Tuesday, May 4
Chain saws in Jefferson National Forest?
The Charlottesville based Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) today released a report claiming that 313,00 acres of Virginia’s forests could be available for logging and road-building if the Bush Administration reverses a 2001 conservation law, as many enviros are predicting. The forestland at risk, which is approximately 50 times the size of Charlottesville, is in the George Washington and Jefferson national forests. “It’s a short-sighted view of natural resource management that will harm future generations,” says SELC senior attorney David Carr, in a press release, of the Bush Administration’s moves toward opening national forests to logging.
Wednesday, May 5
Everybody loves fire trucks
Hordes of kids descended on the parking lot of the Albemarle County Office Building today to hang with County employees and their work gizmos. The event, held in honor of National County Government Week, included dozens of elaborate displays from government agencies. Big draws for kids were a fire truck, with its long ladder extended, and the more sinister police crime scene unit truck and paddy wagon from the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail. One mother was overheard saying to her little boy, who was playing in the jail van, “Why are you in jail?” Another boy was clearly enjoying his seat atop a police motorcycle, and all around the event kids were digging into the free bags of popcorn.
Thursday, May 6
School superintendent hired
The Charlottesville School Board today announced the hiring of a new superintendent, Dr. Scottie J. Griffin, who will replace the retiring Ron Hutchinson. Dr. Griffin, who is an area superintendent for the New Orleans public schools, will be the first African-American superintendent for Charlottesville’s schools. In an introduction ceremony today at Walker Upper Elementary, Griffin said “academic achievement will be first and foremost” among her priorities. One challenge Griffin will face is controversy over the Standards of Learning (SOL) tests, a problem raised today by Sheila Bowles, a former Charlottesville public school teacher. Bowles, who joined an impressive panel assembled by the Stillwater Institute for Social Justice to mark the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board desegregation decision, said the focus on standards testing contributed to the “burnout” that led her to quit after four years of teaching in Charlottesville.
Friday, May 7
The next Grisham
WVPT, Central Virginia’s Public Television, today announced the 15 winners of the 2004 Reading Rainbow contest. The winning novelists and illustrators, all students in grades K-3, included six kids from Albemarle. Billy Livermon, a kindergartner at Virginia L. Murray Elementary in Albemarle, took first place with his entry, “The Lego Robot and Baby Mystery.” The lone Charlottesville winner was Lane Easterling, a first grader at Burnley-Moran, who snagged second place for “Life on Mars.”
Saturday, May 8
Community leaders lauded
The Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, a 96-year-old organization founded by black women, today presented its 2004 SPIRIT Awards at a brunch at the Doubletree Hotel. The winners, who were honored for their “outstanding contributions to our community,” were Jonathan Spivey, the choral music director at Charlottesville High School, developer Chuck Lewis, Mozell Booker, the former principal of Walker Upper Elementary School, Holly Edwards, a registered nurse and member of the City School Health Advisory Board, and Alvin and Barbara Edwards, the “first family of Mt. Zion First African Baptist Church.”
Sunday, May 9
UVA baseball to make a run?
The UVA baseball team today dropped the tiebreaker of a three-game series with Florida State University by a score of 4-1. On a hot day at the UVA Baseball stadium, the Cavs’ bats were cold. The pitchers’ duel was decided, in part, by overly aggressive base running by UVA that led to runners being thrown out at second and third bases. UVA avoided the sweep by drubbing FSU 15-2 on Saturday night. The Cavs still hold a slim lead in the ACC coming into the last stretch of their season.
