Month: June 2004

It sounds a bit like the answer to one of those old late night “so whatever happened to…” questions. Tommy Chong, 65-year-old grandfather, the lesser-known half of the goofy late-’70s burnout comedy duo Cheech and Chong, was convicted of the illegal sale of drug paraphernalia over the Internet (i.e. he marketed a line of glass bongs). In a bit of priceless comedic irony, the investigation was code-named Operation Pipe Dreams. Chong was sentenced to nine months in prison on the second anniversary of September 11.

 Chong, with no prior arrests, is an unlikely figure to wind up in prison for rarely enforced paraphernalia laws. However, much to his misfortune, he does have one asset that the Bush Administration’s Justice Department covets in spades. He’s got a high profile. Chong’s takedown was meant to send a message to every stoner in America: Dude, you cannot wink at The Man.

 Even as issues like Iraq, gay marriage and the environment command greater attention, the Bush Administration has renewed the war on drugs. In this faith-based administration, the drug war is the ur-“values” war, the blueprint for the conservative kulturkampf. In fact, the drug war is even more ancient than most people realize. Temperance as a movement emerged in the early 1800s when drinking, previously considered healthful and a basic component of life, was identified with social disorder. It quickly became an issue of hearth, home and morality.

 Long before Bill Bennett gambled away his virtue book profits and before Richard Nixon, the first president to proclaim a “war on drugs,” was born, the battle between the Wets and Drys was a defining political issue in America. From the 1880s until the end of prohibition, Americans endured 50 years of pitched battle over the drug, alcohol. It’s worth remembering that the drug war gave us not one but two Constitutional amendments: one banning alcohol, then another un-banning it. Despite alcohol’s decisive win, or rather because of it, the battle moved to other fronts.

 In 2000, no sane person following drug policy would have suggested that within three years Tommy Chong would be imprisoned for selling paraphernalia. The trends of the 1990s were decidedly favorable for reform. Between 1996 and 2000, voters passed 17 reform-oriented ballot initiatives on subjects as diverse as medical marijuana, limiting asset forfeiture abuse and treatment instead of incarceration. New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, a Republican, called for legalization of marijuana and ultimately passed a range of reform measures. According to the Drug Policy Alliance (where this writer was formerly the director of National Affairs), 46 states passed 150 notable drug policy reforms between 1996 and 2002. Countries throughout the world, including close allies such as Britain and Australia, began to experiment with reform, often going much farther than the United States without appearing to suffer especially ill effects.

 As a presidential candidate, George W. Bush looked rather moderate on drug issues. In October of 1999, he answered a question from CNN about medical marijuana by stating that “I believe each state can choose that decision as they so choose.” Later, after his election, he said, “I think a lot of people are coming to the realization that maybe long minimum sentences for first-time users may not be the best way to occupy jail space and/or heal people from their disease.” However, the arc of the drug war under Bush veered toward emphasizing morality and punitive policies within months of his inauguration.

Bush turns Right on drugs

Drug Czar John Walters is perhaps the key element in this equation. In the 1980s, Walters served as an assistant to then-Secretary of Education Bill Bennett, and then as Bennett’s chief of staff at the Office of National Drug Control Policy when Bennett became the first cabinet-level drug czar. Walters left ONDCP in 1993 and became a bitter critic of President Bill Clinton’s drug policies. Prior to his return as ONDCP’s director, he solidified his standing in Republican circles as the President of the Philanthropy Roundtable, a far Right-wing nonprofit funded by the Olin, Scaife and Bradley Foundations and the New Citizenship Project, whose goal is to promote religion in public life. Thus, he is not a neocon but more of an old-line Bill Bennett values maven. Walters is in touch with his inner kulturkampfer.

 Bennett and Walters had long sought platforms from which to force national discussion about character and values. Although the drug czar does not command any actual police forces, it is a cabinet-level position that is not only tasked with creating the national drug strategy but also has some ability to force other cabinet officials to participate in the strategy. Walters was a particularly hard critic of Clinton’s drug policies, co-authoring blistering articles for the Heritage Foundation and the Washington Times accusing Clinton of “abandoning” the war on drugs. The articles call for a renewed war on drugs by using the presidential bully pulpit to get an anti-drug message out, stepped up use of the military for interdiction efforts, highlighting the deterrent effects of harsh mandatory minimum sentences, forcing source countries to reduce export of drugs and use of drug testing in treatment.

 As drug czar, Walters has enacted his calls for a renewed drug war by emphasizing drug use as a moral issue and by “pushing back” against perceived cultural permissiveness. He has used his bully pulpit to force discussion of drugs into a black/white, us-against-them paradigm, a paradigm to which the concept of war is already well suited. As a result, the major drug initiatives of the Bush Administration have taken on a distinctly combative flavor. For example, in the first year following September 11, Walters repeatedly sought to link the drug war to the war on terrorism in taxpayer-funded advertising and elsewhere. Indeed, the administration appears to view drug users as one element of a fifth column, a component of the axis of evil inside the United States.

 As part of his efforts to push back against his perception of a countercultural message favoring drugs, Walters has worked to eliminate any visible manifestation of drug culture. Thus, there can be no relaxation of any drug law for any purpose, including use as medicine. As a result, there is a renewed effort to root out physicians who prescribe higher levels of opiates than some of their peers, despite widespread acknowledgement that the American medical establishment routinely undertreats pain. This may also explain the otherwise puzzling use of precious space in Bush’s State of the Union address in January to discuss steroids. It’s a visible, highly talked-about manifestation of drug-related culture.

 Walters has also made good on his desire to invigorate interdiction efforts overseas. In Colombia, the United States is now giving aid to help the government shoot down airplanes suspected of smuggling drugs. In 2001, this type of shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later policy resulted in the deaths of a missionary and her daughter in Peru. Last year, the United States spent nearly $600 million in military aid in Colombia, including tacit endorsement of paramilitary units, despite the Columbian government’s poor human rights record. Unfortunately, reporting on Colombia is almost nonexistent in the wake of the war in Iraq.

 Similarly, Walters is intent on ending drug policy experimentation in the states, a decidedly nonconservative position. He has sought to roll back popular medical marijuana laws in the nine states that have passed them. He also directly opposed drug reform ballot initiatives in 2002 by traveling to, and directing taxpayer-funded ads to, states where drug reform initiatives are on the ballot. In a similar vein, the Drug Enforcement Administration conducted raids on most of the major medical marijuana cooperatives in California, resulting in the arrests of patients suffering from cystic fibrosis, cancer and other ailments. Finally, this pushback really does seem to be about a fifth column in the culture war. Thus, Tommy Chong isn’t merely a paraphernalia dealer, he is a personification of the ’70s—and think how gratifying it must have been to imprison the ’70s.

 In the meantime, Democrats have found it hard to articulate their interests in drug policy and at ONDCP. Why? The framework of the “drug war” is a trap. If, instead of a “war” it was an “effort to minimize dangers from pharmaceutical, alcohol, nicotine and other psychoactive drugs”—if, say, we emphasized health outcomes instead of “fighting a war”—it is very likely that rather than building jails and prisons we would stress health and education. The United States now has the highest incarceration rate of documented prisoners in the world, outstripping even China and Russia. And nearly half of all those in Federal prisons are serving time for drug crimes. In the meantime, it has been estimated that almost half of those who need treatment for drugs can’t get it.

What the Dems can do

Democrats need to find a way to begin to step out of the trap of the “drug war.” Although all too many Democrats are enthusiastic practitioners of the drug war, some are beginning to reevaluate the issue. For instance, Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) was a confirmed drug warrior in the ’80s, but after years of his Harlem constituents being convicted and sentenced to hard time upstate, he has spoken out about overreliance on incarceration, introducing a series of bills to reduce sentencing disparities in crack cocaine.

 Representative Rangel’s turnaround on sentencing is a good example of how the Democrats can begin to change the conversation. They need to tell the real stories of the real people affected by our drug policies. Kemba Smith is an African-American woman who, stuck in a controlling relationship with her college boyfriend, ended up playing a marginal role in her abuser’s drug crimes. Eventually, despite neither actually using nor selling drugs, she was convicted under conspiracy laws of all the crimes of his gang. Under mandatory minimum laws, she received 24 and a half years, a longer sentence than manslaughter in many jurisdictions. She was eventually freed after six years when President Clinton commuted her sentence in 2000. Women, especially African-American women, are now the fastest growing segment of the prison population. Like Kemba, they often play a minimal role in a conspiracy but have little information to bargain with authorities. African-Americans already know Kemba’s story, but white America doesn’t have a clue. It would be interesting to see her onstage at the Democratic convention.

 When Americans talk about drugs in the context of pain management, they express far more nuanced views than our current dialogue allows. The baby boomers are getting ready to retire just as the DEA has announced a war on oxycontin, vicodin and other drugs used with little harm by millions to control pain. Certainly they will be ready for a more subtle dialogue. For the same reason, medical marijuana garners up to 80 percent approval in some recent polls. Americans intrinsically understand its potential benefits as a last resort in helping people to find relief from the pain of cancer or other diseases.

 In addition, people convicted of drug crimes face a set of invisible punishments beyond prison. They lose access to housing and needs assistance, and they are often forbidden from receiving licenses. In one state, they cannot receive a license to be a hairdresser. A particularly self-defeating law prevents people convicted of drug crimes from receiving Federal grants or even loans for higher education. Education is the most likely indicator that an individual will not recidivate.

 In the meantime, parents are screaming for assistance at the community level. There are parents who have lost their houses and their jobs in the process of trying to get their kids into decent alcohol or drug treatment. HIV is resurgent in America, and intravenous drug users, their spouses and children are at particular risk. Study after study has shown that syringe exchange coupled with education can slow the transmission of HIV. Americans want to do the right thing on HIV. The lack of health care and the lack of substance abuse treatment (including the startling lack of most kinds of treatment other than 12-step treatment) is a national disaster. A clear, consistent, highly prioritized message by Democrats on this topic could work.

