County budget watchers have long noted that K-12 spending in Albemarle has outpaced student growth. Barney Breen-Portnoy tackles the topic in today’s Daily Progress, noting that since 2003 there’s been a 2% enrollment increase and a 31% spending increase. The schools point to ever increasing federal and state educational mandates (”No Child Left Behind” has gradually gone into effect during this period) and a desire to offer salaries that are competitive in the regional job market. (As the cost of living in Albemarle climbs, so too must teacher salaries.) The proposed 2009 budget would be a 2.2% increase over the current year’s budget.
Archive for March, 2008
Mike Brown has been arrested for theft and selling stolen goods, Barney Breen-Portnoy and Jay Jenkins write in the Progress. The 21-year-old broke into a student’s car in the Newcomb parking garage stole $3,400 worth of A/V equipment, and then tried to sell it on eBay. The kid from whom the stuff was stolen bought the stuff on eBay, knowing it was his, but apparently Brown was running a scam, because he never sent anything. Police found the stuff in his apartment, along with marijuana. What a maroon.
China is angry with Charlottesville for our support of Tibet, Henry Graff reports for NBC 29. Council will fly the Tibetan flag next week in a show of solidarity with supporters of Tibetan independence, and that’s not sitting very well with China. The tiny mountain nation was invaded by China in 1950, killing millions of Tibetans and prohibiting the practice of religion, sending the Dali Lama into exile.
If the Chinese government is angry with something you’re doing, then you’re doing something right.
The owner of the Anderson Brothers Building on the Corner tells John Ruscher at C-Ville Weekly that he’s looking at new tenants for the building occupied by Plan 9, the Satellite Ballroom and Just Curry. The music store leases the entire building, and in turn leases space to the other businesses; their lease is up in a few months. CVS is looking at the location, though it sounds like they’re not the only ones with their eye on it.
Albemarle County is looking at charging for ambulance fees, Jeremy Borden writes in the Progress, ending the practice of supporting the cost solely through public funding. The county doesn’t know what they’d charge, but Borden points out that Hanover charges $350—$575, and that insurance generally covers about 80% of that price. Charlottesville looks likely to do the same thing with its new paid ambulance service, due to start later this year.
Things are not looking good for the Eastern Connector, Seth Rosen writes in the Progress. The long-discussed road is intended to move traffic between Pantops and 29N without taking the bypass, or any of the routes we take when we don’t want to deal with the bypass. Basically, to move people between these two points:
It’s not hard to see that you can’t get there from here. Either such a road would have to plow right through the city, or veer around, traversing hundreds of millions of dollars of prime real estate along 20N. After $500,000 in studies, that’s basically what the city and the county have figured out. Four routes were proposed: simply widening 250, building new bridges on either side of Free Bridge, running a road straight through Pen Park to Rio, and beefing up Proffit/Polo/20 N. All have some combination of being ineffective and impossible.
Though nobody’s declared the Eastern Connector dead, it’s hard to see how to move forward from here. The good news is that more traffic means more support for mass transit, which will help with the problem. The bad news is that it’ll have to be really bad for at least a decade or so before that support gels into anything meaningful.
Board of Supervisors Chairman Ken Boyd has invoked the nuclear option in city/county relations, suggesting that Albemarle cease sharing revenue with Charlottesville, Jeremy Borden writes in today’s Progress. Boyd’s threat is hollow: Albemarle can’t simply stop paying — a court would certainly order the county to adhere to the contract.
The 1982 deal was struck between the two entities to end the city’s long-standing habit of occasionally expanding its borders, which is how Charlottesville grew from its original one square mile to its current ten. As 29N began to expand economically, the city threatened to grow north to encompass it, with Fashion Square Mall being the target. Albemarle, tired of expanding its revenue base only to have it seized by the city, agreed to share a chunk of its real estate tax with Charlottesville if Charlottesville would stop annexing land. It was put to a referendum, and county citizens overwhelmingly agreed.
The General Assembly put a temporary hold on annexation in 1987, and has extended that temporary hold ever since. It’s due to expire in 2010. Del. Matt Lohr’s HB1979, introduced last year, would have extended it to 2020, but it was vetoed by Governor Tim Kaine. Sen. Emmett Hanger got SB742 through the legislature last week, though it’s not clear whether it will meet the same fate as Lohr’s bill.