Monday, May 10
Al Weed fires up campaign
As one local campaign concluded last week, the race for the 5th District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives begins in earnest this week. Democrats on Saturday nominated Al Weed of Nelson County to take on four-term Republican incumbent Virgil Goode in the November 2 election. During his acceptance speech, Weed, a former runaway, a Yale and Princeton degree holder, farmer and Vietnam vet who served in the Army special forces, said “the Democratic Party does not believe in the sort of fiscal irresponsibility that sticks coming generations with trillions in debt to reward its better-off supporters.”
written by Paul Fain from local news sources and staff reports
Blue skies
Democrats own City Council and they have Republican Rob Schilling to thank for it
“We cleaned their clocks!” exclaimed Mary MacNeil on Tuesday, May 4, as reports of a Democratic landslide victory arrived via cell phone to the party’s headquarters on the Downtown Mall.
With the City’s electronic voting machines providing results just minutes after the polls closed at 7pm, the Democratic celebration was in full swing by the time the three winners—Kendra Hamilton, David Brown and Kevin Lynch—arrived.
“When the first precinct came in, Walker [School], I could tell instantly we had it in the bag,” said Dem chair Lloyd Snook.
In 2002, Democrat Alexandria Searls lost the Walker precinct to Republican Rob Schilling by about 50 votes. This year, the Democrats won Walker by 179 votes and fared even better in the City’s seven other precincts.
Schilling’s victory in 2002 loomed large over this year’s contest, and ironically his win seemed to help Democrats more than Republicans. For the past three months, the Democrats organized, raised money and rallied voters with a newfound vigor, clearly fearing that Republicans Kenneth Jackson and Ann Reinicke’s “throw the bums out” message would resonate.
“I was seeing a nightmare,” said sitting Democratic Councilor Blake Caravati, admitting to worries that both GOP candidates would win and dominate Council for the first time in decades. Democrats usually have a lock on City elections, but during the campaign Republicans seemed to gain traction by painting Dems as elite cronies who spend too much time and money doing much too little.
“When you listen to the drumbeat of all the things we’re doing wrong, you start to wonder,” said Hamilton. “Then the votes come in.”
The prelude
“The party as a whole was embarrassed by what we did not do in 2002,” Snook says.
That year, Searls and Caravati, the two Democratic candidates, seemed like they belonged to different parties. Searls was a Green-ish progressive, in contrast to the centrist incumbent Caravati. The party’s campaign slogan, “Keep a Good Thing Going,” excluded Searls, a first-time candidate. The pair often disagreed, and seemed to dislike each other. Moreover, Snook and other party leaders underestimated Schilling’s candidacy.
This time around, the Democrats’ desire for a unified ticket compelled them to oust two-term Councilor Meredith Richards at the party’s convention in February [see sidebar]. Outgoing Mayor Maurice Cox recruited neighborhood activist Kendra Hamilton to run in his stead, and she joined incumbent Kevin Lynch and former party chair David Brown on the ticket.
Snook tapped an all-star lineup to run a hard-charging campaign—former Mayor David Toscano led a fundraising effort that netted more than $30,000; former Councilor John Conover was an aggressive, unabashedly partisan campaign manager; Michael Signer, who interned with Al Gore and worked with Democratic Governor Mark Warner, tailored the party’s message.
The Republicans, meanwhile, hoped to capitalize on Schilling’s surprising success. Party chair Bob Hodous recruited two candidates: Kenneth Jackson, a charismatic African-American who—as a gay, working-class, native Charlottesvillian—defies Republican stereotypes. His running mate, Ann Reinicke, a recent transplant to the Orangedale neighborhood from Albemarle, was (like Schilling in 2002) largely unknown in the political arena.
Reinicke and Jackson had a tough challenge: to convince voters that Democrats have mismanaged the City when a recent, well-publicized book ranked Charlottesville as the best place to live in America. They turned to the GOP’s chestnut complaint—government spending.
A rough and tumble race
In April Council passed a $100.4 million budget for FY 2004, an increase of more than 7 percent over the current budget. Although Council did not raise property taxes, rising assessments mean many residents are paying more into City coffers, and Republican campaign literature denounced Charlottesville’s “crushing tax burden.” Reinicke and Jackson specifically attacked consultant spending—more than $1.2 million in 2003—and a multimillion-dollar project to integrate the City’s computer database systems.
