Just last week C-Ville Weekly wrote about Josh Bare’s efforts to keep open the Hope Community Center homeless shelter, set up to take the place of COMPASS’ efforts. (I think it was last week. Mysteriously, C-Ville Weekly provides no dates for stories on their website. Or authors, so I can’t tell you who wrote it.) Accused of violating zoning regulations, the city told the shelter that they’d need to shut down unless they got an amendment to zoning regulations to accommodate them. Today Jayson Whitehead writes on C-Ville Weekly’s new blog that the shelter is shutting down, unable to comply with the fire code, with no path forward in their relations with the city, and facing increasingly unhappy neighbors. This will leave 45-60 regular residents without a place to sleep.
Archive for the 'General News' Category
The local homeless population is climbing, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Progress. 292 people in the area are now homeless, an increase from 266 this time last year. A different study, conducted by local schools, has found that the number of homeless children has climbed from 303 to 354. Half of the homeless folks surveyed say that they were evicted or simply couldn’t afford increased rent costs.
And before somebody drags out the long-discredited claim that Charlottesville is some sort of a magnet for the homeless, remember that it just ain’t true. 63% of the local homeless population here is from here, and 23% are from other parts of Virginia. That means that the homeless are way, way more likely to be from here than you are.
City staff want $750k for signage, and council is balking, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Daily Progress. It was just last year that council met staff’s $500k signage request with $200k in funding, so it’s hard to see why they’d support a request so large so soon. Councilors David Brown and Satyendra Huja are quoted as clearly opposing the proposal, Mayor Dave Norris doesn’t think it’s a great idea, and Julian Taliaferro supports it.
The Hook has FOIAed e-mail communications from the city pertaining to the reservoir, and they show that city manager Gary O’Connell is actively opposing citizen efforts to consider dredging. The paper’s staff appear to have become quite the experts in water storage and transportation in the past few months, and present a pretty significant series of facts supporting the notion that dredging is a cheaper, simpler option than the pipeline/mega-reservoir plan. Based on these communications, it certainly doesn’t appear that there’s anything inappropriate going on here — it’s more of a case of “don’t bother me with the facts, I’ve got my mind made up.”
The voice of WINA has passed away. Dick Mountjoy died today, at the age of 61, succumbing to cancer. He first went on-air as a UVa freshman in 1965, beginning at WELK and moving to WINA in 1980, where he spent the remainder of his career. His years on air at WINA made him a beloved figure to thousands. He was first diagnosed with cancer two years ago, when a doctor found a tumor the size of an egg at the base of his tongue. Treatment was unsuccessful — the cancer returned in February of 2007. Funeral plans have not yet been announced.
To learn more about Dick, see Lindsay Barnes’ recent profile of him in The Hook.
The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority has decided to spend $5.2M to reduce the sewage stink from the Woolen Mills processing plant, Seth Rosen and Jeremy Borden write in the Progress. Three million of that will go to building an enclosed receiving statement, with scrubbers to filter outgoing air, and $2.2M will go for equipment to regularly clean the whole joint. Folks living in the area have complained for years, and rightly so — nobody wants to live near that.
Speaking of recycling, Scott Weaver surveys the state of C’ville paper use and recycling in the current C-Ville Weekly. Despite being in the thick of the electronic age, the amount of paper being used continues to climb. Though, interestingly, the amount of newspaper being processed by the RSWA is actually dropping.
I chalk it up to old folks (as does Weaver). I bought a laser printer a year and a half ago and I haven’t even burned through the demo cartridge that came with it. It’s been out of paper for two months, but I haven’t bothered to buy paper.
Jeremy Borden wrote about objections folks are raising to the planned reservoir enlargement last week, and the organization that’s opposing it. Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan are against the $142M plan to embiggen the Ragged Mountain Reservoir by 180 acres and fill it with a pipeline from the Rivanna Reservoir. Their proposal is to, instead, dredge the South Fork of the Rivanna Reservoir. But dredging was considered and rejected as an option by the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority, who didn’t like its unpredictable cost ($127M-$145M) and questionable results.
