Month: June 2010

 Representatives from Schnabel Engineering Associates on Tuesday showed Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority board members the early designs of a new dam for the Ragged Mountain Reservoir.

Cost estimates for Schnabel’s earthen dam at Ragged Mountain Reservoir fall between $28 million and $36 million—roughly the original price proposed by Gannett Fleming in 2008.

Two Schnabel spokesmen made the case that an earthen dam—essentially an embankment of compacted earth—would be a cost-effective option to manage the area’s water supply, and would not greatly disturb the reservoir’s neighbors once construction began. The new earthen dam would raise the reservoir’s water level by 45′.

Schnabel rep Randall Bass addressed concerns about the dam’s sheer size. Of the roughly 80,000 dams in the U.S. that are more than 25′ high, about 90 percent of them are earthen, according to Bass.

“If you have the earth, it is a lot cheaper to move dirt than place concrete,” he said—contrasting Schnabel’s plan with an earlier concrete model proposed by former dam designers Gannett Fleming.

The total cost of the dam would fall in the range of $28 million to $36 million, RWSA Executive Director Tom Frederick said. He added that the price tag could be lower if local bodies act quickly to take advantage of low construction costs.

“The construction market is highly favorable at this point,” said Frederick. “Most people believe that that’s going to continue for a few more months. Beyond that, it gets fuzzy. To some degree, delaying decisions could become more costly.”

However, Betty Mooney, a member of Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan and a perennial critic of the water plan and of Frederick, urged RWSA board members to examine whether a lower-cost option will be sound, both structurally and economically, in the long run.

In 2006, RWSA asked the firm Gannett Fleming to start designing a new Ragged Mountain Dam. After suggesting a pricey concrete dam, to the tune of roughly $72 million, Gannett Fleming’s project was halted in 2008. After a team of independent consultants found that a dam could be constructed for “substantially” less than Gannett Fleming’s estimate, RWSA hired Schnabel last September.

Schnabel’s earthen dam design will be on display during a RWSA public information session at 6pm on June 1 at CitySpace in the Market Street Parking Garage.

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

 The name Anthony Dale Crawford is one that many Central Virginians would like to think of as locked up with the key thrown away. Yet on May 17, the Virginia State Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal that could affect Crawford’s convictions and his sentence of more than two life terms. 

Anthony Dale Crawford (shown here in 2006) was sentenced to two life sentences plus 67 years in prison after he was found guilty of first-degree murder and rape in the death of his estranged wife. However, a new appeal could lead to a new trial and new jury.

“The issue that’s before the court now,” says Steven Rosenfield, Crawford’s attorney, “has to do with whether or not Sarah Crawford’s recorded testimony should have been allowed when the witness was not available to be cross-examined.” 

A little background: Anthony Dale Crawford, 50, was convicted in 2007 of first-degree murder, rape and other charges in the killing of his estranged wife, 33-year-old Sarah Crawford, whose body was found naked, placed in a “frog-like” position (with his semen on the body) at the Quality Inn on Emmet Street in 2004. In what is surely one of the most gruesome cases in Charlottesville history, Crawford, who was previously acquitted in a sexual assault case involving his first wife, was sentenced to two life terms and 67 years in prison. 

Since that time, his appeals have twisted and turned. On December 23, 2008, a three-judge panel from the Virginia Court of Appeals reversed all of Crawford’s convictions, except that of grand larceny (for stealing the victim’s car). The court stated that Crawford’s convictions were based on insufficient evidence, and that the court’s previous admission of an affidavit from his wife violated Crawford’s rights under a portion of the Sixth Amendment known as the Confrontation Clause.  

In an affidavit for a restraining order, Sarah Crawford told police officers: “On October 30, 2004, [Anthony Dale Crawford] called me and told me that I must want to die. He also said he understands why husbands kill their wives.” 

Prior to his original trial, Anthony Dale Crawford motioned to have Sarah’s affidavit suppressed, arguing that her testimony was hearsay and inadmissible under Crawford v. Washington (541 U.S. 36), a Supreme Court decision based on appeals by a Michael Crawford (no relation) of Washington state. The decision in Michael Crawford’s case basically threw the Confrontation Clause on its head. 

