Month: August 2008

Reservoirs, groundwater low, yet still no official drought

With the urban water supply at 73 percent of usable capacity—its lowest level since 2002—you would think Charlottesville would at least be under a drought watch, as it has been the previous two years. But the “state-of-the-art hydrologic computer modeling” of the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority (RWSA) predicts only a 12 percent chance of drought.

“[The computer model] currently sees fall just around the horizon, with cooler temperatures and vegetation soon going dormant for winter—suggesting a high probability that relief will come before reservoir levels get critically low,” says Tom Frederick, RWSA executive director, in a press release today.

Specifically, the model predicts that in 12 weeks the usable reservoir storage will be 80 percent full. The benchmark for a drought watch is a 20 percent chance that it won’t be 80 percent full in 12 weeks. Over the course of August, the probability has increased to 12 percent from 7 percent.

The real problem may be for well water users, who make up 50 percent of Albemarle County residents. The county sent out a press release today warning that groundwater levels are “critically low” and asked citizens for voluntary conservation efforts.

Categories
News

New passenger rail: 2010 at the earliest

When one ventures up Route 29 on the way to D.C., one seriously considers the thought of abandoning this worldly existence and becoming a hermit. Traffic and pollution (and, well, distance) make it impossible to enjoy a nice stroll to Washington. So what about the train?

Currently, the service offered by Amtrak between Charlottesville and D.C. is sporadic, slow and expensive. But the Piedmont Rail Coalition, spearheaded by long-time rail activist and former City Councilor Meredith Richards, has been advocating for more rail service along the Richmond-Charlottesville corridor since 2005.


Meredith Richards is pushing for Lynchburg to D.C. passenger trains, but the funding rail still needs to be found.

“We have now finally gotten a new service for the corridor committed by the state in a new Statewide Rail Plan that has been just released,” says Richards.

New service at this time means that one or two additional trains would be added to the Amtrak schedule with daily round trip service from Lynchburg to Washington D.C. “These trains would leave Lynchburg at about 5 in the morning and arrive in D.C. in time for a business meeting at 9 o’clock and off to New York City in time for lunch,” says Richards.

So what lies between the proposed plan and reality? Money.

The one-time capital for the entire line from Lynchburg to Washington, D.C.—now called the TransDominion Express is estimated at $206 million. Currently, $247 million over six years are devoted to local rail capital needs, coming from the  car rental tax.

But perhaps the biggest challenge is finding money to cover the annual operating costs that Amtrak estimates at $1.86 million per train.

“Presently, Virginia has no funds for rail operations, which is why we have to come up with a new paradigm,” Richards says.

Charlottesville Delegate David Toscano is one of several state legislators who are searching for a solution. He points to the federal government, hinting at a recently passed Amtrak funding bill that could possibly cover some of the costs. “The third option, one that we are not pushing at the moment, but that may become necessary, would be some kind of local money.”

This option, according to both Toscano and Richards, would be a last resort. “It is problematic because localities don’t have a lot of money,” says Toscano.

“I think it’s entirely realistic to think that it would be 2010 when the first service will start,” says Richards. “Assuming we find the funding.”

But not everyone is that optimistic. “We have a lot of work to do before we can get the service up and running,” says Toscano. The challenges of a state budget deficit are going to be one of the obstacles on the course to success, says Toscano.

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

Categories
News

LeRoi Moore, 1961-2008

When Dave Matthews Band took the stage at the Staples Center in Los Angeles on Tuesday, August 19, they did so without saxophonist LeRoi Moore, a member of DMB since its beginnings in Charlottesville in 1991. Moore died at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center from complications related to his June 30 all-terrain vehicle accident near his Charlottesville home.

Moore had been absent from the touring band for weeks, replaced by Béla Fleck saxophonist Jeff Coffin following the accident while the band played on. Yet his presence seemed to pervade DMB’s first set following his death, from the opening lines of “Bartender” (“If I go before I’m old/ Oh brother of mine, please don’t forget me if I go”) to the final carpe diem of the night, longtime fan favorite  “Two Step.”

Celebrate nearly two decades of LeRoi and DMB with us, folks, and view this gallery of photos. Life is short, but sweet for certain.