All of this is a result of the nasty 2002 drought, which everybody would like to avoid. An undercurrent of the reservoir discussions is growth — population growth puts significantly more pressure on our limited water resources, and some folks figure that we if we just don’t expand the reservoir, that’ll prevent the population from expanding much more. On the other side there are people whose livelihoods depend on uninterrupted growth, who want to see the reservoirs expanded to make it possible for new construction to continue. I don’t mean to say that many people fall into these camps, only that this is an unspoken part of this debate that color the views of some opinion makers.
The Hook is apparently in the same mood as C-Ville Weekly right now, and finds themselves looking back at the city’s history in the current issue. Dave McNair features a series of then-and-now photos of West Main Street, using Duncan Brown’s 1979 shots of the street. I know a lot of cvillenewsers enjoy a good look back at the C’ville that was just as much as I do, so y’all will get a kick out of the photos of the Duck Inn, Expresso International, the Cotton Exchange, and a bunch of others.
Via a pair of comments on The Hook’s blog, see also Duncan Brown’s complete collection of 1979 West Main photos, his 1980 downtown photos, and whole mess of photos of Main Street from 1976, taken by John Shepherd. These are some great photos. I was unborn/an infant/a toddler in these few years, so it’s the first time I’ve seen some of these places that I’ve heard so much about.
One year after the city started providing video of Council, Planning Commission, and BAR meetings, they’ve expanded their offerings. They used to offer only Windows Media Player embedded video, which is the very worst way to do it. (But far, far better than nothing.) Now two more formats are offered: MP4 (Quicktime) video and MP3s of the audio. The MP4s can be put straight on an iPod, loaded into iMovie for editing, uploaded to YouTube and otherwise remixed and repurposed, and the MP3s are as portable and flexible as audio can be. This is the raw material that will help citizen media continue to evolve and improve in Charlottesville.
I’ve been puzzled at the accolades that the city has received for their technological offerings, because they so often choose the lesser of available solutions. But this? This is great.
In the Daily Progress, Tasha Kates surveys which area restaurants allow smoking, and fine things are pretty well split. Those restaurants that have banned smoking say that it doesn’t seem to present a problem, and those who continue to allow it don’t seem interested in doing otherwise. The article was prompted by various smoking bans proposed by the General Assembly, whose sixty day session began today.
The county’s recent pledge to reduce greenhouse emissions is nice, but Seth Rosen writes in the Progress that the city will be taking some pretty impressive concrete steps along the same lines. Council will require the city to reduce carbon emissions, buy electricity produced sustainably, and even create a power co-op with other buyers to demand renewable energy from Dominion. The paucity of renewable energy prevents council from setting benchmarks, unfortunately. The commitment to buying power from local producers is especially awesome, though I wonder how it will work. If I stick a 3KW solar panel array on my roof, how will the city get the energy that I produce? Would they buy credits from me, while I just net meter that power back into Dominion’s grid? (I wrote a bunch about this very topic earlier this year.)
Council will vote on this Monday night, where it will almost certainly pass.
Jayson Whitehead has a really interesting story in the current C-Ville about COMPASS Day Haven’s difficulty in getting started. The organization has been working to provide a day shelter for the local homeless population, but trouble finding a location, the loss of a fiscal agent, internal conflicts, difficulty establishing a board and zoning trouble have all slowed them down.
The city staff’s budget includes $24M for capital projects, Seth Rosen writes in the Progress, including the cost of the new pools, a Fontaine fire station, and the Downtown Mall structural overhaul, among other things. That’s a 12.6% increase over last year’s spending on capital improvements, part of an overall proposed 5% increase in the budget.
City Council approved a plan to replace Smith Pool last night, Seth Rosen writes in the Progress. They’ll shut down Crow Pool and rebuild an expanded Smith, in hopes of compensation for the loss of Crow. The renovation will cost $10M.
