The ’Fraidy cat Award for Music Appreciation
–UVA President John Casteen For his apology regarding the Cavalier Pep Band
Despite holding three degrees in English, UVA President John Casteen must have never learned the definition of the word “joke.” Maybe he’s never seen the “Award-Winning Virginia Fighting Cavalier Indoor/Outdoor Precision Marching Pep Band,” either.
But humor has always been at the heart of UVA’s 29-year-old, student-run pep band, from their taste in funky vests to their penchant for mocking opposing teams with silly skits. Yet when the pep band teased West Virginia University during halftime of the December 28, 2002 Continental Tire Bowl, Casteen and UVA officials claimed they were shocked and mortified by the gag. On January 3, the administration fell over itself apologizing not just to WVU (which lost the game 48-22), but to the entire state of West Virginia.
The offending skit featured a female member of the pep band, wearing pigtails and overalls, trying to woo a UVA man in a take-off of the TV show “The Bachelor.” Fans showered the band with boos, and West Virginia Governor Bob Wise penned a cry-baby letter to Casteen.
Some high UVA officials, such as Rector John P. Ackerly III, defended the pep band, which is one of the last student-run “scramble” bands (as opposed to marching bands) among major colleges. It was to no avail. In April, UVA benefactors Carl and Hunter Smith gave UVA a $1.5 million gift to pay for an official marching band, complete with uniforms and cheesy renditions of “Louie, Louie.”
That gesture was the beginning of the end, as Athletic Director Craig Littlepage followed up with an announcement that the pep band would not perform at athletic events in 2004. To top it off, he locked the pep band out of their instrument room for a week. Many ‘Hoos had found the pep band a hilarious––if occasionally tasteless––example of student autonomy that made UVA unique among ACC schools. Too bad Casteen and UVA’s big donors missed the punch line.
The Tipper Gore Free Speech Award
-Albemarle County School Board For banning a middle-schooler from wearing an NRA t-shirt
Thirteen-year-old Alan Newsome likes to shoot paper targets with a rifle. Not a particularly violent sport––not compared to, say, tackle football. But when Newsome walked into Jack Jouett Middle School wearing a National Rifle Association t-shirt, administrators claimed it was too much for other teenagers to bear.
The shirt in question, emblazoned with the letters NRA, depicts people holding hunting rifles. When Jack Jouett’s vice-principal saw the shirt, she claims, it reminded her of Columbine. To protect other students, she ordered Newsome to turn the shirt inside out. Newsome complained to the NRA, and when the group contacted the school, Jouett administrators added a provision to the school dress code banning any clothing that depicts weapons of any kind. That made not only an NRA shirt off limits, but even clothing depicting the Virginia State seal (it includes a spear) or UVA’s sabres.
In September, the NRA and the Newsome family sued the County school system for $150,000 in compensatory and punitive damages. In U.S. District Court, Judge Norman K. Moon found the new Jouett dress code acceptable, but in December a three-judge panel from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals overruled Norman and said Jouett’s dress code was too broad. The School Board isn’t backing down, and has asked the entire 4th Circuit to review the case. The NRA has vowed to take the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary.
The “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” Award
-Kay Slaughter For playing the gender card
Republican State Senators had any number of reasons for blocking Governor Mark Warner’s appointment of Kay Slaughter to a seat on the State Water Control Board, and her gender probably wasn’t one of them.
Warner nominated Slaughter, a former Charlottesville mayor, to the State Water Control Board in July 2002. As an attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, Slaughter had represented Indian groups and landowners suing that very State board to stop construction of a reservoir on the Mattaponi River in King William County. Although Slaughter withdrew from the case a month before she was to join the board, the SELC remains the plaintiffs’ chief council.
In January, the GOP Senators blocked Slaughter’s appointment, citing an obvious conflict of interest. Democrats suggested Republicans also opposed Slaughter because of her record as an environmental activist.
Speaking to The Daily Progress, however, Slaughter claimed she had “an intuitive feeling” that Republicans were “afraid” of strong, powerful women. As a lawyer, Slaughter probably knows that feelings are not evidence; as a strong, powerful woman, she should know that crying wolf dilutes authentic claims of gender discrimination.
