Month: March 2013

Categories
News

Cab wars: Why new taxi technology is making some drivers mad

Mark Brown bought Yellow Cab and Anytime Taxi last year, and has introduced a new computer-based dispatch system and credit card machines in all cars. But phone dispatch has suffered, and many cabbies are angry about the changes. Photo by Elli Williams.

When Downtown Mall landlord Mark Brown bought Yellow Cab and Anytime Taxi last year, he created Charlottesville’s largest round-the-clock cab company, and started making big changes right away: a fleet of sleek new hybrid cars, an app that lets customers book rides via Web and smartphone, and credit card swipe machines that make it easy to pay with plastic in every car.

Brown says business is booming and bringing more shoppers and diners Downtown, but there are discontented rumblings coming from within the city’s cab industry—an industry that’s both highly competitive and resistant to change.

Two Yellow Cab drivers speaking on condition of anonymity said morale is down and tempers are up among the veteran cabbies of both newly acquired companies. The call center is staffed by one inexperienced dispatcher, they said, which means their main customer base—poorer residents without Web or mobile phone access who need a ride to the laundromat or the grocery store —often face hold times of 10 minutes or longer when they call for a cab.

And there are some things the computer system just can’t do, they said, like ask a student which dorm entrance to come to, or prioritize fares by area, so drivers aren’t wasting time crisscrossing the city.

But their biggest beef is over money and autonomy. Most cab drivers operate as independent contractors, paying about $260 a week for the right to shuttle passengers in a car branded with somebody else’s company name. But the cost of doing business with Yellow Cab and Anytime Taxi is going up, they said. The new credit card system takes 5 percent of fares and tips. Many cabbies who agreed to lease the shiny new Hyundai hybrids Brown is pushing are locked into five-year partnerships with Yellow Cab, but aren’t seeing the promised payoff from lower mileage costs, said the drivers.

“We’ve got a lot of drivers out here that can’t even pay their lease,” said one Yellow Cab contractor. And there’s no love lost between drivers and the companies’ new owner. “It’s his way or the highway, is what we say.”

Lloyd Smith used to drive for Yellow Cab, but the same problems the anonymous drivers pointed to finally drove him to contract with relative newcomer McCoy’s Taxi Service instead.

“The computer system is a failure,” he said. “It can’t do what the human aspect can do. A lot of times, you’re getting calls, but there’s no way to show people have moved or called another cab.”

But a bigger problem, he said, is that Brown just doesn’t get the industry—or respect the fact that a lot of cabbies consider themselves independent business owners.

“In order for somebody to run a cab company, they have to have been a cab driver,” he said. “He wants to run it like a McDonald’s.”

Smith thinks a driver exodus could sink Brown, especially once the smartphone-toting UVA traffic evaporates in June. “He’s not going to make it this summer, because everyone is walking away from him.”

McCoy’s owner Kennan McCoy said he and other smaller companies are getting a lot of calls from former Yellow and Anytime customers frustrated with long hold times. In a small town with a lot of cab options, he said, treating the rider right is the only way to succeed—that, and respecting drivers.

“It seems to me you’d catch more flies with honey,” he said.

Brown acknowledged that his phone dispatch system has issues, but he said it’s because his service—particularly the pay-by-card option—is so popular. He started with 15 cars, and now has more than six times that. He’s planning to add several new dispatchers in the coming weeks. “We’re struggling to keep up, the demand is so great,” he said.

One of his supervisors, Mike Anderson, has been driving a cab in Charlottesville for seven years, and said Brown has raised the bar. The previous owners of Yellow were more like slumlords, he said, refusing to repair and update cars that could barely limp to Richmond and back without breaking down.

The computer dispatch system may still have some kinks, but it’s increased efficiency, Anderson said, and it’s more fair. No more dispatchers playing favorites and giving certain drivers all the good fares. And despite the griping over the 5 percent take, he said the credit card machines are a boon for drivers, too.

“People would rather hold onto their cash,” he said. “If they tip with a credit card, they’re a lot more willing to give you a bigger tip.”

Brown said the complaints from cabbies really come down to one thing: resistance to a new system that comes with far more accountability.

“From 1933”—the year Yellow Cab was founded—“to June of 2012, the company hadn’t changed much,” said Brown. “There wasn’t much advancement other than a radio and a map.”

And while drivers might have been content with that, he said, their passengers shouldn’t be.

“For 80 years in this town, as a taxi driver or a dispatcher, you could rip off customers,” he said—or at least get away with blaming lateness on poor communication. Now, every call and mobile request is logged, and GPS tracking eliminates any questions about where and when cabs show up. The new technology is a public safety plus, too, he said. When a UVA student reported an attempted rape by a man she thought was a cab driver last month, Brown said his company was able to map exactly where all its cars were that night, eliminating more than a hundred suspects.