Yay for C-Ville Weekly for calling out 1-800-GOT-JUNK for illegally strewing their own junk all over town. Companies are sticking up their damned signs along every road in town. At the moment it’s a plague of mortgage brokers’ signs, which was preceded by signs pitching a dating service, which was preceded by Mountain Kim Martial Arts (who presumably had to learn self defense in the first place to deal with people pissed off to find their yard cluttered with signs.)
Fun fact: it’s illegal for you to take them down, so the city/county has to use its own resources (read as “tax dollars”) to pick them up, since it’s not like the spammers are ever going to come along and clean up. I want to know which candidate for commonwealth’s attorneys will prosecute these yahoos. I suppose we can rule out Jim Camblos, since he’s not doing anything about them now, but maybe, like “fighting underage drinking and smoking,” this could be his new cause.
In case you haven’t noticed, I really, really loathe these things.
Kelly writes to point out that Seth Rosen had an article in the Progress last week on the topic of the city’s $200k new signage program, designed to help tourists find their way downtown. The Board of Architectural Review is in the process of approving the array of signs, which will appear at the city’s major entrance corridors, ringing the Downtown Mall, and along the Mall itself. The signs on the Downtown Mall is embarrassingly out of date — if there wasn’t a plan to upgrade them, it would be better to tear them down than to leave them up. The city forecasts that the signs will be up come spring.
Sean McCord writes:
According to an announcement posted today in the City website, residents can now curbside recycle paper products such as catalogues, magazines, junk mail, etc. This is big! For many years, I trotted glass, metal, and newspaper out to the curb, but visited the Recycling Center regularly with my bins of plastic, cardboard, and paper. Then, several months ago, curbside recycling began accepting the plastic and cardboard, so my trips to the center with just boxes of recyclable paper were less frequent. Now, with the city also accepting curbside paper, I can safely dispose of everything on a weekly schedule and save the gasoline I would use to travel to the Recycling Center. It’s brilliant! The City does ask that we place our loose paper recyclables in paper bags and to not put them out during inclement weather, which seems fair.
You can request a recycling bin from the city if you don’t already have one. Since I live out in the county in a small house, the trunk of my Volvo has become the household recycling bin. I visit the recycling center when it gets full. Heck of a system.
The Thomas Jefferson Center has posted to their website a two minute time-lapse film of people writing on the chalkboard, made by recent AHS graduate Sasha Solodukhina. It’s pretty clever:
In today’s Progress, Rob Seal writes about the strange, sudden death of STAB student Douglas Wardle last week. The rising senior and class president to be was in Nicaragua, building houses for the poor, when he suffered a brain hemorrhage, out of the blue, and died. The school reports that dozens of kids have expressed interest in honoring Wardle by participating in the house-building program next summer.
How walkable is your neighborhood? My prior home, downtown, gets a 92/100. My current home gets a big, fat 0, but that’s country living for you.
In this week’s C-Ville, Jayson Whitehead provides a lengthy piece about poverty in the Charlottesville area (20% live below the federal poverty line) for which he spent a day working as a day laborer, doing the sort of basic investigative journalism that we don’t see much around here. He also grabs dinner at Holy Comforter, visits with Holly Edwards at Westhaven Clinic, and checks out the Tom Shadyac-funded conversion of First Christian Church to a multipurpose facility for the homeless and poor.
The Jefferson Madison Regional Library is asking for $21M to restore the Central Library, Seth Rosen reports in today’s Daily Progress, as the building’s infrastructure crumbles around them. It’s housed in a beautiful 104-year-old building (the old post office) and while the structure is fine, some of its components (plumbing, wiring, HVAC, carpeting, etc.) are badly in need of replacement. The hope is to expand the area that’s used to serve the public, better suiting the interests of modern library visitors. The county has earmarked $10.5M in its 2013 capital improvement budget, though that’s not finalized, but apparently the city hasn’t moved on the need just yet. The work isn’t due to start until 2014.
There were July 4th celebrations throughout the area today. I went to Monticello’s 45th annual Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony. So did Rick Sincere, who provides video highlights of the event, including a good chunk of Sam Waterston’s address. And Sylvia’s family took part in the Earlysville parade, and provides photos of some of the other participants.
