Month: July 2010

Categories
Arts

The Girl Who Played With Fire; R, 129 minutes; Vinegar Hill Theatre

Movie trilogies can be as depressing as they are predictable. But The Girl Who Played with Fire, the second film derived from Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy of thriller novels, has a strong advantage. Let’s call it the Better Because It’s Swedish Effect, or B.B.I.S.E. for short. This is the phenomenon whereby the world welcomes any new cinematic event issued from the land of Ingmar Bergman, even if, by comparison to the late, great master’s impossibly high example, it disappoints.

Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby: Noomi Rapace plays Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish film adaptations of deceased journalist Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy. American studios will soon take a crack a the bestselling novels.

With that baseline of credibility, it’s not a big deal that the second part of the series disappoints when compared to the first. In other words, screenwriter Jonas Frykberg and director Daniel Alfredson haven’t even bothered trying to top The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and that’s fine. Why is it fine? B.B.I.S.E.

The main characters are Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), your everyday back-tatted, nose-pierced, leather-clad, tech-savvy, bisexual punk badass with a brutally lousy childhood who happens to be beautiful. She rolls with Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist)—a crusading journalist likely based on Larsson himself—who believes in Salander, and slept with her in the first episode of the series.

Instead of investigating a series of bizarre murders as they do in Dragon Tattoo, Blomkvist investigates an accused ring of sex traffickers while Salander—who has monitored his hard drive since their last crusade a year earlier—plots their brutal retribution. So as not to spoil the plot, I’ll just account for some of what more it contains, in alphabetical order: boxing, brooding, electronic communication, human trafficking, lesbian sex, motorcycle riding, muckraking journalism, murder and phone calls.

There is also a thuggish blond oaf who can’t feel pain, and his boss, a sinister, mysterious and hideous figure called Zala. Lest these characters seem like Ian Fleming castoffs, the movie takes pains to give them backstories. The book takes greater and deeper pains, of course, but that’s partly because Larsson loved him some sadism.

Anyway, yes, it all has a perfunctory, transitory, middle-of-a-trilogy quality. I was going to say it has sequelitis, but a) that is not a real word and b) even as a fake word it’s misleading, as “-itis” implies inflammation, which, although thematically appropriate what with the “fire” and all, isn’t accurate on account of the movie’s way of always cooling down. Maybe it’s a symptom of B.B.I.S.E.

And Lisbeth does spend quite a lot of time curled up in her window, posing with a cigarette and taking in her hibernal city view. But the point is, for whatever reason, The Girl Who Played with Fire seems almost anti-inflammatory. It’s like a couple Advil. It’ll turn down your headache, and thin your blood. Don’t take it on an empty stomach.

Missing person report filed for Bel Rio employee Kristian Throckmorton

Missing Bel Rio owner Jim Baldi, the subject of a fraud lawsuit by business partner Gareth Weldon, was reported by other media sources to have left town with 25-year-old Kristian Throckmorton, an employee of Baldi’s Belmont club and restaurant. Now, local media reports that Throckmorton’s mother filed a missing person report with the Charlottesville Police Department. Read C-VILLE’s coverage of Baldi’s disappearance here.

Coca-Cola to leave Preston Avenue building by September

According to a press release from the Mid-Atlantic Coca-Cola Bottling Company, Coca-Cola’s Charlottesville operations "will be consolidated into the company’s Sandston, Virginia facility on September 17."

"We take these actions seriously and will make every effort to be sensitive to the concerns of employees who may be affected during this period"—a total of 42 full-time workers, according to the release.

And what of 722 Preston Avenue, local home to the company? The building, assessed at $1.7 million, is zoned "CCH"—part of the Central City corridor, with a historic overlay, meaning it could be used as a bed-and-breakfast or microbrewery by right, but any changes to the exterior of the building must receive approval from the Board of Architectural Review. A portion of the property is included in the city’s list of 74 Individually Protected Properties.

The building at 722 Preston Avenue was built in 1939, when Coca-Cola’s advertising slogan was: "Whoever you are, whatever you do, wherever you may be, when you think of refreshment, think of ice cold Coca-Cola."

 

 

Categories
News

FBI looking for Jim Baldi, too?

