A mistrial had to be declared in the racketeering and narcotics ring case today, after Judge Norman K. Moon discovered that three jurors were aware of the contents of yesterday’s Daily Progress article, “Man says RICO witnesses lying.” The jury was just about to begin deliberation. While the prosecutors wanted only the tainted jurors dismissed, the defense wanted the entire jury replaced; the defense won out, and the next trial will be held down in Lynchburg, where Judge Moon thinks the jury can be more isolated. Liesel Nowak has the story on the Progress website.
Archive for December, 2005
The story of UVa’s firing of Dena Bowers continues, with UVa saying Bowers wasn’t fired for what she said, but how she said it, dozens of people holding a rally for Bowers on Friday, and the Associated Press picking up on the story today. The document that she sent from her UVa account was an NAACP document reviewing some effects of the charter plan, but it was not labeled as being a non-university correspondence. When the e-mail was widely circulated by a recipient, some of the additional recipients apparently thought that the document reflected the views of the university.
The trouble with Bowers’ firing is that, in the minds of some charter critics, it confirms (rightly or wrongly) their fear that legitimate concerns about the landmark change in university autonomy were being swept under the rug or squelched. Worse still, some university staff have worried that their employment will be more tenuous than ever under the charter plan, with Bowers’ dismissal for a seemingly-minor violation being seen as a sign that that might just be so.
Brian Wheeler has put together a clever graph of Albemarle growth rates, looking at building permits for single-family homes. He’s found that 51% of new permits in the past two years have been for rural areas. Among non-rural areas, Crozet leads at 20%, followed by the Glenmore area at 10%. The whole of the northern growth areas combined yields just 10%, presumably because the construction there is sufficiently urban that single-family homes aren’t being built much.
The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors has approved a move to permanent window stickers for cars, WINA reports. They started talking about this a couple of months ago, and Charlottesville eliminated window stickers entirely in October. Neither Albemarle nor Charlottesville has changed the tax process at all, they’ve just eliminated the need to scrape off those damnable stickers.
No more decal wars?
A couple who own property in Lake Monticello are upset that the homeowners association has shut down the campground. So they’re suing for $7,100,000.
It must a hell of a campground.
On their school closings page, Albemarle County has an RSS feed of closings. Totally cool.
No longer does Charlottesville’s real estate market make the cut as “extremely overvalued”, at least in the estimation of the City Housing Valuation Analysis. That dubious distinction was awarded to us last August, when we were ranked 71st in the nation for having real estate prices inflated an estimated 24%. Now we’ve been dropped from the ranking (107k PDF), along with Essex County, MA; Worcester, MA; Jackson, MI;, Portland, ME; and Bay City, MI.
The Albemarle County School Board has appointed Pamela Moran as the new superintendent, Sarah Berry reports in the Daily Progress. The search began in June, when Kevin Castner announced his resignation, ending with the selection of the twenty-year veteran of the albemarle school system. She spent a decade as the principal of Stony Point, and has been the assistant superintendent for the past few years. She’s been the acting superintendent since Castner announced his resignation. Moran is the first-ever female superintendent of the county school system.
At the Daily Progress, Jessica Kitchin has reviewed traffic accident reports and found that the Rio Road intersection with Rt. 29 is the most dangerous in town:
Rough police numbers show that, through Dec. 1, there were 55 accidents at the Rio Road and U.S. 29 intersection this year. The Hydraulic Road and U.S. 29 intersection was second with 26 accidents, followed by Airport and Proffit roads and U.S. 29 with 19 accidents and Woodbrook Drive and U.S. 29 with 18 accidents. The U.S. 250 and Route 20 intersection in Albemarle rounds out the top five with nine accidents this year.
[…]
Observation of the intersection during 30 minutes of rush hour traffic showed that not a single rotation of the traffic lights was without at least one driver moving on a red signal.
[…]
In a 30-minute time frame, drivers in at least three cars appeared to slam on the brakes at the Rio Road and U.S. 29 intersection because the car in front of them stopped at a red light.
The good news is that the traffic lights on 29 have been synched up. The bad news is that doing has all but eliminated flexibility for intersecting roads; that Rio light lasts just 10 seconds, including the yellow.
From the AP:
A Virginia college student was ordered held without bail Friday on federal charges he was part of a group of radical environmentalists who toppled a high-tension electric line and firebombed a lumber mill office and a tree farm.