Just one week after UVa began offering gym benefits to domestic partners, Henry Graff reported for NBC 29 that Charlottesville is now extending the same benefit to their employees. There’s no indication of whether this is a coincidence, or whether the city is simply trying to stay competitive as an employer after UVa had one-upped them.
In the current week’s Hook, columnist Peter Kleeman decries the loss of public space on the Downtown Mall, now that it’s being leased for the exclusive use of not just cafés, but to the ever-growing Charlottesville Pavilion. The agreement between the city and the pavilion allowed them to occupy a certain amount of space, which was extended down the Mall a bit while the transit center was under construction. Construction is finished, but the pavilion wants to continue to cordon off the Mall beginning at the end of the free speech monument, completely blocking the entrance to City Hall. The city is considering allowing the pavilion to continue doing this permanently, any time that they hold an event.
Henry Graff picked up the story for NBC 29, interviewing local blogger Sean McCord, who was recently surprised to be halted at the barricades while taking a walk.
It was only two years ago that Rich Collins was arrested while campaigning on private property. He decried the loss of public space to privatization, a concern that looks downright prescient now.
The thirty year old brickwork on the Downtown Mall is long overdue for replacement, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Progress, and the city plans to spend $1.72M to replace the bricks over the next four years. The two automobile crossings are in particularly bad shape — the physical infrastructure was never meant to routinely handle anything heavier than pedestrians. An employee in the city engineering department told me, many years ago, that the contractor who installed the brickwork in the first place failed to meet the spec, which dramatically shortened the lifespan of the surface. The brick replacement is just a small part of the $7.5M in planned improvements, which will include “buying new street furniture, upgrading underground utilities, adding new lighting and improving the surrounding landscaping.”
The 400th episode of the Simpsons, “You Kent Always Say What You Want,” aired last night, and it contained a mention of Charlottesville. Our cameo is as a faux ice cream flavor. Fred Weaver provides this clip:
Cool!
Good news: The latest edition of Frommer’s “Cities: Ranked and Rated” has Charlottesville ranked as their #17 city, Brian McNeill wrote in yesterday’s Progress, down from its #1 ranking in the first edition of the book. The top ranking, bestowed three years ago, brought a great deal of attention to Charlottesville, particularly in the form of people moving here because they heard it was a good place to live. Hence, the price of housing went way up (hey, it’s a bargain if you’re from Jersey) which, ironically, is precisely why we’ve dropped to #17. As Mayor David Brown points out, “a little breather would be a good thing.”
But, if anybody from outside C’ville asks why we dropped in the rankings, tell them it’s because of our failing schools, legions of homeless, out-of-control STD rates and, of course, that serial murderer who’s still on the loose.
I had no electricity for the bulk of Monday, and I didn’t realize that the shooting at Virginia Tech had become the biggest news story in the world. It took spending yesterday at Virginia Tech, attending the convocation, to figure that out. The town is overrun with media outlets. I’ve never seen so many satellite dishes in one place. If discussion on Charlottesville blogs is any indicator, people want to talk about the 32 students and professors killed two days ago, including Dr. Kevin Granata, who taught at UVa. Have at it.
(Photo: Students filing out of the convocation held yesterday at Virginia Tech.)
The city is planning to build a network of bike trails surrounding the city, paralleling the Rivanna Trail, Seth Rosen reveals in today’s Progress. The city is starting to get easements for twenty miles worth of trails — the same length as the Rivanna Trail — and hopes to begin construction later this year. The easements won’t be finished until 2010, and the trails won’t be done until 2015. The city will create dedicated trails running from the beltway to downtown, too. UVa, frustratingly, isn’t talking with UVa about integrating a bike network of their own with the city’s, but they say they support it in concept.
The simple creation of bike trails will make it viable for people to bike or skate to and from work and school, reducing traffic and giving people an opportunity to improve their health.
