Clerical Oversight

VMT used to be a city museum. This is an older bit of history, but it bears mentioning because it has to do with this story. VMT got its start as the Roanoke Transportation Center and Railroad Museum in May of 1963. At that time, it was an odd assortment of priceless locomotives and rather ordinary wagons and a four-year old Jupiter IRBM. The whole thing sat in Roanoke's Wasena Park for 22 years before a flood wiped out most of the complex.

The museum relocated to its current home on Norfolk Avenue, with its new and current name in tow. A curious matter of billing never quite caught up, though.

While in the city park, the museum's water bill was paid by the city. This made sense as there was no way to discern how much water was being used by public fountains and bathrooms and how much by the museum itself. Fair enough. But when the museum reopened downtown, the city continued to pay its water bill. One might think that this was an oversight that would be corrected in a few months, or maybe a year. Try 22 years.

In the early spring of this year, the museum received a notice from the water authority that threatened to turn off our water for a past due bill. When we called about this, the water authority told us that the bill had been paid by the city. A phone call to the city confirmed this, and shed light on a clerical error more than two decades old. The museum changed its name prior to moving from the park, so the bills showed the same name and got sent to the same address with the city's Parks and Recreation office. Apparently, nobody in that office thought this was odd. More accurately, 22 years of city officials in that office didn't think it was odd.

We finally started paying our own water bills this year, and we thank the tax payers of Roanoke for their generous contributions over the years. They quite literally kept the water running.