Tuesday, April 6 – Heckling the ambassador
Rich Felker, a UVA grad student, spent a night in the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail for his role in a Students for Free Tibet protest of a campus appearance by Yang Jiechi, the Chinese ambassador to the United States. Felker, who was released this morning, was arrested while attempting to chain himself to a banister inside the Rotunda during Jiechi’s speech on Monday. Another demonstrator briefly shouted over the speech. Felker was charged with disorderly conduct and attempting to incite a riot.
Wednesday, April 7 – Time to pay the bills?
The House of Delegates made strides toward ending the budget standoff when a committee today passed a compromise budget featuring a tax increase that would net an additional $972.5 million. The new plan, backed by 17 House Republicans, will be up for a vote in coming days. Special interest groups on both sides of the debate turned the screws on wavering Republicans this week, with conservative gadfly Grover G. Norquist of the D.C.-based Americans for Tax Reform warning that the proposed tax increase “will endanger the political position of at least 32 delegates.” Norquist, who helpfully listed the delegates’ names in a letter to legislators and the media, says each politician signed a pledge promising not to raise taxes—at all. Albemarle Del. Rob Bell, who told Bob Gibson of The Daily Progress that he would “listen” to next week’s debate over the compromise, did not sign the no-tax pledge.
Thursday, April 8 – Marching on the Mall
About 100 supporters, mostly young women, came to the Downtown Amphitheater tonight for the annual Take Back the Night march to the Rotunda, where a vigil was held. The rally is an international affair seeking to protest violence against women, and was first observed in Charlottesville in 1989. Kobby Hoffman, the president of the Charlottesville chapter of the National Organization for Women and one the local event’s four original organizers, said last year’s event did not feature a march because of a last-minute difficulty in getting approval from the City. Hoffman says a call to Meredith Richards, the City’s vice-mayor, smoothed over any hassles this year, and participants again marched along the Downtown Mall.
Friday, April 9 – Milestone at Monticello
Like celebrities flashing past the velvet rope at a swanky New York City club, the Wang family of Cresskill, New Jersey, was led past an hour-and-a-half-long line of visitors and into Monticello today. Huaihai Wang, an interpreter for the United Nations, his wife and their son got the high-roller treatment, which included an exclusive visit to the dome room and a basket of souvenirs, because one of the Wangs marked the 25 millionth visitor to Jefferson’s manse since it opened to the public in 1924. That year, 20,091 visitors forked over 50 cents each for the tour. In 2003, 464,733 visitors dropped $13 for adults and $6 for children to see Jefferson’s digs.
Saturday, April 10 – Raymond L. Bell’s funeral
A throng of well-wishers came to First Baptist Church on W. Main Street today to pay their respects to Raymond L. Bell, a prominent African-American leader who died on April 3. Bell, a Charlottesville native, was the first black member of the City School Board and was active in the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter. After serving in World War II and attending Boston University, Bell came back to Charlottesville to work at and later run his family funeral home, one of the oldest African-American owned businesses in town.
Sunday, April 11 – All Mel, all the time
After having fallen back in the pack for three weeks, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ reclaimed the top box-office spot over Easter weekend. Christian moviegoers, looking to make a first or second viewing of the crucifixion drama part of their holy week, helped The Passion net another $17.1 million over the weekend. With $354.8 million earned so far, the movie is now the eighth most popular flick on the all-time U.S. chart, and clearly the biggest Aramaic language film in history.
Monday, April 12 – Life on $7.25 an hour
Democratic City Council candidate Kendra Hamilton and author Barbara Ehrenreich were among the people slated to speak today at a campus rally hosted by the UVA Living Wage Coalition and the Staff Union at UVA. The event tried to address the struggle of making ends meet on $7.25 an hour—the minimum wage for employees of Sodexho, the food services provider for UVA.
—Written by Paul Fain from local news sources and staff reports
Electoral college
The Sorensen Institute cranks out candidates
If future public officeholders learn one thing from the Sorensen Institute’s candidate training program, it should be this:
Politics is applied ethics.
“It’s a question of truth versus loyalty,” says Sean O’Brien, the Institute’s deputy director who runs the candidate training program.