 From former clients of his Virginia Payroll & Tax business to the Virginia Department of Taxation, more than a few folks would like to know the whereabouts of Jim Baldi. Baldi, who also owns the Belmont club Bel Rio, now shuttered, slipped out of Charlottesville during the last few weeks without a trace, apparently. Other published reports say Baldi left town with former Bel Rio server Kristian Throckmorton, 25. According to some of Baldi’s former coworkers and clients, the Federal Bureau of Investigation may want to know where he is, too.

A lawsuit filed in Charlottesville Circuit Court by business partner Gareth Weldon claims that Bel Rio owner Jim Baldi failed to provide financial records and documentation of his initial $50,000 investment in the restaurant and club, at the expense of both Bel Rio and Weldon.

“He’s left a trail of disaster,” says Ryan Martin, owner of Martin’s Grill on Route 29. Martin says he hired Baldi to handle his restaurant’s taxes and payroll, but changed services after he noticed that Baldi stopped submitting copies of receipts from tax payments.

Martin claims he was contacted by someone who had passed Martin’s contact information to the FBI, in case the FBI wanted to ask about his involvement with Baldi. A former Baldi coworker, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisal within the local restaurant scene, received a similar call. FBI spokesperson Dee Rybiski told C-VILLE that “[i]t’s against FBI policy to say whether or not we do have any cases on anything.”

A lawsuit brought by Gareth Weldon, Baldi’s sole remaining partner in Bel Rio, LLC, also alleges a lack of financial documentation, along with two counts of fraud. In the suit, filed in Charlottesville Circuit Court, Weldon seeks $300,000 in punitive and compensatory damages, dissolution of Bel Rio, LLC, and reimbursement of Bel Rio funds which he claims Baldi used to purchase the share of former partner Dave Simpson, who owns C&O Restaurant.

Weldon, who declined to comment for this article, contends in the suit that when Bel Rio, LLC was formed, the three partners took an equal share in the company and agreed to pay $50,000 apiece. However, the suit alleges, “upon information and belief, Baldi never made a capital contribution to Bel Rio in the full amount of $50,000 cash.” Baldi’s court summons was posted on the door of his Belmont home on July 12, when Charlottesville Sheriff James Brown III was unable to serve Baldi in person.

Tony Jorge, owner of Café Cubano, a Downtown Mall restaurant, says that Baldi handled his payroll and accounting for roughly four years—a job he’d held until recently. Jorge says he was interested in a more accessible accounting firm, and began looking for one after Baldi’s Downtown office for Virginia Payroll, located in the 200 block of West Main Street, closed.

“There has been maybe a little bit of late filing,” says Jorge of Baldi’s accounting work. However, he says any penalty for late filings was typically picked up by Baldi.

Another local restaurant manager who previously worked with Baldi at Bel Rio says he began to doubt Baldi’s business methods when he “realized how much Jim was doing outside of [Bel Rio.]

“He was doing payroll for over 50 different businesses here in Charlottesville,” estimates the source, “and still running that place. The thing that caught me off guard was how somebody that involved with an outside source of work could bartend at their own restaurant on the busiest nights during the week.”

If Baldi were juggling several professional obligations, a few seemed to drop during the last six months. On February 2, the Charlottesville General District Court ordered Baldi evicted from his Downtown Mall office, for failure to pay more than $2,200 in rent to landlord Joe Gieck. Calls to Gieck were not immediately returned.

On March 15, the Internal Revenue Service filed notice of a tax lien in Charlottesville Circuit Court against Bel Rio, LLC in the amount of $12,989.93. The lien is for a quarterly tax return, for the period of March 31 to June 29, 2009. 

On July 16—the day after Bel Rio landlord Jeff Easter voluntarily surrendered the club’s liquor license—the state Department of Taxation filed a $5,111.88 lien for sales and withholding taxes. (Withholding tax, explains the department, is “the amount of tax to be withheld from each of your employees’ wages.”) The taxes date from November 2008 to March 2009.

The Federal lien notice lists the address of Bel Rio, LLC as that of the club, on Monticello Road. The recent state lien, also filed against the LLC, gives the address of Baldi’s home—a two-story pink house with the tallest wooden fence on its block of Elliott Avenue. The home, purchased for $95,000 in June 2000, has been on the market since January, and is currently listed at $189,000. 

