Tuesday, March 8
Tech loves community
Today the Virginia Piedmont Technology Council announced three finalists for its Community Award, which, with five other categories, will be given out on May 3. In the community category, music promoter and real estate developer Coran Capshaw gets the nod for spearheading the Music Resource Center’s relocation. PVCC President Frank Friedman is nominated for his workforce-related efforts to connect the high tech and education communities. And Jim Lansing, the volunteer executive director of CVG/EntreNet, is nominated for bringing together Charlottesville nonprofits and businesses.
Wednesday, March 9
Hanger on?
This afternoon State Senator Emmett Hanger (R-Mount Solon) inched closer to declaring his candidacy in the crowded lieutenant governor’s race with a speech to the Senior Statesmen of Virginia at the Northside Library. Hanger is circulating petitions to collect the 10,000 signatures he needs to get on the June 14 primary ballot. Hanger seems among that rare species of Virginia Republicans who appears to be neither a religious nor anti-tax ideologue. He has recently pushed changes to the State tax code that would help cities and counties reduce property taxes.
Thursday, March 10
Need a job? Visit Albemarle
January’s magic number for Albemarle County was 1.3 percent. That was the County’s unemployment figure for the first month of the year, the lowest in the state, according to figures released today by the Virginia Employment Commission. Overall, Virginia was up on the month, with 3.7 percent unemployment, compared to 3.4 percent in December.
Friday, March 11
Toscano’s head start
After making his bid official yesterday, today marked the start of David Toscano’s fundraising campaign. The Democrat and former Mayor says he wants to raise $125,000 in his effort to succeed Mitch Van Yahres in the 57th seat of the House of Delegates. “That’s not outside the realm of possibility, although it seems crazy to spend that much money on a job that pays $20,000,” says local businessman Tom McCrystal, a possible Republican contender for the seat.
Streetcar project revs engine
Transportation activists and planners have taken another step toward getting Charlottesville psyched for streetcars. Today the Alliance for Community Choice in Transportation (ACCT), along with Okerlund and Associates, introduced promotional material designed to get the buzz started. Drumming up grassroots support won’t be easy. As UVA planning professor William Lucy points out, the streetcar is part of a grand development strategy to increase density between UVA and Downtown, so the people who would most benefit from a streetcar don’t live here yet.
Saturday, March 12
More bells and whistles for Earlysville
“I keep hearing stories about a little shed down the road that got us started,” Fred Huckstep, chief of the Earlysville Fire Department, said to a couple dozen supporters who gathered this morning for a “ground broken” ceremony. It was a ground broken, Huckstep explained, because work is already underway on the 6,400-square-foot fire hall expansion. The firefighters have still to raise about half of the estimated $500,000 cost. Meanwhile, they’re also recruiting to double their volunteer base. Last year, 35 volunteers and four employees responded to 1,200 calls. Albemarle Delegate Rob Bell summarized the grateful spirit of the audience: “I’m just really here to say thank you. If my wife gets in trouble or my boy takes a fall, you are the ones we are going to call.”
Pete, call U-Haul
With UVA’s second-round loss to Duke in the ACC Tournament yesterday, coach Pete Gillen ends his seventh year as head ’Hoo with a 14-15 record, his worst since 1998-99. Cav-watchers feel little doubt about his fate, but at least one player was classy about the stinky season yesterday. “I don’t know what the future holds, but I know we would like to have Coach Gillen next season,” freshman star Sean Singletary told The Daily Progress.
Sunday, March 13
Gibson busts City cops on record keeping
Bob Gibson, veteran Daily Progress reporter, today goes public with what journalists all over town have been saying for months: City police are not exactly forthcoming with public information. In a front-page story, Gibson describes a 10-day test of Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act in which media outlets requested public information from a range of officials. In subversion of FOIA, “Charlottesville police declined repeated requests to provide felony incident reports for a given day last week,” Gibson reports. “Charlottesville spokesman Maurice Jones said the city police department does not compile a daily criminal incident report and would not do so upon request.” By contrast, and in compliance with State law, Albemarle County police quickly provided a daily crime log, according to Gibson.
