The Albemarle County Fair started its six day run last night. It’s open from 4pm-11pm this week, 10am-11pm on Saturday, and 1pm-6pm on Sunday. The catalog / program is available online, but you’ll find all of the things you’d expect, from a pie eating contests to rides, bluegrass to livestock exhibitions. It’s just ten minutes south of town on 29, and admission is $7 for adults, $3 for kids, and free for kids 5 and under.
Silvia’s family entered a whole mess of stuff and has a photo album of their visit to the fair last night. It looks like they won some ribbons!
Charlottesville Tomorrow released a survey on Monday that shows very strong support for rural preservation in Albemarle County. Both The Daily Progress and The Hook report on it, highlighting the finding that 78% of us support the “phasing” concept, which would limit the rate of growth. Just such a proposal failed 3-3 before the BoS last year.
In the latest C-Ville Weekly, Will Goldsmith uncovers the existence of what sounds like an accidentally secret grant program for affordable housing, at $250k/year. The Housing Initiatives Fund has been available for organizations that need a grant, and fast, if presented with a chance to buy a property to turn it into affordable housing. It was established by Satyendra Huja during his tenure with the city. The trouble is that the existence of the fund has never been advertised, and there’s no formalized application process. So while Piedmont Housing Alliance and Habitat for Humanity knew about the program, Albemarle Housing Improvement Program had no idea. Even Virginia Land Company (Charlie Hurt’s development firm) took advantage of the program. The organizations that tapped into the money said they figured everybody knew about it. Work began immediately to formalize the process once these problems became known to the city’s housing advisory committee last month.
CBS-19 got an anonymous, unauthenticatable comment on their website from somebody claiming to be in on these random attacks around downtown, with the pseuodnym “Chaos.” A useless lead from a random kook? No, a useless lead from a famous random kook: CBS-19 did a story about it. They even showed the missive to police, who had no comment…but still they ran the story.
If I comment on their site with a goofy nickname, claiming that I kidnapped the Lindbergh baby, maybe they’ll do a story about that, too.
In today’s Progress, Rob Seal writes about the strange, sudden death of STAB student Douglas Wardle last week. The rising senior and class president to be was in Nicaragua, building houses for the poor, when he suffered a brain hemorrhage, out of the blue, and died. The school reports that dozens of kids have expressed interest in honoring Wardle by participating in the house-building program next summer.
There’s been the first real break in the serial rapist case. The Hook broke the story that jibes with the information I’ve been getting over the past couple of hours. A suspect was arrested this morning. He’s married, lives in Woodbrook, and works at Harris Teeter. With a decade of consistent, solid DNA evidence in the case, it should be a snap to determine whether he’s the guy. There will be a joint city/county press conference at 4pm to provide details.
12:55pm Update: CBS 19 reports that the suspect is 40-year-old Nathan Antonio Washington of Old Brook Road. He’s been charged only in the August 2004 attack.
1:20pm Update: Regular commenter “Stormy” writes to point out that while CBS 19 names Washington in their story, they stop short of actually saying that he’s the suspect in the serial rapes. That was my inference as a reader, because it would be pretty random to name some unrelated guy in such an article. Anyhow, we’ll all have to hold onto our collective hat until 4pm to find out whether Washington’s arrest on the August 2004 rape charges is one and the same as the arrest of the serial rapist.
5:15pm Update: Well, the press conference was every bit as frustrating as police warned it would be. There’s basically no new information. They arrested Tony Washington shortly after midnight, and they’ve charged him with two of the rapes. Previously about all that police could say was that there was a DNA match on all of the rapes, but at the press conference they refused to even confirm that, saying only that Washington is a suspect in the other cases. This is going to leave media outlets torn: do they report that the serial rapist has been caught, or do they toe the cautious line drawn by law enforcement? NBC 29’s 2001 legendary gaffe — accusing some poor guy of possessing cocaine and then refusing to run a correction — surely stands out as a stark warning of what not to do.
Nathan Antonio Washington was arrested on the basis of DNA evidence, commonwealth’s attorney Jim Camblos told the Daily Progress today. Given that his DNA is a match to two attacks, and those two attacks were a DNA match to the rest of the rapes, it’s now quite clear why Washington was arrested earlier this week and what cause there is to suspect him to be the serial rapist. Law enforcement officials had previously declined to explain how they came to decide upon arresting Washington. He waived his first scheduled court appearance today, a bond hearing, but he’s due back in court next week.
Following the recommendation of the RWSA, Albemarle County today issued a drought warning declaration, the county has announced in a press release this afternoon. The county cites “especially dry conditions in the last 6 out of 7 months causing dangerously low water levels.” With this comes restrictions, including washing cars at home, washing outdoor surfaces, watering outside vegetation with anything other than a watering can, running an ornamental fountain, filling swimming pools and, bizarrely, serving water to restaurant patrons unless they request it.
Let’s hope we don’t end up going down the same absurd path we went down in 2002, with drinking fountains and bathroom sinks being turned off. Drinking and hygiene are the two essential functions for which water is conserved at times like this. There’s no sense in restricting those.
The Thomas Jefferson Center has posted to their website a two minute time-lapse film of people writing on the chalkboard, made by recent AHS graduate Sasha Solodukhina. It’s pretty clever:
I always like to point out when local media outlets manage to write about other media outlets in a way that’s both useful and even-handed. C-Ville Weekly has done so this week. Scott Weaver writes about how local media outlets covered the arrest of of Nathan Antonio Washington, the suspect in two of the serial rapes and the presumed suspect in all of them. It was a tough story to report on, due to the tension between wanting to say “the serial rapist has been caught” and the need for the restraint of sticking to the facts. As Weaver explains, some media outlets did a better job than others, with TV news taking a particularly “aggressive if not hysterical tone.” (cVillain is taking their mention rather badly. Hey, guys, you got a mention — be happy.) Weaver managed to write an informative article about other media outlets — even their direct competition in the former of The Hook — without resorting to snark or bomb-throwing. That’s great to see.