Categories
News

What's in your backpack?


Emily Filler

Emily Filler

Age: 27

Year: Graduate student

Concentration: Religious studies

Hometown: Ovid, Michigan

What’s in your backpack? Datebook, chapter from Berakhot from the Mishnah, The Meaning and End of Religion by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, wallet, phone, passport, keys, dental floss, highlighter, assorted medicines, teabags, gift certificate to a bookstore.

Categories
Arts

C-VILLE Minute! [with video]

Brendan Fitzgerald also writes Feedback, c-ville.com’s music blog, and Curtain Calls, C-VILLE’s weekly arts and music column.

Day Two: Straight Outta Pepsi

Just got out of the convention and am writing from the Media Matters HQ near the Pepsi Center. Media Matters, incidentally, is on top of all the stupid spin coming out of the big-league press corps here in Denver, so their site is definitely worth checking out as events unfold.

I wanted to do some in-the-moment blogging from the main hall this evening, but alas the press filing station was a bust. I couldn’t get the ethernet to work, and neither could the guy next to me who was writing for some foreign newspaper. I did, however, get plenty of good stuff today, which I will post as soon as I am humanly able.

Kenny Rogers and the rock star makeover

By now, you may’ve noticed that Feedback isn’t on the front page of C-VILLE this week, replaced by Jen "Slowpoke" Sorenson’s live blog from the Democratic National Convention. While this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with my trip to see Kenny Rogers last week, it does offer a chance to talk about facelifts, and I’ll be damned if The Gambler‘s going to dodge a bullet for putting his melon in a pressure cooker:


Know when to hold a face, know when to fold a face:
Kenny Rogers tries on a new mug.

Now, this post is in no way a jab at ol’ Ken’s set; in fact, I spent the first half-hour of his gig talking nicely about KR with a few of the Young Divorcees (killer opening set) and throwing out the occasional line from "Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town." But the fact remains that what Kenny did to his face isn’t too far from what he did to his chicken—cooked all character out of it.

So, to honor Kenny Rogers’ old mitt, I give you the least successful music makeovers:

1. KISS ditches makeup for Lick It Up. Then gets mocked like Spinal Tap.

2. Wu-Tang Clan. Remember how these dudes were supposed to split into solo acts and conquer the hip-hop world? According to GZA, who just released a new record, what the Clan members really need is an ointment to cure the Wu outbreak and bring everyone back together.

3. Rolling Stone magazine. It’s not fat! It’s just, um, tightening things up.

Your choices? Leave ’em here.

Close Encounters: Al Franken and Jocelyn Elders

I walked out of Pepsi Center alongside Al Franken last night:

Afterwards, I went to the Rolling Stone/Trojan Evolve "Condom-vention" where I watched Bill Maher deliver a raunchy and hilarious (if a bit old-school in the gender department) comedy routine. As you might expect, the place was scattered with jimmy hats. Towards the end I managed to catch up with former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, whom you may recall was canned from the Clinton Administration for (gasp!) suggesting masturbation is okay for teenagers.

A personal aside: I remember the day she was fired very clearly; I was visiting my mother’s classroom in Pennsylvania (she was an elementary school teacher, now retired) feeling horribly depressed and angry at Clinton. I admire Dr. Elders so much for her sensible, BS-free approach to health care, and am thrilled to have this picture. Props to my cartoonist friend Ward Sutton for taking it.

Elders spoke before I got there, even though I came straight over from the convention. But she did remark to us that abstinence-only "education" doesn’t work, and that teaching about condoms is the responsible thing to do. To echo that sentiment, we hear a lot of lip service from the right about "personal responsibility" —  and if you ask me, realistic, science-based sex ed is part of that.

Categories
News

MCP vote comes with symbolic opposition

In the end, the city approval of its portion of the Meadowcreek Parkway came down to a technicality, one so small that three of five city councilors couldn’t say no. On Monday, August 18, after a dozen speakers implored them not to, councilors David Brown, Satyendra Huja and Julian Taliaferro gave the tiny nudge necessary to allow the project to go out to construction bid. There will be no more public hearings on the road itself.

