Community Relations
The University's rapid expansion has created tension in the city-university relationship with issues such as growth planning. In 2006, the Board of Visitors approved the invocation of eminent domain against a neighboring business, a funeral parlor, to make way for the school's new Performing Arts Center. Before eminent domain was exercised, the property owner accepted a purchase offer from the University. In the May 2006 city election, incumbent mayor Larry Rogers, who also serves on JMU's Board of Visitors, lost his bid for reelection to a JMU graduate. JMU has nearly doubled in size in the last 20 years. JMU purchased the former Harrisonburg High School building, now known as Memorial Hall, and promised to keep some of the important features intact for the benefit of the community.
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Famous quotes containing the words community and/or relations:
“The people needed to be rehoused, but I feel disgusted and depressed when I see how they have done it. It did not suit the planners to think how they might deal with the community, or the individuals that made up the community. All they could think was, “Sweep it away!” The bureaucrats put their heads together, and if anyone had told them, “A community is people,” they would not have known what they were on about.”
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“When any one of our relations was found to be a person of a very bad character, a troublesome guest, or one we desired to get rid of, upon his leaving my house I ever took care to lend him a riding-coat, or a pair of boots, or sometimes a horse of small value, and I always had the satisfaction of finding he never came back to return them.”
—Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774)