Tuesday, April 26
County’s McKeel aims for 12 years on School Board
Diantha McKeel announced her candidacy for the Albemarle County School Board today. Jim Kennan introduced her on the steps of the County Office Building by saying if the School Board were graded, McKeel would earn straight As. If re-elected for a third four-year term, she’ll have been on the board long enough to see kids who started first grade in her first term graduate. McKeel touted her support for teachers’ raises and her work to get the school division to join the Chamber of Commerce.
Wednesday, April 27
And don’t forget to use your napkin!
Dressed in their suits and high heels, about 200 students from Albemarle High School’s career and technical education department took a field trip today to the Monticello Event and Conference Center for a professional etiquette luncheon. Guest speaker Denise Strawderman of the Paragon School of Etiquette defined etiquette as “just a fancy word for simple kindness” and said that in business, good manners would enable one to “outclass your competitor.” Delores Johnson, who owns the Monticello Event and Conference Center, had some advice from the stage, too: Don’t chew with your mouth open, don’t slurp, and with silverware, “start from the outside and work your way in.”
Thursday, April 28
And they all have those itty-bitty book lights
Organizers of the Virginia Festival of the Book announced today that attendance hit a record high in 2004 with 22,874 people at 200+ events during four days in March. Festival Program Director Nancy Damon says attendance has doubled in the past six years. “I am hoping by now that when people come and they haven’t heard of authors on a panel, they will trust that anything we are going to do is going to be good just from the previous quality,” she says.
Want to drink the water?
Dominion Virginia Power announced the new safety accreditation for North Anna Power Station today, granted by Virginia’s Department of Labor and Industry in the same week that Congress advanced the energy bill that could further the company’s interest in more nuke plants. Dominion’s way of “maintaining an outstanding industrial safety culture” earned the commendation. “We do not have an ulterior motive,” company spokesperson Richard Zuercher says, about releasing the news. And what exactly is safety culture? “I think safety culture means that people across the station are all thinking and working in such ways [that] they have safety in mind,” he says.
Friday, April 29
Kenyan hero addresses Cavs
For a woman with 200,000 street kids to safeguard as her life’s work, Jackie Chege came across today as remarkably tranquil. Chege founded the Watoto Village program in Nairobi, Kenya, which offers housing, health care and education to street kids. Presenting slides to 20 people at UVA’s Women’s Center, she took viewers into the endless Nairobi slums, and described rivers of sewage and “child-headed families.” Chege started volunteering with street kids as a 12-year old. She’s been doing the work so long that she says, “Even when I go back home, I go to sleep on the streets.”
Saturday, April 30
Foxfield, mud field…who cares?
Despite the rain (which, gratefully, ceased as the gates opened), sundresses, galoshes, spirits and high spirits were the order of the day at the Foxfield Races. The steeplechase races, founded in 1978, raised funds for the Music Resource Center this year. New to the races today: the three-mile Albemarle Hurdle, won by High Watermark, a moniker that perhaps could have been twisted to apply to some of the bystanders by day’s end.
Sunday, May 1
Fall into the gap
City schools remain the topic du jour as The Daily Progress unloads a boatload of unhappy statistics in a front-page story this morning and participants from yesterday’s “Community Forum on the Achievement Gap” debrief. Yesterday’s forum, attended by about 150 people, was the first of three free, open events to be put on by a group led by Rev. Alvin Edwards of Mt. Zion First Baptist Church. “We are here to define the achievement gap,” he said at the start. “If you came for any other purpose, this is not the place for it.”
Monday, May 2
Grant throws his helmet in the ring
Today former Albemarle School Board member Gary Grant is scheduled to announce that he is seeking the Republican nomination for the Rio District seat on Albemarle’s Board of Supervisors. David Bowerman, who has held the seat for 16 years, won’t run again, and Grant will challenge businessman Tom Jakubowski. Grant pledges “open government,” but how will he deal with negative publicity? As a member of the School Board, he once donned a helmet to deflect criticism.
—Compiled by Cathy Harding from staff reports and news sources.
Back to the drawing board
Touring the sister-city art show with Blake Caravati
“How the hell did they build that bridge? What did they use it for?”
These questions seem perfectly apt coming from a man who concerns himself with construction for a living. And when the speaker, Blake Caravati, is not busy exhorting his fellow City Councilors with his trademark string of colloquialisms, he works as a contractor. But as he asks these questions he is not viewing a city beautification project or site plans from a nearby locality.