 Democrats can also emphasize both the out-of-control costs of the criminal justice system and the failure to prioritize more serious crimes over drugs. They know that Tommy Chong is not a major threat to their kids and they cannot be happy that it will ultimately cost the government at least $18,000 to imprison him and many thousands more to prosecute him. Ultimately it is up to Democrats to free themselves from the straightjacket of John Walters’ war for morality.

 As for Tommy Chong? He’ll get out of prison in July.

William McColl is an advocate and activist in Washington D.C.

Among the 115 police officers of the Charlottesville Police Department, fewer than 10 actually live in the City. Soaring real estate prices have pushed many cops, particularly new hires, to homes in Greene County, Buckingham County, Lake Monticello or Waynesboro.

 “Charlottesville is a very expensive place to live,” says Sgt. Mike Farruggio, a 16-year veteran of the force who has lived in the City for eight years. “It’s very difficult to afford to buy a house in the City.”

 Indeed, the median sales price of a house in Charlottesville hit $196,000 in 2003, doubling the $98,400 median of 1997, and, for the first time in recent history, matching the median sales price for the six-county region. For a newly hired Charlottesville police officer, making the base salary of $29,250, a flip through the real estate section of the classifieds can be a grim experience.

 Police Chief Timothy J. Longo confirms that “housing is a big piece” of recruiting and retaining officers.

 And it’s not just cops. Teachers, hospital workers and UVA employees struggle to buy or rent an affordable home in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, a problem that inspired much hand-wringing during the recent City Council campaign. This week, a housing task force appointed by City Council will release a report intended to address the housing crunch.

 But though local officials are often harangued for not doing enough about affordable housing, it’s not an issue on which government alone calls the shots.

 “The marketplace is very complex,” says David R. Phillips, CEO of the Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors (CAAR). “I’m not sure you can blame this on anybody.”

 Furthermore, it’s not clear that there is a housing crisis, at least one that has any unique local causes. Though many lower-income residents here are sinking under big rents and face dwindling odds of homeownership, Charlottesville’s housing pickle is unexceptional.

And, as exemplified by recent wrangling over a large housing development on the City’s south side, one that involved the Fry’s Spring Neighborhood Association, of which Sgt. Farruggio is president, there are no easy answers when it comes to affordable housing.

 

Just how bad is it?

This spring, when Charlottesville began basking in the glow of its No. 1 ranking in Frommer’s Cities Ranked & Rated, Lindsay Dorrier Jr., the chair of the Albemarle Board of Supervisors, told a gathering that he hoped hordes of people wouldn’t move to the area after seeing the ranking. Dorrier’s not the only one to worry that transplants will drive steep housing costs even higher.

 In fact, compared to many other small cities and college towns, all of which ate Charlottesville’s dust in the “best places” lineup, we’ve got nothing to complain about.

 The ranking book, which was written by Bert Sperling and Peter Sander, tallied sales prices for the “average home type in the area” from the National Association of Realtors—a definition that typically knocks a bit off of home sales prices—finding that the median home price for the Charlottesville metropolitan area in 2003 was $177,840. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, the runner-up to Charlottesville, the median home goes for $234,380. In the third place city, San Luis Obispo, California—a Charlottesville-like small college town surrounded by natural beauty—the median home price is even worse—an astounding $380,130.

 Rents are also steeper in these towns. The fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Charlottesville, as determined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, is $698. A two- bedroom goes for $798 in Santa Fe, and $917 in San Luis Obispo. Other college towns further down in the rankings, such as Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Boulder, Colorado, easily outprice Charlottesville in both home sale prices and rents. Even Corvallis, Oregon, is more expensive than Charlottesville.

 To be fair, most like-sized college towns have more affordable housing than the Charlottesville area, but usually not by much. And after all, shouldn’t housing in cities like State College, Pennsylvania, and Iowa City, Iowa, cost far less than in a blue-ribbon town with a rich history, prime East Coast location and the aura of T.J.? Instead, housing costs in these and other comparatively drab college towns are competitive with those in fair Charlottesville.

 The Charlottesville region isn’t even tops in Central Virginia. Fredericksburg, our neighbor to the northeast, nicknamed “Fred-Vegas” for its urban sprawl, touts a median home price of $224,397, according to statistics from the Virginia Association of Realtors. Six other real estate markets in Virginia boast bigger home prices than the Charlottesville area, which is defined as the City and Albemarle, Louisa, Greene, Fluvanna and Nelson counties.

 On its own, Albemarle’s 2003 median sales price is $254,500, making it the third most expensive housing market in Virginia, costing less than only two areas of Northern Virginia. Still, the high-dollar County isn’t outlandishly expensive for Virginia, and is roughly on par with the Williamsburg, Prince William and Greater Piedmont markets.

 But perhaps the most startling housing statistics that point to the national housing epidemic are those for the United States on the whole. In 2003, the median American home sold for $160,100, according to the National Association of Realtors, while the fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment was $670—both figures nipping the heels of those in Charlottesville.

 “It’s such a common problem,” says County Supervisor Sally Thomas of rising housing costs. “We like to think of ourselves as being unique. But in fact, it’s more of a join-the-crowd [problem].”

 Kevin Lynch, the recently reelected City Councilor and likely next mayor, agrees. “Although we’re expensive, we’re certainly not as expensive as the other cities that are in our cohort,” Lynch says. “There are parts of Charlottesville that are still undervalued.”

 For people moving to Charlottesville from other areas, the question of whether the region has an affordable housing crisis rests on their perspective.

 “People coming from the Northeast or from California get a sense of price relief,” says Jeff Gaffney, CAAR president. “When you’re coming from the South or the Midwest, there can be a some sticker shock.”

 The housing market has been red hot nationwide largely because of high demand and plummeting interest rates, which have taken a nosedive since 2000, and are at 40 year lows. For example, the average rate for a 30-year fixed rate mortgage last month was 6.27 percent, according to Freddie Mac—a substantial dip from the 8.52 percent rate in May 2000. At 6.27 percent, a $150,000 mortgage carries a $926 monthly payment while the 8.52 rate carries a $1,156 monthly payment.

 Also, as Gaffney notes, real estate looked like a far safer investment than the stock market after the tech bubble burst in 2001. As a result, many investors have taken money out of the market and put it into real estate.

 Demand continues to rise, while antisprawl policies have driven up prices in many places, including here, some say.

 Hardest hit, according to a 2003 report for Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, is the already tight supply of smaller, cheaper housing. As a result, lower-income households are spending more of their money on rent and mortgages—a problem made worse by stagnant wages in the Wal-Mart economy.  Affordable housing is defined as that which costs a renter or homeowner less than 30 percent of his income. By this definition, 44 percent of renters in the Charlottesville region cannot afford a $698 “fair market” two-bedroom apartment, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. Again, Charlottesville is hardly alone in facing this dilemma, as the percentage of renters who are priced out of the standard two-bedroom apartment is actually larger nationwide.

 

Economics 101: Supply and demand

Johnson Village and Fry’s Spring are classic middle-class neighborhoods featuring modest detached homes interspersed among the big trees and narrow roads typical of quiet, older subdivisions. Change, however, is coming in the form of a large housing development that includes a mix of single-family homes, townhouses and condos.

 In January, the City Planning Commission rezoned the new housing development’s property to allow the relatively dense clustering of condos and townhouses in addition to the single-family homes and duplexes for which the site had previously been zoned.

 According to Lynch, a goal of the rezoning and City government’s negotiations with the developer, the Kessler Group, was to encourage affordable housing options in Johnson Village.

 “I’ve found that the developers are fairly flexible when they’re putting their plans together,” Lynch says, noting that developers can profit roughly equally from building a cluster of $140,000 townhouses or by building fewer, more spread-out $250,000 homes.

 A week after the Planning Commission approved the rezoning for the 188-unit subdivision, which was to be sited at Cherry and Cleveland avenues, the Fry’s Spring Neighborhood Association caught wind of the project.

 “When we got a look at this, we were flabbergasted,” Sgt. Farruggio said back in March.

 Traffic problems were the group’s major complaint about the development. However, the smaller, cheaper homes also raised the dander of some residents.

 Glenn Catalano, who lives on Jefferson Park Avenue in Fry’s Spring, says new townhouses in his neck of the woods are almost certain to be snatched up by developers looking to rent them to UVA students. As an example of how this can occur, Catalano points to housing farther up JPA toward the UVA campus.

 “None of them are owner occupied,” Catalano says. “What’s going to happen here is the exact same thing.”

 Pushing for a major cutback in the number of units, from 188 to 80, the Fry’s Spring Neighborhood Association convinced the City Council to send the plan back to the Planning Commission.

 In March, the Planning Commission again approved the development, which had been revised to contain 114 units. This reduction was a voluntary concession by the developer, as the City cannot require fewer houses than zoning allows.

 The cutback in units came at a price. Before the City Council finally approved the project on March 15, Mayor Cox asked Steve Runkle of the Kessler Group what the reduced number of units would mean for housing costs. Runkle replied that the price tags would go up, with the cheapest unit now selling for $150,000. He said if only 80 houses were to be built, as neighbors had demanded, there would be an even larger proportion of single-family detached homes—as opposed to townhouses or condos—and the prices would start at $225,000.

 Runkle, who has been involved in several large developments, including the Hollymead Town Center, says neighborhood beefs over chunks of affordable housing are nothing new.

 “[Affordable housing] generally brings concerns of adjacent areas. That’s fairly standard,” Runkle says. “Everybody thinks these public policies are a great idea until they start affecting them.”

 But both Catalano and Farruggio make convincing arguments that more than the standard NIMBY impulse was at play in their neighborhood’s opposition to the Johnson Village development. If the condos and townhouses were to succumb to student rentals, they ask, how would the development boost inexpensive housing stock in the City?

