Month: July 2010

Mark Brown had never stepped foot inside the Charlottesville Ice Park until roughly six weeks ago, when he approached the 25,000-square-foot building with an eye towards buying it. Now, the park has a new owner, a new name and, to hear Brown tell it, more than a few new ideas for its future.

On Friday, July 16, Brown finally confirmed a rumored interest in the ice park with a $3 million purchase—more than $1 million below asking price. According to Brown, the facility will be called the Main Street Arena, and will continue to offer ice skating from October through March. From April through September, the space will feature a turf field appropriate for soccer, lacrosse, field hockey and more.

Asked about planned renovations for the space, Brown said, “The biggest thing is, I’m buying a flooring system to put over the ice.” He estimates that the system will cost roughly $100,000.

Rumors of a deal for the ice park reached a peak last week. Tony Fischer, coach of the UVA men’s ice hockey club, told C-VILLE that a group of investors planned to purchase the park and transform it into a sports multiplex housing turf sports in the summer and hockey and ice skating in the fall and winter.

According to Fischer, the arena would be ready for his team on Wednesday, September 15—a date confirmed in a press release from Brown.

In a news release, Brown extolled the potential uses of the arena. “You can have a concert, a trade show or a convention. You can play soccer, lacrosse, field hockey, kickball, ice hockey or figure skating,” said Brown. “You can have a major fashion show in there, an art show…anything that needs a large climate-controlled space.”

In addition to thanking former park owners Bruce and Roberta Williamson, Brown also thanks his “longtime lending partners who have helped me through the years”—a group representatives from Cornerstone Bank, Old Dominion Bank and BB&T bank.

Brown represented a group of local investors in the deal, including local surgeon John Ligush and his wife, Donna. Brown declined to name additional investors, but said many have children who use the rink. The Williamsons purchased the park for roughly $3.1 million in 2003 and opted to put it on the market in February, acknowledging that if they operated it for another year, their losses would exceed $1 million.

The park shut its doors June 30 and its ice has been melted. The announced September 15 reopening, according to Fischer, puts the UVA hockey club “right on schedule.”

“We’re glad to see that there is going to be a rink in Charlottesville,” said Fischer. “Not only for the team, but for the whole community.”

Peter Dimmick, who has played in the local hockey league since January 2009, said rumors of Brown’s interest in a park purchase had been part of locker room chatter since May.

“There are not too many people who just play hockey on the side,” said Dimmick, who has played since the age of 5. “You either don’t play or you have an obsession. It gets in your blood and you just have to play.”

Hockey passion runs so deep, according to Dimmick, that fellow players told him they would contemplate moving away from Charlottesville if it had no ice rink. And for Dimmick personally, he chose to attend UVA for graduate school in part because he knew Charlottesville had a rink.

“It was definitely a selling point,” the Pittsburgh native said. Now, it looks as if Dimmick can begin sharpening his skates for the upcoming season.

In an op-ed published today in the Huffington Post, Halsey Minor took his Landmark Hotel plight national.

In “Why I Fight,” Minor spills about the failure of the bank that financed the project, the takeover by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC) and his current legal woes.

“I am sure you would expect that the FDIC’s priority would be to maximize the value of the asset for the public by working with me to wrap up the problem caused by the failed bank,” he writes.

“We could have put more than 100 people back to work, injected millions of dollars into the Charlottesville economy and finished a half-built structure that now stands as a nine-story testament to hard times.”

Minor heaps blame on Claire Cotter, who is managing his project for the FDIC.

“She immediately went to work to protect the balance sheets of the eight lending banks by wasting millions of taxpayer dollars continuing to fight Silverton’s misguided legal battle, all so these banks don’t have to write down my loan. (I’ve already won arbitration against the bank’s developer on the project; I face the FDIC in October.) Between the government and me, roughly $10 million already has been spent in legal fees on a dispute over a $10.3 million loan.”

Calls to the FDIC were not immediately returned.

To read the complete piece, click here. For a timeline on the Landmark Hotel, click here.
 

The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s football program is currently under investigation by the NCAA. Carolina’s athletic director Dick Baddour announced to the media today that representatives from the NCAA had been in Chapel Hill investigating matters related to the football team, but he declined to say what the situation involved.

Baddour also stated publicly today that the NCAA asked the Tar Heels not to discuss the issue in the press.

Inside Carolina, a website that claims to be "the independent voice of UNC athletics", stated on their website that the matter is not academically related.

Carolina is coming off back-to-back 8-5 seasons, and is in the fourth-year of former Miami Hurricanes coach Butch Davis’ rebuilding project. The Tar Heels have not won in Charlottesville since 1981. Butch Davis has lost three straight to Virginia, and the Wahoos have won 10 out of the last 12 against North Carolina.

