Month: May 2008

Believe it or not, we here at the Odd Dominion have never harbored any illusions about the fundamentally religious nature of our government. Squawk all you want about the First Amendment, but it doesn’t take a brainiac to figure out that the Establishment and Free Exercise of Religion clauses were designed by the founding fathers to corral a bunch of autonomous states (each with its own state religion, mind you) into some semblance of a working nation, not to make the U.S. government a shining bastion of freethinking humanism.

Like a locust, but with a better-looking wife and kids? Virginia’s own Michael Farris compares Obama to a plague.

If you don’t believe us, just consider this: Not only is trust in the heavenly executive emblazoned on our currency, and new office-holders sworn in on the holy book of his or her choice, but a recent inquiry by the Secular Coalition for America (a lobbying group that “represents the interests of atheists, humanists, freethinkers, and other nontheists”) found exactly one member of Congress willing to go on the record as a nonbeliever. (Representative Pete Stark of California, come on down! You’re the next—and only—contestant on “Who Wants to be a Godless Heathen?”)

Now, we have our own problem with mixing politics and religion, but it’s certainly not due to any deep-seated moral or spiritual convictions. On the contrary, it’s our firmly held belief that the American political system is an irredeemably wicked swamp of iniquity, and that any God-fearing person with a lick of sense in his head would avoid it like Lot high-tailing it out of Gomorrah.

But, as usual, nobody listens to us, and so candidates continue to sully their religious beliefs by mixing them with the black tar of electoral politics, thereby inviting God’s wrath one stump speech at a time.

Of course, having said all of that, we’ll be the first to admit that—if you simply must mix your faith and your politicking—there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it.

The right way, as far as we’re concerned, is best exemplified by current congressional aspirant Tom Perriello, whose fresh-faced challenge to Charlottesville’s offensively entertaining U.S. Representative Virgil Goode has (thank the Lord!) spared us yet another election season full of Goode/Weed jokes.

Perriello, who is by all accounts a devout and dedicated fellow, has hit upon an ingenious plan to help folks out and garner votes, while simultaneously highlighting his opponent’s “loathe thy brother” anti-Muslim intolerance. The gimmick goes like this: Perriello asks his dedicated group of volunteers to “tithe” 10 percent of their time to community service projects around the district, thereby evoking all of the decent and charitable aspects of your local church, while also reminding voters of the extensive volunteer work he himself has done in vacation hot spots such as Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Darfur. This is the sort of plan that we’d normally call Machiavellian in its nefarious, poll-tested brilliance—but Perriello seems so darned earnest, we’re willing to put our cynicism aside and applaud him for designing such a smart, community-building campaign tactic. (But don’t push us, Poindexter—we can only hold our snark for so long.)

On the flip side of this politico-religious coin, however, is Virginia’s biggest home-school advocate Michael Farris, chancellor of Purcellville’s Patrick Henry College and 1993’s losingest candidate for lieutenant governor. According to a recent column by uber-Republican insider Robert Novak, Farris—who backed Mike Huckabee for president—has been spreading the word in evangelical circles that, since the Huckster has been thwarted in his divine quest for the Oval Office, God obviously wants to punish America with “an Obama plague-like presidency.”

That’s just great. You’ve got to love it when a purported man of faith speaks vaingloriously for the almighty, disparages his own party’s nominee, and calls the leading Democratic presidential candidate the anti-Christ behind closed doors. Well, you’d better watch out, chancellor: with that kind of talk, you might actually make the cesspool of politics look good by comparison. And Lord knows, we wouldn’t want that!

Here’s how it seems to have happened in the swashbuckling old days: A developer came along, decided he needed wastewater treatment, and he built a plant hisself, by God!

That was the case with the northernmost stretch of Route 29. In 1990, Wendell Wood, then acting on the part of two companies, Woodbriar Associates (responsible for the Briarwood subdivision) and Gold Leaf Land Trust, dramatically expanded the Camelot wastewater treatment plant, located just north of the North Fork of the Rivanna River, to serve GE Fanuc, UVA’s North Fork Research Park and his own residential projects. But it only took two years for the Albemarle County Service Authority (ACSA) to decide that leaving a treatment plant in private hands was a bad idea.

The Camelot wastewater plant will be decommissioned when the North Fork Pump Station is built.

“The service authority decided, ‘No, we shouldn’t have this going on within the service area, we should be in charge of wastewater collection,’” explains Gary Fern, ACSA’s executive director. A 1992 agreement terminated the earlier arrangement by buying the rights from Wood for $1 million and from the UVA North Fork Research Park for $150,000.

