Month: December 2002

It starts with the music , one of those brass-and-percussion fanfares that news anchors like to hum on their way to work. Then the announcer trumpets: “From Comedy Central’s World News Headquarters in New York, this is ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.’” And before you’ve had a chance to sort through the incongruity of Comedy Central having its own news division, let alone one with a global reach, the music has changed to a soft-rock vamp and the camera has zeroed in on Stewart, a former-frat-boy type with facial features that wouldn’t be out of place on Mount Rushmore. The hair’s a dignified blend of dark brown and gray. And what’s more important, there’s lots of it. For although we Americans are capable of devoting an entire television channel to comedy, there’s no room for a bald anchor.

Stewart isn’t a news anchor, of course. He just plays one on TV. But is it too hard to imagine that someday in the future, when Tom, Dan and Peter can no longer see the TelePrompTer, Stewart will be asked to serve as the National Entertainment State’s once-over-lightly Master of Ceremonies? He’s got the paper-shuffling, pen-twirling thing down. And he’s capable of shifting, in a nanosecond, from utter seriousness to utter fatuity. You laugh, but that may be what we’re looking for in the news anchors of tomorrow. In the past, we wanted them to be wise. (Walter Cronkite, everybody’s favorite uncle.) In the future, we may want them to be wiseasses. For the times, they are a changin’, ladies and gentlemen, and the news better change with them or it could find itself out of a job.

We’ve all seen the statistics. In 1962 (or ‘72 or ‘82 or ‘92) blah-blah percent of Americans read a daily newspaper or watched the nightly news. Today blah-blah percent do, the new blah-blah being significantly lower than the old blah-blah. And the percentages for young people—that Holy Grail of advertising known as Generation X—are even worse. As the 20-odd million gray hairs who tune in to the network news every night get grayer and grayer, nobody’s joining them in the living room. Instead, we’re tuning in to “The Daily Show.” Or we’re poring over the Onion, that weekly cartwheel of fake headlines. Billing itself as “America’s Finest News Source,” the Onion is the newspaper to end all newspapers, a wake-up call to an industry that appears to have taken an overdose of sleeping pills.

Does the proliferation of news outlets like “The Daily Show” and the Onion, that scribble a Mona Lisa mustache on the face of the Fourth Estate, signify the final triumph of infotainment? The giggle-ization of American society? The decline of Western civilization? The end of the world? Or do they, in that tongue-in-cheek, finger-in-the-ribs way of theirs, offer us a view of the world that traditional news outlets are largely blind to? Does Generation X, which supposedly can’t find Iraq on a map, know something the rest of us don’t know—that Baghdad is both a dateline and a punchline? When life turns into a media circus, isn’t a fun-house mirror the best way to see what’s going on? And aren’t news spoofs, therefore, a more accurate reflection of our time? Or are they just, you know, funny?

Stewart likes to open the show with a dollop of pure nonsense—memorably forgettable musings on, say, how risky it is to ignore that old warning about letting the bedbugs bite. (“They won’t stop,” he says with feigned resignation.) Then it’s on to Headlines, a series of riffs on the day’s top stories à la the Weekend Update segment of “Saturday Night Live.” For those who don’t remember “That Was the Week That Was,” a mid-‘60s TV series that made a mockery of current events, “Saturday Night Live” would seem to have invented the fake news broadcast. And its long line of anchors, from Chevy Chase to Dennis Miller to Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon, provides a shadow history of the news-reading game. Chevy Chase was Chevy Chase, and we weren’t—anchor as smug superstar. Miller was one of us, only with more flair and more hair, lots more hair.

And Fey/Fallon? Well, let’s just say they’re cute as heck and funny as hell—anchors as precocious eighth-graders. At least Fey seems precocious. Fallon sometimes seems preconscious, dozing off in the middle of a bit. They’re supposed to be a mismatch made in heaven. As producer Lorne Michaels said about the pairing, according to Fallon: “Tina’s going to be the brainy girl, and you’re going to be the kind of goofy guy who doesn’t do his homework and asks her for answers and stuff.” They certainly look the part, Fey with her smarty-pants glasses and Fallon with his randomly spiked hair. But they both have a tendency to crack up at their own jokes, as if they were broadcasting from somebody’s basement. Consequently, the political humor, coming from the mouths of babes, doesn’t seem all that political. Weekend Update used to take its lack of seriousness a lot more seriously.

Stewart, on the other hand, has that you’re-either-born-with-it-or-you’re-not quality called gravitas. When his face is at rest, he could actually be an anchor—he’s that boringly handsome. And his voice, although not quite up there with the dearly departed Phil Hartman’s, has just enough of that adman/madman plasticity to sell us the news as if it were a used car. He isn’t alone, of course. Like any big-time news anchor, he’s surrounded by a stable of thoroughbred correspondents, all of whom should have been put out to pasture long ago. Steve Carell, Stephen Colbert, Ed Helms, Mo Rocca, Nancy Walls—are these not the most hilarious people on TV right now, somehow managing to keep straight faces while their routines twist in and out of plausibility? Or do the show’s writers, led by former Onion scribe Ben Karlin, deserve a lot of the credit?

When the show’s clicking, the laughs come from everywhere, whether it’s Helms using red and blue M&Ms to show the recent shift in the Senate or Stewart ad-libbing a remark about George Bush’s “stimulus package” when a video clip of the spread-legged president conferring with someone at the White House reveals more presidential timber than many of us care to see. For all its massaging of our funny bones, “The Daily Show” can be surprisingly biting, as when an oil-industry representative (or at least an anchor playing one) says about the latest megaton tanker spill, “Fuel oil is good for fish. They like it. It’s like vitamins.” At such moments, you can’t help but wholeheartedly endorse the show’s ambitious tagline: “Now More Than Before.”

The Onion (also available on the web at www.theonion.com) may not be able to make that claim. Like so many newspapers, it often succumbs to deadline pressure these days, sending out “articles” that are printed to fit rather than fit to print. Articles have never been the paper’s strong suit. After repeating the headline (often verbatim) in the lead sentence, the writers tend to spin their wheels, as if developing a comic premise were a completely foreign idea. Ah, but those headlines! Like haiku, they’re still capable of condensing a world of insight into a few choice words. “Kevin Bacon Linked to Al-Qaeda”—how simple, how deceptively perceptive. Or how’s this for sheer pithiness: “Vote, Voter Wasted.” The dropping of “a,” “an” and “the”—or any other word that might slow down a one-liner—has been a source of constant amusement for the Onion’s writers and readers.

