Commons grounded
Council tables controversial project, promising change is on the way
For now, at least, the stretch of Preston Avenue in front of the Monticello Dairy Building will stay as it is—a triangle-shaped island of grass and empty beer bottles, bordered by the convoluted intersection of Preston, Grady Avenue and 10th Street, along with parking lots, cars and shops ensconced in the 1937 dairy building.
On Monday, March 1, a group of Preston business owners effectively thwarted a City plan to turn the 1.4 acre parcel into about 50,000 square feet of condominiums and office space.
Blake Caravati joined fellow Councilors Rob Schilling and Meredith Richards in a 3-2 vote to kill City plans for the project, with Mayor Maurice Cox and Kevin Lynch opposing; also, Council unanimously voted to form a committee that will study redevelopment opportunities on Preston, from the 10th and Grady intersection eastward.
“I hope there’s as much momentum to create something [on Preston] as there has been to stop something,” Cox said after the vote. The lame duck Mayor and retiring City planning director Satyendra Huja had championed the controversial plan, known as Preston Commons.
Contending with opposition from residents and apathy from developers, Cox formed a toothless “Mayor’s Advisory Committee” last year. Its task: to receive responses to a “Request for Qualifications,” a rarely extended invitation from the City that asks developers for their resumés, but doesn’t ask for specific ideas.
Only two developers submitted proposals; both asked to buy the property, and one asked the City to forget Preston Commons and begin redevelopment on sites to the east.
After killing Preston Commons, Councilors agreed that redevelopment would nonetheless come to that area. A 2000 study by the design firm Torti Gallas recommends mixed-use redevelopment for Charlottesville’s “commercial corridors” on Preston, Cherry Avenue, Fifth Street Extended and River Road. But local business owners disparaged the study, because it does not mention extant businesses that could be displaced or disadvantaged during construction.
Cox says Preston is “certainly underutilized,” and said during the Council meeting that Charlottesville must redevelop, given that the swelling City budget relies heavily on property taxes. “If we wait until the market says it’s O.K. to build on Preston Avenue, we’ll have had to make some severe cuts,” said Cox.
Hey, big spender
More than 35 percent of City revenue comes from real estate taxes—that’s too much, said City Manager Gary O’Connell on March 1 as he introduced Charlottesville’s FY 2004-05 budget, adding that there are few places left to turn for money.
The budget totals $105,813,350—a nearly 7 percent jump from 2004. O’Connell says Charlottesville is facing new expenses (namely, school construction projects and Ivy Landfill clean-up), as well as declining revenues from Richmond for the Regional Jail and youth services.
O’Connell has proposed the following to cover the mounting costs:
n Increase cigarette tax to 25 cents per pack;
n Increase the E-911 tax to $3 per phone line;
n Increase trash fees by 5 percent;
n Increase various building permits and fees;
n Increase public safety fees for finge printing, false alarms and copying reports;
n Increase commercial utility rates.
The Commonwealth’s financial woes may also impact the City’s bond rating, which determines the rate at which the City can borrow money. O’Connell says that given the State’s shakiness, the credit rating agencies will look skeptically at Virginia cities now. Charlottesville’s proposed budget suggests issuing $10 million in bonds for capital projects.
The current and proposed budgets are available on the City’s website, www.charlottesville.org. Click on the “Resident” link, locate the budgets, then register your thoughts with the online Budget Forum.—John Borgmeyer
Passage to India
Local companies send jobs to South Asia
Senator John Kerry, the newly anointed Democratic nominee for President, has been fulminating over “Benedict Arnold CEOs” who are “sending American jobs overseas.” Kerry and other politicians have leveled these charges at the growing trend of “offshoring,” in which American firms send information technology or other white-collar jobs to developing countries, often India.
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) recently found itself in the crosshairs when The Wall Street Journal wrote about the company’s plan to move 3,000 high-paying programming jobs out of the United States this year.
Smaller companies are also taking advantage of an increasingly wired globe, including some based in Charlottesville, with at least three local firms now hiring help in India.
Through a contract with an Indian data collection firm, SNL Financial has operated an office of 40 workers in Ahmedabad, India, since last summer, according to Mike Chinn, SNL’s president. And Brad Lamb, the president of InteLex, an academic publishing firm headquartered in Charlottesville, says his company has employed an Indian data entry firm for more than a decade. A third local company, the National Law Library, declined to discuss its work in India, but did not deny hiring help overseas.
