Month: November 2010

Their $1.2M pledge to PVCC half paid, Kluge and Moses assure the rest is coming

In the fat times, a short five years ago, Patricia Kluge and Bill Moses pleged $1.2 million to PVCC to build a science building that would support, among other courses of study, the community college’s enology and viticulture programs. But now that Farm Credit of the Virginias has foreclosed on Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard, is the donation jeopardized?

Mary Jane King,  the school’s director of institutional advancement and development, says no. A 10-year pledge, the gift is half paid already. And King says that in early November, after the bank shut down Kluge Estate Winery’s operations, "we were contacted by the donor and assured of their commitment to pay the gift in full. And that’s where we are," she says.

The Kluge-Moses Science Building opened this year. "Students love it, faculty love it. The science labs are excellent," King says.

By the terms of the pledge, Kluge and Moses have five more years to pay the remaining $600,000.

 

Opponents to Meadowcreek Parkway prepare legal challenge to Interchange

Opponents of the Meadowcreek Parkway came out in full force at the City Council meeting on Monday night.

They asked Council not to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (MOA) needed for the issuance of a permit to construct the project by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The agreement addresses steps to resolve the adverse effect the road will have on McIntire Park.

The MOA stipulates the inclusion of two rain gardens planted with native specie, a landscape plan for McIntire Road Extended to minimize its impact on the park, the installation of signs for a 35 mph speed limit, and photos documenting the park and the golf course.

John Cruickshank told Council that while the Piedmont Chapter of the Sierra Club, of which he is the president, opposes a road going through McIntire Park, the group supports the creation of bike and pedestrian paths to enhance the park’s experience. He said he saw “serious flaws” in the MOA and urged Council “to take the time and make it right.”

Although three Councilors voted favorably towards the memorandum, with Mayor Dave Norris and Vice-Mayor Holly Edwards opposed, members of the Coalition to Preserve McIntire Park are not planning a legal fight on that decision. They are conserving resources to prepare a legal challenge to the 250 Interchange, the third part of the project.

In late September, the Federal Highway Administration released a Finding of No Significant Impact for the interchange, something required for all federally funded projects under the National Environmental Policy Act.
 

Attack of the local artisans!

The holiday shopping season used to begin the day after Thanksgiving, which was made for an overwhelming but ultimately manageable four weeks of shopping—no eating, sleeping or working, just shopping. The drumroll fades in earlier each year, so before it gets too loud this year I thought I’d point out all the ways in which local artists are coming together for a host of local art fairs that run through Thanksgiving weekend as a simple reminder that, for many artists, without commerce there can be no art.

  • The big art and craft related event this holiday season is the volunteer run Great Gifts: A Holiday Shop, which runs through January at The Bridge/PAI. Included will be a collection of art and artifacts from more an expertly-curated list of 30 regional artists and craftspeople. Go there for all of your t-shirt, music, local jewelry and—brace yourselves—miniature terrarium needs.
  • Charlottesville City Market transforms into turns into the Holiday Market, where you’ll be able to buy all manner of local goods that, for once, we don’t recommend you eat.

Any art sales this holiday season that I missed?

Categories
News

Halsey Minor owes overdue real estate taxes to city







Halsey Minor’s financial woes are once again back in the headlines. 

This time, the owner of the Landmark Hotel on the Downtown Mall owes the City of Charlottesville $62,766.62 in overdue taxes. 




Halsey Minor owes the City of Charlottesville more than $62,000 in overdue taxes. The city has a 10 percent penalty for paying after the due date and 10 percent interest annually. Minor says that paying back that amount may depend on the resolution of the bankruptcy trail. 

But he is not alone. As of June 1, more than $1 million in delinquent taxes, real estate, personal property among others, are owed to the city, about three-quarters of 1 percent of the overall operating budget of $140.7 million. 

It’s not the first time Minor is listed as a delinquent taxpayer. Minor also owes back taxes to the State of California. As of November 9, Minor still topped the list of Top 250 Delinquent Taxpayers in California, and owes the state more than $13 million in personal income tax. California put a tax lien on Minor in July 2009. Minor has been delinquent to the City of Charlottesville since June 7, 2009. 