Sorensen’s candidate training program, a three-day crash course for aspiring politicians offered once a year, is becoming a popular warm-up for aspiring City Councilors. Two of this year’s six City Council candidates—Republicans Kenneth Jackson and Ann Reinicke—graduated from the candidate training program in March 2004, while Democrat Kendra Hamilton attended two of the three days. (Democrats Kevin Lynch and David Brown and independent Vance High are also running for Council this year.)
In 2002, sitting Councilor Rob Schilling took O’Brien’s course and scored a surprise victory in the May election. So far, 124 people have graduated from the candidate training program. Of those alums, 100 have actually run for office, and 27 won.
“That’s not too bad,” O’Brien says, “considering that these are generally first-time candidates running against incumbents.”
The Sorensen Institute started in 1993 as the Virginia Institute for Political Leadership. It was the brainchild of Charlottesville attorney Leigh Middleditch, who at the time was serving both in the Chamber of Commerce and on UVA’s Board of Visitors. He got the idea from a magazine article.
“I was intrigued about getting more business people involved in elected politics,” says Middleditch.
The name was changed in 1997, when Tom Sorensen, a friend of the Institute’s first and only executive director, Norfolk newspaper magnate William Wood, bequeathed the organization $800,000.
Charlottesville Senator Emily Couric graduated from Sorensen’s first 10-month class on political leadership in fall 1993. Three years later, the Institute opened the candidate training program to prepare people seeking local office for the first time.
“I want them to make a decision about what kind of campaign they’re going to run, and about how they’re going to vote,” says O’Brien, who holds a doctorate in environmental science from UVA. “You have to decide what line you’re not going to cross to get elected. And when you’re there, are you going to vote the way you perceive the public wants, or do you vote your conscience?”
The three-day course costs $250, with scholarship and payment plans available. O’Brien says attendees must be seriously planning to enter a race. Besides helping the candidates think about ethics, the course also teaches them how to fine-tune a message, raise money and talk to the media.
O’Brien’s first pop quiz, however, is the training program’s rigorous schedule. It begins at 9:30am on Friday and ends at 9pm. Saturday is another 12-hour day, followed by seven more hours on Sunday.
“If you can’t handle the pace of this weekend, you better not try to run a campaign,” O’Brien says.— John Borgmeyer
The unkindest cut
You’ve just been stabbed. What happens next?
A knife-wielding UVA student allegedly committed Charlottesville’s only murder of 2003. This year, only a few hours passed before the City saw its first stabbing, which occurred on New Year’s Day. Since then, there have been at least three other knife attacks in Charlottesville, including stabbings outside of the Outback Lodge and, across Preston Avenue, at the Firehouse Bar and Grill.
Victims of the rash of local stabbings ended up at the UVA Medical Center, where doctors such as William Brady Jr., the vice-chair of the department of emergency medicine, deal with the damage.
“There’s really a huge spectrum of severity in terms of stab wounds,” says Brady, who helped treat several recent stabbing victims. But though some stab wounds might seem minor, such as one caused by a sewing needle in the arm, Brady says any stabbing victim needs to go to the emergency room, likely by ambulance.
“A stab wound in the chest and a gunshot wound to the chest can both be equally life threatening,” Brady says.
The appearance of a wound can be deceiving when it comes to a victim’s chance of surviving a stabbing. As Brady explains, “The size of the hole is not indicative of the underlying injury.”
For example, someone stabbed in the chest with a centimeter-wide letter opener could have a relatively innocuous-looking wound, Brady says. But, with a six-inch-long blade, the letter opener might have lacerated the victim’s heart, which is often fatal.
On the other hand, “a huge gaping wound may look dreadful,” Brady says, but may pose little threat to a victim’s life and require only stitches and cleaning.
The first step doctors at the UVA Medical Center take in determining how to treat a stab wound is to decide whether to call a “trauma alert.” Brady describes this as a “total hospital response to a very sick patient” that brings in trauma surgeons and nurses, activates the operating room and gets the blood bank ready.
