Tuesday, July 19
It’s not the heat, it’s the… O.K., it’s the heat
With temperatures topping out at 91 degrees today, we’re suffering through, er, enjoying the 11th day of 90+-degree heat so far this year. Just to put that into perspective, 2004 registered only three days of the wretched 90+-degree temperatures. There is a bright side: According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Ad-ministration, July 20-23 is the hottest period of the year. If we’re talking statistics, the end should be right around the corner.
Wednesday, July 20
Music makes the (jobless) people come together
About 140 people turned out today for a chance to check wristbands and serve sparkling beverages at Charlottesville Pavilion at its first of two job fairs. Working with Event Planning, Inc., Pavilion General Manager Kirby Hutto plans to have all positions staffed in time for the venue’s first gig on Wednesday, July 27, a free show by Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe. In other Pavilion news, after rain damaged the rear panel of the $1 million canopy roof last week, a replacement is en route from Hungary, and it will go up following Loretta Lynn’s much-anticipated show on Saturday, July 30. Until then, a partial roof will cover the Pavilion, Hutto says.
Local rate payers will pony up for the Chesapeake Bay
Today the Virginia Department of En-vironmental Quality announced that the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority might have to pay around $30 million to make improvements to the Moore’s Creek Sewage Treatment Plant. The overhaul—which RWSA director Tom Frederick warned would be largely paid for by increases to local water bills—could be necessary to bring the plant in line with new DEQ standards for nitrogen and phosphorous discharge. It’s part of a larger state strategy to protect the declining health of the Chesapeake Bay.
Thursday, July 21
State sets aside $437 million for a rainy day
Governor Mark Warner’s office today announced a $542 million budget surplus for the fiscal year that ended June 30, officially sparking the fight for the pot. Warner’s office said the money would not go toward developing new programs. Instead, the governor will propose that $437 million go to the State’s rainy day fund; $54 million to water quality improvement (especially waste treatment facilities that impact the Chesapeake Bay); $26 million to the transportation trust fund; and $25 million to base realignment and closure expenses. The surplus represents 3.9 percent of the general fund for FY 2005. Earlier in the year, Virginia was the only state to receive a straight-A report card on fiscal management from the Pew Charitable Trust and Governing magazine.
Friday, July 22
School Board set to strategize
City Councilors gathered today for their regular monthly lunch with the City School Board, the first such meeting since appointing Louis Bograd and Alvin Edwards to the seven-member body. Standardized-test passing rates and the division’s strategy for strategic planning comprised the agenda. Though final results are still out, it looks good that all six city elementary schools will be accredited by the State for the first time; Councilors and Board members agreed that efforts should now focus on improving middle school passing rates. As for drafting a strategic plan, the Board has selected Florida-based consultants MGT to facilitate the process, for $45,500. “We really must have the framework of a strategic plan by November 1 from the State’s point of view,” Board member Dede Smith said.
Saturday, July 23
Nats barely back in first place
Today the Washington Nationals beat the Houston Astros 4-2 when Houston’s center fielder misjudged a ball with the bases loaded. The Atlanta Braves didn’t play today, meaning the storybook Nats again have first place in the National League East, but by merely a half-game. The Nationals have earned a 55-43 record so far, with 64 games left to play.
Sunday, July 24
Attention, shoppers! Consumer nirvana open
With the numerous rumors, protests and complaints that preceded its construction, maybe it was inevitable that the grand opening of Target in the Hollymead Town Center would be anti-climactic. Unofficially open to the public for a week now, the store offered little fanfare to mark today’s official opening of the Minneapolis-based retail giant. Aside from the free bag of pharmacy shwag offered to customers as they entered the 400,000-square-foot store, little else was “grand” about the opening. As one Target employee put it, “We’re just servicing our customers.” O.K., but where’s our free balloon?
Monday, July 25
Get in line for Hall and Oates
Today members of The Paramount Theater can buy advance tickets for the 2005-06 season. Folks who pay between $40 and $25,000 or more for membership benefits get early dibs on front-row seats to Daryl Hall and John Oates, The Berenstain Bears On Stage and a rap version of Shake-speare’s The Comedy of Errors.
Written by John Borgmeyer from staff reports and news sources.
