Tuesday, March 29
Deeds in, runs as a regular guy
Local Democratic activists turned out at Bashir’s Taverna during a perfect Mall afternoon to hear Sen. Creigh Deeds make it official: he wants to be your next State Attorney General. Joined by his wife and their four children, he spoke as a friend of “everyday families.” Peter Kleeman, among the 75 in the crowd, said he came out to support Deeds because “I’m scared of the radical Right, particularly as Attorney General. [Republican maybe Robert] McDonald from Virginia Beach would outlaw birth control. We need a grownup.”
Wednesday, March 30
Enjoy your lunch!
In a recent study by the Environmental Work Group, Jason Pearson said on Grounds today, doctors discovered an average of 91 industrial compounds, pollutants and chemicals in the bodies of nine people. None of them worked or lived near chemical plants. “That’s a pretty unpleasant bit of information,” Pearson said, speaking to a campus group called Green Grounds. Pearson is director of GreenBlue, a company co-founded by local enviro-architecture superstar William McDonough. Pearson talked about redesigning industry to mimic nature and eliminate waste. “Our bodies are indicators of failures in the industrial system,” he said, as students sipped soda from plastic cups.
Thursday, March 31
Board gets majority to stem Griffin’s control
Taking clear steps to reign in the spending authority of Dr. Scottie Griffin, the Charlottesville City School Board passed a measure late in the regularly scheduled session to scrutinize the expenditures of the school division’s top administrator. With one abstention and one absent board member, the board carried 3-2 new financial controls that prevent Superintendent Griffin from authorizing any unplanned expenditure over $5,000. The measure further forces board approval of any expenditure from Griffin’s discretionary fund. Griffin, who through the budgeting process openly disagreed with some board members, is frequently rumored to be on her way out. She started as superintendent in July and the board took the unusual step then of granting her a $200,000 discretionary fund. It was Griffin’s second day of public questioning about expenditures. Yesterday she, the full board, and the City Council convened their monthly lunch. Other topics at that meeting: The ninth-grade dropout rate; staff diversity training; and everybody’s favorite, leadership qualities.
Friday, April 1
What part of “No” don’t you understand?
Weekend movie renters find this evening they have a friend in fill-in Virginia Attorney General Judith Williams Jagdmann who joined A.G.s from 47 other states in an agreement with Blockbuster. The arrangement allows the rental monolith to clarify its “No Late Fees” promotion, which has been in place since December. Seems Blockbuster forgot the fine print when advertising its newest campaign, the part about charging customers for the cost of the DVD or video if it’s more than seven days late. In compliance with the plea, by as early as Tuesday afternoon the store on Hydraulic Road had already posted a “corrective sign,” hand-lettered in all caps: “The end of late fees, the start of more.”
Saturday, April 2
1,400 ducks seen on the road
The difference between man and the animals was made clear this morning: Animals would never run 10 miles in the soaking rain. But 1,400 racers hit the city streets this morning despite the conditions, raising money for the Free Clinic and crowning two new winners for the 30th annual Charlottesville Ten-Miler. Alec Lorenzoni was the overall winner and top man, finishing the course in 56:24. The first woman to cross the finish line, Nadia Baadj, timed it at 63:41.
Sunday, April 3
Film Festival gets another Hollywood nod
The Virginia Film Festival got a boost tonight when star-struck Wahoos packed Newcomb Hall to get an early look at Luke Wilson’s newest movie and a glimpse of the multi-hyphenate himself. The screening of The Wendell Baker Story was billed as an appearance by three Wilson brothers, but co-star Owen bailed. (Brother Andrew, who co-directed the comedy, was said to be on Grounds, but he didn’t get to Newcomb.) After the movie, VFF director Richard Herskowitz, arguably a big hand in making Charlottesville a movie town, led a Q&A session with the producer. Mark Johnson, a UVA grad, explained why he brings his movies to Charlottesville: “All of you really appreciate movies and like movies, not just the commercial ones. You’re up for anything, you don’t settle for the conventional.”
Monday, April 4
Now it’s a race
David Toscano gets on the primary ballot this morning when he delivers his petitions to the registrar. Over the weekend, the look of the June Democratic race for Mitch Van Yahres’ seat in the Assembly got clearer as Jeffrey Rossman declared he wouldn’t run and Rich Collins declared he would. Rossman, who has been active at UVA on the charter issue, will focus on the top of the statewide ticket, he said, giving support to Tim Kaine and Creigh Deeds. Collins, who is active in anti-growth initiatives, is Toscano’s sole challenger.
Written by Cathy Harding from news sources and staff reports.
