Archive for June, 2009

Hook Acquires cvillemovies.com

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 1, 2009 in Business and Entertainment.

Long-time Charlottesville website—one of the earliest local sites—cvillemovies.com has been acquired by The Hook. It’s long been a really great site. It does one thing, it does it well, and it’s been run as a labor of love since I was a kid. Unless I’m mistaken, it was the first truly local Charlottesville website; back in 1996, the idea of a local website was laughable, since the web was seen as a way to connect with people far away, not people in your own back yard. (No doubt it inspired me to start cvillenews.com and Charlottesville Blogs.) I e-mailed former site owner Doug Ross to ask him how it all went down. He writes:

Cvillemovies.com was the invention of a UVA grad-student in Philosophy and went online in April 1996 (originally as CineVille.com). Control of the site changed hands a few years later, and in September 2003 the site went down and was almost lost. Serendipitously, I was trying to track down the site’s owner at the same time.

There was a bug on the page and when I viewed the source I found an amusing comment in the JavaScript; something to the effect of “if anyone knows how the hell to fix this, please email soandso@suchandsuch.com”.

Well, I knew what was wrong (it was a Netscape 4 / IE proprietary tag issue, the “button” tag), but the email address went nowhere, so I started asking around and making phone calls, until I found the “owner”. An employee of his had been tasked with the site’s maintenance. He’d been hand editing the HTML for the movie times, and uploading via an FTP client with a stored password that he himself did not know; on a laptop that suffered a crash. The poor guy didn’t even know who’d been hosting the site and hadn’t renewed the domain name, which expired at almost the same time I was setting up a meeting with his boss. Further, he hadn’t yet told his boss anything about the disaster that was unfolding and my desire to do a good deed ended up exposing him.

I offered to “save” the site and after a bit of digging through Google Cache and the Wayback Machine for recoverable markup, and tracking down the Philosophy major (moved to the West Coast) I grabbed the neglected domain name and began resurrecting the site.

I scrapped the original markup (Tag Soup) and replaced it with valid HTML 4.01 Strict + CSS, but I carefully kept much of the original look and feel. I built a backend for the site with PHP and MySQL and got it back online by that October. That was five and a half years ago.

I had fun tweaking the site here and there, added space for local and Google ads; put in a rating system and experimented with some (modified) off-the-shelf forum systems. I felt that a forum could keep the site “relevant” in a world wide web where one could just as easily look up times on Google or Fandango, but I just didn’t have the time or energy to put into the project anymore. I felt very responsible for the site and wanted to see it continue in good hands.

After some interviews with different parties, the Hook seemed like the most responsible; the most likely to understand the significance of, and appreciate the history of the site in it’s local context, and they have a proficient technical staff.

Curious about The Hook’s perspective on this, I e-mailed editor Hawes Spencer. He writes:

One of the things that’s so great about the site is that it started in 1996, in the earliest days of the public’s awareness of the internet, so it has a ton of bookmarks and hundreds of incoming links. And according to Google Analytics, it gets well over 5,000 weekly visits. One other thing that’s really great about it is that it’s not bogged down with a million bells and whistles, so it works equally well on computers and mobile phones—even old-school phones and simple computers with dial-up connections. We’ve been operating it since late April, and our changes have been extremely delicate. We respect the 13 years of history that Doug and his predecessors put into this site, and we’re not about to undo such great work.

One other thing cvillemovies.com has always had and always will have, and which the national movie sites can’t match, is info on special indie screenings and things outside the mainstream cinemas. In the past month, for instance, we’ve given times for special screenings at Newcomb Hall, PVCC, and the Paramount. Local, local, local is what we’re all about. And, hey, I’m a former movie theater owner/operator. I love this stuff!

I’m glad to see the site carried on in the spirit with which it’s existed for so long.

3 Comments

Red Light Cameras Under Consideration Again

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 2, 2009 in Government, Transportation and Crime.