 “It’s not affordable housing that the neighbors are against. We are all for affordable housing,” says Farruggio, who is also a member of the city’s housing taskforce. He argues that a block of rented townhouses could destabilize a neighborhood that “was built and designed for single family detached homes.”

 To truly tackle affordable housing, Catalano argues, the City should ensure that new units are owner occupied. Or, as Farruggio suggests, the City should adopt a trust to subsidize affordable housing, and penalize homeowners who pull out early to sell the subsidized homes. But local governments have neither option, yet.

 Without teeth for affordable housing policies, Catalano says housing developments follow the rule of simple economics: If there’s a market for overpriced rentals, why shouldn’t developers make that buck?

 

Pointing the finger

Stu Armstrong, executive director of the Piedmont Housing Alliance, says overpriced housing in the region is driven by the housing market in Albemarle County, where housing costs have long been the steepest and where most of the area’s population lives.

 Greene, Augusta and other counties, even the City of Charlottesville, have long functioned as “a pressure relief valve” for the overheated Albemarle housing market, Armstrong says, and are now experiencing their own housing cost problems.

 To illustrate the root cause of rising housing costs in Albemarle, Jeff Gaffney, CAAR president, whips out a calculator and begins punching in a simple equation. He says a builder typically wants the value of a lot to be 20 percent of the cost of a total home package. He keys up the cost of a home on a $25,000 lot, which will be around $125,000—definitely in the affordable range. However, once the lot gets to $40,000, the home price jumps to $200,000. With parcels going for $75,000 in growth areas off of 29N, affordable housing is out of reach before the foundation is even poured.

 “Land costs in the County have increased at a rapid pace in the last few years,” developer Runkle says.

 One reason for the spiking land costs, according to several local real estate observers, is Albemarle’s recent efforts to corral development into targeted areas.

 “You restrict the growth, prices go up,” Gaffney says.

 Most of the new housing planned for Albemarle is to be built in the growth areas, which are geared toward planned urban environments. This is all part of the County’s growth strategy, which seeks to preserve mountain vistas and rustic charm by steering new homes and retail into concentrated areas. To compete with new homes in rural Albemarle, the County’s plan is to create a livable, enticing environment in the development areas by providing the city-living perqs of walkability, parks and public transportation.

 These development areas, which were selected as part of the County’s creation of the “Neighborhood Model” in 2001, are located mostly around Charlottesville, Scottsville and Crozet, and account for only 35 of the 726 square miles in the County—less than 5 percent of Albemarle’s land. And though targeted growth on such a small area might be good for urban living, it jacks up land costs and forces developers to plunk down more for infrastructure.

 “Smart growth policies had unintended consequences,” Armstrong says.

 But opening up the rest of the County to unchecked growth and cookie cutter housing is not a popular solution. Furthermore, it probably wouldn’t do much to solve the problem. As Harrison Rue, the executive director of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission says, “Transportation costs are a huge part of a family’s budget.”

 Although a home in a rural area of Albemarle might be cheap, a family in the sticks usually needs two cars to get to work and to shuttle kids around. Rue says a one-car family can save enough to afford $40,000 more on the cost of a house. Therefore, to truly be effective and assist lower-income people, affordable housing needs to be close to jobs, schools and supermarkets, preferably within walking distance.

 There are massive housing developments planned for the County’s growth areas. By boosting supply, theoretically, the new developments could help ease the County’s housing cost woes.

 “We’ve got hundreds of houses that are just over the horizon,” says County Supervisor Sally Thomas, citing the 893-unit North Pointe Community, which has yet to get the go-ahead from the County, and the 300-unit Hollymead Town Center.

 To help ensure that affordable housing is included in new developments, the County recently passed a flexible requirement that 15 percent of the units in new developments be affordable or a “comparable contribution should be made to achieve the affordable housing goals of the County.”

 The new affordable housing policy is getting its first test with North Pointe. The developer, Great Eastern Management, has volunteered that only 3 percent of the 893 units in the giant project will be affordable—just 27 units. To compensate, the developer is giving $100,000 in matching funds to both Habitat for Humanity and the Piedmont Housing Alliance, and $50,000 to the Albemarle Housing Improvement Program.

 Though disappointing to housing advocates, even this modest affordable housing offer is better than nothing, which had been the norm before North Pointe.

 According to Karen V. Lilleleht of the Albemarle Housing Commission, who first started working on housing issues in 1956, extracting any portion of affordable housing from a developer, even a small percentage, is a victory of sorts.

 “At this point in time, it’s probably the best we can do, because we can’t require it,” Lilleleht says, referring to the flexibility in Albemarle’s new affordable housing policy. “Really, they’re doing what they can.”

 

Handout or hand-up?

With limited options for policymakers to force developers to build cheap homes, the three solutions to the affordable housing dilemma that show the most promise are: 1) those that actually funnel cash toward lower- or middle-income homebuyers or renters; 2) those that teach people how to buy a home; or 3) those that treat a primary symptom of the problem, namely low wages.

 The nonprofit Piedmont Housing Alliance (PHA) buys, refurbishes and either sells or rents affordable housing in the area. PHA has worked on 264 housing units, and has educated and counseled scores of local homebuyers.

 PHA is funded by private donors and grants from Federal, State and local governments, and had about $5.5 million in equity at the end of 2003. A recent success for the organization was its efforts to rescue a 16-unit apartment building in the Rose Hill neighborhood from the blocks, keeping rents at $440 per month for the two-bedroom apartments and preserving the character of the building, which has long catered to African-American teachers and other professionals.

 But though PHA’s bottom line looks impressive, it’s small compared to what other areas have mustered. For example, when Santa Fe glimpsed a dismal future of insane housing costs back in 1991, it created the Santa Fe Affordable Housing Roundtable, a coalition of nonprofits and local governments that was able to land $55 million in housing assistance from government and private sources while only spending $900,000 in municipal money. During the six-year life of the project, 621 affordable homes were built, 221 below-market rental units were acquired or built and 1,900 households were assisted in some way.

 So does that mean police officers can afford to live in Santa Fe these days?

 “It can be done. Sometime it takes a little hunting around,” says Aric Wheeler, the recruiting officer for the Santa Fe Police Department. “We do have options to live here.” 

 Santa Fe’s starting salary for cops, minus various incentives, is only a few hundred dollars more than the $29,250 salary at which Charlottesville’s police officers are hired.

 Of course, a bigger starting salary is another way to keep police officers, firefighters, teachers and service industry employees afloat in a tight housing market. In Ann Arbor, a cop starts at $36,442, while in San Luis Obispo County, a Sheriff Cadet gets $45,552.

 And fortunately for Charlottesville’s men and women in blue, wages appear to be on the way up. Chief Longo says Charlottesville police officers have seen “pretty significant increases in their starting salaries this year and last year.”

 Sgt. Farruggio says the City is doing all it can to boost cops’ salaries. And more help is coming, in the form of a newly created police foundation, which should provide funding for homeownership programs.

 “There are some really aggressive initiatives that I’m told are on the way,” Longo says.

 But for other people struggling to find housing, PHA, Habitat for Humanity and the Albemarle Housing Improvement (AHIP), a nonprofit that has rehabilitated 635 homes since 1976, are the biggest games in town. And without serious financial backing, both of these organizations can only take a Band-aid approach to affordable housing.

 The powers that be in Richmond are of little help. PHA received only $192,638 from the Commonwealth last year. This is hardly the case in many other cities, where state governments are far more involved in affordable housing.

 In October 2002, a group of 19 politicians, developers and other local leaders from Charlottesville and Albemarle trekked up to Burlington, Vermont, to see how things worked in that city. Burlington is almost exactly the same size as Charlottesville in area and population, and is also home to a state university and a thriving pedestrian mall. If Charlottesville bordered a lake, the cities would be almost identical.

 Burlington, like most boutique-friendly towns, has had its headaches over affordable housing. During the tour, the Virginians heard how the City of Burlington now requires that 10 percent of all new developments be affordable. They also heard about the many successful affordable housing projects run by the Burlington Community Land Trust.

 To inject some reality into the discussion, PHA’s Armstrong says he asked Burlington’s mayor, Peter Clavelle, about the budget of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, the state’s housing trust. Since its formation in 1987, the trust has directly funded $142 million in affordable housing projects, secured $516 million from other sources and created 6,419 affordable housing units, all in a state of 615,000 people.

 In contrast, Virginia doesn’t have a housing trust fund. It did have one, called the Virginia Housing Partnership Fund, which doled out millions in loans for affordable housing, but the State Legislature sold the fund in June 2003—at a huge loss—to help pay off Virginia’s multibillion dollar debt.

 “There’s no money here. We don’t have the financial tools to do all these things,” Armstrong says. “I love what I do. But we live in one of the most challenging states in the country to do it.”

 

Lowering the ceiling
City housing task force unveils new strategies

Amidst increasing worries about affordable housing, the Charlottesville City Council in February 2003 appointed a task force to come up with a new housing policy for the City. The task force, a diverse group including real estate agents, City planners and neighborhood association reps (including new City Councilor-elect Kendra Hamilton), presents its plan, “The 2004 Housing Strategy,” to the Council this week.

 After months of discussing previous policies and scouring housing stats, the group has pinpointed several key challenges. Chief among them is the fact that the number of residents with low and moderate incomes is growing while the number of “affordable starter homes” is decreasing.

 The task force also identified a somewhat unique local problem, namely that the City no longer has any “undesirable neighborhoods” with scads of vacant or decrepit homes that could be saved with targeted rehab and converted into affordable housing. In Charlottesville, all neighborhoods are subject to booming real estate prices nowadays.

 In order to come up with a fix to the problem, the task force first sought to define affordable housing. Two-thirds of area residents earn less than $50,960 for a family of four, or 80 percent of the area’s median income. Affordable housing is defined in the report as homes that these people can afford. This means that a $218,300 house would be at the top end of “affordable.” Using a slightly different calculation, affordable rents would be $796 per month at maximum.