Monday, March 14
Students are back, but not for long
With seven weeks until courses end, UVA students just back (if not exactly fresh) from Spring Break today don’t have much time left to buckle down—if necessary. The more serious-minded among them can chew on a couple of meaty lectures right away with today’s offerings including “Managing Bounded Code Caches in Dynamic Binary Optimizers” and “The Superpower Myth: The Use and Misuse of American Might.”
Written by Cathy Harding from news sources and staff reports.
Something to Qroe about?
The pros and cons of Bundoran Farms’ “preservation development”
“This farm was sold with six e-mails,” Fred Scott says following his surprise March 3 announcement about his 2,200-acre farm, purchased for an undisclosed amount by the Qroe (pronounced “crow”) company of New Hampshire.
The sudden sale of Bundoran Farm adds new subtleties to the dialogue about rural development. Most prominent as the site of the Albemarle County Fair, the farm’s development is the sort that normally sends rural preservation advocates through the roof. But coverage of the sale optimistically highlighted the preservation side of Qroe’s unique “preservation development” technique.
Scott has just a few memories of a time before Bundoran. The family originally bought 640 acres before World War I. They didn’t move in until after Scott’s father got out of the service, and Scott remembers him building farm gates in their New York basement, “some of which are probably still hanging on this farm.”
During the 60 years he has spent in Batesville, Scott has used the farm as a canvas and background for his varied interests. “This farm works hard,” nurturing a 500-head herd of Hereford cattle and 175 acres of apple orchards, Scott says. He teaches draft horse workshops with his four Belgian horses, hosts a hunt club and maintains a landing strip for his Beech Baron. In the 1970s, the farm was one of the first to adopt low-impact, no-till farming systems. About half the acreage is forested.
Now Scott has entrusted his life’s work to Qroe, hoping that the company will continue his family’s legacy of good stewardship.
“We do it backwards from the point of view of most developers who go in and say, ‘O.K., we are going to put in this many homes and then we will dress it up with some open space if we need to,’” explains Qroe President Robert Baldwin.
Instead of laying down a subdivision grid, Qroe conducts an analysis of the landscape to find and preserve important environmental features. Houses are integrated into the setting, and farm and forestry operations continue. The company sets aside at least 80 percent of the area as open space and discusses use of the land with the community.
Buyers of Qroe homes purchase a small building envelope and a larger “greenbelt.” Overlapping restricted covenants ensure that the open space, farm activities and silviculture cannot be disturbed without the unanimous consent of a homeowners’ association.
Qroe’s rhetoric heavily emphasizes preservation, but there are a few potential kinks in the system. Dispersing houses over a wide area fragments the open space, compared to clustering homes. It can also require many more miles of road.
Planning regulations have proven to be an obstacle in Qroe’s base of Derry, New Hampshire. A proposal to build 20 homes on a 121-acre parcel required nine waivers of regulations. Qroe wanted to build smaller roads, but the planning commission denied the waivers, despite strong backing from the town’s conservation commission. Qroe intends to resubmit plans.
In Hanover, New Hampshire, the planning board expressed reservations about a preliminary proposal from Qroe, focusing on the way the dispersed housing reduced open space.
Locally, the Piedmont Environmental Council would prefer to see Bundoran protected by a conservation easement. “The term ‘preservation development’ is used purely and simply to put lipstick on the pig, and the pig is suburban area development,” says PEC’s Jeff Werner. The PEC and The Nature Conservancy negotiated with Scott and his neighbors to purchase the development rights but never settled on a price.
“We would argue that the way we do it is the lesser impact overall by a significant degree because there are fewer houses and they are more a part of the environment in which they are set,” Qroe’s Baldwin says. A typical subdivision grid laid over a landscape with roads built to State specifications is easier to get through a local permitting process, but more impactful,
he argues.
Looking from mountain to mountain over the land where he has spent his life, Fred Scott imagines what would have happened if he had died before inking this deal. His farm would have been sold at auction, he says, and any old developer could have bought it.
“If there is life after death, I’m not sure I would want to be looking out through the flames at that future of this farm,” he says. “I am sure that Qroe will do something that I can look at for eternity with pleasure.”—Lacey Phillabaum
March madness
City and County budget officials show us the money
City Manager Gary O’Connell delivered his 2005-06 budget to City Council last week with a poetic flourish.