The U.S. Supreme Court held that the use of testimonial evidence could not be admissible in a case unless that person could be cross-examined, a decision that had a profound effect on prosecutors’ ability to prove their cases through previously admissible evidence. In other words, where once the deceased Sarah Crawford’s affidavit might have been upheld as testimony of Anthony Dale Crawford’s premeditative declaration of his intent to kill, her words are now in jeopardy of being excluded from the record.   

On December 29, 2009, the Virginia Court of Appeals then handed down a reversal of the three-judge opinion, upholding the original convictions and the admission of Sarah Crawford’s affidavit. However, the Virginia State Supreme Court has now agreed to hear arguments from Crawford’s lawyers, as well as the Commonwealth’s Attorney, in an appeal of the December 2009 decision.  

“This decision,” says Rosenfield, “will effect other courts around the Commonwealth in determining when testimony is admissible.” 

So what does this all mean for Crawford? The Virginia State Supreme Court can do one of three things: uphold the original convictions and sentencing, reverse the Court of Appeals’ decision with Crawford’s convictions still upheld, or remand the whole thing back to the trial courts, where Crawford would then be allowed a new trial with a new jury.

“It was a horrific crime,” says Joe Platania, Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney, “but appeals are part of criminal prosecution. We’ve been in close contact with the Attorney General’s office and we are hopeful that Mr. Crawford’s convictions and sentences will be upheld by the Virginia Supreme Court.”

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

 

Monticello has announced that comedienne Tracey Ullman will be the featured speaker at its annual naturalization ceremony on July 4. Those hoping for her dead-on impersonations of Arianna Huffington, David Beckham or Rachel Maddow, or perhaps, more crudely, her version of Suzanne Somers hawking the “Vagisizer” on an infomercial, or Laura Bush anticipating life back on the ranch (“George can sleep 20 hours a day instead of his 16 and catch up on needed rest”), will likely have to wait. 

Who understands America better than Tracey Ullman, the comic genius that gave “The Simpsons” its start? An American citizen since 2006,  she’ll share her insights at the Monticello swearing-in ceremony on July 4.

Ullman became a naturalized citizen in 2006, in order to be able to vote, after 25 years of living in the United States. And, as C-VILLE TV critic Eric Rezsnyak notes, her greatest genius lies in her ability to see everyday Americans with uncanny perception and then exaggerate our mannerisms until we see ourselves. In other words, expect in her speech something lively, affectionate, and comparatively straightforward.

As Monticello’s speaker, on a day that will see scores of new Americans take the oath of citizenship, Ullman joins a long list of naturalization ceremony speakers from the arts and politics. They include Madeleine Albright, Andrew Young, I.M. Pei, and, two years ago to mild protest, President George W. Bush. 

Ullman, star of “Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union,” is not the first TV star to take the podium. Sam Waterston (ba-buh, buh buh buh buh buh) spoke at Monticello in 2007. But she’s the first with a direct link to “The Simpsons,” another cultural touchstone that skewers everything that makes America maddening and great. (“The Simpsons” first aired as an entr’acte on Ullman’s Fox program “The Tracey Ullman Show”). As Rezsnyak says, “while she mocks Americans for our indulgences and borderline grotesqueness, she really loves this country, probably more than many people who were born here.”

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

The rule for students at the Westhaven Afterschool Program used to be “No homework, no entry.” If Harold Folley can’t find the funds to sustain the program for another year, the rule might become “No entry, no homework” instead.

Until recently, elementary school students from Westhaven (pictured), the 126-unit public housing project on Hardy Drive, could drop by the Westhaven Afterschool Program for 90 minutes of homework time, enrichment activities and healthy snacks. Now, Harold Folley of the Virginia Organizing Project is looking for new funding sources for the program.

Folley, a local organizer for the Virginia Organizing Project, also oversees the Westhaven Afterschool Program in the city’s oldest and largest public housing project, located on Hardy Drive near 10th Street. The program begins each year in September and runs through the school year, with occasional summer field trips to spots like McGuffey Art Center or Carter Mountain orchard. In 2007, the program received a grant facilitated through the Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors.

Now, says Folley, the group that gave money through Rockefeller has dismantled and, barring additional funding, the afterschool program is closed for the foreseeable future.