While all the oversight might ruffle the feathers of fiercely independent cabbies, Brown said that doesn’t mean it’s not good business. He said some may be complaining, but the uptick in fares is lining the pockets of plenty of drivers. “The machines probably double, triple their business. Everyone who works for me is making markedly more money than before,” he said.

Bottom line, said Brown: High-tech dispatch and cashless transactions of the future of the taxi business. If he didn’t bring it to Charlottesville, somebody else would. “Change is inevitable,” he said.

Categories
Living

Ecology of mind: UVA symposium aims to revive the interdisciplinary thinking of Gregory Bateson

Gregory Bateson–the anthropologist, philosopher, biologist, psychologist, and high priest of cybernetics–died of respiratory disease at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1980. Photo: Barry Schwartz.

“It takes two to know one.”

One of the many riddles that Gregory Bateson–the anthropologist, philosopher, biologist, psychologist, and high priest of cybernetics–left behind when he died of respiratory disease at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1980 after a lifetime of cigarette smoking.

Bateson was a titanic figure at 6’5″, intellectually intimidating, capable of reciting the works of William Blake or rattling off the scientific names of anything in his path. But people who knew him described a gentle, curious, playful man who treated children with as much respect as his colleagues.

Stephen Nachmanovitch (left), one of Gregory Bateson’s most devoted students, and Nora Bateson, his daughter from his third marriage to Lois Cammack, will join UVA anthroplogist Ira Bashkow to host the Bateson Symposium April 10-12. Photo: Leslie Blackhall
Stephen Nachmanovitch (left), one of Gregory Bateson’s most devoted students, and Nora Bateson, his daughter from his third marriage to Lois Cammack, will join UVA anthroplogist Ira Bashkow to host the Bateson Symposium April 10-12. Photo: Leslie Blackhall

The son of a Cambridge don who coined the term “genetics” and named his child after Gregor Mendel, Gregory Bateson grew up in the uppermost reaches of the academy, but he was never comfortable there. He is, perhaps, best known as the husband of Margaret Mead who collaborated with her on the ethnographic studies of Bali and New Guinea that brought her work to prominence.

“In his childhood there were the Darwins and the Huxleys and all the eminences of British biology. Gregory found a way to get 10,000 miles away from all that by doing anthropology,” the musician Stephen Nachmanovitch told me, during an interview at his home office in Ivy.

Nachmanovitch, one of Bateson’s disciples, is an international leader in the improvisational music movement with a Ph.D. in the history of consciousness. Like his mentor, his relationship to the academy is tenuous.

“I’m definitely outside the academy, but I keep coming in as a guest and friend,” Nachmanovitch said.

Between April 10-12, Nachmanovitch is joining with Gregory Bateson’s daughter Nora Bateson and UVA cultural anthropologist Ira Bashkow to host the Bateson Symposium, an interdisciplinary exploration of ideas funded by UVA’s Buckner W. Clay Endowment for the Humanities. An intellectual can opener with a “town and gown” mission, the symposium will include a screening of Nora Bateson’s biographical film An Ecology of Mind: A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson at Vinegar Hill Theatre.

A seminar the following day on Grounds will include UVA professors from across departmental specialties: Bashkow, anthropology; Kurtis Schaefer, religion; Chip Tucker, English; Sandy Seidel, biology; Angeline Lillard, psychology; Deborah Lawrence and Manuel Lerdau*, environmental sciences; as well as Bateson’s former students Katie King, a women’s studies scholar at the University of Maryland and California-based independent anthropologist Phillip Guddemi.

Bashkow is director of graduate studies in UVA’s anthropology department and firmly inside the academy. He first encountered Bateson’s ethnographic studies of the Iatmul people of New Guinea as a young graduate student, and his career as an anthropologist has been focused in that part of the world. In a way, he’s taking the biggest risk by pulling together colleagues with diverse critical approaches to Bateson’s work and introducing them to people so devoted to the man and his ideas. He thinks the discussions will be lively, maybe even fraught at times.

“I can’t think of another person who actually lets you talk to your friends in environmental sciences about something they really care about for their own reasons. And something that mathematicians care about for their own reasons. And something that therapists and family counselors really care about and think is theirs,” Bashkow said. “There’s really a lot of stuff there, and actually I think there’s more that hasn’t been mined.”

The reason it takes so many types of people to unpack Bateson’s ideas is embedded in the ideas themselves. His interest was in connecting the universal to the specific on the grandest scale possible. His early fieldwork in anthropology led him to his conclusions about the importance of context in language and the pathologies of ideas, which later led to his development of the double-bind theory during studies of schizophrenic and alcoholic patients at Stanford University’s VA Hospital.