In this week’s Hook, Lisa Provence writes about the apparent taking of private property by the city without ever actually taking it. They’ve taken over Steephill Street, despite that one of the owners of the private road, Louis Schultz, would like them to knock it off. From Schultz’s perspective, the city is treating it alternately as public property and private property, depending on what’s most convenient for them. It’s a strange problem.
Schultz raised this with Council last month, and sent me the full text of his comments, which I’ve included below. Disclaimer: Louis and I are old friends.
Continue reading ‘Steephill Street: Accidental Public/Private Partnership’
A source who wishes to remain anonymous tells me:
Kristina Cruise found out this morning she will not be anchoring the 12N and 5P at WVIR anymore. Sharon Gregory will be taking her place on these shows and Laura French will be back next week to anchor the 6 and 11.
This was all, of course, done in the absolute worst fashion. Kristina’s distraught, Sharon’s stuck in the middle…and the fact that most of the newsroom knew this would happen months ago doesn’t make things any easier. To make matters worse, rumor has it they’re only telling her now because she shot a story for The Hook on friday about going head-to-head with Duffy.
But, wait, it gets even more scandalous. From a second source:
The Hook article is supposed to run on Thursday. WVIR managers found out about it and threw a fit. The writing on the wall is that Kristina will eventually be demoted to a reporter…. [M]anagement told her to leave the building today because she is suspended and not allowed back until they decide what to do about the whole mess.
Beth Duffy will be anchoring a pair of daily broadcasts over at the competition beginning on the 16th, though it’ll be the noon and 5pm broadcasts, oddly, and not the 6pm. When she left NBC-29, one of the chief reasons that she cited was a desire to stop working the crazy hours required for her to swing the morning shift. Gray wanted her because they knew she’d be a draw, siphoning off viewers from NBC-29 looking for a familiar face. But it seems odd that they’d put her up on the broadcasts while most people are at work, rather than at what I assume is the more widely-viewed 6pm.
All of this presumably leaves The Hook with a front-page article about a match-up between the two perky young white female anchors, a match-up that may well never happen.
9:25pm Update: I’d been wondering why Sharon Gregory would leave WZVN, in a large market in Florida (64th largest market) to move to a little station in Charlottesville (182nd). Turns out it was her DUI arrest that did it.
Jason See writes:
The members of the Charlottesville-Albemarle Rescue Squad are up in arms over a recent line item budget addition proposed by the City of Charlottesville. Both the City and the Charlottesville Fire Department feel that the response times by the busiest all-volunteer rescue squad in the country are “unacceptable.” Their solution is simply to drop a million dollars of the taxpayers money to allow the Charlottesville Fire Department to transport their own patients.
Officials with the City and Fire Department were hoping to avoid any public debate so that it “would be all under the radar,” however public outcry has forced the City to create a task force to try to make amends with the volunteers.
Thoughts to chew on include:
- If the City was so concerned with response times, why didn’t they try to work it out with CARS instead of becoming sneaky with the Fire Department?
- Coincidence that the former chief of the department is now City Councilor?
(wink, wink.nudge, nudge)- Just think what kind of recruitment and retention program CARS could create to fill the volunteer-void if the City even donated half of that chuck to them, noting that the city never pays a dime for CARS services.
- What would the public think once the Fire Department starts running calls and charging patients for the 6 minute trip to the hospital, when CARS can do the same thing for free?
Rob Seal wrote in the Progress yesterday that an August study shows that unifying city and county fire and rescue services wouldn’t result in any savings, though neither the city nor the county would give a copy of the document to the Progress. (Which I’m not sure they’re legally allowed to withhold.) In his most recent column, Bob Gibson argued that it just doesn’t make sense to keep the services separated. Lone City Council candidate (at this point) Jennifer McKeever isn’t buying the city’s criticism of CARS. And in today’s Progress, Rob Seal and Jeremy Borden describe the area’s planned move to more and more paid rescue employees, moving from our current 91% volunteer rate to something much lower in the next few years.
