Tuesday, April 5
Filmmaker tells “untold story” of AIDS
Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Sharon Sopher screened her latest work, HIV Goddesses, to a full house tonight at the UVA Medical Center. The film documents Sopher’s life as she struggles to come to terms with the disease, which she contracted while working in Africa. In the post-film discussion Sopher said she considers the story of American women with AIDS “the greatest untold story of AIDS,” adding that AIDS is the No. 4 killer of American women between the ages of 23 and 44, and the No. 1 killer for African-American women ages 25 to 44.
Wednesday, April 6
Now if they could just build a team…
Today VMDO architect Joseph Celentano led a tour of UVA’s half-finished John Paul Jones Arena. Workers have recently added the last of five 400,000-pound truss rods onto the horseshoe-shaped roof. Construction of the $130 million arena is on schedule for completion in summer 2006, he says. Celentano says that the 8,457-seat University Hall (the site of Cavalier hoops tragedies) would fit inside the new 15,000-seat stadium, and that nearly all of the arena’s seats are closer to the court than those at U-Hall, which will eventually be torn down.
Too cool for school
Today Charlottesville was named the top “Really Cool Small Southern Market” by Southern Business and Development Magazine. The article included this line: “It’s a beautiful place with great K-12 schools and residents who act as if they are the happiest in the entire South. We think they are.”
Ha! Guess the writer didn’t go to any recent city School Board meetings…
PVCC boosts $10M campaign
This afternoon, Piedmont Virginia Commu-nity College celebrated the official announcement of its $10 million fundraising campaign at an outdoor wine tasting and reception. Dubbed “The Campaign for Opportunity and Excellence,” it was prompted by the State’s continued cuts to college funding. Thus, two years ago the school launched the initiative to fund scholarships, improvements to existing facilities and a new science building. To date $9.3 million has been raised, and fund campaign co-chairs Jay and Barbara Kessler hope to net the remainder by the end of
the year.
Thursday, April 7
Students take it back
About 100 people showed up in Lee Park this evening to rally for Take Back the Night, an event to speak out about violence against women. The group then marched toward UVA Grounds for an 8pm candlelight vigil. There, 300 people listened as speakers anonymously shared their stories of sexual violence with the audience. “We are all stronger for working together,” said fourth-year UVA student and member of the Sexual Abuse Peer Advisor program, Annie Hylton. “I wish the administrators would come and pay attention.”
Arrest made in Belmont sexual assault
Antron Marcus Poindexter was arrested at approximately 6pm this evening on Angus Road on charges of felonious assault, robbery and attempted forcible sodomy. On April 1, the 24-year-old Gordonsville resident allegedly arrived at his ex-girlfriend’s house in the Linden Road area of Belmont and demanded sex, said Lt. Gary Pleasants. When the woman refused, she was beaten and sexually assaulted. According to Pleasants, the incident is unrelated to the case of the serial rapist.
Friday, April 8
Corrupt cop case busts open
Today Daily Progress reporter Reed Williams broke the story that two Charlottesville police officers have been indicted as the result of a two-plus-year federal investigation into local cop corruption. Details of the case emerged over the weekend, including that Charles Saunders, 46, and Roy Fitzgerald, 45, allegedly ignored illegal activities at the now-defunct Max nightclub and provided information about police prostitution investigations to its former manager, Charles M. Phillips, in exchange for money and sexual favors. Both officers have been suspended; both deny the charges.
Saturday, April 9
Dude, where’s my historic building?
Spectators who apparently didn’t have much to do today cheered as workers moved Varsity Hall, the 147-year-old UVA building believed to be the nation’s first college infirmary, to make room for new commerce school buildings behind Rouss Hall. House-moving experts loaded the structure onto flatbed trailers equipped with hydraulics to keep it level during its eight-hour, 185-foot journey. The operation—which cost $2.5 million—was denounced as foolishness by at least one person who in recent weeks posted signs around the project calling it a “waste” of taxpayer money.
Belmont gets day of beauty
The balmy morning weather made for an apt setting to “Beautify Belmont,” a community spring-cleaning event organized by the Belmont Carlton Neighborhood Association. Resident volunteers began at about 9am, picking up litter, sweeping up loose gravel from roadsides and clearing overgrowth from vacant plots. Surveying a couple truckloads of piled branches, leaves and grass clippings as the day’s activities were wrapping up, BCNA president Chris Gensic estimated that about 30 people had participated in the main Monticello Road portion and collected about 50 bags of trash.
Sunday, April 10
UVA strikes out to N.C. State
The Cavs drew season-high attendance to Davenport Field this weekend, only to see the home team lose both days to North Carolina State’s Wolfpack. UVA got spanked 6-0 on Saturday and came up short 1-0 on Sunday afternoon. The team’s overall season record stands at 21-11, with its ACC record a much more disappointing 5-8. The boys return to bat Tuesday against Norfolk State in a non-ACC home game.
