Ticket masters
Outside U-Hall the call is “I got your tickets right here”
The UVA men’s basketball team and Clemson’s squad are only minutes away from tip-off, and two men who have driven from Afton and Crozet to see the game have yet to land tickets. But on the walkway to the entrance of the arena, the two fans find their man, or rather, boy, in the form of a 9-year-old ticket scalper.
The kid begins to negotiate prices with the men, but is quickly interrupted by another, full-grown scalper who takes over the deal. The two aspiring fans seem to hesitate, perhaps feeling guilty on this Tuesday night for stiffing the kid, who is shivering in his windbreaker on an evening where the wind chill stands at 19 degrees.
“That’s my son,” says the 32-year-old veteran scalper after sensing that his customers are wavering. “I’m gonna let him in on the action.”
Their worries assuaged, the two hoops fans buy two tickets for a total of $30. Tickets are still available at the ticket window inside the arena, but are selling at the face value of $18 apiece—so the two fans each save $3.
“This is a nice way to get tickets,” one of the fans says. Asked if he thinks he broke a law by purchasing tickets from scalpers, he says, “I would think it’s legal, but I don’t care.”
In fact, it is legal to buy tickets from scalpers for UVA sports events, as neither the Commonwealth nor the City or University has banned the practice. However, numerous scalpers, some of whom have been selling tickets for decades, say UVA police harassment has hit an all-time high in January.
According to several scalpers, the trouble began just before the January 3 men’s basketball game with Providence, when at least one scalper was escorted to the parking lot and told to refrain from selling tickets. A scalper says the police officer, while giving a ticket seller the boot, said, “You won’t be getting your rent money today.”
Of the incident, one scalper, who says his name is Troy, but later offers a different nom de guerre, observes, “It’s a shame, man. With what [Coach Pete] Gillen’s got going on in there, they need all the help they can get to fill the place.”
The consensus theory among several regular scalpers, who are aware that their business is on the level, is that the offending cop may have been new and unfamiliar with the legal status of scalping. Additionally, several scalpers speculate that a bogus ticket may have been sold to a fan, perhaps contributing to increased scalper scrutiny by the UVA police.
Sergeant Melissa Fielding of the UVA police force confirms both suspicions of the local scalping crew. She says UVA police are investigating a case in which a fan purchased an outdated and invalid ticket from a scalper for the January 11 matchup against hoops powerhouse Duke. However, Fielding says the UVA police have long ago reached a working relationship with scalpers. She says their only goal is to keep scalpers from blocking the entrance to the arena.
“It’s not been a problem in the 11 years that I’ve been here,” Fielding says of ticket scalping. “Most [scalpers] are courteous enough. They’ve really been cooperative in the past.”
Fielding confirms that a scalper representative received an audience with command staff of the UVA police force after scalpers complained about the overzealous cop at the Providence game.
“That particular incident was resolved,” Fielding says. “We have new officers in. They’re not really clear on what the rules are. Sometimes there can be some confusion.”
Tensions appeared nonexistent between police and the dozen or so adult scalpers and their four accompanying children working the trickle of fans arriving for the January 20 game with Clemson. Frigid conditions and the prospect of cold shooting (the two teams were dueling for the worst shooting percentage in the Atlantic Coast Conference) likely kept many fans away. As a result, scalpers were asking only $10 to $25 per ticket. In contrast, tickets to the recent Duke game were going for $50 to $80.
Scalpers generally get their tickets from alumni and other season ticket holders who are looking to unload extra tickets on their way into a game. The scalpers then sell these tickets at some markup.
“I think we do a great service,” says the scalper who brought his son to work the Clemson game. He says he brings in between $75 and $200 on men’s basketball games, and anywhere from $400 to $1,200 at football games.
“It’s easy money,” he says.
The Charlottesville native, who says he studied finance in college, says he began selling tickets to UVA games when he was his son’s age. As for why he’s brought his son into the business, he says, “That’s a little guy who I don’t have to give money to,” adding that he even encourages the young scalper to invest his earnings in stocks.—Paul Fain
Over the Hill
Did the Jefferson School Task Force heal the wounds of urban renewal?
City Hall was closed on Monday, January 19, for the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, so Council held its regular meeting the next day. Maybe Council was trying to stay true to the spirit of the holiday by heaping praise upon the Jefferson School Task Force during Tuesday’s meeting.
All five Councilors beamed like doting parents at Lelia Brown and Mary Reese, the chair and vice-chair of the Jefferson School Task Force, respectively, as they delivered a report detailing their group’s 16-month consideration of the fate of Jefferson School—the former all-black school on Fourth Street and the last vestige of Vinegar Hill, an African-American neighborhood bulldozed during “urban renewal” in the late 1960s.
The moldering Jefferson School building had sat largely forgotten until 2002, when Council’s plans to sell the site for a housing development and shuffle children attending the City preschool housed there back to neighborhood schools caused an uproar. In response, black leaders, neighborhood activists, former politicians and other powerful folks formed the Citizens for Jefferson School to oppose the sale. Under pressure from CJS, Council assembled the Jefferson School Task Force and spent more than $121,000 on facilitators to help the disparate group work together.
The task force’s final report was due last fall, but Council granted them an extension when their work wasn’t finished by then. Looking at the 37-page document so long in the making, however, one wonders what the task force was up to all this time.
The report recommends the building and the adjacent Carver Recreation Center be nominated for the National Register of Historic Places, and it suggested three possible redevelopment options—as a new home for the main branch of the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library, an early-childhood education center or an adult-education center. Each option would include a cultural component to “tell the story of Jefferson School and the African American community in Charlottesville and Albemarle County,” according to the report.
“In Washington, there’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in London there’s 10 Downing Street, and in Charlottesville, we’ll have Jefferson School,” Reese told Council.