In the 1940s and ’50s he participated in the Macy Conferences, where he became a founder of the field of cybernetics and a primary proponent of the notion of metacommunication. His work and that of his colleagues inspired the development of family therapy. Bateson’s field research ranged from family structure in Papua-New Guinea to studies of dolphins and sea otters in captivity.

If you want to understand Bateson, you have to understand how he taught. In his signature Hawaiian shirts, with his imperious accent, he told stories that conveyed meaning in “a sort of carrier wave.”

“He had a repertoire of stories, three or four dozen multipurpose parables. Gregory’s explanations were built from these stories, combined, inverted, end-linked in various ways, much as giant protein molecules are built from a fixed repertoire of 20 amino acids,” Nachmanovitch said.

The purpose of the symposium is to start a discussion about the significance of a man whose teachings touched such a wide range of disciplines that they are still being contextualized. But even a casual familiarity with Bateson’s research is enough to indicate the project is more far-reaching than that.

At the end of his life, Bateson was gaining a reputation as one of the most influential minds of the last century for the ideas he cultivated over his lifetime to answer a question he articulated in the opening to Mind and Nature, his last complete published work.

“What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster, the orchid to the primrose, and all four of them to me, and me to you? And to the back-ward** schizophrenic and to the poet?”

During the last two years of his life, after a near death experience with a bout of cancer, he became more expansive as a person and teacher.

“He was readier to hug people. He started writing poetry. He reached a kind of outer clarity about what he was saying, and, coincidentally, his audience became much broader,” Nachmanovitch wrote in a biographical article.

There is no simple way to categorize Bateson’s ideas. It’s not even very easy to explain them.

Last Wednesday, California Governor Jerry Brown named Gregory Bateson  to the California Hall of Fame alongside Joe Montana and Warren Beatty. An admirer of Bateson’s who appointed him a trustee of the state’s university system during his first term, Brown recognized what Nora Bateson has known from her first moments of consciousness but took half her life to be able to communicate to others. There is no limit to her father’s ideas, and they have tremendous relevance to the challenges we face in a global world.

“If I’m talking to designers in Berlin or anthropologists in Brazil, they’re asking the same question. Which is, ‘How do we grow our discipline? What’s the next level? How do we go further with our studies?’” she said. “And the next level is really about integration. But there’s not a lot of context for even the rhetoric about what an integrated conversation looks like.”

Next month in Charlottesville, for a fleeting moment, the context for an integrated conversation will take shape.

*The print version of this story misspelled UVA environmental science professor Manuel Lerdau’s name.

**The print version of this story said “backwards schizophrenic” instead of “back-ward schizophrenic,” changing the meaning of the phrase.

Categories
Living

Space relations: Preventing sibling rivalry

File photo.

The issue of personal space comes up in my household a lot. Both my 5-year-old daughter and husband have a high tolerance for physical proximity—they tend to sit close, speak close, and don’t even seem to notice when they accidentally, but quite frequently, elbow me in the ribs.

Conversely, my 2-and-a-half-year-old and I have what, ahem, others in the house call “huge space bubbles.”

Technically speaking, the concept of personal space is called proxemics. (This is just one of the many helpful factoids I’ve learned since becoming a parent. Among other recently acquired knowledge: the average incubation period of the chicken pox virus (14 days); the maximum speed of a cheetah (70 mph); and the amount of ibuprofen it takes to recover from an up-all-night-with-a-puking-toddler hangover (800mg).)

But we prefer the term “space bubble.” You’ll hear it uttered (shouted) several times a day at my house:

Younger Sister growling because Older Sister has crossed the line onto “her” couch cushion? “Space bubble!” I’ll remind Older Sister.

Younger Sister whining because Older Sister has placed one toe in the playroom where an elaborate baby doll triage station has been established? “Sissy is no where near your space bubble!” I’ll call out.

Older Sister and Husband now sit together on one side of the dinner table where they can elbow each other’s ribs to their hearts’ content while the rest of us can eat in peace and spaciousness on the other side.

My own sanity aside, this recognition of differences among our family’s temperaments ultimately is my way of attempting to prevent one of my worst parenting nightmares: SIBLING RIVALRY.

Oh, I have the common sense bases covered, of course. I’ve never said, “Why can’t you be more like your sister?” to either one (even though I’ve thought it many—many—times), and Husband and I give both kids one-on-one time so they’ll feel loved and appreciated as individuals rather than only as a sisterly unit. But my mission to cultivate sibling bonding has taken on even more strategic proportions, because here’s another important fact I’ve learned since becoming a parent: The best way to ensure a friendship is to create a common enemy. In this case, yours truly.