“The Daily Show” and the Onion could be owned by the same media conglomerate, so closely do their senses of humor mesh. And behind those senses of humor is a sense of the world as this man-bites-dog-eat-dog media fishbowl where everybody lies, cheats and steals, both to get ahead and just for the hell of it. Neither outlet is particularly partisan; they tend to be equal-opportunity offenders. But both offer a thorough critique of the way news is packaged these days, everything arranged into neat little boxes and wrapped up with shiny bows. In fact, that may be the major difference between “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and, say, “The Nightly News with Tom Brokaw.” Brokaw refuses to acknowledge the shiny bows. Stewart goes after them with the Christmas-morning glee of a 6-year-old child.

So, if you were an 18-to-34-year-old Nielsen ratings point, which show would you watch? A lot of ink has been spilled in the last 10 years trying to define Generation X, those hazy, lazy, crazy kids of the boom-and-bust ‘80s and ‘90s. And the general consensus seems to be that, when it comes to the news, they…well, they’re not terribly into the news. That’s what the pollsters tell us anyway. But maybe the pollsters are wrong. Maybe Gen Xers are interested in the news. Maybe they’re just not interested in having the news presented to them with a straight face. Maybe they prefer their news at a slant. These are kids who grew up in the media whirlwind, after all. They’re used to spin. And maybe what they want is for the news to acknowledge when spin is being spun—with a well-timed smirk, perhaps.

Jon Stewart is the Man of a Thousand Smirks, each one perfectly timed so as to squeeze every last ounce of laughter out of the studio audience. But if that was all Stewart was, a smirk machine, then “The Daily Show” wouldn’t be worth watching. He also happens to be a surprisingly well-informed guy and a fantastic interviewer. “I like to read the papers, keep up with the world,” he joked one night, but you get the impression he wasn’t joking, really. His interests range far and wide: He can trade deep thoughts with David Halberstam one night, compare favorite videogames with Ja Rule the next. And his guests are as likely to be Washington politicos as Hollywood stars. It’s an opportunity for the pols to let their hair—or, in John McCain’s case, their comb-overs—down. But even that can be instructive. (Don’t quit your day job, senator.)

Are we a nation of infotainment whores? Would the vast majority of us prefer to be well entertained rather than well informed, leaving the diehards to their C-SPAN marathons? Perhaps, but what such questions don’t take into account are the myriad ways we make sense of the world these days. We combine something we read in the newspaper with something we watched on the nightly news with something we heard on the radio with something Jay Leno said with something our neighbor said with something that was floating by in cyberspace, and tomorrow it may be a whole new mix of sources. We’re constantly bombarded with information, and the stuff that tends to stick is the shtick. Is it any wonder, then, that most presidential candidates manage to find their way onto a late-night TV talk show?

“The show is not a megaphone,” Stewart said when asked whether he prefers to go for the funny bone or the jugular. But he may be underestimating his ability to shape the hearts and minds of his audience—i.e., his role as both baby-boom and baby-bust mouthpiece. (Barely 40, he’s a tweener.) In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, it was David Letterman who led the late-night talk-show hosts back up Comedy Hill, pausing briefly to wipe Dan Rather’s eyes, then slowly turning the valve on the nitrous-oxide tank. But the most purely emotional return to the air may have been Stewart’s. Fighting back tears, he delivered a nine-minute valentine to the Big Apple that Howard Stern would rib him about for weeks afterward. “Our show has changed,” Stewart said, softly. “What it’s become, I don’t know.”

Has it changed? Not so you’d notice. The Onion, newly arrived in New York City, also stopped the presses for a few days. (Nothing puts comedy writers out of business faster than a national tragedy.) But after an appropriate period of mourning, it discovered that people wanted to laugh more than ever, not less. “U.S. Vows to Defeat Whoever It Is We’re at War With,” the major headline in the September 27 issue announced, nailing to the wall the Bush administration’s determination to kick someone’s, anyone’s, ass. By the following week, things had pretty much returned to abnormal: “Greenland Thinks It Looks Fat in Mercator Projection.” But the headline that seemed to capture the mood of the country may also have represented a bit of wishful thinking on the Onion’s part: “A Shattered Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Bullshit Again.”

The September 11 attacks threatened to end our decades-long pose of ironic detachment, which baby-busters share with baby-boomers. Suddenly, we were thunderstruck with the importance of being earnest. We didn’t want to mime quote marks with our fingers every time we said something. But it turns out that irony, which has been handed down from David Letterman to Conan O’Brien, from “Seinfeld” to “Friends,” from Euripides to Shakespeare to Swift to Twain to Mencken to Wolfe to Eggers, is bigger than Osama bin Laden, bigger than Al-Qaeda, bigger than war. Irony has often been considered a luxury item, something to indulge in during times of peace and prosperity. But maybe it’s closer to a necessity, something to reach for when the powers that be refuse to say what they mean, mean what they say.

And maybe “The Daily Show” and the Onion, like a pair of corrective lenses, allow us to see what we would otherwise miss, which is that the mainstream media are themselves distorting the truth, skewing the news. If present trends continue, there’ll come a day when none of us reads a daily newspaper or watches the nightly news. We’ll get everything off the web, or we’ll get a little bit here and a little bit there, as we’ve always done. And the news spoofs? Maybe they won’t be called the news spoofs anymore. Maybe they’ll be called the news. Maybe Jon Stewart, America’s Jokemaster General, will tell us everything we need to know about this wacky world we live in. Today, you have to keep up with the news to get all the jokes. Tomorrow, you may have to get all the jokes to keep up with the news.

Flashlights, GOP handbooks and dirty shirts: very, very costly.

 

This will not be an O. Henry moment.In what follows you will find no stories of bartered hair and pocket watches. If there is sentimentality in these tales of best and worst gifts, we didn’t put it there. Deploying the sharpest investigative tools, by which we mean, of course, telephone and e-mail, we have asked some of Charlottesville’s fine folks to spill it on what has thrilled them and chilled them. Read on and learn. And here’s a hint: Stay away from toilet fixtures, discount candy and anything with the words “pickled” and “pig” in the description. That is, if you want to be invited back to the feast next year.

 

Kore Russell

Proprietor, Oasis Day Spa

One of the best gifts I ever received was when I was in Nagoya, Japan, and I had been with my ex-husband on a blues music tour. We were in a tour bus going back to the hotel. For some reason the bus was stopped. And B.B. King was up the stairs looking for me. At the time he called me Mrs. Harris. He walked up to me and handed me asingle red rosefor no reason except to be sweet. I kept it because I felt it was a real honest, sincere sentiment and he wanted to make me smile and give me a gesture of friendliness.