The chosen one
Playing king of the hill with David Toscano
David Toscano is sitting atop the Democratic heap in this one-party town. When the former Mayor declared his candidacy for Charlottesville’s 57th District seat in the General Assembly—held for more than 20 years by another former mayor, Mitch Van Yahres—local power brokers lined up behind Toscano while potential challengers dropped like flies. So far, Toscano’s raked in about $40,000 of the $100,000 he says he’d like to have for the November election.
Last week, Toscano told C-VILLE about working in his father’s haberdashery (“I guess you could say I’m good at sizing people up”), gaining momentum as a state candidate, playing pranks on Albemarle Rebulican Rob Bell and about how the progressive Dem might navigate a state House of Delegates that just gets screwier each year. An edited transcript of the interview follows.—John Borgmeyer
C-VILLE: Nearly every city and county Democrat has jumped on the Toscano love train. Did you have this many friends when you were mayor?
David Toscano: It’s true we’ve been very fortunate to get a lot of people to come out and say they’d like to see me in the G.A. That’s been very gratifying.
People make decisions about voting for any number of reasons. Maybe they’re your neighbor, you go to the same church, they like your position on issues. Those endorsements make a difference for people who might not know me all that well.
One of Mitch’s strengths as a legislator was the balance he struck between his private religious beliefs and his public activity. How will you do that?
Values make a difference. Any elected official who doesn’t have a strong sense of right and wrong will ultimately fail, because they aren’t centered enough to weather the storms of public reaction to what they do.
Fairness and opportunity is a value I developed a long time ago when I was young. The notion that people ought to have a chance to succeed in life and we ought to reward people for working hard stems from growing up in a household where my father worked six or seven
days a week, and I worked with him. I learned how to run a business, and how important it was to be honest and treat people fairly. That has to spill over in your public life.
People say the Democrats have lost their way. In Virginia Lt. Governor Tim Kaine seems to be hedging rightward, and in the General Assembly a Democrat introduced a bill banning baggy trousers. What do you think ought to be the role of Virginia Democrats?
First, I happen to like some of the things Tim Kaine is advancing. His idea for tax relief moves the decision down to the local level. If you look at Jerry Kilgore’s plan, he would remove a lot of local control over decision making.
Overall, I think Democrats need to speak to the values we think are important—economic justice, opportunity, fairness and compassion. I’m willing to work with business and UVA to create jobs that pay a living wage. I don’t think the public sector alone is going to be able to create those kinds of jobs.
I think people believe that the government’s proper role isn’t to solve every problem, nor is it leaving people to fend for themselves, but to empower people with the tools they can use to solve their own problems.
Such as?
For example, parents ought to be able to get release time from work to go to parent-teacher conferences. It’s a little thing, but it can make a huge difference in the life of
a child.
Another thing I’d like to work on is a permanent source of funding for land conservation. Localities would like to pay owners to put land in easement, but there’s not money to do that. It’s something that cuts across ideological lines—it preserves the idea of private property, and it speaks to the preservation ethos that I think is pretty powerful.
So Albemarle’s Republican delegate, Rob Bell, is moving into the office above yours on High Street. Surely you have some ideas for pranks to pull?
I thought about putting in a trap door. But then I thought that if he’s upstairs, I can see who’s going to talk to him, but he can’t see who’s coming to talk to me. He laughed about it.
The developer who wasn’t
Thomas Sullivan backpedals, offers rural lots
When is a developer not a developer? When the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors believes otherwise, that’s when. The Supervisors trusted millionaire Thomas Sullivan last year when he said he was paying to pave a public road for the safety of his children, not to facilitate new development. Wall Street Journal ads for the subdivided lots now seem to put paid to that yarn.
Homeowners on Blenheim Road near Scottsville were shocked in 2003 when trees were razed and a cemetery desecrated in order to pave the last unpaved section of their road. What had been an idyllic meander on a gravel road through the woods suddenly looked like the “New Jersey turnpike,” neighbor Peter Mellen now says.
When they discovered their new neighbor, Sullivan, was behind the paving, they worried that residential development was soon to follow. Their petition to the County and Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) to stop the paving fell on nearly deaf ears, and the Supervisors voted 5-1 on March 3, 2004 to allow Sullivan to proceed, with Supervisor Sally Thomas dissenting.
Sullivan insisted at the Board of Supervisors meetings in February and March of that year that his first concern was safety. In February he told the Board, “It was his intention to make the area safer for his children, the 30 people who work on the farm and the five families who live there… It is not his intention to develop the land,” according to the meeting minutes.
VDOT’s then resident engineer didn’t object. “When a private entity says they will pay for the road, VDOT’s feeling is why not accept that offer,” Jim Bryan said.