The criteria for calling a trauma alert sounds fairly simple. If a stabbing patient took the knife in the chest, abdomen, back or head, the alert is automatically triggered (if the victim has been stabbed in the head, doctors will also summon a neurosurgeon). Brady says the alert is also called if a stabbing wound to a leg or arm causes enough bleeding to produce low blood pressure in the patient.
The first priority of the trauma team is to protect or restore a patient’s breathing. When a knife rips into the lungs or severs a major airway, a stabbing victim can be in big trouble, Brady says.
The first attempts to stabilize the victim take place in the E.R. “Thankfully, in most cases, that’s successful,” Brady says. However, patients with serious wounds may be sent to the operating room. This can occur after several hours of being worked on by several doctors and nurses, or after only three minutes.
In the worst-case scenario, even a trip to the operating room can’t save a stabbing victim. And, unlike the outcome of many episodes of the NBC television drama “E.R.,” when a patient dies in the hospital, they can rarely be resuscitated.
Brady cites a recent medical journal study that found when hospital television shows depict the struggle to save a patient whose heart has stopped, 80 to 90 percent of the time the patient is revived. According to Brady, the actual resuscitation rate in emergency rooms is typically 5 to 20 percent.
“Many laypeople take medical information from the television set,” Brady says. “In reality, people do die from stab wounds.”—Paul Fain
Upon further review…
Controversy rages over ward system
During budget season you expect partisan battles between Council Democrats and the lone Republican who pledged to keep an eye out for wasteful spending. But during Council’s meeting on Monday, April 5, a party-line battle emerged over something more than money—the very nature of Charlottesville’s government.
On Monday, Council finally approved Republican Councilor Rob Schilling’s plan to study switching to a ward system—or did they?
That night, Council considered two competing proposals: one from Schilling, which would charge a task force with exploring the direct election of the mayor, switching to a ward system and increasing the number of City Councilors; the other, from outgoing Mayor Maurice Cox, added more than a dozen bullet points further refining the task force’s charge.
The task force passed 3-1, with Blake Caravati opposing and Kevin Lynch abstaining because he says the whole thing is a waste of time. Meredith Richards, Schilling and Cox voted for the task force, but there was confusion over which charge they approved.
Schilling apparently believed he was voting for his own version, while Cox believed he was voting for his own version. At press time, City Council Clerk Jeanne Cox and City Attorney Craig Brown were reviewing the tape of the meeting to determine what happened.
“It’s still confusing,” says Jeanne Cox. “Part of the problem is that it was 12:30am, and we’re not at our best. One option is for Council to consider it again at our next meeting.”
Regardless, it looks like a battle is brewing over the issue. Cox has fought Schilling’s move to reform City government. “I oppose the implication that something’s broke here,” says Cox. “It’s an odd debate because it’s not coming from the population, it’s coming from one Councilor.”
Cox says he suspects Republicans want to divide Charlottesville into wards so they can carve out at least one section that will consistently vote Republican, helping the GOP break the Democrats’ tight grip on local government.
“That accusation is just coming from the party spin machine,” says Schilling. “This is about centralized versus decentralized power in Charlottesville. If that’s the best argument they’ve got, then let’s go.”
That’s Bond. Triple-A Bond.
Way up in New York City, there’s a group of people making important decisions about Charlottesville. They decide, in effect, which leaky roofs get patched, which bridges get repaired and whether the City can afford to fix those loose bricks on the Mall.
Who has all this power? Analysts working for two companies—Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services—assign a credit rating to Charlottesville. This year, the City will issue bonds worth $10 million to pay for a litany of capital improvements projects, including Charlottesville High School, Jefferson School and the Downtown Mall. The investment analysts decide at what interest rate the City will repay the money it borrows.
That’s why City Council has made such a big deal about Charlottesville’s triple-A bond rating during this budget season. “A triple-A bond rating is like a financial Oscar,” says Rita Scott, the City’s finance director. She says the rating cuts our interest rate by a half-point. “If you’re talking about a $10 million issue that’s being repaid over 20 years, that’s a lot of money.”
