Month: September 2006

Even though it’s just an advisory board, the County Planning Commission wields significant influence over many major development projects, suggesting which can move forward—and how they will look upon completion. So we caught up with the most recently appointed commissioner, Duane Zobrist, who replaces departing Jo Higgins. “I’m not the kind who says, ‘I’m here, I don’t want anybody else,’” says Zobrist, who practiced law in Southern California for 35 years before buying a Crozet farm in 1998—following a two-year search for the ideal place to live. Here’s more of what he had to say.

C-VILLE: Was Crozet a good spot for a designated growth area?
Duane Zobrist: Well, it’s got to be somewhere. The Board of Supervisors made a very wise decision a number of years ago that they were going to push the bulk of growth in the growth areas and they were going to retain the county as rural as possible. I think the jury is still out on what Crozet is going to look like. Certainly Crozet being designated a development area implies a large change in the future.
    I think the community of Crozet is doing a very good job of speaking for themselves. There are concerns of unrestricted growth—that’s a concern I would voice as a resident owning a farm there.

Should developers be held responsible for providing funding for transportation for their projects?
Developers tend to be pretty willing to step forth and help vitiate the impact on a county vis-a-vis infrastructure, schools, etc. when they come into an area. The biggest problem in development I’ve seen, both in California and when I came here, is that infrastructure tends to follow development instead of the contrary. I think the Board of Supervisors is trying to balance that out.

How does your experience on the West Coast inform your views on development?
Urban sprawl is the real problem. What we’re doing here is forcing development into certain areas for your more extensive development, and I think that’s really, really good.
    I think we should do everything we can to encourage conservation easements and come up with a system of trading development rights. Say there are a certain number of development rights in the county—and I don’t know what that number is. If someone wants to build a Biscuit Run, they want to build 4,000 houses—well, let them go acquire those 4,000 rights from people. That’s was the exact process we followed in Los Angeles with the air rights. It gives all landowners the opportunity to participate in the growth without being prejudiced by it.
    I’m a market capitalist, I believe the market will resolve this stuff. I think it’s unfair to the guy who’s sitting on 500 acres in White Hall, who’s a mile out of the development area, to have somebody who’s inside the development area get $1 million for his land.

Andrew Alston, the man convicted of stabbing Walker Sisk 18 times in a drunken Corner brawl, has filed for bankruptcy following a $3 million civil lawsuit from the victim’s family. Alston served only two and a half years in jail for the voluntary manslaughter conviction, and a hearing will determine if he can dodge the lawsuit.
    Alston filed bankruptcy in the Bankruptcy Court of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania; a motion for stay was sent to the U.S. District Court in Charlottesville in an effort to halt the lawsuit.
    A statement of his assets shows Alston has about $1,500 in personal property, and would owe $3,013,878.22 in damages and fees if he is found liable in the civil suit.
    The Sisk family is seeking $2 million in compensatory damages and $1 million in punitive damages. A hearing will determine if the Sisks can proceed with their suit despite the bankruptcy filing.
    Alston, once a UVA student, was convicted of stabbing Sisk in November 2003. During his trial, Alston brought in a martial arts expert to show how his defensive moves could have caused Sisk to stab himself 18 times.
    Alston was released early from his three-year sentence on June 21. The Sisks filed suit shortly after. Their attorney, Bryan Slaughter, told C-VILLE, “[The Sisks are] after any measure of justice, and they don’t feel like they got it in the criminal case.”