CARS, to their enormous credit, publishes all of their response times to the web in real time, using Ty Hoeffer’s excellent Rescue Incident Display System. All of those calls are archived, making it trivial to look at their response times. The Albemarle County Fire Department participates in the system, too. But the Charlottesville Fire Department does not, making it impossible to provide a comparative analysis. Jason See was kind enough to go through and weed out all response to calls in the county (which skew response times upwards considerably, of course), providing me with a spreadsheet of 1,338 response times from January 1 through Tuesday. (You can download that spreadsheet, if you like.)
Here’s a histogram of how much time elapses between the call and CARS’ arrival at the scene. It’s a long-tailed normal distribution with a median of 7:29.
And here’s a stacked, filled line graph of the time that it takes to arrive at the scene (the same data as in the histogram) and the time that it takes to get the patient to the hospital, with the total indicating the entire time spent in transit. The median time to the hospital is 6:58 (just 0:31 less than the time to arrive at the scene), and the median total travel time is 13:27.
Also, I looked at the time elapsed from when the call is dispatched and when they’re enroute, and found that the median time elapsed is 1:56, with the great majority between one and three minutes.
Given that the standard response time for life-threatening incidents is eight minutes, it’s noteworthy that the average response time is 7% lower…and that’s including responses to a great many situations that quite likely aren’t life-threating (”sick person,” “back pain,” “childbirth,” etc.) I also have to wonder to what extent any response time problems come from traffic, which the rescue squad can’t control. I have zero experience in rescue, but I have to suspect that the only thing that’s really within their control is how long it takes them to suit up and hit the road.
Back in 1982, Albemarle County was weary of Charlottesville annexing the ever-growing urban ring, enlarging the city and shrinking the county’s tax base. So a deal was struck, preventing the city from expanding but obligating the county to pay the city a percentage of the county’s revenue. In yesterday’s Progress, Jeremy Borden and Seth Rosen wrote about the Board of Supervisors’ Lindsay Dorrier’s frustration about those payments, which will come to $13M this year. (Lloyd Snook points out that no supervisor objects more strongly than Lindsay Dorrier, whose district is in no danger of annexation.) Dorrier complains that $13M is the most that the county has ever had to pay, and thinks it’s time to look at changing that agreement.
The city, of course, has zero interest in entertaining such an idea, and for good cause. The best quote about this comes from City Manager Gary O’Connell: “We will be ready at a moment’s notice to start a discussion about giving up the revenue sharing agreement and doing annexation.”
I want to know when can the city set up the same deal with UVa: They stop annexing land, Charlottesville gives them a percentage of revenue.
Lynn Rainville is getting some national attention for her new website about area cemeteries, thanks to an Associated Press story that hit the wires this morning. Her website, African-American Cemeteries in Albemarle and Amherst County, has detailed records about all 29 historically black cemeteries in the two counties. For example, the record for Mt. Calvary Baptist Church in Ivy lists 21 markers and 17 individuals, features photos of every marker and text transcripts of the fading words carved into the stone.
Lynn also runs a new blog, LoCoHistory, dedicated to the history of Charlottesville and Albemarle County.
UVa’s Department of Urban and Environmental Planning released a fantastic study last year about where Charlottesville’s food comes from — it was one of the most interesting things that I read about the area all year. 
So I was pleased to read Brian McNeill’s piece in Tuesday’s Progress about Piedmont Environmental Council’s new “Buy Fresh, Buy Local” campaign, which will promote the importance of buying local food. They’ll be sending a guide to buying local fruit, veggies, cheese, meat and wine to every home in C’ville and Albemarle. No doubt they’ll explain that it’s better for the economy, for your health, and for national security (believe it or not). For more about local agriculture, see my June blog entry about how when you’re interested in “organic” foods, you probably mean “local.”
Speaking of which, if you’re looking to sign up with a community supported agriculture (CSA) program, now’s the time. At least a few Charlottesville bloggers (myself included) signed up with Horse and Buggy Produce last year, and I intend to do so again this year. Anybody want to plug their CSA?
