Circuit City is closing their Charlottesville location, Louis Llovio writes in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. They’re shutting down 154 other stores across the country, laying off a fifth of their employees, and probably facing bankruptcy. This move was inevitable to anybody watching the Richmond business’s death spiral over the past couple of years. The NYSE just warned them that they’ll be delisted if they don’t get their share prices up—they’re at $0.40 at the moment, almost a doubling in value since today’s announcement.
With so many locations closing, I guess oddly-shaped stores will litter the stripmall landscape across the nation, a la Golden Skillets. Who this is really bad news is Albemarle Square, which continues to be viable only because acac remains. It would just take the loss of one or two spots there—Plan 9 or the Northside branch of the library—before you’d see tumbleweeds in the parking lot.
It’s election day, kids—go vote. There are no constitutional amendments, just president, Senate, and House.
Here in Stony Point we had 49 people in line at 6am—probably ten times what we’ve ever seen here before—with steady, heavy traffic ever since. Over two hundred people had voted by a little after 7:00. Nobody has needed to wait more than a few minutes, and the election workers are as efficient and friendly as ever. The rain has held off so far in the northern half of the county, which has surely helped turnout.
What are you seeing at your precinct?
10am Update: Albemarle County reports that 17,556 people voted by 9am, just over 26% of the electorate. That’s compared to to 10% in 2007 and 17% in 2006. (I’m afraid I have no figures for 2004, the last presidential election.) Jeff Uphoff provides photos of Walker in the city—between the donut wagon, the school band, and the bake sale, it seems like quite a hub of activity.
7:00pm Update: “There also have been reports of fake robocalls instructing voters in the Charlottesville area to go to the wrong precincts, allegations that the Virginia State Police are currently looking into.” So says the Washington Post. The results are going to start coming in shortly—follow the returns at the SBE’s website.
It was a good day for Democrats here in Virginia. Barack Obama has won the presidency, of course, with spontaneous celebrations breaking out in the streets of cities across the nation and the world, but he also won the state of Virginia, with about 51% of the vote with 95% of precincts reporting right now. Mark Warner won John Warner’s Senate seat handily, defeating Jim Gilmore. Both candidates easily won Charlottesville and Albemarle.
Less clear is the outcome of the race between Rep. Virgil Goode and and Democratic challenger Tom Perriello. Though Perriello is ahead, there are two outstanding precincts that historically have gone heavily Republican, so Goode is likely to emerge about two hundred votes ahead, by my math. But that’s before the provisional ballots are counted, and that’s before the inevitable recount. Expect this one to stretch out for a while.
Those hoping to find out who won in the Goode/Perriello race will have to wait a while longer—until around Christmas, if the 2005 recount in the Creigh Deeds/Bob McDonnell race for attorney general is any guide. Historically, the best source of data has been straight from the SBE, rather than from third parties like CNN, etc., so those are the numbers to look at. Though at this moment Goode is up by a hundred-odd votes, we’re in the territory where minor adjustments from precinct officials can and will toss the race back and forth. Following this from hour-to-hour will drive you nuts.
That said, many of us are bound and determined to be driven nuts. And to that end, electronic voting expert and UVa professor Bryan Pfaffenberger provides an explanation of what we’re seeing here today:
I just did an analysis of the changes due to Veris [the new (and controversial) state voter registration database system] malfunction (?). In Danville, Tom Perriello’s vote totals (”original value”) were REDUCED by 308, while Virgil Goode’s vote totals were INCREASED by 1819.
I do not understand why vote totals would have been affected by VERIS “going down after midnight,” as the VBE update page states. It seems the system is used to report vote totals. So precincts were able to report vote totals before midnight (presumably, these are the “original values”), but were prevented from finishing until this morning, when (it seems) the system was rebooted. Why, then, would vote totals have been decreased as well as increased?
There will certainly be a recount, and that recount will require volunteers from both campaigns to go stomping around in sheds and barns to witness the audit of the voting equipment over the course of a half a day. If you want to help, get in touch with your candidate of choice and offer to observe come the appointed day. I did it for Sen. Deeds, and have volunteered to do the same for Tom Perriello.