Monday, April 11
Back to school
Local schoolkids likely grumbled as they trudged to the bus stop this morning, the first day of school after spring break. But take heart, kids (and beware, parents): Albemarle County’s approximately 12,300 students have just 10 more weeks of classes, while the city of Charlottesville’s 4,227 kids have only nine until summer recess.
—Compiled by Eric Rezsnyak from news sources and staff reports
Rob Bell’s serious keg stand
New law makes bar time equal jail time for underage drinkers
A new State law closes a loophole big enough to drive a tank through—or, at least big enough to get a kid tanked. House Bill 2255, sponsored by Albemarle Delegate Rob Bell and signed into law last week, makes consuming alcohol under the age of 21 or providing alcohol to the underage crowd a class I misdemeanor as of July 1. Most people consider those activities illegal already. But Bell worried that the current law actually says “possessing” underage and “purchasing” for someone underage were illegal, not “consuming” and “providing.”
The bill’s not winning kudos from UVA’s cohort of underage drinkers, but it’s hard to find politicos to argue for under-21 boozers. Like Bell’s bullying bill, the law allows the delegate to take a strong stand on an issue without any political opposition—both Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the alcohol industry (through the lobbying group Washington Regional Alcohol Program (WRAP)) pushed the bill.
“It is unlawful if someone is under 21 to possess, but the courts have never been clear if that includes possession in your stomach or blood. In some places it was worse to have beer in your hand than in your stomach,” Bell explains.
Sen. John Edwards of Roanoke was one of five senators who voted against the bill, calling it “silly” and suggesting it was frivolous.
Liz Murtagh agrees. The senior assistant public defender for Charlottesville/ Albemarle says she’s tried to exploit the technical distinction between “possessing” and “consuming” to get clients off an underage-drinking rap, but it doesn’t fly in juvenile court. “I use it all the time and lose all the time. If you have a blood test that it is in your system…that is enough to get you convicted.”
Underage drinking is a prominent issue in Virginia, where 76 percent of high school seniors and 66 percent of 10th graders said in a 2001 survey that they drank. WRAP’s Kurt Erickson emphasizes the importance of the bill by pointing to 2004 studies that showed “65 percent of people under 21 get their alcohol illegally not from retail establishments, but from individuals.”
High-profile cases of underage drinking include a pair of county parents providing alcohol for a 16-year-old’s birthday party in August 2002, and an underage UVA student falling to her death after drinking the “fourth-year fifth” in 1997.
“Alcohol dramatically changes people’s judgment. It is a danger,” Bell says. “If we can, we are trying to make sure you get to 21 before you make those choices and undertake dangerous behavior.”
The new law isn’t going down easy on UVA Grounds. Most students are unaware that they could face a year in jail for drinking underage.
“That does seem harsh. I think it’s ridiculous,” says Alex Blanchard, 19. “People get slapped on the wrist for marijuana. A year for underage drinking when it occurs on college campuses hourly? If you can send people to a foreign country to die, which is happening right now, then how can you deny them a responsible drink of an alcoholic beverage?”
Blanchard offers that he drinks, but he’s “never been caught because I’m too crafty.” He then worried that “this is probably going to hurt my future political career.”
Not necessarily. Bell recalls that he drank while underage at UVA. It hasn’t hurt his career, and another successful bill in his name can only help the wholesome young politician who, despite his expertise, still confuses a beer bong with a keg stand.—Lacey Phillabaum
Housing project
High-density developers hope Wahoos dig big-city living
An experiment is underway at UVA, and the laboratory is the Corner. Beginning this spring, local developers will start putting up a slew of high-density student apartment buildings near UVA [see table for details]. Most of the projects will start construction when students leave this summer, and are scheduled for completion by fall 2006.
The developers are taking advantage of a recent rewrite of the City’s zoning codes, which now allow a maximum density of 87 units per acre with a special use permit. Also, the new zoning laws allow developers to include less than one parking space per bedroom.
The hypothesis is that UVA students will be willing to abandon their cars—or at least park them in faraway lots such as those around University Hall—and use alternative transportation instead.
“It’s a test, but it’s the right kind of test,” says William Lucy, a UVA architecture professor who sits on the City’s planning commission. “It’s a matter of getting people in positions where they can walk, or use mass transit.”
The City claims that packing students into high-density apartments around UVA has a number of benefits. Planners say it will reduce the number of single-family homes sold to landlords for student rentals, and also reduce traffic congestion and beef up Charlottesville’s property tax revenue.
“We feel it’s a mixed blessing” says Bobbie Bruner, president of the Venable Neighborhood Association. “There’s a concern about the number of cars going in and out of the neighborhood, but there are positives. When developers put that much money into a project, they keep them well maintained.
