Month: March 2008

Kathy Tejano

Year: Senior

Age: 21

Hometown: Fairfax, Virginia

Major: Systems engineering, with economics minor

What’s in your backpack? Snowboard magazine, notebook, schedule, Personal Finance, green iPod mini, flash drive, chocolate chip granola bar, UVA sweatshirt, water bottle, pens, pencils, eraser, cell phone, wallet, contact lens solution, contact lens case, Portuguese/English mini dictionary, a couple of paper clips.

More features: Up in smoke Practically unknown, salvia will soon become the latest casualty in the War on Drugs Salvia 101 What is it? It might be legal, but there’s still a stigma A high school newspaper censors a student journalists attempt to write about salvia use

John Whitehead says that bills like HB21, Del. John O’Bannon’s measure to make salvia a Schedule 1 drug, “are not carefully thought out.” The president and founder of The Rutherford Institute, a libertarian legal organization based in Charlottesville, and well-known advocate of marijuana decriminalization, says, “They’re knee-jerk reactions to a problem.” When dealing with any drug, Whitehead says, two issues have to be considered: medical potential and religious freedom. Many studies are underway into the plant’s potential medical benefits, including a possible treatment for cocaine addiction, and a whole mess of diseases like bipolar disorder, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, cancer and HIV. Most states considering its criminalization aim to make salvia a Schedule I drug, which, by definition, has no medical use. O’Bannon says that he has “no desire to inhibit research,” but criminalizing it will leave doctors with a conundrum: While Schedule I drugs can be tested for medical benefits, the high illegality of the drugs means that most scientists find such testing difficult to pursue.

John O’Bannon

“It’s the same thing as Peyote,” Whitehead says. “It can be dangerous if yuppies are sitting around chewing it up,” but Native Americans should be allowed to use it in the practice of their religion. In fact, salvia has a long tradition among Mazatec shamans.

For his part, O’Bannon acknowledges that criminalizing salvia is a civil liberties issue, saying, “That’s not something you do lightly. …That’s the balance we have to strike.”

Local budget season has come early this season, in case you haven’t noticed. Thanks to a change in the law, the city and county officials have had to scratch together a proposal much earlier than they did last year. So here at C-VILLE, we’ve cast a dutiful eye to the budget situation.

The city budget looks like it will go up 5.7 percent to $151.7 million and the county budget is recommended to increase 8.5 percent to $331.4 million. Like last year, the topic is more contentious on the county side, with the Board of Supervisors considering whether to raise the tax rate to pay for schools and other services.

You’ll get your fill of local budget talk before it’s all over in mid-April, but before we throw you into the minutiae: questions anyone?

I thought I wasn’t supposed to care about the budget until April.

That’s not a question, but I’ll answer: Those suits in the General Assembly changed the law. Now, localities have to advertise a tax rate 30 days in advance of a public hearing, which gives us Joe Citizens enough time to pore over the figures and decide whether it’s worth it to whine and complain.

There is an exception to this new law—localities only have to give seven days notice if the average assessment increased less than 1 percent—and Albemarle County fits the bill. However, the Board of Supervisors is still trying to stick to the schedule and will try to set a high bar for the tax rate at its March 5 meeting. The trick with setting that rate is that it can go down but not up.

I own a house. Are my taxes going up?

Depends on where you live. Remember that your taxes depend on two numbers: your house’s assessment, which depends on factors like neighborhood housing sales and the location of your house, and the tax rate, which local government sets every year. Multiply your assessment by the tax rate and you’ve got the amount you have to pay in taxes. For example:

Assessment of house: $300,000

Assessment increase: 5%

Tax rate: 68 cents per $100 of assessed value

300,000 * 1.05 / 100 * 0.68 = $2,142

If one of those numbers goes up, even if the other one doesn’t change, then your taxes will go up. Here’s how much the same taxpayer’s bill would go up if the Board returns to the 74 cent tax rate:

300,000 * 1.05 / 100 * 0.74 = $2,331, an increase of $189

Quit giving me math lessons. Will my taxes go up?

O.K., O.K. Your taxes will almost definitely go up if you live in city working class neighborhoods like Belmont or Ridge Street, where assessments went up 8 to 14 percent. Chances are that if you live in already gentrified city neighborhoods, your taxes are going to stay about the same. Regardless, there’s little you can do about it: City Council hasn’t shown any signs that it will lower the tax rate.

