The Charlottesville PD’s request for security cameras fizzled out after a majority of council was opposed to them. Now Chief Longo is taking another bite at the apple, having appealed to downtown business owners to turn out at Monday’s city council meeting and support his request for the $300k camera setup. Council started to move on this in July, but it didn’t go anywhere.
As Kate Harmon explains in her Progress article, there are now specifics: the plan is five cameras on the east end of the Downtown Mall; ten on Water 3rd and 4th; and fifteen along the rest of the mall and its side streets. Longo says that even if this request doesn’t pan out, he’s not done trying.
Former Western Albemarle High School teacher Neal Willetts has been given a ten year federal prison sentence for attempting to sexually entice a student over the internet. The 26-year-old taught social studies at WAHS two years ago. Shortly after then, while teaching in the United Arab Emirates, he sent graphic sexual e-mails to a 15-year-old male student. Ten years is the minimum allowed under federal guidelines.
Sending sexually explicit e-mails to a former student gets you ten years in a federal penitentiary. Actually having sex with students at school? That’ll get you just twenty one months. The law tells us that Willetts would have been better off molesting one of his students than talking dirty to him from 12,000 miles away. But the law, as Dickens wrote, is an ass.
City council voted against Chief Timothy Longo’s request for $300k for downtown security cameras, but is willing to support a scaled-back version, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Daily Progress. Mayor David Brown and councilors Kevin Lynch and Dave Norris all voted against Longo’s proposal to blanket downtown with security cameras. To their great credit, both Brown and Norris specifically cited the utter lack of evidence that security cameras lead to a reduction in crime. All members of council but Brown said they’re willing to explore a scaled back version, with mobile security cameras that store the video (rather than transmit it to the police station), to be extracted only in the case of an incident report. They’ve asked for a modified proposal from Chief Longo, but they’re making no promises that they’ll support it.
Well-known local artist and AIDS survivor Gerry Mitchell was knocked out of his wheelchair by a police cruiser earlier this month, and then received a ticket for jaywalking (rolling?).
Courteney Stuart explains in this week’s Hook that Mitchell was returning home from a shopping trip to Reid’s when he stopped to wait to cross West Main at 4th. When the light turned green, he progressed across the street. Halfway across, a police car hit him from behind, hurling him from his motorized wheelchair and into the street. The apologetic Albemarle County police officer Gregory Davis leapt from his car to help, as did a pedestrian. Bleeding from his limbs, Mitchell consented to be taken to the hospital by ambulance. A city officer came to visit him a few hours later, a ticket in hand.
The press only learned about this because a bystander contacted The Hook. Mitchell just wants an apology and, presumably, the ticket to be dropped. Obviously, Officer Davis didn’t deliberately run into a man in a wheelchair, but the decision to ticket his victim quite literally added insult to injury. (Attorney Debbie Wyatt speculates that this was deliberate — as with the recent case of the officer nearly running down pedestrians on Water Street, in which he charged two of them with crimes, both of which they were acquitted of.)
Given the press attention to that other recent cruiser/pedestrian incident, the timing for this couldn’t be worse. The victim likewise couldn’t have been worse: it’s not just that he’s a man in a wheelchair, but an enormously well-known, well-respected, well-spoken man with an unimpeachable reputation. The smartest thing for the county police to do in this case would be to get the city police tear up the ticket, apologize, and move on. Let’s see how circuitous their path to that obvious solution proves to be.
Nathan Washington has pleaded guilty to four of the serial rapes, NBC 29 reports. Prosecutors have agreed to charge him in only four of the seven cases in exchange for his guilty plea. With the deal comes a recommendation for a life sentence on each charge. It was just four months ago that Washington was arrested. Washington is a husband and father of three, and lived in Woodbrook and worked as a Daily Progress deliverman and Harris Teeter meat cutter until his arrest. There’s no word on when sentencing will take place. Suffice it to say, he’s never getting out of prison.
9:15pm Update: Lisa Provence reports for The Hook on how Washington was caught, something that many of us have been wondering. It turns out that one of his victims spotted him in the parking lot of the UVa Aquatics and Fitness Center, the same place where he’d attacked her in 2002. She’d also seen him at Harris Teeter. So she wrote down the plate number and called the cops. They put him on surveillance, and a detective grabbed a disposable cup that he’d thrown away after drinking from. The DNA results came back quickly, showing it was a perfect match to every attack, and they arrested him three days later. That’s some clever, efficient work on the part of both police and the alert victim.
Rob Seal reported in the Progress a couple of days ago that a former Whisper Ridge resident is suing the mental health facility for $10.35M. The anonymous plaintiff just recently turned 18, and alleges that he was physically and sexually abused while there between 2003-5. Which, odds are, is true. It seems that Whisper Ridge (formerly The Brown Schools, before that The Millmont Center) has broken just about every law, regulation, and standard of decency that’s possible (see exhibits a, b, c, d and e), so if I were a betting man, I’d place my money on the kid winning the case. I guess what’s amazing is that it took this long for somebody to sue this place.
Jayson Whitehead has a really interesting story in the current C-Ville about COMPASS Day Haven’s difficulty in getting started. The organization has been working to provide a day shelter for the local homeless population, but trouble finding a location, the loss of a fiscal agent, internal conflicts, difficulty establishing a board and zoning trouble have all slowed them down.