 

Charles Peale

Illustrator and WTJU radio host

A few years ago I was given a present by a friend of mine. It was a photograph that she found in her attic, really large, 20” x 18” or something like that. It’s a sterling portrait of a woman in her bridal outfit. She has a string of pearls, her veil off, flowers in her hand and she’s staring off. It was taken by Bradford Bachrach, who apparently wasa sought-after photographeraround here, or maybe somewhere else. It was really something. I have it up in my office. Somehow it was the best present and worst present I ever got, because my friend said she just found it. Anyway, people often come in here and say, “Is that your mother?”

Damani Harrison

Frontman, Beetnix

It was last Christmas. My older sister and I had been really tight until the time I was 16 or 17 and she left home to join the military. While she was gone, a lot of things happened in her life and I had not seen her for more than a week in four or five years. Last year in August she told me she had met a guy, and they were engaged to be married. She called me right before Christmas and told me she wanted to get married here in Charlottesville with my family and me. She came up here Christmas Eve. It took us forever to track down a justice of the peace on Christmas Eve. We married her in town and her daughter was there, too. Her husband was a really wonderful guy. We reconnected that day. And ever since then, we’ve been so tight. We had a beautiful dinner that night. When my wife and I got married, we had a wine goblet that splits in two like a yin yang. My sister and her husband drank from it during their ceremony. That was the greatest gift that I could have gotten—that my sister wanted to share that special moment with me anddrove all the way up from Mississippito do it.

 

Matteus Frankovich

Tea Missionary, Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar

The best gifts were all the American classics. The Schwinn Stingray, the Red Rider BB gun. The best gift was traveling with a friend in British Columbia who got me a ticket to asensory deprivation tankand my mind was particularly ripe at the time and I entered into a state, which has not left me since. It was one of supreme neutrality in which the lines between good and bad diminish. So asking me about a good gift or a bad gift…. Basically what I’m saying is that every complete vision of God must have a vision of terror in it and often times you say the “worst gift” and that could be the most transformative. Like putting you at your wit’s end, you sometimes come closest to the ultimate in those experiences. That would be desirable for me.

 

Ted Rall

Cartoonist and political commentator

The worst gift I ever got was in 1984. I was working on the Mondale campaign at the time. I was really crazy about this girl andspent a ridiculous amount of moneyon a watch for her. It was beautiful and she was really pleased with it, but she didn’t give me anything. Christmas passed; we were well into the new year. It sort of got to be a joke. Finally she decides to cough up a gift. It should be noted, I was in college at the time and had just had my financial aid package completely gutted by Reagan. I was working three jobs trying to stay in school, my grades were going to hell and I really held Reagan personally responsible for the fact that my life was going to hell. With all this, what does she do? She gives me this really, really cheesy GOP propaganda book for Christmas on February 1. And it wasn’t a gag gift. She said, “I thought you liked politics.” It was at that moment that I realized I had to dump this girl I was crazy about who I had thought I would marry.

 

Adam Thorman

Downtown regular

The worst gift I ever got was adirty white shirtfrom a thrift store, from my brother. The best gifts I ever got I bought myself, and there are a lot of them.

Mary Murray

Graphic designer

The worst Christmas present I ever got was when I got a Gravely lawn mower, which is a really good lawn mower, but the message was clear:Guess who’s mowing the lawn?

The best Christmas present I got was from my present husband who doesn’t know that much about art but he got me a French painting easel. The first couple of times I took it out, I was too self-conscious to stay out in public, until my very good friend said, “Shut up and paint.” Now I take it outside and to painting class and I park it in my living room so I look like an artist.

 

John Owen

Interior designer/painter

I was once given a soft toilet seat. That was the worst.

One of the best was from my daughter Sarah who wrote mea wonderful book of poemswhen she was very young and bound it herself and put illustrations in it. Every time I move, should my address change, Sarah will come and find it so she knows where it is should I ever lose it.

 

Alexandria Searls

Writer/photographer

The best Christmas present I’ve ever received: a gold garnet ring that I wear. I’ve also received a beautiful Twelve Days of Christmaspop-up book, by the artist Robert Sabuda. It’s gorgeous.

Worst present I’ve ever received: I have a charm bracelet, and I once received a charm that I just

didn’t want to put on there.

 

Bryce McGregor

Publisher, C-VILLE Weekly

One of the best gifts I got was when I was 5 years old. I got an Electro-Shot Shooting Gallery. It was an arcade-kind of game that had BBs and it was self-fed. But there was a hole in the back andone of the BBs fell outand I stuck it in my nose and ended up in the hospital. I spent Christmas afternoon in the emergency room. My parents treated it as though I had a knife in my frontal lobe, but the doctor plugged up one nostril, put a Kleenex on the other and said, “blow,” and out it came.

 

John Gibson

Artistic Director, Live Arts

We had an aunt who was notorious for her bargain shopping, and one Christmas she stopped by a Russell Stover outlet and we each got two pounds of candy that had been fused together into one solid mass—factory-reject candy. And it wasall fruit creams, too.

 

Terri Saunders

Proprietor, Sunrise Herb Shoppe

To me the best gifts are those that touch my heart, and usually they’re fromsomeone I loveor someone who loves me. It’s not so much the substance of the gift but what’s behind it. Unless the intent is negative, I think any gift is a good gift.

 

Eden Turkheimer

Seventh Grader, Buford Middle School

I got a cell phone. It was good because I can use it and I don’t have topay a billon it and I don’t have to borrow my Dad’s because I got my own.

The worst gift was a hot pink shirt with Barbie on it. I got it when I was 8 and I never wore it.

 

Sandy McAdams

Proprietor, Daedalus Bookshop

Twenty-two years ago at the holiday season, my wife, finally, after enormous pressure, agreed to marry me. Best present I ever got. She’s wonderful, has a huge heart, kept me out of jail andI’m not dead.

 

Barbara Shifflett

Proprietor, Station and Mono Loco restaurants

My best gift was the first year my dad bought Christmas gifts on his own, because Mom always bought. It was incredible to get a gift from your dad that you knew he picked. It was a winter sweater with knitted flowers appliquéd on.

The worst was when someone gave me a jar ofpickled pig lips. It was horrible. I threw it away or probably I re-gifted it like they did on “Seinfeld” to someone equally as deserving.