To hear Boyd’s comments and read more about the BoS meeting in question, see Sean Tubbs’ report for Charlottesville Tomorrow.
I’d wondered if the town had collectively forgotten that the Corner parking lot is the cradle of the local music scene. Brendan Fitzgerald brings the happy news in this week’s C-Ville that, no, people remember: local filmmaker Meghan Eckman is making a documentary about it. She’s spent a year learning about the lot’s history, and is in the process of turning 125 hours of footage into a single work.
It’s noteworthy that the lot’s manager, Chris Farina, is the creator of “West Main Street,” a gem of a documentary made back in 1995. I’ve seen it a half dozen times (I own a copy), and the more time passes, the more valuable it becomes as an artifact of the town’s history.
Continuing their series of exposés about the reservoir, The Hook this week features an article about all of the opportunities that our government had to get things right, but missed or ignored. Both the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority and the Board of Supervisors got close to getting things right — and apparently had the necessary information to do so — but failed to manage it. Now it looks pretty clear that it would be cheap to fix the Ragged Mountain dams, and that simply dredging would take care of the area’s water needs for decades to come.
The Board of Supervisors has OKd a big retail development for 5th Street extended, Jeremy Borden writes in the Progress. (Or, as most of us will think of it, the long-needed road connecting Avon and 5th.) It’s a standard suburban shopping center — a sea of asphalt with a few single-story big boxes — with a LEED fig leaf. We discussed it here when it was first proposed in 2006. Charlottesville Tomorrow had the details.
It’s been tough keeping up with the news about whether Charlottesville and the Charlottesville Albemarle Rescue Squad have forged a deal to cooperate on charging for emergency service. First it was widely reported that there wasn’t a deal. Then that there was. Then that there wasn’t. What gives? Seth Rosen looks into the state of things for the Progress. There is clearly not a deal at this point; CARS’ Larry Claytor makes that clear. City manager Gary O’Connell has stopped talking to the media, presumably feeling cautious since he was the source of the false news in the first place. Apparently, CARS’ board hasn’t even talked to the city about a deal yet, leaving the rescue squad feeling puzzled about all of the news.
Maybe CARS will want to play ball with the city’s upstart rescue squad, maybe not. But this marks the second time that the city has put their foot in their mouth on this deal, which doesn’t put them in a great position to plead for cooperation.
The $500,000 Charlottesville Transit System GPS installation is done: now you can track CTS buses’ locations online or at dozens of bus stops. At least, it’s possible in the abstract that they can be tracked online. I wouldn’t know, because the site requires Internet Explorer and some Adobe plugin. (Install a plugin? Really? Didn’t we already do 1998?) Like one in four UVa students, I have a Mac–there is no IE to suffer through. Want to check your iPhone/Treo/Blackberry to see if you can make the next bus? You’re out of luck. Work in an office that doesn’t allow installing software? No schedule checking for you.
The significant upside, of course, is the remaining 95% of the system. Now CTS can track, coordinate, and adjust bus schedules in real-time to meet traffic demands. And the little screens at the bus stops sound pretty great. I’ll just have to abandon my hope of putting together per-line location-triggered RSS feeds and e-mail alerts. Cue the tiny violin.
NBC 29 reported something yesterday not likely to surprise many: a lot of UVa students stick around after they graduate. According to the UVa Alumni Association, 7-10% of each graduating class stays in Charlottesville. JMU, on the other hand, says that 15% of their graduates live within fifty miles of campus.
While interesting, that doesn’t necessarily tell us much. Perhaps 7-10% of UVa students are from Charlottesville. It strikes me as pretty likely that 15% of JMU’s graduates are from within fifty miles of Harrisonburg. (The media reporting bad or useless statistics are a pet peeve.) That said, we all know lots of people who stuck around after getting their degree, so whatever the percentage is, it’s got to add up to a significant chunk of the population.
The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority has decided to spend $5.2M to reduce the sewage stink from the Woolen Mills processing plant, Seth Rosen and Jeremy Borden write in the Progress. Three million of that will go to building an enclosed receiving statement, with scrubbers to filter outgoing air, and $2.2M will go for equipment to regularly clean the whole joint. Folks living in the area have complained for years, and rightly so — nobody wants to live near that.