Last season, the 3-9 Wahoos embarrassed UNC 16-3 in Chapel Hill in just what might have been one of the worst college football games in the modern era.

I’ll have more on this breaking story as information becomes available. Go Hoos!

Community members had their final chance to provide feedback on the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority’s (CRHA) plans for neighborhood revitalization at a final master plan meeting Tuesday evening.

Westhaven resident Takiyah Jones, who has attended most of the CRHA neighborhood revitalization meetings, hoped to have one simple question answered: Where would she and her two children will live during construction?

CRHA Executive director Randy Bickers said current residents could relocate to new units built on vacant land during the first phases of construction and thereby remain under CRHA’s jurisdiction. Should these units prove too few in number, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) could provide residents vouchers for relocation within the housing market, although CRHA hopes to keep the dispersal of vouchers to a minimum. CRHA has also contacted local public schools to ensure that children who are moved outside of their present school zone would be able to stay at their current schools.

CRHA also wants to create more mixed income communities. Bickers said that making solely lower income housing creates “pockets of poverty” in the community. By mixing in tax credit and market rate units, the dynamic of the neighborhood changes and achievement scores go up, explained Bickers. But in order to create this new type of community while maintaining the current number of public housing units, the neighborhood has to increase in density.

Residents had different responses to increased density. Crescent Hall resident Overy Johnson and his wife, Adrienne, said they were glad that more families will have affordable housing, but added that redevelopment will take away much of the current recreational area for the children. Johnson repeated the importance of education and recreation for kids, and said, “Children want to go places, but they need a place to go”— a take on the New York City Police Athletic League motto. His wife echoed the sentiment, and said children need “to have some place to go beside the streets.”

While a time frame has yet to be set for the project, CRHA executive director Randy Bikers predicted construction should start within the next year.

The July/August issue of Orion (one of my favorite green pubs) has plenty of food for thought, as usual, but for my money the most eye-opening piece was James Powell’s account of the impending disaster on the Colorado River. I’ll try to sum it up briefly, though the full story’s well worth reading:

The Colorado has two tall dams on it: Glen Canyon Dam, which created Lake Powell, and the Hoover Dam, which created Lake Mead. These structures drastically alter the character and flow of the river, including in the Grand Canyon, which lies between the two dams. They also make human habitation possible in much of the arid Southwest. In fact, the Colorado River is completely used up by human needs, no longer flowing into the ocean.

The piece lays out the problem: Lake Powell is filling in with silt, faster than anyone expected. Meanwhile, because of falling supply and rising demand, the water level in the lake is dropping. Within 55 years at the outside, the author predicts, the lake will be full of mud instead of water.

"Some of the driest states–Nevada, Arizona, and Utah–are among the fastest growing and none plans to slow down," Powell writes. "Take a desert, add water, stir in money–that will continue to be the Southwest’s definition of success until it fails, until whole subdivisions stand empty because they have no water."

Why should we, far away in the humid East, care? Well, falling water supply and rising population are conditions we share. We may have a wetter climate, but we don’t have infinite water–as both sides in the local water-supply debate are well aware. As we watch Westerners grapple with this looming crisis, we’d do well to take a lesson: we can’t rely on manipulations of our natural watersheds to supply any number of new houses, golf courses and strip malls. In other words, we can’t simply grow forever.

Anyone else read this piece? What are your thoughts on local water supply?

One major topic of discussion throughout the adjustment period at WTJU has been whether falling rates of listenership at the station reflect a broader trend towards fewer radio listeners in general. One threat to traditional radio just got a little more threatening, as the online music listening service Pandora announced its first profitable quarter after spending a decade in a state of near-collapse.

Internet radio isn’t going anwhere. And, y’know, we listen to Pandora a lot at the C-VILLE office. As in, nothing but Pandora all the time. So as something of an expert, I can say that one of Pandora’s shortfalls is that it can’t organize songs thematically, instead organizing music according to qualities as identified by a huge team of musicologists (apparently, they spend about 20 minutes analyzing a song), and rarely delivering a surprise that’s worth investigating.

On a day like today, I’d rather not take the Muse-Radiohead express through Pandoraland if I can take the crow’s path to the pleasure center. Which is why—taking a cue from David Hajdu’s great Famous Door blog—I ask: What’s your favorite song for a summer day in Charlottesville?

Kneel before King Jonathan.

The UVA Law School’s most recent giving campaign was highly successful. The school announced it has set a new donors record with 8,430 graduates contributing—52.7 percent of alumni, the fifth consecutive year with contributions from more than 50 percent of alums. According to a news release, annual gifts were in excess of $10.3 million.

“The Law School tries, I think successfully, to provide the best student experience of any in the nation,” said Dean Paul Mahoney in the release. “The support we receive from our alumni is an important measure of our success in that endeavor.” According to the  school’s website, the UVA School of Law "relies solely on tuition and private giving."