Though the agreement states that Wood gave up control of Camelot and would get no favors in the future, Wood still felt some entitlement to the plant last year when asked by an Albemarle County planning commissioner if there was enough sewer capacity for his plans for two office buildings and an apartment complex next to the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC).

“We constructed the sewer plant, we actually built the sewer plant ourselves, paid for it, with enough capacity to serve these properties,” said Wood. “I am confident that we have sewer capacity.”

A year later, Wood’s first office building is under construction, but the Camelot plant is swiftly running out of capacity. Though it was originally rated to handle 365,000 gallons daily, its permitted capacity is only 200,000. In order to accommodate Wood’s project, ACSA is pumping $500,000 into the facility to keep it afloat for two years while a new North Fork Pump Station is constructed. Afterwards, ACSA will decommission Camelot.

Last week, ACSA entered into an agreement with a Richmond-based firm to do preliminary engineering work for the new pump station, which would direct waste to the Moores Creek treatment plant. It will be funded in part by the various 29N players with future development plans: the UVA Foundation, NGIC, Wendell Wood, and North Pointe developers. ACSA plans to spend $7 million on the project in the next two years, with a goal of getting it online by 2010.

North Pointe developers say the timing is right. “If things go according to the rough schedule, then the timing should go very well,” says Valerie Long, an attorney speaking on behalf of Chuck Rotgin’s Great Eastern Management Company, the primary North Pointe developer. The company is looking to finish houses in late spring/early summer of 2010—just in time for the 800 new NGIC employees to hit Charlottesville.

Richard Spurzem, who owns the northwestern portion of North Pointe that consists of 188 townhomes, is having difficulty with preliminary site plan approval, so the sewer situation remains the least of his worries.

“It’s only when you’re about to unlock the front door that you need to have the sewer working,” says Spurzem.

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

Two years ago, Colin Steele and his wife thought they had conceived of the ideal product: ice cream made from all local products. Most important would be the use of milk straight from the cow. The business would be called A Perfect Flavor and would be customized ordering. That settled, Steele began to look into how to incorporate raw milk. And that’s when it got difficult.

“If I would have known how hard it was when I started, I don’t think I would have done it,” he says. In Virginia, selling raw milk is largely illegal, though that’s not the case in 28 states.

Adding to Steele’s difficulty is the scarcity of milk processing plants. Decades ago, small areas like Charlottesville and Waynesboro (where A Perfect Flavor is produced) had their own dairies. But as the industry has become more and more regulated, big companies have been able to buy smaller competition and stamp them out. Consolidation means that there are only six or seven milk processing plants in the entire state.

Because of regulatory hurdles and the complexities of the market, Colin Steele had a difficult time finding local milk for his ice cream business.

As a result, Steele decided he would process his own milk. That meant getting certified by the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (VDACS).

“To start like this with no knowledge of the business, they were taking a real chance,” says Carroll Jones, one of four inspectors Steele ultimately had to satisfy. “We met with them several times even before they found the building.”

According to Jones, once they found a site, they then had to go over the plans for the building with VDACS. For instance, the floor where the pasteurizing would take place had to be graded and its drains protected. Then Steele had to purchase a pasteurizer—which typically costs between $15,000 to $30,000—that alone must be inspected every three months to make sure it is up to snuff.

An additional challenge was finding a raw milk supplier. Most dairy farmers in the area must sell their milk through a co-op, which ships the milk to a processor. The process was hampered by the state of milk production in America. In the summertime, heat in Southern states severely cuts down on cow’s production of milk and has created a system where much of the milk produced in Virginia ends up in the Southeast. As a result, most of the milk bought in area stores comes from as far away as New England. Organic milk is even further removed.

After bugging the nearest co-op for six months, Steele says, they finally found a nearby dairy farmer named Dan Holsinger.

“He gets just a little dab,” says Holsinger of Steele. That dab is acquired when Steele visits Holsinger’s farm to get milk straight from the cow’s teat. That same day, it is taken back to A Perfect Flavor, where it is pasteurized and used in ice cream.

Finally, Steele and his wife were able to open this past February and have already had success with their high-end product. They were nominated for a breakthrough award from the Charlottesville Business Innovation Council and were recently added to Virginia’s Finest Directory, a listing of producers and processors located in the state who offer a vast array of products that are “the best of the best.”

VDACS’ Jones is still impressed A Perfect Flavor decided to process their own milk: “It was a big step to start a business like that.”

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