Albemarle County is considering installing red light cameras at three intersections around town, Jenn McDaniel reports for NBC-29. Two spots on 29—Rio and Hydraulic—and the intersection of 20N and 250 are where they’ve got in mind. County police have studied the intersections, and had police officers run down the light-runners and ticket them, but say that it’s not safe to have officers chasing them, and would rather just ticket them automatically.

We first discussed this in 2001, but the legislature outlawed red light cameras pending further study, until they legalized them in 2007. Two years ago it came up again in the form of Dave McNair’s Hook article, which explained all of the reasons why red light cameras are not the cure-all as promoted by their manufacturers. (VDOT’s own study found that they increase injury rates.) And, most recently, city and county staff recommended the installation of red light cameras in July of 2007.

11 Comments

City Republicans Can’t Find a Council Candidate

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 2, 2009 in Politics.

It’s official: Charlottesville Republicans will, for the second election in a row, not field a candidate for the election, Henry Graff reports for NBC-29, leaving the two Democratic nominees challenged only by a pair of independent candidates. Charlottesville consistently delivers the second-highest percentage of Democratic votes of any locality in the state (Petersburg always trumps us), usually around the 75% mark. This fact of demography understandably leaves Republicans uninterested in running anybody.

The trouble here is that Democrats and Republicans are given a special privilege in Charlottesville (as in most—all?—localities in Virginia) which is that they can field candidates who they select. Independent candidates Bob Fenwick and Andrew Williams have to get the signatures of 125 registered Charlottesville voters and submit that paperwork to the State Board of Elections to get on the ballot, simply because they are not affiliated with a party. So with Republicans opting out of elections, I think it’s time to seriously consider whether a third party—whether to the left or the right of Charlottesville Democrats—need to be given the right to nominate candidates, taking over that duty from the unwilling Republicans. I don’t know how that process works, but if Democrats are to be seriously challenged in an ongoing fashion, exchanging Republicans for a third party seems like a route worth exploring.

10 Comments

RSWA Sues Local Recycler

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 2, 2009 in Government and Business.

There’s a strange ongoing saga between the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority and local recycling facility operator Peter van der Linde that I haven’t written about here simply because it’s too confusing to be summed up in a couple of paragraphs. But I’ll take a stab at it here.

Back in April, Dave McNair wrote a long feature about the local man’s Zion Crossroads facility, which is a state-of-the-art, single-stream, mechanical sorting recycling operation. It’s a natural addition to the 800 dumpsters that the home builder rents out throughout the region. He’s long hauled waste to Allied’s Zion Crossroads waste transfer station, where he pays to deposit the contents of those dumpsters, so it’s logical that he’d want to recover some of that money by recycling the waste and turning it into valuable scrap. Somewhere along the way, the RSWA started charging a $16/ton service fee to everybody other than Allied to dump their Albemarle-originating waste at Allied’s facility, which haulers aren’t happy about, because they can’t see what the RSWA has to do with it, and also because they figure it gives Allied an upper hand. (Waste from outside Albemarle is $34/ton.)

Now the RSWA has filed a lawsuit against Van der Linde, alleging that he’s had his haulers lie routinely, claiming to be hauling trash from outside Albemarle, thus depriving them of an unknown quantity of money. Van der Linde counters that it wouldn’t make any sense to lie, because then he’d have to pay more, and he also claims to have surveillance video showing that his guys routinely weren’t even asked where their load originated. He says that this is really about the RSWA trying to shut him down because he’s getting all of the waste business at his facility, which charges less, thus ending their monopoly. In a statement, the RSWA denies it, saying that they’re simply trying to claim money that he owes them.

If you’re confused, Tasha Kates sums all of this up in today’s Daily Progress. I know I’m puzzled. It just doesn’t make any sense for the RSWA to sue over getting too much money. I must be missing something.

11 Comments

Independence Day Organizers Calling It Quits

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 3, 2009 in General News.
The Crowd Watches the Fireworks
Charlottevillians watch a red firework explode overhead in McIntire Park on July 4, 2007.