Caravati is looking at a 17th-century drawing by the Dutch artist Herman van Swanevelt. Titled “Paysage animé avec un torrent dans un site de rochers,” meaning “Landscape with a Waterfall Among the Rocks,” it’s a typical Italianate-style landscape scene with tiny country figures in the foreground and a castle and bridge in the distance. The van Swanevelt piece, in pen and brown ink, is one of 62 works from a fine old French museum that are now on display at the UVA Art Museum through June 5. And in the comprehensive show, featuring everybody from Bruegel and Mantegna to Courbet and Matisse, Caravati has the ideal medium to let his inner art lover, not to mention Francophone, shine through.
The art show is the splashiest manifestation so far of Charlottesville’s official sibling tie to Besançon, a town of about 120,000 in the Franch-Conté region of France in the Jura Mountains. It is a place, Caravati says in his unofficial capacity as the booster of the French sister-city project, which resembles Charlottesville in many ways. They have a pedestrian mall; we have a pedestrian mall. Victor Hugo and Colette spent time there; Edgar Allan Poe and William Faulkner spent time here. The topography is similar in both places. The Lumiere Brothers, who hail from Besançon, invented movies; we show them at the Virginia Film Festival.
But one thing Besançon has that Charlottesville does not is a collection of 5,000 masterpiece drawings that is second only to the Louvre’s collection and that is housed in their museum, the oldest in France. To partially cover that deficit, the UVA Art Museum raised $100,000 to transport and display the small fraction of Besançon’s drawings in the current show. Forty percent of the money came from UVA. The City kicked in $5,000, and the remainder came from private donors. Jill Hartz, the museum’s director who has the fundraising for her impending new building very much on her mind, says the show gives her institution a huge boost. “It’s a wake-up call,” she says. “We’re in the big leagues.”
The exhibit awakens some new notions of who’s working for Charlottesville’s citizens, too, at least when it comes to viewing it with Caravati. Andrea Mantegna’s 15th-century “Portrait of a Man” is among his favorites in the show, Caravati says. “If you look at his dress, his hat, nose and facial features—what did that guy do?
“Maybe because he’s Italian,” Caravati, a Roman Catholic originally from Richmond, continues. “That might be what draws me to him. Tall, dark and handsome.”
A discussion of Henri Matisse’s “Self Portrait with a Pipe” from 1919 unveils Caravati’s close association with France. He launches into an appreciative description of the Matisse House in Nice. “You feel like you’re in your own house,” he concludes. Gustave Courbet’s “Rural Nap” doesn’t do much for him, but Jean-Louis David’s “Portrait of Napoleon in his Office” sparks reflection on the diminutive one’s relationship to Josephine. “He was winning three major campaigns. He’d come home and write seven letters to Josephine,” Caravati says. “He was very smitten by her.”
“Smitten” might overstate Caravati’s feelings for France, but just barely. It’s clear that the former Sorbonne and University of Geneva student who boasts that he worked illegally as a wine steward in Murren, Switzerland one summer and whose graduate work was in French and international relations is enamored of la vie francaise. He cites the language, the culture and the history. And he justifies his attachment by way of politics, too. “A lot of our country, when we started, came from Great Britain and France,” he says.
Besançon is one of three international cities to have special friendships with Charlottesville, but for now the French relationship is sure to overwhelm ties to the others, Poggio a Ciano, in Italy and Pleven, in Bulgaria. That’s because, as Caravati points out, the others lack a current champion. Former Mayor Maurice Cox, who spent a decade as a young architect in Florence, was hot for Poggio when he was in office. And though Pleven may have a present-day defender in City Manager Gary O’Connell, according to Caravati, the overall commitment seems a little thin. As Caravati puts it, “I’m too old to learn Bulgarian.”—Cathy Harding
What’s up with the County subdivision ordinance?
Developers run into rules and object On Wednesday, April 20, the Albemarle Board of Supervisors adopted new rules governing the design of County subdivisions.
The revised subdivision ordinance is a “response to the changing urban character” of Albemarle, says County Planning Director Mark Graham. From now on, all new subdivisions must have curbs, gutters, sidewalks, and trees planted between the sidewalk and the road. That means no more subdivisions on the model of Glenmore, Carrsbrook and Forest Lakes.