“I like to partner with people,” says Folley, who collaborated with The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, Community Bikes, the Quality Community Council and more on projects for Westhaven students. “Without funding, I won’t be able to be at Westhaven. So, I depend on funding to bring the kids the special stuff that they need.”

And while Westhaven may be the most prominent example of an underfunded afterschool program, it’s not alone. Leslie Channel, an AmeriCorps volunteer who works with students at Blue Ridge Commons, estimates the annual afterschool budget at $4,000, paid for in part by residents. Blue Ridge Commons, managed by Community Housing Partners and located at Orangedale and Prospect avenues near Buford Middle School, is not a public housing site, but accepts Section Eight vouchers for low-income residents; the program works with Abundant Life Ministries and also receives a grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). 

“Any time you’re working in this kind of environment, there’s a lot of turnover amongst the residents,” says Channel about challenges facing afterschool programs. “Our school year’s ending. We’re going to lose a handful of kids who are moving to different states. Their families have decided there’s a better opportunity for them in different cities, bigger cities. We end up sort of losing students.”

Friendship Court, on Garrett Street, also accepts Section Eight vouchers. In September, a residential services organization called Urban Vision received a $7,500 grant from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation for an afterschool tutoring program in Friendship Court. During the last two years, Urban Vision received roughly $25,000 from the City of Charlottesville, but is slated to receive no funding in the city’s proposed FY2010-2011 budget.

Folley says the Westhaven program needs about $26,000 to adequately provide for students. On busy days, he works with as many as 25 kids, who do homework for 45 minutes, have a snack, then spend enrichment time playing tennis, painting or playing “Black History Bingo,” says Folley.

“If we don’t do anything that’s positive for these kids, they will see a lot of negative,” says Folley, who is currently applying for grants from other sources. “We won’t break the chain of incarceration, of drug use, or mental abuse, in these neighborhoods.”

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

To paraphrase The Communist Manifesto, a specter is haunting Hollywood. Actually, two of them: zombies and vampires. The undead.

ZOMBIEMANIA Click here to hear from local zombie filmmakers.

Not only do people want to watch the undead, as demonstrated by the ongoing flood of films about vampires and zombies and the big box office they pull in, they want to be the undead. “Zombie walks,” in which thousands of participants gather, made-up as ambulant, flesh-eating corpses (some reputedly entering a trance-like, zomboid state), have sprung up over the past decade or so, dawning first in Sacramento in 2001, and then spreading to marches in Richmond (look for it on October 13) and dozens of other metropolises worldwide, including Boston, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Toronto, various British cities, Shanghai, and Brisbane, Australia.

Not even George A. Romero, who as much as anyone can take credit for the zombie phenomenon—spawning it as he did back in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead—can explain why they do this. “I don’t get it,” he remarked about these undead wannabes when I interviewed him recently about his newly released sixth film in his zombie franchise, Survival of the Dead, which opened last weekend. “You just want to say, ‘Get a life.’ ”

Rather than getting a life for themselves, however, other fans go as far as wanting their newborn children to be undead, as well. An article in the May 8 New York Times reports that the name growing most rapidly in popularity for boys these days is Cullen, the name of the vampire clan in Stephenie Meyer’s four-book Twilight series. It goes without saying that these happy parents will also be lining up on June 30 to see The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, the series’ third cinematic adaptation, the two previous films having already grossed more than $1.1 billion worldwide. 

High Marx

 

What’s the appeal of such memento mori, such models of soulless rapacity? Fear and desire would be my first guesses. And sex and death. You can’t get much more basic than that: We dread and desire both extinction and reproduction (or so Freud would have it), and such powerful psychic forces shape the waking nightmares that we call entertainment.

Sex and death, along with taxes, we always have with us, and consequently both vampires and zombies (and mummies and Frankenstein’s monster fit in there somewhere, too, I suppose) have persisted throughout the history of cinema. But Freud doesn’t shed much light on why they are more popular at certain times and not others, or why sometimes one revenant has the edge over the other. Or why both movie monsters have proliferated in the past few years as abundantly as have subprime mortgages in Goldman Sachs’s portfolios.

