Tuesday, May 31
In Charlottesville, even the Republicans are progressive
While politicians in the rest of Virginia make a beeline for the right-wing, here in Charlottesville even the Republican candidate wants to be “progressive.” Today city Republican Tom McCrystal, 44, announced his candidacy for the 57th House of Delegates seat to be vacated by Mitch Van Yahres. Democrats on June 14 will decide which of three candidates McCrystal will face on November 8. A former GOP precinct chair in the Tonsler precinct, McCrystal says he’s running as a…progressive? “I think I’m squarely in the center,” he says. “Progressives are for the little guy. I think people who turn ‘progressive’ into a code word for liberal are taking something that isn’t theirs.”
Man sentenced to four months for hit-and-run
Robert Steven Newell was sentenced in Albemarle Circuit Court to four months in jail for a November collision on Earlysville Road, which killed 19-year-old Martha Jones. Jones had already crashed her car, but had made her way out a window and onto the road when Newell struck her. He left the scene of the accident and turned himself in to the police one week later. The Daily Progress reported that Judge J. Howe Brown called the case a great tragedy for both families involved.
Wednesday, June 1
38 seniors have nothing to show for their city education
Responding to Memorial Day absenteeism, which was eight times above normal, the Charlottesville School Board tonight voted 5-1 to retain Memorial Day as a holiday next year, protecting it from becoming a snow make-up day again. The meeting, marked by a newfound cooperative spirit, also brought disturbing news from the high school: Of the 218 seniors in the Class of 2005, some 38, or 17 percent, will not graduate. Factors contributing to this alarming statistic include absences, insufficient standard credits, failure to meet Standards of Learning and dropping out.
Thursday, June 2
Protestors decry pipeline
More than 70 people lined up in their rain jackets and huddled under umbrellas at the Scottsville Farmer’s Market this afternoon to sign a petition against the proposed James River pipeline. The protesters say the pipeline—one of four proposals the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority is considering to increase Charlottesville’s water supply—would encourage unwanted development along Route 20, lead to increased water pollution and negatively affect those whose livelihoods depend on the river. Its estimated building cost is $49.9 million. The protesters heard from speakers and later, on the count of 3, the crowd yelled, “Stop the pipeline!” as a banner went up on the bridge across
the James.
Friday, June 3
See it now, while it’s still old
Yesterday the National Trust for Historic Preservation put a 175-mile portion of Route 15 and Route 20—running from Gettysburg, Pennsylvania to Charlottesville —on this year’s list of the nation’s most endangered historic places. The journey includes six presidential homes, among them Monticello, and important Civil
War battlefields such as Antietam and Manassas. The threat is growth. That area has lost 150,000 acres of farmland since the early 1980s, as the population along the route has doubled. Speaking to The Washington Post, National Trust President Richard Moe said, “I think there is more significant history in this corridor than any comparable space in America.”
Saturday, June 4
Beachward, ho!
The sun came out in earnest midday and, lo and behold, Charlottesville had a beach day on its hands. Plenty of locals headed to one of Albemarle’s “beaches,” really, lakes with sand, at Chris Greene Lake, Mint Springs and Walnut Creek. “I want to get a tan, I reckon, relax and enjoy myself,” said Greene County resident Troy Morris about why he had joined the beach-goers for this official opening weekend. Albemarle’s beaches are open through Labor Day.
Sunday, June 5
UVA’s Zimmerman the next Ripken?
Though a loss to the Ohio State Buckeyes yesterday squashed UVA baseball’s NCAA run, the season could finish on a high note for Ryan Zimmerman, who’s being touted today as a hot prospect when Major League Baseball’s supplemental draft begins Tuesday. The Washington Nationals are taking a close look at him, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch. And an unnamed scout paid Zimmerman a high compliment, saying he’s “one of the best defensive third basemen I’ve scouted in all my years.” The scout added, “But don’t be surprised if he moves to shortstop. With his athleticism, he could be a Cal Ripken-type.”