“It all goes back to the County trying to avoid expanding its development area as much as possible, and to protect its rural areas,” says Graham.
To do that, the County planners want developers to build in a “New Urbanist” style. New Urbanism attempts to address the transportation, land use and social problems of suburbia by building neighborhoods that mimic those constructed before the prevalence of car culture. New Urbanist neighborhoods are supposed to be more compact than conventional subdivisions, with interconnected streets and sidewalks to make foot travel easier.
The new subdivision ordinance is the result of nearly three years of back and forth between developers and planners. In a November 2004 letter to former County Supervisor Lindsey Dorrier, Blue Ridge Home Builders Association President Buddy Carlisle outlined his organization’s disapproval of many provisions of the new ordinance.
Carlisle’s biggest problem with the new ordinance was the requirement that developers submit a grading plan for the entire subdivision. It was an attempt to limit the amount of water running over lots after heavy rains, but ultimately the Board of Supervisors removed it for reconsideration.
Still, the new ordinance does include a provision that developers say is unfair.
In an effort to eliminate cul-de-sacs, the new ordinance demands that new subdivisions be interconnected. It requires developers to extend streets to their subdivision’s property line.
Frank Stoner, of Stonehaus Development, says the interconnectivity requirement is a dodge on the part of the County to avoid the tough political choice of building connections after a neighborhood is already established—such as the recent strife to approve a connector on Hillsdale Drive in the city. Residents protested the increased traffic a connector would bring, demonstrating that it’s much easier to join neighborhoods before people move in.
Stoner, though, says the interconnectivity provision could be abused. If two developers planned to build on adjacent properties, Stoner says one could just sit back and wait for the other to do all the connection work. “It creates an unlevel playing field,” he says.
Neil Williamson, director of the Free Enterprise Forum, goes one step further, saying the connectivity provision could provoke a lawsuit. “I haven’t heard about anything specific,” says Williamson, “but
I wouldn’t be surprised if it were tested
in court.”
The larger debate over the subdivision ordinance concerns the County’s intentions to channel growth into development areas (basically the town of Crozet and the urban ring around Charlottesvile) and away from rural areas. Developers contend that the County’s New Urbanist policy is so cumbersome, that it actually encourages development in the rural areas, where restrictions are comparatively lax.
“I don’t see evidence of that,” says County Planning Director Graham. He cites the fact that rural homes cost more than suburban houses. “This seems to say we have two distinct market segments. People do not move to the rural area because they couldn’t afford a house in the development area,” he says.
Williamson avers. According to County records, in 2004 there were 599 building permits issued for single-family detached homes. Of those, 268 were in the growth areas while 333 were in the rural areas, a fact that Williamson says indicates builders are seeking out rural lots.—John Borgmeyer
Why not play in traffic instead?
City School Board applicants few
Who in their right mind would want to sit their keisters on the hot seats of the Charlottesville City Board of Education?
It’s been a long couple of years for the city school system. In 2002 the board lined up three candidates for the job of superintendent, but after an extensive interview process and a public ranking of candidates before the job had been offered to No. 1, all three turned down the chance to come to here. The school board finally hired Dr. Scottie Griffin as superintendent on July 1, but on April 21 accepted her resignation after controversy overwhelmed her leadership.
City Council will soon appoint three new School Board members to the seven-member body. Their terms will begin July 1. Their first responsibility will be to conduct another superintendent search. With parents, teachers and City officials anxious for success, is anyone willing to step into the game?
So far, only two are.
One is David Randle, a lawyer who attended Charlottesville High School, UVA and Stanford and now works as a consultant for Ridgeview Capital Partners. On his application, Randle, a 45-year-old volunteer lacrosse and soccer coach, says, “I grew up in this community and believe I know it well. I would provide vision and leadership on the board based on my understanding of this community.”
The second applicant is Kenneth Jackson, a 38-year-old temp worker at Venturi Staffing Partners. Jackson has been on the board of the Quality Community Council and presided over the Ridge Street Neighborhood Association; in 2004 he ran an unsuccessful bid for City Council as a Republican candidate.
Last Friday the outspoken Jackson sent C-VILLE his take on the Griffin debacle. Jackson targeted his outrage at UVA professor and NAACP president Rick Turner, who was quoted in The Daily Progress on April 23 as saying, “The black community did not support Dr. Scottie Griffin.”