Those of y’all who are as eager to keep up with the fluctuations of numbers as I am are welcome to post the changing numbers here as they settle down in the coming days.
O-Hill is going to start composting their food waste, Aaron Lee wrote in the Daily Progress yesterday. They account for half of the food served at the university, sending 5,000 pounds of food to be composted into soil, rather than to sit in the anaerobic environment of a dump, where food generally can’t biodegrade. Steve Murray’s Earlysville-based Panorama Pay-Dirt will be hauling it off beginning Tuesday.
The bad news: Two laptops containing personal information about every voter in Charlottesville have been stolen, Henry Graff reports for NBC-29. The good news: The data was encrypted, so there has almost certainly been no breach of privacy. On election night, after things shut down for the evening, somebody tossed a cinderblock through the front door of Tonsler and made off with the two systems. Voters’ names, addresses, birth dates, and driver’s license numbers are stored on the computers. Laptops’ portability make them common targets of theft, and it’s inevitable that government systems containing confidential information will be stolen now and again. But if best practices are followed, and the data is encrypted, it’s not a disaster.
11/07 Update: The more I think about this, the more I figure that this story is fear-mongering on the part of NBC 29. (Compare to WINA or the DP’s coverage.) Wanting to know what else was in place, other than encryption, I checked with Charlottesville election official Rick Sincere, and he told me: “The laptops require multiple passwords to make them operable. The passwords are complex and difficult to remember.” They’re using Datacard’s Electronic Poll Book Solution, which you can read about in Rick’s October 2006 blog entry on the topic. Rick favors electronic voting, while I think it’s a security nightmare, but this is an example of everything apparently being done safely. If there’s reason to think that anybody’s confidential information has been breached here, Henry Graff hasn’t provided it—NBC 29 should stop making this claim if they can’t back it up.
All over town, folks are pretty obsessed about the status of the Goode/Perriello canvass (or the recount, as it’s colloquially known.) You’ll notice a new item over on the sidebar of cvillenews—the latest status of the Perriello/Goode recount. That’s updated every five minutes, with a link to the SBE’s log of changes to the tally. I’ve also created a JavaScript widget that you can embed in your own website:
<script src="http://waldo.jaquith.org/recount/perriello.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
Here’s a screenshot of how it looks:
And for those of y’all looking for something rawer, there’s a plain text version with each candidate’s totals.
BoS member David Slutzky is considering running against Del. Rob Bell, Brian McNeill writes in Sunday’s Daily Progress. Bell, a Republican, is up for reelection next November; he had no challenger last year. Slutzsky, a Democrat who represents the Rio district, says that he hasn’t made his mind up, but that what Bell does in January’s legislative session will affect his decision.
Slutzky is upset that the state isn’t funding transportation (hence no roads getting built anytime soon), and would like to have a Charlottesville/Albemarle referendum on raising taxes to fund a regional transportation authority. Bell is threatening to oppose that referendum—that is, to lobby against allowing Charlottesville to hold one at all—which led Slutzky to declare the following in an October 31 regional transit authority working group meeting: “We will pillory him in the press. Then we run against him and we kick his ass out. Not to be subtle.”
Bell hasn’t faced a significant challenge since his 2002 election, allowing him to build up one of the state’s largest campaign war chests. his campaign has $94k on hand, he also runs the Piedmont Leadership PAC, which exists solely for him to donate money to and to give money to him, and he’s got $312k squirreled away there. The common assumption is that he’s planning a run for a higher office, since otherwise there’s just no need to sit on that money, though earlier this year he announced that he wouldn’t be running for attorney general in the 2009 election.
Coincidentally, I crunched the numbers on the the 58th district earlier today and found that Democrat Tom Perriello beat Republican Virgil Goode in the 58th with 55% of the vote, a significant move leftward from past election results in this district. That’s the sort of demographic shift that’s got Del. Bell vulnerable at the polls. But with his fundraising advantage, anybody running against him will have to fundraise as few in Virginia ever have.
