Tuesday, July 12
Phone book company plays dirty?
DataNational, Inc., the company that puts out The Community Phone Book, filed suit today in U.S. General District Court-Western District against competitor Yellow Book Sales and Distri-bution Company, Inc., and six former DataNational employees who now work for Yellow Book, seeking $7.7 million in damages. In the 13 counts ranging from false advertising to defamation and conspiracy, Data-National alleges that Yellow Book sales reps misrepresented DataNational’s advertising fees and told advertisers Data-National was going out of business. Both companies distribute phone books locally.
How the mighty have fallen!
Today Money magazine unveiled its 2005 list, “The Best Places to Live in America,” ranking Charlottesville No. 90. Because its ranking is based largely on financial indicators (median household income, state income tax and housing prices, etc.), the fact that we’re on Money magazine’s list at all is anomalous. As City Communications Director Maurice Jones points out, “None of the cities listed in the Frommer’s ranking made the Money magazine cut, except for Charlottesville.” Frommer’s, of course, liked Charlottesville better than any other U.S. city a couple of years ago.
Wednesday, July 13
Habitat goes “green”
Facing the heat and late-afternoon rainstorm, dozens of volunteers gathered on Page Street to dedicate Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville’s first “green” house in the city, built for Salvadorian immigrants Emperatiriz Amaya and her 7-year-old son. Increasingly, the green building movement is joining forces with affordable housing initiatives, and Bank of America rewarded the work in this case with a lead donation of $60,000. The resulting three-bedroom home is “energy efficient, low maintenance and environmentally friendly,” said Habitat’s Bruce Hogshead, who also noted that with the house “we’re…moving forward with sustainable design.” The home’s insulation derives from recycled newspapers, the carpet is made from recycled two-liter bottles, and its Hardiplank siding and metal roof should last more than 50 years.
Thursday, July 14
God apparently condones child labor
About 15 protestors, including young children, from Life and Liberty Ministries displayed images of dismembered fetuses today outside Planned Parenthood’s Hydraulic Road clinic. “People will either stand for God’s law or against God’s law,” said Dennis Green, pastor of the Powhatan-based group. Though he was confident in informing a passer-by of God’s thoughts, he didn’t reveal the Almighty’s opinion about enlisting children in the macabre display.
The best of times, the worst of times
Fate dealt Charlottesville Pavilion General Manager Kirby a tough blow, or as he said this morning, “I’ve had better days.” Within hours of raising the $1 million canopy roof over the Pavilion yesterday, hard rains falling at “probably the most vulnerable point in the process” ripped a huge gash in the rear roof panel. By this morning, Hutto had the “whole team” at hand to assess the situation: “No one has waved a red flag and said, ‘Here’s the reason we can’t open July 27’” when Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe is scheduled to play a free show. The only question, Hutto said, is whether “come July 27 will we open with a partial roof, a temporary roof, or no roof?”
Friday, July 15
High schoolers get the love
The Washington Post reports today that the gap in reading scores between white and minority elementary students has narrowed over the past 30 years, but research suggests little progress in closing the gap among high school students. All of which creates a hospitable context for an initiative from Governor Mark Warner, Democratic presidential candidate-in-waiting. This week the National Governors Association, which Warner chairs, announced a grant to Virginia to help “redesign the high school experience,” according to a news release. Last month, 17 percent of Charlottesville High School seniors did not graduate.
Saturday, July 16
Kilgore ducks the camera
Political junkies awakened this morning to…nothing. Though today marked the first gubernatorial debate, there was nothing to view—at least, not on television. Republican Jerry Kilgore would not allow his debate with Democratic challenger Tim Kaine to be televised. “It’s the same ol’ Kilgore—nothing is new with him,” says Charlottesville Dem Mitch Van Yahres. “He won’t be on TV because people would clearly see the difference, especially against Kaine’s visionary ideas.” Van Yahres’ sentiment was typical of the 12 people gathered for a debate non-watching party at the local Democratic party office on W. Main Street.
Sunday, July 17
NGIC cozy with MZM
Today The Washington Post reported that defense contractor MZM, Inc., a company now under investigation for questionable ties to Rep. Randy Cunningham (R-Calif.), and which was the largest donor earlier this year to the coffers of area Congressional Rep. Virgil Goode, is also cozy with the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center in Charlottesville. The story says that two months after MZM got its first order in October 2002 to perform services for NGIC, the company hired the son of the center’s senior civilian official, NGIC executive director William S. Rich, Jr.
