Month: April 2009

On April 21 at a forum sponsored by Charlottesville Tomorrow and the Free Enterprise Forum, Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris strengthened his place as the lead candidate for one of the two spots open for this year’s city council election (as well as for the May 9 Democratic primary).

“The wonderful experience that I’ve had raising my family in Charlottesville is an experience not shared by every family here,” said challenger Kristin Szakos.

Before a small gathering in Burley Middle School’s auditorium, Norris consistently outlined his agenda for a better Charlottesville, starting with his plan—if he is re-elected—to revitalize the city’s public housing developments by creating a mixed-income, integrated neighborhood system, instead of the current model. “It’s the best opportunity for changing the very dynamics of poverty in our community,” he said, “moving away from … the failed model of segregating people by income which too often means segregating people by race.”

Norris was joined on the stage by Councilor Julian Taliaferro and challenger Kristin Szakos. While the former emphasized his concern over the 13.2 percent dropout rate in the city school system, Szakos said she is running to improve the “city’s responsiveness to its citizens.” As part of that she suggested that City Council meetings be held in neighborhoods and schools to give greater access to the public, even that pizza and childcare be provided. “We have to figure out how to motivate people to participate,” she explained the next day. 

Overall, there was great agreement among the three candidates, with the major difference concerning the embattled Meadowcreek Parkway. On that question, Norris firmly detailed his opposition. “I don’t see what the city gets from this deal,” he said. “We’re putting a huge swath of asphalt through our largest park” that “will clog downtown streets” and “drive a stake through the downtown renaissance.”

Over the course of the evening’s two hours, Norris’s clarity of position left little doubt he will be re-elected, leaving Taliaferro and Szakos in a likely battle for the last spot. “It’s all fair game,” the latter says, but politics dictates that an incumbent always holds an edge in name recognition if nothing else. As a result, it is up to Szakos to separate herself and she seemed to do so based on her advocacy for those with the lowest income in Charlottesville. “Many people who work here in the city cannot afford to live here,” she said during the April 21 forum. As a result, she called for more frequent and efficient bus lines.

“The wonderful experience that I’ve had raising my family in Charlottesville is an experience not shared by every family here,” she expounded in her closing statement. “And I feel I have an obligation … to make sure that that sort of opportunity is available for every family and every child and everyone who lives in the city.”

“I believe in public service,” said Taliaferro. In his closing, he stressed his decades as a public servant in Charlottesville (he was fire chief for more than 30 years before running for council in 2005), reasoning that his experience would help when it came to making tough decisions in hard economic times. Norris also called attention to his past accomplishments while on City Council, but cautioned that more work is necessary, saying, “We have made good progress but we’re not where we need to be.”

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(1) John Casteen — President, University of Virginia

John Casteen: The undisputed leader of the house that Jefferson built remains a masterful manager and fundraiser, and seems, as The New York Times claimed, “placed on this earth for the purpose of being president of the University of Virginia.”

In a hierarchical organization like UVA, the man at the top is just that. John Casteen is one of the longest-serving university presidents in the country, at a school that’s long made a convincing case for itself as an “Almost Ivy.” He controls enormous human and financial resources (13,920 employees and a $2.2 billion operating budget) and is closely identified with an extremely ambitious $3 billion capital campaign.

JUMP TO: • Up & Comers from this and the other four categories!

Casteen earned all three of his degrees at UVA, specializing in Beowulf, and was the dean of admissions there for seven years. After teaching English at UVA and serving as Virginia’s Secretary of Education and president of the University of Connecticut, he became UVA president in 1990 and has since overseen a raft of major projects, from construction to restructuring. Much of his power comes from his track record as a master of eliciting donations: In redefining the role of university president as fundraiser-in-chief, Casteen has helped to establish UVA as increasingly independent from the Commonwealth.

In terms of network, Casteen’s connections in the business and higher education worlds are wide and deep. He has been involved with a panoply of corporate boards, nonprofits and educational organizations: everything from Allied Concrete to Wachovia to Sallie Mae to the NCAA. In tandem with Chief Operating Officer Leonard Sandridge, Casteen has true power to shape UVA and, in turn, the economic, physical and cultural profile of Charlottesville. As The New York Times had it in a 1999 story, “If ever there were a man placed on this earth for the purpose of being president of the University of Virginia, it is Dr. John Casteen III.” He is likely to retire within a few years, but for now his power is undiminished.