Monday, June 6
StoryCorps catches local tales
It’s been one week since the StoryCorps trailer parked on the Downtown Mall. One of the more fascinating stories so far is how Brian Korbon Field in McIntire Park got its name. Korbon was 9 years old when he died during a baseball game there 12 years ago. According to his parents, Brian foresaw his death in the months leading up to the game, and he left goodbye notes on the day he died. “He wrote that he was going away for a trip, and that everything was O.K.,” said his father, Gregg, who recorded his son’s story in the trailer with his wife, Kathryn, on June 2. StoryCorps, a project of National Public Radio, hopes to collect 100 stories from Charlottesville before leaving on June 13 to continue the tour of the East Coast. Some 250,000 stories will eventually be housed in the Library of Congress.
Written by John Borgmeyer from staff reports and news sources.
Dr. Moreno’s House call
Stem-cell reversal in Congress tied to UVA ethicist
Usually you’d figure the last person Congress wants to hear from is an ethicist. Yet it seems some of our Representatives are taking the advice of UVA bioethics professor Jonathan Moreno quite seriously.
Moreno co-chaired a committee from the National Academies (sort of a public think tank that assembles experts to inform the government and the public on matters of engineering, science and medicine) that in April released a report setting guidelines for human embryonic stem-cell research. Even though the rules are voluntary, the 131-page report represents the first attempt to move the United States another step forward in establishing protocols for stem-cell research.
Embryonic stem cells are extracted from unused frozen embryos in fertility clinics. The embryonic stem cells can give rise to all of the body’s 200 or so cell types, including nerve, liver, skin, bone, heart muscle and pancreas. This makes the cells uniquely useful in studying spinal cord injuries, heart disease, Parkinson’s and diabetes.
Christian conservatives—championed by President Bush and his Republican buddy Speaker of the House Tom DeLay—have raised moral objections to a method of research that, they say, demands the sacrifice of human life. “The best that can be said about this research is that it is scientific exploration into the potential benefits of killing human beings,” DeLay told The Washington Post on Wednesday, May 25.
The National Academies’ report is all the more significant because it preceded a surprising vote in the House of Representatives: 50 Republicans broke with Bush and DeLay and passed a bill repealing some federal restrictions on stem-cell research on May 24. In August 2001, Bush put strict limits on federal funding for stem-cell research, a move critics labeled as a triumph of religious dogma over sound, ethical science. The May 24 vote came down 238 to 194 in favor of reversing those restrictions.
Moreno calls the vote “re-markable,” but notes that the Senate has not yet voted on the bill. Bush has vowed to veto it, which could be a first in his four and a half years in office.
Ironically, Moreno says, federal opposition to embryonic stem-cell research actually opens the door for ethical abuses. Without federal funding, there’s no federal oversight, and so companies that choose to proceed with embryonic stem-cell research do so without a clear ethical standard.
“It basically leaves the industry to its own devices,” says Moreno. “If you withdraw funding, you remove the American people from knowing what’s going on.”
As an example, Moreno cites the issue of in vitro fertilization. The Reagan Admin-istration ignored it, and the industry developed without public oversight. Now it’s common for the eggs of an Ivy League graduate to fetch $50,000. “It raises some policy questions about medical services that put people at risk when money is changing hands,” says Moreno. “Poten-tially people could be exploited.”
Moreno supports getting the National Institutes of Health (the leading federal agency for medical research) more involved in embryonic stem-cell research. With federal guidance, the United States could move forward scientifically to meet countries like South Korea, Israel, Great Britain and Canada, where research is proceeding apace. In the meantime, he hopes that universities, state governments and private research firms will adopt the guidelines as they push forward, with or without federal funding.
Even if the rules are voluntary, Moreno says it’s unlikely that researchers would flout them. The rules create a community standard that image-conscious institutions will be wary of violating. “Venture capitalists don’t want to go with companies that might get sued or shut down,” Moreno says.