“Spring is here. March madness has begun, the first crocus is pushing through the snow, and it’s budget season,” he said, sounding a bit like an undergraduate slaphappy from an all-night cram session. Indeed, crafting the annual budget means long hours for City staff—especially as expenses mount and backlash over rising property taxes grows louder.
In Albemarle County, budget director Melvin Breeden says his office goes through a pot of coffee a day during budget season, “and it’s never enough.”
Money, like coffee, always seems in short supply during budget season. This year Charlottesville and Albemarle are set to spend a combined $361 million in FY 2005-06. County Executive Robert Tucker proposed a $255 million budget that includes a $2.9 million reserve, which the Board of Supervisors can dip into for schools, capital projects or tax-rate reduction.
O’Connell, meanwhile, presented Council with a $106 million proposed budget. Money is tighter in Charlottesville than in Albemarle, as the City struggles with rising social service costs and political pressure to cut the property tax rate.
This year the City is proposing to cut the property tax rate to $1.05 per $100 of assessed value from $1.09, which O’Connell calls “the largest reduction in memory.” The cut is a bit of a surprise, because back in December Council voted 4-1 to ask O’Connell for a tax rate cut of 2 cents, or no cut at all.
“It makes me wonder what’s going on behind the scenes. Who’s making policy in this city?” says Councilor Rob Schilling, who dissented in that vote because he argued then that the tax rate should be cut by more than 2 cents.
Regardless, the City acknowledges that property assessments have risen so much in the past year most residents will still see their tax bill go up, despite the rate cut.
So far, Charlottesville’s budget includes no other fees or rate changes. To save money, O’Connell would eliminate the equivalent of 14.25 full-time positions. The budget proposes a 4 percent salary and benefit increase for remaining City employees. Charlottesville would also abandon commercial trash collection by contracting the service out to a private firm. Based on recent bids, O’Connell predicted the City would save $1.2 million.
“This budget doesn’t meet all the needs of residents and employees,” O’Connell said. “But it begins to meet the financial realities we face.”
While Albemarle seems flush compared with the City, Budget Director Melvin Breeden emphasizes that the County’s pockets aren’t as fat as the budget suggests. The 27 percent increase in Albemarle’s real estate assessments is spread over two years; also, the City gets 10 cents off the top off the 76-cent tax rate as part of the City-County revenue sharing agreement adopted in lieu of annexation. “I don’t think the emphasis should be on the new things that we are doing because there are not a lot of them,” Breeden says.
The County also faces a number of expensive mandated expenditures. The budget includes over $800,000 for a required stormwater system, plus money for the first year of remediation at Ivy Landfill.
At the first hearing on the budget on Wednesday, March 9, more than a dozen people—including principals, teachers, parents and the superintendent—stood up to ask that the County fully fund the School Board’s proposed budget, to the tune of $1.3 million more than the County Executive had proposed. They uniformly emphasized that higher teacher compensation should be the first priority.
But for every person who advocated for more school funding, there was someone else asking for a tax-rate reduction. William Tomlin submitted a petition with 122 signatures calling for the rate to be reduced to 70 cents per hundred dollars of assessed value from 76 cents.
Advocates for the ACE program also asked that funding for conservation easements return to the $1 million level from $350,000.
Both the City and County will be keeping the coffee on for another month, as Councilors and Supervisors examine the budgets and take public comment before adopting final budgets in April.
You can see the City budget for yourself at www.charlottesville.org, where you can also check out a web forum discussing budget issues. If you prefer to air your gripes in the flesh, City Council will take public comment on the budget on March 21 and April 4, before adopting a final budget on April 12.
The Board of Supervisors will hold work sessions on the budget on March 14, 16, 21 and 23. A final public hearing on the Board’s proposed budget will be April 6.—John Borgmeyer and Lacey Phillabaum
A broken social contract
When it comes to helping cities fix poverty, Virginia cries poor
Give Vice Mayor Kevin Lynch an “A” for effort. He spent months analyzing City budgets over the past seven years, looking for ways to solve Charlottesville’s ongoing money problems. Last week he released a 14-page, single-spaced “white paper” that identified the growing number of families in poverty as a significant driver of City expenses, and the rising property taxes necessary to pay for them.