“We’re mostly ready to accept the changes,” says Bruner. “I think people are fairly calm about it.”
Developers, however, acknowledge that there is an inherent risk in the hope that young people raised with cars in the garage will be willing to ride the bus to the grocery store.
“We all hope there’s a market out there for people who really want to rely on their vehicles a lot less,” says Rick Jones, president of Management Services Corporation. “The biggest inconvenience is that you have to get on the bus to go to the store, but that’s what people in cities do.”
As one might expect, student reaction is mixed. Joey Vide, a junior foreign affairs major, says he wouldn’t want to live without his car nearby. “I’m just not active enough,” he says.
Meanwhile, Dewey Aldinger, a graduate student in health and physical education, says he already enjoys getting around campus by walking or rollerblading. He lives in student housing near the Medical Center, and parks his car at University Hall. “It doesn’t bother me,” Aldinger says.
Developers hope the new apartments will do better than some of the student apartments that have recently gone up in Albemarle County, such as Eagle’s Landing, off Route 20S, and Sterling Place, off Fifth Street. Those units have not rented well, developers say, because they’re too far from campus. Also, developers say there’s currently a glut of student apartments in Charlottesville.
“It’s a risk. It’s new,” says Jones. “But I applaud the City for letting developers take that risk.”—John Borgmeyer
Rape in Charlottesville
Sexual assault by the numbers
An early April sexual assault in Belmont, rumors of a late March rape near the Downtown Mall and the ongoing serial rapist investigation keep wary locals—especially women—looking over their shoulders and down dark alleyways.
Such knee-jerk apprehension is a natural response when faced with such disturbing news in our back yard. But after the initial alarm, the question is raised as to whether rape and sexual assault are more of a clear and present danger here in Charlottesville than they are in other cities of comparable size.
To get an idea of how our burg compares to its counterparts nationwide, C-VILLE looked at the numbers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2003 report
on “Crime in the United States” (www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm). Each year, the report tallies the numbers and types of reported crimes in metropolitan statistical areas. For 2003, Charlottesville (and the surrounding counties of Albemarle, Greene and Nelson) reported a forcible rape rate of 39.2 victims per 100,000 residents.
That compares to a rate of 18.5 percent for Bloomington, Indiana, and 34.6 percent for Athens, Georgia—both college towns with populations similar to Charlottesville. However, Santa Fe, New Mexico—to which Charlottesville is often compared on those ever-popular “Best Places to Live” lists—has a smaller metropolitan population, but a rate of forcible rape of 58.8 victims per 100,000 residents.
When it comes to rape stats, it seems Charlottesville is just about average.
That doesn’t mean that there shouldn’t be an acute awareness of the existence of rape and sexual assault in our community. Jessica McGrane, an outreach advocate with the Sexual
Assault Resource Agency, worries that once the serial rapist is caught “that people will breathe a sigh of relief and kind of forget…that this is an issue that is always present.”
For further information on rape statistics in the Charlottesville area, the table provides the numbers gathered from both the
City and County police departments of incidents of forcible rape in both jurisdictions for the past five years.—Nell Boeschenstein
Sifting through the fallout
Comments pour in on Louisa’s proposed new nukes
People around here have strong opinions about nuclear power, as evidenced by the debate raging in C-VILLE’s Mailbag section. Since our February 22 story “30 miles to meltdown?” described plans to build two new nuclear reactors on Lake Anna in Louisa County, letters have poured in citing the potential pros and cons of more nukes in Central Virginia.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), the federal agency that oversees America’s nuclear reactors, has also been inundated with comments—the vast majority of them opposing any new reactors.
Just because people don’t want them, though, doesn’t mean they won’t get built. However, the NRC has also heard from two important government agencies—the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality—and their concerns will not be so easy to ignore.
As previously reported in C-VILLE, the Bush Administration wants to revive America’s nuclear program, starting in Louisa County. In December, Richmond-based Dominion Energy Resources, Inc. (which provides Charlottesville’s power) became the first company to receive a regulatory recommendation for a new reactor site permit.
The NRC has drafted an environmental impact statement (EIS) that declares Lake Anna suitable for two more reactors. In February, about 200 nuclear protestors and supporters packed the Louisa County Middle School auditorium to comment on the draft EIS; the NRC has also accepted written comments. The NRC will consider those comments as it prepares the final version of the EIS, due in mid-August, and the NRC will either grant or deny Dominion a site permit sometime in 2006.
You can see the comments for yourself at the NRC’s website (www.nrc.org). The vast majority seem to come from form letters or e-mail alerts circulated by anti-nuke groups like Public Citizen, Envirocitizen and the local People’s Alliance for Clean Energy.
“All the public comments are reviewed,” says Scott Burnell, a spokesman for the NRC. “Where individuals raise technical or factual issues, the staff compares them against its own information to see if any modifications need to be made.”
