Month: July 2012

Categories
News

Albemarle approves visitors bureau marketing plan

The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors has backed off its threat to yank hundreds of thousands of dollars in accumulated tax revenue from the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau, instead agreeing to spend the money on a marketing push to draw tourists to the area.

The CACVB is funded by both county and city, which each direct 30 percent of hotel tax revenues to the five-employee department. That money—a little over $1 million per year—is intended for visitor services, promotion, and other efforts to draw tourists to the area. But a big portion of it has instead been rolled over in recent years, leading to a 2011 fund balance of more than $700,000, a snafu director Kurt Burkart said was the result of staff reduction and restructuring since his arrival in 2009.

The county called the department on the carpet last fall—announcing it would scale back the fund balance to 20 percent and use the reclaimed money for its own initiatives—and the city supported the move.

But the CACVB board wasn’t wild about the idea. In December, it presented the Board of Supervisors with an alternative: a marketing plan that would include a website overhaul and rebranding and would, over the course of three years, slash the fund balance to 20 percent of the CACVB budget.

Mollified, the Board agreed to see the plan, and last Wednesday, supervisors nodded approvingly through a presentation by Susan Payne. Her PR firm, Payne, Ross & Associates, has already landed $55,000 in contracts to develop the marketing effort, which will ultimately cost more than $623,000. The vote to leave the fund balance intact was unanimous. The decision goes before the City Council in August.

“I think they’ve come forward with an excellent plan,” said Supervisor Dennis Rooker. “Perhaps the fact that they didn’t spend this money in previous years has turned out to be a blessing.”

Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce Chair and longtime CACVB board member Tim Hulbert agreed. “The bad news is the money didn’t get spent,” he said, “and the good news is it didn’t get spent. Now there can be a really aggressive marketing effort.”

It remains to be seen whether the ambitious return on investment projections that encouraged political support of the plan will come to fruition. State tourism officials say every dollar spent on marketing brings in $5 in tax revenue. According to the 2004 agreement between the city and county to jointly fund the CACVB, the bureau is required to meet a 7 to 1 ratio of direct visitor spending for every dollar of tax revenue pumped in—or run the risk of having either municipality scuttle the funding agreement. According to year-end reports, the CACVB hasn’t quite met the requirement recently—the ratio ranged from 6.56 to 6.96 in the last three years.

BOS chair Ann Mallek said she’s hopeful the payoff will come. But elected officials will be watching to make sure the money gets spent and the returns roll in.

“I think there will be a large amount of oversight,” she said.
“There’s no question that we stumbled, board and staff,” Hulbert said. “But that fumbling came to a halt five months ago. The plan is in place and the team is energized.

Categories
Arts

Moonrise Kingdom; PG-13, 94 minutes; Regal Downtown Mall 6

Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton, and Bruce Willis star in Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom, a whimsical tween love story set against a nostalgic 1960s backdrop. (Focus Features)

The new Wes Anderson movie is certainly a richer pastiche than anything else you’ll see at the multiplex this season. And in its Andersonian manner, Moonrise Kingdom is a nourishing regressive pleasure, a sort of summer movie for grown-ups. Yes, the manner is mannered, but the intention is noble: to affirm the dignity of escapism by direct example.

And so we find the New England island town of “New Penzance” sent into mild upheaval when a serious and sensitive Boy Scout (Jared Gilman) runs away with the headstrong misfit girl he decides he loves (Kara Hayward). This being a Wes Anderson movie, the kids are precocious; it feels good and righteous to root for them, like reclaiming those pre-adult prerogatives regrettably ceded to the pose of maturity. Wasn’t summer once supposed to be about the pure liberty of endless possibilities?

Anderson still knows better than anybody how to survey the cusp of adolescence with all the existential angst of a mid-life crisis, and for relief’s sake, to salt his findings with droll irony. Co-written with Roman Coppola, set in the 1960s, and shot by Anderson’s regular cinematographer Robert Yeoman, Moonrise Kingdom accommodates not just retro flourishes of Euro-mod chic, but also the emotional aura of some wistfully remembered Charlie Brown holiday special. Habitually, Anderson revels in bric-a-brac production design, eloquent riffs on stagings from his earlier films, and a tendency to arrange his stars—Bob Balaban, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton, Jason Schwartzman, Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis—in handsome tableaux. The filmmaker’s musical affinities lean toward English composers; sometimes it seems like instead of a full film narrative he should’ve just tried a music video for the entirety of Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols. Which, of course, would be fantastic.

