Erika Howsare profiles the jail’s re-entry program in the current C-Ville Weekly. Locking people up for years and then loosing them on the public without any sort of transition hasn’t really been working out, so the eight-week-long New Beginnings Transitional Re-entry Program is an effort at the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail to prepare a small number of prisoners for life on the outside—teaching them how to get a job, avoid the temptations of their old life, and support their families. The program can accommodate only a very small number of the prisoners, and its effect on recidivism isn’t particularly stellar (a 50% rate instead of 55% for the general population), although that hasn’t been properly measured just yet. Howsare profiles some of the inmates going through the program, avoiding presenting them in the sort of black-and-white, good-and-evil terms that would have been easy, but wrong.
Archive for September, 2009
The conservative Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors has endorsed challenger Rodney Thomas over incumbent David Slutzky in the BoS race, Sean Tubbs writes for Charlottesville Tomorrow / The Daily Progress, despite having endorsed the Democrat last time around. During Slutzky’s inaugural 2005 run, CAAR chose him over Republican Gary Grant, garnering him some $20,000 in campaign contributions from the group. The local group is giving $10,000 to the Republican, no small amount of money in a BoS race.
This is, incidentally, the first Charlottesville Tomorrow story that I’ve noticed in the Progress under their new arrangement.
USA Today has a feature entitled “24 hours in the ER” that happens to be set at the UVA Medical Center. It’s meant to be a slice-of-life piece, showing what happens during a random day in a single hospital, as a way of showing what’s going on with our nation’s healthcare system.
Developer Wendell Wood is upset. He bought a big chunk of rural land—meaning that he can’t develop it, which he’s known since before he bought it—but he had Walmart sign a contract to build a new store there. And then the county wouldn’t let him because, again, it’s zoned rural. He claims Walmart offered a “minimum of $8 million to $9 million…to do what’s called ‘at-site work,’” which Wood implies would have gone entirely to help cover the $25M bridge and road that would be necessary to even get to his parcel. Where is this land? Why, it’s right next to Walmart—on the other side of Sam’s Club, just across the river. Why build another Walmart by the old one? Because they want to replace the old one with a bigger one, leaving the old shell behind. Wood says he’d take over the current location, but one look at Albemarle Square will tell you there’s not a lot of demand for existing big-box stores. So why would anybody support this? Because the Places29 plan calls for building roads parallel to 29, including extending Berkmar, the road in question, and if Walmart could actually toss in $8M-9M towards the cost of road construction, that would be good to get. Brandon Shulleeta dug up all of this for the Daily Progress, and I think it’s got the potential to prove to be a big story. He tried to get Walmart’s side of this, but they’re not talking, so this information is all coming from Wood.
If this all sounds a bit familiar, Wood pulled something very similar a few years ago on the NGIC land, just a bit farther up 29, and successfully got the BoS to agree to convert 30 acres of rural land into develop-able land—which, to date, they have not acted upon—which would turn nearly valueless woodland into a multi-mullion-dollar parcel with a prime location, backed up by phone call to Ken Boyd (who won’t say who he talked to) saying that NGIC would pack up and leave town if the county didn’t go through with the deal. Much like Walmart, NGIC wasn’t willing to talk to the press about those claims, either.
You’d think that this would be the end of it, but BoS member David Slutzky is apparently on Wood’s side, Shulleeta writes, working to designate Wood’s land as developable. (Want to build a new house for your grandkid on your rural land? You’re out of luck. Wendell Wood wants to put in a Walmart? Come on down!) Given the lack of funding for new transportation infrastructure, it looks like all of this is academic anyhow. Whether $25M or $250M, there’s just no money to build roads or bridges.
An unidentified man was hit and killed by a train on Shamrock Road, Stephanie Satchell reports for CBS-19. It’s not clear how long ago he died, or even known who the man is. Police do believe that he was killed after being struck by the train, rather than beforehand, but that seems to about all that they know right now. 09/09 Update: He committed suicide, police say.