Monday, July 18
Thousands of eyeballs crossed today
Today thousands of local kids are cross-eyed from their weekend reading: the 672-page Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book in author J.K. Rowling’s wildly popular series. More than 2,000 people showed up at Barnes & Noble to buy the book at midnight on Friday, July 15. “With each book the fan base gets even bigger,” says B&N flak Allyson John.
Written by John Borgmeyer from staff reports and news sources.
House of cards
In the wake of national credit card hacking, local banks stay alert
The hacking of credit card information pertaining to 40 million American consumers, which broke the headlines on June 17, affected 7 percent of the nation’s population. The largest case of attempted identity theft to date, it didn’t leave Charlottesville immune. Fifty-two of Virginia National Bank’s 10,000 customers were affected. Also, according to Aaron Paula Thompson, a marketing specialist with the UVA Community Credit Union, “a small percentage of” the bank’s mem-bers (out of 47,000) were affected as well, although the exact number has not yet been disclosed.
The hackers accessed the credit card information via CardSystems Solutions, Inc., a service provider for credit card-swiping machines common in retail stores nationwide. Local banks were not culpable for the breach itself. But they are taking responsibility for managing the fallout, for reassuring customers of account safety and for communicating to customers how they can work together with banks to improve account imperviousness.
The breach allowed the hackers access to cardholder names, account numbers, security codes and expiration dates, but not to Social Security numbers or dates of birth. Visa, MasterCard, Discover Card and American Express customers were affected.
According to VNB President Mark Giles, Visa alerted the bank “within days” of the newspaper headlines that VNB was affected. In response, on July 1 the bank sent out a letter to its 52 affected customers that began, “CardSystems Solutions, Inc., a third party payment processor for retailers nationwide, has identified a potential security breach involving 40 million customers. We have received an alert from Visa’s Compromised Account Management System that your debit card information was contained in the compromised database.”
The letter goes on to reassure customers that no fraud had been identified, but that as a precaution, VNB had ordered replacement debit cards. Moreover, should fraudulent charges appear, the banks, not the customers, would be charged. New cards arrived within days of the letter.
The Credit Union, according to Vice President of Marketing Janine Williams, dealt with the CardSystems alert almost identically, sending out letters and reissuing cards to affected members. The entire process took about two weeks.
Despite Visa’s and MasterCard’s allegations that CardSystems was not meeting the credit card giants’ minimum-security requirements at the time of the breach, VNB’s Giles, remains confident in Visa’s anti-fraud systems.
“I think that they do an awful lot for predictive fraud control,” he says, “and they know how to find us really quickly.”
CardSystems admitted that indeed the minimums were not being met, and its website now assures visitors that this oversight has been rectified.
Sharon Jones, whose struggles as a victim of identity theft C-VILLE chronicled in a February 2004 cover story, is a member of the Credit Union.
Upon hearing about the national breach, “It didn’t surprise me,” Jones says. “I just knew that it was a matter of time before [credit card security breaches] hit big.”
But then Jones heard that Credit Union members had been targeted.
“I was just waiting for that letter to come,” she recalls. Luckily for Jones, it never arrived.
Jones has been dealing with the fallout from her identity theft for six years. As a result of the bad credit accrued in her name, she’s had to have relatives co-sign on her car loan and purchase cellphone service for her. Her latest hurdle involves a townhouse that her identity thief leased in Fredericksburg, before skipping out on the rent and leaving the real Sharon Jones with a $956 bill for late rent and fees. There is still a judgment out against Jones and, she says, Fredericksburg has made no effort to arrest the thief.
According to the Federal Trade Commission, identity theft affects 10 million Americans each year. Last year, bogus charges resulting from that kind of crime totaled $52.6 billion nationwide. Between 2001 and 2003, reported incidents of identity theft jumped 150 percent.
In 1998, the federal government passed the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act making it a federal crime. Virginia Code regards identity theft just as seriously, stating that, “Any violation resulting in financial loss of greater than $200 shall be punishable as a Class
6 felony.”
Devon Porter, vice president of Sona-bank, a new locally owned operation, notes that banks often outsource their online services. Therefore, says Porter, “there’s no way to get inside the banks’ networks because they’re not putting themselves on the Internet.”
Instead, Porter suggests that if a consumer is doing online banking, he do a little research into the company providing the Web services. He also suggests consumers take things into their own hands by checking balances at least once a week.