 The plan, which recommends about 40 actions, includes several potentially weighty ideas that, if implemented, could make a dent in the City’s affordable housing woes. These include:

•The creation of a full-time Housing Planner for City government.

•A requirement that 15 percent of most new housing developments be affordable. This proposed rule, similar to Albemarle’s new affordable housing policy, would give developers the option to instead make a “comparable contribution” to the City’s affordable housing goals.

•The development of deed restrictions or other ways to ensure that affordable housing created by the City remains inexpensive for a specific period of time.

•The creation of a housing trust fund with a minimum annual contribution from the City of $300,000, which, it is hoped, would attract other public and private monies. —P.F.

In its first weekend of wide release, Fahrenheit 9/11 took in $21.8 million on just 868 screens, making it the highest-grossing documentary opening in history. The movie did equally well in red and blue states where a not-so-silent civil war is raging over America’s representation under the Bushies. While U.S. citizens fret over a terrorist attack before the election and tamper-easy Diebold voting machines, arguments rage about Donald Rumsfeld’s refusal to step down after Abu Grahib and Vice President Dick Cheney loses his mind in Congress.

 Now that it’s clear that Fox News will not keep audiences away from Fahrenheit 9/11, the question is, Will conservative media recognize its defeat in trying to impugn director Michael Moore and shift the dialogue back to the issues he raises?

 A populist filmmaker, Moore engages in a kind of independent journalism that raises crucial questions with an air of simplicity and honest curiosity. But the damning answers to some of his direct queries demand action. When Moore declares that no member of Congress had even read The PATRIOT Act before voting on it, you’ve got to wonder when the American public will serve our negligent Congress with pink slips.

 However, the blind passing of the PATRIOT Act is but one in a laundry list of offenses that Moore exposes. His movie keys into the lies that we’ve been fed since Bush and his cronies illegally seized power. The best part is that Moore is a sincere and articulate Everyman to whom people around the world listen and respond enthusiastically. That’s more than can be said of George W. Bush.

 The following interview was conducted at the recent Cannes Film Festival where Fahrenheit 9/11 won the Palme d’Or.

Cole Smithey: What in this movie do you think will be shocking to the public, and what of that would be threatening to the U.S. government?

Michael Moore: Well, what’s going to be shocking to most Americans who see this film is Bush’s military records that were blacked out by someone at the White House. I don’t think people have heard American soldiers in the field talk the way they talk in this film of their disillusionment, of their despair, of their questioning what’s going on. Those were brave words to say to a camera. We have not seen that on the evening news. We’ve not seen the suffering that the war has caused—from those who’ve been maimed and paralyzed to the families back home who’ve lost loved ones. How often have we heard their voices? Every step along the way in this movie will be a revelation in terms of how this lie was perpetrated upon them.

 The good thing about Americans is once they’re given the information, they act accordingly, and they act from a good place. The hard part is getting through with the information. If the freelancers I was using were able to find what they found in Iraq, with our limited resources, you have to question why haven’t we seen this? You see in the movie the first footage of abuse and humiliation of Iraqi detainees. And this occurred in the field, outside the prison walls. That is disgraceful, that it would take as long as it’s taken, and for me to come along with stringers and freelancers to be able to bring this to the American people. The American people do not like things being kept from them, and I think what this film is going to do is be like a mystery unraveling.

Do you think the coalition should pull out of Iraq?

Of course the [chuckling] “Coalition of the Willing” needs to de-will themselves, and the United States must remove itself from the situation. We need to find a better solution with people who the Iraqis want there, and who will help the Iraqis rebuild their country—that is not the United States of America.

George Bush accused the U.S. troops who abused the Iraqi detainees of a “failure of character.” What do you think are the failures of George Bush’s character?

Bush’s comment about the failure of the U.S. troops is another example of how George W. Bush does not support our troops. George W. Bush and his ilk actually despise our troops. Only someone who despises our young people, who have offered to serve and protect our country and give up their lives if necessary—to send them to war based on a lie is the worst violation of trust you can have, and the worst way to treat our troops. He is against our troops. He has put them in harm’s way for no good reason other than to line the pockets of his friends and benefactors.

 The lack of character begins with him and Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld, and the fish rots from the head down. Whatever’s going on in Iraq, in terms of this prison abuse and the things you see in the film, starts with sending them over there based on a lie. Immoral behavior begets immoral behavior. This is not some noble mission to free the country, to free people, to prevent a holocaust. This was a disgusting effort on their part, and all we can say is thank God that they got caught as early as they did. If you remember with Vietnam, it took years before the lie was revealed. This has just taken months. So, I’m somewhat optimistic that we can find a way out of this.

In your movie, you criticize the way the American public is manipulated with fear by the media. How do you manipulate your images?

We do a de-manipulation of the images. The media in America provides a manipulation. During the Bush years they put on a filter and they only allow the American people to see what they think will keep the waters calm. So night after night on the evening news you’ll get maybe five seconds of George W. Bush where it sounds like he makes sense. In my film, I show the 20 seconds on either side of the five seconds where he clearly is totally discombobulated. In my film, I take the filter off, and you see it raw and uncensored and the way it really is. It’s both hilarious and frightening.

Are you afraid of being manipulated?

When you come from the working class, you’ve got a pretty good bullshit detector. I come from a factory town, my dad worked in a factory, and there’s a total lack of pretension—everything is the way that it is. Anybody who tries to pretend to be something else is immediately seen for who and what they are. That’s a good thing about growing up that way, and I haven’t lost that. And I hope I always maintain that sense of always having a healthy disrespect for authority and always believing, as a great American journalist once said, “All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” If we had more journalists who started with that premise, that governments must prove everything that they’re saying, then maybe we’d get to more of the truth.

How do you get the clips of these uncensored moments that belong to networks?

We spend a lot of time digging in their archives. Another way we do it is there are people who work in media who don’t like the way the media is censored. So there’ll be a cameraman over here or a sound guy over there who knows that I would like to see something and will send it to me. We have a network of people who believe that the public should be given all the truth. I can’t reveal everything in terms of how we do this, but we’re able to get it out there to the people. I shouldn’t really have to do this in a free country where there should be open information and you should hear all the different voices. It shouldn’t take a guy like me to provide the people with the things that you’re not seeing. But as long as that’s the case, I’m going to take you to a place that you haven’t been before during the four years of the Bush Administration.

How were you able to get the war footage from Iraq?

I had a number of freelancers that I was working with, both people that I was able to have go to Iraq and others we discovered once they were in Iraq—some were embedded, some weren’t. The footage of the Iraqi detainees was from a journalist who was embedded with the troops.

How do you think the White House has tried to prevent your film from being made and released?

I only know what I was told by my agent. We had a signed deal with Icon. We were just starting the movie and I got a call from my agent saying that he just got a call from a person at Icon asking for a way to get out of the deal, even though there was no way they could renege on it. They asked if there was any way we could get someone else to take over the deal because they received a call from “top Republicans,” people connected to the White House, who essentially wanted to convey the message to Mr. Gibson [Mel Gibson, who runs Icon Films—Ed.], “Don’t expect anymore invitations to the White House if they’re going to be behind this film.” That’s all I know. I don’t know who made the calls, but we had this deal—there was a big thing in Variety about the deal—then suddenly, weeks later the deal didn’t exist. Fortunately, Miramax immediately took over the deal and said they would make the film.

Since the agenda of your film seems to be to influence the outcome of the election in November, to what extent do you think a movie can accomplish that goal?

When I make any movie, it’s to make something that I would want to go see on a Friday night if I were going to a movie. That’s always the foremost thought in my mind: How can we make something that will be enjoyable and entertaining, that people will want to take their date or their spouse to the theater and eat popcorn, have a great time, laugh, cry, think, and leave the theater to talk about it later? Those are always my primary motivations, and that is the motivation behind making this film.

 I wanted to say something about the times in which we live, in post 9/11 America—how we got to where we’re at, what’s happened to us as a people—and have a good time doing it. I also think it’s important to laugh during times like these and that’s why this film, like my other films, has a good amount of humor in it. This time I was the straight man—Bush wrote the funniest lines, so what am I going to do when George Bush files a grievance with the Writer’s Guild wanting some sort of screen credit? In terms of “Will it influence the election?” I hope it influences people just to leave the theater and become good citizens—whatever that means. I’ll leave it to other people to decide what impact it will have on the election.

 

Heat index
Fahrenheit 9/11 pulls no punches in burning Bush
By Kent Williams

Let’s start by getting the name-calling out of the way: Michael Moore is a political gadfly, a provocateur, a firebrand, a rabble-rouser, a muckraker, a satirist, a populist, an entertainer and a Big Fat Stupid White Man, that last epithet courtesy of a book about Moore that’s just been published. As for Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore’s headline-grabbing documentary about the Bush Administration’s foreign policy, it’s a screed, a diatribe, a polemic, a comedic hatchet job that, according to London’s Guardian newspaper, got a thumb’s-up from Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based militant group. Except for the fact that he never quite gets around to asking George Bush whether it’s true that he beats his wife, Moore doesn’t even pretend to play fair. On the contrary, he’s out to behead a king with every sharp tool at his disposal. And if you have a problem with that…well, then get in line, because lots of people, from both sides of the political aisle, have a problem with it. Right-leaning leftie Christopher Hitchens, in a recent Slate article, all but challenged Moore to a duel. Live by the word, die by the word.

