Archive for August, 2009

County Wants Developers to Cover Mud Expanses

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
August 5, 2009 in Government, Development and Law and Justice.

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The county is looking to stop developers from razing the land and then leaving a field of mud, Sharon Fitzgerald writes in today’s Daily Progress. The proposal is to require that cleared land be covered up within nine months, whether with grass, a structure, or some kind of paving. Developers who can’t get that done in nine months can apply for a three-month extension.

After land is graded, the denuded land can lead to terrible runoff problems, clogging storm drains and filling stream beds with silt. (Recall Hollymead Town Center, which was a sea of red earth for years, the runoff from which reduced Hollymead Lake to a mud puddle.) It’s in a developer’s best interest not to let that happen—dirt isn’t as cheap as the expression would have you believe, and if you let dirt start flowing around on your property, there’s no telling where it’ll move to, and that can make a mess. Wendell Wood, the developer of Hollymead Town Center, blames the multi-year moonscape on the county, for delaying his permits, but that doesn’t explain why he’d grade acre upon acre of land without the permits to do anything with it. Jay Willer of the Blue Ridge Home Builders Association opposes the proposal.

Disclosure: I’m in the awkward position of writing about this during the same week—the very day, I think—on which the county is going to consider whether I have to renew the bond for the swath of land that I had cleared last year, which is contingent in part on whether I have adequately covered the land in question. Though having gone through that process, I do think I’m in a good position to say that nine months ought to be enough time, especially if those nine months don’t include winter. (Mine did, which meant I couldn’t grow a blade of grass until March, despite my best efforts.) Anyhow, knowing that folks from that office read this blog, and wanting very much to be released from that bond, the assumption that I’m sucking up is, while incorrect, totally warranted.

4 Comments

USPS Considering Shuttering Processing Facility

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
August 8, 2009 in Government.
USPS Distribution Facility
The USPS Distribution Facility on Airport Rd.

It was just a few years ago that the USPS built their processing facility on Airport Road, but they’re already looking at shutting it down, Jason Bacaj reports in today’s Daily Progress. A study of their operations will be running for the next few weeks, which will determine whether they’re going to keep it open, move all of the operations to their new facility in Richmond, or do something between those two. The results of the study are due to be announced late next month. If they were to shut down this facility, my understanding is that all mail sent within Charlottesville would have to be routed through Richmond, though I certainly hope that’s not right. Charlottesville’s original mail sorting facility is now the home to the central branch of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library, which took it over in 1977; if abandoned, I wonder what the future holds for their current facility.

38 Comments

Crozet Citizens Want to Stop Population Growth

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
August 8, 2009 in General News.
Crozet Hardware
Crozet Hardware. By Charlottesville Tomorrow. / CC BY 2.0

Crozetians believe overwhelmingly that their #1 priority is limiting growth, WCAV reports. The county surveyed Crozet’s citizens about the Master Plan—which currently calls for the population to more than double—and it was in that context that they volunteered their concerns about population growth. Specifically, they’re also looking to stop the 250 corridor from sprawling out, and instead build up downtown. A 2006 county report forecast a maximum Crozet population of 24,000 in 15 years, a number that left many Crozet residents horrified, no doubt spurring contributing to the strong support for a sustainable population that this survey has shown.

30 Comments

Boyd Running Against Perriello

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
August 16, 2009 in Politics.

Ken Boyd plans to run against Rep. Tom Perriello for Congress, Brian McNeill writes in today’s Daily Progress. Well, that’s not strictly true. McNeill writes that Boyd attended an informational session for the apparent hordes of Republicans who intend to seek the nomination to run against the freshman Democrat, and Albemarle County Republican Chair Christian Schoenewald tells McNeill that “he told us he was running”; Boyd tells McNeill that he’s “still considering it very seriously.” Boyd serves on the Board of Supervisors, representing the Rivanna precinct. He’s a sophomore, first elected in 2003, defeating Democrat Peter Hallock with 52.6% of the vote. The 5th congressional district is huge—the size of New Jersey—and Charlottesville is in the northern tip of the triangular district, which extends clear to the North Carolina border. I’d say that somebody from this far north is unlikely to win the district—since we have very little in common with the rest of it—but given that Rep. Perriello was born and raised in Ivy, that’s clearly no true anymore.

10 Comments

UVA Eliminating Psych Beds

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
August 16, 2009 in General News.

Chiara Canzi provides the alarming news in the current C-Ville Weekly that the university intends to eliminate half of its psychiatric beds from its total of forty, getting rid of eight next months and another twelve early next year. The PR director for the UVA Medical Center says that it won’t be a problem because “not all beds…are used,” but the folks I talked to who work for the facility tell me that’s absolutely not true. They’re basically the psychiatric equivalent of an emergency room, and one of very few available right now—folks are routinely brought down from upstate, where (a member of the General Assembly recently told me) there are generally no beds available. The state has a significant shortage of beds, and it’s becoming a problem. Obviously, we’re not talking about literal beds here, but rather the capacity to deal with an individual represented by it.

The result of this will not be good. This will leave people without care, instead winding up in jail (without the care that they need), on the streets, or with family who don’t know how to help them. Note that this coincides with the General Assembly passing a slew of new mental health laws in response to the Virginia Tech shooting, many of which will require more beds to deal with the more stringent standards. They’re stiffening the laws, but not providing the funding to actually follow through. That’s basically par for the course: legislators want to brag about how they’re tough on crime and cut taxes, but as we see here, the two are often in opposition.