When the City expanded the road that runs from Main Street to Cherry Avenue years ago, it didn’t anticipate it would remain with the cumbersome name “9th-10th Street Connector.” But at long last it has a new name: Roosevelt Brown Boulevard, as approved by City Council at their September 18 meeting. The biggest advocate for that change has been John Gaines, a resident of the 10th and Page neighborhood and former NAACP president, who has been petitioning the City since 1999 to name the road for Brown, an acclaimed football player.
    “It was a little discouraging at times, but I don’t give up easy,” says Gaines. He presented Council with roughly 150 signatures of those who support his cause.
    Why Roosevelt Brown? “Why not?” replies Gaines. “To me, it was fitting, because he’s the only Charlottesville native in the National Football League Hall of Fame. He came along during the days of segregation and he excelled.”
    Brown was an offensive tackle for the New York Giants from 1953 to 1965, and is reputedly one of the best linemen ever to play the game. He died in 2004 at age 71.
    Gaines says that, though imposing, Brown was small compared to the players today, relying on his foot speed to make up for size. When he was in high school, Gaines says he used to watch Brown train at Washington Park, when Brown was playing college ball at Morgan State, in Baltimore. “We didn’t have ACAC then—matter of fact, we didn’t have the planes and buses that carry players around. Roosevelt rode to the games in a truck.”
    Before Council finalized Roosevelt Brown Boulevard, they heard a request from Fifeville resident Herb Porter to name the street for Sally Hemings. “It’s not that she was the mistress of the third president,” said Porter, explaining that she was an American ambassador while with Jefferson in Paris. Porter observed that only one other city street, West Street, is named for an African American.
    City officials say new signs have been ordered and will be put in place during a small ceremony in the coming month.

The Class of 2007 has plenty of cause to eat, drink and be merry. After starting its school year with back-to-back concerts from the Dave Matthews Band, the graduating class will finish their year with a speech from DMB violinist Boyd Tinsley.
    Tinsley accepted an invitation from UVA to deliver the keynote at the 2007 Valedictory Exercises. While a skilled stringsman and a veteran of the Charlottesville High School Orchestra, Tinsley’s commitment to education in Charlottesville suggests that he was invited to speak for more than his chops.
    The violinist’s “sincere interest in this community and humble philanthropic efforts have inspired countless members of the fourth-year class,” said Graduation Committee Chair Margaret Bolton in a September 18 press release.
    Both Charlottesville public schools and UVA received generous gifts from the Boyd Tinsley Fund during the past year. Charlottesville City Schools stand to gain $75,000 from the Boyd Tinsley Fund, according to a September 18 press release from Charlottesville City Schools. A portion of the money will benefit students of music and tennis that show a commitment to their hobbies—from instruments for CHS graudates that will pursue music in college to racquets for students that complete Tinsley-funded tennis camps.
    Tinsley’s tennis program will also support the future construction of a new tennis facility for UVA teams.

Virginia ranks dead last in the nation for pay for court-appointed attorneys, but, thanks in large part to the threat of a lawsuit, local public defender Jim Hingeley thinks that soon will change.
    “I usually go into the budgeting season feeling encouraged…but then when the budgeting season is over and the legislature adjourns, I’m discouraged,” said Hingeley, speaking at the September 22 meeting of the Citizens Advisory Committee for the Charlottesville-Albemarle Public Defender Office. “At the risk of repeating that cycle, I do want to say that I think this is different.”
    Public defender offices represent clients who can’t afford to pay. In those places where there are no public defenders’ offices—or where those offices are too backed up or there is a conflict of interest in representing co-defendants—lawyers are court-appointed.
    Hingeley is serving on a task force set up by Governor Tim Kaine to improve indigent defense, and he’s hopeful that this time, they will up wages. The task force has discussed drastically raising (or even abolishing) caps on how much court-appointed attorneys can get paid per case, as well as increasing pay, number of positions and other aspects of State public defender offices.
    During the meeting, Hingeley alluded to many of the woes that come from receiving such paltry pay in comparison to compensation for prosecutors. Turnover rates have been relatively high and the office handles 50 percent more cases than it should, according to Hingeley.
    But he says with the new governor, attorney general—and pending lawsuit—he’s encouraged. “We should be an equal partner at the table,” said Hingeley, “but, at least if not being seen as an equal partner, I think we’re at least sitting in the back seat now, instead of running along behind the car.”

In the wake of George Allen’s "Macaca" misstep, the senator’s campaign held an "Ethnic Rally," hoping that a multi-culti photo op might put the controversy behind him. But recent revelations about Allen’s casual, college-age use of racist language could make his political recovery more difficult than ever.