As a filmmaker, Moore lives by the word and, increasingly, by the image. Culling footage from various nooks and crannies of the mediasphere, he’s fashioned a montage barrage that, often as not, uses Bush’s own words and images against him. There’s a shot of Bush addressing a banquet of wealthy types, which he refers to as the haves and the have-mores. “Some call you the elite,” he tells the crowd. “I call you my base.” There’s a shot of Bush making an urgent appeal for the fight against terrorism, then turning around and driving a golf ball into the wild blue yonder. But perhaps the most memorable shot is of Bush, having just been told that a second plane has hit the World Trade Center, sitting there for nearly seven minutes while an elementary-school class completes its reading of “My Pet Goat.” Moore slows the videotape down so that the expression on Bush’s face morphs from anxious to afraid to confused to vacant, then back to anxious. Some might call this a cheap shot, and maybe it is, but the effect is of a little boy waiting to be told what to do.

“Was it all just a dream?” Moore asks about the last four years, and maybe the best way to view Fahrenheit 9/11 is as an alternative history of the United States during one of its darkly comic nightmares. The movie opens with CBS and CNN declaring Al Gore the winner in Florida, only to have Fox News, spear-carrier for the red states, hand the whole country over to Bush. The Supreme Court seconds that emotion, and Bush proceeds to spend 42 percent of his first eight months in office on vacation, a cinematic longeur that’s enlivened by the sight of Paul Wolfowitz prepping for a TV appearance by running a comb first through his mouth, then through his hair. (Another cheap shot: What does his personal grooming have to do with Wolfowitz’s politics?) Then the screen goes black for Moore’s dramatic sound-only reenactment of 9/11, and what had been a comedy has suddenly turned into a tragedy, the Hillbilly banjo music giving way to the wailing violins of Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten. Manipulative? Damn straight, but effective, too.

 Now that he has us in the palm of his hand, Moore lays out his next argument—that Bush’s connections with Saudi Arabia’s royal family, which go back 30 years, clouded his judgment and influenced his policies as he scrambled to come up with a response to 9/11. Craig Unger covers the same territory in his recent book, House of Bush, House of Saud, and Moore doesn’t add to what Unger wrote so much as supply pictures.

 Then he moves on to his final argument—that the upper class always gets the lower class to fight its wars for it. Meet Lila Lipscomb, a self-proclaimed “conservative Democrat” from Moore’s hometown of Flint, Michigan, who lost both her son and her faith in our country’s ideals to the war in Iraq. Distraught, Lipscomb pours out her emotions, and our heart goes out to her, but I couldn’t help wondering about the mothers who’ve lost sons or daughters but still believe in the war. Do they not grieve? What makes Fahrenheit 9/11 so effective is that it combines emotional appeals with both comic relief and—last but not always least—debate-society argumentation.

 Some find Moore’s approach engaging. Some find it enraging. And how you find it doesn’t necessarily depend on whether you voted for Bush or Gore the last time around. Imagine a movie much like this one, only about Bill Clinton and directed by Rush Limbaugh. Engaging or enraging? Personally, I think Moore’s funnier than Limbaugh, and I think he’s at his best when he plays the court jester who entertains us paupers by jabbing the king and his court in the ribs. But if he’s determined to dethrone the king and send him packing to the great state of Texas…well, there’s nothing in the U.S. Constitution to prevent it. Not yet, anyway.

Fahrenheit 9/11 is rated R with a running time of 112 minutes and is now playing at Vinegar Hill Theatre. For times see page 71 or call 817-FILM.

 

Right or wrong
What are local conservatives saying about the movie?

The recent debut of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11—an aggressive indictment of President Bush and the war in Iraq—generated much hot air and spilled ink amongst the punditry, many of whom fretted over the documentary’s impact on the November election. Not to be outdone,C-VILLE Weekly tracked down two prominent local Republicans to discover what they think of the movie and its influence on the electorate.

 But both Bob Hodous, a local lawyer and chairman of the Charlottesville Republican Party, and Randolph Byrd, a publisher and staunch Republican, plan to skip Moore’s latest work, bolstering the widespread belief that the movie is preaching to the choir.

 “I don’t know of a single soul who’s gone to see this movie,” Byrd says.

 Both Hodous and Byrd say they follow a broad variety of media, including those which many charge lean to the Left, such as The New York Times. But Michael Moore’s perspective is one that neither of the two Republicans are compelled to heed.

 “It would probably piss me off,” Byrd says of Fahrenheit 9/11. “I don’t want to feed this guy’s profits.”

 Hodous says he decided to ignore the movie mostly because of having read many news articles and opinion pieces that describe bias and inaccuracies in the film. For example, Houdous says a recent piece by liberal columnist William Raspberry in The Washington Post, which called the movie “an overwrought piece of propaganda” and a “hatchet job that doesn’t even bother to pretend to be fair,” helped him decide to save the $8 for a seat at the Vinegar Hill Theatre.

 “I think that [Moore’s] bias is so great that I’m not sure I’d be able to wade through it,” Hodous says.

 But though Hodous believes Fahrenheit 9/11 is a cynical effort to tap into knee-jerk leftie hatred of the Bush Administration, he acknowledges that this sort of media pandering occurs among conservatives as well.

 “That happens on both sides. It’s sad, because I think we miss a lot that way,” Hodous says.

 Byrd strongly echoed this belief, saying that Fahrenheit 9/11 is “meant to enrage the Right as much as [The Passion of The Christ] was meant to appeal to it.” (Byrd saw and liked The Passion.)

 But despite the fact that Moore is trying to help oust Bush with a documentary film many conservatives call grossly inaccurate and unfair, Byrd says the Right wing shouldn’t be outraged by the movie.

 “Like Rush Limbaugh never goes over the top,” Byrd says with a chuckle.—Paul Fain

Q: Ace: I heard that the Keswick Hall golf course, bastion of the bourgeoisie (and better), was recently lauded for being environmentally sustainable. “Environmental” and “sustainable” are not the first two words that spring to mind when it comes to golf, so Ace me this: How can a golf course be “green” in more ways than one?—Rich Baffy

A: It’s true, Rich, that more often than not, golf courses suck water like vampires suck blood, and green their grass with quantities of pesticides that could de-bug small South American countries. Moreover, you’d think that those fortunate enough to pay their way through the golden gates of Keswick Hall would be thinking about more important things—like how foie gras compares to caviar—than the impact of their golf course on our natural landscape and wildlife.

 But think again and move over Laura Ashley, ‘cause Peter McDonough, golf course superintendent at Keswick (and of no relation to internationally renowned green architect and Charlottesville resident, William McDonough), has gone above par when it comes to the greening of his green, Keswick Hall’s Arnold Palmer golf course. It took two years of work, but the course recently attained the status of “certified Audubon Cooperative sanctuary status”—one of only nine golf courses in the State and 411 golf courses internationally at that time to meet the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary System’s stringent guidelines, according to Keswick Hall Public Relations Director Anne Hooff.

 One of the ways McDonough meets these needs is through “airification,” or “punching holes in the grass,” since as McDonough says, “grass is no different from people, trees or animals: You need air to breathe.”

 Another key component to his program is the limited use of pesticides based on an integrated pest management program that identifies the actual need for pesticides instead of “applying the products just because it’s the ‘time’ to apply them,” McDonough says. Moreover, for a different kind of (larger) pest control, he has kept 25 acres of “buffer zones” in which no fertilizers or pesticides are used around the perimeter of the golf course, or the natural streams that run through it.

 But McDonough’s proactive approach to water management is what has garnered him the most recognition. He uses a computerized weather station attached to his computer irrigation system to compute heat and humidity. Combining those measurements with the average temperature tells you, as McDonough says, “whether you need five, 10, or no minutes of water.”

 So whether you choose to take tea or tee off at Keswick Hall, your social conscience can rest assured: The gophers are dancing out there on the green with no Bill Murray in sight.

Bankers, experimentalists, runners, bike cops, tortilla experts and many other avowed individuals who choose this place above all others to ply their trades, promote their ideas and otherwise stir up the creative brew that we call home and that others lately are calling No. 1. We don’t really need Frommer’s, Outside or anyone else to tell us what we have here—especially when those folks only get as much of the story as a single day’s research allows. But if they were to ask for a more in-depth view of the people and institutions making Charlottesville what it is right now—for better or worse—we’d present them with this, the third annual C-VILLE 20, the cast of characters featured in our town’s present-day tale.

THE MISSIONARY
Pastor Bruce A. Beard

After a week in which his department was battered for a DNA dragnet of black men, Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy J. Longo specifically thanked Pastor Bruce A. Beard for helping foster a dialogue with the local African-American community that had been so deeply offended. Beard’s calming role in the controversy probably doesn’t surprise members of his congregation at the First Baptist Church on W. Main Street—bridging divides is Beard’s specialty.

 A Pittsburgh transplant who quit his job as a corporate executive for Pepsi-Cola to become a pastor, Beard has worked hard to make First Baptist a church that appeals to a broad swath of Charlottesville.

 When Beard took the helm of First Baptist, a historically black church with a storied past, he says church attendance was “hovering around 50 to 60.” Now, Beard sees 500 or more faces from his Sunday perch in the pulpit.

 “It’s become much more diverse,” Beard says of First Baptist. “We have quite a few white members.”

 Beard and his wife, Rev. Gardenia Beard, focus on the divide between church and community, which he says has been growing in recent decades. Their ministry, which they call Transformational Ministries, is “a radical rethinking of what is church” that includes an emphasis on getting out into the community.

 “Most churches tend to be 30 to 40 years behind the times,” Beard says.

 Beard thinks Charlottesville could eventually be a national example for cooperating across ethnic lines. In fact, he thinks Charlottesville has so much potential, “I’m not sure people realize it.”—P.F.

 

THE PICKER
Fred Boyce

At The Prism Coffeehouse on Rugby Road, you can hear some of the finest acoustic musicians in the world perform in a space no bigger than a living room. So far this year the schedule has included such diverse acts as New Grass revivalist John Cowan, classical guitarist Beppe Gambetta, and Appalachian balladeers Ginny Hawker and Tracy Schwartz performing in the 80-seat venue. It’s one of those places you really can’t find anywhere else but Charlottesville, and Fred Boyce is the guy who makes it happen.