Previous C-VILLE coverage:

Meadowcreek Parkway to-do list in city
Council approves two designs for 250 interchange

MCP may have future legal problems
Parkway project’s segmentation could be illegal

Commission approves MCP interchange
Commissioner Lucy frustrated with final review

Parkway interchange design gets support
Committee likes roundabout design as new city gateway

State funding problems affect local roads
Meadowcreek Parkway could be stalled

County approves road priorities
Meadowcreek Parkway tops the list

“I do think that for where we are now, that this is an important road,” said Brown. “I think we’re going to continue to be car dependent, we’re going to see Albemarle Place built, we’re going to see 29 get more congested. We’re going to need a vibrant Downtown.”

For the uninitiated: The thing we call the Meadowcreek Parkway is actually three different projects. One segment is in the county, and would run from Rio Road to Melbourne Road. The other two projects are in the city: McIntire Extended goes from Melbourne Road to within 775′ of the 250 Bypass, where a separate $35.5 million project takes over. On August 18, City Council definitively granted temporary easements to the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) to build the McIntire Extended portion through McIntire Park. Council also signed off on a diamond interchange for the 250 intersection, though that project will have to come back for a public hearing, probably in the spring.

The Meadowcreek Parkway has served these past four decades as the ultimate symbol of Charlottesville’s divisions with the county, with the automobile and with its self. A two-mile stretch of road, it will ostensibly allow traffic to flow more expediently from 29 North to the middle of the city and vice versa. But it will also go through the city’s largest park. Moreover, critics say it’s the product of an auto-centric era, a cut-through so that county residents can get from one side to the other.

Most councilors felt like the real final decision was made in October 2007. This vote came because of a technicality—a slight change in stormwater design necessitated Council’s approval. At this last public hearing on the road, a dozen people opposed the project. No one came out to support it, though perhaps proponents assumed it was the done deal it ended up being.

Mayor Dave Norris offered a pro forma vote in protest, arguing that the county wasn’t likely to live up to its end of the deal. Holly Edwards joined him in voting no, though she offered no explanation of her vote.

Norris’ vote served as evidence on the record that the Parkway was divisive to the end. “Ultimately, I don’t think it benefits the City of Charlottesville,” says Norris. “It is going to benefit a certain number of residents who live north of the Bypass on Park Street, at least for a short time, but looking at our city as a whole, looking at our Downtown, looking at what we could be doing with these dollars rather than paving over our biggest park—there’s so many reasons to me to not do this road.”

He sees some silver lining. The final resolution conveying the easements include language about the “expectation” that the county will do certain things—increase transit funding, improve pedestrian and bike trails in its urban ring, build the Sunset/Fontaine connector and keep working on the Eastern Connector.

If Norris’ vote did nothing else, it at least spoiled a bet of architectural historian Dan Bluestone. In his comments, Bluestone, a city resident, said that he had a betting pool back home that the vote would be 5-0.

“I think you people have stopped listening,” said Bluestone. “You’re not thinking any longer, you’re just committed to voting five votes yes, and that’s where we go. There’s not going to be any debate about this.”

Before casting his “no” vote with Edwards, Norris told him, “I hope you didn’t bet too much money.”

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

Entering Pepsi

Can I just say having to use the word "Pepsi" all day long is making me feel slightly tawdry?


Hope springs eternal outside Pepsi Center

Two words describe the experience of walking into the Center: sensory overload. The lobby is a sea of bodies, all trying to go different directions. I could barely move without whacking people with my backpack. I finally made my way into the main hall, which I have to say is pretty damn exciting the first time you do it. The dazzling spectacle below takes your breath; it’s like being on the deck of a starship looking out at, uh, a really big political convention in outer space.

My view from the altitudinous Periodical Press Gallery:

The stage is on the left; my view is from slightly behind. If you look really closely, you’ll see the podium — and if you look really REALLY closely, you’ll see Nancy Pelosi standing behind it giving her speech, I swear! (Pelosi: "McCain has experience… being WRONG." Not bad.)

A couple notable sightings: at one point, Jimmy Carter walked right past me in the hallway. Also outside the main hall, correspondent Andrea Mitchell politely said "excuse me" and walked right under my nose. She’s very petite.