A neighbor commented that she doesn’t know Baldi, but has not experienced any trouble with noise or raucous parties—issues that led to heightened scrutiny by City officials and neighbors during Bel Rio’s existence.

Jorge, who says he hopes to reclaim Café Cubano’s tax return and profit-and-loss statements from Baldi, calls the man’s sudden departure and recent inaccessibility “uncharacteristic.”

“It’s unsettling,” says Jorge. “It’s very unsettling.”

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

Categories
Living

Wine basics in three easy lessons, starting with dry vs. sweet

Master Sommelier Tim Gaiser has a new $89 DVD that promises to teach you everything he knows about wine—or at least as much of it as he can disseminate in 20 minutes. At $4.50 a minute, that’s a pretty penny.

 

Since I have yet to get my big break (“Swirling with the Stars”?), I’m going to spend the next three weeks covering wine basics—sugar, fruit, acidity, alcohol, and tannin—for the price of your favorite weekly newspaper. The goal? To make you confident and conversant enough to order and buy wines that you will consistently like. Knowing what you like is one thing, but knowing how to communicate it is another. School’s out for summer, but Wine 101 is now in session.

When I ran a wine bar, the most common request was for a “really dry” wine or one that “wasn’t too sweet.” Not a difficult request as the majority of wines made are dry, but since so few people know the technical meaning of dry and sweet, translating this request proved more difficult.

A wine is dry when the yeasts responsible for fermentation have converted all of the grapes’ sugars into alcohol. In red wines, the presence of tannin (stay tuned for Week 3) is often mistaken for dryness. The astringent sensation of tannin does indeed dry out the mouth, but the presence of tannin does not make a wine dry; rather, dry simply means the absence of sweetness.

A wine is sweet when fermentation has been intentionally stopped before all of its grapes’ sugars have been converted into alcohol. The earlier fermentation is halted, the sweeter the wine. What remains is called residual sugar and is measured in grams per liter (g/L).

A common mistake is to perceive a wine’s fruit as being sugar. Our brain thinks of fruit as sweet, so when we taste a dry wine that is fruity, we perceive it as sweet, even when there is no detectable residual sugar.

The best way to illustrate the difference between dry, fruity and sweet is with unsweetened tea. Taste it and notice that no sweetness is detected by the sweet receptors on the tip of your tongue. That’s dry. Tea contains tannins, though, so you will also notice the astringent sensation on the roof of your mouth. That’s tannic. Now, add a squeeze of lemon. Your brain will think “sweet” because of the presence of fruit, but the flavor hits your mid-palate, rather than the tip of your tongue. That’s fruity. Now, add sugar and notice how its sweetness registers with the taste buds on the tip of your tongue. That’s sweet.

Ready for wine? Try fruity wines, like Spanish Albarino, Chilean Sauvignon Blanc, or California Merlot next to sweet wines, like Moscato d’Asti, Icewine, or a sweet German Riesling and compare how the first hit the fruit receptors on the middle of the tongue and the second hit the sweet receptors on the tip of the tongue.

Now, repeat: “Fruit is the perception of sweetness!” “A fruity wine is still a dry wine!” Stop yourself the next time you are tempted to describe a fruity wine as “too sweet.” If you really can’t stomach fruit in your wine, rather than asking for a drier wine, ask for something less fruity, or with more oak, more tannin, or more acidity, because remember, “It’s not sweet, it’s just fruity.”

Categories
Living

DMB's Bama fund keeps VCCA available to area artists

 As you leave the Virginia Center for Creative Arts in Amherst, you pass a sign that reads “Welcome to the Real World.” Of course, the real world can be a place where artists struggle to make ends meet, or juggle equal commitments to making art and making ends meet. 

A show that opens September 10 at PVCC’s Dickinson Building will display some of the concepts local painter Sharon Shapiro fleshed out last year at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts.

Not so on the inside. And thanks to a grant from the Dave Matthews Band’s Bama Works Fund, more than a dozen area artists will have their stays subsidized, VCCA announced last week. The fund will bankroll a good chunk of residency costs for 14 local artists at the center. “Basically, it more than doubled the number of artists we were able to take from the greater Charlottesville area,” says Lexie Boris, communications director at the center, which is open to artists outside the region, too.