While everybody was wondering whether crime has actually risen downtown recently, The Hook found out. Simple assaults are occurring at twice the 2004 rate, which is a pretty startling increase. In fact, it’s the single most common crime downtown, occurring 134% more often than shoplifting. To re-mount my two-year-old hobby horse, if the police would simply make raw crime report data available online (incident, date, time, and block address), news outlets and citizens activists could mine this data for trends on our own.
When a convertible full of four blondes nearly mowed me down on McCormick this afternoon, I knew it was on: the students are coming. Tomorrow is the big day, though the all of The Corner, 14th Street and 29N is bound to be a mess through Sunday.
And there’s your annual day-before warning.
Remember the BS charges brought against four UVa students after they filmed a scene that involved a BB gun for a class assignment? Albemarle commonwealth’s attorney Jim Camblos actually charged them each with “brandishing a firearm.” Well, four months later Camblos was forced to accept that the charges were just goofy — Brian McNeill reports in the Daily Progress that Camblos has dropped the charges against the kids.
The whole thing smacked of his equally ludicrous charges in the “smoke bombers” case this time last year, when he charged those middle school students with conspiring to “blow up” their school. After the case led to an acquittal, Camblos showed no interest in his universal condemnation, even pointing to the fact that one of the accused kids’ birthdays was also the anniversary of Columbine as evidence against him. This time around, Camblos realized that he’d have to drop the charges, since no judge or jury would rule against these kids, and managed to keep himself from threatening the media for violating a non-existent gag order. Those who need to get caught up can look at my year-old compilation of the most outrageous things that Camblos has ever done.
It’s well worth noting that Camblos is running for reelection this year — he’s seeking a third term. I sent $50 to his challenger, Denise Lunsford, via her website a few days ago. There’s not much I know about Lunsford, other than that she’s not Camblos. That’s good enough for me. On the other hand, if Lunsford wins, what in the world would I write about for the next four years? I’d be like Jon Stewart without Bush as president.
Speaking of meta-media coverage, Lindsay Barnes looks at the rise of WCNR “The Corner” in local radio in this week’s Hook, focusing on the station’s program director, Brad Savage, and his counterpart at WNRN, Mike Friend. The formats of the two stations are very similar, but WCNR is owned by media conglomerate Saga Communications while WNRN is is a locally-founded non-profit. Barnes explores the degree to which that difference in business approaches ultimately matters, and how it affects the two stations. There’s some good discussion about the story on The Hook’s website, and over at CE Conversations Ralph offers some thoughtful analysis of WNRN’s ban on the phrase “The Corner”
A friend just turned me on to the brilliant, satirical, and local Beta Carotene Show. Their brand-new installment of the old-time-style radio show is an episode entitled “Secret Agent Ken Boyd.” The show is credited to Steve Ashby, Alex Davis, Bill Davis, and Robert LaRue, who play characters including Wendell Wood, all of the BoS, and God.
I’m so happy to have a chance to use the “Satire” category. This town needs satire, and it needs it badly.
Sean McCord writes:
According to an announcement posted today in the City website, residents can now curbside recycle paper products such as catalogues, magazines, junk mail, etc. This is big! For many years, I trotted glass, metal, and newspaper out to the curb, but visited the Recycling Center regularly with my bins of plastic, cardboard, and paper. Then, several months ago, curbside recycling began accepting the plastic and cardboard, so my trips to the center with just boxes of recyclable paper were less frequent. Now, with the city also accepting curbside paper, I can safely dispose of everything on a weekly schedule and save the gasoline I would use to travel to the Recycling Center. It’s brilliant! The City does ask that we place our loose paper recyclables in paper bags and to not put them out during inclement weather, which seems fair.
You can request a recycling bin from the city if you don’t already have one. Since I live out in the county in a small house, the trunk of my Volvo has become the household recycling bin. I visit the recycling center when it gets full. Heck of a system.
Kelly writes to point out that Seth Rosen had an article in the Progress last week on the topic of the city’s $200k new signage program, designed to help tourists find their way downtown. The Board of Architectural Review is in the process of approving the array of signs, which will appear at the city’s major entrance corridors, ringing the Downtown Mall, and along the Mall itself. The signs on the Downtown Mall is embarrassingly out of date — if there wasn’t a plan to upgrade them, it would be better to tear them down than to leave them up. The city forecasts that the signs will be up come spring.
It was one year ago that real estate attorney Duane Zobrist was appointed to the planning commission by White Hall Supervisor David Wyant. Now Zobrist has given Wyant a jaw-dropping $10,000 campaign contribution, doubling the size of Wyant’s campaign coffers. The Daily Progress is reporting that story today (though Chris Graham at the Augusta Free Press broke the story several weeks ago), raising the question of whether there’s a relationship between the nomination and the contribution. Wyant, a Republican, is facing stiff competition in the form of Democrat Ann Huckle Mallek, and $10,000 is the sort of money that will make or break a candidate for BoS.
The central issue in the race is development — Wyant favors increased development in Crozet, while Mallek wants to limit growth. Though Zobrist’s line of work has presumably spurred his generosity, the appearance of impropriety is hard to ignore.
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