Tuesday, September 7
Ballot blues for Ralph
The Virginia Board of Elections today gave Ralph Nader the official thumbs down in the independent candidate’s quest to be on the state’s presidential ballot this November, ending weeks of partisan hand-wringing. Both election officials and a Washington Post review deemed that Nader’s troops broke the rules in scoring the needed 10,000 signatures to get their man on the ballot.
Wednesday, September 8
Road warriors
The red lights and traffic on U.S. 29 aggravate people from Warrenton to Danville. Today, about 60 bigwigs from up and down the U.S. 29 corridor came to Charlottesville to talk about improvingthe road at a “Route 29 Summit.” Reportedly, much of the discussion, and the disagreements, focused on the hated stretch of the road around Charlottesville, and proposals included bypasses on either side of the city and a various gas taxes to pay for construction.
Thursday, September 9
Nice day for a swim?
Members of local rescue squads were seen scanning the Rivanna River around noon today, looking for a man who reportedly jumped into the swollen, fast-moving river somewhere near the Free Bridge. However, City spokesperson Maurice Jones says the initial report is that witnesses spotted the man getting out of the river near Riverview Park, getting into his car and driving off.
Friday, September 10
Lawyer angry over man’s treatment
Kerry Cook, a Fluvanna County man who was shot by police during a violent encounter at Friendship Court on August 21, has emerged from a coma and currently is listed in fair condition at UVA Medical Center. Civil rights attorney Debbie Wyatt, who is representing Cook, tells C-VILLE she is upset with Charlottesville police and the City Commonwealth Attorney’s office for, as she claims, officers attempting to interview her client at the hospital despite her request that he be left alone until he is healthier. Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman says he can’t comment on his office’s actions regarding the incident until a “comprehensive and impartial investigation is completed.” Wyatt says her client is “vulnerable” and that “he is in fear that his life is in danger.” Cook is in the custody of the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, and, according to Wyatt, was to be discharged and taken to the jailsite today. Wyatt, who saw Cook on Wednesday, says his injuries, which include a stomach wound she describes as “pretty huge,” are too serious for him to be taken to the jail. She says Cook was granted a reprieve from the hospital discharge because he has developed a fever in recent days.
Saturday, September 11
Bradshaw shines for Marshall
Though the UVA football team hardly needed extra help in their 56-24 stomping of UNC, one of their former recruits also had a big game at an even bigger venue today. Ahmad Bradshaw, a freshman from Bluefield, Virginia, was tossed off the UVA football team shortly after a booze-related arrest near the Rotunda. Today, he had a team-leading 81 rushing yards for unranked Marshall University in a barnburner against football powerhouse Ohio State University. Playing in front of 104,622 fans in Columbus, Ohio, OSU eked out a last-second win with a 55-yard field goal.
Sunday, September 12
Short-changed no more?
The State of Virginia pays about $9,700 for each in-state student attending UVA. But the University of North Carolina and the University of Michigan, two comparable top-flight state schools, get $22,484 and $19,213 from their respective home states, according to The Virginian-Pilot. In response to Virginia’s funding shortcomings, The Daily Progress’ Bob Gibson today reports that UVA, Virginia Tech and The College of William & Mary have begun a full court press for more fiscal freedom through a charter system.
Monday, September 13
No honeymoon for superintendent
A major spat may be brewing over the direction in which Dr. Scottie Griffin, the new Charlottesville superintendent, and the School Board is steering city schools. During the weekend and this morning, parents and teachers circulated lengthy e-mails that denounce Griffin’s initiatives and management style and call for complaints to be aired at this Thursday’s school board meeting. “Morale among teachers and school administrators is rock bottom. We will not stand aside idly while they polish their resumés,” write parents Jenny and Karl Ackerman in one of the much-posted e-mails. Among the “upheaval and wholesale restructuring” by Griffin and the School Board that rankle the Ackermans are the removal of Deputy Superintendent Arletta Dimberg, a “gag order” on teachers, the discarding of a reading program (PALs), and a supposed singular focus on the SOL standardized test scores. At press time, School Board member Julie Gronlund responded to the charges via e-mail, defending Griffin’s "proven ability as a collaborative leader."