But the movie’s characters—in particular its refreshingly un-actorly protagonists, so poignantly and palpably unformed, nicely set off against all that art direction—seem quite helpfully, people-like. All the grown-ups are in some way hapless, and therefore implicitly obliging to the youngsters’ enterprise. With heart-swelling sympathy and sincerity, Norton, as the scoutmaster, redeems potential caricature, and Willis stands out as the cop, a melancholy and reflective figure of earned adult authority. “It takes time to figure things out,” he advises the boy, tenderly.

That might also be Anderson talking to himself. Moonrise Kingdom has a welcome new allowance of naturalness, particularly in landscape and weather. It is another of Anderson’s dollhouses, unavoidably, but with its windows open and without any shortage of fresh air in circulation. If Anderson now lacks the will to innovate, he has traded it for the real benefit of relaxing into vision refinement. Now we know for sure that he makes movies, even summer movies, the way he must.

Categories
Arts

The Storyline Project fosters creative connections

Participants in the Charlottesville Parks & Recreation summer camp program connect the dots through The Storyline Project. (Photo by Greg Kelly)

Monticello Road is an odd part of Charlottesville. It was once literally the road to Jefferson’s house, but the construction of I-64 and Route 20 have truncated it to a short stretch that cuts through southern Charlottesville’s Belmont neighborhood. Though it’s only a mile in length, Monticello Road is a cross-section of residential homes, fancy restaurants, corner store bodegas, a gas station, an elementary school, and even a factory. This spring, photographer Peter Krebbs documented the people he met on his daily walks along the street in “The Monticello Road Project,” and the resulting photographs showed a broad range of individuals, a reminder of all of the different types of folk who make up a community.

This summer, Krebbs walked the road again, this time with 35 kids and a handful of mentors and volunteers as part of The Storyline Project. Now in its fourth year, Storyline is a collaboration between a half-dozen local organizations, led by The Bridge PAI and Piedmont Council for the Arts. For the project, a group of rising fourth through sixth graders from the Charlottesville Parks & Recreation summer camp program walked the length of the road over the course of four days, stopping along the way to draw what they observed and listen to presentations from those who live and work along the street.

The trip took them from Jefferson’s Monticello itself to places as varied as Lazy Daisy Ceramics, the Virginia Institute for the Blind, tapas restaurant Mas, and the so-called Belmont Mansion, the house that gave the neighborhood its name. The journey ended at the Free Speech Wall on the Mall, where the children spent the day drawing a chalk mural that represents their experiences.

Pete O’Shea, one of the landscape architects responsible for designing the Free Speech Wall, helped start the Storyline Project through his work with the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Preservation of Free Expression. “It’s my favorite project of any kind that I’ve ever worked on,” O’Shea said. “I’m used to finishing a project and just putting it away, but this has been a way of maintaining a relationship with the community.” With the program’s upcoming fifth year, O’Shea hopes that the project can be expanded, possibly by working with multiple groups, and offering the template to local schools as a teaching tool.

Local poet and teacher John Casteen IV has volunteered with Storyline since the beginning. “The group of campers for the first Storyline Project came from the Tonsler Park area,” said Casteen. “I grew up in that neighborhood, and I found it startling that The Bridge was making connections with neighborhoods like Tonsler, and with kids in places like Westhaven and Fifeville. In my life, I had not seen any outreach going on in those neighborhoods. When I talk to white, middle-class people in Charlottesville, they’re not even aware that places like the Southwood Trailer Park exist. To give the kids who are from those neighborhoods access to local history is to give them a way to make themselves politically aware.”

As the kids gathered around the Wall, with buckets of chalk at the ready, there was a wave of creative energy waiting to be unleashed. Rowdiness is the default setting at this age, but once the project was underway, they were fully committed to covering every inch of the Wall with chalk.

Some of the children had impressive technical skills, while others were just finding ways to move beyond basic stick-figure representation, and the chalk mural gave everyone a chance to try things and mess up without the pressure of permanence or the intimidation of working alone.

“If you ask a group of kids this age who’s good at drawing, they’ll all point to one or two kids,” O’Shea said. “But if you ask a class of kindergarteners who can draw, everybody’s going to raise their hand. We learn to draw before we can write, and it’s not until we get older that we start to become self-conscious about it. Adults have the hardest time with it, actually—by the time we’re adults we’ve already raised so many barriers for ourselves, and told ourselves what we are and aren’t good at.”