The National Academies’ guidelines say, for example, that embryonic cells should be freely donated by both parents. The rules also set limits on the manufacture of chimeras—creatures composed of human and animal cells—limiting, for example, injection of human embryonic cells into primates as well as any chimera that could give rise to a human-like brain. Any experiment that results in a human embryo developing inside an animal’s uterus should also be banned, says the report.
The report suggests that after being donated freely by the mother and father, the embryos should be cultured for no longer than 14 days, the point at which the human nervous system begins to form. The report’s key recommendation is that all institutions researching embryonic stem cells set up independent oversight bodies to evaluate proposed experiments.
Although the guidelines are sensitive to ethical questions, they do not attempt to resolve the religious questions that are more akin to politics than science. After reading DeLay’s quote in the Post, Moreno said, “I’m not sure he knows what he’s talking about, technically.”—John Borgmeyer
Read the National Academies’ guidelines on embryonic stem-cell research at http:// books.nap.edu/catalog/11278.html.
NoVa, here we come!
Is the Loudounization of Albemarle an imminent threat?
Huddled together underneath a tent in the center of Scottsville on a recent rainy Thursday, a group of concerned citizens donned their “Stop the Pipeline” t-shirts and raised their voices in opposition to the proposed James River pipeline. The pipeline, they say, is not good planning. Rather, it’s a precursor to unplanned growth.
Taking the microphone to welcome the crowd and rile them up on June 2, Jeff Werner of the Piedmont Environmental Council bellowed, “Don’t let us become the next Loudoun County!”
The crowd applauded and bobbed their heads in agreement.
Lately, as the commercial monster of Route 29N creeps ever northward, “Don’t let us become the next Loudoun County” has become a familiar chant among those concerned about Albemarle’s long-term future.
Loudoun County (everything from Dulles Airport to the horse farms of Middleburg) is the fastest growing county in the United States. Before Dulles opened in 1962, Loudoun County had a population of about 20,000 and was primarily rural. By 2001, its population had swelled to 200,000, doubling in the past decade alone.
Overwhelmed, Loudoun voters elected a slow-growth board of supervisors in 1999. This board passed strict building limits allowing for only 10,000 new homes. Developers took the limits straight to court and the rules were thrown out this March. With pre-limit zoning back in place, the county is potentially zoned for at least 37,000 new houses, though a compromise is in the works.
Moreover, frustrated that the slow-growth board had not eased Loudoun’s growing pains, citizens put in a Repub-lican-led, pro-growth board in 2004. The result was political stalemate.
Therefore, when people refer to the “Loudounization” of Albemarle, they’re referring to one of two possible concerns: exponential growth or a political standoff.
Sally Thomas, a member of the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, dispels concern of a similar political situation here. Because Albemarle elects only half its board every two years, instead of the entire board every four years as Loudoun does, Albemarle avoids the wild political swings to which Loudoun has been prone, she says.
The sprawl up there is the eyesore, however. Luckily, due to the simple facts that Dulles is not part of the Albemarle equation and there’s no D.C. octopus nearby to dispatch its tentacles into our farmlands, Albemarle’s growth potential is not nearly on the scale of Loudoun.
The two counties may operate on different scales, but Albemarle still expands. The steady 2 percent growth rate for the past 10 years means the county’s population could double every 32 years if the pattern holds.
Thus, says Jack Marshall, president of Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population (ASAP), “Population growth is not a false fear here in Albemarle County. We are no longer in a position of having an unbridled frontier.”
Marshall suggests planning ahead for optimum population growth by putting caps on the population. These caps, he says, are already implied in zoning laws. They’re not intended to keep people out of the county, as some ASAP critics allege, but to pace the county’s growth.
The issue of population control is a sticky one. Neil Williamson, executive director of the Free Enterprise Forum, which is pro-growth and often speaks for the Chamber of Commerce, considers such options elitist.