“We need to take a big-picture approach to dealing with poverty instead of the current piecemeal approach,” Lynch argues in his report. “Reducing the amount of poverty in the Charlottesville area is not just a moral issue, but is increasingly becoming an economic one as well.”
The report outlines long-term strategies for reducing the number of poor families in Charlottesville. It won’t be easy, though. As the Commonwealth grows increasingly conservative and cash-strapped, the costs of poverty fall more heavily on city taxpayers. C-VILLE’s War on Cities research suggests that the trend of declining State support for poverty relief will only get worse in the coming years.
The costs of poverty
Perhaps the most significant difference between cities and suburbs is the percentage of people living below the poverty line. Poverty is a problem in many of Virginia’s rural areas, of course; but low-income people often gravitate toward cities to take advantage of public transportation and social services.
In Charlottesville, for example, UVA’s Weldon-Cooper Center estimates that about 26 percent of the population lived below the poverty line in 2004; in Albemarle County that year, only about 7 percent of the people were poor. The federal Department of Health and Human Services defines poverty as a personal income of $9,570 or less; for a family of four, it is $19,350 or less. According to Census figures, there are about 925 poor families in Charlottesville.
In his budget analysis, Lynch argues that children and families living below the poverty line contribute to the City’s rising costs for incarceration and social services. To make matters worse for Charlottesville, State government has underfunded these items for years, passing on the costs to the City—and to you.
City budget outlays for incarcerating juveniles and adults rose to $4.5 million from $618,000 in the past seven years, an increase of 626 percent. Much of that increase comes from capital costs for an addition to the Regional Jail and the new Blue Ridge Juvenile Detention Center. As C-VILLE reported last week, the State does not adequately pay for inmates or guard salaries, leaving localities to make up the difference.
Lynch also reports that in 1997, the City spent about $3.7 million for social services and housing programs. By 2004 that number had grown to nearly $7.6 million—a jump of 105 percent. State and federal law require the City to maintain social services, but they don’t always give us the money to pay for them. For example, Lynch estimates the City’s costs for the mandated Comprehensive Services Act have increased by 329 percent since 1997; the City spent nearly $1.3 million for the CSA last year, even as the State has drastically cut funding for that program in recent years.
Other major social services are Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) and Family Access to Medical Insurance (FAMIS). The Federal government funds these services, but the City must administer them.
This is where cities get hurt by State budget cuts: The State is supposed to pay 80 percent of the overhead for local social service departments—money for salaries, supplies, etc.—but since the 1980s the Commonwealth hasn’t kept up with rising costs.
“We have new mandates and growing workloads,” says Buzz Cox, director of the City’s social services department. “But we don’t get any new money for the extra things we have to do.”
A 100 percent increase in City costs over seven years is bad enough, but Cox says he’s bracing for more budget shortfalls in the near future.
In January 2006, a new federal prescription drug plan will take effect that will require local governments to figure out how many people in their community are eligible for new drug benefits. Cox says there’s no money to help the City cover the extra workload.
Also in the near future, Congress is likely to enforce a new welfare-to-work program that will require local governments to help everyone on their TANF program get a job—in Charlottesville, that’s about 375 people at any one time. Cox’s office will have to assess their employment history and skills, make a plan for them to get a job, help them find a job and make sure they don’t stop looking.
“We think it could double our caseload,” says Cox. “At this point we see no prospects of new State and federal money. And right now is not a good time for cities to be picking up the slack.”
Finally, one of Virginia’s most egregious oversights is its disregard for families with disabled children. Children who require ’round-the-clock care can stress families and throw them into poverty, unless the family is able to secure a Medicaid waiver. These waivers pay for in-home care for their disabled children. Barbara Barrett, a disabled-rights activist who sits on the local Region Ten Community Services Board, says these waivers can save families, but there are not nearly enough waivers to go around.
Some states provide a 300 percent or 400 percent match for federal Medicaid dollars, while cheapskate Virginia provides a mere 85 percent match, one of the lowest in America. As a result, says Barrett, many families must either care for their disabled children themselves or send them to an institution.
Bennett says the federal government wants to make Medicaid a block grant, which she says could cut Medicaid funding even more.
“It’s hard to believe they could do something to make it down instead of up, but that’s the way things are going now,” says Barrett.—John Borgmeyer