Thanks for this press release about Fort Monroe's future. Forum 
participants might recall that I'm one of five co-founders of Citizens 
for a Fort Monroe National Park (CFMNP.org), an organization mentioned 
in the release. I attended the event described, and I'd like to 
interject a few comments. I speak here only for myself, though I know of 
thousands who, I believe, see things as I do.

It's important to emphasize that yes, people overwhelmingly want all of 
Fort Monroe protected, with sensible provisions made for revenue 
generation and self-sustenance. Many of us have known this elementary, 
obvious truth from the beginning of the six-year struggle to save the 
place from financially and culturally counterproductive overdevelopment.

The problem lies in the defining and control of those sensible 
provisions. That process, even today -- maybe especially today -- still 
amounts to an invitation for abuse by those who seek not just limited 
development solely for the sake of future Fort Monroe, but development 
for the sake of development.

The present euphoria -- and again, we all join in endorsing the best 
possible treatment of this national treasure -- involves something like 
the Big Lie Technique. Or maybe it's more of a Big Disingenuous 
Conflation Technique.

Here's the conflation: it's the frequently implied, and often outright 
asserted, equating of "make the moated fortress into a national park" 
with "make Fort Monroe into a national park." The first is the main part 
of the official plan. The second is what people actually want.

The front page of the local paper on the Peninsula the other day, for 
example, cited nonexistent Washington “proposals to turn [Fort Monroe] 
into a national park.” In fact, the bills before Congress, and the 
requests to the president, call merely for a bifurcated, balkanized, 
token national park that includes only those parts of the Fort Monroe 
national historic landmark that no one ever meant to ruin anyway -- 
namely, the moated fortress and the green areas at the north end.

The proposals exclude the parts of the officially recognized historic 
landscape that have always been in contention. They’ve been in 
contention because Virginia’s leaders, including the Daily Press’s 
opinion editors, consider them irresistible real estate rather than what 
they actually are: the sense-of-place-conferring dimension of a national 
treasure with thousand-year implications in the history of liberty itself.

If Fort Monroe is as important as everybody now belatedly admits, the 
plan put forward in these bills is incoherent and irresponsible. It will 
ultimately work to the discredit of Mayor Ward, Gov. McDonnell (already 
vulnerable on slavery-related issues anyway), Secretary of the Interior 
Salazar and President Obama. It’s like planning to place a subdivision 
on the hillside opposite Monticello.

Some will try to claim that finances force on us this narrow, parochial 
plan. But the financially responsible disposition is actually a Grand 
Public Place based on a substantial, _nonbifurcated_ national park. Such 
a national park would lie alongside Virginia-controlled portions of Fort 
Monroe away from the bayfront, for example the fine old residences and 
the marina. A single boundary would encircle the whole place, with 
Virginia responsible for certain non-national-park-service-administered 
parts. Visitors would experience Fort Monroe as an integrated whole, 
like San Francisco's Presidio.

That kind of Fort Monroe could anchor the fourth side of a new Historic 
Quadrangle that would tell the story of the Civil War’s completion of 
America’s founding as a nation that, at long last, was really going to 
try to live up to its founding ideals of liberty and equality.

Every Tidewater preservationist believes this. We had all worked hard 
for six years to see such a Fort-Monroe-integrating-and-unifying 
boundary drawn -- a Fort-Monroe-permanent-integrity-ensuring boundary 
drawn.

But it's not drawn.

So yes, it's nice, in fact it's vital, to tell the National Park Service 
that Americans resoundingly want this national treasure to be treated as 
a national treasure. But in fact national parks get created by 
politicians, not by federal officials. That means Gov. McDonnell and the 
commonwealth's congressional delegation, not the leaders of the park 
service.

This McDonnell administration press release implies, in effect, that 
Virginia's leaders, after more than five years of resolute stubbornness, 
suddenly had epiphanies. If we now had solid guarantees of fitting 
treatment of non-National-Park-Service-administered lands at Fort Monroe 
-- and if those lands were planned to lie within the boundaries of a 
substantial and nonbifurcated, nonbalkanized national park that itself 
would stretch the whole length of the shoreline real estate -- I'd find 
these epiphanies credible.

But we don't, and I don't. In my view Virginia is actually letting 
America down. So is the National Trust for Historic Preservation, with 
its six-year record of feckless complicity.

Forum participants are kind to indulge this quick note. I plan to offer 
more -- next time maybe with fewer words -- including a recommendation 
as to exactly how Fort Monroe's true friends can best influence Fort 
Monroe's future.

Thanks.

Steven T. Corneliussen
Poquoson

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