In February, the Senate reversed itself and voted 23-13 to confirm Slaughter’s appointment, after environmental lobbyists and Governor Warner’s political team convinced the General Assembly that she had no conflict of interest. Slaughter promised to remove herself from the reservoir issue, but she resigned her seat in early October after Republicans questioned her meeting with Environmental Protection Agency officials regarding the project.
The Susan Smith Award for Racial Harmony
-Steve Shiflett and Ed Robb For creative use of “a black guy” in a criminal investigation
When Susan Smith drowned her children in 1994, she exploited racial prejudice by blaming the crime on a fictional black man before finally admitting her guilt. This year, Albemarle County Sheriff’s Deputy Steve Shiflett tried the same trick, and Sheriff Ed Robb bought the story hook, line and sinker.
In March, Shiflett showed up at the Sheriff’s office with bullet holes in his cruiser, claiming to have been shot by an African-American man in a big coat. Before an investigation could be launched, Albemarle Sheriff Ed Robb fanned the racial flames by calling the incident a “hate crime.”
Oops. In July, County police claimed Shiflett lied about the shooting, prompting Robb to apologize to the African-American community. Despite the conclusions of County officers, Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Camblos declined to prosecute Shiflett for filing a false police report.
The Kenneth Lay Award for Business Ethics
-Ivy Industries CEO John Reid For a $2.4 million check-kiting scheme
We’re trendy folk here in Charlottesville, fearlessly embracing fads like specialty cocktails, metrosexuality and Friendster. In 2003, shady business executives were as fashionable as chocolate martinis, so naturally Charlottesville jumped on the corporate-scandal bandwagon.
In March, former Ivy Industries CEO John Reid admitted to fraudulently manipulating more than $2.4 million at Albemarle First Bank through a check-kiting scheme that had begun two years earlier. Check kiting is a neat little trick––Reid would write checks from an account at Albemarle First that exceeded the available balance. Reid would then deposit the checks into another account at Sun Trust Bank, from which he’d write another check to cover the overdraft at Albemarle First.
To date, Reid has yet to face criminal charges in the scandal that bankrupted his company. Ivy Industries had manufactured wood moldings for picture frames and employed about 150 people in Charlottesville and Beverly, West Virginia. All those people lost their jobs, and the company’s collapse opened a 65,000 square-foot vacancy in the factory’s former site on Monticello Road. Now owned by developer and music mogul Coran Capshaw, that building’s future occupant is rumored to be fitness leader ACAC.
The “Hey, Where are the Naked Chicks?” Award
-OUR proliferating tapas bars For a homophonic confusion of food and sex
Dude, we thought you said we were going to a new topless bar!
The Crack Reporting Award
-Channel 29 For the Jesse Scheckler fiasco
Those magic words, “I’m sorry,” can solve so many problems—they might have saved NBC television affiliate WVIR a lawsuit and a load of money. But it’s hard to admit you’re wrong.
Channel 29 had plenty of chances. After Jesse Sheckler was indicted, along with four other men, on a charge of conspiracy to possess cocaine, WVIR rookie reporter Melinda Semadeni erroneously reported that 50 grams of crack and 500 grams of powder cocaine had been found in the Greene County mechanic’s garage. Maybe it was a misunderstanding. Semadeni had been new to courtroom reporting, and the charge against Sheckler, who loaned money to one of his co-defendants, referred to legal “threshold weights” of 50 grams of crack and 500 grams of powder cocaine. Perhaps that’s where she got confused.
After the broadcast, at least two lawyers called the station on Sheckler’s behalf, demanding a retraction. But Benjamin Dick, a Charlottesville attorney and one of the two who called the TV station, claims station general manager Harold Wright gave him the blow-off. In court, Dick testified that Wright told him: “We have the greatest lawyer in the world and all the money in the world to fight this, so if your client wants to sue, tell him to bring it on.”
Sheckler brought it. Having been acquitted, he sued in March, and after testifying that his ordeal with Channel 29 caused him “pain in his heart,” a Charlottesville jury awarded him $10 million, the largest libel award in Virginia history. In November, Judge Edward Hogshire reduced the sum to $1 million, which Sheckler accepted. In subsequent media reports, however, Sheckler claimed that if WVIR had admitted its mistake and apologized, he never would have sued.
The McHistory Award
-Downtown law community For rejecting designs for a modern courthouse
How many Charlottesvillians does it take to change a light bulb? Three—one to screw in the new bulb and two to fondly reminisce about the old one.