The money owed to the city is “part of the bankruptcy and litigation,” Minor said via email. Asked about plans to repay, Minor says that “totally depends on where the litigation goes and where the bankruptcy goes.”

In September, Minor filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in federal court in Lynchburg. Chapter 11 is referred to as a “reorganization” bankruptcy, where the debtor can voluntarily file a petition and write a reorganization plan detailing how the creditors will be paid over time. The filing was meant to expedite the resolution of the multiple lawsuits involving the Landmark Hotel, which, according to a September press release announcing the filing, amount to eight between Georgia and Virginia. 

At the same time Minor sued Specialty Finance Group (SFG), the financing company that originally gave Minor $23.6 million to build the hotel, in Virginia court, SFG sued him in Georgia. SFG was a subsidiary of Silverton Bank, based in Atlanta, which failed in May of last year and was taken over by the FDIC.

“Because we had already gone through one arbitration that was very costly against Lee Danielson’s company, Hotel Charlottesville, we really didn’t want to go through multiple trials,” says Betty Shumener, Minor’s lead attorney. “Seeing how expensive it is to go to trial, we thought, ‘We need to bring everything in one place’ and most of the witnesses are in Virginia, the project is in Virginia, the parties are in Virginia.” 

In July, the result of the arbitration between Minor and former hotel developer Danielson favored the owner. Danielson’s Hotel Charlottesville LLC was ordered to pay $4.2 million in damages and $2.2 million in legal fees for misrepresenting the costs of the construction of the hotel. 

But the road to resolution has hit a few bumps. Just a few days after the bankruptcy filing, a federal judge in Georgia ordered the case sent to the Virginia bankruptcy court. The Virginia court then decided to remand the trial back to Georgia.

“We have appealed that decision to the Virginia District Court and hopefully we will reverse that decision so that we can go to a speedy trial in Virginia,” says Shumener. 

In the mean time, the Georgia Court has already scheduled the trial for March 14, 2011. “We don’t mind the trial date, we don’t mind when it goes to trial, we just want one trial,” says Shumener.

NEW C-VILLE COVER STORY: Charge it!

Just before President Obama took the stage at the Charlottesville Pavilion on October 29, Congressman Tom Perriello delivered a well-honed stump speech about successes from his first (and only) term. Among these was bringing electric vehicle (EV) tech jobs to Charlottesville. The crowd responded with rapturous applause. Even if Perriello never spelled out exactly to whom or what he was referring, there can be no doubt that the Department of Energy’s recent $500,000 grant to the City of Charlottesville and Aker Wade Power Technologies for the development of two EV fast-charge battery stations in Charlottesville was the project in mention. Read the cover story, on the local tech firm developing the technology, here, and don’t forget to leave comments.

 

Categories
Living

The natural bridge







If you’re a fan of Cher’s “Believe,” Kanye West’s “Heartless” and Daft Punk’s “One More Time,” then, boy, does this year’s TechnoSonics festival have the song for you. It’s called “Social Sounds from Whales at Night,” an eight-minute diddy that applies that ubiquitous Auto-Tune vocal effect to whale songs. 



The composer and sound collagist Douglas Quin, pictured recording seals in Antarctica, is a special guest at this year’s TechnoSonics festival. Photo by James Barker.

This piece is by visiting artist Emily Doolittle, a Canadian-born composer, who is coming to town for the 11th TechnoSonics, an illuminating survey of the high-concept sound art that’s produced in UVA’s Virginia Center for Computer Music. The festival runs Wednesday through Saturday with panel discussions, installations, a soundwalk and a performance Friday night at Live Arts. 

Doolittle’s piece fits neatly into the theme of this year’s festival, “Mediated Nature,” which explores the interplay between natural noises—taken broadly, to include the the sounds of classical instruments—and the technologies that can be used to manipulate them. Some of the pieces walk the line between field recordings and composition, like Doolittle’s. Another special guest, Douglas Quin, travels extensively to archive and compose with the sounds of disappearing species and habitats. (The Washington Post apparently called him the “Audobon of audio.”)