Membership has its privileges
Keswick sues Albemarle over tax bill, claiming it has overpaid by at least $150,000
Most people just grumble when they write their checks to the taxman. Keswick, however, called in the lawyers.
One of Albemarle’s swankiest country clubs is suing the County over its 2003 and 2004 tax bill. The Keswick Club L.P. alleges in its suit that the County Assessor improperly calculated the club’s value, and therefore overcharged the club by nearly $150,000 in taxes during those two years.
Working for Keswick, Frederick Payne and William Tanner, of the Charlottesville law firm Payne and Hodous, filed the suit in May 2004. The case was heard in Albemarle Circuit Court on June 27, 2005; Circuit Court Judge James Luke has taken the case under advisement—meaning he will make a decision after both sides have submitted briefs summarizing their arguments. Keswick’s brief is due August 1; the County will have two weeks to file a response brief before Luke decides the case.
The suit centers on about 154 acres at Keswick Country Club east of Char-lottesville, including land, a golf course, a clubhouse with a restaurant, a spa and exercise room, a pro shop, tennis courts and a swimming pool. In May 2003, County Assessor Bruce Woodzell assessed the property at $12,585,700; Keswick, however, claims the assessment should have been no more than $2,900,000.
The crux of the case is the method by which the County decides how much a commercial property is worth. The County used the “cost meth-od” to assess the Kes-wick property—basically, the assessor sets the value by estimating what it would cost to rebuild the property, minus depreciation. In the suit, Keswick argues that the County should assess the property by the “income method,” that is, assigning value to a commercial property based on its revenue stream.
The County performs assessments every two years. Under the 2003 tax rate of 76 cents per $100 of assessed value, Keswick would have paid $95,651 in real estate tax each year under the County’s method. Under Keswick’s method, the bill would have been $22,040.
Woodzell declined to comment for this article, but Deputy County Attorney Mark Trank says the County uses the cost method to assess other golf clubs: Farmington Country Club (assessed at $21,585,700), Glenmore Country Club ($13,281,200) and Birdwood Golf Course ($9,159,800).
According to court documents, the genesis of the suit stretches back to a $25.5 million deal in 1999 between Keswick’s former owners, Metropolaris, and Orient Express Hotels, Inc. For that sum, Orient Express acquired Keswick Hall (the club’s 48-room luxury hotel), Keswick Estates (a 600-acre gated community adjacent to the club) and the Inn at Perry Cabin (an upscale hotel on the Maryland shore).
In 2002, Orient Express also bought the 154-acre property that includes the golf course and clubhouse from Metropolaris for $3.7 million.
In 2003, Keswick challenged the County’s $12,585,700 assessment before the Board of Equalization—a panel that mediates assessment disputes. The Board reduced Keswick’s assessment by 11 percent to $11,175,700. Keswick sued anyway. Club officials did not return repeated calls.
“The value of the real estate is intimately affected by the performance of the business that’s on it,” says Will Tanner, a junior partner at Payne and Hodous. And business ain’t been good. According to the suit, the business on the property in question “has not realized a positive net income in many years.”
This isn’t the first time a country club has thrown a tax tantrum in court. In 1994, Farmington went through a similar appeal. “Roughly, the County assessed it back then at about $12 million,” says Trank. Farmington wanted it reduced to $4 million or $5 million, but the judge reduced it to about $10.2 million.
“A lot of property owners go through administrative challenges up to the Board of Equalization,” says Trank. “It’s pretty unusual to have one of these cases end up in Circuit Court.”—John Borgmeyer
Dilated pupils
Mixing up Albemarle school districts is never easy
Where is your kid going to school next year? If you live in Albemarle County, you can never be sure.
As the county’s population of 89,000 continues to grow by about 5 percent per year, school officials routinely rejigger Albemarle’s school districts. This year, the redistricting process was long and occasionally uncivil, but a compromise proposed by Superintendent Kevin Castner seems to have satisfied most people.
Castner presented his plan to the School Board on Thursday, July 14. “I told him jokingly that he did a very good job of splitting the baby,” says Linda McRaven, who sat on the 16-member redistricting committee assembled to advise Castner.
Castner had to play Solomon between some committee members who favored an ambitious redistricting proposal and a group favoring a more conservative effort.