As the mural neared completion, it unmistakably resembled the work of children, and in fact it may already be washed away by rain by the time this column sees print. But the goal of the project is the process, not the results, and seeing the children work with each other and the volunteers seemed like a small success. At one point, a middle-aged woman held a tiny child aloft so he could trace the towering outline of a VIB employee who had stopped by to help out. Once the kids had their hands covered in chalk, several began painting it on their own faces as well —until a volunteer showed them a photo of what they looked like and they squealed in delight and horror. A hula-hoop materialized seemingly out of nowhere, and, most impressively, when a dozen pizzas arrived, the kids were too busy working on the mural to notice.

Categories
The Editor's Desk

Woody Guthrie and the working man’s song

Woodie Guthrie. Zumapress.com.

“Despite its relative affluence, Charlottesville has an income gap problem,” writes our news editor, Graelyn Brashear, in this week’s story about the Green Dot Cooperative . Hmmm. Despite its relative affluence, America has an income gap problem. That has a nice ring to it. Despite my relative affluence, I have an income gap problem. Too much?

The Pew Research Center was cutting and remixing income disparity data before the Congressional Budget Office inadvertently defined the 1 percent in 2010, but its findings have taken on greater significance since then. After highlighting record gulfs between white and black/Latino earners (20 to 1 as measured by median income) and between the assets of older and younger Americans (widest in history), the Center published the results of a survey earlier this year that said 66 percent of Americans believe the conflict between rich and poor is serious. The survey only included about 2,000 people, which seems small to my unscientific mind, but I don’t need a poll to tell me that income disparity is a major problem.

It’s not a new problem, either. Last week radio stations across the country celebrated the 100th anniversary of Woody Guthrie’s birth. It’s easy to trace our country’s political conversations through Woody’s songs. He was singing about war, work, immigration, race, class discrimination, and patriotism through the Depression, World War II, and the ’50s. His behavior got him called a Communist, and while I don’t think he ever made too many bones about being a lefty, Woody sang songs for poor working people, the least political class in the country since its beginning.  “I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world,” Woody told Ed Cray in his biography. “And that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.” Who’s singing that song today? What’s the tune?—Giles Morris

Categories
News

Albemarle upgrades county trails and recreation space

Dan Mahon has one of the coolest jobs in Virginia. While other Albemarle County staff are stuck behind desks, this ponytailed child at heart spends most of his days running around Albemarle’s parks and trails, which serve as both his office and his backyard. As Albemarle’s Outdoor Recreation Supervisor, Mahon’s duty is to develop and maintain the county’s elaborate trail system and do everything he can to meet the needs of anyone who wants to take a hike, hang a hammock, or launch a canoe. With eight years in the position, a lifetime of outdoor exploration, and a Master’s degree in landscape architecture under his belt, Mahon has a vision for the county trails, and is making that vision come to life, slowly but surely.Mahon grew up on Grandview Island in Hampton, Virginia, where he developed his affinity for Virginia’s outdoors and natural history. Despite years of traveling the country, he found himself constantly drawn back to the Commonwealth, and eventually settled in Crozet with his wife.

Mahon never questioned the importance of outdoor recreation, but after the county conducted a needs assessment in 2004, staff members were surprised to learn that residents wanted more trail access rather than more gyms and other indoor recreational space. Despite the overwhelming support for parks and trails, the county slashed the Parks & Recreation budget years ago, eliminating funds for the greenway, and Mahon was forced to get creative, utilizing proffer money, grants, and donations to close the gap.

So with the community’s blessing and very limited funding, Mahon took it upon himself to transfer the county’s acres of parkland into accessible outdoor recreation space and began mapping, clearing, and rebuilding trails along the Rivanna River.

The county’s Rivanna Greenway currently runs along the river from Pantops, across the Free Bridge, and through Darden Towe Park. A limited number of county staff and a revolving door of volunteers maintain the unpaved trail, which Mahon said is “a nice alternative to the city’s trails.” Mahon hopes to see it snake through Shadwell, connect to Fluvanna’s Heritage Trail, and ultimately join the James River Heritage Trail, which runs from Lynchburg to Richmond. Unlike the city trail system that loops around Charlottesville, this portion of Albemarle’s trails will be a more linear, straight shot along the water, and will take wanderers on a “narrative trip down the river.”

