability”
- “Strongest current market demand is for residential uses”
- “Unresolved property ownership hinders marketing to prospective use”
In other words, Sasaki recommends selling the land to condo developers 
(“compatible” ones, of course).

* On the “DRAFT RECOMMENDATIONS” slide near the end, please note as well: 
“Provide a critical mass of residential to create a thriving, mixed-use 
community.”

No one is opposing sensible development on the bridge-tunnel side of Fort 
Monroe, where an already permanent community indeed ought to thrive within 
limited boundaries. But that’s not what’s being planned.

Sasaki is slicker than Dover-Kohl was in 2006, but other than that, little 
has changed – unless you believe that a fake, split national monument/park, 
with its center consigned to overdevelopment, somehow befits Fort Monroe and 
somehow respects the historic landscape’s Chesapeake Bay sense of place.

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