 

Ann McDaniel

Director, The Warehouse (the official Dave Matthews Band fan club)

In thinking this over, my memory keeps returning to the Xmas when I was probably 8 years old.

I opened a small flat box containing a wonderfulpen and ink drawing my father, an architect/artist, had done of a beautiful canopy bed. It took me a moment to figure out, but in the basement was a canopy bed and all matching bedroom furniture. It was one of the best Christmases ever.

 

Jill Hartz

Director, University of Virginia Art Museum

The best gift was when I was 14, I got tickets to see the Beatles in Detroit. So you can imagine! My father took me with three other girls. He dropped us off and picked us up afterwards. Inside it was just abunch of screaming girls. We made these gum-paper chains that we threw at them. It wasn’t a very long concert, in retrospect. They opened with “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” The most disappointing part of it was that my father had contacts with people who knew them and thought we’d be able to go to a cocktail party and meet them. But that fell through.

 

Adam Geilker

Fourth Grader, Johnson Elementary School

I don’t know what the worst gift I ever got was, but the best was when I was 4 and my grandmother I call Nana gave me a 3-foot-long white teddy bear.It was all furryand everything. It’s really old and tattered now. Now I use him as a pillow, but he’s mainly legs so he’s not much of a pillow. I named him Jonah.

 

Randolph Byrd

Publisher and Republican analyst

I was 10 years old and I wanted a “big boy” bicycle—26 inches. What I wanted was aSchwinn Phantombut I didn’t want the red one. That year they made them in all chrome. I wanted the all-chrome one. My parents told me prior to Christmas there were none available so I thought I’d have another bad Christmas with just socks and underwear and a lump of coal in my stocking. And I woke up Christmas morning and there was the beautiful, dazzling chrome bike. I felt like Pee-Wee Herman incarnate. That was my Cadillac for a long time.

 

Jen Sorensen

Cartoonist and this issue’s cover artist

A few years ago, my boyfriend, now my betrothed, went to Hawaii over the holidays and brought me back a tiki doll key chain. The tiki was supposed to be a reference to a “Brady Bunch” episode called “The Tiki Caves,” which unfortunately, I had never seen. He also gave me ashot glass covered with hula girls.

Of course, he intended these to be the worst gifts ever, but in these ironic times, perhaps that makes them the best gifts ever.

 

Al Byrne

Co-founder, Patients Out of Time, a marijuana

education group

I was 17 years old. I had been dating her for three years. I was madly in love. She gave mea flashlight. And she did it in front of my best friend and his date. It was over. Right at that moment.

 

NJ Gauthier

Local Music and Metal Director, WNRN-FM

When I was about 6 years old, around Christmas time I was complaining that our cat’s Christmas stocking was bigger than mine, and then—that Christmas day I came downstairs and Santa had brought mea stocking 4-feet tall! Full of goodies. I didn’t complain about my stocking that year again. I think later Santa burned that 4-foot stocking due to the cost of filling such a stocking, but at least I had it for a while.

 

Chad Hershner

Executive Director, The Paramount Theater

One of the things I remember is that growing up as a kid I always got a large orange at the bottom of my stocking every year. It was because my mother grew upin the years of the Depression, and they got an orange or chocolate bar. That was their special gift. I always got an orange and it was always special. It reminded you that then the holidays were more about family and treasuring the gifts you have around you every day.

 

Andrew Holden

Living-wage activist

Best gift was when I was in jail [for protesting low wages at the Courtyard by Marriott Hotel]. It was definitely the best gift I ever received. My fiancée knitted me a scarf herself. It’s nothing fancy, but she put so much love into it that it made it wonderful. I wear it all the time.

The worst gift wasone doughnutthat I received as a Christmas bonus from an employer, a factory I worked at. It was a glazed doughnut.

What purpose does a gate serve but to limit access? Depending on the setting, a gate can forbid freedom or promise a new horizon. Or, if you live in Keswick, Glenmore, Lake Monticello or any of the ersatz gated subdivisions around Charlottesville, a gate can rise as a shining symbol of such lifestyle amenities as electronic surveillance devices, swimming pool complexes, clubhouses and steeply rising property values. From the outside, the gates send a hearty message of “Do Not Enter.” From the inside, they signal a distinctive brand of “community.”

But whereas other parts of the country have experienced a rush on wrought iron, so to speak, as concerns about crime and privacy drive families out of the cities and into the suburbs, Charlottesville has become home to hundreds of sequestered houses apparently for different reasons.

“We have a giant bubble over our community,” says Charlottesville Albemarle Association of Realtors President Pat Jensen. “With so many beautiful and safe places to live, gated communities simply don’t mean the same thing here as they do in other parts of the country.”

Still, Charlottesville’s gated enclaves share at least one feature with similar neighborhoods around the United States: They practically guarantee an above-average return on investment. Whether it’s the presumed prestige factor or an epidemic of golf enthusiasm, houses in places like Keswick appreciate at a rate that observers say is greater than the County’s annual 7 percent norm.

Not surprisingly, gated communities inspire vehement opposition, too, among those who believe they promote isolation and homogeneity, not to mention an “us”-and-“them” mentality.

 

Down and out in Fluvanna County

The oldest gated community in our area, Fluvanna’s Lake Monticello, which was built in 1970, doesn’t seem to be constructed on the Who’s Who foundation of other gated enclaves. With more than 3,500 acres filled with 4,500 homesites, the local price of the fortress mentality, in this neighborhood at least, is less than one might think—$75,000 to $500,000, according to Greg Slater, a manager at Lake Monticello. (Lake Monticello also offers three areas that are not gated for those who would prefer access to the golf, pool, lake and clubhouse facilities without the manned porthole experience.)

And, claims Slater, that budget price can buy individuality. “We have no cookie-cutter homes here,” he says.

Close enough to Charlottesville to be convenient but far enough away to be more affordable, Lake Monticello, says Jensen, is a place where “you can simply buy more house for your money than in the rest of Albemarle.”

Not only that, but for an annual owners association fee of $490, you buy access to a 352-acre man-made lake with more than 22 miles of lake shoreline for swimming, fishing and boating; an 18-hole championship golf course; three clubhouse eateries ranging from formal to casual; private campgrounds; tennis courts; and several playing fields. Lake Monticello even has its own closed-circuit informational TV channel. In a mini town like that, why (aside from earning a living) would anyone want to venture past the gate?