The history surrounding Charlottesville and Albemarle is important to our local identity, but does that mean we have to remain stuck in the past? Apparently some like to think so, judging by the design for the new Charlottesville-Albemarle juvenile courthouse.
In 2000, the City and County appointed a design committee to plan for a new juvenile and domestic relations courthouse that would relieve the dangerous overcrowding in the current High Street building. Preservationists also demanded that the new courthouse retain the century-old jail that remains on site.
Two years later, the committee came back with a design that kept the old jail and satisfied space demands, but to architect Mayor Maurice Cox’s eyes, it was downright ugly. He proposed hiring one of his favorite firms, Philadelphia’s Wallace, Roberts and Todd, to give the new courthouse a more modern façade.
But then-Councilor David Toscano, echoing the sentiments of the influential community of Downtown lawyers (of which he is a member), advocated that a “traditional” design be put forward, too. In this case, “traditional” means something that looks more like the bricks-and-columns Albemarle County courthouse, a genuine relic of the 18th century. Each got his way, and this year Council put WRT’s “modern” design alongside the “traditional” design. Cox argued that a modern design reflects a city looking to the future, rather than the past. The traditionalists argued that a modern design just didn’t “fit in.”
The City put both designs on its website and asked people to vote for their favorite. Unfortunately for buffs of authentic history, the traditional design handily won out. On December 16 the Board of Architectural Review approved the faux-historical design. Given that the BAR’s mission is to preserve real history and separate it from the pretenders, one has to assume outside pressures—or fatigue—influenced the decision.
It has to be said that WRT’s strange mix-and-match contemporary design might have silenced some modernists or artificially swelled the ranks of tradition-lovers. But a new building that looks like an old building will cheapen the real value of its authentic twin. Shouldn’t the courthouse that heard the arguments of Jefferson, Madison and Monroe have a look all its own to match its unique place in local and national history?
The Better Living Through Science Award
-Herman Stanley For setting up a crystal meth lab in the Marriott Hotel on W. Main Street
The Marriott Hotel on W. Main Street is best known as the former target of Living Wage protests, not a place to get geeked on bathtub coke.
Use of methamphetamine, an addictive synthetic drug that produces feelings of energy and euphoria, spread throughout middle America in the late ’90s. More recently, crystal meth has shown up in Southwest Virginia, a trend the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration blames on an influx of Mexican immigrants. Meth is usually manufactured in rural areas, but on July 23 it showed up in one of the City’s swankiest hotels.
On that day, police evacuated about 40 guests from the hotel and busted a clandestine methamphetamine lab in one of the guest rooms. Officers learned of the lab from a Fluvanna County Sheriff’s deputy who, while investigating a suspicious car parked on Route 616, discovered a meth lab in the woods. The car’s driver, 36-year-old Herman Bradford Stanley of Alabama, gave a tip that led officers to the Marriott. He was arrested and charged with manufacturing a controlled substance and felony endangerment of life and property.
That’s good news for the cops, but bad news, we fear, for hotel employees who must not have detected the meth lab in their midst even though the manufacturing of the drug can lead to strong odors similar to cat urine.
The Better Shopping Award
-Supporters of Target For missing the point
When the Albemarle Board of Supervisors held a public hearing on whether to approve the 165-acre Hollymead Town Center on Route 29N, the question at hand should have been “How will the County manage its explosive growth?” But the many Target supporters there seemed to miss the point completely.
Speaker after speaker—many of them Realtors and small business owners—trotted before the Supes to plead and moan that there just are not enough places to shop in Albemarle. How long, they asked the sympathetic Board, would they have to drive to Short Pump or Tyson’s Corner? How long must they suffer without a Target of their own?
Sprawl-buster Stratton Salidis says he heard rumors that key Hollymead developer Wendell Wood hired a public relations firm to drum up support for Target and, by extension, the Hollymead project. Salidis notes a surge in television commercials around the time of the July hearing and that many of the project supporters showed up at the public hearing wearing red-and-white target buttons.
“Both the Observer and The Hook had Target logos on their covers,” Salidis points out, referring to a couple of small community newspapers. “In part, the Hollymead Town Center got passed because a lot of people thought it was just about a Target store.”
Wood denied hiring a P.R. firm. The support for Target and the Hollymead project were, he claims, strictly grassroots. “We got phone calls from people saying they supported it, asking what they could do,” says Wood. “Target gave us those buttons, and we gave them out so people could show their support.”