InteLex produces electronic versions of scholarly texts, the hard copies of which are scanned by the company, sent to India and then typed-in twice by workers there to create accurate electronic versions. U.S. companies commonly outsource this process, which is called “double keying.” Lamb says that if any American companies are double keying, it’s with offshore subcontractors.
Tim Grubbs, a text editor for InteLex, traveled last year to see his company’s contractor operation in Bangalore, India. Though Lamb and Grubbs say the company took steps to assure that its contract workers were treated well, such as paying them 30 percent more than the local industry standard, Grubbs says he had some worries before the tour.
“I really went into it with some apprehension,” Grubbs says, admitting that he wondered, “Is this going to be a sweatshop?”
The office is located in an upscale suburb of Bangalore, a city of about 6.5 million people. Grubbs says the well-dressed workers were typing on about 50 computers in a room that looked like it could be located on the second floor of a building on Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall. He says the employees took regular Chai breaks on the rooftop.
“[I] was very impressed,” Grubbs says. “It seemed like a dream job for a lot of those people.”
Chinn at SNL stresses that his company’s contractors in India are not replacements for liquidated local jobs, but are part of an overall expansion of the company. SNL trained the employees, who are hired through a contractor, even bringing several of the “team leaders” to Charlottesville. He says the data analysis done in India is “largely still manual” and is most helpful when SNL crunches data around the quarterly reporting cycles of the financial corporations it analyzes, a time when “the sheer volume of information that becomes available is overwhelming.”
The appeal of hiring help in Ahmedabad, a city that is home to more than 5 million people and massive pollution problems, is that the English-speaking population includes “a large pool of people with accounting skills,” Chinn says. Also, the time difference between the two countries can be helpful, because, as one Indian data processing firm says on its website, “While the U.S. sleeps, India works, and vice-versa.”
Cost is obviously an important factor in offshoring. Chinn says that for the work in India, SNL spends about 25 percent to 30 percent of what it would to hire comparable American employees for the job. Furthermore, Chinn says the cheaper skilled labor is important for SNL to stay competitive, particularly because he says industry rivals such as Bloomberg, Thompson and Reuters are also engaging in offshoring.
“In order to sort of stay ahead, we felt like we had to do this now,” Chinn says, adding that he feels that most local SNL employees “understand why [offshoring] should benefit them in the long run.”
Chinn says SNL’s operations in India have been a success, and that “we expect the office to grow.” The company is also looking at new offshore locations in countries such as Pakistan and the Philippines.
Analysts predict that many U.S. companies will join SNL in ramping-up overseas outsourcing. A recent report from Forrester Research estimates that 3.3 million U.S. jobs and $136 billion in wages will have moved to developing countries between 2000 and 2015.
Charlottesville resident Ariel MacLean has been a private job search consultant for almost 15 years. She says the skills of many of her tech-oriented clients are becoming obsolete, partially because of offshoring. However, she stops well short of blaming that trend for local and national employment woes, calling the protectionist rumblings from Kerry and others “just rhetoric.”
“It’s a one-world economy,” MacLean says. “It’s the way of the dollar. It’s nothing personal.”
Grubbs of InteLex says he hopes the backlash caused by offshoring doesn’t fall on India.
“It’s a very intelligent culture that’s just starting to shine now,” he says.—Paul Fain
Popular click
Meet George Edward Loper, gentleman journalist
Aquick Internet search for any Charlottesville newsmaker is likely to yield dozens of links to www.loper.org/~george. For example, Google finds a whopping 63 links for City Councilor Rob Schilling on the site, which is run by George Loper, 57, a local liberal and media maven.
“I saw things I’d forgotten I’d even written,” says Lloyd Snook, local Democratic Party chairperson, of the links his name turned up on the Loper page.
With deep archives stretching back to 1996 and beyond, and a daily drumbeat of content, some of it original, the Loper webpage has become a repository of information on local politics and personalities, as well as national issues that are hot in progressive circles.
“It’s completely arbitrary,” Loper says of the material on his site, most of which are links to news articles and letters from readers. On a recent sunny morning at his office, which is on the second floor of his home in the Greenbrier neighborhood, Loper points to a two-foot-tall stack of newspaper clippings that is to be scanned and uploaded to his website.
Loper sporadically hires two writers to help him write for the free webpage, and regularly sends e-mails to a list of about 350 people who signed up to receive updates. And though Loper works with and has served on the boards of several local groups, including Planned Parenthood and the Piedmont Housing Alliance, running the giant website is his chief calling.