For at least one resident, however, a man originally from New Hampshire who would be interviewed only on the condition of anonymity, neither the amenities nor the gate were the appeal. He retired to Lake Monticello six years ago after buying his house sight unseen, he says, because “the biggest draw was the reasonable price.”

“I rarely even use the lake, golf course or pool,” he says.

Jeane Rashap and her husband moved to Lake Monticello about nine months ago from a home they rented near Charlottesville’s Rugby Road. Although they loved living in the City, when it came time to buy, there was just nowhere else they could find a 2,700-square-foot home for around $200,000. “The golf has been nice for my husband,” says Rashap, “but we wouldn’t have chosen Lake Monticello if we’d found something affordable somewhere else.”

 

Privilege or necessity

Glenmore, the 10-year-old gated colony in Albemarle, east of Charlottesville and on the other end of the pricing spectrum, draws its residents not out of affordability (prices for houses can soar past $1 million), but sheer exclusivity. And nearby Keswick, considered one of the area’s most elite communities, offers 300 homes ranging in size from 1,200 to 10,000 square feet at prices that can be upwards of $4 million.

Evidently, there’s something of value to keep secure behind those gates.

“With all that’s going on in the news today,” says Jeff Gaffney, the supervising broker for the section of Real Estate III that manages Glenmore, “people are looking for that extra safety factor.” Like Lake Monticello, Glenmore has a manned front gate. The gatekeeper will let you pass only if you have been authorized to enter by a resident. Also, all entrances are equipped with security cameras that monitor which cars pass through.

Still, Jensen figures that what really lures people to Glenmore and Keswick are the special amenities like a championship golf course and an equestrian center. Translation: You might live in a glorified subdivision, but you’ve come a long way, baby.

At present, there are 500 residences in Glenmore, with developers hoping for a total of 800 to share what the promotional literature describes as “the beautifully laden emerald-green pastures, gentle knolls and rolling hills reminiscent of a Scottish landscape.” And besides the Platinum MasterCard aura and the manned front gate, something else fortifies Glenmore’s appeal—real estate values.

“When you’re looking at increased property values,” says Gaffney, “while all of Albemarle County has appreciated, Glenmore is at the top of the list.” With land values that have doubled in the last decade compared to the 8 percent increase of the county average, a pad in Glenmore has proven to be a good investment. One home that sold for $170,000 in 1993 recently sold again for $300,000. Another going for $500,000 in 1993 went for more than $750,000 this year. According to recent nationwide real estate studies, in fact, gated community-style housing can fetch anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 more than comparable non-gated housing.

 

State your business here, sir

Even where the lines of secluded turf are not drawn solely by wealth, the message to the public at large remains, “keep out.”

By the same token, however, Glenmore has been praised by some for creating “communal bonds” within the gates themselves. With pedestrian-friendly streets and public spaces like the clubhouse or fitness center, “It is so easy to meet other residents here,” says Gaffney. “It’s like stepping into a built-in social life.”

Tom Pace, who is the sales manager of Glenmore and a longtime resident, agrees. “One can get as involved or not involved as one wants,” says Pace. “It truly is a social lifestyle choice.”

Pace says his clan was the seventh family to move into Glenmore, and, although he has moved three different times within the community, he has never left.

Still, where insiders see “community,” critics on the other side of the gate see an elitist “members only” club.

Dave Norris, chair of the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, believes gates serve only one of two purposes—to keep people in or out. Gates can wall off very poor communities and very wealthy communities, all the while eliminating the public spaces in which different social classes might combine. Typical melting pots such as Darden Towe Park or Fridays After Five have been replaced by private soccer fields within the gates and black-tie events at the clubhouse.

“One of the main reasons a neighborhood such as Belmont works so well,” says Norris, “is you have a mix there—an integration of poor people, middle class people, middle-upper class people, residential and commercial retail. Walled-off enclaves removed from services and others kinds of people just don’t work.”

Ron Higgins, the City’s planning manager, also maintains that a city needs to be connected, especially a smaller city such as Charlottesville, which holds dear the value of congruity. “As a 30-year resident of the City,” says Higgins, “I imagine gated communities have their place; it just seems more isolated.”

 

Don’t fence me in

For some people, of course, isolation is exactly the point.

“The gate is definitely a selling feature,” says Slater. “It is nice when not just anyone can drive up on your property at any given time.”

“We have people like [UVA basketball and football coaches] Pete Gillen and Al Groh living in our community,” says Real Estate III’s Gaffney, “and they don’t want just anyone walking up to their front door.”

Yet there are those occasions when the rules and regulations that are the price of admission to the box seats can be real downers. “Sometimes these communities with their homeowners associations,” says Jensen, “can be limiting to people’s freedom of choice.” Want to stack wood in front of your house? Well, that’s just too bad if you live in Lake Monticello. You can’t.

One Lake Monticello resident (who also refused to have her name published) says she came home one day to a “citation” for verboten pipes exposed in her yard. “We are unsure if the complaint came from a neighbor, or from the owners association,” she says, “but either way, there are times when we really have issues with all the rules.”

Lake Monticello is also the only gated community in the area to employ a private police force, a measure often too expensive for other communities, which choose an electronic gate system instead. The Lake Monticello Police Department, on the lookout for any suspicious elements in this forest by the lake, make alien infiltration difficult, unless of course you are the Domino’s delivery guy, the Lake Monticello Fire Department or a construction vendor—these folks have bar codes to get in at any time.

“The gates can be irritating, especially if they aren’t working correctly,” says Lake Monticello resident Rashap, “but they serve their purpose—to protect the residents and their amenities.”

 

Go jump in a lake—but only if you’ve paid your dues

There’s no hiding the fact that Lake Monticello residents, like others in gated communities, want their amenities to remain their amenities. “The gates are necessary for the people paying dues,” says Slater.

The gate at Glenmore was built for $200,000, and yearly maintenance is another $170,000, which includes not only salaries for guards, managers and staff, but electricity and computers, as well. “Although it’s certainly not fool proof, it’s worth it for the peace of mind it gives people,” says Gaffney.

Again, some observers see the situation differently. A gate does not a great community make. As Jensen points out, Charlottesville has plenty of historic and stately areas such as Ivy, Park Street and Rugby Road. Some area residents occupy both worlds. Developments such as Bellair, Farmington, Ednam, Dunlora and Forest Lakes have many of the makings of a gated community, minus the uniformed man (or bar code) raising the gate.

