Tuesday, October 26
A detestable act
Today The Daily Progress announced it would adopt a new advertising policy, after some readers protested the newspaper’s decision to run an anonymous ad decrying homosexuality as “A Detestable Act… Wickedness… Gross sin!” The quarter-page ad, which contained no identification of its sponsor, appeared in the DP on Monday, October 25. John Kimbel of the DP today posted a message on George Loper’s website (http://loper.org/~george). “Some of our readers… told us they expected us to identify the organization placing the ad,” Kimbel wrote. Consequently, he said, the organization must identify itself if the ad runs again, and future advocacy ads will no longer be anonymous.
Wednesday, October 27
To unseal or not to unseal?
A federal court has ordered Virginia State Police to unseal documents relating to the arrest of former death row inmate Earl Washington Jr., according to news reports today. Washington was days away from execution before DNA testing earned him a pardon for the 1982 rape and murder of Rebecca Lynn Williams, a 19-year-old Culpeper woman. Even after his pardon in 2000, Washington was still regarded by authorities as a suspect in the murder. In an effort to finally clear Washington’s name, Charlottesville attorney Steven Rosenfield, one of Washington’s attorneys, wants the state police to open their files on Washington. Though the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals has ordered Attorney General Jerry Kilgore to open the files, Kilgore will likely appeal to the Supreme Court. “This Attorney General likes to spend the taxpayers’ money using bad judgment,” Rosenfield said in an interview with C-VILLE Weekly.
Thursday, October 28
Eure sale price is $22 million
In an earnings call today, Saga Communications, the Michigan-based broadcasting company that recently announced a plan to buy three local radio stations, said that the deal is for “approximately $22 million.” Saga CFO Sam Bush said the radio stations—Eure Communications’ WINA, WWWV and WQMZ—will “add approximately $4.0 million in net revenue and $1.5 million in station operating income,” each year for Saga.
Friday, October 29
NAACP busted for Bush bashing?
A speech by Julian Bond, a UVA history professor and chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), has resulted in an IRS investigation of the venerable civil rights group, NAACP officials today announced. A letter from the IRS to the NAACP says Bond’s keynote address at the July NAACP convention, which “condemned the administration polices of George W. Bush on education, the economy and the war in Iraq,” may have broken rules that keep nonprofit groups from “intervening in a political campaign.” During a press conference call today, NAACP officials questioned the “suspicious timing” of the investigation, hinting that it might be aimed at blocking the NAACP’s get-out-the-vote efforts. “So far as I know, this has never happened in the United States before,” Bond said of the investigation.
Saturday,October 30
John Warner, NASCAR dad
Taking time out from Election Weekend GOP duties, Sen. John Warner stopped by UVA Grounds to lend support to his documentary filmmaker son John Warner, Jr., who showed two-thirds of his NASCAR trilogy at this weekend’s Virginia Film Festival. The Senator, who narrates all three of Junior’s NASCAR movies, joked that he “didn’t even get a ham sandwich” for his voice-over efforts. “You ham it up enough,” replied the younger Warner, a 1986 UVA grad and onetime racecar driver.
Sunday, October 31
Back in the hunt
An off-week was just what the UVA football team needed. With huge upsets yesterday of ACC foes Florida State and Miami, the 6-1 Cavs shot up to the top of conference rankings and are again in the running for a big bowl game. UVA, which also rose to No. 12 in the AP rankings released today, controls its own fate with looming games against No. 11 Miami and No. 18 Virginia Tech.
Monday, November 1
Two cousins—two police shootings
This year, both the Charlottesville and Albemarle County police departments have been involved in police shootings. According to Reed Williams of The Daily Progress, the two men shot by local police this year are actually cousins, and share a violent past. Robert Cooke, 30, who is scheduled to appear in Albemarle General District Court today, allegedly shot an Albemarle police dog while fleeing a burglary scene on Sunday, October 24. An Albemarle cop then shot Cooke twice. Cooke’s cousin, Kerry Cook (who spells his last name differently) was shot by a city police officer during a violent confrontation at Friendship Court in August. The DP reports that the two cousins were tried as juveniles for a 1988 Charlottesville robbery in which an elderly female store clerk was brutally beaten.
—Written by Paul Fain from local news sources and staff reports.
Exile on W. Main Street
Sidewalk-sign crackdown handicaps businesses
In early September, Cal Glattfelder looked out the window of his record store on Water Street and saw someone absconding with his sign.
“I just happened to be looking out the window,” he says. “I see this guy picking up the sign and carting it down the sidewalk.”
Glattfelder, who runs Sidetracks record store, confronted the would-be thief. He turned out to be Reed Brodhead, a City zoning inspector.
“What’s going on?” Glattfelder asked.
“Didn’t you get the letter?” Brodhead replied.
In late August, Brodhead sent Glattfelder’s landlord, Oliver Kuttner, a letter warning that freestanding signs—such as the one Glattfelder had leaning against a telephone pole outside his store—were prohibited by the City’s zoning ordinance.