—Written by Paul Fain from local news sources and staff reports
Is that a rocket in your pocket?
Pocketbike rider happy to see new rules
When Ben Purdy was a sophomore at Charlottesville High School, he went “nuts” over a neighbor’s new Honda Interceptor motorcycle. When the rest of his classmates were getting their first cars—or, as Purdy calls them, “coffins”—he got a Honda VTR 250.
“If you haven’t ridden a bike yet, you haven’t lived, man.” Purdy says. “It’s like riding a horse. Humans were meant to be on top of something and just riding it.”
Purdy’s latest obsession, however, seems at odds with his enthusiasm for straddling unbridled horsepower. He was one of the first people in Charlottesville to own a “pocketbike,” a super-tiny motorcycle a mere three feet long and 20 inches high. It looks like a clown’s bike, powered by the same kind of engine that runs a weed whacker.
About six months ago, a friend of Purdy’s discovered the bikes for sale on the Internet for $400 each. He and his friends bought five, tinkering with them to boost their speed. They raced the pocketbikes in local parking lots, hitting top speeds of about 35 miles per hour. Since then, the bikes have appeared at several local retailers.
Purdy’s parking lot race sessions have caught the attention of passers-by—including the police.
“We were riding at McIntire Park, and the cops asked us to quit scaring the children,” says Purdy. “Apparently, we were riding too close to the playground. I died laughing, though, because they sent three cars to talk to us.”
Because pocketbikes are equipped with engines that displace less than 50 cubic centimeters, and because their top speed is less than 30 mph—in their unmodified form—they are classified as mopeds by Virginia law and are therefore street legal. That means riders do not have to weara helmet nor obtain a special license, and the machines do not need headlights or state tags.
That will change soon, however. On Tuesday, September 7, Charlottesville City Council gave tentative approval to an ordinance requiring moped riders to wear helmets, and to obtain a license from the City Treasurer. There will be a second vote on the ordinance at Council’s next meeting, on September 27.
While pocketbikes will fall under the law, it appears to be aimed primarily at the scooters proliferating around the city. According to City documents, police have received numerous complaints about noise from the vehicles—exacerbated by owners who remove the muffler to gain horsepower—as well as about reckless driving.
Purdy applauds more safety regulations. Scooters, he said, have become hazardous. “I saw some guy carrying his baby sister on one the other day,” says Purdy. “He was going full throttle, and his front wheel was going like this,” he says, making a wobbly motion with his hand.
“Safety is good,” says Purdy, offering this advice to any motorcycle riders: “Always be scared on it. When you lose that, you’re about to die.”
Beach bitchin’
This summer, Virginia Beach sent nasty letters to City Police Chief Tim Longo, complaining that Charlottesville cops are unfairly ticketing Virginia Beach residents. On Tuesday, City Council basically told the coastal crybabies to take a long walk off one of those short piers.
In 2003, Virginia Beach stopped issuing local car decals, which indicate that people have paid their local property taxes. Around here, not having a decal earns you a ticket from Charlottesville’s men and women in blue.
People who get an unfair ticket can write or call the City Treasurer and have the fine dismissed. That’s apparently too much trouble for Virginia Beach’s commissioner of revenue and city attorney, who in April sent letters to Longo asking his department to simply stop ticketing stickerless car owners.
That ain’t gonna happen—the City’s decals sell for 25 bucks, and they help the City collect property taxes, says Deputy City Attorney Lisa Kelley. Longo says it would be unsafe for officers to tie up police radios checking out a car’s city of origin. For now, the City will stay status quo and hope Virginia Beach doesn’t try to sue.
“I’m not inclined to jump through hoops for Virginia Beach,” said Councilor Rob Schilling during the Council meeting.
Remembering Herman Key
Also on Tuesday, current and former members of the City Planning Commission asked Council to consider renaming a street or a building to honor Herman Key, who died in June at age 39.
They suggested renaming the 9th/10th streets connector for Key, a Fifeville resident who served on a wide variety of City boards and committees, most recently as Vice Chair of the Planning Commission.