52 Comments

New Talk of Moving Farmer’s Market

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
August 19, 2009 in Government and Business.
Chrissy Hunt / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

City Council is again talking about moving the Farmer’s Market to a permanent location, Rachana Dixit writes in today’s Progress. It’s been setting up in the metered lot on Water St. for a little more than fifteen years now; before that it was in the Jefferson School parking lot, as I recall. On Monday night Council talked about making another push at finding some better digs for the weekly market, although that’s something that comes up every few years and never goes anywhere. Court Square is the perennial suggestion, both for historical accuracy and because it lends itself to a decent shopping experience today, but it’s not clear how vendors would be able to set up there with the ease that they do at the current location. At this point, it’s all just talk—here’s no movement that indicates that anything’s more likely to happen now than before.

22 Comments

The Late, Great Zeke Hoffmeyer

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
August 23, 2009 in Entertainment.

In 1994, Joel and Ben Jones created a mockumentary honoring “Zeke Hoffmeyer” for Live Arts’ “Off the Mall” show that summer. At the time, the story of the slacker Gen X musician and downtown denizen was hilarious, timely, and intertwined perfectly with the real downtown Charlottesville. Joel made Zeke Hoffmeyer available online this weekend, and I just watched it for the first time in fifteen years. It’s aged beautifully. If you spent any significant time living, working, or relaxing downtown during the mid-90s, you’re bound to enjoy this look back into that time. And even if you didn’t, heck, it’s just plain funny; carve out twenty three minutes and give it a watch.

4 Comments

DP and Charlottesville Tomorrow Team Up

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
August 23, 2009 in Meta News and Business.

The Daily Progress will begin carrying Charlottesville Tomorrow’s stories, the two publications announced late Saturday night. No money is changing hands in the agreement. As the newspaper has lost reporters, it’s impacted their ability to have reporters present at meetings of regional government entities. Filling that void has been the privately-funded nonprofit Charlottesville Tomorrow, dedicated to providing neutral coverage of issues pertaining to development and growth in Albemarle County. The newspaper will publish their stories, providing Progress readers original coverage of important news and providing Charlottesville Tomorrow with an instant ten-fold increase in their readership.

Though I haven’t seen much of it for a while, when Charlottesville Tomorrow first started there was some significant push back against the organization from developers and folks aligned with them, who argued that the group was anti-development by virtue of so closely covering the topic. With Charlottesville Tomorrow’s just-the-facts approach to their coverage (DP editor McGregor McCance calls it “accurate, fair and balanced”), it’s tough to see any room for slant. I suspect we’re about to see quite a bit more complaints along those lines, despite that the conservative Progress has seldom had many unkind words for development or growth.

To the extent to which the Progress is relying on the continued generosity of Charlottesville Tomorrow’s donors, this might put the paper in an awkward position. On the other hand, by virtue of being a daily newspaper subject to the whims of a huge media conglomerate in a terrible economy, they’re already in an awkward position—at least this way they’ll be in an awkward position with a dozen more column inches of news every day.

25 Comments

Study: Growth Not Good for the Environment

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
August 24, 2009 in Development.

A Shippensburg University study has found that the ecological carrying capacity of the county will have a hard time with continued growth, Brandon Shulleeta writes in today’s Progress. Commissioned by Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population—and funded in part by the city and the county—the study (4.9MB PDF) is limited to environmental matters, and considers how well our water, air, and other natural resources on which we depend will fare under an ever-increasing population density. It turns out that the trouble starts when the population climbs from our existing 140,000 to 217,000, when we’d wind up with air pollution problems, nitrogenous waste in water, and storm water filling our lakes and streams. The forecast was done in part with the CITYgreen program, a sort of a grownup SimCity.

The good news is that the requisite 55% population growth is a long way off, but the bad news is that it’s well within my likely lifetime. These results are sort of obvious—more people are bad for the environment, duh—but the ability to quantify the county’s ecological carrying capacity is important as one of a great many factors to use to determine if we want to grow, how much we want to grow, and how fast that we want to do it.

Disclaimer: I’m on the board of ASAP, I’ve helped oversee this study in that (limited) capacity, and I helped write the press release announcing this study. Really, I’m about as biased as I could be on this, save that I’ve got no financial interest in the matter.

10 Comments

Morris Freed in 1988 Murder Case

Published by
Waldo Jaquith
August 28, 2009 in Law and Justice.

Alvin Lee “Butch” Morris is free of the charges that he killed Roger Shifflett back in 1988, Tasha Kates writes in today’s Daily Progress. You’ll recall that Morris was arrested for the murder last year, with the bizarre twist that he went on to marry his alleged victim’s wife. The new evidence that came last year was DNA testing of cigarette butts found at the scene of the crime, which matched Morris’s DNA. But a jury deadlocked, and there was a mistrial. Commonwealth’s attorney Denise Lunsford hasn’t dropped the charges—she’s hopeful that more evidence will come to light—but she isn’t going to push for a second trial now, since there’s no reason to think that the outcome would be any different than the first one.

4 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.