 

(2) Leonard Sandridge — Chief Operating Officer, UVA

Sandridge is the day-to-day mastermind of UVA in all its guises: as an educational institution, major employer, local development player, business and cultural force. If you’re a top leader at UVA—the chief of police, the VP for management and budget, the chief human resources officer, the athletics director, the chief student—you’re probably reporting directly to Leonard Sandridge.

An accountant by training, Sandridge held various finance-related positions at the school beginning in 1967 and worked his way up to the No. 2 position at UVA in 1990. Casteen became president that year, and the two are strongly linked as a team. Sandridge clinches his power at UVA through sitting on the boards of UVIMCO and the UVA Foundation.

Though he’s risen high, Sandridge has not traveled far: He’s a Crozet native and a product of Albemarle County schools, and has been involved in everything from the Lions Club to the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce, where he serves on the board. When the Chamber presented him with the 2003 Paul Goodloe McIntire Citizenship Award, it cited his “skill, purpose and grace” in representing UVA and the community, along with his remarkably busy schedule of community involvement. It wasn’t the only public recognition of Sandridge’s long shadow: You may have noticed a certain road bearing his name, off the 250 Bypass.

(3) Bob Sweeney — Senior VP for Development and Public Affairs

Bob Sweeney: The man responsible for developing UVA’s power and image remains involved in nearly every aspect, from overseeing the relationship between school and city to nearing that $3 million capital campaign total.

Sweeney oversees the $3 billion capital campaign and the considerable staff that makes it run ($1.873 billion raised through February!), as well as the University’s public relations arm. His fundraising expertise includes overseeing a fourfold increase in philanthropic giving to UVA between 1990 and 2000, when he led a previous $1.43 billion campaign.

Sweeney not only manages an enormous swath of the UVA bureaucracy, he also has a national network in the world of higher education fundraising, due to his having directed development at universities throughout the East Coast (SUNY-Oswego, UNC-Chapel Hill, Loyola College) prior to taking his local post in 1991. UVA’s development office is recognized as one of the most effective in the nation, and Sweeney personally has a track record of managing campaigns that meet their objectives and then soar beyond them ($440 million in a $320 million campaign at Chapel Hill, for example).

Sweeney has also assumed greater control of public affairs than UVA’s previous development VPs, giving him oversight of UVA’s official publications and media outlets, marketing, and the changing relationship between UVA and Charlottesville. As the University becomes an ever bigger powerhouse nationally and an ever more significant presence locally, Sweeney is the boss of that big ship’s engine room. 

(4) Susan Carkeek — Vice President and Human Resources Officer

As UVA’s first vice president and human resources officer, since 2006 Susan Carkeek has overseen the realm of human relations: work benefits, retirement benefits, leave plans, employee grievances. Carkeek came to Charlottesville knowing a thing or two (she has more than 30 years of experience in higher education human resources management) and didn’t waste any time getting to work. In the last couple of years, she has sponsored and implemented a new HR plan that was greeted by 13,920 employees with both disdain and joy. Any UVA employees hired after July 1, 2006 (they number 1,500 and growing), were required to switch from a state-based benefits system to a more autonomous, University-based plan. The plan is a direct outcome of the 2005 Management Agreement and Restructured Higher Education Finance Administrative Operations Act, a.k.a. “charter,” that gave UVA greater autonomy from the state.

As the new HR plan kicked in at the beginning of the year, employees who were hired before July 1, 2006, had the choice to switch over or stick with the old plan. According to UVA HR, of 4,400 employees eligible to switch, only 2 percent decided to make the leap. Still, Carkeek notes that 28 percent of employees are under the new plan. That number will only grow with future hires. Thus, Carkeek’s revamped HR plan has created two very distinct classes of UVA employees, Classified and University Staff, working alongside one another, yet with different sets of benefits and leave policies. That’s a big deal at the largest employer in town.

Perhaps one of the biggest changes had to do with compensation: The new plan makes use of national and local market-rate pay bands. For thousands of UVA employees and their families, Carkeek is the architect of a changing vision of the future.

