Month: December 2008

The county Board of Supervisors couldn’t make a decision about the safety of synthetic turf at their December 3 meeting. The Board was asked to give $225,000 to aid the county schools’ replacement of natural grass on three high school stadium fields, but Board members were uneasy green lighting the project without concrete data on the potential health concerns for student athletes.

The funds would help Monticello, Albemarle and Western Albemarle high schools to afford the $600,000 cost per field, reduced from an earlier estimate of $800,000. An anonymous donor gave $1.5 million toward installing synthetic turf at the local public high schools, including Charlottesville High.

Staff reported that the initial expenditure is the only big investment because the cost of maintaining synthetic turf fields is less expensive than that of natural grass.

“The economics of this makes sense to me,” said Supervisor David Slutzky. “My concern is about the health and safety issues,” citing lead content and overheating. According to a Brigham Young University study, the surface temperature of synthetic turf of the university’s football practice field was 37 degrees higher than asphalt and 86.5 degrees hotter than natural grass.

Fitzgerald Barnes, athletic director of Monticello High School, said that students would be playing on the field “after the time of about five in the afternoon, when heat is not a big factor.” Synthetic turf would be much easier to manage, said Barnes, and the number of injuries would be a lot less than on natural grass.

“Right now, my field at Monticello High School is a mess, and if you get rain, we don’t have the manpower to work the fields the way they should be worked,” he said in an interview.

Supervisor Dennis Rooker asked the Board to obtain a written statement from the manufacturing company guaranteeing that lead levels are below hazardous standards and a product sample to be tested independently.

Jon Pritchett, CEO of General Sports Venue, the manufacturing company that will supply the turf, agreed to both conditions. “As it related to the products we produce, I can give you confidence that we don’t believe there are any safety concerns or any level of heavy metals that can be made available, so therefore we consider it to be safe.”

School Board Chair Brian Wheeler says that if the Board doesn’t approve the $225,000, the schools will seek to raise the money privately.

“We reviewed [the safety issues] when it was before the School Board last year, and obviously the School Board was comfortable in moving forward,” says Wheeler.

Slutzky and Supervisor Ann Mallek were appointed to work with county staff to answer questions raised by the Board, which will take it back up on Tuesday, December 9.

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

Job title: Training and accreditation supervisor for the Emergency Communications Center. Wade trains the folks who handle all of our emergencies, and keeps our area on the cutting edge.

Worked for the county for: 24 years

Resides in: Fluvanna County

Best of times: Receiving national accreditation. “I spent two-and-a-half years working to have our department meet national standards. It’s good to know we don’t only talk the talk, we walk the walk.”

Worst of times: Unsuccessful training, which takes up to a year. “It’s hard to be spending months and months with someone, spending a lot of our energy and their energy and time, and not have them succeed. There are no indicators—we’ve had people with high school diplomas, bachelor’s degrees, even master’s come in here and not make it.”

Strangest moment on the job: Man who called during a blizzard who said he was trapped and needed some pot. “He said that he needed it for a prescription for pain management. When I told him we couldn’t do that, he asked, ‘Don’t you have some in the evidence room?’”

If she were any superhero, she’d be: A super-duper accreditation supervisor to improve the national emergency response system. “We’ve got it pretty great around here, but I would like to help the whole country.”

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

Unable to find a tenant for the former Order from Horder space on the east end of the Downtown Mall, the Masonic Corporation that owns the building is asking the city for permission to partition the space into two roughly equal units that could be rented out to gift shops or other interested businesses.

“The Mall project is scaring people away,” says Andy Keller, building manager for the Masonic Corporation. Keller is referring to the Downtown renovation project, which involves rebricking the original Mall in sand rather than with mortar, as well as other upgrades to the electrical and plumping systems. Though some test work has already been done, the real work will commence January 2. The city says that the project will finish in May—a schedule that many are greeting skeptically, including Keller.

“We talked to two national chains, but we had to tell them what was going on,” he says. “We couldn’t pull the wool over their eyes.”

“A couple of the [possible tenants] said that if they are right, they will come back in the summer,” says Keller, “but we can’t operate between now and June. Our monthly

bills are pretty high. We don’t charge the various Masonic groups that use the building.”

The Board of Architectural Review will consider the Masonic Corporation’s proposal at its December 16 meeting.

Across the street from the former Order from Horder is the empty former A&N building that recently housed an Obama campaign office. A few doors down from there, Morgan MacKenzie-Perkins is about to close shop on the Sage Moon Gallery that she owns with her husband.

“It’s been a hard decision, but it was a decision that we didn’t have a choice about because, financially, we could not afford to maintain this space,” says MacKenzie-Perkins, who will shut it down December 15. “This kind of an economy is not for sissies, and maybe I’ve turned into a sissy,” she says, with a laugh.

Sage Moon leases the space from Chuck Lewis, who also owns York Place and several other commercial spaces around Charlottesville. Lewis did not return calls for comment, but MacKenzie-Perkins says he was a good landlord who made an effort to keep her in the space. However, “in this financial climate, I can’t take the risks that it would require to do those things.”

Instead, she will exhibit some of the gallery art a few blocks down at Siips, a wine restaurant.

MacKenzie-Perkins doesn’t put any blame on the Downtown renovation, which she sees as necessary. “You cannot let something like this deteriorate,” she says. “We love the Mall, so we’re going to love it no matter what, but when people fall down and hurt themselves on the Mall, they don’t love it a whole lot.”

Sage Moon isn’t the only gallery closing shop on the Mall. Migration, an art gallery on Mall sidestreet Fifth Street SE, will shutter in January, according to a press release from owners Laura and Rob Jones. (C-VILLE’s music blog, Feedback, has the full scoop.)

Another art shop on the east end of the Mall, L’Affiche, is also closing, though owner Zulema Weinschenk says, “It’s not because of the economy, and not because of the bricks or anything. I am just retiring. I have been here since 1980 when there were hardly any businesses down here. I truly believed that the Downtown Mall would become something special, and it has.”