Seven years ago the organization who had long run the annual Independence Day celebration abruptly threw in the towel. Ray Cadell rounded up a bunch of local business owners and put together the big annual celebration with only a few weeks’ notice. The then-aptly-named Save the Fireworks Committee has been running the show every year since, despite their hope that they’d only have to do it that one year. Committee chairman Dave Phillips says that this July’s scaled-back event will be their last, Bryan McKenzie writes in the Daily Progress this afternoon. They cite a lousy economy, which makes it tough to raise money, but it also makes it tough to justify spending that money on frivolity when there are so many more needs that are more urgent.

A lot of people think of a July 4 celebration as something that “they” do—the state, the city, the county, somebody. But “they” is actually us. It’s a thankless, difficult, money-losing task. Here’s hoping a combination of local grant-making organizations and a local community organization can start planning now to put together a 2010 event and lay the groundwork for a sustainable event that will take place annually for decades to come.

06/04 Update: In an updated article today, McKenzie points out that the Charlottesville Downtown Foundation ran the event in 2003, and that it was the Jaycees that had run the event for so many years.

30 Comments

School Board Candidates Running Unopposed

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 4, 2009 in Education and Politics.

Karl Ackerman writes:

November 2009 marks the third election for the Charlottesville City School Board. Three members were elected in the first cycle in 2005 (Ned Michie, Juan Wade, and Leah Puryear), with six candidates running. Four members were elected in the second cycle in 2007 (Kathleen Galvin, Colette Blount, Llezelle Dugger, and Alvin Edwards), with seven candidates running. This year three slots are open and, to date (June 9th is the closing date for nominating petitions), there are only three candidates running for the three open positions—the three incumbents: Michie, Wade, and Puryear.

When they declared their candidacies earlier in the spring they announced that they were running as a team.

Our School Board elections are non-partisan. When candidates (especially incumbents) run as a team, they effectively skirt this provision by making it nearly impossible for a single candidate to win.

I don’t think Michie, Wade, and Puryear teamed up with the goal of limiting their opposition. But this is what they have effectively done.

The School Board is a tough job. It needs to be an elected job so that voters have a measure of accountability that was missing with an appointed School Board, and led to a number of terrible decisions in Charlottesville (the “pairing” of Walker and Buford, the hiring of Scottie Griffin as superintendent). How to get good people to run for this job? I think School Board members themselves need to take an active role recruiting their successors. Michie, Wade, and Puryear haven’t done that. By running as a team they have effectively shut out the competition.

I think their move will weaken the authority of Superintendent Rosa Atkins just at the moment when she needs a great deal of community input and, ultimately, support to bring about the many changes, including possibly closing a school, called for by the recent efficiency review.

If anybody wants to run for Charlottesville City School Board—or better yet, three people who might consider running as a team—please give me a call. I’ m sure many folks in Charlottesville would love to see us avoid a Soviet-style election come November.

I haven’t followed this race at all, but if these three candidates wind up running unopposed, that certainly doesn’t wouldn’t support the notion that elected school boards would lead to vigorous competition and thus a better school board. Candidates should never go unopposed in a general election, I don’t care who they are.

20 Comments

Restauranteur Says He’s Suing Over Sign Ordinance

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 7, 2009 in Government, Business and Law and Justice.

Tom Slonaker, the owner of the Arby’s at Forest Lakes, says he’s suing Albemarle County for “discriminatory” enforcement of sign ordinances, Tasha Kates writes in today’s Daily Progress. Slonaker has sought for years to evade the county’s zoning restrictions on how garish the signage for a business can be, and is continually caught and cited for violating the sign ordinance. (In 2003 he had an advertisement fashioned into a flag, and when caught for that, he claimed that the county was anti-flag, hoping to win popular opinion by impugning their patriotism.) Slonaker doesn’t intend to sue over the appropriateness or constitutionality of the laws, but rather because he believes that his business is being targeted while others are allowed to violate the same standards.

27 Comments

Child Shot While Asleep in Bed

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 8, 2009 in Crime.

A fourteen-year-old was shot while asleep in bed on Sunday morning, the Daily Progress reports. At 4:09 AM, the home, two apartments, and a vehicle on Prospect Avenue were all hit by gunfire. The unidentified child was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries. There haven’t been any arrests.