Dunlora, for example, which is fronted by a large brick entrance and a gate-like aura, has some of the same amenities as Glenmore (minus the ACC coaches): community swimming pools, clubhouses, annual dues and basic rules and regulations. But, in theory, anyone could drive through.

In the end however, for whatever reason, communities such as Glenmore, Keswick and Lake Monticello succeed in attracting residents. Fluvanna County, still considered primarily rural, is now the second-fastest growing county in Virginia. With a population of 21,200, it has grown by more than 60 percent during the past decade. “Most of this growth is thanks to Lake Monticello,” says Slater.

 

Access and egress

Whether gated communities promote homogeneity or a secure environment, Gaffney advances the standard market-bearing rationale for their existence around here: If people didn’t want gated communities, then developers wouldn’t be building them. “It’s a ‘move up’-type market and people are choosing it left and right,” he says.

CRHA’s Norris, though, raises doubts about the health of gates for the community at large.

“These gated communities are just a form of ghettoization,” he says. “You’ve got ghettos for the poor and ghettos for the rich.” As an example, Norris points to a new fence, of sorts, at Westhaven, a low-income housing development in the neighborhood of 10th and Page streets. One side of Westhaven borders the rear entrances of West Main Street businesses, some of which have started to complain about graffiti and vandalism and responded with a new divider. “There’s a stairway that ends with a fence now,” says Norris, “just a further sign of the isolation of Westhaven.”

The fences might obstruct graffiti, but they’re roadblocks to progress, too, says Norris. “As long as both the rich ghettos and the poor ghettos remain isolated,” he says, “how can we ever broaden the community, embrace diversity?”

Pace, the Glenmore sales manager, maintains that his community is more than diverse. With residents of every age hailing from places like China, Hawaii, Canada and England and participating in local politics and schools and boards, Pace says it is wrong to think that the people of Glenmore have chosen to lock themselves out of society.

“Living in Glenmore, or any gated community for that matter,” says Pace, “is simply a lifestyle choice, that’s all. It has nothing to do with isolation whatsoever.”

Rain…The word alone forms a complete prayer. Spoken as a plea or demand, the simple invocation has been a common mantra across the Southeast this year. The congregation of thirsty supplicants included, until recently, those of us living in the Rivanna Watershed, which in the past four years has been shy about 40 inches of rain.

To everyone’s relief, our prayers have been answered. In the past two months, a blessing from the jet stream dropped roughly 10 inches of rain on the Watershed, bringing this year’s precipitation levels in line with annual norms. Around here, perhaps no one is more relieved to see the drought subside than the City and County water officials responsible for keeping a clean, cheap supply of life’s elixir swirling down our toilets.It’s refreshing to again see full reservoirs and real dinnerplates in Charlottesville. Yes, the rain soothed a shortage and mitigated an emergency. It did not, however, solve the real problem, which is this: The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority has seen this crisis coming for more than 25 years, and yet now, coming out of it, our water supply remains at the mercy of divine intervention.

 

When in drought…

Charles Ancona has lived in Albemarle County since 1967, and in that time he has seen, he says, “many brown Augusts.” He remembers a drought in 1976 that prompted government conservation ordinances. It also convinced many people that, although water had been taken for granted as a “natural resource,” dominated by technology to serve economic growth, water might begin to limit the region’s blossoming development.

“All these years later, and we’ve still done nothing,” says Ancona. Although he draws his water from a well in rural Albemarle, he has followed the water situation for 30 years, and he’s mystified by the response of local officials.

“You can’t have the growth we’ve had, and the reduction in supply, and expect to have sufficient water,” Ancona says.

The last time Charlottesville impounded a water supply was in 1966, when the City built a 1.68 billion-gallon reservoir on the South Fork Rivanna River. Since then, the region’s population has more than doubled, to at least 124,000. But along the way, rather than meet increased demand, the South Fork reservoir has lost about 500 million gallons of its capacity, thanks to sediment filling in its bottom.

In 1972, Charlottesville and Albemarle launched the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority as an independent agency to manage the region’s shared water resources. Within a few short years, when studies showed that demand would outpace supply sometime early in this century, one of the RWSA’s main jobs became to provide enough water to satisfy the growth.

The RWSA met this challenge like an ostrich, Ancona says: “They must have their heads stuck in that sediment.”

Indeed, the rain has been followed by a deluge of criticism for local officials, who critics believe are as culpable as God for the recent water shortage.

“What are you going to do when it’s gone? Vote your ass out of office!” says local bartender Al Zappa, playing on the City’s cartoonish conservation posters. They depict a man examining the dry nozzle of a garden hose, apparently unaware that he’s standing on the hose with a bulge of water building up behind his shoe. Is that cartoon Charlottesvillian supposed to be us, Joe and Jane Car Washer? Is the City saying we’re morons, dumbly pinching off our hose, about to get squirted in the eye?

Many people say the cartoon better represents the RWSA. Some say the water officials must be truly idiotic––after all, they’ve seen a water crisis coming for decades, and yet they’ve done nothing to increase or maintain supply.

Others believe the RWSA feigned surprise at the water shortage. Henry Weinscheck, for one, thinks public officials are the ones standing on the hose, intentionally blocking our water.

“Was it bad planning, or a determined effort? That’s the question,” says Weinscheck, who owns Express Car Wash on Route 29. “The water shortage was not ineptitude. It was deliberate.”

Granted, Weinscheck has never been a cheerleader for the City. He’s a member of the North Charlottesville Business Association (comprising mostly people who own land or operate businesses on 29N), a group most famous for unilaterally supporting the Route 29 Western Bypass. Weinscheck himself defied City Council’s order on August 23 to shut down all commercial car washes.

“It was a knee-jerk reaction [by Council] to get people’s attention,” he claims. “It didn’t do much to reduce water consumption.”

City public works director Judith Mueller admits she doesn’t know how much water was saved by closing car washes. “People understood that car washes were not a good use of our drinking water,” she says. “No one ever called me to complain about it.” Most car washes, she says, imported their own water and reopened.

The notion that some leaders of the RWSA have conspired to limit water and stifle growth is popular among business owners, real estate developers and others for whom growth means profit. Their official house organ, The Daily Progress, parroted the sentiment in a series of editorials last month. But it’s not solely the usual pro-growth advocates who express skepticism about the RWSA.

“It’s all about keeping people out,” says Stephanie White, a UVA-trained climatologist who works at Perrin Quarles Associates. “It’s outrageous.”