“There’s so much history along here. Before the railroads and the roads, this was it,” Mahon said, gesturing to the woods and waterway behind him. Revolutionary War troops used the water as a primary transportation route, and Lewis and Clark’s expedition was conceived by Albemarle’s own Thomas Jefferson. The Lewis and Clark Exploratory Center, which currently serves about 5,000 visitors per year, is in the process of being refurbished, and Mahon hopes it will serve as the anchor of the historic trail, as “the spirit of journeying on the water ties in with a river trail system.”

But creating a historical trail system of this scale is not as simple as consulting a manual, and Mahon has had to essentially make it up as he goes along, with input from the community.

“Every governmental organization and cultural area is unique and distinct,” he said. “So how you put it together is very different. It’s hard to just go by the book.”
While the big picture never leaves the back of his mind, Mahon’s recent focus has been on developing the trails one section at a time.

He said the primary effort has been to open up the trail around Darden Towe Park as quickly as possible. The trail is currently open to the public, but when Mahon and his team finish leveling paths, building benches, and posting signs, the county’s Parks & Recreation Department will hold an official grand opening ceremony in the fall.

Because the department is understaffed, Mahon said volunteer involvement is crucial for the survival and success of the trails. Boy Scouts, college service organizations, local trail groups, and even convicts from the city and county jail have joined him in the woods, sometimes up to their ankles in mud in the freezing rain, to make the trails usable. Mahon said he has been blown away by the transformation he sees in volunteers.

“There’s a therapeutic value in being outside and working hard,” he said. And while the groups assist him with physical labor, Mahon gives back by sharing his sense of cultural awareness and natural history.

“I grew up in a place that I was really grounded in, knowing a lot of history and stories, and I really have a keen understanding of its value for your personal identity,” he said.

 

Categories
News

Odd Dominion: Will Cuccinelli and climate skeptics ever learn?

Cuccinelli Odd Dominion
Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. Photo ©Carrie Devorah/WENN

There is, at this very moment, a highly amusing video burning up the YouTubes featuring Aaron Justus, weatherman for Richmond’s CBS affiliate WTVR, delivering an apocalyptic weather report in perfect deadpan. After calmly detailing “a volcanic eruption right near Charlottesville” which will bring local temperatures up to 400 degrees, he explains that the tidewater area will be “a bit more comfortable, with highs near 100 degrees.” The reason? “We’re going to have tidal waves moving in ahead of this: a global superstorm.” But not to worry, viewers; this superstorm will ultimately be deflected by the timely arrival of Godzilla.

Now, there’s a reason that this local-news goof has become a viral hit—and it’s not simply because it’s freakin’ hilarious. It’s because it so eerily mirrors the recent spell of extreme weather that has swept the nation. As any Charlottesvillian who was awake on Friday, June 29, can tell you, the freakish combination of sweltering heat followed by hurricane-force storms (the now-famous “derecho”), which then spawned multi-day power outages, felt every bit like the end of days. In fact, for many local residents, the arrival of Godzilla might have been a distracting relief.

And, let’s face it, we’ve got it easy. All you have to do is glance at the headlines to follow the devastation in fire-ravaged Colorado, or read about the truly extreme temperatures gripping much of the nation (record highs of 109 degrees in Nashville, 108 degrees in St. Louis and, according to the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang, “D.C.’s hottest June temperatures in 142 years of record-keeping”).

Which brings us, as you knew it would, to our main point, which is this: Anyone continuing to refute the scientifically accepted consensus on man-made climate change and its attendant effect on global weather patterns is either willfully ignorant or criminally negligent. We could go over the facts in depth here, but due to limited space, we will simply suggest that you read Eugene Robinson’s excellent editorial in the July 2 edition of the Washington Post (“Feeling the heat”), which lays out the case far more cogently than we ever could.

Suffice it to say that the broad preponderance of evidence is irrefutable, and that those who continue to deny it are fighting a losing battle against extinction. Unfortunately for Virginia, one of the nation’s most prominent climate-change skeptics, Ken Cuccinelli, is currently making a very credible run for the governor’s office.