Transportation consultant Peter Kleeman offered more than a few reasons VDOT should have reconsidered. The road grade was too steep, runoff was a problem and there was insufficient right-of-way. “VDOT did not contest any of the design or developments that Sullivan wanted to do,” Kleeman says now, “and some of the developments appeared to be outside of VDOT’s own guidelines.”
That part of Albemarle is outside the county’s urban growth area as well. The County comprehensive plan attempts to preserve its rural and historic nature. “Without providing good roadways to those sites, the development potential is very small,” Kleeman says. By allowing the paving to continue the Board of Supervisors “turned the key to allow subdivision in what was rural property.”
Ads for portions of Sullivan’s property recently promised the “perfect location to build a manor home.” Real estate agents McLean Faulconer have listed parcels for prices ranging from $199,000 to $1.5 million.
County records, while somewhat unclear, seem to show that Sullivan started subdividing his property, owned by his Murcielago company, even while the Board of Supervisors was still deliberating. (Murcielago is also the name of a model of Lamborghini.) Lot divisions were filed in September 2003 and March 2004. After the County stood down, the subdividing sped up, with three site plans affecting or creating seven different lots between June and December 2004.
McLean Faulconer has already offered one 24.9-acre parcel for $249,000. If all lots sold at that $10,000-per-acre rate, Sullivan would stand to pull in almost $4 million dollars. Neighbors think that’s a much more likely motive for fronting a million bucks to pave the road.
Neighborhood tension heightened further when Sullivan’s employees put up a new hog pen near the home of a neighbor who objected to the paving, as reported in The Hook. Another vocal opponent, JoAnn McGrath, was shocked to see Sullivan advertising his parcels as The Farms at Lower Sherwood. Her farm has been called Lower Sherwood for the past 30 years. “He is riding roughshod first over the Board of Supervisors and now the people who have lived here for a long time,” says one neighbor, who is too worried about retaliation to use her name.
Some neighbors were even more perturbed to see that Sullivan is now advertising his own Mt. Pleasant home on Blenheim Road for rent. (It goes for $3,000 a week; see www.murcielagofarms.com.) “It’s amazing that after all his claims about the safety of his children, he is now just renting out the property,” marvels Peter Mellen.
Thomas Sullivan and his agent Kim Atkins did not return phone calls requesting comment.
Supervisor Sally Thomas worries about the precedent that is set and the new pressure to develop on landowners in the neighborhood. “The people who live along that road placed their faith, their home and their investments on the belief that it was an unpaved road… It could be seen as breaking a trust and certainly an expectation that people had about what kind of place Albemarle County is.”—Lacey Phillabaum
The meter trade
Hey, don’t blame the meter maid, he’s just doing his job
Crawling along E. Jefferson Street towards High Street in his department-assigned Jeep, meter maid …er…meter guy…er…Traffic Community Service Officer (CSO) Greg Wade, wields a long metal pole with blue chalk attached to the end. With it, he methodically reaches out his right-hand window and chalks the rear tires of the approximately 150
cars parked in the plum two-hour spaces. It’s 10:30am. Chalk, roll forward, stop. Chalk, roll forward, stop. Chalk, roll forward, stop.
A sedan is missing its 2005 city decal and the monotony breaks momentarily: Chalk, ticket, roll forward, stop.
For the average, law-abiding citizen, Wade is the face of the law we all fantasize about punching: Blond, blue-eyed, lanky and…19. He has only gotten one parking ticket in his life—it was the day he got his license and he had parked, by accident, in a loading zone on Water Street. As for the job, it’s just Wade’s first stop on his way up the law enforcement ladder. When he turns 21, he hopes to become a full-fledged officer.
His uniform is starched and the interior of his Jeep is an efficient mini-office. Everything is within arm’s reach. His ticketing computer rests between the seats to his left on top of his file folders that contain a phone book, maps, City ordinances, zoning codes. His radio rests next to the stick shift and a “hit list” of license plates with five or more unpaid tickets is pinned to the visor.
Done chalking, Wade drives down Locust and into to the residential areas around Downtown to kill time before returning to tally up the cars that have overstayed their welcome on E. Jefferson. Today’s Downtown parking beat means he’ll drive up and down the same 20 streets for eight hours. Chalking, cruising and ticketing. Chalking, cruising and ticketing.
“When I got [my ticket] I just wanted to pay it, get it over with and get it done,” he says driving down Calhoun Street. “But I guess some people really like to fight about it.” Wade only gets hassled about once a week though, he says.