“I am opposed to digging a moat around the county and keeping new residents out,” he says, adding that he thinks the county is already working well to accommodate disparate growth interests.
When development talk turns philosophical, things can get interesting. After all, who can see into the future? Who would have pre-dicted 20 years ago, for instance, that a three-bedroom house in Bel-mont would sell for more than $200,000?
Thomas says that, pragmatically speaking, people can only plan 20 years at a time (coincidentally, the time frame that Albe-marle attaches to its master planning process). But be it planning for 20 years hence or 100, Jim Burton, a member of the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, warns Albemarle that even if certain circumstances differ, we should nonetheless take heed if we don’t want to go the way of Loudoun.
“Set in place rules and regulations now that will keep things under control,” he says. “Hopefully, you’re already in the process of doing that.”—Nell Boeschenstein
Bidding Big Mouth Pizza goodbye
At the public auction, one man’s misfortune was another man’s jackpot
The parmesan cheese shakers are still half-full. They’re clumped on a shelf with the roasted red pepper, salt and pepper shakers, an ashtray and a small shell tchotchke with the words “Big Mouth Pizza” written across the figurine’s “mouth.” Collectively, this is Lot No. 34.
There are crumbs in the crevices of the Sunfire gas stove (Lot No. 48) and the floor could use a good mopping. The lucky bidder on Lot No. 57 will take home the contents of both bathrooms, including the unemptied trash cans, and three half-used rolls of toilet paper.
An itemized list compiled by the City Sheriff’s Department of everything up for auction is available at the front door for the deal hunters as they file in.
This is a public auction: The end of the road for small bus-iness owners who default on their rent payments.
Big Mouth Pizza on W. Main Street, owned by Frank Cramblitt, officially closed four months ago when its landlords, Main Street Associates (owned by Allan Cadgene and Gabe Silverman), filed a civil suit in Charlottesville General District Court. The suit claimed the pizza joint owed $25,762.10 in unpaid rent from October 2003 to February 2005. The resulting judgment found in favor of Cadgene and Silverman, ordering a public auction (administered through the City Sheriff’s office) of all Big Mouth inventory to help pay Cramblitt’s debt.
The auction isn’t set to begin until noon, but Jack Davis has been sitting outside since 11am. He’s a sales rep for a restaurant supply company based in Waynesboro and sold Cramblitt much of Big Mouth’s kitchen equipment when the restaurant opened. Today, however, he’s looking to buy that merchandise back at a sweet deal.
Asked about whether he has sympathy for his former client, Davis shrugs.
“That’s the way of life,” he says. “Some people make it, some people don’t.”
Sharon Johnson agrees. She comes to auctions like this all the time in search of a deal, especially on anything electronic. TVs, computers, CD players. She’ll buy any number of electronics so long as they’re cheap. If she can’t use another
TV, she’ll pass it on to her church “or the next person.”
“I’m just a scavenger,” she says smiling. “I like to see what they got.”
The auction starts promptly at noon. Deputy M.T. Greene reads the terms and conditions of the sale, before opening the bidding at $1,000 for Lot No. 1: The entire contents of the whole business.
“$1,000. Do I hear $1,000?”
Cadgene nods his head, but a man quickly outbids him across the room. Cadgene raises to $3,000. The man across the room counters again. Within two minutes the price has risen to $8,000, Cadgene being the last bidder.
“$8,500? Do I hear $8,500?” asks Deputy Greene.
There’s a moment of shocked silence before Deputy Greene seals the deal with a booming, “Sold for $8,000!”
The 20 or so hopefuls look like they don’t know what hit them as Cadgene heads over to another deputy manning the door. He writes the check on the spot.
Johnson breaks the semi-silence with a laugh. “That was a quick sale!” she says, shaking her head and walking out.
Within minutes almost everyone has dispersed. Cadgene paces the driveway talking on his cellphone. When he hangs up, he looks pleased.
