Tuesday, July 20
Red tape for Capshaw
County planners today voted on early language for the Fifth Street/Avon Street development, a 90-acre Coran Capshaw venture just beyond the city’s southern border. Planners rejected a request from Capshaw’s team to designate the space a “regional service” area, voting 5-2 for language that instead stresses community- and neighborhood-based mixed-use development. The rejected designation would have allowed larger-scale commercial development. A key discussion point among planners was the size limit for a big box. During the meeting, Susan Thomas, a county staffer, stressed that the recommended max of 130,000 square feet for a big box is roughly the same size as the Wal-Mart on 29N.
Wednesday, July 21
Empty seats at Clark
When today’s deadline arrived, the families of 38 Clark Elementary School students had applied to send their children to other city schools. Two of the students could not be placed in their first choice transfer school and will instead remain at Clark, their back-up choice, says school administrator Robert Thompson. Clark students were given the option to attend another school as a result of the school’s inability to meet standards set by the federal No Child Left Behind policy. The transfer requests represent 12 percent of Clark’s student body of about 320, a lower rate than the national school choice average of 15 to 20 percent.
Thursday, July 22
Westside story
The Daily Progress today printed mug shots of nine local black men above its lead story on a federal drug trial. The men have been charged with crimes relating to a drug ring called “The Westside Crew” reports Liesel Nowak in the story. Beginning in the mid-’90s, the gang allegedly dealt drugs and committed violence in and around the 10th and Page and Westhaven neighborhoods. According to Channel 29, the nine men were arrested last Thursday and Friday. Two other men were charged with related crimes, but remain at large.
Friday, July 23
Less civil in Richmond? No way!
The UVA Center for Politics, Larry Sabato’s shop, today hosted a conference onthe recent history of the General Assembly. The topic of camaraderie, or lack thereof, was on the agenda at the conference, which was held at the Richmond Marriott. Two veteran lawmakers, Sen. John Chichester and Del. Vincent Callahan Jr., said during a panel discussion that increasing partisan tension has squashed much of the mingling between Democrats and Republicans, reports Bob Gibson of The Daily Progress. But in the spirit of the recent session where lawmakers couldn’t agree on much of anything, House Speaker William Howell begged to differ, claiming that he had not seen a decline in camaraderie in recent years.
Saturday, July 24
Lobbyists pick up the tab
State lawmakers can’t blame testy relations on lobbyists, who are doing all they can to keep delegates and senators happy. According to a report in today’s Richmond Times-Dispatch, lobbying expenses during this year’s session topped $13.6 million, easily shattering the previous spending record of $12 million in 2001. Lawmakers dined at swanky Richmond restaurants, traveled to pro and college football games and went on hunting trips, all on lobbyists’ tabs. The Times-Dispatch reports that Dominion Resources was the big spender this year, with the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association running second.
Sunday, July 25
Defense cash coming to town
The $416.2 billion defense bill for FY 2005 passed Thursday by the Senate and House, includes $6.8 million for Sperry Marine/Northrup Grumman, WINA today reports. The money is for an integrated system for the bridges of Navy ships. More federal defense funding was earmarked for UVA researchers to help find a way to bring intravenous fluids to wounded military personnel. The massive funding bill has been sent to President Bush for his signature.
Monday, July 26
Locals hit Beantown
Among the primetime speechifying at the Democratic National Convention, which kicks off today in Boston, is a prominent Thursday night slot for Virginia Gov. Mark Warner. In writing about the centrist hotshot Democrat, The Washington Post speculates that Warner could receive a Cabinet position or an ambassador gig if Kerry wins the election. Warner has been joined for the hoopla in Boston by a team of delegates that includes Lloyd Snook, Charlottesville party chairman, and Albemarle Democratic Chairwoman Charlotte Dammann. Among the hordes of journalists attending the events in Boston is local political maven and website editor George Loper, who is toting his digital camera and C-VILLE Weekly press credentials.
Bloated budget blues
O’Connell predicts belt-tightening
The charts told a dire story. Beginning in 2005, the city’s projected expenses will eclipse projected revenues, putting city government in the red by $7 million by 2010.
“The bottom line,” Charlottesville City Manager Gary O’Connell intoned to City Council on Monday, July 19, “is that we project a future financial gap.” There is, however, some fine print—O’Connell based his forecast on the pessimistic assumption that Charlottesville’s real estate assessments would rise by only 5 percent annually. Real estate assessments have grown by more than 10 percent annually during the past three years. Thanks to that real estate boom the City has weathered increased demand for social services, even as the state has slashed its budgets. But the assessment gravy train has to stop somewhere, O’Connell warned. “We can’t continue to rely on double-digit real estate assessment increases and tax and fee increases to balance the annual budget,” O’Connell said. “We need more balance in our revenues.” The City’s budget has increased 83 percent in the past 10 years, largely driven by increased public demand and decreased state support for police, courts, jails and social services—what Councilor Kevin Lynch called “the costs of poverty.” “It’s a function of our position in Central Virginia as the affordable housing and
service provider of choice,” said Lynch. “We have a really big stake in trying to get the next generation of Charlottesville out of poverty.” A laudable goal, but not exactly a business plan. The more plausible—and more controversial—strategy is cutting the budget. “Everything is on the table,” O’Connell says. While O’Connell’s forecast seems bleak, money problems are nothing new for City Council. In the early ’90s, doom-and-gloom charts spurred a failed movement to revert Charlottesville to town status. Since then, Council has tried to raise its tax base by coaxing more middle-class residents into the city.
A desire named streetcar
Now that former Mayor Maurice Cox is off Council, he’s found a hobby to keep him busy—bringing streetcars to W. Main Street.