I’ve been driving around with Wade for an hour and a half praying for an irate citizen encounter to fulfill my fantasies of what happens when an angry citizen confronts the meter maid, or whatever. Too bad. Today, everyone who catches him writing out a personal ticket has either shrugged and accepted their fate, or promptly moved their car. Accordingly, City treasurer Jennifer Brown says that of the 27,691 parking tickets given out in the past fiscal year (which raked in $595,895 for the City), surprisingly few were contested—just under 9 percent.
As Wade explains that people who pitch a fit over a parking ticket “usually have something else going on,” he passes a car parked left side to the curb. He swings a U-ey and pulls alongside. Within seconds a barefooted woman comes flying out.
“I’m stopping by here for two seconds,” she screams as a man rushes out, keys in hand. “Can I move it?”
Wade nods. “Have a nice day,” he says, replacing his ticketing computer on top of the file folders. “That’s usually how it goes,” in the residential areas.
It’s been two hours since he chalked and it’s time to return to East Jefferson. While he’s found six parking violations in the residential areas, the overtime parking on E. Jefferson is the gold mine. In 25 minutes he writes up 16 violations—doesn’t drive a single block without writing up a ticket. Ticket, roll forward, stop. Ticket, roll forward, stop. Ticket, roll forward, stop. By 1pm Wade’s total is 22 tickets. In pure economics, that’s $425 or, in my dreams, a night at the Four Seasons.—Nell Boeschenstein
Candid camera
Why we just can’t get enough of Brad and Jen
“Good evening and welcome to ‘Entertainment Tonight!’ In the next hour, an exclusive interview with the man who gave Terri Schiavo a sponge bath! A re-enactment of the Michael Jackson trial, and Jane Fonda’s shocking sex confessions. Also, Joan and Melissa Rivers interview top experts to deconstruct American’s fascination with the famous. From starlet to star to superstar, what’s behind the rising allure of these icons? That’s all coming up right after this word from our sponsor.”
Actually, since Mary Hart from “ET!” hasn’t bought into the concept yet, it falls to America’s leading intellectuals to explain our obsession with celebrity stargazing. During the presidential election last year, scholars at UVA’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture noticed that Americans prefer everything, including their news and politics, served with a dash of celebrity. Stardom has expanded from the fields of acting and sports until now we have celebrity business tycoons, celebrity home-making mavens and even celebrity “real” people. People are famous for being famous, famous for being strange and famous for being normal. Stranger still, celebrity worship has started to pervade the way Americans think about every important issue, from Third World debt relief to living wills.
On Tuesday, April 12, UVA will bring together cultural critics Wendy Kaminer, Joseph Epstein and Loren Glass on the ever-popular subject, “Celebrity Culture” (see www.virginia.edu/iasc). They’ll dissect the two faces of pop: our simultaneous love and loathing for every detail about the lives of the famous, from Kirstie Alley’s waistline to the facial hair of the newly single Orlando Bloom.
Together Kaminer, Glass and Epstein can name as many reasons celebrities are bad for us as there are channels on basic cable. “The way that intellectuals have looked at mass culture is like how Marx looked at religion: as the opiate of the people,” says Glass, author of Authors Inc. and a professor at the University of Iowa.
Wendy Kaminer, shooting sharper, talks about celebrity culture in terms like debased, stupefied, pathology, and “deadening, so intellectually deadening.
“You can’t understand politics in this country without understanding pop culture,” she says. Celebrities are the new religion for Kaminer, with sexpots Angelina Jolie and Colin Farrell standing in for Athena and Zeus (or maybe Mary and Joseph?). And talk about ironies: Kaminer’s book about skepticism, Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials, rocketed her to fame by taking Americans to task for their religious irrationalism.
The love affair with celebrity starts with the myth that “life is grander among the famous,” as Loren Glass puts it. Celebrities offer us the great pleasure of knowing all about something without us actually living it—the vicarious life. Celebrities are also fodder for the gossip mill. “Why do I care that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston broke up,” wonders Jennifer Geddes from UVA’s Institute. “What is the allure there in something that shouldn’t interest me so much?”
Gossip is a primal instinct, and as Americans move away from communities grounded in common interests or a common place, celebrities become the people “we have in common, not the people we live with,” says Geddes. “One of the easiest ways to start a conversation is movies you’ve seen or shows you’ve watched.” People are more likely to know that Aniston filed divorce papers a couple of weeks ago, for example, than to offer a sympathetic ear to a co-worker going through a divorce.
Besides, “Who wouldn’t rather watch ‘Idol’ than the serious news?” Kaminer asks. “When I think about the state of the country, I would rather read People magazine.” With 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq, it’s easier for Americans to ponder the stars than grapple with deep fears about terrorism or serious moral questions like complicity.