But as vast swaths of Virginia recover from the most recent outbreak of abnormal weather, we can only hope that the true precariousness of our position becomes apparent. At the very least, we can take solace in the fact that Cuccinelli’s years-long suit against the Environmental Protection Agency—in which he attempted to argue that the EPA had no standing to regulate greenhouse gases—was recently struck down by a federal appeals court in the most humiliating way possible.

Ruling that the EPA’s position was “unambiguously correct,” the court pointedly noted that this “is how science works. EPA is not required to re-prove the existence of the atom every time it approaches a scientific question.”

Of course, legal setbacks and simple logic have never stopped the Cooch before, so why should this time be any different? In the end, all we can do is batten down the hatches and wait for Virginia’s populace to finally vote this guy out of office.
Or, barring that, the inevitable arrival of Godzilla.

Photo ©Carrie Devorah/WENN

Categories
Arts

T.V.: “Trust Us with Your Life,” “Political Animals,” “Breaking Bad”

 “Trust Us with Your Life” 
Tuesday 9pm, ABC
This comedy series from the creators of “Whose Line is it Anyway?” brings back the televised improv concept, but with a celebrity talk-show spin. Each episode will feature a different famous person—Serena Williams, Jerry Springer, Florence Henderson, and Ricky Gervais among them—being interviewed by host Fred Willard, as he prompts them to recount key moments from their actual lives. A troupe of improvisers reenacts their stories through a variety of improv games and sketches. Anchoring the improv team are familiar faces Wayne Brady, Colin Mochrie, and Jonathan Mangum, who’ll be joined by rotating comics. Writing this prompted me to watch some “Jerry Springer” videos on YouTube, and his episode’s hair weave budget (for pulling) had better be massive.

“Political Animals” 
Sunday 10pm, USA
This new mini-series is easily one of the most anticipated TV events of the summer. Sigourney Weaver stars as a former First Lady and current Secretary of State potentially eyeing a run at the presidency. (Now where do you suppose they thought up that idea?) While the six-part series deals quite a bit with politics, and the media’s role in them (Carla Gugino plays a scoop-thirsty reporter), it is also very much a family drama: which makes sense, as it’s being executed/produced by the man who brought us “Brothers & Sisters.” Rounding out the cast are Ciaran Hinds as the oft-philandering former President, James Wolk (“Lone Star”) and Sebastian Stan (“Gossip Girl”) as their twin sons, and the great Ellen Burstyn as the family matriarch.

“Breaking Bad” 
Sunday 10pm, AMC
“Mad Men” and “Walking Dead” get all the headlines, but scores of critics—and viewers—consider “Breaking Bad” the best show on AMC. I’ve seen its most recent season referred to as one of the strongest seasons of any show in TV history, and a hard-to-please friend referred to it as a completely flawless string of episodes. So of course the show is coming to an end. Its fifth and final season bows this week, featuring 16 episodes split in half with a sizable break in between (like “Walking Dead” Season 2). The good news is that means we get a little longer to learn the final fate of Walter White, cancer-ridden high-school science teacher turned inadvertent drug kingpin (played to perfection by Bryan Cranston), and his tragic de facto protégé, Jesse Pinkman (the equally excellent Aaron Paul).

Categories
News

Updated farm bill evokes mixed feelings in Virginia

The locavore craze is spreading, and fast. American agriculture has come under public scrutiny, and more and more people want to know the origin of the food on their plates. Central Virginia’s hunger for food produced sustainably and close to home is fed by scores of nearby farms, but Congress may not be keeping pace with the rapid expansion of the buy-local movement.

Every five years, Congress refocuses the nation’s agricultural policy with a big piece of omnibus legislation known as the Farm Bill. On June 21, the Senate passed the 2012 Agriculture Reform, Food, and Jobs Act in a 64-35 vote. The bill has moved on to the House, where it’s now under consideration.

In certain respects, the Senate’s proposed bill is a triumph for organic farmers. It authorizes the National Organic Certification Cost Share program, which helps farmers pay exorbitant organic certification fees. Under the bill, up to 75 percent of certification costs are subsidized.

The bill also reforms the antiquated crop insurance system that puts organic farmers at a disadvantage. As Priscilla Lin of Environment Virginia explained, “Organic farmers are paying higher premiums for their crop-insurance, however, they’re not getting paid the price of their crops.” The Senate’s bill would remedy this discrepancy. “A really great amendment that was introduced and passed allows them to receive the price at which their crop is grown,” Lin said.