Leaving aside the absurd notion that we “need” a Target, or any other chain retail store, the real question before the County and its residents is whether we will continue to pave over precious (and rapidly vanishing) countryside every time a new chain comes knocking. When Target finally opens, the first thing we’re going to do is pick up a discounted copy of that Joni Mitchell record. You know, the one with that song about paving over paradise to put up a parking lot.
The Eight Days a Week Award
-The all-Beatles radio station For staying on the air all of three days
Spinning through the radio dial in early September, we stumbled across a station playing Beatles hits 24 hours a day. For one Indian summer weekend, we cruised around Charlottesville tripping on the Fab Four’s blissful pop psychadelia. Sadly, it was not to be strawberry fields forever. Turns out all the love was just a publicity stunt.
When media behemoth Clear Channel decided to switch the format of Charlottesville’s 102.3 WFFX to “classic hits” from “classic rock,” local manager Regan Keith decided to bridge the change by spinning tunes from what is arguably the most beloved rock band ever. The all-Beatles format began on Friday, September 5.
“It was always going to be a transition. We were surprised that people thought we were going to stick with it,” says Keith. By Tuesday, September 9, Keith had successfully fixed the hole. He says he was surprised to hear people lamenting the Beatles’ disappearance.
“Playing all Beatles is like playing Christmas music,” says Keith. “It’s nice for a while, but pretty soon you’re sitting at your desk blowing spit bubbles, waiting for it to end.”
The Black Lung Award
-UVA For burning coal in a residential area
As a liberal academic institution, UVA preaches the latest theories in the arts and sciences. As a multi-billion-dollar corporation, however, UVA can be surprisingly slow to embrace change.
In spring 2002, when UVA applied for a permit to burn more fuel and increase the emissions from its coal plant near the Corner, people were shocked to discover the plant already emits more than a ton of sulphur dioxide each day. UVA attempted to dodge Federal emission regulations by appealing to its nonprofit status.
Then, in January 2003, the boilers fired up and barfed black soot all over the Venable neighborhood. Neighbors awoke to find dark dust all over their cars. Councilor Kevin Lynch spearheaded an effort to convince UVA to stop burning coal and spewing pollution in the residential area. UVA claimed it has a plan to make the plant cleaner, but there’s a catch––the improvements would cost $50 million that UVA doesn’t have.
Hmmm. A public entity currently in the throes of a billion-dollar construction spree can’t find $50 mil? Maybe that’s because while deep-pocket donors don’t mind writing checks to get their name on a new sports arena or theater, they just don’t see the appeal in underwriting the “Carl Smith Smokestack.”
The Pet Rock Award for Stupid Trendiness
-Middle-class 20somethings For aping blue-collar style
It used to be that you had to join a union or hang at the VFW to see guys in mesh John Deere caps and gas station shirts drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from cans. Now, you just have to go to the more upscale watering holes or the UVA campus.
Maybe it has something to do with trust-fund guilt or nostalgia for this nation’s lost manufacturing era, but the trend of white-bread suburban hipsters dressing up as blue-collar heroes has swept the nation. The fashion emerged from the irony-drenched indie-rock culture of the early ’90s, and has since become a bona fide fad––Pabst Blue Ribbon posted a 12 percent sales gain last year, the beer’s best showing since 1978. Local bars have caught the fire, with hip joints like Mas and The Shebeen peddling PBR on tap.
Pabst drinkers have one excuse––it’s usually the cheapest beer in the bar. But can that rationale really apply to people with champagne budgets? Retail companies like Von Dutch now charge a whopping $42 for trucker hats (truck not included) or $119 for something called a “machine shirt.” We bet wherever you might find people in Charlottesville drinking loads of cheap beer, listening to Johnny Cash and complaining about the “boss man” with complete sincerity, they didn’t pay that kind of money for their clothes.
In valuing the image of authenticity over actual honesty, Generation X embedded irony so deeply into youth culture that Generation Y can’t even tell the difference between real and fake anymore. It’s all cool or uncool, ironic or sincere, or, like, whatever, you know? We’ll leave it to the semiotics professors to puzzle the whole thing out and focus instead on one burning question: You don’t really like the taste of PBR, do you?
