The Daily Progress has raised their newsstand prices by 50%, Hawes Spencer writes for The Hook. The paper was $0.50 for some years, but on Monday it went up to $0.75. The Richmond Times-Dispatch, which is likewise owned by Media General, also raised their price to the same level on Monday. The narrative of the Progress over the past few years has been continuous spending cuts, often in a form negatively impacting the quality and quantity of reporting. This time, at least they’ve found a way to increase profit without cutting quality. And I can’t complain: like most people, I read the Progress online.
Archive for September, 2008
By aripeskoe2, CC license.
Charlottesville’s looking to add a fourth sister city, Jennifer Black reports for CBS-19, and the proposed place is Winneba, Ghana. The fishing town has the same population as Charlottesville, and is the home of the University of Education, which has about the same number of students as UVa. Our three existing sister cities are all European: Besançon, France; Pleven, Bulgaria; and Poggio a Caiano, Italy.
Mayor Dave Norris is shooting to take action on the proposal by May, which is when the city holds their annual game hunting festival. The Aboakyir Festival, awesomely, pits two warrior groups against each other to see who can catch an antelope bare-handed. The antelope is a stand-in for a leopard, which used to be the target, but so many people died each year that they recently moved to less dangerous game.
- By Erika A., CC license.
UVa’s new no-signs rule at sporting events is getting national attention, in the form of Rick Reilly’s article for ESPN Magazine. It was all started by people holding up signs demanding that coach Al Groh be fired. Confusingly UVa isn’t saying what a “sign” is. Could I wear a “Fire Al Groh” t-shirt? How about a “Keep Al Groh” t-shirt? Or a “Nike” t-shirt? As Reilly asks, if UVa can censor students at the stadium, why not on the Lawn? The tradition of saving signs at sports events goes back decades, and UVa banning them is awfully strange. Reilly proposes bringing blank signs, or signs that read “This Is Not a Sign.” I like it. (Via Scott Jolly)
- A stretch of asphalt on the UW-Madison campus after a rain; permeable asphalt on the left, typical asphalt on the right. (By Tristan Porto, CC)
UVa, the city and the county are all rethinking how they get rid of runoff, Tasha Kates writes in the Progress. Every time a new house is built, a new sidewalk is built, or a new chunk of land is paved, that many square feet of grasses, trees, and soil cease to exist to absorb rain. So it all runs along the man-man ground cover, from which it has to be trapped, channeled, and ultimately dumped somewhere. It’s an expensive process that’s bad news, environmentally-speaking.
That old and busted process is being replaced with the new hotness: letting storm water sink stay where it falls. Over a thousand feet of Meadow Creek, long channelled through underground piping, is now a stream again, where water can run into. The JPJ has a plant-filled flood plain to slow down and absorb runoff. The city and the county have plant-covered roofs, which absorb rainfall. Next year the Nature Conservancy will improve over a mile of Meadow Creek along Greenbrier Park, once again allowing the creek to overflow into the adjacent floodplain. And Albemarle is exploring using pervious paving.
The Albemarle Place shopping center is back on track, Brian McNeill writes in today’s Daily Progress, something like eight years after they first started promoting it. Last year it turned out that the developers never bothered to check if the city’s sewer line has capacity for such a huge development (it doesn’t), and that basically shut ‘em down. But a big new sewer line is being built by the county (that’s your tax dollars subsidizing a 2M square foot private development), so now it’s feasible again. They’re still planning the same theater-hotel-grocery-offices thing, and promoting Charlottesville as, chillingly, “the Napa of the East Coast.”
There’s a dispute over whether to light up the softball fields at Darden Towe Park, Rachana Dixit writes in the Progress. The YMCA going in at McIntire means the end of their (lit) softball fields, so there’s a lot of interest in spending $500-$700k to add lighting to the three fields at Darden Towe. Supporters include softball players, while opponents include folks who live around the park and those who aren’t thrilled with spending over a half million dollars on this when we’re facing a budget shortfall. Both the city and the county will hold hearings on the jointly-operated park in October.