The County Board of Supervisors threw a kink in the committee’s efforts in February when they announced that there would be no money for a new middle school in fast-growing southern Albemarle. Populating this new school had been one of the committee’s major missions—after it was thrown out, McRaven says the group lacked direction. Which kids would move? Where? Why? No one seemed sure.
“Some of us realized that the only kids who were being moved around for no compelling reason were kids who lived west of Charlottesville,” McRaven says.
In June, the committee released a report that recommended redistricting 629 students. But one week later McRaven and four other members—John Hermann, Anne Izard and James Ryan—issued a “minority report” that outlined numerous flaws with the process and urged more conservative redistricting. (You can relive the drama for yourself at www.k12albemarle.org.) Castner’s plan “scales back a lot of what the redistricting committee wanted to do,” says Dean Riddick, the committee chair.
The School Board will consider Castner’s plan on August 25; if they pass it, the changes will go into effect in the fall of 2006. Castner’s July 14 proposal would affect 479 students, with 148 students in the Woodbrook district possibly switching schools. The total potentially redistricted kids amounts to less than 4 percent of Albemarle’s 12,356 enrollment. But residents of Woodbrook in northern Albemarle seem to be taking the changes with equanimity.
“It worked out beautifully for us,” says Monica Pawinski, the parent council representative for the Woodbrook district. A previous redistricting decision had sent all Woodbrook kids to Sutherland Middle School, except for kids in the Raintree subdivision. Now, all Woodbrook kids will go to Jack Jouett Middle School. Students who choose to stay at Sutherland, however, can take advantage of the plan’s “grandfather” clause.
For Steve VeGodsky, this means his son can choose to stay at Sutherland, but he wouldn’t be able to ride the bus, which heads to Jouett. “I hope it stays the way it is, but I’m just holding out to see what happens,” VeGodsky says. “I’ve heard some people say they like Jack Jouett, some say they like Sutherland. I don’t think there’s a lot of uproar about it around here.”
Most of the uproar has been about the process itself. When redistricting happens again—and it surely will—Riddick says the plan should not be in the hands of a public committee. “I think the public should weigh in, but it should be handled by the staff and the superintendent. It’s too divisive for the general public.”—John Borgmeyer
Mixed use
University women give a hand to SHEA Center, combining arts and social services at Ix
To Johanna Drucker, words are not merely aggregations of letters. For Drucker, a letterpress artist and UVA professor of media studies, words are literally something else, too—measurements of weight and height found in each piece of metal type that goes into printing them.
Her involvement in a new Downtown arts project marks another instance when one word has many meanings.
In this case, the word is ”SHEA.” It signifies both the surname of a highly regarded painter who died in December, Karen Shea, and the interdisciplinary arts center that might be inaugurated next year in her honor. SHEA, in the latter case, stands for Social Services, Hu-manities, Education and Arts— disciplines that would be joined beneath one roof. It’s hoped the center will be developed at the Frank Ix building, the monolith on Elliott Avenue.
The SHEA Center is the brainchild of, among others, Joan Fenton, a Downtown business owner and longtime friend of Gabe Silverman, one of four Ix developers and Shea’s husband. Jill Hartz, the director of UVA Art Museum and Drucker’s colleague in recruiting local artists to help envision SHEA, credits Fenton with the idea to join social service groups (such as Computers 4 Kids and FOCUS) with artists and maybe even an arts-centric charter school. Proximity is everything in this vision—proximity of artists and nonprofits to each other, and of the SHEA Center itself to the people its tenants hope to serve. Ix’s location, in south Downtown, would make it easy for low-income kids from Friendship Court and Sixth Street to participate in outreach programs at SHEA.
“Karen felt that through the arts, and specifically getting to kids at a young age, you could give them the self-confidence to understand that everyone doesn’t have to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer,” says Silverman. “When-ever she could, she reached out to kids. I’m trying to put enough nonprofits together that deal with kids so that there’s a critical mass and it’s easy to put the arts programs in front of them.”
Though the arts piece is being spearheaded at this nascent stage by two prominent UVA women, the majority of artists to whom they’ve pitched the idea are not affiliated with the University. They organized an initial meeting on July 7, and about 35 artists attended, Hartz says. Based on those discussions, Hartz estimates that SHEA would need about 25,000 of Ix’s 300,000 square feet—some of it to be common performance space. Once SHEA organizers come up with enough firm rental commitments from artists and nonprofits, developers will start to carve the space into the studios and shared areas the artists want.