The proposed bill would also expand the Farmers Market Promotion Program, which was instituted in 2008. The program provides funding for farmers markets and promotes the sale of local foods.

“It’s a great program because it allows farmers to sell to local communities,” Lin explained.“It really builds support for local food.” The Senate’s bill devotes $20 million to the program—that’s double the amount that FMPP received in 2008.

Despite these advances, the bill leaves much to be desired. For years, large agribusinesses have benefited from extensive government subsidies, making it difficult for small-scale Virginia farmers to compete. Brian Walden, owner of Steadfast Farm in nearby Red Hill, deems the Senate’s bill “more of the same.”

“There is a local food push, but we’re not organized like [agribusinesses] are, nor funded like they are,” Walden said. “They rely on subsidies as their cash cow. But money doesn’t come free—or it shouldn’t. When it does, you just get lazy, and that’s what’s happened. They’re getting more for their minute of work than anybody else.”

Now, many are anxiously waiting for the House to release its version of the Farm Bill. According to Ms. Lin, Environment Virginia has been urging House leaders “to get moving on the bill and put in more provisions for local farmers.”

Brian Walden, though, is not optimistic.

“The Farm Bill’s no good,” Walden said. “It’s going to take a lot to fix it. And I don’t know who’s motivated to do it. Small farms need help for sure. But it looks like they’re not going to get it from the government.”—Katy Nelson

Categories
News

Common Ground kickstarts fundraising campaign with sit-a-thon

When the Jefferson School City Center opens its doors in January, nine nonprofit tenants with overlapping missions in health and education will share the responsibility of making good on the City’s $5.8 million equity investment in the project. Most of them—like the Jefferson Area Board on Aging (JABA) and Piedmont Virginia Community College—have long track records in the community, but Common Ground Healing Arts is a brand new initiative, aimed at providing broad community access to therapeutic health care through yoga, acupuncture, massage, and meditation.

On Saturday, July 14, Common Ground will host a “sit-a-thon” at the Haven’s sanctuary as part of a fundraising campaign aimed at securing the remaining $80,000 of the $185,000 the organization needs to outfit its space at the Jefferson School. Pat Coffey, senior teacher at Insight Meditation Community and leader of a regular Tuesday night program at JABA, will conduct a two-hour vipassana meditation workshop in return for a donation.

“The goal is twofold: to raise awareness for Common Ground and just have that positive energy focused on the project when everyone gets together and sits in solidarity to say, ‘We support this idea in the community,’” said Common Ground Executive Director Kate Hallahan Zuckerman. “And there’s the fundraising aspect as well.”

Zuckerman, co-founder of the Charlottesville Yoga School, is the driving force behind Common Ground, which is an outgrowth of the Guerilla Yoga Project, a nonprofit she started in early 2009 that offered sliding scale payment for yoga classes as the recession set in.
“I started thinking if my friends, my peers, can’t afford to come to class, how many other people can’t afford it at a time when healing arts practices can be really beneficial?” Zuckerman said. “When stress levels are high, that’s when self care is the last thing people think about and when it’s most important.”

Guerilla Yoga held 15 classes per week at its height, harnessing the talents of yoga instructors from a wide range of practices and traditions. The group added massage and acupuncture to its menu and organized regular free outreach sessions in Southwood Mobile Home Park, Friendship Court Apartments, and Fluvanna Women’s Correctional facility.

The work caught the attention of JABA CEO Gordon Walker, who then helped Zuckerman set up a weekly 20-minute chair massage program at Westhaven Apartments, a major public housing development in the Starr Hill neighborhood. Walker also helped Zuckerman get in touch with the board at the Jefferson School Community Partnership, which was looking for health- and education-focused nonprofits to fill the 80,000 sq. ft. building whose anchor tenants include the African American Heritage Center and the City-run Carver Recreation Center.

“One of the constant themes that kept coming up was how to make this a lifelong learning center, one that can benefit people of all generations,” Walker said. “While learning about the history and culture of the African American community is a main theme to the school, it’s also exposing people to other kinds of things in the community. And Common Ground will bring these treatment modalities that people often don’t have exposure to.”

Dr. Greg Gelburd serves as an advisor to Common Ground board, and his medical practice, Downtown Family Health Care, is located directly across from Friendship Court. Gelburd routinely prescribes acupuncture and massage as complementary treatment methods for conditions like insomnia, hypertension, allergies, and stomach issues—but not all his patients can afford it.

