Month: April 2007

Dear Ace: I know gambling is illegal in Virginia. Is online gambling O.K.? —Tex S. Holdem

Tex: Kenny Rogers’ rotisserie chicken chain may have gone belly-up, but his wisdom springs eternal: You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away and know when to run. But if you’re playing online poker, are you gonna have to know when to run from the cops? Ace went to the law to find out.

The virtual showdown has so much less flourish, but online poker play has its advantages (and legality for now).

The Code of Virginia has a long, boring definition for gambling that boils down to placing a wager on anything that has the potential for profit based on chance. With a few exceptions (“contest[s] of speed or skill between men, animals, fowl or vehicles” and bingo), anything that falls under that definition makes the bettor guilty of a Class 3 misdemeanor. But don’t start frantically deleting your Internet browser history yet, ‘cause there’s a big loophole.

Section 18.2-334 of the Virginia Code mandates that the law doesn’t apply to any “game of chance conducted in a private residence, provided such private residence is not commonly used for such games of chance.” The law does go on to say that if there’s a gaming operator in your house who “conducts, finances, manages, supervises, directs or owns all or part of an illegal gambling enterprise, activity or operation,” you’re in trouble. In the context of online gambling, however, that means you’d have to be running AlbemarlePoker.com to raise the Commonwealth’s suspicions. Clearly, the law was enacted to ensure that smoky five-card stud games played around a buddy’s kitchen table are kosher, but it should also set you in the clear as far as online gambling’s concerned. Right?

Well…sort of.

The Unlawful Internet Gambling Act of 2006 was Bill Frist’s pet project at the very end of last year’s Senate session. It ties the hands of banks in funding online gambling sites, but the law doesn’t explicitly apply to individual poker players. So you’re entering some murky legal territory, Tex. Provided you can find a legit way to pay to place your bets, however, and provided you’re playing a game like poker that involves some degree of skill (it’s the pure chance stuff that can get you in trouble), then game on. And hell, no individual has ever been prosecuted for online gambling, so Ace puts the odds of your arrest at, let’s say, 1 million to one. Any takers?

When local photographer Billy Hunt set out to record the strange, temporary landscapes that result from clearing land for development, he at first shot the sites in the daytime. “They were really not interesting to look at,” he says. “Just a lot of dirt.” Seems obvious, until you visit his show (up at Café Cubano through the end of April) and see what he wound up doing instead: visiting the sites at dusk, making long exposures and revealing a weird beauty in the scraped soil and empty bulldozers.

The project carries the deadpan title “The Number One City in America,” and the accompanying statement makes clear the irony in this designation: “Previously untenable tracts of land are being transformed, aggressively and irrevocably,” it reads. Hunt’s own neighborhood, the Ridge Street area, is undergoing such a change right now with the Roy’s Place, Carter’s View and Brookwood projects (over 100 residential units altogether), despite his and other residents’ efforts to stop them. “My concern after having been involved with the process is I don’t feel like there’s a plan,” he says. “Charlottesville for a very long time has been pretty good at balancing [growth with quality of life]. In the last five or seven years, that balance has gone out of whack.”

With images such as this one, local photographer Billy Hunt hopes to get people thinking about aggressive development.

Disappointed in the civic process, Hunt hopes instead to get people thinking with his gorgeously mournful images. In “Burnet Commons #1,” a bare hillside stretches up and away from the viewer, layered with an inch or so of snow and patterned with bulldozer tracks. The dozer itself sleeps at the edge of the frame, almost as sentient as a cow. At the top of the hill, two nondescript houses and a beacon of a streetlight seem to presage the hastily built neighborhood that will soon occupy this slope.

Hunt says it was a tricky choice to make attractive pictures of destruction. “I want the images to be approachable for the vast majority of people who don’t think about this stuff very much,” he says. He also tried making pairs of photos, before-and-after views of developed sites. But, he says, “they were so different you couldn’t make the connection between the two.”

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After years of discussion, Charlottesville will finally begin to build a bike-accessible loop trail around the city that will exist in addition to the Rivanna Trail, a recreational hiking trail that’s rough in most sections. The new bicycle bypass would serve commuter bicyclers and parallel the existing trail for the most part. In some places, the new trail would share right-of-way with the Rivanna, such as the two-mile paved section on the east side of town, while in others it would be entirely separate, running on city streets.

Trail construction should begin by the end of the year, but meanwhile Charlottesville lacks a contiguous bike-friendly trail, in comparison to several other localities—such as Lynchburg.

Happy trails, coming soon. Construction on a contiguous trail loop for commuter bikers should begin by the end of the year. The city may seek grant funding to make up budget gaps.

“They have a beautiful multiuse commuter bike trail that goes from downtown to the outskirts of certain neighborhoods,” says Alia Anderson of the Alliance for Community Choice In Transportation. “If Lynchburg can do it, Charlottesville better get on it.”

“It will be done in pieces,” says Chris Gensic, the city’s greenways and trails planner. The trail along Moore’s Creek is one of his first projects, as is the Coal Tower trail that will connect Downtown to Riverview Park (both are scheduled to be completed by the end of 2008). The coal trail will be unusually lavish, as the city received a $300,000 private grant to fund it. As a result, it will be paved and fenced.

