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 ______________________________________ To subscribe, change options, or unsubscribe please see the instructions at http://listlva.lib.va.us/archives/va-hist.html