8 Comments

Downtown Blanketed with WiFi

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 8, 2009 in Government.

The Downtown Mall has WiFi now, Rachana Dixit reminds us in the Daily Progress today, and people are digging it. As a part of the completed overhaul of the Mall, the city is spending $29k/year to blanket the area with free high-speed wireless. The same thing has been done in cities across the country in order to encourage tourists to linger and businesses to locate in the vicinity. I’ve used it just once so far, on my iPhone—you’ve got to click through a license agreement in your browser to get started, but from there it was just like at home, only faster.

3 Comments

Democratic Primaries Today—Remember to Vote

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 9, 2009 in Politics.

Here’s Democrats’ day-of reminder that the primary is being held today. You’ll be choosing between Sen. Creigh Deeds, Brian Moran, and Terry McAuliffe for governor. (By way of reminder, Sen. Deeds represents Charlottesville.) And for lieutenant governor the choices are Mike Signer and Jody Wagner. (There’s a third name on the ballot, but that candidate actually dropped out weeks ago, after the ballots were printed.) Polls are open until 7:00 PM, and you vote at the same polling place where you always vote. The Deeds fans among us can join him at The Omni this evening for what will quite probably be a victory party, starting at 7:30 PM.

Turnout is light, I suppose, but so far it’s really a lot better than most people had hoped. Albemarle is reporting 4.9% turnout of registered voters (so basically double that to get the turnout of Democrats) as of 1:00 PM, and I though we’d be lucky to get that for the whole of the day.

Creigh Deeds and Family
Sen. Creigh Deeds and family stand on stage at The Omni after he accepted the Democratic nomination for governor.

10:35pm Update: Sen. Creigh Deeds has won the Democratic gubernatorial nomination by a very strong majority, garnering twice as many votes as his opponents. In Albemarle he got 79% of the vote, and 76% in Charlottesville. Jody Wagner won the lieutenant governor nomination handily, defeating Mike Signer with 74% of the vote statewide, with 55% of the vote in Albemarle and 66% in Charlottesville. Sen. Deeds will go on to face Republican Bob McDonnell in November’s election, while Wagner will face incumbent Republican Bill Bolling.

4 Comments

Last-Minute Independent Candidacy Filings

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 11, 2009 in Politics.

There are some notable candidacy filings emerging after Tuesday’s deadline. Independent Paul Long has secured a spot on the City Council ballot, Brian Wheeler writes for Charlottesville Tomorrow. The eleven year resident moved here from Pennsylvania, and works for the UVA Medical Center. He says he’s running on the decriminalization of drugs (which isn’t actually something the city can do), creating a regional transit authority, and financially supporting local organizations that are helping the homeless. Independent candidate Andrew Williams won’t be on the Council ballot after all, the Progress reports, after he didn’t manage to get the required 125 petition signatures to get on the ballot. He’ll be running as a write-in candidate. And, finally, Del. David Toscano has a challenger in the form of independent Robert Brandon Smith, who has secured a spot on the ballot, Brian McNeill reports in today’s Progress. The Belmont resident “works odd jobs as a carpenter,” McNeill writes, describes himself as a “militant green,” and says that his top priority is to “kill” the Meadowcreek Parkway. He also says that he’s “concerned about the curriculum of the university” and he’d “like to see homework abolished forever” in the local school system.

Given that Republicans have ceded these seats to Democrats, independent competition like this is inevitable.

8 Comments

Casteen to Retire Next Year

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 12, 2009 in UVa.

In a press release this afternoon, the university announced that President John Casteen declared at today’s Board of Visitors meeting that he’s resigning his position next year. On August 1, 2010 he’ll conclude his 20th year as UVA president, and he’s taking that as his occasion to retire. It was widely speculated that he wouldn’t step down until the conclusion of the school’s $3B capital campaign, but the economic slump presumably made that goal move considerably farther into the future than perhaps he’d planned. The BOV will start their for a replacement next month.