In case you haven’t been paying attention, here are a few things that Virginia’s Republican Senator George Allen has done over the past few weeks: held an “Ethnic Rally,” where he met with constituents of every available race, creed and color; delivered remarks at a National Historically Black Colleges and Universities luncheon, where he discussed how his recent “civil rights pilgrimages to the deep South” had given him a “much deeper understanding of [the South’s] cold-hearted history”; prominently touted the endorsement of State Sen. Benjamin J. Lambert, a black Democrat, on his website; and released a statement embracing his Jewish heritage.
    If you’ve been on an extended, TV-and-cell-phone-free camping expedition, this probably all comes as quite a shock. This is, after all, the same George Allen who reportedly hung a noose from a ficus tree in his Charlottesville law office and prominently displayed a Confederate flag in a cabin near his Earlysville home (it was part of a “collection of flags,” he claimed—although The Daily Progress’ Bob Gibson quoted a pair of officials who recalled only two flags: “a Confederate flag and, on an opposite wall, an American flag”). In addition, as a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, Allen opposed a state holiday honoring Martin Luther King and, after being elected governor in 1993, proclaimed April to be Confederate History and Heritage Month, honoring the Confederacy’s “four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights.”
    But all of that was before Senator Allen, feeling his oats at an early-August outdoor rally in Breaks, Virginia, delivered a single off-the-cuff remark directly into the video camera of S.R. Sidarth, a UVA student of Indian descent who was taping the rally for Allen’s opponent, Democrat James Webb.

There are, basically, three campaign missteps a politician seeks to avoid at all costs. The first is caused by organizational failure—usually when the campaign team throws their candidate into a situation that produces images of a highly embarrassing nature. (Remember Michael Dukakis tooling around in a giant tank, his tiny little head swallowed up by his big-boy’s helmet?) The second involves a verbal gaffe or display of weakness, usually spawned by the rigors of nonstop campaigning. Democratic hopeful Ed Muskie’s tearful ‘72 speech defending himself against charges of racism and John Kerry’s forehead-slapping “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it” sound bite are prime examples of what can go wrong when emotion and exhaustion overtakes a candidate’s common sense.
    But the third type of blunder can be the most damaging of all. It comes about when an apparently lucid, completely unscripted candidate blurts out something so wrongheaded and offensive, even their most ardent backers are at a loss to explain it. From Jesse Jackson calling New York “Hymietown” in an ’84 interview to Senator Trent Lott proclaiming that, had segregationist Strom Thurmond’s 1948 presidential campaign been successful, “we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years,” pols have repeatedly found this particular strain of foot-in-mouth disease to be politically deadly.
    Which is why the campaign of Senator George Allen is in such a frenzy to quash the ongoing controversy created by his extemporaneous remarks on that August day.
“This fellow over here with the yellow shirt,” the senator began, smiling generously, “Macaca, or whatever his name is. He’s with my opponent. He’s following us around everywhere. And it’s just great.” After pointing out that Webb was currently in California, attending a fundraiser with a “bunch of Hollywood movie moguls,” Allen once again addressed Sidarth directly: “Let’s give a welcome to Macaca, here. Welcome to America, and the real world of Virginia.” As has been repeatedly noted since the tape became public, Sidarth was born and raised in Fairfax County, and his parents currently live in Dunn Loring.
    If a gaffe is, as Michael Kinsley famously defined it, “when a politician tells the truth,” this one was a doozy. Despite Allen’s repeated denials (“It’s just made up… a made-up word,” he recently insisted on “Meet the Press,” and has claimed that he was simply riffing on the word “mohawk,” because of Sidarth’s mullet-like haircut), his pointed use of the same word twice lead many to suspect that he knew exactly what he was saying.
    But what was he saying, exactly? Well, “Macaca” is French, derived from the Portuguese “macaco,” and refers to a genus of short-tailed monkeys. Its plural, “macaque,” is also used as a racially charged insult in French-influenced African nations, such as Tunisia. As has also been widely reported, Allen’s mother, Etty, was raised in Tunisia, and spoke five languages, including French, around the Allen household—a fact that Allen has mentioned repeatedly.
    And, as it turns out, the slur is not nearly as rare or obscure as the Allen campaign might claim. Sidarth himself, in an online interview at ABDCLady.com, says that it wasn’t his first exposure to the term. “I’d heard it when I was studying in Spain last fall,” he told the site. “Not directed towards me, but I’d heard the term used.” In addition, Jeffrey Feldman—who publishes his “frameshop” diaries on left-wing blog Daily Kos—has found numerous instances of the word “macaque” being used by white supremacists to refer disparagingly to African-Americans on hate sites like stormfront.org, years before the current controversy erupted.