Indisputably, there was a drought. White, however, points out that local reservoirs, including Sugar Hollow and Ragged Mountain, were full in July, and it took merely a couple of dry summer months to drain them. Drought or no drought, she says, such a dry snap could happen anytime. “In the summer, the weather is much more volatile,” she says.

The skeptics have some pretty damning evidence on their side. It’s been established that for 30 years the RWSA knew demand would skyrocket. Yet only now, with doomsday on the horizon, did the RWSA move to expand the region’s supply with what most observers characterize as a “Band-Aid” solution.

The RWSA denies any conspiracy––to a point. The current Chairman of the Board, Rich Collins, along with former chairs Treva Cromwell, Francis Fife and Jack Marshall, this year founded Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population (ASAP). They called for a debate on how to slow and ultimately cap regional growth. Collins and Cromwell say the chairs have never forced their agenda on other board members. But Collins admits he likes a soapbox.

“I look at my role as a voice for stewardship of the watershed,” says Collins. “To say that growth is a holy grail is absurd, and to be concerned merely with supply at all costs is a short-sighted vision for the future. We don’t have unlimited supply. We need to include growth in our planning. I use the pulpit that’s there, for good or bad, to highlight these ideas.”

Conspiracy or not, water shortages disturb our quality of life and can seriously dampen the region’s economic prosperity. The RWSA blamed the drought, but rainfall wasn’t actually the issue. The drought merely exposed our real problems, which now lie in the open like dead tress strewn across the crusty mud at the bottom of an empty reservoir.

Water provides; growth consumes––when the two balance, there’s no problem. The RWSA’s dams and pipes have restrained and shaped the Watershed to fulfill dreams of unlimited growth. For the past 30 years, however, Charlottesville and Albemarle have failed to take water into account as the region grew.

The drought just proved something the RWSA should have already known, that water can destroy as well as create. Similarly, the deluge didn’t resolve the conflict between growth and water. It just submerged the tension once again—for now.

 

Water fight

The simple, miraculous liquid from which all life springs has been the source of some bitter disputes between Charlottesville and Albemarle. On the surface, the arguments seem to be about land and money. In truth, the real font of City-County tensions has most often been the question of water.

Before a revenue-sharing agreement reached in the 1990s helped the two jurisdictions fairly divide tax revenue, the question of who pays for water was answered by land grabs and courtroom battles. Pre-RWSA, the City built water infrastructure (such as reservoirs, treatment plants and pipes) for both localities. To help pay for those costs, Charlottesville would occasionally annex portions of Albemarle where business had boomed—along the water and sewer lines—thus bringing more property tax revenue into the City. Annexations had to be approved by a judge, and these hearings, which the City almost always won, were bitter, say those who recall them. The courts’ reasoning was that since Charlottesville incurred the cost of growth, it should reap the spoils.

After losing a particularly vicious annexation battle for businesses on 29N in 1961, Albemarle grew tired of Charlottesville triumphantly using water to justify territorial incursions. The County wanted to build its own network of pipes and treatment plants, and it applied for federal funds to do so. But when the State bureaucrats who doled out the cash saw that Albemarle wanted to duplicate City services, the Commonwealth withheld support for funding until the two jurisdictions learned how to play nice.

“They said the City and County share a common resource in the Rivanna River,” recalls Bill Brent, director of the Albemarle County Service Authority since 1971. “It wasn’t in our best interest––or the river’s––to compete.”

In 1972, the two jurisdictions created a corporation, the RWSA, with a dual mission: provide water and sewer services for the expected growth rate, as determined by City Council and the Board of Supervisors; and protect the Watershed. The RWSA is led by a board of directors (comprising two City officials, two from the County, and a non-affiliated, appointed chairman) as well as an independent executive director.

“Some referred to it as a shotgun wedding,” says Brent. The RWSA’s marriage of convenience solved long-running spats between the two jurisdictions. The epic struggle between water and growth, however, has proved far too complicated for any single agency.

Those two goals clashed soon after a brief, cooperative honeymoon during which the RWSA succeeded in vastly improving the region’s sewage treatment capabilities.

Before the RWSA, most of Albemarle didn’t have water and sewer lines. County leaders tried to make do without them, allowing developers to build subdivisions using well water and septic tank systems.

“You could see a water crisis coming,” says Peggy King, then president of the local League of Women Voters.

That’s because just beneath Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall and a few feet below the County’s spectacular rural vistas, local geology is a hostile foundation for big developments. Under a layer of topsoil and finely crushed stone, there’s a chaotic pile of impermeable rock laced with crevices. The only groundwater the land can contain is what fills up these cracks. In Western Albemarle, groundwater is especially scarce.

“I think a scientist told us the geology was confused,” says Gerald Fisher, chairman of the County Board of Supervisors between 1976 and 1987.

Local geology makes it nearly impossible to discern whether wells for subdivisions like West Leigh will last three years or 30. During the drought of ‘76, that and other subdivisions ran dry, and the RWSA had to truck in water for several weeks.

To make things worse some residents woke up to raw sewage on their lawns––Albemarle’s geology also makes it hard to tell whether wastewater from septic systems will filter deep into the ground.

“The residents eventually had to pay to get connected to the water and sewer systems, at a considerable expense to them,” says Fisher.

 

Turning off the tap

In 1976, drought brought water shortages and government-imposed restrictions to Charlottesville for the first time in recent memory. Newspapers reported that the crisis made people aware of water’s “true value.” Some people wondered how much more growth Albemarle could tolerate. The RWSA promised to take action.

Sound familiar?

When that drought hit, the government was already using its control of the water supply to manipulate free enterprise. “We never talked about limiting the supply of water,” says former County Supervisor Fisher. “We talked about limiting where it would be delivered. At first, the Albemarle County Sewer Authority would hook up services wherever they could, and that caused sprawl. Then we tried to set some limits.”

Albemarle made baby steps toward integrating water and land-use planning. By the mid-’70s, officials knew the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir was rapidly filling with sediment trapped by dams (according to current data, the SFR can safely provide 16 million gallons of water per day; by 2050, sedimentation will reduce that to 5 million gallons daily). At the time, experts believed that erosion caused by development was exacerbating the siltation process.

So between 1975 and 1980, the County Supervisors passed ordinances designed to protect the Rivanna River from the effects of development. They enforced erosion control methods and put most of the public land around the reservoir into conservation easement. Supervisors also down-zoned all the rural land in the Rivanna Watershed, about one-third of Albemarle, drastically reducing the County’s supply of commercial-ready real estate.