Moreover, says Jacques Smith, Sonabank’s chief information officer, if people want to avoid what’s known as “social hacking,” they need to be more careful with where and how loudly they announce their passwords
“In our experience, people don’t take that seriously enough,” says Smith. “[Security] is two-part: us and the consumers themselves.”—Nell Boeschenstein
The great wide open
As Downtown development heats up, what about the coal tower?
Facing east down the dirt road that runs along the railroad tracks by the coal tower, roughly situated at 10th and Water streets, you might mistakenly think you’re standing somewhere in the middle of the country. Both sides of the narrow thoroughfare are overgrown with grasses and weeds, and the only immediate sign of city life is the Bel-mont Lofts building across the tracks, peek-ing up from behind the thick foliage.
The coal tower property, which Coran Capshaw purchased from fellow developer Oliver Kuttner in September 2003 for $2.3 million, is 10.4 acres of prime, undeveloped, Downtown real estate. As the rest of that area booms with the chorus of bulldozers and jackhammers working on various redevelopment projects, the coal tower property remains quiet, if not eerily peaceful. But for how long?
Before selling to Capshaw, Kuttner had rough plans to build a 30,000-square foot mixed-use building on the lot, until his building permit was rejected and the plans abandoned. But questions surfaced about what, if anything, is on the development horizon for the acreage after a rape was allegedly attempted on the site last month. Three men allegedly attacked a female victim, beating her and kicking her to the ground.
That wasn’t the site’s first brush with notoriety. It made headlines in August 2001 when 20-year-old Craig Nordenson shot and killed two people there. Nordenson then holed up in the building and had a shoot out with police, before being taken into custody. On a lighter note, as a testament to Charlottesville’s railroad and industrial history, Live Arts staged a play there, and the tower was a featured site in the UVA Art Museum’s 2000 exhibition of site-specific installations, “Hindsight/Foresight: Art for the New Millennium.”
According to Jim Grigg, whose architecture offices on 10th Street NE abut the coal tower property, Capshaw commissioned Daggett & Grigg to draw up “very rough” sketches for the property “a couple years ago,” but they never progressed beyond the preliminary stages. Grigg believes, however, that Capshaw has been working with other local firms to generate ideas for the lot’s development.
Jim Tolbert, Charlottesville director of neighborhood planning, allows that there have been “preliminary discussions about concepts.” But he further says no plans have been left for review. Beyond that, he will not elaborate. Capshaw’s camp has no comment.
Regardless of whether the plans have been submitted, de-velopment of the pro-perty is inevitable.
“Anything we can do to extend the Down-town area into the eastern part of the city would be extremely helpful,” says Director of Economic Planning Aubrey Watts.
With market demand for Downtown dwellings on the rise, as evidenced by the Belmont Lofts, Norcross Station and The Holsinger now under construction at Fifth and Water streets, Grigg anticipates that when the coal tower is developed, it will be residential.
Bill Dittmar, who developed the Norcross Station apartments a few blocks west, agrees with Grigg.
“I would anticipate that you would see residential development on the property,” he says, noting further that “[the property] is not wide enough to do a lot of commercial.”
Grigg also asserts that developing the area would enable the City to extend Water Street through to Carlton Road, which, in turn, might improve Downtown traffic patterns.
But whatever the mystery plans may hold, “development would make the area safer,” Grigg says.—Nell Boeschenstein
Promises, promises
But can the candidates deliver on lower real estate taxes?
Virginia’s two main contenders for governor, Democrat Tim Kaine and Republican Jerry Kilgore, both have plans to lower your real estate tax bills. It seems that neither plan, however, will amount to anything more than campaign bluster.
“Blah, blah, blah,” is how UVA’s state political expert, Larry Sabato, characterizes both plans. “I always enjoy the campaign promises, because the reality is that either man would have trouble getting the General Assembly to adopt his program.”
Rising real estate taxes prompt much griping in the Com-monwealth, especially in affluent communities like Charlottesville and Northern Virginia. Over the past decade, skyrocketing property assessments have left homeowners here (and there) with ever-higher real estate tax bills. It’s not just the usual Grover Norquist-lovin’ rich white guys whining about real estate taxes, anymore—homeowners on fixed incomes say their tax bills could force them to sell their houses.
So rising real estate taxes have become major political issues for both parties at the local level; not surprisingly, Kaine and Kilgore would each like to be seen as “the man with a plan” to reduce taxes. Neither plan seems to be satisfying local officials, however.
“Even though I’m very much in favor of low real estate taxes, I would rather see the decisions be left at the local level,” says Ken Boyd, an Albemarle County supervisor. Boyd, a Republican, tentatively endorses Kilgore’s plan, “if we have any change at all.”