Glattfelder, however, hadn’t seen the letter and didn’t know about the law until he caught Brodhead taking his sign. Glattfelder took control of the record store across from the Ice Park a year and a half ago, and he says the sign on the sidewalk “has an impact” on business. Glattfelder says he needs some way to let passers-by know where the store is, but the City is so far determined to crack down on illegal signage.
Similar confrontations have occurred along W. Main Street.
It all started in early summer, when a group of blind people came to a City Council meeting. They claimed that temporary signs and sandwich boards made walking dangerous for them, especially along the narrow sidewalks of W. Main. According to the City’s zoning code, such signs are permitted on the Downtown Mall and the Corner, but not on Water Street or W. Main, a commercial dead zone that the City would like to redevelop into a pedestrian thoroughfare, and where a few new businesses are trying to take root.
The City’s zoning department started cracking down in August, sending out letters that threatened to “initiate legal proceedings, which may include civil or criminal penalties,” according to a letter mailed to Gabe Silverman, who owns the purple Main Street Market on W. Main. Hayley Peppard relied on a sandwich board to bring customers into her flower store, Hedge, inside the Market. The City confiscated her sign before she saw the letter, however.
“It’s a problem for me, because I don’t have a storefront,” says Peppard. On the Mall and on the Corner, people have time to relax, move slowly and look at all the shops. Drivers on W. Main don’t, she says, so she considers the ordinance “not fair.”
The harsh wording of the City’s letter surprised Patrick McClure, who owns West Main—A Virginian Restaurant, as well as the original Virignian, which is on the Corner. “The last line was almost funny,” he says. After threatening to prosecute the business owners, the letter concluded with the sentence. “Thank you for helping make Charlottesville a world class city.”
On Monday, October 18, a group of W. Main business owners appeared at City Council’s regular meeting to ask for help. “My sign has been out there for 32 years,” said Lois Mundie, who owns the Shear Power hair salon on W. Main. “The sign is responsible for 30 new clients a week at my store,” she says.
Mundie says the group plans to band together and hire an attorney to fight the crackdown, but McClure hopes the matter can be settled without a legal standoff.
“This is not a ‘burning torches’ issue,” McClure says. “It’s a fly on the shoulder of City Council. We’d like them to knock it off.” He says many of the affected business owners plan to write letters to Mayor David Brown this week.
So far, Neighborhood Development Director Jim Tolbert says enforcement will continue. He says he wants to meet with the offending shopkeepers to discuss other types of signs they could use.
“I’m not going to recommend allowing sandwich boards on the sidewalk,” says Tolbert. “Our sidewalks are far too narrow as it is. And I don’t think a sandwich board, when it’s behind parked cars, is the best advertising in the world.”
For now, the only sidewalk sign permitted on W. Main is one at L’Etoile Restaurant. Owner Mark Gresge paid about $50 for a permit for his sign, he says. But it may not last. City zoning administrator Ashley Cooper says the permit may have been issued in error, and that her office is reviewing its validity.
So it looks like Council will have to step in. Peppard says she’s already talked to City Councilors, and they’ve been “real helpful.”
“I feel like they’re going to take care of it,” she says. “Until then, it’s a pain in the ass.”—John Borgmeyer
Mountain flop
Traffic complaints dominate Pantops master plan meeting
The bulldozers have been busy of late on Pantops, Thomas Jefferson’s former farmland that was given its name by T.J. himself in deference to the sweet views it commands from a certain hilltop location just east of Charlottesville. And, as one of Albemarle County’s designated growth areas, more development is on the way. To better plan for Pantops’ growth, County officials and residents began work in October on a “master plan” for the area—a process that was recently completed for Crozet.
Before they could begin master planning, however, residents needed to be brought up to speed on development in Pantops.
To that end, County planners held a public meeting at the Montessori Community School on Monday evening, October 25. During the meeting, which was attended by about 30 people, planners ran down a list of proposed and ongoing development projects and gave a tutorial on the County’s planning policies.
But attendees weren’t particularly interested in discussing zoning rules or even the specifics on the many residential and commercial developments.
“How much longer are we going to go without talking about traffic congestion?” asked Pantops resident Ron Dimberg, as soon as the County planners had finished their presentation.
A litany of likeminded comments followed, including worries about bottleneck traffic on the Free Bridge and about new developments bringing more cars to neighborhood cut-throughs. Though the meeting’s facilitator, Becky Clay Christensen, tried to steer the discussion back to the County’s zoning policies, traffic ruled the rest of the night.
“Until you have roads that move traffic, what we’re talking about here doesn’t matter,” said Lynwood Bell, who says he moved to Pantops to avoid the road hassles on Route 29N. “I don’t need to talk about this, I need to know what my elected officials are going to do about it.”
Two of those elected officials, County Supervisor Ken Boyd, who represents Pantops, and Kevin Lynch, Charlottesville’s vice-mayor who also sits on a regional transportation board, were on-hand to address residents’ complaints.