More budget cuts are hitting UVA, Bryan McKenzie writes in the Progress, with the state cutting its funding by 8% and requiring university employees to take a day of unpaid leave next spring. Only something like 6% of UVA’s funding now comes from the state—awfully low for an ostensible state college—with this cut coming to about $7.7M. Gov. Tim Kaine’s budget reduction plan (2MB PDF) makes cuts across state government, including layoffs of nearly 600 employees, though none at the university. This is just the latest in a series of such cuts in the past year and a half. Though there have been no layoffs at UVA yet, there’s speculation among many employees that they’re coming.
Disclosure: I’m a UVA employee though, oddly, not a state employee.
The state prison system has shut down the locally-based Books Behind Bars program, Maria Glod writes in tomorrow’s Washington Post, because they’ve deemed it a security threat. As first reported by Bryan McKenzie in Monday’s Daily Progress, the twenty-year-old program has been banned by the Virginia Department of Corrections. Operated out of and funded by the Quest Bookshop on West Main, the program functions without taxpayer dollars, for the purpose of allowing prisoners to better themselves through literacy and education. They’ve provided an estimated one million books to prisoners over the years, according to the Post. Prisoners make requests for books—the dictionary and the Bible are especially popular—which Quest fulfills by mailing books directly to the prisoners, free of charge. The books are treated like anything materials mailed to prisoners, inspected by officials for contraband before being given to prisoners. After prison officials found a CD left in one book and a paperclip in another, they deemed the program both a security threat and a waste of prison employees’ time, and informed Books Behind Bars that they could not send books to prisoners.
Note that prisoners can purchase both books and CDs from approved vendors, and they are permitted to keep up to thirteen books in their cell. So they can receive books, and they can keep books, but they just can’t receive books from Books Behind Bars.
The program’s founder—Quest owner Kay Allison—has asked the Department of Corrections to reconsider their decision, but lacking some sort of pressure other than that of a 78-year-old woman asking nicely, there’s no good reason to think that they’ll change their mind.
City Council has unanimously agreed to ask the General Assembly to prohibit discrimination against state employees based on sexual orientation, the Progress reports.
Right now state law makes it perfectly legal for state agencies to fire somebody for being gay (or, for that matter, straight), although both Gov. Tim Kaine and his predecessor, Mark Warner, have issued executive orders enacting such prohibitions, though the current executive order will expire with Kaine’s term in January. (Kaine’s executive order was his first action in office, in fact.) The Republican candidate for governor, Bob McDonnell, opposed Kaine’s executive order, and issued an opinion against it in his capacity as attorney general in 2006. Executive orders don’t have the legal strength of a law—in March Martinsville’s Virginia Museum of Natural History fired a man for being gay.
The General Assembly is no stranger to debates over the topic. I sat in on a debate over a bill that would prohibit such discrimination back in February of 2006 and, while it was hilarious, it made it pretty clear to me that a bill like this won’t pass so long as Republicans control the House of Delegates, regardless of what Charlottesville City Council wants Richmond to do.
The Board of Supervisors has OKd charging for ambulance service, Sean Tubbs reports for Charlottesville Tomorrow. Strictly speaking, the county isn’t charging for ambulance service, they’re simply giving permission to the Hollymead and Monticello fire stations to charge for service if they see fit, as well as the volunteer rescue squads. The county anticipates that the costs will be picked up by people’s health insurance, with Dennis Rooker saying that this allows the county to “obtain some fees for services that are generally picked up by third parties other than our citizens.” About a third of the state’s localities have similar arrangements. The BoS hasn’t specified how much that may be charged. This is only the first of a series of steps necessary to put the fees into place, so there’s no charge right now.
It’s been five years since Gray Television launched CBS-19 and ABC-16 here in Charlottesville. (Here’s the original cvillenews.com story.) If asked, I would have guessed it’d been, like, a week and a half. We were all relatively fresh off the C-Ville Weekly / Hook split then, seeing some of the results of competition in our weeklies, and I think hopes were high that the new stations would have a similarly beneficial on the staid NBC-29. Five years later, I’d be curious to hear what folks think about CBS-19, ABC-16, and Fox-27, especially their news coverage, and how they’ve affected NBC-29 and the overall news coverage in town. I can’t get local TV stations—there’s a mountain between me and town—so I’ve never actually seen any of their broadcasts, only online excerpts.