The analysts’ reports indicate that “a stable economic base anchored by the vast presence of the University of Virginia, steady growth in the property tax base with no taxpayer concentration, a low debt burden and continued strong financial performance” factor into Charlottesville’s high rating.
The City’s high bond rating isn’t guaranteed, however. During Council’s Monday meeting, Meredith Richards suggested that the State’s financial blundering could bring Charlottesville down with it.
“The State has no budget, and they’re on watch with the credit agencies,” she said. “As Virginia goes, so goes Charlottesville.”—John Borgmeyer
Totally tubular
Monticello High School takes to the airwaves with WMHS
On a recent Friday morning, Will Cabot-Bryan, a student at Monticello High School, is in “Studio B” of the school’s television station—call sign WMHS—disassembling a malfunctioning Xerox machine. “Everything is totally dusty,” he says of its insides, looking up at Denny Barberio, the operation’s faculty coordinator, and back down at the grime on his pants. “Does this stuff come out of my clothes?”
Someone without a license in copy machine repair would have been scared by the number of parts on the floor. But Barberio explains that this sort of improvisational self-reliance is the essence of the success of the student-run station, which just completed its second year of producing “Heart and SOL,” a commercial-supported, “Jeopardy!”-style quiz show designed to help students pass Virginia’s Standards of Learning tests that runs on PAX’s Charlottesville affiliate.
Each episode of “Heart and SOL,” which airs at 9:30am on Saturdays and 7:30pm Mondays, puts three casually dressed students from Albemarle County’s high schools in relaxed competition answering multiple-choice questions drawn from the multi-disciplinary SOL curriculum. The fifth show of the current season featured questions prerecorded by football commentators Howie Long and Terry Bradshaw, who insouciantly fumbled over cue cards and tittered over a question about the effect of air resistance on “smooth balls” made of different materials, as if to make sure the stress level stayed low.
WMHS is the descendant of a program Barberio began at Walton Middle School about 10 years ago when the school’s student council asked to change its news bulletin from an audio to a video format. Barberio, a New York native and former professional musician with experience in television and film production, said the initiative’s core ingredients—highly motivated and self-sufficient students and a supportive community—were immediately in evidence. “Doing this for a grade meant nothing,” Barberio observed of Walton students who routinely put in long hours after school and on weekends.
Barberio was recruited to launch Monticello High School’s video and broadcasting program in 1998, when the school opened. A staple activity of WMHS is its daily morning news program, which is piped through the school’s closed-circuit network and includes a weather report with graphics and radar maps spliced in behind student forecasters. WMHS is run by a largely autonomous student staff of about 25, five of whom currently work after school as part-time production assistants at Charlottesville’s NBC affiliate, WVIR.
In addition to “Heart and SOL,” WMHS has a full schedule of upcoming student-produced projects. For example, the station is working on expanding a story on the Paramount Theater restoration into a full-length documentary film with hopes of airing it on Charlottesville’s PBS affiliate. Of his view of the future of WMHS, Monticello High School Principal Billy Haun says, “My only strategic plan is to keep Denny employed.”—Harry Terris
The call of the Web
Katherine McNamara brings quality publishing to the Internet with www.archipelago.org
Katherine McNamara has just returned from driving Michael Ondaatje to the airport after a weekend of “book festivaling” (now officially a verb). They’re old friends, her late husband having edited one of The English Patient author’s books. Clearly, McNamara, who lives in Charlottesville, is not just one of the masses who went from lecture to lecture at the Virginia Festival of the Book buying books and getting them signed. No, she is the founder and editor of the Web journal www.archipelago.org, an online, nonprofit quarterly, the spring edition of which came out April 6.
Archipelago is the online equivalent of the Paris Review, DoubleTake and The Atlantic Monthly, all rolled into one. Having started with only 12,000 unique visitors per year, the website today draws around 14,000 unique visitors per month and has published everything from an interview with Umberto Eco at Prague Castle to Senator Russ Feingold’s speech on why he voted against the PATRIOT Act. It publishes well-known and unknown writers from around the world, McNamara’s only requirement being her sense of quality.