“It’s outside the realm of insurance coverage in this state and in most states in the East, so it’s pricey for people out of pocket,” Gelburd said.

Gelburd believes Common Ground’s location in the Jefferson School alongside Martha Jefferson Hospital’s community outreach clinic will send the broader message that alternative treatments need to be included in mainstream community health initiatives focused on chronic conditions like diabetes and obesity.

Martin Burks, former president of the Jefferson School Community Partnership, and current chairman of the Jefferson School Foundation, is a longstanding business leader in the Starr Hill neighborhood at the J.F. Bell Funeral Home on Sixth Street. Burks said Common Ground will add a new dimension to the center’s range of offerings.

“The approach was that we wanted to excite old and young people. To attract people with a diverse approach to things,” Burks said. “And I think we’ve done that with a broad array of nonprofits offering services there, and I think Common Ground fits perfectly.”

Zuckerman doesn’t feel the need to soft pedal her project. She’s motivated and ambitious and believes yoga, massage, and acupuncture are for everyone.

“Our stated mission is to bring sliding scale healing arts services to the community. A larger vision we have though is that through this avenue people are going to come into contact with people they wouldn’t otherwise come into contact with,” she said. “My ultimate vision is that I’ll have someone from Farmington and someone from Friendship Court and they’re both on their yoga mats and they’re both in my class.”

Categories
News

UVA grapples with GE in electronic records suit

More than three years after it filed a $30 million lawsuit against the software company hired to design an electronic records system for its hospital, UVA heads to Charlottesville Circuit Court this week, and while the suit is expected to suck up an unusually large amount of the court’s time, it’s just the latest chapter in a battle over new technology that’s lasted 13 years.

According to UVA’s complaint, the deal dates to 1999, when UVA contracted with tech firm IDX to develop an electronic medical record system, or EMR, for its hospital. But problems started early, UVA claimed, with IDX failing to hit milestones on the multi-phase project. When technology company GE took over IDX in 2006, the parties got together to rework the contract. But UVA said the issues continued, and it ultimately pulled the plug, saying GE failed to meet its obligations.

GE, meanwhile, claimed it was UVA that broke contract. The two parties had agreed to work together on the complicated project, according to the company’s counterclaim. UVA was to act as a development partner, collecting and processing two decades’ worth of patient data and building and testing the system. But the medical center didn’t hold up its end of the bargain, said GE, making it impossible for the company to stay on schedule.

By 2007, UVA was dragging its feet, said GE, pushing off its own deadlines and quietly looking for another company to finish the project. GE said that in June 2008, the University announced it was searching for a new vendor.

In February 2009, UVA awarded a $60 million contract to Epic Systems Corporation and filed suit against GE, demanding the $20 million it had paid the company and $10 million in damages. GE wants $1.6 million it claims it’s still owed by UVA, as well as unspecified compensation for lost profits and expenditures.

Besides involving big names and big numbers, the suit also highlights the fact that contract squabbles slowed the UVA medical center’s adoption of a comprehensive system for digitized medical records—technology that industry and the government now consider essential. Many large teaching hospitals, including those at Duke, Vanderbilt, and the University of Wisconsin, had patient and prescription records in place for years before UVA fully implemented EMR in 2010 and 2011.

Neither UVA’s nor GE’s attorneys responded to requests for comment, and a medical center spokesman said he couldn’t discuss current litigation. But Charlottesville civil attorney Robert Yates, who isn’t involved in the suit, said that in a battle over who broke a deal first, it’s rare to find litigants settling out of court.
“It’s very difficult for these parties to get together, because they get entrenched in saying who owes who money,” said Yates.

In many ways, the suit isn’t that different from any other contract dispute, but it’s generated some buzz in the local legal community, he said, because it’s got a very big footprint.

Circuit Court Judge Edward Hogshire has been sifting through thousands of pages of filings in the case, and has set aside three weeks to hear it because of the amount of complex technical testimony involved. The sheer volume of evidence attorneys will be slogging through was a big part of why it took so long to get the case on the docket, Yates said.

“You can imagine the scope of a contract of this magnitude in terms of the data—20 years of medical records, and however many hundreds of thousands if not millions of patients,” he said. “The legal issues are not that complicated. It’s the evidence that’s complicated.”