Founded in Charlottesville nearly four decades ago, the VCCA operates under a simple idea: Artists shouldn’t be banished to a life of misery and poverty in their quest to make the world a more beautiful place. (A radical idea, indeed!) The Amherst center is one of the largest artist communities in the nation, hosting around 350 artists per year. 

Here’s how it works: Artists are asked to contribute 25 to 50 percent of the cost of hosting them—which, left unsubsidized, is not cheap—at around $180 per night. At VCCA artists are provided with meals, a private studio and bedroom during their residencies, which last anywhere from two weeks to two months. They exercise at nearby Sweetbriar College, chat with other artists over meals and spend lots of time at work. 

The list of VCCA alums is impressive: UVA’s Judith Shatin spent some time here, as did Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici, widely recognized as the father of neoromantic music, and Wicked author Gregory Maguire. (It also claims to operate the largest international exchange program of any artist community in America, with centers both in Virginia and at a facility in Auvillar, France.)

Another noted alum is local painter Sharon Shapiro, winner of the venerable “Best Artist” distinction in last year’s Best Of C-VILLE issue. Shapiro spent about $30 per night on a residency. VCCA is “fertile ground for being creative,” she says. “Even though you’re not really out in the country”—you pass its entrance on the way from Charlottesville to Lynchburg–“you feel like you’re removed from the rest of the world.” It’s also an important place where artists “take time for yourself and your thoughts,” says Shapiro. 

“I have a daughter who is a teenager. One of the main distractions in life is children—they’re great, but they take up a lot of time.”

The result? “I got done in two weeks what I would have gotten done in three months at home,” says Shapiro. For Anne Carley, another alum, distractions include a consulting business that supports the arts and technology. She’s working towards supporting herself with music. A crucial step toward that goal was a two-and-a-half week residency at VCCA, “an environment that permitted me to blot out the world and just pay attention” to a song cycle she worked on.

“One of the beauties of the VCCA experience for me was the sense of community,” says Carley. “We all were there for the same reason—to work on our stuff. There was a basic understanding shared by everyone there.” 

“It buoyed us all.”

Categories
News

UVA faculty, staff write wish lists for incoming Prez, including transparency and arts upgrade

 This week Teresa Sullivan begins her term as the eighth President of UVA. She walks into a situation dominated by economic challenges and ever-shrinking financial support from the Commonwealth. But that hasn’t kept faculty and staff at the University from crafting a wish list of changes they’d like to see happen under the new Prez. 

Siva Vaidhyanathan, an associate professor of media studies at UVA, says incoming president Teresa Sullivan ought to pay particular attention to funding for sciences and the performing arts.

UVA has been hit with $36.8 million in budget reductions since 2007. Another reduction of at least $14.7 million for the 2011-2012 academic year is on the horizon. For Ann Hamric, professor of Nursing and former chair of the Faculty Senate, “the major issue and my major wish is that we maintain academic excellence in the face of these continuing budget cuts.” She’s cheered to know that Sullivan has already been talking with the Board of Visitors about an alternative financial model. 

“I think it’s such a fundamental issue that it is hard to think that we can achieve a lot of other things without it,” says Hamric. 

When Sullivan met with UVA deans, she told them to find resources and “take control of them,” says School of Nursing Dean Dorrie Fontaine. Those resources include human capital. “We have got great people here and we should keep an eye out and watch for more good people,” Fontaine says. As far as wishes, Fontaine wants Sullivan to remain curious, adding, “I think she is going to be fabulous.” 

In his last State of the University Address in early February, former President John Casteen said that one of the “missed opportunities” during his tenure has been the lack of a proper performance and rehearsal space for the arts. Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate Professor of Media Studies, agrees. 

“Most other major state universities have world-class performance spaces for music and drama and our arts infrastructure is embarrassing,” he says. “I saw The Sound of Music at the Heritage Theater Festival a couple of weeks ago at Culbreth Theater and the air conditioning was dripping on the audience. That theater is worse than my high school theater. It’s just an embarrassment.” 

Although UVA may be the country’s second-best public university to be an undergraduate, Vaidhyanathan, who has known Sullivan since his graduate school days at the University of Texas, says the same school “is not one of the best places to be a graduate student in physics, or to be a professor of physics.” In fact, according to him, science departments and support for graduate students at UVA pale next to his alma mater and Sullivan’s former employer, the University of Michigan. “When you spend money on the sciences, you are attracting not only more federal grants… but you are also enhancing the potential for licensing patents, generating visibility for the University as well,” he says. 