Key also captained the Charlottesville Cardinals Wheelchair Basketball team; his fellow commissioners further suggested renaming the Downtown Recreation Center in his honor.
Council opted to schedule and advertise a public meeting in the Fifeville neighborhood to discuss how best to memorialize Key.—John Borgmeyer
Chain reaction
Supes give green light to two big boxes south of city
The tide was turning against Coran Capshaw’s proposed Fifth Street/ Avon Street development, which is slated for woodland between the two roads just south of the city’s borders and north of I-64. Project designer Frank Cox and Steve Blaine, who was representing the band manager and real estate magnate’s New Era Properties, watched helplessly as County Supervisors wrangled over preserving old-growth trees and limiting square footage for big boxes.
But then Lindsay Dorrier Jr., who chairs the Supes, reminded his colleagues of how Panorama Farms developer Jim Murray failed in his controversial proposal to bring Wal-Mart to the same spot back in 1999.
“I don’t want to have a repeat of that [failure],” Dorrier said. Earlier, during the September 8 meeting, Dorrier had stressed that the 90-acre Capshaw development would pull traffic off of 29N and create a necessary transportation link in the proffered connector road between Fifth and Avon streets.
A few minutes later, County Attorney Larry Davis deftly proposed compromise language, and a deal had been struck.
“We can live with that,” an assuredly relieved Blaine said of the new comprehensive plan amendment for the site, which was then unanimously approved.
The compromise means a Lowe’s and a Target or two similar big boxes are likely to be built at the site, which was given the green light for far more big box space than County planners had suggested. Though Capshaw’s reps were careful to say that no deals have been brokered with retailers, store prototypes for a large home-improvement store and a discount retailer were the basis of the requests by his team.
The Supes approved 300,000 square feet of big box space at the site, which would allow for the typical 170,000 square foot Lowe’s and 130,000 square foot Target (roughly the same size as the Wal-Mart on 29N). If these chains aren’t part of the mix as the development moves through rezoning, similar big box retailers such as Home Depot or Costco will likely get the nod.
“I think the site would easily accommodate two substantial big boxes,” said Frank Cox of the 50 developable acres among the wooded, hilly land. Besides big box chains, Cox and Blaine say a large grocery store, restaurants and a drug store will likely be part of the development.
Blaine told Supervisors before the public hearing, which drew zero speakers, that a Wal-Mart study had found that 62 percent of shoppers at the 29N Wal-Mart indicated that they would shop at a new store at this spot. Though Blaine mentioned the study only to tout the potential traffic benefits and repeatedly asserted that no tenants are booked for the site, his mention of Wal-Mart prompted The Daily Progress to speculate that the mega-retailer might open a second area store—raising the possibility of another ruckus like the Wal-Mart battle of 1999.
But in an interview with C-VILLE, Coran Capshaw puts to rest any Wal-Mart worries.
“There’s no intent to build a Wal-Mart,” Capshaw says. “There’s no secret there’s interest on their part. I’m going to look elsewhere, despite their interest.”
Capshaw says his latest development is bolstered by the “tremendous amount of growth” on the south and west sides of Charlottesville, much of which comes from projects in which he has a hand.
“I don’t think there is a better site in the community if we’re going to commit to another big box,” Supervisor Dennis Rooker said.
The Supes’ worries about the development came chiefly from Sally Thomas, who said big boxes could dominate what was to be a mixed-use development and that plans didn’t necessarily fit the “urban template” County planners have been pushing in recent years.
The plan for two new big boxes will likely draw heat as the project moves forward. Jeff Werner of the Piedmont Environmental Council, who attended the public hearing, cites figures from Albemarle and other sources that show greater Charlottesville already hefts 7 million square feet of retail space, with another 3 million square feet on the way. Werner says this works out to 80 square feet per person, more than double the average in the strip-mall nirvana of Northern Virginia.
“We need more retail like we need a hole in the head,” Werner says.—Paul Fain
This ’bud’s for you
Cavalier Daily hires its first off-Grounds ombudsman
If you want to get Jeremy Ashton all riled up, tell him that the Cavalier Daily is “just a student newspaper.”