As she relates in Archipelago’s first issue, McNamara christened the site as such because she tried to place where a “literary colony” might currently exist and decided that “if one exists at all, geographically and culturally it would be an archipelago… evoking rock-ribbed peaks with green life clinging to their slopes, rising from some vast, erosive ocean.”
This bleak attitude is, in many ways, McNamara’s response to the commodification of trade publishing in the 1990s, which she witnessed through her own experiences, as well as those of her late husband, Lee Goerner, an editor at Knopf. She saw the practice of nurturing young writers over time tossed out the window in favor of “the big splash,” thus alienating serious readers that publishing houses had by then come to view as “niche marketing.” This made McNamara fighting mad.
“I didn’t like what I saw happening,” she says. “I thought I knew something about what should be offered or what could be offered, so why not do it?” Thus, she launched Archipelago in 1997 to glowing reviews from everywhere from the Times Literary Supplement in London to USA Today.
While the website has always been international in perspective and tackled major issues, since 2000 Archipelago has become notably more politically outspoken. This new focus is mostly due to McNamara’s reaction to Bush’s preemptive war doctrine. She remembers thinking, “I’m not going to be a ‘good German.’ It’s so important from this moment on to register as much opposition as vocally, as clearly as possible.”
Since then she has applied the same “get up and go” attitude she took in creating Archipelago to her criticisms of the Bush Administration and the Iraq war, expressing herself in Archipelago’s endnotes. “There seems to be so little comprehension here of how we’re viewed from outside,” she says. “So it’s nice to have Archipelago to formulate my own thoughts about this.” —Nell Boeschenstein
Budget boondoggle
Albemarle wrangles with ledger while State funding remains uncertain
On Wednesday, April 14, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors will vote on the County’s fiscal 2005 budget, finalizing an even balance between $241,073,047 in expenditures and revenue. The problem, however, is that 26 percent of the County’s revenue—the chunk requested from the State—remains stuck in limbo as budget negotiations drag on in Richmond.
Only 10 people spoke during a lightly attended public hearing on the Albemarle budget last Wednesday, most of them firefighters making the case for an unfilled request for five new positions. After the 45-minute hearing was over, Supervisor Sally Thomas asked Robert W. Tucker, the County executive, to describe the resulting snafu should the uncertain State funding not come through.
“It will put localities in a very, very precarious situation,” Tucker said of the scenario in which State funding has not been secured by July, the beginning of the next fiscal year.
If the more than $61 million in projected funds from Richmond are held up beyond July, Tucker said “at best” the County would run out of money by next January. At that point, “we will be faced with borrowing funds to finish the year,” Tucker said.
An additional solution, if the drained coffer scenario plays out, would be for Albemarle to consider a tax-rate hike. Earlier in the year, the Board of Supervisors had considered knocking two cents off the real estate tax rate of 76 cents per $100 of assessed value. That proposal was later dropped. At last week’s budget hearing, Tucker said an emergency tax increase brought on by a potential State funding hole “could be significant.”
If Supervisors pass an emergency tax hike, it would affect next year’s collection, which is slated for June of 2005. Tucker says the County would likely seek to move the collection date closer to January, the month in which he says the County could run out of money. Asked if there is a precedent for a bumped-up tax collection date, Tucker says, “I’ve never done that before. Never had to.”
After closing last Wednesday’s public hearing, Board Chairman Lindsay Dorrier Jr. said he wanted to “work with” County firefighters to perhaps funnel more money to the department, particularly to the Scottsville Rescue Squad, which serves Dorrier’s district. In response to Dorrier’s suggestion, the Supervisors again raised the uncertainty caused by the State budget impasse.
Supervisor Kenneth Boyd asked what sort of wiggle room Supervisors would have to adjust items in the budget after Richmond’s contribution materializes. Tucker said Supervisors could go back to the budget and pencil in more money for firefighters or other County services if the State meets the projected $61 million for Albemarle, or exceeds it.
But, as Boyd noted later in the meeting, this flexibility “works the other way too.” When the State budget is finalized, it could include less for Albemarle than budget planners had expected. As Tucker said, “local government does not fare well” under the budget plan championed by the Republican-dominated House of Delegates.—Paul Fain