The John Ashcroft Award for Excellence in Law Enforcement
-Albemarle County For fighting the War on Drugs, er, Terror at home
Since September 11, it’s been hard to discern the priorities of local law enforcement.
Both the Albemarle and Charlottesville Police departments have lapped up big Federal Homeland Defense grants to purchase gas masks and high-powered rifles, even as both groups remain understaffed. While both departments pay lip service to the value of community-based policing—where officers try to make friends with neighborhood residents—the images of police officers arming themselves with military equipment sends a different message.
The war mentality among local police extends from the not entirely proven belief that the drug trade is intimately tied to international terrorism. While it is known that the Taliban made money off Afghanistan’s poppy crops, there’s no evidence that teenagers selling bags of reefer are part of a vast Al Qaeda sleeper cell.
But Albemarle Police Captain Crystal Limerick insists that the War on Drugs is part of the War on Terror, because, she says, “Someone could rob a house to buy drugs, and the money could go to terrorists.” That’s a lot of speculation for an official trained to deal with facts and evidence. It’s this kind of reasoning, though, that keeps the Federal money flowing.
In the City Hall offices of the multi-jurisdictional Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement Task Force, the fascination with warfare reaches fetish levels. Judging by all the 9-11 iconography in that office, it’s hard to tell whether JADE is tracking crack dealers or Osama bin Laden.
Drug raids are necessary and dangerous, but around here they’re relatively rare. Most local police work requires officers to imagine themselves as social workers, not soldiers. In recent years there have been numerous examples of Albemarle officers applying excessive force under questionable circumstances. In some casses, you have to wonder why these guys were hired in the first place. Most recently, Officer James Michael Fields shot unarmed French citizen Raimond Riviere twice on August 16, landing him in the hospital for weeks with an injury to his liver. After an investigation by Goochland Commonwealth’s Attorney Edward Carpenter, Fields was cleared of any wrongdoing and Riviere pleaded guilty to drunk driving, obstructing justice, eluding police, escape and assault. In October, Albemarle Police Chief John Miller fired Officer Carl Graves after Graves was charged with assault and battery on his girlfriend. Previously Graves had been charged in 2000 with threatening family members with a gun.
But perhaps no agency reaches further to connect itself to the War on Terror than the Albemarle Sheriff’s Department. Recently reelected Sheriff Ed Robb declares that fighting terrorism is his office’s No. 1 priority, even though his deputies are only authorized to guard prisoners and deliver court papers. Robb’s mission to ferret out evildoers should be a little worrisome for local Arab-Americans, given Robb’s history of jumping to racially charged conclusions, as in the Steve Shiflett case.
The “Whose Side Are You On, Anyway?” Award
-Meredith Richards, Blake Caravati and Rob Schilling For trying to give away nine acres of McIntire Park
Three Councilors, eager to get pavement flowing on the long-delayed Meadowcreek Parkway, tried by year’s end to force the highly controversial road through a legal loophole.
State law protects public space by requiring a supermajority—in this case, four-fifths of City Council—before a locality can sell parkland. Since the three pro-Parkway Councilors don’t have that supermajority, they’re maneuvering to grant the land outright to the Virginia Department of Transportation—State constitution and potential lawsuits be damned.
Even though the triumvirate could reach a supermajority if they would work harder to appease ready-to-compromise Councilor Kevin Lynch, they seemed at recent Council meetings hell-bent on squandering the political capital that the parkland represents in City-County relations.
Perhaps the fuel in their drive lies with the Chamber of Commerce, whose members—powerful and well-off City and County businesspeople—support the road. Indeed, the long reach of the Chamber has been felt before in MCP matters. Caravati, a building contractor who campaigned against the road in 2000, was probably trying to play ball with the Chamber when he switched sides in the Parkway debate. And Republican Schilling is clearly aligned with that group.
But Richards is the one side of the triangle that’s harder to solve. The Democratic Vice-Mayor has sought the advice of Republican Attorney General Jerry Kilgore on the parkland question, and pledged to abide by his opinion—a possible prelude to the run for statewide office she’s expected to announce in the coming year. To win outside the City, Richards needs to make friends with conservative County voters, so is it far-fetched to think her actions on the MCP might be a signal to Albemarle Republicans?
The MCP has been a political litmus test for the past 30 years, so it’s no shock that it now reappears on the agenda. The surprise, rather, is in the exposure the Parkway question gives hidden agendas—possibly at taxpayers’ expense.