“That makes me angrier than anything,” says Ashton, a 25-year-old graduate student at the University of North Carolina’s School of Journalism. “It’s difficult fighting that perception, though.”
Why would a Tarheel care what people think about UVA’s school paper? This fall, the Cavalier Daily hired Ashton to be the paper’s first non-alum ombudsman.
Ombudsmen serve as mediators between newspapers and their readers, fielding complaints and critiquing coverage. The Cavalier Daily has had an ombudsman for years, says editor-in-chief Chris Wilson. But that person has always been a former member of the paper’s staff.
“Usually, they’d be far enough removed so they wouldn’t have any overlap with current staff, but they’re still, in effect, an insider,” says Wilson. “We decided to try something different this year.”
Wilson sent queries to various graduate journalism programs. On Monday, September 6, Ashton’s first column appeared in the Cavalier Daily, which supports itself through advertising and has no faculty advisor.
“Each week in this column, I will tell you what the staff can do to improve,” Ashton wrote. “And I’ll tell you what they’re doing right.”
Ashton entered N.C. State as an engineering student, and graduated in 2002 with a degree in biochemistry. But after working at N.C. State’s student paper, The Technician, he took a job at a community paper near Charlotte. He’s now pursuing a master’s degree in medical journalism at UNC, and the Cav Daily kicks him $100 each week to critique the paper.
Time presents the biggest problem for college newspaper reporters, says Ashton, who says he worked 25 to 30 hours per week as a sports editor for The Technician in addition to being a full-time student. “If you’re going on the road to the game, then you’ve got to write the story and edit other stories, your weekend is shot,” says Ashton. “You’ve spent it all on the newspaper and done nothing for school.”
The pressure to write well on a tight deadline can easily lead to reporters cutting corners. Jayson Blair, the now-infamous New York Times reporter, admitted he made up stories when the pressure became too much to handle. As first reported in C-VILLE, The Cavalier Daily had its own brush with plagiarism last spring, when two reporters were fired for copying movie reviews off the Internet.
Being busy “doesn’t excuse sloppiness,” says Ashton, “but I know what the reporters are going through.”
So far, though, Ashton hasn’t had to deal with anything as egregious as plagiarism. In fact, he’s only received one e-mail from a UVA student, complaining about a Cavalier Daily reporter who quoted men in an article, but described them as “she’s.”
Wilson says Ashton has freedom to write whatever he wants in his ombudsman column. “We’re paying someone to criticize us,” says Wilson. “My greatest hope is that readers take advantage of that resource.”—John Borgmeyer
Sign me up
Locals registering to vote in droves
Spencer Gifts is a goofy chain store in Fashion Square Mall that counts lava lamps and “Chucky” dolls among its best sellers. This year, however, Spencer Gifts is also touting voter registration forms, as are 7-Eleven branches, doctors’ offices and other local businesses.
“It has been a very busy month,” says Jackie Harris, the General Registrar for Albemarle County since 1991, adding that she’s seen “more independent groups than ever before working on voter registration.”
Harris says 56,500 Albemarle residents were registered to vote by September, exceeding her projections for the November 2 election, which features the big Bush v. Kerry decision, as well as an active challenge by Democrat Al Weed for Virgil Goode Jr.’s Fifth District seat in Congress. Harris says she expects the county to have 1,000 more voters before October 4, the registration deadline.
“I half expect to see voter registration on the back of a cereal box,” Harris says.
Her counterpart for the City, Sheri Iachetta, has also been busy. Iachetta says her office registered 400 UVA students in just two days this month, forwarding the paperwork for out-of-town students to the appropriate localities.
A rancorous presidential election season clearly underscores the drive to sign up voters. And though local Democratic groups seem to have the most visible registration drives, both sides of the aisle are working to register voters locally. For example, an ambitious program spearheaded by UVA’s Center for Politics, which seeks to register 2004 voters before the election, is working with both Democratic and Republican student groups. Molly Clancy, a programs and research associate for the Center, says the program landed 1,000 new voters in just five days.
Harris says local businesses that are signing up voters have been careful to be nonpartisan in their efforts. Asked what’s behind the push, she cites an increasing “civic mindedness that everyone needs to vote.”—Paul Fain