And this is where the Allen tale really goes off the rails. When, at a recent Tyson’s Corner debate, Allen was asked by WUSA TV reporter Peggy Fox whether he could have possibly heard the term growing up, he bristled. When Fox followed up by asking about his mother’s religious heritage (Allen’s Jewish grandfather, Felix Lumbroso, was imprisoned by the Nazis during the German occupation of Tunis), he positively seethed. “Why is that relevant?” he shot back. When Fox answered, “Honesty, that’s all,” Allen mocked her savagely. “Oh, that’s all? That’s just all?”
    As it turned out, that was just all. Although Allen claimed ignorance (“…she was, as far as I know, raised as a Christian”), the following Thursday’s Washington Post reported that his mother had actually revealed her Jewish heritage to him in late August.
    By this point, George Allen’s story has become so convoluted and incoherent, it seems like his tobacco-chewin’ good ol’ boy persona might be damaged beyond repair. While he continues to try to joke his way through the political thicket (speaking with the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Allen called his Jewish roots “just an interesting nuance to my background,” and quipped, “I still had a ham sandwich for lunch. And my mother made great pork chops”), most folks aren’t laughing.
    In fact, it’s no longer just the ill-advised use of a single, obscure racial epithet that Allen has to worry about. Yes, his “Macaca” jab was damaging, but it’s all of the subsequent fumbling and mistruths that may finally push Allen’s carefully calibrated political angle of repose past its tipping point, and drop Virginia’s once-invincible senator—and highly touted 2008 presidential hopeful—into the political scrap heap.—Dan Catalano

Though a September 7 Associated Press article noted an unusually high percentage of inter-sex fish in the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers, local experts say they’d need more research to determine if male fish growing eggs are cause for alarm in the increasingly developed and polluted Shenandoah watershed.
    “We’re not convinced,” Julia Dixon, spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (DGIF) says. “We have not ruled out that [the inter-sex fish] could be naturally occurring.”
    Scientists aren’t sure because the control study, done in a supposedly cleaner river with no chemical runoff, showed similar numbers of inter-sex small-mouth bass. Scientists say bass are susceptible to developing inter-sex traits. “It’s not something that is known to occur just here in this area,” Steve Reeser, a fish biologist with the DGIF and the Shenandoah Fish Kill Task Force says. “It has been found or documented throughout the world and in other places in the United States. The one question that comes to mind—what are the natural background levels of this?”
    But the inter-sex fish are part of a larger trend of unhealthy fish in local waters. Scientists on the Shenandoah Fish Kill Task Force discovered inter-sex fish when studying the health of other fish that have been dying off in large numbers since 2004. Fish kills are associated with pollution. “What’s causing this is what they call hormone-disrupting compounds, or endocrine-disrupting compounds. Some of them have been known to induce inter-sex, some are suspects,” Reeser says.
    Waste water treatment plants currently don’t remove the compounds, which are in everything from pharmaceuticals to herbicides to feed additives and hormones for livestock. The Shenandoah watershed includes the Shenandoah Valley, with agricultural areas and growing residential and commercial impacts. The EPA doesn’t regulate the amounts of endocrine-disrupting compounds left in water.
    Though it would seem that where there is pollution, there are inter-sex fish, Reese says his team isn’t ready to draw that conclusion. “We’ve had pretty drastic fish kills, and I think that just shows that we’ve got a whole river system that’s stressed to the point where it doesn’t take much to push those fish over the edge…It’s just been really perplexing.”