UVA’s graduate program in composition tends to encourage the mad scientist in its composers. Take, for example, the EMMI, or Expressive Machines Musical Instruments that will be on display outside Live Arts before Friday’s performance. In 2007, graduate students Steven Kemper, Troy Rogers and Scott Barton started making computer-controlled musical robots, which are exactly what they sound like: autonomous instruments that include modified conventional instruments. These little no-man-bands are surprisingly melodic, plucking and clicking away pieces that are a mere shade off the pop palette. 

The center’s director, Judith Shatin, will present “Elijah’s Chariot,” a piece named for the flaming biblical vehicle that ushers the prophet Elijah to heaven. In it, Shatin loops the sound of a string quartet and the shofar—a ram’s horn blown during the Jewish High Holidays. “There’s a continuum between the sound of the shofar, its electronic transformation, and then the integration of the string quartet,” says Shatin. 

She says that the the theme “captured what many of us were doing. Our goal is to combine the best of both worlds. Working in digital media will sometimes give me ideas for acoustic instruments, and vice versa. One of the things that I personally love about using sounds from nature is that one can create a kind of bridge between the sounds of the world around us and the transforming power of technology and acoustic instruments.” 

If it sounds radical, it may help to take a step back. “The piano is a technology, too,” says Shatin. “It was invented.”

For more information on TechnoSonics XI, visit www.virginia.edu/music/techno sonicsxi or call UVA’s Music Department at 924-3052.

 

Signing off

During the Great WTJU Kerfuffle of 2010, the co-host of the station’s much-loved Saturday morning folk and bluegrass program “Leftover Biscuits” recorded a final show, anticipating that he would walk out on the station. But after UVA reversed course, postponing changes to the station, the 15-year volunteer DJ, Emmett Boaz, returned to the WTJU.

Boaz, 63, died of a heart attack on November 6 “doing one of the things he loved best:” hosting “Leftover Biscuits.” By the time you’ve read this, his final show will have been re-aired by co-host Peter Jones, but until next Saturday you can still hear Boaz’s signoff show in WTJU’s online Tape Vault, which archives shows for two weeks. In lieu of flowers, the Boaz family has asked that donations be made to the Emmett Boaz Memorial Fund at WTJU, P.O. Box 400811, Charlottesville, VA, 22904.

Feedback Session: Nurse Beach

In the continued spirit of offering new local music, here’s a video of the new hardcore-ish band Nurse Beach. Some of the band’s members split time between Richmond and Charlottesville, and, with the former city’s rough edge, it shows. Onstage, singer (screamer?) Justin Hya-Glaw looks like he might subject himself to whiplash, banging off-kilter melodies on a cheap Casio, while the trio’s other two pieces—drummer Kevin Haney (disclosure: he also plays with me) and bassist Pete Nagraj—hold down an arty, Liars-inspired bottom end. 

Thanks again to Nailgun‘s Gary Canino for the video work. 

Who else would you like to see?

BOV confirms that UVA will offer early action admission in 2011

This morning the UVA Board of Visitors confirmed September’s decision to begin offering early action admission in the Fall 2011.

With the new policy, high school seniors will have the chance to apply to UVA early. November 1, 2011 is the deadline. They will be able to apply to other schools and then wait until May 1, 2012 to decide where to go to college.

From 2000 to 2006, UVA offered a binding, “early decision” admission. Students who chose to apply early would commit to the University if accepted. UVA stopped offering “early decision” in 2007, following Harvard and Princeton, after it was deemed unfair to minority students and those students in need of financial aid.

John Blackburn, the late UVA Dean of Admission, was a champion of the change and said that even if more applications were needed to meet class size goals, “we don’t think that it’s going to have any serious impact on what we do. Besides, we think this is the right thing to do no matter what any ranking magazine says about it,” he said in 2006.
 