“Being a fellow black citizen of this community for the 38 years of my life,” Jackson wrote, “as well as being a parent of a so-called ‘achievement gapper’ myself, I must say, you and Dr. Griffin did not support us.
“We have not seen you in our neighborhoods,” he continues. “You have not asked our input… Instead you took it upon yourself with a handful of black individuals… to speak for us…”
The terms of current School Board members Peggy Van Yahres, Bill Igbani and Byron Brown end June 30. Brown says he will not seek reappointment; the others have not yet disclosed their intentions.
City Council Clerk Jeanne Cox says it’s unusual to have so few applicants at this stage. “I would call it low,” she says. “Usually people see in the press that there’s not many candidates, then they’ll apply”
Meanwhile, the Griffin disaster has prompted many to question the City’s method for assembling a school board. City officials have long defended the status quo, saying an appointed board does more to ensure racial diversity. Regardless, momentum is building to switch to an elected school board, like the majority of Virginia’s school divisions.
UVA history professor Jeffery Rossman, a prominent Democrat and a fixture at recent school board meetings, is spearheading a petition to switch to an elected school board.
“We’ve got about 15 people out collecting signatures,” Rossman says. “I think it could allow for greater responsiveness from the school board, and more transparency about what their priorities are.”
Advocates need 2,145 signatures by August 8 to get a referendum for an elected school board on the ballot in November.
“I plan to touch base with everyone around June 1,” says Rossman. “I hope we have at least half the signatures we need. If we’re way short of that, it might indicate the interest isn’t there.”—John Borgmeyer
More bark than bite?
Mundie’s was the first conviction in two years of Rob Bell’s dog-fighting law
With the fancy new SPCA and dog lovers coming out of the woodwork with each new leash law controversy, there’s no question Charlottesville loves its canines. So, when Whitehall resident Davey Mundie was convicted on felony dog fighting charges on April 20 in the Albemarle Circuit Court, there was virtual cheering in the streets.
In the early morning of January 1, 2005, Norma Lively called the cops on Mundie after witnessing her 27-year-old neighbor fight his dogs in a brightly lighted makeshift ring off Pea Ridge Road in the Garth Road area. According to court testimony, Mundie owned one pitbull, and was caring for four others, all of whom he had raised to fight. Lively testified against Mundie on April 20.
Mundie’s conviction was the first in the area under a March 2003 bill sponsored by Eagle Scout Del. Rob Bell (R-Albemarle). It upped the dog-fighting ante from a misdemeanor to a felony offense, meaning that the maximum penalty for each count is now five years. (Forty-seven states classify dog-fighting as a felony.) Bell’s bill includes additional preventative measures that make it illegal to own, train, transport or sell a dog with the intent to use it for fighting.
For the average Joe, it’s a hard bill to argue with: You like fluffy puppies? You like this bill. But even as local dog lovers breathe a collective sigh of relief that a bad guy is behind bars, the question lingers as to why, in the two years since the bill passed, there has only been one such conviction in the area. Especially when, judging by anecdotes, dog fighting persists as a problem.
The anecdotal evidence largely consists of the numbers of pit bulls in area shelters and the number of those pits sporting cuts and scars around their head and neck and, perhaps, an attitude problem. These are often indicators that a dog has fought and been raised to do so. It’s getting to the point, says Susanne Kogut, executive director of the Charlottesville-Albemarle SPCA, that where there are pits, there’s probably a problem.
Using the Web, results suggest prevalent fighting problems. On petfinder.org, if you enter 22902 for the zip code and make a quick search for “pit bull,” 450 results pop up. These numbers don’t surprise Kogut, who adds that around 50 pit bulls have passed through the Charlottesville SPCA since January. That adds up to about 200 annually. (By way of comparison, approximately 600 dogs have been registered in the City of Charlottesville since January.)
Dog fighting may be a serious crime that needs to be sternly addressed, but other than relying on the fluke of tips from neighbors, it’s unclear how to crack down on it. When the dogs arrive at animal shelters, the crime has already been committed. The victims can’t talk and turn the criminals in, so there’s often nothing that can be done, no matter what authorities may suspect.
Moreover, in the grand scheme of things, dog fighting is a mid-level crime. Bell himself echoes the sentiments of avowed dog lover and Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Camblos (prosecuting attorney in the Mundie case) and City animal control officer Bobby Durrer, when Bell says that as a crime, dog fighting is “less important than murder, robbery, aggravated battery but more important than simple trespassing.”
