Corner bar and pool hall Orbit has abruptly shut down after a 13-year run. A band scheduled to play there this week has been told that the establishment is no more, and that the building is going to be renovated over the next month or so. There’s no word on why this has happened, or what the future holds for that space. All is presumably well at Orbit’s sister restaurant, Rapture, and some of the gigs will end up there. Orbit was the first business venture of local restauranteur Andrew Vaughan, who had previously owned and operated the Java Hut coffee cart on the Downtown Mall. It quickly became a favorite among students, packed to the gills on weekends.
This is probably a good time to point out that Gravity Lounge remains very much (and very successfully) in business, despite the 2006 declaration that it was going out of business. In case anybody lives in a cave, it’s probably worth pointing out that, happily, that news hasn’t proven to be true.
A federal judge yesterday ruled in favor of the Cavalier Daily in the matter of accepting alcohol advertising, the AP reports. Both UVa and Virginia Tech’s Collegiate Times had been barred from accepting any advertising promoting alcohol under state law. The Virginia American Civil Liberties Union argued on their behalf, demonstrating that not only is the restriction unconstitutional, but that there was simply no evidence that it has any impact on alcohol consumption. Advertising revenue at the papers should climb accordingly.
In today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, Bill Lohmann writes about the Jefferson Board for the Aging’s contribution to the eat local movement. JABA’s end of summer goal is to have their kitchens serving meals that are at least 25% locally grown. Long term, they want as close to 100% as is feasible.
Very impressive. It’d be wonderful to see our local schools doing the same.
It’s that time of year when a young man’s thoughts turn to picking out a Community Supported Agriculture program. Like many cvillenews.com readers, I’ve gone with Horse and Buggy Produce (not a true CSA, but more of a local farming aggregator for farmers who don’t want to run their own CSA) for the past couple of years, and ought to get off my duff and sign up again. And many friends speak highly of Best of What’s Around. For a review of all of the options, Cathy Clary provides a listing of seven area farms and explains the concept in the current C-Ville Weekly, while Erika Howsare airs some sour grapes about Horse and Buggy from local farmers.
The schtick, for those who aren’t familiar, is that you pay a big chunk of change up front — $150-$675 — to a local farmer to pick up a big box of fruits, vegetables, flowers, grains and herbs every week. They’re often (but not necessarily) organic, and “local” might mean grown right in Albemarle or from as far afield as the valley. Some CSAs require that you pitch in a few hours to help work on the farm. And some will let you pay extra for a weekly bonus supply of beef, chicken, unpasteurized milk or flowers. (I did the chicken and milk last year, and now I’m totally ruined.)
Now’s your chance to convince people to discover that Mexican stuff they’re buying at Food Lion is crap. Does anybody want to offer any specific recommendations for a CSA?
Dave McNair writes in The Hook:
The Blue Moon Fund is getting ready to demolish a 13-year-old apartment building on its property at 222 South Street to make way for a new 6,800-square-foot conference center. But an adjoining property owner wonders why the philanthropic organization dedicated to “new economic, cultural, and environmental approaches to resource use, energy use, and urban development” didn’t take him up on his proposal to save landfill space by simply letting him move the building next door.
Tearing down a structure to build an environmentally friendly one is like…uh…help me out here. Pushing your poodle out of a moving car to save a mutt from the SPCA? Selling your child to organ thieves to foster another one? Hacking off a limb to replace it with a less calorically-demanding carbon fiber prosthetic?
The local homeless population is climbing, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Progress. 292 people in the area are now homeless, an increase from 266 this time last year. A different study, conducted by local schools, has found that the number of homeless children has climbed from 303 to 354. Half of the homeless folks surveyed say that they were evicted or simply couldn’t afford increased rent costs.
And before somebody drags out the long-discredited claim that Charlottesville is some sort of a magnet for the homeless, remember that it just ain’t true. 63% of the local homeless population here is from here, and 23% are from other parts of Virginia. That means that the homeless are way, way more likely to be from here than you are.