It’s been over a decade since the UVA baby switch. (New to town? See Time’s 1999 story. The whole thing is too complicated—and bizarre—to explain here.) The UK’s Daily Telegraph has done a followup story on the two girls, who are now fourteen years old. Callie Conley and her (adoptive) mother, Paula Johnson, are both interviewed by the newspaper, while Rebecca Chittum and her (adoptive) grand/mother, Rosa Chittum, characteristically demur, so this is all from Conley’s perspective. For more, see Mike Allen’s 2008 look back on the decade anniversary of the whole affair in the Roanoke Times.
The Albemarle County School Board is trying to decide whether they should shut down Red Hill, Scottsville, and Yancey elementary schools, Brandon Shulleeta writes in today’s Daily Progress. All three are in need of some significant infrastructure repair, and it’s not obvious whether they should each be renovated, or if they should be shut down and replaced with a single school big enough to accommodate the 525 students. The board’s waiting for a recommendation from superintendent Pam Moran, which is expected next week. There’s a hearing later this month, and a decision is planned for October 22.
Though this might be an infrastructure consideration, inevitably it’s got lots more rolled up in it—how big schools should be, the racial diversity of the schools, how far kids have to ride on the bus, etc. The cheapest option will likely prove to be consolidating the three, but that’s not necessarily the option that will lead to the best education for future students. Expect a ruckus.
The county budget is in rough shape, Rachan Dixit writes in today’s Progress. Sales tax and personal property tax revenues are down 6.6% and 4.8% respectively, leaving Albemarle with a $4.7M shortfall. That’s worsened by the governor’s recent budget cuts, leaving the county $600k short on expected state funding. Short of a spectacular improvement in the economy in the coming months, the debate over taxation and spending should be particular contentious come spring. If this seems familiar, it’s because the same thing happened last year.
Albemarle County school superintendent Pam Moran has recommended against consolidating three southern elementary schools, Henry Graff reports. The school board is debating whether to consolidate or renovate three schools—Red Hill, Scottsville, and Yancey. The school board has been waiting on a recommendation from staff, which they may or may not adhere to. They’ll make a decision next month.
One month ago BoS candidate Rodney Thomas was interviewed by Lisa Provence for The Hook. In the context of highlighting his local roots (versus those of his opponent, incumbent Democrat David Slutzky), Provence wrote:
Rodney Thomas has lived in Charlottesville all his life. He went to Lane High School and as a freshman, was president of the Young Republican Club in 1958, the year Governor Lindsay Almond closed the school rather than integrate it.
“We got along fine,” he says of African-American students. “I think it was a pure government thing to force down people throats. Blacks had the best school. We loved to go over there [to Burley].”
Thomas is referring, of course, to massive resistance, which closed both Lane High, the white school, and Burley High, the black school. Lane’s facilities were considerably better than those of Burley, as was standard for black schools; hence the debate over “separate but (un)equal” and Brown v. Board of Education. Since Thomas wasn’t a student at Burley, though, he may not have known that.
Well, those remarks didn’t escape Slutzky’s attention, and he brought them up at Albemarle Democrats’ annual barbeque last weekend, as Brandon Shulleeta writes in today’s Progress. When asked to explain the remarks by Shulleeta, Thomas said that he didn’t really want to talk about integration, for fear of being “misconstrued,” but said that he “always thought that integration was necessary.” But then, unfortunately for Thomas, he kept talking:
However, Thomas said he doesn’t always use words that society considers “politically correct.”
“There’s certain things that I say, that I’ve said all of my life. And I really don’t want to have to change my vocabulary just to adapt to someone else’s politically correct answer to something. I mean, I’m still having a hard time calling Asians, ‘Asians.’ I still call them ‘Orientals,’” Thomas said. “And I have a hard time calling the black people African-Americans. I’m forcing myself to do it.”
Thomas added: “The word ‘N-word’ was never used in my house. And I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think I’ve ever used the word either, unless it was ‘Negro.’ I don’t know; do they mind me calling them a Negro anymore? Is that improper also?”