The presentation consumed about an hour of the January 20 meeting, yet many questions remained unanswered when Council finally finished lauding the task force, many of whose members were at the meeting. The report is full of scenarios for how Jefferson School might be reused, yet there’s little information on what redevelopment might cost the City, how long it might take or what Council needs to do next. More than anything, the report told Council that a great deal of work remains to be done before Jefferson School can be brought up to code (an $8 million project).
Yet Council’s praise of the report is a clue that the City convened the Jefferson School Task Force not so much to advance a development project—indeed, it seems a smaller group could have done the same work faster and cheaper than did the task force—as to defuse a political landmine.
Racial tension will always be an issue in Charlottesville, which struggles to reconcile its progressive image with a racist history that some would argue still informs its social fabric. In the late ’60s, for instance, the City bulldozed Vinegar Hill to make way for white businesses, sending many black residents to live in housing projects such as Westhaven. Newspaper reports from that time show that feelings were mixed among displaced blacks about urban renewal. Some welcomed the transition from Vinegar Hill’s substandard housing to homes with heat, running water and reliable electricity, while others opposed the damage to local black culture and the blatant disrespect of a forced move. Today, the legacy of Vinegar Hill is so politicized it’s all but impossible to talk about race issues without mentioning the incident.
Indeed, when Council talks about “expanding Downtown’s vitality,” some people still remember when that phrase justified wiping out an entire black neighborhood. Today, critics of Council’s current housing plan—which involves replacing low-income renters with middle-income homeowners in poor neighborhoods—invoke Vinegar Hill and level charges of gentrification. When Citizens for Jefferson School argued that Council should save the building, Vinegar Hill figured large in their rhetoric.
A year and a half ago, some CSJ members claimed the task force would “heal the wounds of Vinegar Hill.” Making amends for racial injustice seems beyond the scope of the report presented to Council last week, and even though the document is short on facts and figures, given the back-slapping, it’s easy to say Council won over former foes and got exactly what it wanted from the task force.
Mayor Cox: See ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya
“Part of what professors do is profess,” said Mayor Maurice Cox during a press conference at City Hall on Thursday, January 22. Standing behind a wooden podium, clad in his trademark light green Euro-style shirt, striped tie and corduroy jacket and sipping a lukewarm ginger ale from a clear plastic cup, Cox exuded the academic air—which inspired some and infuriated others during his term—as he announced he would not seek reelection to City Council.
Doing triple-duty as a practicing architect, a UVA professor and City Councilor left very little time for family and relaxation during the past eight years, Cox said. He said he has applied for an eight-month Ivy League fellowship and is looking forward to “taking a break from public service to reflect on the past eight years, and to consider how I might best serve this community in the future.”
The Mayor left no doubt he would remain a behind-the-scenes player in local politics, especially as Council works to develop a new transit system and redevelop W. Main Street, and he all but promised to seek public office again.
For months, observers speculated Cox would leave Council, and in practical terms his resignation was confirmed on Tuesday, January 20, when Rose Hill Neighborhood president Kendra Hamilton announced her candidacy for the Democratic Party nomination. Cox had claimed he would leave Council only if a candidate who shared his views—preferably a black woman—could be found.
Hamilton joins chiropractor and former Dem chair David Brown, as well as Council incumbents Kevin Lynch and Meredith Richards, as the only announced candidates for their party’s nomination. At press time, Republicans have not fielded a candidate. (Two years ago, Republican Rob Schilling entered the race at the 11th hour and defeated Democrat Alexandria Searls in the May election.)
By State law, both parties must have their ballots set by February 10. The Democrats will hold their nominating convention on February 7; the Republicans on February 5.—John Borgmeyer
Interpretive dance
Economists duel with different reads on the Guv’s tax plan
Ask two people the same question and you’re liable to get two different answers. This maxim certainly applies to two groups of economists who were tasked with evaluating Gov. Mark R. Warner’s proposed tax plan. As expected, the economists’ takes on the plan reflect the view of whoever requested the review.
The complex tax overhaul proposed by Warner includes raising taxes on goods, cigarettes, high-income households and on some corporate practices. It would also reduce rates on food and on certain income brackets, estates and business expenses. The net impact would be an added $1 billion in State revenue.
Republicans who oppose the tax hikes are citing an analysis from a firm headed by Dr. James C. Miller III, who was President Ronald Reagan’s budget director. Miller’s number crunching, which was commissioned and paid for by two top Virginia Republicans (House of Delegates Speaker William J. Howell and Attorney General and GOP gubernatorial candidate-apparent Jerry Kilgore), found that the Warner plan would wreak economic ruin on the State. By 2006, the plan would cost Virginia $9.8 billion in lost revenue and 27,700 jobs, the report says.
Not to be outdone, Warner and other supporters of the tax plan are touting their own economic analysis. Four economists in the State’s Department of Planning and Budget, which is under the purview of the Governor’s office, produced this study. The document, which is heftier than its counterpart, finds that the economic stimulus resulting from the plan will outweigh any hindrances caused by raising certain taxes.
The Republican-funded study looked only at the impact of raising sales and cigarette taxes, which it calls the “central feature” of the tax plan. The State analysis seeks to “assess the overall economic impact” of the tax plan, partially by factoring in the ripple of indirect benefits resulting from education and infrastructure spending increases. As a result, the State report offers a far more complete view than the study from Miller’s firm, but is also less specific and more likely to trail off into uncertainty.
Dueling economic projections are nothing new in politics, likely leading some observers of the tax scrap to disregard the reports as little more than expanded sound bites from the politicians who commissioned them. However, the analyses warrant a second look in the run-up to a vote with potentially long-lasting effects on Virginia’s economy.—Paul Fain