The voice of WINA has passed away. Dick Mountjoy died today, at the age of 61, succumbing to cancer. He first went on-air as a UVa freshman in 1965, beginning at WELK and moving to WINA in 1980, where he spent the remainder of his career. His years on air at WINA made him a beloved figure to thousands. He was first diagnosed with cancer two years ago, when a doctor found a tumor the size of an egg at the base of his tongue. Treatment was unsuccessful — the cancer returned in February of 2007. Funeral plans have not yet been announced.
To learn more about Dick, see Lindsay Barnes’ recent profile of him in The Hook.
Chipotle is a chain, so I won’t eat there. But the Barracks Road Chipotle buys their pork from Polyface Farm.
My head just exploded. I guess I have to go to Chipotle now.
The Planning Commission shot down the proposed Pantops sports complex yesterday, saying it’s just too big given the parcel’s rural designation. The plot would have to to have its zoning designation changed, which would flout the whole idea of growth areas. They like the concept, just not the location for it.
All of these concerns came up here when this was proposed last month, so it’s hard to say that this was unexpected. It’s tough to argue with commissioner Linda Porterfield, who says that while the lot might be designated rural, just look around at Pantops — it’s a little late.
Charlottesville Tomorrow has the full report on the commission meeting.
A 20-mile stretch of Route 64 was closed for hours early this morning after four apparently random shootings. Two people were injured (not severely) and four vehicles were shot, all close to the overpass on the C’ville side of the mountain. Traffic was diverted along 250 until just a few hours ago, and schools opened two hours late are closed. Local and state law enforcement responded with helicopters and K9 units. State police are leading up the investigation. If there are any suspects, or if anybody’s been caught, there’s no word.
Given that the overpass exists solely to get to the Scott family farm, which has no other exit other than Route 250, I’d have to think it’d be pretty easy to corral the shooter, at least if he drove up there.
12:30pm Update: There’s a bunch more information out now. Shootings took place at three different locations, off the mountain, all around Yancey Mills/Ivy; the Royal Orchard overpass was not one of them. It turns out that a fifth vehicle was hit, an unoccupied VDOT truck at the Yancey Mills facility. The caliber of the bullets in all incidents appear to be the same (though they’re not saying what caliber that is). The suspicion is that this is the work of more than one gunman, though presumably they’re working together. Police figure the shooters are still in the area, and the whole region is under surveillance. They say it’s safe to drive on 64 now, but looking at the traffic cameras, it doesn’t look like many people are buying that.
The national media haven’t picked up on the story yet, but Virginia media are all talking about it. If it stops with this morning’s string, then people may well remain calm. But if there are any more similar shootings, we can expect to be whipped up into a frenzy by a nationwide media brouhaha.
The Hook has FOIAed e-mail communications from the city pertaining to the reservoir, and they show that city manager Gary O’Connell is actively opposing citizen efforts to consider dredging. The paper’s staff appear to have become quite the experts in water storage and transportation in the past few months, and present a pretty significant series of facts supporting the notion that dredging is a cheaper, simpler option than the pipeline/mega-reservoir plan. Based on these communications, it certainly doesn’t appear that there’s anything inappropriate going on here — it’s more of a case of “don’t bother me with the facts, I’ve got my mind made up.”
The Daily Progress has a new website, and it’s a big improvement for them. It looks like they’ve abandoned the beastly, totally insecure old content management system that they were using. Articles now have big-boy URLs. At long, long, long last, they have RSS feeds. Stories have tags. The search engine works. There appear to be lots of new features like integrated video, photo galleries, audio, etc. So the good news is very good.
But the bad news is very bad. Their archives are gone. Years of news have simply disappeared. Every link to every Daily Progress article from cvillenews.com (and anywhere else) 404s, even links from just this morning. (WINA used to have a mind-blowingly great site, because they had news stories going back over a decade; it was a treasure trove. That all disappeared two years ago, apparently forever.) The RSS feed exists only in the abstract — it doesn’t actually work, and the fact that the layout has changed drastically means that my screen-scraped RSS feed is broken. So those of y’all who, like me, read the Progress primarily via RSS are out of luck.
The feed should be easily fixable, but the loss of the archives is a real bummer. There’s just no need to lose all of these articles when upgrading to a new CMS. The improvements, though, are great, and I’m impressed. For more about the changes, see the article by the paper’s web guy, Matt Rosenberg.