But that’s not true of county residents. The Board of Supervisors is having serious discussions about possibly raising the tax rate. Right now, it’s 68 cents, which was lowered from 74 cents last year because assessments went up 30 percent over two years. But since assessments didn’t go up this year, the county might raise the rate a couple of pennies, primarily to pay for schools. The big hearings are March 5 and April 2, with plenty of work sessions in between on March 10, 12, 17 and 19.

I don’t own a house. Why should I care?

I could come up with a bunch of reasons, explaining how local funding affects quality of life stuff like parks and police forces, but I’ll assume you care only about your wallet. All right then. If you’re paying rent, the taxes that your landlord pays probably affect how much rent he or she charges you. Perhaps more directly, when government doesn’t get enough money from property taxes, it often comes up with other ways to make ends meet. As an example, last year, the Board opted to raise personal property taxes (a.k.a. the car tax), which affects just about everybody in the county, in order to help offset the decrease in the real estate tax.

Where does all my money go anyway?

In the city, 31 percent of the general fund goes to the school system, while 44 percent of it does in the county. The rest pays for stuff like police, fire fighters, social services, parks, libraries and debt. Theoretically, the state is paying for most of road maintenance and construction costs, but many local leaders have found that funding woefully inadequate. For the full listing of expenditures, visit the budget websites for the city and for the county.

I need a pet issue to work myself into a frothy frenzy about. Where’s the fat?

So far, no big rallying points like the $1 million ambulance in the city last year. As a category, city infrastructure and transportation spending is increasing $1 million, or 7.8 percent. Public safety spending in the county is recommended to rise $1.3 million, or 4.7 percent over last year. Budget hawks haven’t settled on an issue to serve as the scapegoat of bloated bureaucracy, but look to the new county fire station at Hollymead as a possible candidate.

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

Just two-and-a-half years ago, Michael Antwain Brown, Jr. came to UVA to cover receivers and evade would be tacklers as the punt returner for the football team. Then he tore his ACL in last summer’s workouts and missed the 2007 season. Now, Brown has the long arm of the law to contest with. According to a March 3 press release, University Police have charged the junior cornerback with one count each of grand larceny, possession of stolen property with intent to sell, altering serial numbers and possession of marijuana in connection to a February 6 report of larceny from a vehicle at the Central Grounds Parking Garage. The victim reported four items stolen from his vehicle valued at more than $3,400. Brown was released on a secured bond.

I spend the first five minutes of Cirque du Soleil’s opening night at the John Paul Jones Arena, the first performance in a five-night stand by the Canadian-spectacle-gone-Vegas-glitz-fest, not writing a thing. Instead, I mutter awed syllables with the people around me, cutting phrases like “Did you see that?” and “How’d those trapeze artists pull that stunt off?” into nonsense: “Di?…How?”

Each time I lower my eyes to my notebook in the dark, it feels like an exercise for the attention deficient—how long can someone keep from gawking at a cast of just-shorter-than-lifesize neon highlighters that flip and spin in front of him? The whole of Saltimbanco, Cirque’s oldest touring show (launched in 1992), skips along so brightly and colorfully that it rewards the bedazzled spectator while refuting the critic’s attention; the moment I start paying close attention, I get sidetracked or sidestepped by something else. It’s a three-ring circus with a lax immigration policy, everyone jumping borders.

As a play, the show hangs loosely together. There are acts, but they’re organized more by type of stunt and the degree to which they thrill or terrify the audience; there are characters, but they seem to be differentiated solely by costume and skill, and they all speak in a gloppy babble of sounds.

But as a musical circus, Saltimbanco is wildly entertaining—a collection of electrified pinks and blues that bungee jump from trapeze bars to cross paths and flip like flaming pinwheels, men and women in Bozo paint and “Smurf” uniforms catapulting from swingsets onto mattresses, and a few hilariously syncopated mime scenes. Cirque’s live band sounds like Genesis playing the b-sides of Andrew Lloyd Webber, a lunar soundscape with the occasional jagged shard of fanfare, to match the quick-flipping pace of a bicycle daredevil one moment and the slow formation of body sculptures by two muscle-heaped men in spandex and suspenders.

Most impressive is Saltimbanco’s use of the stage’s periphery. With a cast of a couple dozen characters in front of a crowd of a few thousand, there almost seems to be too many performers; they slink, masked and rainbow-slapped, to the borders of their stage and act out smaller dramas ranging from infantile jokes to naive flirtation to sex-savvy suggestion. When I lose interest in the sensational main course, I pick and choose among the smaller, colorful side dishes. And when they turn their heads back to the big, shimmering spectacle at center, I have a hard time not doing the same.