(5) Dorothy Batten — Darden M.B.A., Class of 1990

How do you insulate an enormous university against a shrinking economy? Keep your friends close and your donors closer. It’s hard to imagine any donor closer to UVA than Dorothy Batten.

A graduate of UVA’s Darden School of Business, Batten worked with her father, Landmark Communications retired Chairman and CEO Frank Batten, Sr., to fund the “Batten Family Challenge for Entrepreneurial Leadership” in 1996 with a $13.5 million donation—a precursor to perhaps the Batten family’s biggest contribution, the $100 million Batten School of Leadership. But Dorothy Batten is a donor across an even wider variety of fronts—namely business and the arts—and doubles her power as a donor by making her presence felt on a few boards. A longtime member of the UVA Arts Council (along with donors John and Mary Scott Birdsall), Batten is also a friend of the Virginia Film Festival, serves on the board of UVA’s Jefferson Scholars Program and helped to sponsor choreographer and dancer Bill T. Jones’ artist-in-residence program last fall.

With well-placed donations and board positions to shape how her money is used, Batten is in a prime position to help steer a few key parts of Mr. Jefferson’s University through the next few years. And in the midst of our current recession, you can bet that she’ll be the first person UVA tries to woo for funding big plans.

Back to introduction

If you’re anything like us (and honestly, our condolences if you are), you probably spend way too much time following the vagaries and vicissitudes of Virginia’s preening political class. And if you’ve been watching closely over the past few weeks — while completely ignoring that insignificant little thing we call real life—you could be excused for thinking that our Commonwealth is absolutely awash in cash.

Kaine took his pro-stimulus message straight to the people…of Israel, Dubai and Morocco, courtesy of Virginia’s taxpayers.

For starters, just take a look at the eye-popping first quarter fundraising haul for the governor’s race, in which the four candidates raked in nearly eight million smackers, setting a pace that seems sure to make this the most expensive electoral free-for-all in Virginia’s history. And if you’re wondering where all of that sweet, sweet green is going, just head on over to YouTube and take a gander at the massive sign gauntlet (aka “Terry McAuliffe’s Sea of Hubris”) that greeted this year’s Shad Planking attendees.

But even more impressive than the ability to rake in massive amounts of loot (and spend it like Michael Jackson in a Baby Gap) is the devil-may-care insolence it takes to be handed a heaping pile of cashola on a silver platter, and then blithely hand it back because the platter isn’t shiny enough.

Yes, that’s exactly what the swells over at the General Assembly recently did, giving the old “thanks but no thanks” to $125 million in federal stimulus funds because, even though it would fund a nice chunk of current state unemployment benefits, it might just possibly maybe make it necessary to expand unemployment coverage in the future. Now, we’re certainly no experts, but with Virginia’s unemployment rate at 6.7 percent and rising, you’d think these guys would just take the money and concentrate on creating new jobs, thereby solving the problem, instead of assuming that we’re headed for a post-apocalyptic future where everyone is on the dole, and the only available work revolves around the shoe-shining and suit-pressing needs of our god-like legislators. But hey, that’s just us.

Now, there is one way in which Virginia’s pols resemble regular people when it comes to money: They just can’t stop talking about it. In fact, it seemed like the entirety of last week’s gubernatorial debate was dedicated to charges and counter-charges of shady fundraising (for those keeping score at home: Brian Moran took money from defense contractors with business in front of his brother, Creigh Deeds wanted to take money from defense firms but failed, Terry McAuliffe takes money from anything with a pulse, and Bob McDonnell takes money from a Virginia Beach law firm, but claims to be “sort of unemployed”).

Not to be outdone, Governor Tim Kaine (who’s sort of over-employed, if you ask us) has been berating the Assembly non-stop for turning down the Fed’s free dough, and recently promised to take his message to the people to force lawmakers to “do the right thing.”

So what’s the Gov’s first message-spreading stop? Why, an eight-day trip to Israel, Dubai and the Kingdom of Morocco, of course, at an estimated cost to taxpayers of $32,000.

Like we said: as long as you ignore everything outside of politics, we’ve got the best economy in the world!