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“There were only two roads coming into town when I moved in.”

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 15, 2009 in General News.

I like this story about 100-year-old Pernetha Gilbert. She speaks Gullah!

11 Comments

Dominion Beta Testing Smart Meters Here

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 16, 2009 in Business.

In a press conference downtown today, Governor Kaine announced that Dominion Virginia Power will be beta testing 46,500 smart power meters in Charlottesville and Albemarle, CBS-19 reports. The devices can communicate with Dominion in real-time, wirelessly, allowing both Dominion and customers to know at any time how much energy that they’re consuming. Not only does that make it easier for customers to conserve, but it will allow demand-based pricing, basically selling all energy via a real-time, automated auction, a sort of a never-ending conversation between our appliances and power stations about how much we need electricity right now and how much we’re willing to pay for it. More details about this are available on Dominion’s blog.

I’m so geeked about this that I will pay to use this service, if I have to. (I’m a big energy grid geek.) Here’s hoping that they’ll partner with Google PowerMeter for that extra touch of awesome.

20 Comments

Gerry Mitchell Sues City, County for Wheelchair Collision

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 17, 2009 in Transportation and Law and Justice.
Video of the accident, as filmed from the police cruiser. Courtesy of The Hook.

Gerry Mitchell has filed a lawsuit against the city and two police officers for $850,000, Courteney Stuart reports for The Hook. In 2007 Mitchell was struck by a county police officer’s patrol vehicle while Mitchell was crossing the street in his wheelchair, and then city police had the gall to go to the hospital—where the victim had been taken by ambulance—and ticket him for jaywalking. The charges against him were dropped a couple of weeks later, on a technicality, though one that city police may have been happy to identify. Mitchell says his health problems have worsened because of the accident, and that his attempts to settle with the city and the county have all been rebuffed.

7 Comments

Sacajawea Acknowledged on Lewis & Clark Statue

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 19, 2009 in General News.
The statue, viewed against the sky
The Lewis and Clark statue, photographed by Alexander Kurashev / CC

A plaque was dedicated to Sacajawea at a ceremony at the Lewis and Clark statue today, Dave McNair writes for The Hook. The statue has been the subject of protest for its depiction of an apparently cowering Sacajawea—in fact, the Shoshone teenager served as a translator and, at times, a guide—which is what motivated the city to commission the plaque honoring her.

Anybody interested in the context of how this statute came to be will appreciate Michie Company-printed 1919 booklet detailing the unveiling exercises. Mayor W.M. Forrest spoke—thanking Paul Goodloe McIntire for providing the sculpture—UVA President Edwin Alderman presented the statue, Miss Virginia McIntire unveiled it, Judge R.T.W. Duke accepted it on behalf of the city, and Armistead Churchhill Gordon gave a rather lengthy historical discourse on the honored explorers.

2 Comments

Independent Joins Sheriff Race

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 19, 2009 in Law and Justice and Politics.

An independent candidate is running for city sheriff, Christine Mora reports for NBC-29. Charlottesville Police Department detective Paul Best works on the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement Task Force, and says that if elected he’d implement the Gang Reduction and Intervention Program in Charlottesville. The only other candidate in the race is Democrat James Brown.

51 Comments

Meade to Create Parking Problems…Briefly

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 19, 2009 in Transportation.

Neighbors of the new public pool on Meade Park aren’t thrilled about its lack of parking, Gordon Block writes for The Hook. The pool complex can accommodate 225 people, but the parking lot—which appears to basically use all of the available land—can only fit 36 cars. There’s plenty of on-street parking, but folks who live in houses on and around Meade Avenue use those spaces to park their own cars. No problemo, though—City Council intends to limit some spaces to residents, and provide permits to folks who live nearby, once they’ve observed how much strain the pool places on existing parking. But some residents are angry that the pool will open this weekend without the permitting program already being in place.

Given that Council already has plans to solve the problem, it’s not clear that there’s anything to be done here. It’ll be interesting to see if this is actually a problem tomorrow.