UVa’s Hereford College has started a mini-farm, Tasha Kates reported in yesterday’s Daily Progress. The 800 square foot garden, maintained by members of the university community, fits in with a recent course on alternative food production. Now students are working on creating another garden, this one a half-acre in size, with some of the resulting food passed along to area soup kitchens.
Business owners on Garrett Street are sad that people have to walk a block to get to the parking garage, Rachana Dixit wrote in yesterday’s Daily Progress. Though there’s lots of on-street parking, it’s all-day, and is often filled up by commuters by 9:00 AM. The city plans to turn fifteen of those spaces into two-hour spaces in spring, but some business owners don’t want to wait that long. Of course, once those become two-hour spaces, expect commuters to be angry at their loss of parking.
Route 64 shooter Slade Allen Woodson has been sentenced to two years in prison, Tony Gonzalez reports in the Waynesboro News Virginian. Woodson was the brains behind the operation, to use the term “brains” generously; the younger of the duo was sentenced in July. The two were arrested one day after their shooting spree on 64, west of town. The only damage was to property, though two people were slightly injured by broken glass.
Things have gotten strange between Lee Danielson and Halsey Minor over the Landmark Hotel, Brian McNeill writes in today’s Daily Progress. Minor says that the bank has pulled their funding and construction has stopped. Lee Danielson—and anybody walking the site by yesterday—says that, in fact, construction is ongoing. Both Danielson and the bank say that there’s no funding problem. When asked what to make of Minor’s comments, Danielson told McNeill “I suggest you Google him and see what else he’s gotten up to.” And when Minor was asked about Danielson’s comments, Minor said “He can go and do his thing—I’m just not going to engage.”
What is it about Lee Danielson that causes his business partners to flee from him?. (I can guess.)
11/14 Update: Will Goldsmith writes in C-Ville that Minor says that he’s canned Danielson. Danielson has no public response, and the job manager says that while money was a problem, it’s resolved now.
Our area has lost five hundred jobs in the past year, Brian McNeill writes in today’s Daily Progress. That decline of 0.5% is the worst of any of the state’s nine largest metropolitan areas. What the Progress doesn’t tell us is where these 500 jobs disappeared from, since there have been no major layoffs in the area. Small-scale job losses have recently occurred, or are soon coming, from LexisNexis, Circuit City, and Luck Stone, but that’s a) not part of these numbers and b) just a drop in the bucket.
9pm Update: I’m a moron. McNeill wrote: “The Charlottesville region’s lost jobs over the past year were primarily in the construction and manufacturing industries.” It makes sense that this area, a part of the growth boom (especially Fluvanna), would fall particularly hard as the bubble collapsed.
Work on the new Whole Foods has stopped, Rachana Dixit writes in today’s Daily Progress. The store wouldn’t comment on the status of the development, and the land’s owners—who have provided a 99-year ground lease to Whole Foods—have no idea why construction has halted. The national chain’s profits dropped sharply this past quarter.
11/20 Update: It’s back on. Apparently the city shut it down for a few days to work on the stormwater pipes, which is considerably less dramatic than some thought.
After years of increasing property values—and property taxes—the collapse of the real estate bubble has left both Charlottesville and Albemarle are facing some hard decisions on their budgets and tax rates. They don’t know how to forecast revenues for the upcoming budget years, and that makes it tough for them to know what they’ll be able to fund. Worse still, state budget cuts will likely reduce services to local governments (but without corresponding state tax cuts), leaving localities having to make up the difference.
Rachana Dixit explained Charlottesville’s situation in the Progress on Tuesday. The city has to raise its tax rate in order to maintain existing services, unless they want to end up with a $1.8M deficit (about a 1.5% overrun). Alternately, of course, they can cut $1.8M worth of services. Council has assumed no tax rate increase as their starting point, Sean Tubbs reports for Charlottesville Tomorrow, though that’s a philosophical approach that doesn’t indicate how they’ll ultimately plug that gap.