While Republicans complained that Council spends too much, the Democrats complained that Republicans in Washington and Richmond spend too little. Charlottesville needs an active government to pay for education and police, to protect the environment and promote well-designed development, the Dems said, especially now that Federal and State conservatives have cut local funding for schools, jails and social services. “You’ve got to pay for civilization,” Lynch said on several occasions.
The philosophical differences were clear—Democrats believe in a strong, active City government to balance business interests and the political powers in Albemarle and Richmond. Republicans say City government should cut both services and taxes, and follow Albemarle’s lead.
Right when the Republican message seemed to be gaining a hold, Reinicke and Jackson proved to be their own worst enemies.
Jackson admitted to a not-so-distant criminal past that included four assaults, three involving knives. Reinicke said she thought creationism should be taught in public schools as an “alternative theory” to evolution. (Democrats considered the admission so damning that at Tuesday’s victory party Snook thanked Clive Bradbeer, the citizen who at a candidates’ forum asked Reinicke about her views on creationism.)
As the campaign heated up, Jackson’s credibility seemed to slip as his attacks on Council grew increasingly hostile. At one forum, he called the current Councilors “bold-faced liars” without backing up the charge. While his stance in favor of the Meadowcreek Parkway earned him some support (presumably among business leaders who are hot for the road), Jackson inexplicably argued that Council was wrong for playing political hardball with Albemarle to protect the City’s interests. Also, he didn’t seem to know the difference between an intersection and an interchange—an important element in the Parkway debate.
Nevertheless, The Daily Progress performed its role as house organ for the Chamber of Commerce and dutifully endorsed Jackson, along with Reinicke and Hamilton, two days before the election. Many Dems were flabbergasted. And very nervous.
Aftermath
It was a resounding victory for Democrats. Hamilton led all candidates with 3,465 votes, followed by Brown with 3,366 and Lynch with 3,183. Reinicke netted 1,782 votes while Jackson pulled down 1,557. The write-in category drew 778 votes—driven by an unofficial campaign for Richards. Independent Vance High (the only candidate to articulate his platform in haiku) won 717 votes.
Overall, 27 percent of the City’s 19,820 registered voters turned out—up from 22 percent in 2002, but down from 28 percent in 2000. City Registrar Sheri Iachetta said she expected a higher turnout, but the Dems didn’t complain—before the election they created a new list of more than 5,000 local party members, and clearly won the race by getting their people to the polls.
“There’s a tendency for Democrats in Charlottesville to take these elections for granted,” says communications director Signer. “We told the base that this was a very important election that they couldn’t afford to roll the dice on.”
A post-election news story reported “rumors of intimidation tactics,” but Iachetta said she received no specific reports of intimidation.
“It was rumored that people were going to see how long people were taking in the booth,” Iachetta says. People spending a long time at the voting machine would presumably be casting a write-in vote. Iachetta said “a couple” people told her they were going to feel “uncomfortable” voting without curtains around the machines, so the electoral board installed them just before the election.
While the Dems danced, Republicans struck an optimistic note.
“I think it’s been an excellent few weeks,” Jackson said at the Republican’s post-poll party at Wolfie’s Bar & Grill on Rio Road. “We put the issues first. We gave the other party a scare and a run for the money.”
During his time at the microphone, Republican mastermind Hodous told the crowd of about 50 supporters—including County bigwigs like Albemarle Delegate Rob Bell and County Supervisor Ken Boyd—that he was disappointed by the fourth and fifth finish of his two candidates for the three open spots on Council.
“Losing was not fun, and I’m not going to pretend that it was enjoyable seeing the results this afternoon,” Hodous said.
News of the Democrats’ election sweep arrived soon after the polling places closed at 7pm, before attendees had begun helping themselves to the buffet of barbecue, baked beans and homestyle mac and cheese.