Developers revolted. In those years, Fisher says, developers fought the new rules with lawsuits, and some took litigation to ridiculous extremes.

One developer sued every individual supervisor personally, for $1 million each, says Fisher. Another developer sued for libel several members of the League of Women Voters and Citizens for Albemarle, two groups that had opposed development projects during public hearings. None of the developers won, says Fisher, but the experience was expensive and traumatic nevertheless.

“Trying to hold a public meeting at that time was agonizing,” says Fisher. “You’d have the developer up there speaking, and all these people with clenched teeth and intensity in their faces. But they were afraid to say anything. That’s a period I hope we don’t have to relive.”

“The question then was pretty much the same as it is now: How many people can we support?” says the League of Women Voters’ Peggy King. “Looking out for the good of the overall public went against the grain for a lot of locals.”

But in the ‘70s, no-growth or slow-growth voices were muted by RWSA promises to build a new reservoir on Buck Mountain Creek, a waterway originating in the northern Albemarle mountains, then flowing down through Free Union to the South Fork Rivanna River. Numerous studies said Buck Mountain was a prime spot for a dam.

After arguing for months on how to divide the project cost, the City and County settled on a surcharge system. New water customers still pay a $200 surcharge to cover the $6 million of land RWSA bought along Buck Mountain Creek.

Treva Cromwell, who chaired the RWSA between 1978 and 1986, said at the time that the new reservoir could not be developed overnight—and she didn’t think that should be a problem. After all, studies predicted the existing water supply could meet demand until 2012; the RWSA predicted it would take eight to 10 years to build the Buck Mountain facility. They were so confident that when Cromwell retired from the RWSA, she received a plaque engraved with an image of the Buck Mountain reservoir.

In the early 1990s, the RWSA began the long process of applying for State and federal permission to build the reservoir. In the ‘60s, it only took four years to build the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir. By the 1990s, however, State and federal regulators at the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency were no longer keen on new reservoirs.

“The regulatory agencies reflected the new national mood, that you don’t build dams on creeks and change the hydrology cycle,” says Cromwell.

On top of that cultural shift, in the mid-’90s, scientists discovered an endangered species, the James River spinymussel, living in Buck Mountain Creek. The rare invertebrate effectively killed the Buck Mountain Reservoir.

“The DEQ said they wouldn’t permit a reservoir until we had tried everything else first,” says Cromwell. “If there ever was a shock that went through the community, it was when we couldn’t build the reservoir.”

So the RWSA hired new consultants to figure out the best alternatives to a new reservoir. By then, the doomsday scenario was moved up to about 2000, when consultants predicted water demand would eclipse supply. The consultants, Vanasse Hangen Brustlin, Inc., further predicted that by 2050, the County’s growth rate and the reservoirs’ siltation rate would combine to produce a water shortfall in the neighborhood of 12 million gallons per day.

But the RWSA had other problems, namely the Ivy Landfill, which had polluted nearby groundwater. It needed to be closed and monitored at high cost to the RWSA and, ultimately, to taxpayers.

“Landfill issues were taking so much of Rivanna’s time for so many years,” says former City Councilor David Toscano. “Council was not as engaged in water issues as it should have been. But, until a crisis emerges, people aren’t focused on it very much.”

 

An unchanging tide

It’s said that there are no new problems in government––just the same issues appearing and disappearing in the public’s field of vision. Conflicts between development and resources have been around a long time, but as Toscano implies, only in times of shortage do people pay heed.

The recent crisis reminded us, once again, that water is not unlimited. It also showed that people can work together to protect a common resource. For that reason, the experience was valuable, says Downtown restaurateur Tony LaBua.

“The City did exactly as it should have done,” he says. “People really stepped up to the plate.” LaBua says that after the deluge he’s keeping the waterless hand sanitizer in his bathroom at Chap’s. The posters––”If it’s yellow let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down”––are staying up indefinitely, too.

“It’s nothing a little incense can’t take care of,” LaBua says.

People’s willingness to conserve water is certainly part of the drought story. On August 23, when the City and County first passed mandatory water restrictions, the municipal water system used about 12.5 million gallons per day; by October 25, consumption had dropped below 7 million gallons per day. Water officials laud the public for their efforts while simultaneously “rewarding” them with hiked water rates––from $3 per 1,000 gallons last summer to $7.48 per 1,000 gallons in November.

“People feel like they’re being punished,” says leading City Republican Jon Bright, who keeps close tabs on public sentiment at the Downtown branch of his Spectacle Shop business. “I’ve heard so many people say that we’ve sucked it up, we did our part, and now we’re being punished.”

The rate characterizes RWSA’s Catch-22. Because all the Authority’s money comes from water sales, when people conserve water, the RWSA has to raise rates to keep up its revenue.

The money is also helping to pay for the $13.2 million, three-part plan to dredge sediment from the South Fork Rivanna, raise the dam by four feet and re-open a pumping station on the Mechums River—a plan widely viewed as a quick but temporary fix. RWSA Executive Director Lawrence Tropea says raising the dam will take at least two years. The pump station should be open by next summer. There’s no telling how long it may take to clean out some 70,000 cubic feet of silt. Right now, the RWSA is waiting for the Service Authority’s Bill Brent and the City’s Public Works Director, Judith Meuller, to hash out a cost-sharing scheme.

Clearly, the deluge hasn’t solved our water crisis. Groundwater, which feeds the streams that flow into our reservoirs, is still below normal. More significantly, there are no clear solutions to the long-term conflict between growth and water.

Any government efforts to slow down growth would be “disastrous,” says Leigh Middleditch, an attorney for McGuire Woods who serves on a water advisory committee. “Growth is inevitable, and managing growth should not be dependent on the water supply. What’s the best approach beyond these temporary fixes? Anything is going to be terribly expensive. The community’s got to debate these things.”

RWSA Chair Collins agrees with Middleditch’s call for a public debate. He believes it would be best to talk about limiting demand as well as increasing supply. Given the State and federal reluctance to approve new reservoirs, building new water impoundments won’t be easy; nor will it be simple to stop growth, either.

“Anyone can come, but not everyone can come,” says Collins. “At some point, we’re going to have to plan and seek the optimum level of population.”

These debates may go on for another 30 years. But by then, water, in its own soft way, will have attacked Albemarle’s solid trend of human and economic growth. In the past 30 years, Charlottesville and Albemarle haven’t made much progress resolving their liquid arguments. That trend likely could continue if the recent deluge dilutes the public water consciousness, which lately made everyone so proud.