 A virtuoso banjo picker from North Carolina, Boyce and his partner Kenyon Hunter have run The Prism since 1990. In that time Boyce has used his connections in the musical world, picking acts that have elevated The Prism into a hallowed haunt for fans and artists alike. For Boyce, The Prism is built for education, not just entertainment.

 “The Prism has been built by the people and the musicians who trust in Fred’s vision,” says Mike Seeger, a longtime Prism performer and legendary scholar and interpreter of Appalachian folk music.

 Aided by a small, loyal band of volunteers, Boyce and Hunter do almost everything to keep the smoke- and alcohol-free Prism running smoothly—booking shows, hanging flyers, ordering coffee and snacks, orchestrating The Prism’s live broadcasts on WTJU and cleaning up afterwards.

 Recently, Boyce has come under fire with some former Prism volunteers who, offended by his notoriously fiery temper, have hung their dirty laundry on the line, going public with an injudiciously uncensored voice mail message that Boyce left one of them. With the talent for improvisation that is characteristic of a bluegrass banjo player, Boyce has rolled with it and has not commented publicly on whether he’ll drop The Prism reins—or rein in his management technique. In any case, if or when others take charge at the 38-year-old venue, they’ll inherit one of the East Coast’s coolest folk venues with Boyce to thank for it.—J.B.

 

THE MAESTRO
John Conover

Having dominated City government for decades, the Democrats’ resounding sweep in this year’s City Council election hardly qualifies as a Cinderella story. Yet the Dems’ victory party on May 4 had the air of a team celebrating a come-from-behind win, with John Conover as the victorious coach.

 For two years, ever since Rob Schilling beat Alexandria Searls to become the first Republican in 12 years to win a Council seat, Democrats have been gnashing their teeth over the loss. This year, the party vowed to play hardball, and they tapped former Councilor Conover to manage the campaign.

 Conover’s role seemed to be keeping his candidates—Kendra Hamilton, David Brown and Kevin Lynch—focused on defeating the Republicans instead of each other. It gave him plenty of opportunities to talk a little partisan smack, which the Legal Aid attorney seemed to especially relish. “I think John enjoys the sparring,” says former Mayor David Toscano, who ran the Dems’ fundraising efforts this year.

 With Conover at the helm, the party did a lot of things right. First, they raised more than $32,000. Then, they identified their target voters by looking at voter rolls from State elections and cross-referencing those with rolls from local elections. In so doing, the Dems discovered they had lots of party faithfuls who weren’t turning out for City elections, so they made an extra effort to get those voters to the polls.

 “John’s philosophy is to put a lot of people in the mix, give them responsibilities and get things done,” says Toscano. “That’s the essence of a good organization.”—J.B.

 

THE MENTOR
Carol Pedersen

If you’ve been to the theater in the past year, you’ve probably seen Carol Pedersen’s influence. True, she’s only directed one local production and has never acted in front of Charlottesville audiences. But as a leading force behind Live Arts’ drama education program, not to mention her work as a dramaturge and as a teacher at UVA and, starting this fall, at Piedmont Virginia Community College, she’s shaping a whole lot of local talent that makes it before the footlights.

 “I love teaching, I really do,” she says. And her students return the affection, citing the calm and trust that she imparts to a classroom setting. She works as well with absolute beginners as she does with more experienced actors, prepping part-time thespians in a way that enables them to expertly make the switch from their daytime vocations to their evening and weekend avocations as community theater performers. And her audition workshops have been known to give the necessary booster shot of confidence to otherwise retiring wannabe actors.

 Pedersen may be working with nonprofessional players, but she has a heavy dose of credentials backing her up: graduate degrees in theater and directing from the City University of New York and Columbia University. Indeed, to a great extent she embodies Charlottesville’s unique approach to culture, in which professional tools are made available to amateur performers.

 A lunch at the now-defunct Liquid with Live Arts Artistic Director John Gibson led to the start of those audition workshops and eventually, the Saturday morning actor’s lab, which commenced in February, 2003. Since then, all but one Live Arts production have this season featured at least one of her students in the cast. “There are people who had never acted before getting terrific parts. That’s really fun,” she says.—E.R.

 

THE ACTIVIST
Holly Hatcher

The rest of Virginia looks to Charlottesville —not always fondly—as a stronghold of liberal values in an otherwise conservative Commonwealth. The contrast is especially pronounced when it comes to women’s rights, as an increasingly Christianist House of Delegates moves to limit access to abortion and—in the newest development—federally approved contraceptives.

 Charlottesville activist Holly Hatcher won’t let legislators turn back the clock without a fight. Last year, Planned Parenthood hired the 29-year-old Hatcher to direct its organizing efforts in Virginia, at a time when the Commonwealth is one of hottest battlegrounds for reproductive rights.

 “She’s a fireplug,” says David Nova, director of Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge. “Holly’s got an innate talent for empowering others to express themselves.”

 Hatcher honed her activism at the Public Housing Association of Residents (PHAR), a local nationally recognized nonprofit, where she taught low-income housing residents how to navigate through City Hall. At Planned Parenthood, her job is to help concerned Virginians defend their rights to privacy and health care.

 In May, Hatcher filled 12 buses with Richmond pro-choice activists, and helped statewide Planned Parenthood chapters fill a total of 32 buses (including eight from Charlottesville), all bound for the March for Women’s Lives. That event drew close to 1 million people to Washington, D.C., on April 25.

 Lately Hatcher’s been commuting to Richmond for her job, but later this summer she’ll start working in her hometown when Planned Parenthood opens a new office and clinic in Charlottesville. That state-of-the-art facility will likely further encourage Charlottesville’s radical reputation, since a growing contingent in the General Assembly supports TRAP, or Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, legislation that could close down other clinics around the State. If that happens and Charlottesville becomes a refuge for women seeking safe, legal abortions, Hatcher will undoubtedly cement her own hard-won reputation as a committed force in the struggle for progressive health care.—J.B.

 

THE HEALER
Jim Haden

When Jim Haden moved to Charlottesville in 1993 to take the helm of Martha Jefferson Hospital, the community hospital had 140 medical staff. That number has grown to 360 during Haden’s time as president and CEO. The hospital, which recently built a 94,000 square foot Outpatient Care Center at Peter Jefferson Place, now has more than 100 primary care physicians.

 “There has been an awful lot of growth,” Haden says of his time at Martha Jefferson. “It’s not just being bigger, it’s being better.”

 Haden says the hospital, in addition to expanding its role as the Charlottesville region’s biggest primary care provider, has bulked up its cardiology and cancer treatment capacities as well as women’s health services.

 By expanding its specialty care, Martha Jefferson, which this July will celebrate the 100th anniversary of opening its doors at 919 E. High St., has increased the areas of overlap with its research-focused crosstown competitor, the UVA Medical Center, which can only be good news to the thousands of newcomers—including young families and retirees—who relocate here each year.

 Haden says there can be “creative tension” when his hospital’s services are in competition with the UVA Medical Center, but that the two hospitals often work together “very cooperatively.”

 Before coming to Charlottesville, Haden says he knew nothing about the town. After more than a decade at Martha Jefferson, he says he hopes to stay here if “the community wants me around.”

 The big challenge for Haden and Martha Jefferson, much like for the rest of Charlottesville, is how to keep growing without harming the hospital’s core values.

 “I don’t want to lose who we are,” Haden says.—P.F.

 

MR. WAHOO
Rick Jones

Charlottesville may be No. 1, but it isn’t perfect—especially when the topic turns to racial harmony and social justice. If Charlottesville ever becomes a place where more people of different classes and races live side by side, Rick Jones will deserve some of the credit.

 Jones runs Management Services Corporation, one of the largest student housing providers in Charlottesville with nearly 800 rental units. While many developers take a standoffish view of municipal bureaucracy, Jones in 2000 joined a committee that helped rewrite Charlottesville’s entire zoning code, a job the City finally finished last year.

 “I always thought it was my job to offer a balanced perspective,” says Jones, who’s never shy about offering his ideas. His influence helped ensure that the new zoning would actually work for real developers and not remain just an academic exercise for government planners.

 Three years of swimming in public policy is enough for most people. Jones, however, came back for more. He is currently serving on the City’s Housing Task Force, a group studying ways to take the edge off the local housing market for low- and middle-income residents.

 But of all his involvement, Jones may make his biggest contribution to the City through his position on the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority Board. For years the CHRA has focused on managing the City’s eight public housing sites. Jones wants the CHRA to become developers, building sites where subsidized housing sits adjacent to market-rate housing. The idea has worked well in bigger cities like Chicago.

 Departing Mayor Maurice Cox says Jones gives the CHRA the business credibility it needs to work with the private sector. “We’re inviting the kind of know-how that allows us to sit at the table as an equal,” says Cox. “That’s a fairly new direction. Rick Jones is going to move the CHRA forward.”—J.B.

 

THE KING
Rudy Padilla

Rudy Padilla sits at a table in the “club” area of his recently expanded Greenbrier Drive restaurant, El Rey Del Taco, like a royal surveying his kingdom.

 In just five years, Padilla has opened four successful restaurants around Charlottesville. More than just places to spill salsa on your shirt, Padilla’s restaurants comprise a community of their own.

 Padilla moved to Virginia in 1995 to join his brother’s Richmond eatery, El Paso Mexican Restaurant. Three years later he decided it was time to open one of his own, and started Amigos in the Woodbrook Shopping Center on Route 29N. Two years later Amigos got a friend on Fifth Street Extended, followed by a third Amigos on the Corner in 2001. Those three restaurants feature more mainstream Mexican dishes and cater equally to both the American and Mexican tastes.

 In 2003 he opened El Rey, with a focus on more traditional Mexican food. The Spanish-language CDs and movies for sale at the restaurant also demonstrate that he’s trying to better serve Charlottesville’s 3 percent-and-growing Hispanic population.

