And then there were three…
Dems oust Richards for new faces
Meredith Richards believes that a referendum to build the Meadowcreek Parkway would pass in Charlottesville, but on Saturday, February 7, the only votes that counted belonged to the 530 people who showed up for the Democrats’ nominating convention for May’s City Council election.
“It’s a shame that it came down to a single issue, but that’s what happened,” Richards said moments after party chair Lloyd Snook announced that David Brown, Kendra Hamilton and Kevin Lynch had beaten her for three positions on the Dems’ May 4 ballot, effectively writing the ending to her eight-year term on Council.
Hamilton won with 429 votes. Incumbent Lynch took 341, and David Brown beat out Richards 322 to 300 for the third position on the Democratic ticket. It will be the first political campaign for both Hamilton, president of the Rose Hill Neighborhood Association, and Brown, a chiropractor, youth soccer coach and former party chair.
That the Dems chose to oust the two-term incumbent Richards in favor of newcomers reflects just how seriously the party faithful opposes the Meadowcreek Parkway, which Richards wants to build. On the other big-deal Dem issues—affordable housing, public transportation, social activism and environmental policy—Richards sounded all the right notes. She shucked her party only on the controversial road, which for local Dems has come to symbolize the City’s battle with the County for middle-class homebuyers.
“It’s not just a single issue,” explained Mary MacNeil, an outspoken Parkway opponent. “The Parkway is about who’s going to live in Charlottesville, who’s going to pay the taxes,” she said. The City should be coaxing the middle class into Charlottesville, MacNeil says, so why should Council approve a road that sends more of them into Albemarle? “What does it do for the City? Zilch!” she declared.
At press time, only Republican Kenneth Jackson, a Parkway supporter, had unofficially declared his candidacy (the Republicans’ nominating meeting was to take place during the evening on Monday, February 9). Jackson, a restaurant worker, says he will attack the Democrats for wasteful spending. “We have schools in disrepair,” Jackson says. “We need to spend our money on necessities.” On the Parkway, Jackson says it’s time to start construction.
Richards knew her stance on the Parkway would cause hard feelings within her party. Before the convention, she presented a Parkway referendum as democracy in action. “I want to let the people decide,” she said at a candidates’ forum on February 5. Fellow Councilor Lynch argued on that occasion that he didn’t want the issue to be decided by a California-style “battle of sound bites.”
Richards’ line played well on WINA, which advanced the notion that Richards was the only Democrat who would “allow the people to choose,” but Richards knew that outside AM radio-land she was in trouble with the party. At the February 5 forum, Richards backed away from a plan to ease VDOT land for the Parkway.
“It’s been misreported that we would vote for an easement,” she said. “That’s not the case. I want to have a public discussion about it.”
The conflict provided the only interesting debate during that night’s two-hour event, moderated by Virginia Organizing Project Director Joe Szakos. About 30 people braved freezing rain to meet in City Hall, where Szakos gave each party hopeful two minutes to answer audience questions.
Though the forum’s theme was ecology and social justice, no one asked any questions about water.
The Democrats would rather not talk about the water supply, says Jock Yellott, a Republican who attended the forum and who says he might consider a run at Council as an Independent. “They’d rather not remind us that 30 years of irresponsible Democratic rule has left us vulnerable, and we remain so,” Yellot said via e-mail. “Next drought we’ll be flushing our toilets with bottled water again.”
Instead, the questions allowed the candidates to wax philosophical: What is the best way to achieve social justice? How will you protect citizens from the PATRIOT Act?
“Let’s do something about gentrification in our traditionally African-American neighborhoods,” Hamilton said, in response to a question about racism and classism. A Ph.D. student in English, Hamilton’s eloquent speeches about a diverse City “dreaming the same dream together” helped win her the nomination on Saturday. As a newcomer to politics, however, Hamilton has yet to face the paradox that confronts every Democratic activist who would sit on Council—the party values social programs, but the City must court a middle-class tax base to pay the bills. As City leaders, Councilors encourage gentrification. But in the company of fellow Democrats, they can’t be too enthusiastic about it.
