The Hook has announced a new feature, weekly restaurant reviews. I dimly recall a proper restaurant review in the Daily Progress many years ago, but I’m not sure that we’ve had any regular ones since then. Ned Oldham’s debut review is of Maya, a year-old West Main restaurant whose food I quite like. Oldham ate there twice and generally gives it high marks.
The latest installment in the ongoing reservoir saga comes from Dominion Development Resources, who has offered to take all of the dredged-out dirt from the reservoir and put it in the old quarry off Rio Mills Road, Hawes Spencer writes in The Hook. The fourteen-acre quarry is seventy feet deep, so it could store a metric pantload of sediment. For those who had no idea about the quarry, it’s in the center of this map:
You’ll notice it’s immediately next to the reservoir — only about 3,000 feet away. DDR investor Charles Hurt owns the quarry, and would dump the sediment there as a part of a $24-29M deal to do the dredging themselves. My personal business dealings with DDR a year ago were ghastly (which I mention only because I’m one of the 350 clients they cite as evidence of their competence), but perhaps a job in the spotlight like this would be handled a little better. To catch up on the whole reservoir-dredging story, check out the sidebar on The Hook’s story, which runs down the whole history.
The Hillsdale Connector won’t be happening until at least 2014, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Daily Progress. The mile-long street, planned to parallel 29 for the benefit of local traffic, will run $30.5M. The slow-motion car crash that is the state’s transportation funding process makes any proposed road purely hypothetical. And how much will VDOT be providing in 2014? A whopping $332,000. Short of a radical rethinking of how we fund transportation in Virginia, it’ll be at least a decade before the Hillsdale Connector is built.
Seth Rosen at the Progress had some interesting news on Saturday that I don’t want to let slip by. The still-forming police advisory committee won’t have investigative powers, the city has decided. The panel, made up of Charlottesville citizens, will apparently have no power, other than (presumably) to raise a stink if they see something inappropriate going on. The last such group to exist in the city — active from 1990-97 — had the ability to interview witnesses and access internal misconduct complaints. Chief Timothy Longo points to the 17/45 rate of sustaining complaints of rule violations against officers last year as a sign that the police department is willing to discipline its officers.
Area officials are giving up on plans for a 64/Sunset Avenue interchange, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Daily Progress. The traffic flow south of the city is awkward (moving between 20 S, Avon, and 5th isn’t particularly easy), and the city, county, and UVa were angling for improving things by way of a new interchange. But at $50-100M it’s just too expensive. Instead, they’re looking to connect Sunset and Fontaine, but as with just about all road construction, even that’s unlikely to happen. (The state is hurtling towards 2018, the date at which the spiraling cost of maintaining our roads will eat up 100% of the state transportation budget. With each year that goes by, we can build less and less roads.) The need for this is going to come from the massive Biscuit Run development, just south of town. But with the developers offering a paltry $1.2M towards the road, there’s no reason to think that we’ll end up with anything but more traffic.
Just last week C-Ville Weekly wrote about Josh Bare’s efforts to keep open the Hope Community Center homeless shelter, set up to take the place of COMPASS’ efforts. (I think it was last week. Mysteriously, C-Ville Weekly provides no dates for stories on their website. Or authors, so I can’t tell you who wrote it.) Accused of violating zoning regulations, the city told the shelter that they’d need to shut down unless they got an amendment to zoning regulations to accommodate them. Today Jayson Whitehead writes on C-Ville Weekly’s new blog that the shelter is shutting down, unable to comply with the fire code, with no path forward in their relations with the city, and facing increasingly unhappy neighbors. This will leave 45-60 regular residents without a place to sleep.
Mac McDonald has quit his gig as the radio announcer for the Cavaliers, effective yesterday, NBC 29 reports. It seems like it was just yesterday that he came back from last time he quit — he left the job in 1985, returning in 1996. The football and basketball announcer says he wants to “pursue other opportunities.” He’s long been billed as “the voice of the Cavaliers,” a clever form of job insurance that presumably leaves CBS Collegiate Sports Properties in a tight spot. For more information, see the company’s press release.
Given the climbing price of food, I’m looking to expand the household vegetable garden this year beyond the seeds that we planted back in February. We’ve looked around, but the few places we’ve checked are devoid of organic labeling. Organic isn’t a particularly big deal to me in the food that I buy, but the stuff that grows in my own garden I like to keep away from the ol’ Miracle Grow. Can anybody suggest a nursery in the area where I could stock on up tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, etc?
Lori writes:
Last night, we were up at Christian’s on Pantops. The signs were all gone and they had little hand written signs announcing that the individual slice prices were going up by a quarter and $1.00 for a pie. I know that there was an article in Sunday’s Progress about Bodo’s raising their prices slightly (and still losing money on it). One of my friends thinks that the farmers are going to be making money, money, money but they don’t seem to remember (or know) how much gasoline is used.(I’m suddenly remembering reading about the days of the Weimar Republic where people walked around with wheelbarrows full of money so they could buy a loaf of bread.)
It’s not just Christian’s, of course — prices are going up everywhere. Seth Rosen wrote about this in a pair of articles [1, 2] in the Progress this weekend. Bodo’s is taking the cost their bagels up $0.10/apiece, since the price of flour has tripled — it’s not enough to even things out for them, but it’s an improvement. Local schools are having a tough time providing food for the kids. The food bank has seen demand climb, and food stamp cases are up 10%. My wife and I went to buy a bag of grain for our horse at Southern States last week, and the price had doubled (and the quality reduced).
Remember that your standard factory-farm fertilizer is petroleum-based — your food is literally bathed in oil, and at $118/barrel, that fertilizer is getting expensive. The price of diesel has doubled, so our food economy — premised on the notion of cheap, fast transportation from California, Mexico, Chile, or New Zealand — is getting pricy along with it.
It’s been a rough week for the Meadowcreek Parkway. First the school board deferred a decision on giving up some of their land to build the road, Barney Breen-Portnoy wrote in the Progress on Saturday. And now city council has declined to endorse any of the interchange options, Seth Rosen writes today. Now, the school board signing off is really just a formality — and they’re quite likely to do so, anyhow — but the interchange is a bigger problem. Sen. John Warner secured $25M in federal funding for the road almost three years ago, but then the interchange committee went and recommended a design $5M+ over budget.
Councilor Julian Taliaferro thinks that interchange, at seven acres, is just too big. And Mayor Dave Norris just doesn’t see how the city is going to pay for it. Council will hold a work session in a month or two to figure out what to do.
The school board is willing to give up the required 8.5 acres, but they’ve got some conditions. They want a 25mph speed limit near school property (thus reducing the benefit of this dedicated route), a pedestrian bridge, a prohibition on trucks, a guarantee that the fifty replacement acres of parkland would forever be parkland*, and for CHS teams to get first dibs on the promised replacement sports field in McIntire Park.
* The same promise that the city made in order to accept the money from Paul Goodeloe McIntire to establish the park in the first place. Clearly, promises are no obstacle for the city.
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