Dressed in jail fatigues and shackled around the ankles, Stanislas “Jack” Meyerhoff, a student at Piedmont Community College in Charlottesville, Va., responded in a quiet voice, “Yes, your honor,” when asked if he understood the 17 counts of arson, conspiracy and destruction of property that could send him to prison for life. About 5-foot-6 and 140 pounds, Meyerhoff was clean-shaven with short brown hair.
Meyerhoff, 28, was one of six people arrested Wednesday in five states on federal charges they took part in a series of attacks in Oregon and Washington state dating back from 1998 to 2001.
Given that he was named an honor role student at Central Oregon Community College just last June, we (happily) can’t claim him as a local.
Billionaire John Kluge is auctioning off much of the contents of Morven, the AP reports, now that he’s decided to spend all of his time at his other home in Palm Beach. Kluge announced that he’d be donating Morven to UVa in May of 2001, retaining the right to live there for the rest of his life. The 91-year-old has decided that he can do without 553 items, including furniture and rare collectables. The auction will be held on the 16th at Christie’s — a preview is available on Christie’s website.
I call dibs on the truck-sized picnic hamper.
In today’s Progress, John Yellig writes about the state of Charlottesville’s parks:
A city-sponsored needs assessment by PROS Consulting LLC, a consulting firm specializing in public facilities, found that Charlottesville’s aging park system needs $33 million in upgrades to bring it up to modern standards.“The majority of parks look ‘tired’ and lack the strong image value that enhances neighborhood, the community and creates a strong advocacy,” states the 69-page document, presented to the City Council last week. “The city of Charlottesville is locked into a 1960’s mindset as it applies to recreation centers.”
$20M of that is to deal with rec centers and pools, $13M for the parks themselves. Council will figure out what to do in a month or two.
As of this morning, there are now exactly 100 Charlottesville blogs. I’d hoped to reach this goal by the end of the year, and so it has been done. I’ve been removing blogs that haven’t been updated for a few months, so these are all the real deal.
I’m happy that so many of these blogs are genuinely interesting. I subscribe to the RSS feed, see everything that gets posted, and I bet that I read 75% of what’s up there. Amazing that it’s only been six months.
Interested in joining the fray? Pick a free blogging service, any free blogging service and get started.
mom133d writes: “According to NBC 29, Charlottesville is paying a a California design company $70,000 to help create the new site. One can only hope its design is better than the current incarnation.”
California? Ouch. I was at last night’s Neon Guild meeting. There were at least a half dozen local website development shops represented there, each of whom could have done the job as well as any company in California. Assuming this is a total site overhaul and the quality of work is decent, then the price is reasonable. Whatever this new website is like, it’s bound to be less craptacular than the current site. If the new site validates, is ADA compliant, doesn’t have URLs of Death and — please, Lord — doesn’t have scrolling-freaking-text, I’ll feel pretty good about it. Bonus points will be awarded for RSS feeds, DIV-based layout, a ban on posting Word documents, and a user interface that doesn’t make my head hurt. Implementing trackbacks in any capacity will result in an automatic victory.
Some unsolicited advice to the city: Get together a beta group of uppity local geeks (*ahem*) to check out your contractor’s work before you declare the job to be done.
Check out WINA’s description of a hellacool accident last night:
In the early morning hours of Wednesday, there was a short pursuit involving a state trooper and a speeding vehicle. The car was pulled over on 5th Street Extended near I-64, the driver got out of the car and fled, and the trooper eventually called in a tow-truck to haul away the suspect vehicle. At around 2:30 a.m., a 2003 Ford Taurus approaching the three parked vehicles at a high rate of speed hit the state trooper’s cruiser and the suspect’s car, and then went up the tow truck ramp that had been lowered. The car flew up the ramp, over the cab of the tow truck and then landed right-side up on all four wheels in front of the tow truck. There were no injuries.State Police say the driver of the airborne car was 34-year-old Jodie Ellen Finney of Blue Jay Way in Albemarle’s Briarwood subdivision. State Police say Finney was charged with DUI.
If that trooper had a camera rolling on the dash, they’d best release that video. I want a voiceover, too: “Look out, sheriff! The General Lee ain’t known for its wings, and I can guess what ol’ Jodie Finney is thinkin’ right now. Set a spell, folks, and see Enos get madder than a weasel in a gum-bush.”