Albemarle County set a $0.71 real estate tax rate last night, Jeremy Borden writes in today’s Progress. It was 4-2, and you know how that vote broke down. That’s a $0.03 increase over the current rate, and precisely the same as the $0.71 ceiling that the BoS recently set. That leaves the county with a $334.7M budget.
Del. Rob Bell has often been cited as a likely contender for attorney general in the 2009 election, largely on the basis of his sizeable war chest, an artifact of going without a serious challenger in his tailor-made Republican district (in which I live). Now Bell tells Bob Gibson that he won’t be running for AG, citing his impending second child as a higher priority. Of course, there’s nothing keeping him from changing his mind: Paul Harris, who used to hold Bell’s seat, declared on March 10 that he wasn’t running for AG, only to announce precisely the opposite fifteen days later.
Democrats had hoped that a distracted Bell would either retire from his seat in order to run for AG (unlikely) or simply be unable to defend his own seat, and lose it to a centrist challenger. Straight-up running against him isn’t likely to get Dems real far. As Will Goldsmith explained in C-Ville Weekly last month, Bell works hard and gets a lot done. Though a lot of folks might not like what he gets done, neither corruption nor laziness exist to provide a purchase for prying him out of his seat.
The downtown kiosk is finally gone, available to the highest bidder. It started its life as a Nagle/Danielson newsstand, and never really found a viable use.
Bad news for my fellow UVa employees: an employee’s laptop was stolen, and it contained names and Social Security numbers for 7,000 students and staff. Brian McNeill explains in the Progress that the university has contacted everybody whose data has gone missing, saying that they suspect the intended theft was of of the computer, not its data. The university uses SSNs as a primary identification number for many UVa employees, so it’s used whenever there’s cause to provide a unique identifier for a given employee, but they’re thankfully phasing that out.
Charlottesville has adopted a $140M budget, Sean Tubbs writes for Charlottesville Tomorrow, keeping the real estate property tax at $0.95, as it was last year. The budget (99k PDF) includes some last-minute additions of funding for things like JABA, Streamwatch, and Children, Youth & Family Services.
For a sense of perspective, note that we had a $100M budget in 2005, a $94M budget in 2004, and a ~$80M budget in 2003.
©2008 Bill Detmer. All rights reserved.
OK, I’m calling it — winter is over, spring is here. Monday’s threat of sleet was winter’s last gasp. I was convinced of that when I saw this photo by Bill Detmer appear in the Charlottesville Flickr group this morning. The daffodils have come and gone, the flowering trees behind my office have lost their flowers, and The Dogwood Festival is underway.
A barely related memory. A decade ago, when Robert Van Winkle was still at NBC 29. It’s early December. The weather has turned cold because, hey, winter’s coming. Robert has just finished providing the forecast. A bubbly anchor without a brain in her head turns to him and asks earnestly: “oh, Robert, when will this cold snap end?”
Plan 9 and the Satellite Ballroom will close at the end of May, David Moltz writes in today’s Cavalier Daily. Plan 9 is going to allow their lease to expire, seeing their possible forced closing as a sign that perhaps it’s best that they consolidate their two C’ville locations. Their subtenants — Higher Grounds, Just Curry, and Satellite Ballroom — will likewise be out come midnight, May 31. Plan 9 owner Jim Bland intends to make a formal announcement today.
1:20pm Update: C-Ville Weekly provides more details. CVS sounds like all but a sure thing, and Satellite Ballroom is looking hard for a new location, rather than simply giving up.
In the current (soon-to-be prior) issue of C-Ville Weekly, Jayson Whitehead writes about a pretty cool idea: turning Morven into a farm to grow food for UVa. John Kluge donated the 7,400 acres to UVa in 2001, and the university has been trying to figure out what to do with the land that they haven’t sold off. Urban & Environmental Planning graduate student Anne Bedarf has pitched her idea to the UVA Foundation (which owns all of UVa’s land), and they’ve been receptive.
I considered attending Asheville college Warren Wilson after high school and was pleased to find, when I visited, that they had their own farm for just this purpose. Yale does the same thing.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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