Both the EPA and the DEQ insist modifications to the draft EIS are, in fact, necessary.
The EPA’s four-page comment lists eight concerns the agency has about the draft EIS. The document “does not include an assessment of the energy needs…nor does it assess other energy alternatives,” the EPA says. The organization also takes issue with the draft EIS taking much of its information from Dominion’s own environmental report without independent review.
The EPA further criticizes the draft for a lack of information about air and radiological issues, consideration of unforeseen population growth in the Louisa region and information about how new reactors might impact wetlands—and how those effects would be mitigated.
While the EPA apparently has no authority over the EIS, EPA engineer Kevin Magerr says more information “would clearly be needed” before the EPA would grant Dominion the permits needed to start construction.
The DEQ’s 46-page response says Lake Anna may not be an adequate source of cooling water for another reactor, and insists that more research should be done regarding the effects of a new reactor on hydrology and biology. Also, the DEQ’s Division of Water Resources declares that it would be better to build a new reactor at Dominion’s Surry Power Station, near Jamestown.
While the NRC’s Burnell says his agency will take the EPA and DEQ comments “seriously,” the EPA’s Magerr says it’s not clear exactly how the process will unfold.
“I don’t think there’s been any new nuclear construction for at least a couple decades,” Magerr says. “All this is fairly new.”—John Borgmeyer
Power station
Despite new competition, WVIR stays atop television ratings heap—and branches out
The last two decades have been tumultuous ones for network television, which has seen its share of national audiences fall to 43 percent so far this year from 66 percent in the 1984-85 TV season. Meanwhile, cable networks have surged to a 54 percent share from barely a sliver.
Things have changed locally, too, from the rise of cable to the recent appearance of new network affiliates alongside the region’s longtime sole commercial broadcaster, NBC affiliate WVIR. And last week, WVIR made public its plans to partner with a local newspaper to collaborate on coverage of the region.
But the more things change, the more they stay the same. WVIR, which first signed on the air in 1973, remains firmly in command of the area ratings contest, according to the most recent Nielsen ratings. WVIR had a 28 percent share of weekly early morning to late-night audiences, beating its competitors by a wide margin.
Nielsen collects local ratings information using paper diary surveys distributed to households during four “sweep” months a year—November, February, May and July. In the Charlottesville market, which comprises 69,930 households in Albemarle, Fluvanna, Greene and Madison counties, WVIR’s 28 percent share of audiences between 6am and 2am, Sunday to Saturday, in the February survey compares with 5 percent for Richmond CBS affiliate WTVR, 4 percent for Washington, D.C., FOX affiliate WTTG and 3 percent each for Richmond ABC affiliate WRIC and the FOX cable news channel.
Recent market entrant WCAV, a full-power Charlottesville CBS affiliate owned by Gray Television Inc., garnered a 2 percent share. Gray’s low-power ABC affiliate, WVAW, failed to notch even a 1 percent share.
Why has WVIR continued to dominate in a radically changing business landscape? General sales manager Jim Fernald, a three-decade veteran of the station, chalks it up to “a real 7/24 commitment to localism.
“The reason we’re able to achieve these strong numbers…is localism: local news, local weather, local sports, trying to hire more people, trying to put more equipment in the field,” Fernald says.
In the February period, WVIR averaged about 7,000 adult viewers in the Charlottesville market during any given quarter-hour segment between 6am and midnight. Its newscasts—totaling four and a half hours of programming on weekdays—generally led the average, peaking at about 22,000 viewers for the 6pm news show.
Roger Burchett, general manager of WCAV and WVAV, which began broadcasting in August and launched news programs in November and last February, respectively, says his stations are currently “in the building block phase, building a rela-tionship with the peo-ple that live in Charlottesville.”
“We didn’t expect it to be a success, ratings-wise, overnight,” says Gray president Bob Prather. “You’ve got a long-time station there—and [it] has obviously done a good job over the years. We’ve got to prove to the marketplace that we can be a good community citizen and can put on a good newscast.”
Fernald says that it took WVIR a year or two to unseat the Richmond NBC affiliate—a benchmark WCAV and WVAW have yet to achieve with respect to their Richmond competitors.
If Gray has helped to alter the profile of media in Charlottesville, WVIR is shifting too through its recently announced merging of its Shenandoah Valley bureau into a shared facility with the News Virginian, Waynesboro’s Media General-owned newspaper. According to the Staunton News Leader, a Gannett Co. newspaper, WVIR General Manager Harold Wright said he expects the station eventually to also develop a formal relationship with the Charlottesville Daily Progress, another Media General newspaper.
That kind of consolidation worries public advocates concerned about independent voices in the news. But of the newly formed rivalry for community viewers between Gray and WVIR, Fernald says, “Competition is good for the viewing public.”—Harry Terris