Hamric concurs. Maintaining academic excellence involves “robust graduate student support, it includes enhanced faculty lines and replacing the faculty that we have lost,” she says. “It includes a lot of things that have distinguished the University that have been imperiled by 20 years of eroding state support.” 

Even from the student perspective, resources are “a really big problem,” says Colin Hood, student council president. And although times may be tough, Hood hopes that Sullivan will lead the student body through them “and that she will do her best to maintain and hopefully even improve the student experience,” he says. 

For Brad Sayler, who provides computer support for the Civil Engineering department, the most important aspect of the new presidency will be trust. “I think that if we could trust the administration to do what they are saying they are doing…then there would be a much better spirit of cooperation here at the University,” he says. In addition to budget and salary transparency, a major wish is to finally have staff representation on the Board of Visitors: “That would be a big step forward.”

Overwhelmingly, Sullivan’s arrival is seen as a fresh start. 

“[UVA] is always going to be a charming place full of history and heritage, but it can be so much more. The very fact that Teresa Sullivan is now president of the University she would not have been allowed to attend as an undergraduate shows how far we have come,” says Vaidhyanathan.

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

Categories
Arts

Checking in with Ned Oldham

Ned Oldham released several records with the Anomoanon. With multi-instrumentalist Matty Metcalf, bassist Michael Clem and drummer Brian Caputo, he performs as Old Calf.

What are you working on right now?
I’m just trying to finish the artwork on a Ned Oldham single, or a three-song, 7" EP, coming out on Gold Robot Records. A guy named Kevin Earl Taylor is doing the art and it’s really awesome. I was just on my e-mail, working out the details. I’ve also got Old Calf practice going on. We’re going to try to practice at 9 in the morning tomorrow. We are trying to record an album called Borrow a Horse soon. We just aren’t sure what kind of studio and how we’re going to do it. We might record it ourselves, or we might try to get some cash together and go to a studio.

Locally, who would you like to collaborate with?
I’ve collaborated with all kinds of great people in town already. I’ve been playing some with David Baker Benson. I don’t think I’ve played his last two shows, but I’ve played a couple shows with him in the last two months. The last time I was playing electric guitar and sitting next to Adam Smith, whom I’d never met, but he was playing synthesizer of some sort. I wouldn’t say we’ve collaborated, but it might be fun to do some other stuff.

What music have you been listening to lately?
I have The Fall’s Slates out on the record pile now. I listen to WTJU. I like the Early Music show, I like Dominic DeVito’s show, I like Danny Shea’s show, I like Tyler Magill’s show. I dwell on it ever so slightly right now because I’ve been hearing from some DJs that they’re being threatened with forced rotation. Having lived in Birmingham, Alabama, and Baltimore, Maryland, for seven years each before I moved back here years ago, I really missed, and really would miss, WTJU. I can’t believe how awesome it is compared to what passes for college radio and noncommercial radio. Because a lot of those stations play what they’re told to play, and they play the same songs. Even if they play some good independent music, they are not interesting.

What is your first childhood memory of an artistic experience?
I suppose listening to records. Buying 7" singles at Ayr-Way, which later morphed into Target. They used to sell records, and I’d buy KISS and Queen singles there, and listen to rock radio. Later on, in my grandmother’s house, there were some unused instruments, a mandolin and guitar, both with just a couple strings each, and I remember learning, like, “Sunshine of Your Love” on a two-string mandolin and just messing around with the way two strings worked.

If you’re cooking a meal for yourself, what do you make?
If I’m here, cooking for myself, tenderloin tips.

What piece of public art do you wish were in your private collection?
Anything by Jim Denevan. He works with sand and turf, large-scale things. That’d be really awesome to own.

If you could have dinner with any person, living or dead, who and why?
I’d like to have dinner with my great-grandfather. He was a bad man, and I’d be very interested to see what kind of person he was, in person.