Linda McRaven, a County resident and campaign volunteer who recently lost her bid for a seat on the Albemarle County School Board, wore an American flag-patterned sweater to the party, one of several flag-emblazoned apparel items seen at the gathering. Though she thought the candidates did an excellent job, she was frustrated by the outcome.
“I think the City Council is full of more yuppies,” McRaven said. “They all want to use Charlottesville as some sort of experiment.”
The candidates themselves expressed no such bitterness after the election, each graciously congratulating the victorious Democrats during their concession speeches. Hodous commended the level of civility by both parties.
“Most of what was said during the campaign was positive and issue-focused,” Hodous said.
Not surprisingly given their party chair’s lead, neither candidate cited the creationism or anger-management flaps when asked if they had regrets about their campaigns.
Jackson’s concession speech, though apparently delivered off the cuff, garnered several enthusiastic rounds of applause. During the speech, Jackson cited the strong morals of his Republican peers.
“That’s the reason I’m a member of this party,” Jackson said.
But Jackson has repeatedly stressed that party affiliation is not important to him. A former Democrat who says he came over to the Republican camp after meeting Schilling during his campaign two years ago, Jackson answered a reporter’s question of whether he’d remain active in Republican politics by saying he’d continue to work in “local politics.”
Questions about Reinicke’s political future also came up at Wolfie’s. In fact, as soon as she stepped away from the stage, Reinicke was asked if she would run for Council in 2006.
“We’ll see what happens,” Reinicke said of her political plans. “You’ll probably see me around.”
Looking ahead
Despite the Republicans’ decisive loss, Hodous says the election wasn’t a failure, in large measure because of the issues Jackson and Reinicke managed to lob into the limelight.
For example, when Schilling proposed converting Council from an at-large body to a ward system, Democrats saw it as a Republican attempt to secure a ward loyal to the GOP, and they essentially ignored his request to examine the issue. During the campaign, however, the ward issue earned plenty of airtime and all three Democrats signaled they would be open to a study.
Republican charges of fiscal irresponsibility could stick, too.
Mayor Maurice Cox drove much of the consultant spending that Reinicke attacked. The outgoing mayor, an architect and UVA architecture professor, encouraged contracts with outside architects. Lynch is poised to be the next Mayor, and during this campaign he continued his shift toward the political center.
As a rookie Councilor four years ago, Lynch espoused the liberal “Dems for Change” platform, but over the course of his first term he has supported strategic road building and has sided with Schilling on some fiscal issues. Both Lynch and Schilling, for example, raised hackles in the art community by questioning the City spending on the McGuffey Art Center.
Schilling’s party may have lost the election, but he’s poised to wield greater influence in the next Council—if he chooses to do so. So far, Schilling’s strategy has been to spout Reagan-esque critiques of the governing process for TV cameras, but he’s come up short with behind-the-scenes legwork. Now that he’s no longer the rookie, he may be able to turn his rhetoric into policy if he decides to roll up his sleeves.
And what of the oft-debated Meadowcreek Parkway? Lynch, Brown and Hamilton all said during the campaign they will support the Parkway as long as it comes with quality replacement parkland, an interchange where the parkway would intersect the 250 Bypass, and County support for connector roads that would prevent Charlottesville from becoming a cut-through for suburban drivers.
The Dems say they’re trying to protect the City’s interests, but Parkway supporters suspect the promises are more like attempts to stall and ultimately block the controversial road. If Schilling and his Republican County buddies really want to see the Parkway unveiled, perhaps they could work to meet the Dems’ conditions and hold them to their word.
“There is one group in Charlottesville that will hold them up to their promises,” Hodous said on Tuesday, “and that’s the Republican Party.”
Round three on 29N
County Supervisors discuss North Pointe development
In the last two years, Albemarle planners have wrangled over three major mixed-use developments on Route 29N. Of the three projects, all of which combine residential and commercial elements, Albemarle Place and the Hollymead Town Center have already been green-lighted. But the big daddy of the trifecta, the 269-acre “North Pointe Community” slated for the east side of 29N between Proffit Road and the North Fork of the Rivanna River, remains stuck in limbo at the Albemarle County Office Building.