Categories
News

No incidents yet on Meadowcreek Parkway







We last left the Meadowcreek Parkway saga with construction underway, the county detour open, and the Federal Highway Administration ruling that the Meadowcreek Parkway would not have a considerable impact on the environment. What’s next for the 43-year-old project?

The county portion of the Meadowcreek Parkway opened last month and no accidents or tickets have been reported.

Part of East Rio Road is currently blocked off to complete the northern connection of Albemarle County’s portion of the parkway. The detour, which directs drivers from East Rio Road by Melbourne Road onto the Meadowcreek Parkway, opened on October 12. That stretch of the parkway is a two-lane road that takes drivers through about a mile and a half of open landscape with many trees, but also many construction signs and a closed walking trail. They exit the parkway back onto East Rio Road by CATEC. 

When the detour opened, VDOT said it would last approximately six weeks until about Thanksgiving. VDOT spokesman Lou Hatter said construction is currently on schedule, though that could change if extreme weather prevents construction. When that is finished the parkway will close and the obstructed part of East Rio Road will reopen. Construction will then begin again on the parkway itself.

Sean C. Hackney of the Albemarle Police Department reports there have been no tickets or accidents on the parkway since it opened. The only minor incidents involved one disabled vehicle and one hazard due to a deer that was hit by a car.

As for the city portion of the parkway, things remain at a standstill due to a collision of interests. Despite passing the federal benchmark of the FHA finding, the City has yet to receive the necessary permits to begin construction. The City also faces opposition from the Coalition to Preserve McIntire Park. John Cruickshank, a member of the coalition, says the group plans to file an injunction against the project. The coalition has until April to file the injunction, but Cruickshank says it hopes to file before the end of the year. They also will send responses to the Army Core of Engineers’ memorandum of agreement concerning the McIntire Road Extended project.

Categories
News

City Market in the market for a permanent home after 17 years

Seventeen years after the Charlottesville City Market’s inaugural season selling food, flowers and crafts in a “temporary” Water Street parking lot location, City Council is taking nominations for a limited-term task force to study potential permanent sites for the growing market, which has seen sales triple over the past decade. 









Sales have tripled at the City Market in the past decade and more growth is expected. 

At a November 4 work session, interested parties crafted a list of criteria to consider in evaluating potential sites. The criteria include: more space than the current .8 acres, convenient access to public transportation and to utilities such as electricity and water, and the potential for a permanent pavilion.

Kathy Kildea of the nonprofit advisory group Market Central is quick to point out that the Water Street market has no plans to move in the near future. The city-owned lot is currently “available for development” but does not have a buyer at this time. Mayor Dave Norris assured those at the work session that the city would not accept any development plans until a decision on a permanent site has been made.

Vendors and organizations that support the market don’t all agree on the specifics of the market’s future. Some feel that the current size and location are fine, while others see the need for growth. All agree, however, that it is time for the City to support the market in securing a permanent home. “The formation of this task force lends validity to Market Central’s efforts,” says Judy Berger, Jefferson Area Board on Aging community nutrition director.

“We’ve been trying to get the City Council’s attention on this issue for years,” says Kildea, adding, “as Central Virginia’s largest, this market needs careful stewardship. Failure to come up with a long-term plan would be a huge opportunity missed. We want to help the City make this happen.” She points out that as a nonprofit, Market Central can help secure needed funding through partnership with other nonprofits. “This is the time,” says Berger. “There are a lot of grants and a lot of USDA money for farmer’s markets right now.”

According to vendor Diane LaSauce of Free Union Produce & Edibles, “the City has pushed this issue to the back burner for way too long.” She feels that the current size and location of the market are fine and that the City should redevelop the Water Street lot as the market’s permanent home, adding seating, water and a shelter. 

Berger and Kildea both see the need for more physical space to handle more vendors and more customers. Says Berger, “We need an outlet that is suitable to handle growth. We need economic opportunities to attract a new generation of farmers.”

Although a time frame for the task force’s search has not been set, a report is expected by sometime next spring.—Meredith Barnes