While laws on the books may be tough on dog fighting, enforcing those laws is where problems arise. Kogut, from the SPCA, is behind Bell’s bill all the way, but she has some ideas for how to go further with it. She suggests increasing penalties, as well as control of the pit bull population, perhaps by requiring all the pits to be spayed or neutered.
“Or why not a special license for breeding?” she asks.
Rob Bell has heard such breed-specific arguments before but says it’s difficult and controversial to legislate. When it comes to putting someone in jail for a felony, he says, it has to be because of “conduct you’re trying to stop, as opposed to everyday conduct that falls within the law.” Under normal circumstances dog breeding can be a benevolent activity.—Nell Boeschenstein
Think global, click local
Ten years later, Monticello Avenue still gives local nonprofits a foothold on the Web
As Monticello Avenue, the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library’s nonprofit Web hosting and online community directory service, approaches its 10th year of existence, the Internet is a vastly different place than the program encountered at its outset.
In fact, it’s hard to remember what the Internet was like at all a decade ago, with the Web having “become the ‘new normal,’” as it has been couched by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. That organization has tracked the percentage of adults using the Internet to rising to more than 60 percent currently from somewhere between 10 percent and 20 per-cent in early 1995.
But when leaders from UVA, JMRL, the governments of Charlottesville and Albemarle County, and other commercial and local organizations conceived Monticello Avenue, it was primordial stuff. Monticello Avenue was vital in promoting the development of a user base and spurring private service providers to build a high-speed infrastructure, and transforming Charlottesville into a wired community. It gave ordinary citizens free access to the Internet through banks of terminals in JMRL’s Central Library branch, and populated the Web with community sites that galvanized broad, civic embrace of a new media then finding its way to the informational and transactional applications that now seem essential conveniences.
Now, the center of the conversation on digital infrastructure has moved elsewhere—to Philadelphia’s plan to provide ubiquitous wireless Internet access across its 135 square miles, to Virginia Tech’s eCorridors program and related initiatives to create a state-of-the-art telecommunications backbone to protect rural Virginia from economic isolation, and to vicious turf battles waged by large commercial operators against rapidly multiplying municipal initiatives. But the core issue remains the same: universal access and opportunity.
Monticello Avenue currently hosts almost 200 nonprofit organizations based in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, according to Stella Pool, who has served as the program’s director since 1998. Offering free server space and Web development training to nonprofits, schools and government agencies with a local presence, Monticello Avenue’s clients range from neighborhood associations to philanthropic organizations like Habitat for Humanity, and the National Ground Intelligence Center, a recent addition. Monticello Avenue also maintains a comprehensive directory of area websites at avenue.org, covering local businesses, job opportunities and health resources, among other things, and creating a piece of virtual localism within the global Internet.
“Organizing information and making it accessible to the community is what librarians do and what Monticello does,” says Pool. “For nonprofit organizations in the Charlottesville-Albemarle area whose resources are already stretched fairly thin, we are that grassroots entry into the World Wide Web. We make it feasible for them to have a Web presence when they might not otherwise have that opportunity.”
JMRL has also broadly expanded its electronic offerings outside Monticello Avenue, including prodigious full text periodical databases available to patrons accessing its website at jmrl.org from home. (The archives of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are available online at no cost, for instance.) And it recently introduced free wireless connectivity at its central branch. Library director John Halliday expects the wireless service to be expanded to all branches in the next year or two.
Glen Bull, a professor at UVA’s Curry School of Education who was closely involved in Monticello Avenue’s formation, points to stark economic and sociological gaps in Internet usage—and
the importance of home access to educational development—as reasons that make such programs necessary. “We think it’s extremely important to use things like Monticello Avenue and the things that will hopefully come after to bridge the digital divide,” he says.
Robert “Chip” German, former chair of the executive committee that steered Monticello Avenue’s formation, and now the chief information officer at the University of Mary Washington, says, “The notion was to level the playing field a little bit to provide the talent and understanding [needed] to put your content online and distributing that talent—making it available to nonprofit organizations which might not have otherwise had the means to go exploring in those territories.”
The program’s continued existence, he says, is a “real testimony especially to the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library folks who have kept it healthy and alive over the years.”—Harry Terris