Double H Farms have gotten about the friendliest possible court ruling, Rob Seal writes in today’s Daily Progress. Richard Bean and Jean Rinaldi had expected the worst after their bizarre SWAT-style arrest on a labeling offense back in September, but the judge who OKd dropping nearly all of the charges and the fine actually volunteered that farming laws just don’t make any sense, and that the legislature should fix them. They had to plead guilty to a single count of transporting uninspected meat for sale, and they’ve had to agree to comply with all state and federal farming regulations.
Incidentally, none of the 127 bills pre-filed for this January’s General Assembly session address farming. But there are thousands more bills to come, so it’s certainly not too late.
The county’s recent pledge to reduce greenhouse emissions is nice, but Seth Rosen writes in the Progress that the city will be taking some pretty impressive concrete steps along the same lines. Council will require the city to reduce carbon emissions, buy electricity produced sustainably, and even create a power co-op with other buyers to demand renewable energy from Dominion. The paucity of renewable energy prevents council from setting benchmarks, unfortunately. The commitment to buying power from local producers is especially awesome, though I wonder how it will work. If I stick a 3KW solar panel array on my roof, how will the city get the energy that I produce? Would they buy credits from me, while I just net meter that power back into Dominion’s grid? (I wrote a bunch about this very topic earlier this year.)
Council will vote on this Monday night, where it will almost certainly pass.
Jeremy Borden had a nice article in Saturday’s Progress about The Womenfolk, an early 60s all-female band that were big in the U.S. and in Europe for about three years before fading out. Four members of the band (two of whom I know, but hadn’t the faintest clue about their prior fame) got together recently and recorded an oral history of the band at Live Arts. One of their hits was their cover of Malvina Reynolds’ “Little Boxes” — Womenfolk’s version remains the shortest-ever song on the Billboard charts, at 1:03. It sounds like they had a heck of a ride, and had the rare wisdom to give up performing when it stopped being fun.
In today’s Progress, Seth Rosen describes a dispute over what to do with a big chunk of undeveloped land on the corner of Cherry and Ridge. It’s in private hands, owned by developers, who want to acquire a couple of small city-owned parcels next to it, but the neighborhood is opposed. Rosen does something in this article that’s so rarely done in the Progress, which is to present a brief, factual overview of the heart of the story, rather than merely dancing around it:
Yet in the coming weeks the developer likely will press councilors to make a final decision. If councilors acquiesce to a land deal, they risk alienating many outspoken residents. If they rebuff the offer, they could kill a development that would bring tax dollars and help revitalize the Cherry Avenue corridor.
Land owner Southern Development says the project can go ahead with the land that they have, they just figure it’d be better with the city’s land, too.
It’s official: council voted last night to let the Young Men’s Christian Association establish a private fitness center on several acres of McIntire Park, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Progress. In exchange for a forty year lease on $2M in parkland and $1.25M in cash to build a lap pool, CHS’ swim team will be given priority in the swim lanes. The vote was 3-2, with Kendra Hamilton and Julian Taliaferro voting against it.
City council has voted to establish a paid 24-hour ambulance service, Seth Rosen writes in the Progress, planning to spend $1M to hire a half dozen medics and buy a pair of ambulances. This came after a committee established by Mayor David Brown recommended a half-time service, although the representatives from the county fire department and the rescue squad voted against it. Council’s decision is going to be controversial, especially because the all-volunteer, donation-funded Charlottesville Albemarle Rescue Squad is such a beloved community institution. The city doesn’t pay a dime towards the operation of CARS, leaving CARS and its supporters wondering why the city doesn’t just chip in to support it, rather than launch a competing service. The new service should start next year. The vote was 4-1, with Kevin Lynch opposing.
Four juveniles have been arrested for a Tuesday night beating of a man on West Main, the Progress reports. Along with three others, they mobbed a couple walking down the street, clotheslined the guy, and beat him. An officer tracked down the kids down on Wertland, and the victim was able to ID them. There was no robbery — just a random attack. This sounds a lot like the series of random assaults there this summer, which stopped after a pair of teenagers were arrested in July.
The city is dropping their citation of Gerry Mitchell for jaywalking, WINA reports. Commonwealth’s attorney Dave Chapman found a technicality on which he could drop the charges: §46.2-925 specifies “pedestrian control signals exhibiting the words ‘Walk’ or ‘Don’t Walk’,” and thus Mitchell’s crossing was legal, since the intersection only exhibits walk and don’t walk icons. The ill-advised ticketing came after Mitchell was hurled from his wheelchair when a police car collided with him.
29 N. is being widened, again. Traffic backs up pretty terribly along the section north of Wal-Mart for hours each day, often stretching clear to Ruckersville. So another lane is being added between Polo Grounds and Airport Road, which will surely be finished just in time to get terribly backed up again, what with the new developments approved for just north of there on 29. It seems like it was just yesterday that we dealt with years of beastly traffic while 29 was expanded to its current size. NBC 29 has thoughtfully provided a Google map of the section of the highway:
The addition was approved by the Metropolitan Planning Organization last week, and will be paid for with $2M in federal funds. Suckers for punishment can listen to the audio of the meeting, courtesy of Charlottesville Tomorrow.
After evaluating running the city bus service without charging fares, city council is likely to keep fares for the immediate future, Seth Rosen writes in the Progress. Financial reality means that council has to pick their priorities, and they’ve got an eye towards adding new routes and having buses come more often. Eliminating fares would eliminate $315k from CTS’ $5.25M annual budget, and likewise obligate them to provide $190k to JAUNT, who would be left unable to charge for rides in CTS’ service area. All of this is leading up to a hoped collaborative transit venture with Albemarle County, turning CTS into CATS.
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