Area officials are giving up on plans for a 64/Sunset Avenue interchange, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Daily Progress. The traffic flow south of the city is awkward (moving between 20 S, Avon, and 5th isn’t particularly easy), and the city, county, and UVa were angling for improving things by way of a new interchange. But at $50-100M it’s just too expensive. Instead, they’re looking to connect Sunset and Fontaine, but as with just about all road construction, even that’s unlikely to happen. (The state is hurtling towards 2018, the date at which the spiraling cost of maintaining our roads will eat up 100% of the state transportation budget. With each year that goes by, we can build less and less roads.) The need for this is going to come from the massive Biscuit Run development, just south of town. But with the developers offering a paltry $1.2M towards the road, there’s no reason to think that we’ll end up with anything but more traffic.
Archive for May, 2008
Seth Rosen at the Progress had some interesting news on Saturday that I don’t want to let slip by. The still-forming police advisory committee won’t have investigative powers, the city has decided. The panel, made up of Charlottesville citizens, will apparently have no power, other than (presumably) to raise a stink if they see something inappropriate going on. The last such group to exist in the city — active from 1990-97 — had the ability to interview witnesses and access internal misconduct complaints. Chief Timothy Longo points to the 17/45 rate of sustaining complaints of rule violations against officers last year as a sign that the police department is willing to discipline its officers.
The Hillsdale Connector won’t be happening until at least 2014, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Daily Progress. The mile-long street, planned to parallel 29 for the benefit of local traffic, will run $30.5M. The slow-motion car crash that is the state’s transportation funding process makes any proposed road purely hypothetical. And how much will VDOT be providing in 2014? A whopping $332,000. Short of a radical rethinking of how we fund transportation in Virginia, it’ll be at least a decade before the Hillsdale Connector is built.
The latest installment in the ongoing reservoir saga comes from Dominion Development Resources, who has offered to take all of the dredged-out dirt from the reservoir and put it in the old quarry off Rio Mills Road, Hawes Spencer writes in The Hook. The fourteen-acre quarry is seventy feet deep, so it could store a metric pantload of sediment. For those who had no idea about the quarry, it’s in the center of this map:
You’ll notice it’s immediately next to the reservoir — only about 3,000 feet away. DDR investor Charles Hurt owns the quarry, and would dump the sediment there as a part of a $24-29M deal to do the dredging themselves. My personal business dealings with DDR a year ago were ghastly (which I mention only because I’m one of the 350 clients they cite as evidence of their competence), but perhaps a job in the spotlight like this would be handled a little better. To catch up on the whole reservoir-dredging story, check out the sidebar on The Hook’s story, which runs down the whole history.
Jeremy Borden wrote in today’s Daily Progress about the arrest of Alvin Lee “Butch” Morris for the 1988 murder of Roger L. Shifflett. It sounded like a pretty straightforward story: Shifflett was found shot dead in his Southwind Gas and Grocery Store one morning, his till cleared of $135, and now the 67-year-old Morris has been charged with it. The only question was how Morris was caught. But now comes the bizarre twist, explained by Lisa Provence in The Hook: the accused murderer is married to the victim’s widow, having helped to raise three of the victim’s children.
Morris left his wife just weeks after the murder. In a small-town twist, former county sheriff Terry Hawkins’ sister was Morris’ first wife, and Hawkins says that Morris was a suspect from the very start. The Hook has labeled this the “replacement husband” case and, for lack of a better phrase, I’m sticking with it.
The Charlottesville-Albemarle Regional Jail is just about full, Tasha Kates writes in the Progress, and they’re trying to figure out what to do about it. As in the rest of the country, incarceration rates have been climbing for over three decades, despite flat or falling crime rates. (The U.S. has a greater percentage of citizens in prison than any other country in the world.) The jail can fit 580 people, and averages 540 people each day. Now the Thomas Jefferson Area Community Criminal Justice Board is trying to figure out how to empty some beds. The clearest path seems to be to stop jailing the mentally insane and those merely addicted to drugs or alcohol. Other proposed solutions are to let defendants put their bond on a credit card and accelerating the process that moves convicted criminals out of the jail and into prison. Everybody seems to agree that expanding the jail is the solution of last resort.
The younger of the two Interstate 64 shooters has been sentenced to “an indeterminate amount of time at a state juvenile facility,” Tasha Kates writes in today’s Daily Progress. The 16-year-old Brandon Dawson could be in prison until he’s 21, but it’s up to the Department of Juvenile Justice when he gets out, and something closer to a year or a year and a half is more likely. Dawson pleaded guilty to five counts of shooting at unoccupied vehicles. The other shooter, Slade Woodson, has not yet been tried.
The Albemarle County Service Authority is jacking up rates for sewer and water connections, Jeremy Borden wrote in yesterday’s Daily Progress, in an effort to pay for the enormous costs associated with upgrading the system to deal with growth. The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority has taken the price of connecting to the water network up 62%, to $2,095, and the price of connecting to the sewer network up 82%, to $2,425. The total cost in Albemarle was $11,790 to hook a house up to the network, and now that’s $14,079. Homeowners’ alternative, installing a septic tank and drilling a well, isn’t a whole lot cheaper, and may well be substantially more expensive. And, of course, the alternative to the rate increase is to simply raise everybody’s property taxes, but that would hardly be fair.
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