The two budding young rocket scientists that went on a shooting spree on Route 64 are in custody. Police went to Crozet’s Yonder Hill Farm to make the arrest around 5am this morning, only to have a guy with a handgun come at them. (That was presumably the second suspect.) They shot him, natch; he’s in the hospital now. Then they arrested 19-year-old WAHS alumnus Slade Woodson. These two dopes used Woodson’s own orange 1974 Gremlin on their little adventure, which was caught on camera at the bank that they shot up yesterday morning and eventually abandoned up 29N near Greene. Woodson’s already got a record (read as: fingerprints on file), convicted of auto theft and arson a year ago. He was stealing trucks, driving the hell out of them, ditching them and burning them. Presumably charges against the second guy will be coming soon, at least for threatening a cop with a gun, and I’d bet the shootings, too.
Either these guys were drunk out of their minds or they are two of the dumbest bastards ever to the walk of the face of the earth. I vote for “both.”
2:30pm Update: The Hook reports that the gunshot victim is not a suspect, and that there were five people in the house when the police showed up at 4:48am. It looks like it’ll be a few days until enough of this story comes out that we’ll began to piece together a proper narrative.
From the Progress and the Waynesboro News Virginian, some addition developments in the case of yesterday’s shootings on Route 64:
- Charges have now been filed against Slade Woodson and an unnamed 16-year-old in the case, “Dumb” in the “Dumb and Dumber” duo. Felony malicious wounding, using a firearm in the commission of a felony and maliciously shooting at an occupied vehicle are just the beginning of what will surely be a heaping serving of legal trouble for the pair. They’re facing twenty charges between the two of them.
- The house the duo shot up was the home of Woodson’s apparent nemesis, a fellow student whose questioning by police last year led to Woodson’s prior conviction. This is not the first time Woodson has made a scene at the household — he’s a regular there
- Not content to merely abandon his own laughably recognizable vehicle — a bright orange 1974 Gremlin — that he’d used for the crime spree, Woodson left the .22 shell casings in the vehicle, which were recovered by police. No doubt his fingerprints are all over them.
- The guy shot by police at the time of the arrest this morning is in stable condition, but his identity and specific condition hasn’t been revealed.
- The injuries sustained by the two occupants of vehicles were slight enough that police suspect they might have been caused by shards of glass from the shot-out windows rather than the bullet themselves.
For those of y’all who aren’t familiar with firearms, a .22 is the smallest caliber bullet you’re likely to come across. Both handguns and rifles commonly fire .22s. They have so little powder in them that there’s very little recoil, making it simple to aim a weapon that takes this cartridge. If you had to pick a caliber to be shot in the shoulder with, this would be the way to go. But though it might be small, it’ll punch right through the side of a car and, once it starts to tumble, tear up anybody in its way. Jackson Landers (disclosure: my brother) coincidentally explained this on his blog just two days ago.
Though it remains to be seen which law enforcement agency is responsible for this — Albemarle or state — somebody deserves a lot of credit for making an arrest within 30 hours of the first shot being fired. This could have been a source of a lot of fear and anger, but instead it was wrapped up immediately.
City staff want $750k for signage, and council is balking, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Daily Progress. It was just last year that council met staff’s $500k signage request with $200k in funding, so it’s hard to see why they’d support a request so large so soon. Councilors David Brown and Satyendra Huja are quoted as clearly opposing the proposal, Mayor Dave Norris doesn’t think it’s a great idea, and Julian Taliaferro supports it.
Fellow local history buffs, albeit those a bit older than me, might be interested in this note from Sean Kotz:
Where were you on Saturday nights during the witching hour in the 1970s? Well, there is a good chance, like a lot of Virginians, you were watching your local horror host. This summer, Horse Archer Productions is brushing back the cobwebs as we film the new documentary, “Virginia Creepers: The Horror Host Tradition of the Old Dominion.” We will be charting more than 40 years of Virginia’s television history by talking with hosts (former and current) as well as fans to create this just in time for Halloween. In fact, we’re very interested in involving you, and are currently planning a Charlottesville area taping for fans, so if you remember Slime Theatre or Cobweb Theatre or any Virginia host or show, contact us at info@horsearcherproductions.com. And go to the website to learn how your stories, memorabilia, and memories can be part of this movie.
I’m always glad to see efforts to document recent local history. John Hammond Moore’s excellent “Albemarle: Jefferson’s County, 1727-1976″ peters out in the 1950s, Moore presumably figuring then-recent history would interest few. Here’s hoping somebody takes on the task of updating it soon.
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