Peter Swendsen, a graduate student in music at UVA and co-artistic director of Prospect Dance Group, attended the July 7 meeting and found it “very encouraging to see the cross pollination happening.”
For Hartz, SHEA’s community outreach would be an extension of her UVA work. The museum, she says, is also “the community’s museum.” But for Drucker, community involvement—be it at SHEA or with the Virginia Arts of the Book Center, where she does her letterpress work and which is already located at Ix—provides a welcome respite from her UVA career. “This is a place to not be Professor Drucker. Here I’m just an artist who teaches people stuff,” she says.
However SHEA might link to Hartz and Drucker’s day jobs, sculptor Susan Bacik, another meeting-goer, says the arts center, with the “interesting conversations” it could engender, might herald a new day in Charlottesville. “During the life of any city,” she says, “from time to time there are certain moments of opportunity that dramatically expand the quality of life. This is one of those moments and places, and to have it attached to Karen Shea’s name is very fitting.”—Cathy Harding
Beyond the call of duty
Friendship Court employs off-duty police officers for extra protection
For the second consecutive year, Friendship Court has donated money to the City for extra police protection. The fiscal year 2006 sponsorship agreement will pay $88,522 to the police department in four installments.
While similar agreements already exist between the department and retail outlets such as Food Lion, Fry’s Spring Beach Club and Wild Wing Café, Friendship Court is unusual in that it’s a housing project. But it’s not the residents themselves who pay. The property owners foot the bill.
Two years ago, the Washington, D.C.-based National Housing Trust/Enterprise Preservation Corporations (a nonprofit that works for affordable low- and middle-income housing) and the local Piedmont Housing Alliance entered into a limited partnership (of-ficially termed the NHTE Piedmont Garrett Square Lim-ited Partnership) to acquire the Friend-ship Court property. PHA owns 50 percent of the de-velopment; NHTE owns the other half. PHA Exec-utive Director Stu Armstrong calls the partnership “a good marriage.”
Edgewood Property Manage-ment is in charge of the day-to-day operations and signs the check to hire the off-duty officers. The money comes from the operating budget, supplied by rent income. Technically, they’re not hiring the officers themselves, but rather giving the City money to provide the extra services, says John Morland, the Friendship Court project manager at NHTE. Moreover, the extra coverage at Friendship Court, NHTE’s only property in the area, is not a new development; the previous property managers had a similar deal.
According to Police Chief Tim Longo, the department currently has 12 to 15 “operational vacancies” and six actual vacancies. However, while seeking out extra law en-forcement could imply that the management company finds the police coverage already provided by the City to be insufficient, Morland is hesitant to say so.
“We want more attention paid to our property than the normal police service would allow,” says Morland. “In order for us to get [that attention] we have to pay for it. We want a very high level of service for our properties.”
Morland also points out that the alternative is a private security firm. But the City’s police force already spends time at Friendship Court and has an established relationship with residents.
The going rate for hiring the off-duty cops is $30 an hour. According to Longo, the extra Friendship Court patrols enlist the services of 10 officers and provide an average of 33 additional hours of police coverage per week.
While working off-duty at Friendship Court, officers wear their uniforms and have access to all the department’s equipment.
Longo likes the City’s arrangement with NHT/Enterprise. He says that while “community policing” is the philosophy de-partment-wide, being short-staffed means officers don’t always have time to get out to meet and greet citizens. Because of the arrangement, Friendship Court gets more face time, says Longo, and the housing development is thus “more likely to have one-on-one contact with officers because it’s a higher ratio of person to officer.”
City Councilor Kevin Lynch agrees with Longo’s assessment, allowing that, “In an ideal world we would provide that level of policing across the city, but we can’t afford that.”
Lynch also cites a similar situation in which UVA paid the City to hire another housing inspector for University housing. True, says Lynch, the City should already be doing inspections, but the students present a particular challenge.
“Clients, be they students or residents with specific needs, put specific financial stress on the City,” says Lynch. “I think [offering to help] is a goodwill gesture to the City.”—Nell Boeschenstein