City Council has agreed to divest its holdings in any companies that do business with Sudan’s government, Rachana Dixit writes in the Progress. The city doesn’t think that any of its $87M in investments are going to be affected, but it does set a policy for staff going forward. Sudan is a seriously bad situation, with the government having killed hundreds of thousands of their own citizens in the past few years. Most states in the nation now have policies similar to Charlottesville’s, as do nineteen other cities.
The feature story in the current C-Ville is Jayson Whitehead on the largely invisible latino minority in Charlottesville, a group that I’m happy to see written about. Whitehead focuses on the legal and social hardship aspects of immigration—legal and illegal—and writes quite a bit about the far-right Albemarle County Republican Party and their position on immigration. (The party chair says he totally agrees with Rep. Virgil Goode about everything; Goode got all upset about Mexican restaurants displaying the Mexican flag just last year, and that’s the least of his opposition to immigration, legal and otherwise.) The latino population remains relatively small, but as it grows, so too will immigration as an issue in Charlottesville and Albemarle.
Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has become the central repository for human knowledge, but Charlottesville isn’t very well represented. Many of the basic historical figures and central geographic locations of our area are only given a cursory description, if they’re listed at all. There are predictably informative and lengthy entries for Thomas Jefferson, UVa, DMB, etc. But there’s nothing at all about the Jefferson School, the Charlottesville Pavilion, Barracks Road, or our own mayor (for instance). And the entries for the Downtown Mall, WINA, the Daily Progress, CHO, Lane High School, The Corner, and the Southwest Mountains are pretty anemic. And given their profile, Ash Lawn-Highland and Montpelier should have way better entries.
I’ve made a list of a bunch of entries that I’d like to create or improve, though no doubt folks can think of plenty more. It took two of us just a couple of days to create a decent entry for Paul Goodloe McIntire. I hope that y’all in the habit of contributing to Wikipedia will take a few minutes to add some information to local entries. And those of you who are new at this, I encourage you to give it a try: just click on the “edit this page” link at the top of any one of those entries, add any information that you think should be there, and save your changes. (See Wikipedia’s guide to editing a page.) Collectively, I’m sure that we all know enough about the area’s history to make a considerable contribution to its chronicling.
Well, this seems bad:
An engineering firm has nearly doubled the estimated cost of a dam at Ragged Mountain Reservoir, prompting officials to halt design work on a project intended to supply drinking water to the region for the next 50 years.
Gannett Fleming — the firm tasked with the project’s design, engineering and construction — hiked the original $37 million cost estimate to $70 million largely because of fractured and weathered rock at the site of the future dam. Local officials then sought a second study from Schnabel Engineering, which concluded that the project could be done for $56.5 million or less.
Brandon Shulleeta explains in the Progress that the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority is putting together a panel to review the two studies and figure out what to do. Citizens for a Sustainable Water Supply Plan are thrilled, saying that this is makes clearer than ever that it would be cheaper to just dredge the South Fork. The trick is that we’re not trying to provide water for everybody who lives here, but also everybody who might move here between now and 2058. Growth is expensive, and it’s the taxpayers who get stuck with the bill.
UVa has finally built a new dorm, the first of seven long-promised new ones, Katie Bo writes in today’s Cavalier Daily. The university has had a housing shortage for the last half decade, pushing students out to rent houses, which drives up the cost of housing in Charlottesville. The Kellogg dorm has such new-fangled technology as air conditioning, elevators, and the internets. It’s a start, but it’s not like others are following close on its heels: the plans for the next one won’t even be finished until next year.
Coiners Scrap Iron and Metal has been sold, Christina Mora reports for NBC 29. The Meade Avenue business, in its 101st year, is now owned by the Roanoke-based Cycle Systems, which is nearly as old. Cycle Systems has been on an acquisition binge in the past decade, snapping up scrap metal companies in Harrisonburg, Waynesboro, Staunton, Martinsville, Pulaski, and South Boston. Because the sale is private, it’s not known how much walking around money Preston Coiner has suddenly found himself with.
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