And when we do think about other realms of life, the rich-and-famous mentality structures the way people look at that. “Think about the pieces of legislation that have someone’s name attached to them,” Kaminer directs. What with Megan’s Law, Amber Alerts and It Girl Terri Schiavo, a “celebrity ghoul,” says Kaminer, you have to wonder, “Are we capable of dealing with these important issues except through the lens of an individual melodrama, the celebrity victim?”
Über-author Joseph Epstein is slightly more forgiving of the American proclivity for distraction, “the sizzle, not the steak, as they say.” His witticisms have filled 16 books since 1975. His speech on Tuesday, April 12, will bring heavyweights like Marcel Proust to bear on questions of “Access Hollywood” and “Entertainment Tonight.” He insists that the critique of celebrity is more than academe looking down its nose at pop culture. He has a little fun with the phenomena, too, by alternately blasting pop culture as “passively acquired,” and noting that he’s had his own People magazine photo spread. “Voyeurism is not without its pleasures,” he says.
As a specialist in cultural studies, Loren Glass gets paid to watch trash TV. Speaking in lofty terms, he’s keenly aware that the celebrity critique can be seen as cultural snobbery. “Because cultural studies in its academic home is a middle class and elite phenomena,” he says, “it can’t avoid having the twin emotional pulls toward popular material. Those pulls are either envy or loathing.”
Which also explains why it can feel so good and yet so bad to waste a day in front of “Sex and the City” re-runs or by pouring over The New York Times Sunday Style section. Luckily, the Celebrity Culture conference starts at 2pm on Tuesday so the heavy thinkers can tsk tsk together and still get home in time to catch “American Idol.”—Lacey Phillabaum
End of the Quest?
Successful for five years, a county college prep course comes up empty
While city schools struggle to close the achievement gap, Albemarle County schools are about to lose a program that goes a long way toward meeting the goal. College Quest, or CQuest, is a college access program at Monticello High School that helps high achieving, low-income students get the best possible college placement.
CQuest targets the clever kid who thinks he’ll go into stereo installation or the brainy one who just wants to get into ODU. CQuest encourages them to aim higher and at least apply to college, or to apply for better schools than they might otherwise.
Private college counselors can cost more than $100 an hour. School counselors can oversee 300 students, mostly focusing on the ones in trouble. CQuest fills the gap, offering an SAT prep course at no cost, admissions counseling, help crafting college essays and the opportunity to visit 15 college campuses.
Since it started as an after-school program and has grown into a regular course with 30 students, CQuest has flourished. “After five years it is absolutely obvious that working with these kids in small groups pays off in big dividends,” says founder Rebecca Lamb. For kids whose parents didn’t graduate from college, the application process is a mystery. Just being surrounded by peers who are college-bound raises the bar.
Both graduates and current students enthusiastically laud CQuest. LaToya Brackett is a junior at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, whose family “didn’t know what Ivy League meant” before she went into CQuest. “Sometimes you need the extra push from someone to tell you that you really can do it, and I am really glad I had that,” she says.
Monticello High School senior Telma Sheppard is waiting to hear from Cornell, James Madison University and UVA. She credits CQuest with pushing her to aim higher. “You’re in a positive environment surrounded by people who only want to help you,” she says. If the program is cut, “a lot of people would be out of an opportunity to get help with the future.”
“At this point, it is closing in May,” Lamb says. In the past the Ron Brown Scholar Program, West Wind Foundation and Boys & Girls Club have helped fund the approximately $30,000 annual budget. Lamb tried to fund the program privately this year, and it hasn’t panned out.
Monticello High School principal Billy Haun endorses both Lamb and the program. “One young man in particular, his SAT scores went up 100 points. The SAT prep is a good part of the program, and getting these students aware of colleges and getting them the hands-on, this is what it takes. She is the push behind these kids,” he says.
Current students heard from colleges before April 1. This year Lamb remains waiting for word too, hoping that a funding source comes forward to give other students the same opportunity.—Lacey Phillabaum
College Access by the numbers
77 Percent of students from high-income families who went to college in 2003
48 Percent of students from low-income families who went to college that same year
22 Percent of federal student aid that was need-based grants in 2004
61 Percent that was need-based 30 years ago
25 Percent of income a poor family was required to pay for one year of college in 2001
5 Percent of income well-off spend on one year of college in 2001
2.9 Percent of people with a bachelor’s degree who were unemployed in January 2004
4.9 Percent of people with a high school diploma who were unemployed then
8.8 Percent of people with less than a high school diploma
100 Percent of Monticello High School’s College Quest students who have been accepted to a college
Source: USA Funds and CQuest