Maybe Karl Marx, wrong about so much in the real world, could offer some clarification in the realm of make-believe. Could vampires, like the filthy rich, parasitic, aristocratic, and charismatic Cullens, be representatives of the capitalist class? And zombies, those lumpen, lurching, mass-consuming legions, could they stand for labor and the proletariat? If so, vampire movies would embody the audience’s anger and fascination with the money men responsible for the recent economic collapse. And zombie movies would touch on the dread of—and wish for—an uprising of the working against those same exploiters.

Sounds plausible. Maybe. As Marx put it in Capital: “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

Is he talking about vampires? Or is Marx describing zombies? Both versions of vigor mortis have no other function than to consume—Porsches and other costly toys, as well as blood, for the Cullens and their kind; living human flesh for the zombies—and by consuming create more consumers like themselves. They don’t produce anything; they survive only by feeding off those who still do.

WALK IT OFF Looking for a thriller, diller night of our own   When it comes to giving a voice to our zombies—even if that voice just sounds like a chorus of sleep apnea sufferers—Charlottesville is regularly outdone by Richmond. Roger Barr, founder of the humor website I-Mockery, started the Richmond Zombie Walk in 2005 after seeing similar walks popping up in cities throughout the world. In the years since, the Richmond walk has blossomed into a 400-zombie strong benefit march. (Zombies are asked to donate $5 toward cancer.) According to Anthony Menez, who now organizes the RZW, “It doesn’t take that much” to start a walk. “Just a few enthusiastic people with guts enough to walk around and pretend to be dead.” But beyond that, what would it take to start a zombie walk in Charlottesville? There are three lessons to be learned from Richmond’s zombie walk. First, maintain a consistent location. Zombies are creatures of habit and tend to haunt locations of years past. The sight of many zombies is scary; one zombie looks stupid. Second, be prepared to deal with the un-undead. “There are people who try to ignore us,” says Menez, “which is funny on our end. But some people who are absolutely terrified of us.”  And finally, prepare for potential enemies. In the Richmond walk’s third year, Menez says that about a dozen mummies emerged from an alleyway and walked in the opposite direction, against the zombie grain. But I guess it’s as they say: “The more the scarier.”—Andrew Cedermark Last year’s Richmond Zombie Walk, held each year around Halloween, attracted hundreds of zombies.

The only difference between the two is that the vampires are sexier. Who wants to sleep with a zombie? Then again, as witnessed by poor Bella’s futile wooing of Edward Cullen in the Twilight series, no self-respecting vampire wants to sleep with you, either. So in a sense, the zombie/vampire dichotomy reflects the current state of postmodernist pop culture. The world is divided into two classes: zombies, who take comfort in the solidarity of their fellow ciphers, mindlessly submitting to the swarm, engorged by mass consumerism, and vampires, the ever-elusive beautiful people, the inaccessible celebrities who offer audiences the vicarious intimacy of their cold, dead, useless immortality.

Sounds like a dead end to me. Such has not always been the case, however. In their past on-screen incarnations, zombies and vampires have been signs of life as much as they have been harbingers of death.

Count me in

 

Significantly, the vampire and zombie were born nearly simultaneously, both on the page and the screen. The first written manifestations, as cultural critic Franco Moretti points out in his 1982 essay “Dialectic of Fear,” occurred during that famous ghost-story contest that took place in 1816, when Mary Shelley penned Frankenstein and Lord Byron wrote an abandoned tale that his friend John Polidori would later turn into his story “The Vampyre,” about a murderous, decadent, undead nobleman. (O.K., I stretch a point by calling Frankenstein’s monster a zombie. Technically, he is a zombie, a reanimated corpse—and solidly working class. Admittedly, however, he’s an offshoot on the evolutionary tree of zombiedom.)

A century later, a variation on the evolving zombie myth would appear on film in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), in which the title hypnotist engages a deathly sleepwalker to do his lethal, venal bidding. Vampires would keep pace, appearing a couple of years later in F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula.

Two of the most lauded masterpieces of German Expressionism, these movies also reflected, according to Siegfried Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler, the ambivalent attraction of the German audiences to a seductive despot, who would provide a tyrannical alternative to the country’s political and economic chaos, but also would, especially as demonstrated in Nosferatu, likely lead them to disaster. Clearly, this cinematic warning went unheeded.