Loper may be the site’s editor, but he says he doesn’t personally agree with the majority of its material.
“If you’ve got a good discourse, then things will come out right. My contribution is not about advancing agendas,” Loper says.
So what drives Loper to be the de facto archivist of local politics?
Loper, who has a master’s degree in social work, says he created the site in part because he missed the “intellectual dialogue” of the UVA community, which he had not been directly involved with since he finished postgraduate work there in 1982. (Loper’s wife, Ann Booker Loper, is a professor and director of programs in clinical and school psychology at UVA’s Curry School.)
“I had some time on my hands and I wanted to see what was going on,” Loper says of his decision to start the website about a decade ago. “By giving other people voice, it also gives me voice.”
Loper’s political ideology has shifted a great deal since his teenage days in San Antonio, Texas, where he says he was a “Barry Goldwater conservative.” While at the University of Texas at Austin during the Vietnam War, Loper, a conscientious objector, decided that certain situations require Federal involvement, and a devout Democrat was born.
When asked if he ever wishes he’d become a professional journalist, Loper says, “Oh absolutely.” But though his site, which he admits is about what interests him, might not qualify as pure journalism, it certainly pursues several journalistic goals, including holding local figures accountable. When a noteworthy statement is made in Charlottesville, it likely lands on Loper’s site—and stays there.
“If you ever thought that e-mail is not a permanent thing, you’re sure wrong where George is concerned,” Snook says.—Paul Fain
High expectations
Independent Vance High wants to drop science on City Hall
The notion that Charlottesville is getting too big too fast isn’t uncommon. Nor is it unusual, as election season draws near, for squeaky wheels to get louder.
Vance High isn’t mad mad. Irked is more like it. When the City began considering plans for a new residential development in a wooded area near his home on Cleveland Avenue, High realized he would lose the sound of horned owls at night and the sight of blue herons in the morning. Charlottesville can’t afford to keep paving natural areas, he says.
“Green space needs to be protected, and the neighbors need to be addressed when developments are coming,” says High. “That’s what got me off the bench.”
That the City needs better public relations is an oft-heard complaint—witness last week’s demise of Mayor Maurice Cox’s plans to redevelop Preston Avenue [see “Commons grounded,” p. 9]. Local business owners opposed that project, Preston Commons, and decried the City’s “arrogance.”
High, who is 46, doesn’t seem like a ruckus raiser. Bespectacled and slight, he fits the image of a science teacher, a job he’s done in both Charlottesville and Snohomish, Washington. High’s scientific background (he has masters degrees in epidemiology and science education) earned him the support of Council-watcher Peter Kleeman.
“He wants to know: How much pollution is in our waterways? Is the City concerned about it?” says Kleeman. “He’s willing to take his camera and his chemistry set out and ask, ‘What’s really going on out here?’”
Last week, as High struggled to obtain the 125 registered voter signatures he needed by Tuesday, March 2, he posted a message on George Loper’s website (http://george.loper.org) offering to buy dinner at C&O for whomever helped him round up signatures. High got help from both Kleeman and Dudley Marsteller, but High says neither accepted the dinner offer. [For more on Loper, see page 13].
With no party apparatus to help raise money and mobilize voters, High is at a clear disadvantage compared to the other five candidates. No independent has won a Council seat in recent elections. James King ran as an independent in 1998, and won 34 percent of votes cast in the four-man race for two seats. He finished fourth, 140 votes behind Republican Michael Craifac. In 2000, independents Kevin Cox and Stratton Salidis earned 14 percent and 6 percent, respectively, of 5,220 votes cast.
Cox, who ran to oppose “the City’s long neglect of working class people who pay their own way, and public policy that treats renters as second-class citizens,” says he feels the other Council candidates ignored his ideas, in contrast to the voters.
“I think people took some satisfaction that there was a voice there,” says Cox.
High’s message to preserve green space may indeed resonate in neighborhoods that oppose Council plans to increase density and building heights. As a newcomer to politics, High can afford to ignore, for now, the fact that the City’s budget is demanding a wider real estate tax base.
All that will come later, says High, who adds he’s studying the issues and fine-tuning his platform. “Right now I’m just happy I had a chance to get on the ballot. It’s nice to be able to get involved on this level,” he says.—John Borgmeyer