“It takes one term to make you a Councilor, two terms makes you a leader,” outgoing Mayor Maurice Cox said on February 7, to the cheers of Democrats who packed the Albemarle County Office Building auditorium for the convention. As he spoke, he was endorsing Kevin Lynch, but he could have been talking about Richards, too.
Regardless of Charlottesville leaders’ attitudes toward sprawl-favoring County pols, the City can’t pursue its interests without the cooperation of the County and the State. In ousting Richards, the Dems lose a politician with expertise outside the City limits. Cox personally courted Hamilton to oppose the Parkway, and her nomination now means that this summer Council will gain at least two rookies. And who knows? Maybe the Parkway will prove to be as popular as Richards thinks, and Republicans will ride the road to a Council seat.—John Borgmeyer
Progress returns to pooch patrol
Daily paper all worked up over old issue
Controversy has heated up around a dog lab at the UVA School of Medicine in which students practice surgical techniques on dogs that are later euthanized. Animal welfare activists held a protest in front of Jordan Hall and later met with the Dean of the School of Medicine, who refused to shutter the lab.
That was more than 15 years ago.
Now the dog lab flap has been resurrected. A new group called the Citizens for Humane Medicine is taking it on. And this time, leaders of the campaign have succeeded in saving the dogs’ lives—for now.
Key to the campaign’s success has been local media coverage. The Daily Progress has led the charge with at least three news articles and an editorial denouncing the lab. However, the DP made no mention of previous debates over the pooch lab.
“We had a lot of coverage back there, 15 years ago,” says Susan Wiedman of the Jordan Hall protest in which she participated.
The difference with the current campaign, say Wiedman and Marianne Roberts, a co-founder of the Citizens for Humane Medicine, is the leadership of Rooshin Dalal, a fifth-year M.D., Ph.D. student at UVA, and the fact that since the mid-’80s many medical schools have moved away from using dog labs.
“I think the time was not right,” says Roberts of previous efforts to shut down the lab.
Supporters of the dog lab surely will be disappointed by the February 4 announcement from the medical school suspending the lab “until after the review has been completed.” Troy Mohler, a UVA medical student, who was enrolled in the optional lab a month ago, says working with live tissue is invaluable. Of the 30 students in his class only three opted out of the dog lab, Mohler says.
“I think it’s a great lab. I learned a lot,” he says.
The supposed shift by medical schools away from dog labs was highlighted at a forum at UVA just more than a year ago. Arranged by Dalal, the forum sparked several editorials in the Cavalier Daily. The Daily Progress, however, failed to cite the debate’s long tenure on campus in its recent articles.
The keynote speaker at least year’s forum was Neal D. Barnard, M.D., the president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine—a group that opposes live animal labs. Barnard’s group argues that only 18 percent of the approximately 125 medical schools in the country use live animals to train students. This claim has been central in the current donnybrook over the UVA lab and features prominently in DP coverage. And though the survey was conducted by the PCRM, hardly the most unbiased of sources on animal labs, it appears to be mostly validated by other research. For example, a 2002 USA Today article cited an academic survey that found only 30 percent of medical schools still offer live animal labs.
Dalal says that instead of cutting into dogs, the common standard these days is for medical schools to use more “human-based models” such as high-tech dummies or cadavers.
Besides the PCRM, Dalal and his group now have allies among other national organizations, including the Humane Society and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). But although the local campaign has widely distributed the group’s e-mail alerts, they did not actively seek the high-powered support of them or other national activist groups.
“I have not spoken to PETA once,” Roberts says. “I guess The Daily Progress contacted them.”