Kilgore proposes a constitutional amendment that would limit increases in real estate assessments to no more than 5 percent a year. The plan would likely mean local governments would be forced to raise their tax rates to make up for limited assessment increases.
Kaine, meanwhile, is proposing an amendment of his own that would give local governments the authority to cut real estate taxes to homeowners, but not commercial property. City Council, for example, could cut homeowners’ real estate taxes by up to 20 percent while leaving the tax rate charged to, say, Barracks Road Shopping Center, unchanged. Kaine’s proposal would “be
a useful tool” for the City, says Mayor David Brown.
“It addresses a real problem for localities—how to save homeowners money without losing a whole lot of tax revenues,” he says.
The bloggers known as Not Larry Sabato say that the much-coveted voters in Northern Virginia seem to be favoring Kilgore’s plan. “Tim Kaine risks his plan being seen like Don Beyer’s car tax plan: Too little, too late,” says NLS, referencing 1997’s Democratic gubernatorial election. That year, Republican Jim Gilmore cruised to office with a plan to cut Virginia’s car tax.
Sabato himself, however, says that neither plan has much chance of passing the Senate. The failure of Gilmore’s car-tax cut has left that body skittish of any tax-cut schemes, he says.
Outgoing 57th District Delegate Mitch Van Yahres, a Democrat, says Gilmore’s shadow hangs over any tax plan this year’s gubernatorial candidates might propose. “It left us in a $6 billion hole,” says Van Yahres. “We’ll never get over that.” He says state pols interested in giving local taxpayers some relief should consider fully funding education, transportation and social services costs, which the Commonwealth regularly passes down to city and county governments.—John Borgmeyer
Thou shall not…
Unlike many comparable universities, UVA’s honor code leaves much to the imagination
Lying, cheating and stealing—those are the three big no-no’s in UVA’s honor code.
But what, exactly, does that mean? Many elite schools have rules governing academic integrity, but most provide more information about what’s prohibited than does UVA. Perhaps keeping with Thomas Jefferson’s well-known affinity for lofty ideas rather than the messier realms of law and politics, UVA’s honor code sets a high ideal. The interpretation of that ideal, however, is left to the students themselves.
The question of what exactly constitutes cheating arose last month, when faculty in UVA’s economics department announced that they suspected that some graduate students may have cheated on a homework assignment. According to Inside Higher Education, there’s an online answer key to some problems in an economics textbook, and at least one student found the answers and apparently shared the information with classmates. The incident involves “a large fraction” of the 30 first-year econ grad students, department chair David Mills told Inside Higher Education.
David Hobbs, a soon-to-be senior finance major and chair of UVA’s honor committee, declined to say whether any students face formal honor charges in the case.
Permanent expulsion is the only penalty for an honor infraction, be it lying, cheating or stealing. Hobbs says students explain the honor code to incoming freshmen during summer orientation and again in the fall, through presentations held at the freshman dorms. The simplicity of UVA’s honor code, and its all-or-nothing punishment, makes it unusual among other elite universities.
For example, Stanford University—the private UVA of the West Coast—also has a fairly simple honor code. Upon registering at Stanford, students agree “that they will not give or receive aid in examinations; that they will not give or receive unpermitted aid in class work, in the preparation of reports, or in any work that is to be used by the instructor as the basis of grading,” according to The Stanford Bulletin. The code also says Stanford students ought to “do their share” to make sure others uphold the school’s honor code.
Unlike UVA, however, Stanford also publishes a guide to its honor code and documents to help resident advisors explain the code to students.
And whereas a philosopher could have written UVA’s honor code, codes of conduct at Ivy League schools like Harvard or Brown, by contrast, could have been written by lawyers.
Harvard publishes a lengthy “Standards of Conduct in the Harvard Community,” with lengthy subsections on sexual misconduct, unauthorized use of Harvard’s logo and plagiarism. The “Academic Code of Brown University” is a nine-page document explaining offenses in the use of sources, test taking, homework assignments—it specifically bans, for example, the use of research companies or files saved from previous classes. Brown’s code outlines punishments ranging from a reprimand to expulsion and revocation of a student’s degree.
While an honor code full of specifics may make prosecution less complicated, maybe that’s not such a good thing, either. “I think the struggle is good,” says Mark Hyatt, president of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University. “Honor violations are a big deal. It can affect people’s lives and careers,” Hyatt says. “I think we need people to struggle with this.”—John Borgmeyer