Ouch.
The city planning commission isn’t going to regulate yard sales after all, Sean Tubbs writes for Charlottesville Tomorrow. They were considering requiring permits in response to homeowners holding never-ending “yard sales” that really amount to unlicensed businesses selling quasi-junk in an area not zoned for businesses, and also because of the illegal posting of signs to promote legitimate yard sales. (Two examples provided are the produce stand somebody set up on the corner of Long and High recently and the sketchy sales of rugs and shoes in an empty parking lot on Preston). The commission figures that there are enough existing laws that make these sorts of things illegal that there’s no need to require that everybody else go through an onerous process to hold a simple yard sale.
VDOT is recommending a couple of new connecting roads, Sean Tubbs writes for Charlottesville Tomorrow.
The first is a chunk of the western bypass, extending “Leonard Sandridge Drive” (the exit to the bypass that UVA built recently, near the law school) on the other side of the bypass, running across Barracks Road and connecting to the far side of Hydraulic, towards Albemarle High School. That could hug the developed area pretty closely, connecting to and expanding Georgetown Road, or it could loop farther out, still connecting to Hydraulic where Georgetown does. There’s a third option of running clear up to Earlysville Road. (See the Daily Progress’ map.) The idea is to formalize what many people already do—drive clear up 29 from Barracks Road without ever driving on 29—but starting back at UVA. The folks in Canterbury Hills are about to bust a vein over these proposals—this road would run right through the back of many people’s property there, or through the middle of the neighborhood if the Georgetown option is chosen. VDOT emphasizes that this isn’t a bypass—it’s just a new road, meant to be used for local traffic. Presumably that means that there will be connecting roads, traffic lights, etc., so this new road would be opening up a whole new corridor for development. Part of VDOT’s interest has to be that the clock is ticking on the land that they acquired for the western bypass—if they don’t put it to use within the next few years, they’re going to have to sell it back.
The second proposal is an exit for 29N from the bypass at Best Buy. “We already have one,” you say? That’s true. (Though I figure we have two—one via Hydraulic and one that’s direct.) But VDOT wants us to have another one, so they’re proposing an elevated roadway that would run north from that stretch between Hydraulic and 29—going towards Barracks Road, it’s on your right where you can see a stream and a pedestrian footbridge—between Kroger and Dominion Power, over Hydraulic and the used car dealer owned by that guy who shot his neighbor’s cat, and then merge into 29 in front of Seminole Square. (See VDOT’s rendering.) If Albemarle Place ever happens, that merge point would seem to prevent access to it.
Given the state of Virginia’s transportation budget, this all seems academic. Though VDOT wants to see Charlottesville help fund it with local property tax increases along the corridor, it’s tough to see how that could possibly add up to being enough money. (Though it would send local business groups into fits, simultaneously favoring new roads and opposing having to actually spend any money to build them.) VDOT’s study group is going to take these recommendations to the Commonwealth Transportation Board in a couple of months, who will presumably decide whether it’s a high enough priority for the state that they’re prepared to spend however much it’ll cost.
Rachana Dixit had a commendable story in the Daily Progress a couple of weeks ago that I was remiss in not mentioning at the time, “What did McIntire really want?” There have been a lot of efforts to divine the intent of Paul Goodloe McIntire in donating land and money to establish McIntire Park, but Dixit pulled the deed for a chunk of the land and checked it out. It says:
Said property shall be held and used in perpetuity by the said City for a public park and play ground for the white people of the City of Charlottesville but the authorities of the said City shall at all times have the right and power to control, regulate and restrict the use of said property.
“White people”? Awk-ward. That makes it a bit tough to adhere to McIntire’s (apparent) intent. That particular parcel of land is at the Rugby interchange. (The land that makes up the park is a patchwork of land acquired at different times.) One of the parcels where the parkway is going was condemned by Council “for use by white people as a park and playground.” Park opponents tell Dixit that McIntire surely didn’t have different intents for different chunks of the park—that in specifying that the land was to be “held and used in perpetuity…for a public park” he meant the whole shebang, and not a particular few acres. The city, obviously, disagrees.
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