Outside of your medium, who is your favorite artist?
Albrecht Dürer. I love visual art and I appreciate all types of visual art, but for me, his amazing draftsmanship and the insane quality of his drawings, his engravings and woodcuts—I can look at them endlessly. There’s always something new to find in them, and I think, while I can appreciate many pieces of abstract art, it ain’t there unless you can do representational art with astonishing ability. That’s what I love about Dürer. I’ve loved him since I was a fourth-grader, and I’m always finding new things in his work.

What’s your favorite hidden place?
The beaches in Skopelos, the Greek islands in the Aegean Sea.
 

Categories
News

Results from our fourth annual The Art Director is on Vacation Photo Contest

First Place

Untitled, by Nick Strocchia

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second Place

 

“Crozet View,” by David Anhold

 

 

 

Third Place

Untitled, by Hannah Peterson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Congratulations, winners! Nick Strocchia wins a $500 gift certificate from Pro Camera; David Anhold wins a $200 gift certificate from Fast Frame; and Hannah Peterson wins a $100 gift certificate from ZoCaLo.

 

Meet the judges

Cynthia Burke is a painter and “sometime actrist” who is a longtime member of McGuffey Art Center.

Bill Chapman is the founding editor of C-VILLE Weekly and worked for a while at ArtForum Magazine.

Warren Craghead likes to draw. He publishes and shows his work internationally. This fall he’ll curate a show of lo-fi artists’ books at The Bridge/PAI.

Categories
News

Whittington development pipes up

 On the west side of Old Lynchburg Road, directly opposite Biscuit Run, sits Whittington—Biscuit Run’s Rural Area cousin, a 183-acre development approved by Albemarle supervisors in 1977 and slated for 96 units. Since plans for the 3,100-lot Biscuit Run development were flushed in favor of a 1,200-acre state park, Whittington developer Frank Stoner thinks the site could take advantage of Biscuit Run’s nearby sewer lines.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Although county staff did not recommend sewer service for Whittington, a planned 96-unit development near Biscuit Run, the Board of Supervisors agreed to host a public comment session on expanding Albemarle County Service Authority’s jurisdiction to the site.

During a recent Board of Supervisors meeting, Stoner requested that the Albemarle County Service Authority (ACSA) expand its jurisdiction to offer sewer services to Whittington, currently approved for water lines but slated for a septic system rather than sewer lines. Supervisors denied the same request in 2006; this time, they unanimously agreed to hear public comment on the proposal in September.

Supervisor Dennis Rooker told Stoner that he “wouldn’t be unsympathetic to looking at this as a Comprehensive Plan change”—moving Whittington into the county’s Development Area. Stoner said he would consider the step. However, Stoner reminded the board that Whittington was approved for one-acre lots more than 30 years prior, and said the request for sewer service wasn’t a growth management decision.

But with Biscuit Run, the county’s mega-development, out of the picture, a site like Whittington could be a sort of bellwether for how development is moderated in southern Albemarle. Should the ACSA expand its jurisdiction to include Whittington, located in the county’s Rural Areas? Or should developers pursue an amendment to the Comprehensive Plan?

“I think the county has to take a serious look at development south of town, now that there’s a state park in the middle of it,” says Elizabeth Breeden, who sold Biscuit Run to developer Hunter Craig and Forest Lodge, LLC in 2005 before that group sold it to the state of Virginia last year.

Asked about use of sewer lines by Whittington, Breeden says the county and developers would “be foolish not to use [them].

“It would save lots and lots of trees, and be of little cost to them since now capacity is nowhere close to what it was built for,” says Breeden.

Pete Gorham, ACSA’s chief engineer, said two sewer lines run near Whittington. Roughly 400′ away, an 8"-diameter sewer main connects to the Mosby Mountain development, also in the Rural Area. Another 125′ further is a 12"-diameter sewer main, located at the upper end of what Gorham calls the “Biscuit Run collector.”

“The closest is the 8", but a lot goes into figuring out capacity—not just diameter but also slope,” says Gorham. “You’d have to look at slope of sewer, what Mosby Mountain is contributing, and see what capacity is left in it.”

Liz Palmer, a member of the ACSA board, says that ACSA has sufficient capacity for a development the size of Whittington. (“We were prepared for Biscuit Run, a much bigger development,” she says via e-mail.) However, she adds that expanding the authority’s jurisdiction “does set a precedent” for developments in the county.

“The lines have been kept firm for many years and I have personally been a supporter of that policy,” says Palmer.

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