“The problem is money,” Boyd said of the County’s traffic conundrum. With little funds coming from Richmond to build new roads, Boyd said, the County couldn’t possibly make all of its desired road fixes.
“If you start adding up all these [road projects], it’s in the hundreds of millions of dollars,” Boyd says.
Lynch drew applause when he stressed the need for a framework of roads and public transportation to support development in Pantops. But later, he shifted some of the responsibility for the region’s traffic problems back on residents, asking if the meetings’ attendees would support a 4-cent hike in the gas tax to pay for road projects.
Though County planners didn’t engage in the traffic question during the meeting, suggesting that the topic would be better addressed in upcoming discussion groups, they made a compelling case for the need for a master plan. Though they acknowledged that the neighborhood is already an “urbanizing neighborhood,” its future is not sealed.
Senior Planner Tarpley Gillespie drove this point home by pointing to a map of Pantops that was speckled with many “areas of indecision,” all of which are likely sites of future development. Among several current proposals Gillespie mentioned is the Cascadia project, which features 384 housing units and 10,000 square feet of commercial space on the east side of Route 20N. By having a master plan in place, County planners say they can help steer that neighborhood, for instance, to be better interconnected while also determining what sort of public facilities—such as roads, parks and schools—are needed to support growth.
Longtime resident Dimberg was hopeful after the meeting, but not because he was optimistic about a better model for growth.
“I am encouraged about what I sense is a rising tide of opposition [to development],” Dimberg said, adding “these meetings are 10 years too late.”—Paul Fain
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Walker Sisk Murder 101
High-profile trial of suspect Andrew Alston finally begins
Former UVA student Andrew Alston’s trial for second-degree murder begins on November 3, and is scheduled to conclude on November 8—one year to the day after Alston, 22, allegedly killed Walker Sisk, a 22-year-old volunteer firefighter and Free Union resident during an early-morning verbal confrontation on the Corner.
Alston’s legal team has been busy in the yearlong runup to the trial. His revolving crew of at least six lawyers has filed several pre-trial motions and also successfully pushed back the trial date, which had been scheduled for August 30.
John K. Zwerling, a prominent Alexandria defense attorney who is cited regularly in The Washington Post and on CNN, is leading the defense for Alston, a suburban Philadelphia native whose father is a corporate lawyer and an elected township supervisor. Charlottesville Circuit Court Judge Edward L. Hogshire has granted Zwerling’s request to suppress Alston’s prior felony and misdemeanor assault convictions for a Halloween evening attack in 1998, when Alston was a juvenile. That previous incident may not be introduced during the trial, but could be used during sentencing, if Alston is convicted.
However, Judge Hogshire denied a defense motion that would have prevented speculation about Alston’s propensity to carry or collect knives. Sisk was stabbed and cut 20 times, with the lethal injury coming from a wound to the chest and heart, according to an autopsy report.
The evening leading to Sisk’s murder began with two groups of young men out for a Saturday night of barhopping on the Corner. When Alston, his brother Kenneth and two friends encountered Sisk and fellow firefighter James Schwab later that night, there was plenty of jawing, but no violence until Alston attacked Sisk, according to January testimony from both sides of the encounter.
“I didn’t see any hitting going on at all,” testified Jeffrey Cabrera, who was with Alston’s group when they met Sisk and Schwab near the corner of 14th and Wertland streets. “Just the usual swearing going back and forth between each other.”
At some point, two witnesses said, Alston began striking Sisk.
“It was a strange-looking punch,” Cabrera said, adding that it looked like Alston may have been holding keys in the hand with which he was hitting Sisk. Neither Cabrera nor Schwab said they saw a knife.
“He wasn’t fighting back, at any point,” Schwab said of Sisk’s role in the altercation.
Schwab said he heard his friend cry out in pain a couple times. Sisk eventually slumped to the ground, lying face-first, according to witnesses. Schwab testified that when he rolled Sisk over, “he was blood from neck to waist.”
Sisk later died from the wounds. Charlottesville police followed a track of blood to a nearby house on 14th Street, where they arrested Andrew Alston. Investigators never found a murder weapon.
In Alston’s car, which was parked near the scene of the murder, investigators found blood from Alston, whose hand was allegedly cut during the incident. The defense has sought to exclude this evidence, claiming that the blood came from a previous injury. The bloodstain could be used to argue that Alston’s brother Kenneth transferred some of Alston’s blood to the car during, perhaps, an effort to dispose of the murder weapon.
The pre-trial maneuvering is not the first time Alston has battled a charge of violence in a local court. Just weeks after his arrest last November, Alston beat the rap for a misdemeanor assault stemming from a September 2003 argument he had with his girlfriend, a fellow UVA student. During that trial, the girlfriend testified that Alston’s parents pressured her to sign a written statement denying Alston’s culpability in the assault, according to an account by Liesel Nowak of The Daily Progress. Alston was acquitted of that charge, and taken from the trial back to the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, where ever since he has been held without bond.—Paul Fain