The descendants of Caligari’s sleepwalker would take a while to fully awaken. They would pursue the voodoo route in White Zombie in 1932 and in Jacques Tourneur’s uncanny tone poem “I Walked With a Zombie” in 1943. They would gestate as the pod people in 1956 in the many-times remade Invasion of the Body Snatchers and slum as vampire plague victims in 1964’s The Last Man on Earth, the first of many adaptations of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend. But it wouldn’t be until Romero’s Night that they would spring fully to life.

The vampire, though, would immediately prove a hardy horror-movie perennial. Transplanted to Hollywood, it bloomed with Bela Lugosi and Dracula (1931). You’d think that such an elitist creep, especially with the mitteleuropäische accent, the greasy hair, and the cape, would arouse fear and loathing among hard-working, xenophobic Americans dispossessed by the Depression. Instead, they loved the guy, starting a vampire trend that would continue to the present day.

The direction this trend took was toward tarting up the monster. As Tim Robey points out in an April 14, 2009, London Telegraph essay entitled “Zombies and Vampires: Why Do We Love the Undead?,” “If you trace the successive generations of Draculas on screen, from Bela Lugosi in the original Universal version, through Christopher Lee and Gary Oldman to Gerard Butler (in Wes Craven’s Dracula 2000), they get younger and more sexually rapacious every time.” The logical progression leads to pretty boy Robert Pattinson, who plays Edward Cullen in the Twilight series.

Working stiffs

 

Actually, Edward Cullen and his killer elite coven face serious competition from Taylor Lautner as Twilight’s Jacob, the hunky teenage werewolf. Not a zombie by any means, Jacob and his ilk nonetheless partake of zombie class consciousness. He’s a Native American—a member of a dispossessed minority—and a working-class kid as opposed to the genteel, colonialist Cullens, not to mention the ruling vampire clan of the Volturi, the epitome of epicene, ruthless parasitism.

So maybe Jacob and his lupine brothers will eventually rise to overthrow their capitalist exploiters. Just don’t count on the zombies to be revolting (in the political sense) any time soon. Of late, they have lost their revolutionary ardor. While the vampires have declined from terrifying autocrats to frivolous sex symbols and dandified celebrities, zombies have become the clowns of horror, literally so in last year’s farcical, box-office-busting Zombieland. Or they have become whack-a-mole-like targets in video games, and in movies based on video games (Resident Evil Afterlife, the fourth in that series, is scheduled to open September 10).

The irony of fans and viewers delighting in the decerebration of deadheads is that, in a sense, they are rejoicing in killing themselves. Perhaps the most horrific aspect of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, already a Rorschach test of period issues including Vietnam, civil rights, media manipulation, and the encroachment of a police state, was its emphasis on the similarities and bonds between the desperate survivors and the hordes out to eat them. The dead are family members, friends, the people next door. Romero would maintain that chilling insight through each sequel, a series that can be read as a dead people’s history of the United States for the past five decades.

“I didn’t think of them as zombies,” Romero said when I interviewed him. “To me, they were dead neighbors.” Or, as one of the last of the living holed up in a shopping mall in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) puts it, “They’re us, that’s all. When there’s no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth.”

Return of the repossessed

 

The Apocalyptic spirit of that last quote—the notion that the rising of the dead portends a war between good and evil and a Last Judgment—has been oddly missing in most of their recent screen manifestations. One exception is the messianic allegory of The Road (2009), John Hillcoat’s adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, though technically speaking the cannibal troglodytes that prowl this end-of-the-days vision are still living and not zombies. Perhaps that urgency and relevance might return to the genre with the AMC television series “The Walking Dead,” based on the Robert Kirkman graphic-novel series, or in the film adaptation of Max Brooks’s (Mel’s son) novel World War Z, expected in 2012.