I wrote a really long blog entry about indigent dental care in Virginia back in August after many hours of research into the topic, and came away convinced that we have a terrible, terrible system for dealing with what is a far bigger problem than I ever would have guessed. (For example, one in five Virginians don’t have a single tooth in their head. Wow.) For most low-income Virginians there is no relief for dental problems, and resulting health problems can easily leave them crippled or even dead.
Now comes news that the Monticello Area Community Action Agency is coordinating a dental program to serve these individuals, Brian McNeill reports in today’s Daily Progress. Private dentists and the Charlottesville Free Clinic will provide the actual care. It seems unlikely that they’ll be able to meet the significant demand (especially demand for adult dental care), but this is an enormous step forward for a very big problem.
On his blog, Dave Norris addresses the question of whether our homeless population has migrated here to take advantage of our services. Using the results of the Thomas Jefferson Area Coalition for the Homeless’ annual census of the homeless, he’s found that the majority of the local homeless population is from the Charlottesville area, the overwhelming majority is from Virginia, and those that aren’t from Charlottesville have lived here for many years. (In fact, a much higher percentage of the non-homeless moved here than the homeless.) Quite simply, the homeless are far more likely to be locals than the non-homeless.
I keep meaning to write about Albemarle County’s new web-based mapping system, but every time I get sucked into playing with it for an hour or so and then I don’t have time to write anything. It’s a map of the entire county with zoning classifications, school districts, soil classifications, watersheds, voting precincts, historic districts, hydrant locations, structures, driveways, elevation contours, bodies of water, 1ft aerial photography and a whole lot more. My wife and I are preparing to acquire land and build a house, and suddenly this data is all enormously useful. This system is really impressive, and the county deserves a lot of credit for making it available.
In this week’s Hook, David McNair takes a look at the four fountains on the Downtown Mall (Miller’s, Central Place, Sal’s, Nook) and, look at Downtown Mall designer Lawrence Halprin’s original vision, finds them wanting. Halprin’s vision was for them to be interactive. There’s a reason why the Central Place fountain is wide, shallow, and has steps leading down into it: people are supposed to be able to walk into it. Instead, it’s surrounded by chain. The three smaller fountains are inaccessible to the public during the warm portion of the year, because the space around them is leased to restaurants for cafés. Everybody McNair talks to agrees that it’s time to make the fountains accessible again and restore Halprin’s plan.
Media outlets across the state conducted their own audit of municipal compliance with Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act this fall, and both Charlottesville and Albemarle did really well. Three requests were made of every 134 cities and counties in the state: crime reports, e-mails between elected officials, and school fire inspection reports. Only thirteen localities in the state granted all three requests, and Charlottesville, Albemarle, and Greene all made the list.
City Council, Planning Commission, and BAR meetings will all be broadcast online beginning Monday, the city announced on Thursday. They’ve been testing this for a bit — which is why I jumped the gun on this two months ago — but now it’s official. Better still, the video will be archived and integrated with agendas and minutes for a fully-searchable archive. Very impressive. (Via Charlottesville Tomorrow)
Albemarle County has issued a notice concerning locations for tree drop off where they will be recycled into mulch for use in public areas.
Phillip Allen Gianniny died on Saturday at the age of 31. Phil, a former member of The Hogwaller Ramblers and The Hackensaw Boys, was perhaps best known to Charlottesvillians for playing banjo on the Downtown Mall. He could be an ornery cuss; Phil was kicked out of just about every bar in Charlottesville, at one time or another. But he could also be a sweet guy, and he was a hell of a musician. Substance abuse made his path in life a rocky one, but he’ll be missed just the same.
It seems like I only learn about awesome people who live here when the Progress runs their obituary. Legendary comic artist Jack Burnley died this week, 25 years after he moved to Charlottesville. Burnley invented the muscle-bound superhero in his work with DC Comics, and drew for Action Comics throughout the 1940s. He was 95 years old.
An airplane has crashed on Rivanna Farm at Riverview Farm, just off of Proffit Road, CBS 19 reports. It’s said to have had four passengers on it from Chesterfield County. At least one passenger is known to be dead. My wife saw a small airplane flying far too low while driving on Stony Point Road some time around 1:30pm today — it was odd enough to concern her, but she thought it must just be sightseers. Presumably more information will be coming in soon.