Brandon Shulleeta explained the county’s predicament in the Progress a week ago. They’re facing a $4.9M shortfall with their existing 71¢ property tax rate. County staff figures they’d have to let 47 positions remain vacant, get rid of all raises for employees, delay the Crozet library by two years, push back maintenance on the jail for five years, eliminate much of the funding for new fire stations, and slash funding for transportation. In part because their board is split between Democrats and Republicans, the talk there is all about tax rates. BoS chair Ken Boyd wants county staff to establish a budget using a 74.5¢ rate, a number that would preserve the same dollar value of tax payments as the current rate, but would require lots of spending cuts. David Slutzky, on the other hand, wants the budget to begin at a 90¢ rate, the level at which the county could maintain services, and figures they can decide what to cut out from there.
Given the state of the economy—bad, with genuine fears of sliding into a depression—it’s tough to see how municipalities can justify increasing real estate taxes now. We’ve all got less money, and the sensible among us are cutting our spending as a result; Charlottesville and Albemarle will have to do the same.
Good news from the university: they say they’re planning to expand up, not out. They’re going to focus on infill, taking buildings up (or down, underground) and increasing density. As UVa grows, acquiring land, they remove property from the city and county property tax rolls, shrinking the municipalities’ tax base. That’s a source of significant tension between the university, Charlottesville and Albemarle. This new approach is a part of the university’s 20-year master plan
Tom Perriello has been certified as the winner in the 5th CD election, Brian McNeill reports for the Daily Progress, with a lead of 745 votes. Rep. Virgil Goode is challenging the outcome, and understandably enough. It’s being called a “recount,” but no actual recounting takes place. It’s more of a re-canvas, making sure that the total number of votes on each machine matches the recorded total, and that those add up to the recorded total for the precinct. The numbers will change a little, maybe by a few dozen votes, but the odds of Goode gaining 746 votes are slim-to-none. Perriello is proceeding with his transition, planning to start his new job as Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) come January.
Concerns about the regional water supply are based on the projection that, come 2055, we’ll require 18.7M gallons per day. But the county’s own water resources manager says we’ll need 20% less than that, Hawes Spencer writes in The Hook, which is an awfully big difference. Greg Harper wrote in an internal memo that water usage has been declining over the past decade, contending that the natural replacement of old plumbing fixtures with modern ones will only accelerate this trend. The debate over dredging and a new dam is all about trying to anticipate future demand; if our demand forecasts are pessimistic, we could potentially waste millions of dollars on unnecessary supply increases.
Get ready to write checks to a new telco: Embarq has been bought by CenturyTel. The Lousiana-based company, founded in 1930, bought Embarq for $11.6B in cash and debt assumption. CenturyTel is, like Embarq, largely in the business of providing service in small markets and rural areas.
For those of y’all new in these parts, Centel was long our telco here. It was started in 1900, and come 1993 they had 1.5M landline customers in seven states. That was when they were bought by Sprint, which meant that, weirdly for the time, a long distance provider was our local phone company. Sprint spun off Embarq in 2006, which consisted of Centel and their other local phone assets. And now that they’ve gotten their name and logo updated, they’ll be CenturyTel. Let’s all practice cursing a new business name. For those of us who still slip and call the phone company “Centel,” at least the new name is a little closer.
Synchronicity says that their two employees missing in Mumbai—58-year-old Alan Scherr and 13-year-old Naomi Scherr—are dead. The State Department is not confirming their deaths, so this news is known only from Synchronicity. The say that the two were killed in the attack on the Leopold Café. The restaurant, a watering hole for visiting Westerners, was stormed by terrorists on Wednesday, who fired indiscriminately at the patrons with automatic weapons. The attack went on for ten minutes, leaving a large but as-now uncertain number of people dead and injured. The attack on the Leopold was one of a half dozen such attacks launched against civilians across Mumbai, attacks that are still ongoing now.
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