 Last fall he gave them an even bigger space to call their own when he expanded El Rey, more than doubling the restaurant’s space. Hit it on any Saturday night and find its booths, pool tables and spacious dance floor hosting more than 300 people shaking it to tasty Latin rhythms.

 Most of Padilla’s dance crowd is Hispanic, but white folks come out too, especially
for Friday night Latin dance lessons. “Americans like that,” Padilla says.—E.R.

 

MR. FRIDAY NIGHT
Ted Norris

The weekend has kicked off at Zocalo, and Ted Norris is a busy man. The well-dressed, scrubbed-clean crowd of 20-, 30- and 40somethings stands three or four deep around the gleaming counter of the Downtown Mall’s of-the-moment restaurant, and everybody wants Norris’ attention. In between making up mojitos and assorted other potent potables, he hands out the drinks, each with a complimentary smile.

 Norris has been bartending for nearly a decade, first in his hometown of Dayton, Ohio, and then here, where he moved with his wife in 1999. Locally he’s kept the good times rolling at the former Boudreau’s (now Wolfie’s), Michael’s Bistro and Zocalo, where he’s worked since it opened late
last year.

 “I love bartending. I’m a night person. I love meeting people, and if I go to a party I’m always the one behind the bar. I like the action,” he explains of his success. Bar patrons apparently love him back: He took home the title of Best Bartender at this year’s Bartender’s Ball in February.

 His secret is simple: “You have to be a friendly person; personality has a lot to do with it…. And you have to be able to move,” he says on a recent, much slower Wednesday night, checking around the bar to make sure everyone’s happy. “Anyone can make drinks. Making drinks isn’t enough.”—E.R.

 

THE INSIDER
Bob Gibson

Even highly educated people like those of us who live in Charlottesville need a capable interpreter to decipher the political squabbling and legislative gibberish occurring in Richmond’s halls of power. Fortunately for us, we’ve got Bob Gibson to tell us what it all means.

 Gibson, who has reported and edited for The Daily Progress since 1976, is a scribe of the old-school variety, asking tough questions and putting in the hours to get the scoop. His political reporting easily trumps formulaic stories by less seasoned reporters, and has enabled the Progress to hold its own against the Richmond Times-Dispatch and The Washington Post in covering this year’s 115-day budget standoff in the General Assembly.

 

 Gibson’s savvy was on display during Gov. Mark Warner’s recent huddle with reporters at the Mudhouse. When Warner was unsure about a bill’s fine print or a funding number, he turned to Gibson for the skinny.

 So why hasn’t Gibson, like many former local reporters, left town for a bigger media market?

 “We just decided this would be a good place to raise our daughters,” Gibson says of the choice he made with his wife of 22 years, Sarah McConnell. Gibson and McConnell, the host of the WMRA radio show, “With Good Reason,” have three daughters.

 Of his body of work for the DP, Gibson says he’s most proud of a weeklong investigative series on the “racial variations in sentencing” by local courts. Gibson says the series, which ran in ’92, was influential in the creation of the Charlottesville/Albemarle Public Defenders Office, which represents lower-income people in criminal cases.—P.F.

 

MR. BULLDOZER
Wendell Wood

Plenty of people love to hate Wendell Wood, but the developer needn’t worry—most of his detractors probably shop at the stores he builds, anyway.

 It’s the unique places in Charlottesville and Albemarle that earned the region its recent ranking as America’s best place to live—the Downtown Mall, the UVA campus, Albemarle’s rolling hills—but what good are locally-owned boutiques and a bunch of grass and trees when you want to buy a car battery, light bulbs and tennis shoes all in one stop?

 Wood is happy to oblige. He’s one of Albemarle’s largest landowners, and his company, United Land Corporation, built the Wal-Mart, Lowe’s and Sam’s Club stores on Route 29N, where, it should be noted, the titanic parking lots are never empty. But even those giant “big boxes” will seem small compared to Wood’s current project, the 165-acre Hollymead Town Center under construction north of the Rivanna River that will house—hallelujah!—a Target.

 Wood’s detractors claim his projects are rapidly turning Albemarle into Anytown, U.S.A. Wood correctly responds that, hey, people want to shop in big stores. And some, like Tim Hulbert, who directs the regional Chamber of Commerce, reckon that the furor will die down once the backhoes get off the site and the Michael Graves teakettles move in. Wood and the other investors in Hollymead Town Center “have responded to specific requests from the community regarding town center and neighborhood model concepts in the County’s growth areas,” Hulbert says. “It’s certainly a natural evolution for the County. It’s tough to look at now, but there will be a time when the omelet will be made and the eggs won’t look so scrambled.”—J.B.

 

THE OLD GUARD
The McGuffey Artists

Spotlighting BozArt Gallery and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, American Style magazine placed our city on its list of “10 Places to Watch” for up-and-coming art scenes on the national stage. But before Kluge or Ruhe or Boz, there was, and still is, the McGuffey Art Center, undisputed godfather of Charlottesville’s visual arts and cultural life.

 Established in 1975 as the result of a citizens’ committee set up by the City to remake the former McGuffey Elementary School, the Art Center stands as the City’s first concerted effort to promote the arts as a civic enterprise. With 23 studios, three galleries and 40-odd artist members specializing in everything from book arts to painting to industrial design to dance to glass blowing, McGuffey rightly declares itself the “largest displaying space in Charlottesville” (until recently it housed Second Street Gallery, too). And on the first Friday of every month, it plays host to hundreds of curiosity-seekers there to eye the new exhibits, drink warm wine from tiny cups and do what all communities do best: dish.

 There’s an important educational component, too: McGuffey’ s studios are open to public tours and more informal drop-ins some 17 hours per week, putting the artists front and center in this growing City’s struggle to understand how the artistic life and the public life can intersect. As Rosamond Casey, president of the cooperative McGuffey Art Association puts it, “McGuffey is a lot of different things but I think it is primarily an educational institution…we do a tremendous amount to bring people into the building and to extend ourselves outside of the building and into the community.”

 McGuffey found itself caught in the hail of political posturing during the months leading up to passage of the latest municipal budget and the Council campaign that followed. Some criticized the artists for stepping outside the box to make a pointed political statement about their value to Charlottesville at large, but what else would you expect from a group of artists who for decades have been encouraged to balance on the edge between culture and community?—N.B

 

.THE ENFORCER
Nancy Eismann

Remember the time unruly teenagers knocked over your Caesar salad while you dined on the Mall one spring evening? No? You probably have Officer Nancy Eismann of the Charlottesville Police Department to thank for avoiding that experience.

 Eismann, the ubiquitous bike patrol cop who works the Downtown Mall and City Council meetings, is an exceptionally graceful keeper of the peace. If Mall urchins get out of line, Eismann calms them in a manner that makes everyone happy. Never disrespectful or overly authoritarian, Eismann manages problems by doing a great deal of listening.

 “I think all officers have to have a touch of psychology in their background,” Eismann says. “I just like to treat people the way I want to be treated.”

 August will mark Eismann’s 23rd anniversary with the Charlottesville Police Department. Eismann, a native of Massachusetts, moved to Charlottesville after a visit in which she says she “fell in love with the area.”

 Eismann hasn’t always been on the Mall, having driven squad cars and police vans during her years on the force. She was assigned to the Mall patrol in February 2003, and now works afternoons and evenings, Monday through Friday, enjoying, she says, the highly visible beat.

 After mingling with Charlottesville’s Mall strollers for so many hours, Eismann knows quite a few locals. Many of them carry one of Eismann’s business cards, the backs of which are adorned with a photo of her posing by a squad car with Homer, a hefty potbelly pig who is one of her many pets.—P.F.

 

THE BRAND NAME
Patricia Kluge

Here in Charlottesville, we’ve grown accustomed to conspicuously consuming at gas stations that serve latté and Brie instead of coffee and beef jerky sticks. But Patricia Kluge, the master of national publicity and self-promotion, has taken this concept a step further. There is no other way to say it: With Fuel, the enterprising former Mrs. John Kluge (now Mrs. Bob Moses) has made her mark as a gourmet gas station extremist. The futuristic purple fueling station/take-out sandwich joint/upscale bistro at the corner of Market and Ninth streets combines cutting-edge design by Madison Spencer Architects with you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me prices. Somehow the whole thing repels and attracts our curiosity at the same time.

 Naturally, Fuel is amply stocked with Kluge Estate wines, her earlier foray into the culinary marketplace from her Albemarle home and vineyards south of Ash Lawn-Highland. And amazingly, considering Virginia’s relatively low ranking among wine-growing regions, Kluge has managed to snag plenty of national press for her product, blessing Charlottesville along the way.

 But her dogged pursuit of logo-level recognition is no embarrassment to Kluge, as it might be to others of a certain class. On the contrary, it’s part of her grand scheme to join the pantheon of brand superstars (even if her claim to the Kluge surname is—how to put this?—dated). “When you are building a business and expect to have certain standards and certain style, you have to focus not only on the product but on the brand,” she told C-VILLE. “Quality, style, heritage, place—this is what the Kluge brand represents. The customer will recognize the brand. You think of great brands—Coke, Louis Vuitton—people don’t think of just drinks or luggage.”

 Maybe it sounds grandiose, but Kluge has plans to pepper the national landscape with Fuels—which, of course, will convey Kluge Estate products, too. Given her knack for getting her name in society rags like W and gossip columns like The Washington Post’s “Reliable Source,” it might not be so far-fetched to think that one day people will say, “Charlottesville? Isn’t that where Patricia Kluge got her start?”—N.B.

 

THE HEALTH NUTS
Mark and Cynthia Lorenzoni

In 1982, Mark and Cynthia Lorenzoni decided to open a small fitness store on Elliewood Avenue. Only a few blocks from UVA’s fraternity row (a symbol of ’80s-era decadence if ever one was) the Lorenzonis, barely out of college themselves, must have looked like missionaries of the mile, preachers of pronation, heartily advocating health to an audience of heathens.