I just stumbled across a great website that catalogs the the locations and contents of every historical marker in Virginia. It’s maintained by M-CAM’s CTO, Jason Watson. I particularly like the Albemarle County section, because I’ve so often driven past those markers but had little success in reading them at 55mph. Every marker is mapped, photographed, and transcribed. Very cool!
I’ve been listening to Professor Bebop’s R&B show on WTJU since I was a kid. It’s the show I’ve listened to more regularly, and certainly look forward to more, than any other local radio program. In the mid 90s, when I DJd at WTJU, I’d hoped I’d meet the professor himself, but I never did. Throughout, I’ve heard rumors that he’s actually a principal of a school in town, but I never knew if there was anything to it.
In this week’s Hook, Lisa Provence interviews Dave Rogers, aka Professor Bebop. (Shocker: He’s white!) Turns out he’s the principal at Jack Jouett, and used to be principal at Walker and Buford. The piece is a great read for fans of his show.
Early May 1970 was a tumultuous time. May 4 brought Kent State, Nixon had just sent 30,000 troops into Cambodia, and on May 9, 100,000 people protested the Vietnam War in Washington D.C.
On May 10, in the thick of all of this, Dutch war hero and First Presbyterian Church minister Dr. Arie D. Bestebreurtje gave a fiery pro-war sermon, in reaction to national protests and protests held at UVa. It was broadcast by WINA at the time and, due to high demand, rebroadcast shortly thereafter. The event was all but forgotten until now.
Charlottesville blogger Colten Noakes bought a box of reel-to-reel tapes at a yard sale a couple of years ago, including one with the audio of that sermon. Colten has made the audio available on his website, and it definitely makes for a fascinating bit of history.
This is a great example of the value of internet archival of local media content. Though Dr. Bestebreurtje’s might have been noteworthy at the time, it’s downright fascinating these 25 years later. Day-old news might be worthless, but decade-old news is invaluable.
Remember how Thomas Rogers, creator of Charlie the Tuna, the Keebler Elves, and Morris the Cat, lived here? It seems we’ve got another mascot creator living in the area — Mike Edgett, creator of Geoffrey the Giraffe, lives in Buckingham. David Maurer profiles Edgett in today’s Daily Progress.
The oddest bunch of folks live around here.
In early 2004, hundreds of black men were persuaded to submit to DNA testing in the years-old hunt for the serial rapist, told that they could eliminate themselves from the suspect pool (which consisted of all black men in Charlottesville) if they did so. The ensuing controversy made national news in April, leading to the suspension of the dragnet by Chief Timothy Longo. All of this resulted in Larry Monroe filing a $15,000 lawsuit against Detective James Mooney in July of last year, citing harassment. Monroe looks absolutely nothing like the description of the rapist, other than being a black man. The suit was dismissed.
Now Monroe has filed a class-action lawsuit against the detective, the police department, and the city, John Yellig writes in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Monroe alleges violations of his constitutional rights, including the 14th (equal protection) and 4th (unlawful search and seizure) amendments. Once again, only $15,000 in damages is sought. A particularly interesting bit of the lawsuit is the allegation that a report was filed within the police department regarding anybody who refused to submit to the DNA test — it’s not known what the purpose of those reports were, or what’s become of them.
I got an interesting e-mail in response to the piece about Mike Edgett, creator of Geoffrey the Giraffe. “North Lake Drive” writes:
I read the Daily Progress story noted in cvillenews about the creator of Geoffrey the Giraffe. While the man in the story no doubt created the ads for Toys R Us, there is some controversy (as always!!) about the real “creators” of the beloved character. You see, my friend, Mary Ritts, and her husband, Paul, created Sir Geoffrey the Giraffe in the 1950’s as a puppet. Sir Geoffrey and his other puppet pals (including Magnolia the Ostrich) are probably best known as the stars of several Better Business Bureau public service announcements that aired during the 1960’s and 1970’s.
Toys R Us has never acknowledged the existence of the Ritts Puppets and their Geoffrey, as far as I know, so it may just be a coincidence. To be sure, Geoffrey is an easily-given name for a giraffe.
At any rate, here’s a photo of an album that the Ritts Puppets did long ago. It features Sir Geoffrey the Giraffe. I think the similarities are remarkable. Judge for yourself!
Small world.
Residents of Albemarle County will want to take advantage of the tree recycling program to avoid other less desirable outcomes, such as filling the landfill or lobbing branches into the neighbor’s yard. Maybe next year they will accept Festivus poles as well. One can hope.
Recent Comments