Last week, the County Board of Supervisors conducted a work session to begin bridging the gulf between the plan from North Pointe’s developers and the critique from the County Planning Commission, which nixed the project last November. The two-hour work session on Wednesday, May 5, in which almost every comment opened a can of worms, was evidence that the Board can expect trouble in settling the North Pointe controversy.
One major disagreement is over the quality of “proffers” made by North Pointe’s developer, Great Eastern Management Co., the Charlottesville-based group that built the Pantops and Seminole Square Shopping Centers, among many other local developments. The proffers are, as Charles Rotgin Jr. of Great Eastern says, the “cream” volunteered by developers to sweeten the deal for County government, and include offers of green spaces, road funding, affordable housing and other perqs.
However, the developers’ proffers have not satisfied County planners. And, as Rotgin noted with irritation, the back and forth over proffers has consumed three of the four years that Great Eastern has spent haggling with County staff over North Pointe.
A proposed next step for the Board of Supervisors is to compare the proffers made for North Pointe with those made by Albemarle Place and Hollymead’s developers. But even this is difficult, because North Pointe dwarfs both of those projects. The most recent publicly available iteration of North Pointe, submitted last October, included 893 housing units, three big box retail buildings and about 650,000 square feet of commercial and office space. That means North Pointe would include three times the housing units and a somewhat larger chunk of retail space than Hollymead, all on a site that is four times bigger than Hollymead.
“It’s apples and oranges,” says Mark Graham, Albemarle director of community development, of stacking North Pointe against other developments.
But according to Rotgin, the comparison might help the public see “that there’s $25 million worth of infrastructure going in there.” As Rotgin says, North Pointe’s developers are forking up big cash to help the project fit into Albemarle’s pedestrian friendly, mixed-use neighborhood model.
Besides, “both apples and oranges taste good,” Rotgin says.—Paul Fain
WCAV, coming to your TV
CBS affiliate and Channel 9 keep rolling toward fall on-air dates
Developments continue in Charlottesville’s shifting TV landscape, a week after news of a CBS television affiliate moving into the old Ix building and of veteran news director Dave Cupp’s plan to leave WVIR-TV, Channel 29 this fall [“Station gestations,” The Week, May 4].
Gray Television, Inc., which owns the new CBS affiliate slated for Channel 19, has announced call letters for the station—WCAV— and the slogan, “Where Community Counts.” The call letters were obtained from a TV station on Saint Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Gray has also launched a website for WCAV-TV, www.wcav.com.
Tracey Jones, Gray’s regional vice-president of television, says the new website is primarily for recruiting purposes. In addition to hiring reporters, producers and engineers, Gray is working on scoring a slot for WCAV on Adelphia, the primary local cable company. Jones says cable negotiations “are not buttoned up,” but “I certainly anticipate cable carriage.”
WCAV’s recently hired general manager, Bill Varecha, has previously run a new TV station in a small market. Jones says Varecha helped Gray launch an NBC affiliate in Grand Junction, Colorado, which is about the same size as the Charlottesville market, in 1996. At the time, CBS and ABC stations were already entrenched in Grand Junction, but Jones says Varecha shepherded the NBC affiliate to the top rating in Grand Junction.
Two former Channel 29 reporters think their old newsroom is up to the challenge posed by CBS and the other proposed local television channel—Albemarle entrepreneurs Bob Sigman and Denny King’s planned community station, Channel 9—but that news director Cupp will be missed.
From her new job as an anchor for a CBS affiliate in Charleston, West Virginia, former WVIR anchor and reporter Brooke Baldwin says, via e-mail, “Dave Cupp is quintessential Charlottesville. Period. His departure will leave a huge hole in NBC 29.”