Also, interest persists in that vampire-movie anomaly, the blue-collar or redneck variation, as seen in Romero’s Martin (1977 and, according to Romero, in the process of being remade) and Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987), which, perhaps unsurprisingly, are among the best films in the genre. One such recent example of this type is Swedish director Tomas Alfredson’s widely acclaimed Let the Right One In (2008), about the friendship between a 12-year-old boy in a dreary suburb who befriends a girl who seems the same age. Not only is the revenant heroine not a rich aristocrat, but she comes from that truly powerless and oppressed—bullied pre-teens. Let Me In, the Hollywood remake of Alfredson’s film by Cloverfield director Matt Reeves and starring Chloe Moretz (Kick-Ass) and The Road’s Kodi Smit-McPhee, comes out October 1.

Surely there is no shortage of other groups that the undead could rise and represent and vindicate: victims of war, famine, terrorism, economic disaster. Back in 1919, Abel Gance’s epic J’Accuse! ended with a vision uncannily reminiscent of George Romero’s worst nightmares: thousands of the World War I fallen rising from their graves to demand that the living account for their sacrifice. This earliest of the zombie movies sets the standard for the rest to follow: the undead return to demand justice—for the living and the dead.

 

This article is reprinted from the Boston Phoenix.

 

 

 

 

 

With sufficiently heavy rain, the area’s sewer system overflows and clogged or backed-up manholes dump raw sewage into creeks.

A YouTube video dated January 25 shows the extent of the problem: A manhole gushed raw sewage, toilet paper and tampons into Lodge Creek near Observatory Hill, which inevitably flows into Moore’s Creek.

Betty Mooney, a long-time water activist, says she was shocked by what she saw in the YouTube video. “I think those graphic videos were a wake-up call,” she says. “I have really no idea how bad the problem is, but it must be bad or the DEQ wouldn’t be sending out letters.”

The problem is so severe, it appears, that the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) sent warning letters to the City of Charlottesville, the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority (RWSA) and the Albemarle County Service Authority. The letters are a “sort of first step in our process to notify entities that there is a problem that needs to be addressed,” says Gary Flory, water compliance manager for the DEQ.

Although the letter says overflows are not “uncommon in very wet weather periods,” Flory says that “we are actually seeing a trend here where we are seeing a significant number of overflows and something needs to be done to try to address these issues.”

According to the letter sent to the City of Charlottesville, the DEQ lists 40 unauthorized discharges from July 2008 through March 2010 into Schenks Branch, Meadow Creek, Lodge Creek, Moore’s Creek and the Rivanna River, among others.

Lauren Hildebrand, the city’s director of utilities, says that Charlottesville has been "in the midst of implementing a five-year plan capital program."

"We estimated that we need to spend about $26 million over the next five years" to replace existing sewers with larger ones, or to rehabilitate older sewer pipes that are already in place, according to Hildebrand.

“We have done flow monitoring in years past and you can tell by flow monitoring where your highest priorities should be set,” she says.

In a letter addressed to the RWSA, the DEQ’s records indicate that Moore’s Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant had 10 unauthorized discharges from August 2008 through March 2010. The letter sent to the Albemarle County Service Authority lists three instances when unauthorized discharges flowed into local bodies of water. In November 11, 2008, 5,000 gallons of sewer water flowed into the Rivanna River; on April 27, 2009, 500 gallons flowed into an unnamed tributary and on June 22, 2009 1,000 gallons of sewer water flowed into Carron Creek.

Flory says representatives from all three entities have met with DEQ staff. “What we have here is a regional problem, because we have a single waste water treatment plant that is owned by Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority and we have all three of these entities having part of that collection,” he says. “What we have to look at is a sort of broad, regional approach in resolving this problem.”

The DEQ asked each entity to provide a written plan detailing ways to solve the problem.
Hildebrand says the city is in the process of sending the plan in draft form. In addition, the city is taking action. “Now we have contractors working and they are actually constructing sewers or rehabilitating them,” she says.

But for Mooney, rehabilitating seems the right approach. “Before you spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars on new infrastructure for water and sewer, we’ve got to repair the infrastructure we already have and if, in looking into the repair, it would be more economical to replace, I am not against that. I think we don’t know that yet. I think we’ve got to have adequate information, which we don’t have,” she says. “We are literally poisoning our water with our inadequate sewer system.”

Calls to the Albemarle County Service Authority and the RWSA were not immediately returned.