10:30pm Update: John Yellig provides details for the Daily Progress. It was a Piper Lance that was cleared to land at CHO, but the pilot reported that he was having engine trouble and, in fact, the engine was turned off. He tried to land in a field at the farm but crashed into the woods. The pilot was killed on impact and the plane caught fire. Amazingly, Pegasus was in the air at the time and witnessed the crash, so they were on the scene immediately. It took half an hour for fire crews to figure out how to get to the crash site. The condition of the three passengers hasn’t been reported.
12/11 Update: The deceased is Richmond oncologist Christopher Desch, the RT-D reports. He was 51 year old, and leaves a wife and son in Henrico. It also seems that the early word of there being three passengers was wrong — Desch was the only occupant. Finally, Autria Godfrey at CBS 19 provides a Pegasus flight nurse’s account of the crash from their perspective.
The U.Va library’s Geostat Center makes available maps of Charlottesville from 1907 and 1920, and they’re pretty great. 
The detail and level of description is what really makes it. The room-by-room rendering of the Woolen Mills’ Pantop Academy, for instance, notes that there are night and Sunday watchmen, that it’s heated by steam fueled with coal, and that there’s a 20,000 gallon water tank. Businesses’ names aren’t given but, instead, they’re described. Downtown, Sal’s was a barbershop, CVS was a telegraphy shop, the corner of 3rd SE and Water was a carriage shop and a wheelwright, the Jefferson Theater was the Jefferson Theater (”moving pictures”) and Timberlake’s was Timberlake’s. (Not everything has changed.) All are accompanied by metadata so they can be loaded into mapping software, for that extra touch of awesomeness.
There have been a pair of interesting articles in the past few days about the hundreds of refugees resettled in Charlottesville by the International Rescue Committee. The first is what I guess qualifies as propaganda, an article by the State Department, and the second is Bob Gibson’s pieces from yesterday’s Progress. I knew that refugees were being relocated here, but that was the extent of my knowledge. I had no idea that we’re unusual in the scope and scale of our role in that process, that our schools take a big hit on those kids thanks to No Child Left Behind, or that nearly 100% of refugees are self-sufficient within four months of arriving here.
Give these a read — it’ll give you a new perspective on C’ville’s role in the international community.
MAACA has put on their annual three-day poverty diet over the past three days, in which participants voluntarily spend just $2.83 on food. The idea is to give participants an understanding of what it’s like to live on the budget allotted to food stamp recipients.
This time around, local blogger and CHS student Michael Strickland participated. He kept an audio diary over the course of the three days, talking about what he was eating, how he felt, and how he did with his budget. And it’s available via the Charlottesville Podcasting Network, natch. It’s interesting and enjoyable — I’d love to see more people working with CPN’s Sean Tubbs to create this sort of original audio webcast.
Many of the city’s infrastructure and buildings are starting to age out, John Yellig wrote in yesterday’s Daily Progress, necessitating millions of dollars in impending repairs and upgrades. Roads, sidewalks, the central fire station and city hall all require costly improvements. (City Hall is hideous. I wish we could tear the thing down and start over again. Who thought it’d be a good idea to construct city hall without windows?)
The article doesn’t mention two of the more costly projects due: the central library and the Downtown Mall. The beautiful old building that houses the library on Market Street is badly in need of some serious renovation that the city can’t put off much longer. And the Downtown Mall is crumbling under the weight of vehicular traffic it was never meant to bear, though a fellow in the city engineer’s office told me some years ago that the whole structure has aged badly, and much of it needs to be torn up and rebuilt.
Seems to me spending money on new maintenance-requiring capital improvements (expanding the Downtown Mall down side streets, revamping West Main) isn’t a great use of money right now, unless they’ll lead to increased city revenues sufficient to offset those costs.
Kevin Lynch makes an interesting suggestion in the article: differentiating between commercial and residential properties for the purpose of taxes, such that they can be taxed at different rates.