“I think their coverage can only get better,” Baldwin says of how WVIR will perform with two challengers. She says because Channel 29 reporters have the “home field advantage,” it will sting when they are bested on stories. “So, they’ll just have to up the ante,” Baldwin says.
Though Luke Duecy, a former NBC 29 anchor who has just signed on with WRIC, Channel 8 in Richmond, predicts competition will be a good thing for his old station as well as for TV viewers, he says, also by e-mail, “Let’s just hope for all journalists’ sake the competition between them doesn’t produce exaggerated, sensationalistic stories that don’t really impact anybody.”
While WCAV-TV moves toward a mid-August on-air date, Channel 9’s King says his phone is ringing off the hook. King says he and Sigman have received around 300 calls, e-mails, faxes and letters “from every walk of life” about the new station.
Many people contacting Channel 9’s creators have submitted ideas for shows, ranging, King says, from “equestrian life” to law enforcement and senior-oriented programming. King also says a “very famous author living in this area” has expressed interest in a show about books.
King now calls the deal for a studio under the Water Street parking garage “inevitable.”
“We’re getting real close,” King says of making Channel 9 a reality.—Paul Fain
Raising the glass
The building that almost wasn’t
It’s not often you hear Downtown developers sing the praises of City Hall. When the Board of Architectural Review presented its 2004 “Preservation Awards” during City Council’s meeting on Monday, May 3, Oliver Kuttner and Lisa Murphy took home a “Best Adaptive Use and Revitalization” certificate for reconfiguring the former Cavalier Beverage building into what’s now known as the Glass Building on Second Street.
“This project never would have happened if we had been in a design-control district, under the BAR’s purview,” Kuttner said at the meeting. What sounded like the preamble to one of Kuttner’s rants against red tape turned into a shout-out to planning director Ron Higgins.
As C-VILLE reported, the Glass Building spurred a surge of modern architecture in South Downtown [“Split personality,” March 2]. But this keystone site nearly became a parking garage before Kuttner and Murphy put a contract on the building in early 2000.
Kuttner says Higgins helped with his plan to develop the site with minimum investment.
The City allowed Kuttner to divide the site into two parcels even as the final sale was still pending. Then, Higgins greased Kuttner’s plans for a 70-car parking lot through the Planning Department. The City’s speed allowed Kuttner to finish the parking lot before actually purchasing the building, thereby increasing the building’s assessed value by about $100,000, Kuttner says. With the increased value, Kuttner was able to secure a bigger loan—about $1 million, he says—from BB&T Bank.
In March 2000, Kuttner and Murphy purchased the Cavalier Beverage site for $851,000, according to the City Assessor. In 2003, it was assessed at $3,394,900.
The City allowed Kuttner to develop the building piecemeal as new tenants signed on. The City could have required the developer to submit a new site plan for each piece, and had the site been under the BAR’s purview each new addition would have required the Board’s approval.
“All the T’s were crossed and all the I’s were dotted on his site plan,” says Higgins. “So I didn’t make him go through the process for each phase. I don’t think he had the cash flow in that project that allowed him to take large delays.”
Kuttner often clashed with the BAR in the late ’90s as he built The Terraces atop the Downtown Mall’s Foot Locker. In that case, Kuttner started some work on utility lines and internal supports before getting BAR approval, and when the Board ordered him to stop work he echoed a common complaint among developers that the BAR has a chip on its shoulder.
“The current BAR is a good one, but there was a time the BAR would deny me things just to show me they were in charge,” says Kuttner.
The City’s revised zoning ordinances have complicated the process of approving site plans as City staff gets more familiar with the new rules, says Higgins.
“If somebody understands our standards, we can help anyone the way we helped Oliver,” says Higgins.
Does that signal a new harmony between developers and bureaucrats? “Well, we don’t roll over and play dead, either,” Higgins says. “It goes both ways.”—John Borgmeyer