PETA’s controversial tactics, such as putting naked women in cages to protest the circus, have been known to provoke backlashes. Though Dalal says he appreciates the support of groups like PETA, he admits he’s concerned that the group “won’t get the full facts” in its Web material or elsewhere. Indeed, PETA’s action alert drastically overstates the number of dogs put to death by UVA each year, which officials say is fewer than 100. —Paul Fain
Creative differences
Local screenwriter leads Hollywood types against the FCC
With almost a decade in Tinseltown and nine television movies under his belt, screenwriter Jonathan Rintels knows a bit about Hollywood. But as a lawyer who has practiced in Washington, D.C.—and also worked as a cab driver there—the Keswick resident also knows his way around the nation’s capital.
Armed with this bicoastal experience, Rintels came to believe that Federal regulators are doing little to stem the snowballing growth of media conglomerates. Furthermore, the homogenized content controlled by these companies means less work for writers.
“The things that were happening in Washington were having an obvious negative impact on creative writers,” Rintels says. “All these issues were having a hell of a lot more impact on my destiny than what was going on in L.A.”
In the fall of 2002, Rintels decided to actively combat the big media trend by forming a nonprofit advocacy group comprising Hollywood writers, producers, actors and directors.
The group, originally called the Center for the Creative Community, first hit the scene during the hubbub prior to the Federal Communications Commission‘s decision last June to loosen the rules on how many television and radio affiliates a media company can own in each media market. That ruling sparked a massive backlash, with an estimated 2 million complaints deluging the Beltway agency.
In the last year, Rintels has put together a board of directors with several Hollywood heavy-hitters—including Warren Beatty, Fay Wray and director Blake Edwards—and recently changed the name of his organization to the Center for Creative Voices in Media. Rintels, a UVA Law School graduate, has represented the group on National Public Radio, C-SPAN and at an FCC hearing in Richmond.
Besides Rintels, other Charlottesville luminaries occupy positions on the board of the upstart Hollywood group, among them Sissy Spacek and filmmaker Paul Wagner, who won an Oscar for a 1984 documentary. Wagner says he has “libertarian leanings” and admits that he hesitated when asked by Rintels to join in calling for government action on media consolidation. But Wagner says his belief in the need for a true “marketplace of ideas” won him over.
“I wish that we didn’t have to ask the government to do these things,” Wagner says.
In early January, Rintels, Beatty and other members of the group met in Hollywood for a discussion with Senator John McCain (R–AZ) and network executives. And in March, Rintels’ group will host a conference in Los Angeles on media consolidation that will feature numerous bigwigs from both Hollywood and Washington.
Though energized by his organization’s role in a hot issue that he sees as being “the new environmental movement,” Rintels acknowledges that the Center has its work cut out for it. For example, he says people often believe that having hundreds of cable channels means that they have more media choices than ever before.
“It’s like the cereal aisle. There’s a hundred brands, but they’re all made by three companies,” Rintels says.—Paul Fain
It’s ’Hoo you know
UVA shows its love with hot tickets for pols
It’s not what you know, it’s who you know—nowhere is that more true than the back-scratching world of Virginia politics. As a State agency, UVA needs the support of elected leaders. What better way to make nice with good ol’ Virginia boys than free tickets to the big game?
UVA invites local leaders like Creigh Deeds, Rob Bell, Steve Landes and Mitch Van Yahres to every game. “They usually meet for snacks or lunch at Carr’s Hill beforehand, then they’re taken by bus to the game with University leaders,” says University spokesperson Carol Wood. Also, UVA invites every member of the General Assembly to the Virginia Tech game, which is known as “Commonwealth Day.”
Other legislators apparently get tickets when UVA wants something from them. In 2003, for example, UVA entertained Delegate Bob Marshall and Senator Mark Obenshain and likely encouraged them to back off on their efforts to ban emergency contraception pills at all Commonwealth universities. Marshall and Obenshain must not have been too impressed by the Cavalier victories—this year Marshall introduced a bill prohibiting emergency contraception at all public colleges.—John Borgmeyer