Last year, Cox organized a “transportation summit,” inviting urban design experts to diagnose Charlottesville’s mounting traffic congestion. Some suggested that as new apartments spring up between UVA and Downtown, a streetcar could help new W. Main Street residents get around the city without a car.
“I’m absolutely convinced that a streetcar is the next big thing,” says Cox, who contacted C-VILLE about this story.
He figured that a streetcar wouldn’t fly without a massive education campaign—but now that Cox is off Council, he can’t drum up public money for studies. So he turned to the nonprofit sector. Cox rallied the local Alliance for Community Choice in Transportation (ACCT) to apply for grant money to rally public support fora streetcar.
In April, ACCT received about $100,000 from the Blue Moon Fund, a local offshoot of what used to be the W. Alton Jones Foundation. The two-year grant will be used to bring Fairfax-based transportation consultant Roger Millar to Charlottesville. Millar, a 1982 UVA grad, developed Portland, Oregon’s $57 million, state-of-the-art streetcar system in the mid-’90s.
Millar told C-VILLE he’ll do “a very conceptual kind of feasibility screening” when he visits Charlottesville August 2 to 6. “If something like the Portland streetcar system were to happen in Charlottesville, would it work?”
ACCT president Susan Pleiss says they will also use the grant to organize a “friends of West Main” group, a coalition of yet-to-be-named UVA bigwigs and business owners, who have a stake in the road’s redevelopment and sway with City Council. The Blue Moon grant will also pay for public meetings, and, in October, ACCT will send about 20 city and UVA officials to Portland, and Tacoma, Washington, the only two U.S. cities with modern streetcars.
Millar says the Portland streetcar happened because it had supporters with ties in both business and politics. Cox hopes to play such a cheerleading role in Charlottesville.
“We’re hoping to have hundreds, if not thousands of citizens well-versed and knowledgeable about streetcars,” says Cox. “They’ll give the elected officials the mandate to proceed.”
UVA student housing developer Rick Jones says traffic on West Main is “pretty awful right now, and getting worse.” He wonders how a streetcar would be different from the current free trolley, but Jones says he could support a streetcar if the City showed how it would help move people and ease congestion. “It sure doesn’t look like they’re going to build any roads,” he says.
We can’t make this stuff up: On Tuesday, July 20, Council met in a worksession to further one of David Brown’s first mayoral priorities—restoring civility to the dais. The meeting ended with a rancorous exchange between Councilors Blake Caravati and Rob Schilling. Caravati left early, but not,he insists, in a huff. “My wife demanded my presence,” Caravati explains.—John Borgmeyer
Station to station
Moving our garbage to Amelia County
The average person tosses about 4.4 pounds of garbage per day, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. With 1,500 new residents moving here annually, we could have an extra 2.5 million pounds of trash to contend with each year.
But with the 2001 closing of the landfill in Ivy, there are no active landfills in Albemarle or Charlottesville. Local trash is currently being shipped elsewhere, much of it being hauled by tractor-trailers to a landfill 50 miles away in Amelia County.
Charlottesville pays Waste Management, the nation’s largest waste company, to collect its curbside trash. Together with recycling, which is collected by BFI, Charlottesville pays $1.27 million each year for trash hauling.
The Rivanna Solid Waste Authority (RSWA), a nonprofit agency partially funded by the city and county, handles the rest of the area’s trash and recycling. RSWA owns a waste transfer site in Ivy and contracts for the use of a second, busier transfer station near Zion Crossroads in Fluvanna, about 18 miles west of Charlottesville. At the transfer stations, city and county garbage is compacted, loaded into 45-foot long trailers and then shipped off to landfills.
Thomas Frederick, RSWA’s recently hired executive director, says RSWA has handled a “generally increasing” amount of trash during the past three years. The bulk of the increase is being felt at the Ivy facility, where RSWA is expected to receive and compact 31,300 tons of waste in the year prior to July 1—a 32 percent jump from the previous year. “
There are a number of days that we handle more waste than we were originally intended to handle,” Frederick says of the Ivy transfer station, which is a stone’s throw from the former Ivy landfill. However, he says that although the facility occasionally gets more than the 150 tons per day for which it was designed, he says it could deal with spikes of up to 300 tons of trash in a day. On a recent muggy morning at the Ivy transfer station, a giant green Waste Management trash truck backs toward the compactor area. The stench emanating from the truck, though not overpowering, has a pungent, almost sweet smell, like rotting fruit. The truck lifts the front end of its trash compartment and dumps its load onto a conveyor belt at the bottom of a large metal receptacle. With some prodding from a small Bobcat bulldozer, the white trash bags and other goo-laden items then travel uphill on the conveyor belt and are dropped into the compactor, where they are compressed for loading into a trailer.
Mark Brownlee, manager of RSWA’s Ivy operations, says large trash trucks like the one doing its business at the transfer station right then hold 10 to 15 tons of trash. Eight to 15 trash trucks unload at the Ivy yard everyday, Brownlee says.
RSWA weighs each truck traveling to and from the transfer stations, charging $61 per ton of waste dumped at Ivy and $57 per ton at Zion Crossroads. But despite having raised these prices in recent years, RSWA will need about $1.9 million from Albemarle and Charlottesville to make ends meet in FY 2005. “
It’s a lot more labor intensive than it was to bury it,” Brownlee says of compacting and shipping local trash.
When RSWA was still burying trash at Ivy, the organization was indeed self-sufficient. But, with serious contamination problems at the former landfill—a multimillion-dollar clean up is underway—it seems unlikely that the Ivy landfill will accept trash again anytime soon. Prospects for a new landfill among Albemarle’s pricey real estate seem highly unlikely as well. “
There are a tremendous amount of issues that go into where landfills are sited,” Frederick says. “Public acceptance is much more difficult than it was 30 years ago.”—Paul Fain