31 Comments

BoS Denies Family’s Additional Development Request

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 22, 2009 in Development.

In today’s Daily Progress, Brandon Shulleeta writes about a pair of rural landowners with a family subdivision who are upset that they can’t divide their land one more time. Ronnie and Janie Matheny had seventeen acres, but they divided it up to give some land to their various kids. Now they want to carve off two of their 4.9 acres for their grandson, but they’re all out of development rights. So they had to appeal to the Board of Supervisors for special dispensation to break the rules, who turned them down in a 4-2 vote, Lindsay Dorrier and Ken Boyd dissenting. Boyd says that an exception should have been made. Republican Rodney Thomas, who is challenging incumbent Democrat David Slutzky, is making a campaign issue out of it, saying that he “more than likely” would have granted an exception to the Mathenys.

The trick here is that all family subdivisions are for family members, so allowing anybody to build more houses than zoning permits because “it’s for family” basically eliminates the notion of limiting the number of development rights in a family subdivision. There may well be criteria under which exceptions should be granted, but if those criteria run counter to the notion of family subdivisions, then they cease to be a logical way to divide up land.

By way of acknowledging conflicts of interest, I a) own land in a family subdivision and b) recently had Ronnie Matheny and his son come out to my land about drilling a well, which I expect to hire them to do.

36 Comments

Woodson Sentenced to 15 Years

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 23, 2009 in Law and Justice.

Slade Woodson has been sentenced to 15 years in prison, the Daily Progress reports. One of the pair of teenaged route 64 snipers, Woodson pleaded guilty to fourteen charges related to firing a .22 into homes and vehicles on the night of March 26, 2008. The total sentence was actually 150 years, but Judge Cheryl Higgins suspended 135 years. This is apparently on top of the two years he was already sentenced to on six other charges.

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Mink Creek Floods Scottsville Homes, Businesses

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 28, 2009 in Weather.

Scottsville’s Mink Creek flooded a bunch of Scottsville on Friday evening, Liz Palka reports for CBS-19. Apparently it rained a lot there on Friday (though I can’t find any record of that from nearby weather stations), which was enough for the downtown creek to jump its banks and leave some homes and businesses with the stream running across their floors.

The odd thing about this is that Scottsville spent millions of dollars to prevent this very thing from happening. Though obviously the James River is the real danger for Scottsville, Mink Creek has been a source of flooding problems for more than a century. That’s why Mink Creek was dammed up in 1975, as a part of the larger project to protect Scottsville from the periodic floods that devastated the town. What with the lack of a hurricane on Friday, it’s tough to understand what happened here. Thanks to “TrvlnMn” for the tip.

4 Comments

Judge Upholds Parkway Construction

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 29, 2009 in Transportation, Development, Law and Justice and Politics.

Judge Jay Swett has ruled against the Coalition to Preserve McIntire Park in their lawsuit to halt the Meadowcreek Parkway, Sean Tubbs reports for Charlottesville Tomorrow. He found that four of the six parties bringing the lawsuit have standing, but ruled that the state constitution’s requirement that a supermajority of City Council vote to sell any land isn’t applicable here, because use of the land is being provided via an easement and not actually sold. Therefore the 3-2 City Council vote that’s already been held is sufficient to proceed with construction.

Those who are legally inclined can read Judge Swett’s ruling.

73 Comments

City Planning Public Housing Redevelopment

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
June 29, 2009 in Government and Development.

Well, here’s a can of worms: The city is beginning the process of redeveloping its public housing, Hawes Spencer writes for The Hook, and everything is on the table. A series of community meetings are scheduled to determine what to do—demolish and rebuild, fix them up, or nothing—and no doubt they’ll be contentious gatherings. There’s no mistaking that our public housing stock is in rough shape, but with residents that are, for various reasons, often not engaged in the larger community, the road ahead for any redevelopment is perilous for everybody involved.

52 Comments

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This is a community news blog about Charlottesville, VA, USA, started in March of 2001. It's run by Waldo Jaquith. It has nothing to do with C-Ville Weekly, the newspaper. Feel free to submit a story.