 On the other hand, the speed with which the Lorenzonis Ragged Mountain Running Shop grew up suggests the interest was there from the start. Would the streets of Charlottesville still be filled with as many runners on a warm spring day if the Lorenzonis had set up shop elsewhere? Maybe so. But would the City’s running community be what it is, and would Charlottesville be USA Today’s “most energetic” American city? Most certainly not.

 Like any good business people, the Lorenzonis want to make customers for life. What they’re selling isn’t just shoes, but an appreciation for fitness. Indeed, they host running/walking clinics and are almost permanent fixtures at every one of the dozens of events sponsored by the Charlottesville Track Club. Not only that, their second-floor sneaker shop is like a clubhouse for local athletes—be they super-intense ultramarathoners or 9-miles-a-week joggers. (And that’s not even taking Mark’s regular newspaper and radio spots into account). Fitness is like buying a car, says Mark Lorenzoni—if you know to keep the oil changed and to maintain it properly, it will run for a long time.

 “In running,” he says, “we think, with more education…people go longer.” Judging from the fact that a great many
of the 1,643 participants in the recent Charlottesville Ten-Miler were over 40, it’s obviously working.—B.S.

 

THE DREAMERS
Bushman Dreyfus Architects

There are a lot of bricks in Charlottesville. Let’s just call it the “Jeffersonian tradition” of Charlottesville’s cityscape. But what would Thomas Jefferson, the great experimenter, think if his hometown kept designing the same building over and over, for 200 years?

 Bushman Dreyfus Architects are dragging Charlottesville—sometimes kicking and screaming—into the realms of modern architecture. As head architects for the City Center for Contemporary Arts building on Water Street (which just picked up a City award for best new construction) and associate architects for the Paramount Theatre, they’re helping remake the Mall into a vibrant, modern urban center that proves tradition can co-exist with contemporary design—and attract the tourist wallet, to boot.

 It has been Bushman Dreyfus’s design for the C3A building, as it’s known, with its inventive use of materials like concrete and steel, that has really gotten local tongues a-wagging. In the words of Jeff Bushman, the building “is forward thinking …and it’s led people to question the standard kit of parts that we build with Downtown.” We concur with his assessment that such inventiveness “can only be a good thing.” After all, who wants to always be glancing backward to find out where we’re located?—N.B.

 

THE LOCAL HEROES
Dave Matthews Band

If philanthropy were merely a promotional strategy for the Dave Matthews Band, it would be easy for them to simply throw some money at the Yanomami tribes in the South American rain forests, issue a press release and be done with it. But that’s never been the band’s style. DMB has given millions to local charities that are as valuable as they are unglamorous, and much of the band’s generosity happens behind the scenes.

 Through its Bama Works Foundation, the band has given 172 grants to organizations in Central Virginia since 1998—and the list is growing. In March, the rockers appeared as honored guests at the opening of the Music Resource Center space in the former Mt. Zion Baptist Church on Ridge Street, one of two organizations for which they staged a September concert fundraiser in New York’s Central Park.

 High-profile causes like the MRC are only the tip of DMB’s charity iceberg. According to John Redick, who manages the band’s local charity through the Charlottesville-Albemarle Community Foundation, they’ve donated $2,170,286 since establishing the tie. It’s gone to causes like disadvantaged youth, the environment, the arts and more.

 The band might be too huge to liven local stages anymore, but that clearly doesn’t mean they’ve lost their interest in fixing some of Charlottesville’s busted stuff.—B.S.

 

THE EDGE
John Lancaster and Laurel Hausler

Critics may call it tasteless, kitschy, or just plain bad, but the art world no longer questions the validity of Self-Taught, Outsider and Southern Folk art as belonging to a greater movement. And to John Lancaster and Laurel Hausler, founders of Nature Visionary Art, there’s a perfectly good reason for that.

 “John says it’s because it’s the most exciting art there is,” says Hausler.

 In the six years Lancaster has been operating Nature, first behind the Jefferson Theater as a shared venture with artists/musicians David Sickmen and Eli Simon, and more recently with Hausler in a new nearby gallery, Charlottesville’s folk art scene has become synonymous with excitement. Nature is built on the premise that art training is less important than soul, an idea that appeals to younger artists as well as fans seeking work outside art’s conventional boundaries.

 “Nature is good because it provides a venue for artists that might have been shut out of other galleries,” says Hausler.

 The couple, planning to be married in September, may no longer be the misfits they once were. With the launch last year of Nature Visionary Art at 110 Fourth St. NE, they’ve fulfilled their vision. The Downtown gallery’s exhibitions of well known Southern Folk artists Howard Finster, Jimmy Lee Sudduth and Mose Tolliver rival not only established local venues, but also major museums and galleries in Washington, D.C., and beyond.—B.S.

 

THE THINKER
Philip Zelikow

UVA employs many professors who are world famous in their fields. But these intellectual heavy hitters often remain anonymous to many City residents.

 One such UVA luminary is history professor Philip Zelikow. If his name doesn’t ring a bell, the institutions he heads probably do. In addition to directing the Miller Center of Public Affairs, Zelikow is the executive director of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States—the so-called 9/11 Commission.

 Ten bipartisan commissioners, including Thomas H. Kean and Bob Kerrey, control the 9/11 Commission. But Zelikow’s team of 80 staff members is doing the heavy lifting of the investigation, and has produced reports cataloging intelligence failures, and, as The New York Times reported, drafted the questions for President Bush and Vice-President Cheney’s closed session interview.

 Zelikow’s work hasn’t gone unnoticed, however. His chummy relationship with the Bush Administration—he co-authored a book with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and worked on Bush’s 2000 transition team—has led critics to call for his resignation. But the Commission’s aggressive reports have softened these complaints.

 When Zelikow isn’t analyzing terrorism, he and his staff at the Miller Center are busy educating Charlottesville about what’s going on in the world. The Center, which Zelikow has headed for five years, regularly brings a bonanza of notable speakers to town—including recent visits by legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh and former WMD hunter David Kay—that would make any Washington think tank jealous.—P.F.

 

THE MONEY
Mark Giles

The new restaurants, office buildings, hotels and homes that continue to bloom around Charlottesville and Albemarle County often start with loans. And though big national banks are required by law to invest in the community, many entrepreneurs seek out the hands-on service of independent, locally owned banks, and chief among them is Virginia National Bank.

 Mark Giles is one of a group of entrepreneurs who launched VNB in 1998. The bank immediately stepped into the role of primary community bank, which had recently been vacated by Jefferson National Bank, which sold to Wachovia that year.

 Under Giles’ leadership as president and CEO, VNB has grown into a major player on the local banking scene. The bank’s assets increased by more than 25 percent in 2003, standing at $214 million at the end of the year. Also during 2003, VNB increased its loan volume to small consumers by 79 percent and bankrolled $20 million in local real estate construction.

 Before helping to start VNB in 1998, Giles headed two banks in Houston and also worked as a lawyer for a Houston firm. Though he’s a Texas transplant, Giles also has local roots, having graduated from UVA in 1977. He earned a J.D. from the UVA School of Law a few years later.

 Though VNB had a strong 12 months, the recent sale of Guaranty Bank to a large banking company leaves VNB as one of only two remaining small fish in the Charlottesville pond. The question for Giles is whether he can keep earnings headed up while competing with Wachovia, SunTrust and other swelling bank behemoths.—P.F.

Q: Ace: When I go to Wal-Mart I try to park as close as possible, as would any good American. But I am kept from doing so due to the number of reserved spaces. For the handicapped and pregnant women, I understand. Wal-Mart, however, also reserves parking spaces for the police. Oh, Ace of all Aces, tell me: When did the cops become a demographic in need of special privileges?—Lay Z. Boyd

A: Poor Boyd, Ace understands how frustrating it can be to carry that new wide screen TV or oversized box of Froot Loops an extra 20 feet to the car. The wilds of our national parking lots have become the Outback of America and you don’t want to get caught out there on your own for too long without some soda and chips for sustenance.

 But sarcasm aside, our local Wal-Mart and the police that protect it do have a special relationship mapped out. It doesn’t identify with any popular varieties such as “You Scratch My Back and I’ll Scratch Yours,” “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” or “A Family Affair.” In fact, according to the Albemarle County Police (under whose jurisdiction Wal-Mart falls), this case of cahoots is so special that the County cops did not even know it existed. A befuddled County officer, Corporal Jim Larkin, explained the relationship this way: “We don’t have any mandate [over] what people do with their parking spots.”

 However, when pressed on the subject, Larkin exercised his powers of logic saying, “If I remember history, we’ve had a number of officers park in the fire lane when addressing shoplifting calls,” extrapolating that the reserved spaces are so designated for those times when criminals get caught after deciding that everyday low prices aren’t low enough.

 To confirm Larkin’s logic, Ace phoned Wal-Mart and spoke with manager Shannon Moon. His first response to the question of the reserved parking spaces was similar to Larkin’s: “Yeah…um…there’s probably not anybody in the store who could tell you. I don’t know how long it’s been like that.”

 Ever persistent, Ace called back the following day to find that Moon had done some investigation on his own and had spoken to a former manager. Both men agreed that, as Moon said, “It’s because of convenience for [the police] when they come—so they don’t have to block any fire lanes. [It] gets them as close to the front [of the store] as possible. I don’t think there’s a reason other than courtesy.”

 So Boyd, as you can see, the reason for your long trek to the fourth parking space in from the storefront is simple. It may not be a case of “special privileges” so much as a simple case of courtesy. With smiley faces bouncing across their advertisements, and greeting committees on hand for every arrival and departure through store doors, “courtesy” is something Wal-Mart likes to think it knows a little something about.