The plan is to put another restaurant in the space, he explains. Buying the whole shebang gives him and Silverman a ready-made space to offer “about three” interested parties.
As for the legal tangle, says Cadgene, forget the rent aspect of the equation and Big Mouth still wasn’t turning a profit. But this marks the end of the road for Main Street Associates LLC v. Big Mouth LLC.
“It’s not worth pursuing,” he says. “[Cramblitt] just doesn’t have the money.”—Nell Boeschenstein
Quick, close the door!
Goode takes a hard line on Virginia’s 100,000 illegal immigrants—again
Immigration policy has returned to the front of the national political discourse. Having become entwined with the debate over national security in the wake of 9/11, immigration measures have swung pivotal legislative fights. And on the general issue of what to do about the country’s large and growing undocumented population—estimated at around 10 million—President Bush’s decision to steer toward somewhere in the middle ground with his “guest worker” proposal has revealed deep fissures in the Republican Party.
Virgil Goode, Charlottesville’s Congress-ional representative, has made restricting immigration a pillar of his political career. “Illegal immigrants take jobs from our citizens. I’m working to stop illegal immigration and secure America’s borders,” he proclaims on his campaign website. Goode regularly gets perfect marks for his voting record from anti-im-migration advocacy groups. He has co-sponsored bills cutting back legal immigration and a resolution to amend the Constitution to restrict citizenship from children born in the United States whose parents are not legal residents.
When Bush announced in January 2004 his proposal to grant renewable, three-year “guest worker” status to illegal immigrants, Goode was a visible member of the opposition. “It’s a glide path to a green card and citizenship,” Goode tells C-VILLE. “It encourages persons who are here illegally to get a reward… That’s the wrong message to be sending persons. If you’re here illegally, the only way you can come into the United States is go back and get in line with everyone else. Or if you’re in a guest worker program, you got to go back to your home country and apply in that country for a guest worker program.”
Goode describes his position as “no amnesty for illegals, period.”
“There’s a general rec-ognition by people on both sides of the immigration debate that there’s an urgent need for comprehensive immigration re-form,” says Tim Freilich, managing attorney with the Virginia Justice Center for Farm and Immigrant Workers. “You have people who tend to favor enforcement over providing a more balanced system that ensures there is
a path to legalization
for immigrants, rather than just a boundless supply of labor for employers.”
Early last month Senators John McCain, an Arizona Republican, and Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, introduced legislation in line with Bush’s temporary work-permit idea and which created a path to permanent residency and citizenship.
In Virginia, the undocumented population has been estimated in excess of 100,000. The Commonwealth ranked 25th between 1990 and 2000 out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia in terms of the growth of the percentage of its population made up by foreign-born people.
Some Republicans have espoused the cause of “millions of hard-working men and women condemned to fear and insecurity in a massive, undocumented economy,” as Bush has put it, a posi-tion that melds with commercial interests dependent on immigrant labor and the party’s desire to court rapidly growing numbers of Hispanic voters. The crosscurrents between them and immigration hardliners have produced a welter of dueling legislative initiatives.
Republicans stumbled badly late last year after sweeping to victory with a new lease on the presidency and improved congressional majorities when dramatic intelligence reforms—modeled on recommendations from the September 11 commission and favored by Bush—were held up by dissident Republican leaders. In part, objections arose because measures tightening controls against illegal immigrants had been dropped from the package. This year, federal provisions requiring confirmation of legal residency for state driver’s licenses were successfully attached to the $82 billion Iraq spending bill that passed in May.
Proponents of the McCain bill expect a tough fight. Of the varying policy prescriptions Goode says, “It would be difficult for me to say that any has a consensus majority.” But Freilich identifies a baseline curb against the toughest anti-immigration proposals that points toward accommodation. “We have an im-migration policy right now that doesn’t reflect the economic realities in Virginia or the rest of the United States,” he says. “We are largely dependent on un-documented workers who perform the toughest and lowest paid jobs in the economy.”—Harry Terris