Most of the trail will be outfitted with a stone-dust surface that the Monticello Trail presently incorporates. “It’s a good mix between the surface you need for strollers, wheelchairs and bicycles,” says Gensic, “but you haven’t gone to pavement that isn’t as natural or good for water quality.”

A stone-dust surface is also inexpensive when compared with the alternatives of asphalt or concrete that the city’s 2003 plan called for. “The funds are not there, but we have a lot of opportunity to seek state and federal grants,” says Anderson.

For a trail that should cost millions, a mere $100,000 is set aside in the city’s 2008 fiscal budget. While the county has made it a priority project and expects to receive trail upgrades through private proffers, the bike loop has an unspecified amount of the Parks and Rec trails budget.

The effort may ultimately require a “mentality shift,” says Anderson, “from biking being something people view as a recreational sport to something that’s an integral part of our transportation system.” Not only would it open up more money for trails, but new trails should mean a reduction in traffic. “We just need to start viewing biking as part of that,” Anderson says.

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The kids had plans with friends at Chris Greene Lake, so last August 19 their parents, Colin and Virginia Glasgow, packed them into the family’s blue Toyota van and headed out from their home in Crozet. The plan: drop the kids (a son and daughter) and Virginia at the lake while Colin, unemployed, would continue his job search. Sadly, what should have started out as an unremarkable Saturday ended up in trauma.

Colin Glasgow, 44, who will serve 12 years for taking his family on a terror-filled ride, keeping them in the car for hours, then crashing the vehicle into a tree. Reportedly, his wife wanted a divorce.

Colin Glasgow kept his family hostage in the vehicle while he took them on a wild and dangerous driving spree, eventually wrapping the van around a large tree in an Earlysville yard in what law enforcement authorities categorized as an attempted murder-suicide. With his family inside and injured, Glasgow ran away from the scene.

On Tuesday, April 17, after being held without bond in the regional jail, he was sentenced to serve 12 years for abduction, child endangerment and domestic assault. In January, he entered an Alford plea on these and other charges, meaning he acknowledged that there was enough evidence to convict him. When Glasgow, 44, gets out of jail, he will have three years of supervised probation. If he puts together 40 years of good behavior, including getting and keeping a full-time job, then he will be allowed to see Virginia and his children again.

Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Jon Zug, who tried the case in Albemarle Circuit Court, says that Virginia Glasgow believes her declared intention to divorce Colin prompted his reckless behavior. As for whether 40 years without contact between him and his family is an exceptionally harsh restriction, Zug is emphatic: “He tried to kill them, so no.”

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Following the violent shooting April 16 at Virginia Tech that left 33 people dead in a campus dormitory and classroom building, university officials everywhere are examining policies that protect students’ safety.

President John T. Casteen III addressed a group of mourners at an April 17 vigil for the Virginia Tech victims: “The University has detailed procedures in place to handle catastrophes of many kinds. We will review all of these procedures.”

UVA students noticed a rise in police presence on Grounds after Seung-hui Cho murdered 32 people at Virginia Tech. UVA is reviewing campus security and has plans to implement an alert system that includes text messages and high-tech LED screens next fall.

Patricia Lampkin, vice president of student affairs, also sent a notice to parents that University police were collaborating with staff “as needed.” “Finding ways to improve safety is at the forefront of our minds,” Lampkin wrote. Among those improvements: an “instantaneous notice system” for the fall, to include e-mail, text messaging and PDA alerts as well as strategically placed LED video screens around Grounds.

Students, too, are rethinking safety on campus.

“I was sitting in class earlier this week and I started to think about what possible exits I could take if someone were to come into the classroom with a gun,” says Kate McMillan, a senior. “I realized that there were only a limited number of exits for the number of people in the room. In many ways we are just as vulnerable to an attack as Virginia Tech sadly was.”
Carrington Dudley, a freshman, wrote over e-mail: “I’ve seen a lot more security guards and police around campus, but only the beginning of this week. We still use cards to get into our dorm, but I haven’t noticed that people are much more hesitant to let people in. I guess people feel like if they recognize the person and know that the person is a student…that it doesn’t matter. I just find that strange since the shooter was a student himself.”

Though these facts may seem chilling to parents of campus-dwellers, experts say universities are doing a fine job of securing students.

Sheldon E. Steinbach, a higher education attorney and former vice president of the American Council on Education, says, “I wrote the first white paper on campus security in 1983, urging our schools to increase campus security: sophisticated locks, more lighting, escort services, and dramatic increase in personnel, all of which has happened at enormous expense, by the way. It’s not like schools are negligent.”

Governor Tim Kaine has ordered a review of Tech’s actions surrounding the incident, and schools everywhere are reviewing their policies. But Steinbach says few gaps may be found.
“What we’ve been talking about is really Monday morning quarterbacking, all the wisdom of 20-20 hindsight that doesn’t, in the light of day, replace the fact that the institution as of this moment did everything right.”—with additional reporting by Stephanie Woods

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