Playtime hijinks
Occasionally, when I find them rowdily engaged in cooperative play, I’ll swoop in and invent a reason to chide them in the most ridiculous way possible:

“Are you spilling too much water outside the bathtub? What will the poor fish in the ocean have to drink?”

“Can you guys laugh without being so loud?”

“You’re making the My Little Ponies be nice to each other, right?”

And then I’ll smile to myself at my cunning when I hear them giggling at me together behind my back.

Treat trickery
Sometimes I’ll create a rule for the achievement of, say, a special post-school snack, and then purposely forget the terms just so Older Sister can correct me and look like a hero to Younger Sister: “YOU said we could get ice cream if we brushed our teeth without complaining this morning. You didn’t say anything about keeping our coats buttoned!”

Inane narration
“Wow, that was really thoughtful of Older Sister to let you play with her [insert toy Older Sister no longer cares about that’s missing half its pieces]. She must really love you!”

Or, “I noticed Younger Sister didn’t scream, ‘You’re hurting my ears!’ at you in the car when you sang along to the radio this time. She must really love you!”

I know I’m setting myself up for future ridicule when the girls grow up and return to our house for a visit, high on the horse of their independent lives, and crack each other up re-telling tales of my buffoonery.

And that will be one proud parenting moment indeed.

Categories
News

Face time: Author Jonathan Coleman visits Jim Baldi in jail

Convicted embezzler James K. Baldi is currently serving his sentence at the Cold Springs Correctional Unit in Greenville and could face additional prison time for a new federal charge.

There he was, much as I remembered him: the same mischievous, knowing, somewhat furtive look, jaunty and clean-cut as ever; even the erudite black glasses were not that much of a surprise. He is nearly 50 now, but still incorrigibly youthful, and, despite all that he is up against, hopeful, hopeful for “one more day.”

James Kirk Baldi—waiter, bartender, former college professor with a Ph.D., accountant, restaurateur, fugitive—had enjoyed life one day at a time since he fled these parts with his much younger girlfriend, Kristian Throckmorton, in the summer of 2010, leaving a number of people in his wake who felt, among other things, angry, disillusioned, financially taken, and betrayed. He somehow managed to stay gone until January 4 of this year. One more day. For him, it was like a mantra for his deceptively paradisiacal life on the run. Just one more day. It didn’t last. As Joan Didion wrote, “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”

So on that first Friday evening of January, nearly 3,000 miles away from Central Virginia, a team of United States Marshals surprised and surrounded Jim Baldi at Pachino Trattoria and Pizzeria, the San Francisco restaurant where he and Throckmorton (a.k.a. Dario and Eliana DiSovana) worked, and where he had charmed, as is his wont, many of the regular clientele. Five weeks later, after time spent at San Bruno #5, one of San Francisco County’s main correctional facilities, he was extradited to Charlottesville, where he faces a variety of embezzlement charges in both city and county courts.

I had written him a short note on a yellow legal pad and said I would like to come see him at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail on Peregory Lane. We had, at separate times, gone out with the same woman, and we had played basketball together on a few occasions. We would nod to each other on the Downtown Mall, and I was, and remain, good friends with someone who was particularly close to him.

What I didn’t know at the time I received a letter back from Baldi was that I was the only person he had put on his visitation list —or so he said. Other than his attorney, Scott Goodman, he preferred not to see anybody, he told me when I appeared for the first time on the gray Saturday morning of March 2.

Thirty minutes, twice a month, is all the time he is granted for visitation. In my line of work as an author of nonfiction, I have made a number of visits to prisons—federal, state, and local—but this is the first instance when I have had to stand the entire time.

He seemed pleased to see me. Why, I am not entirely sure and can only guess. He also struck me as nervous, alternating between looking at me directly and avoiding eye contact altogether. I asked about his children, Gina and Nick, whom I had met briefly years before. Gina is 20 now, just a few months older than my own daughter, and Nick a year younger. Like me, Baldi had physical custody of them half the time, starting when they were both young, and I always had the impression that he was a caring, devoted father. I was curious if Gina and Nick had been in contact with him and he said they hadn’t.

He claimed it was on account of their mother’s wish that they stay away until after his legal issues were behind him. I started to say that they were grown now and could make that decision for themselves, but I didn’t. I did find it curious, though, that he seemed to know something about his daughter’s life—that Gina was in her third year at UVA—but nothing about his son’s. The subject of his children, as one might expect, was difficult for him, and I let it go.

So why was I there, you might ask? I had not come to interrogate him or to elicit a confession, or to unearth some unambiguous evidence that he felt contrite about the things he was being charged with and wanted to make amends. I had come because, years before, I had written a book called Exit the Rainmaker, a book that recounted the planned disappearance of a beloved Maryland college president and the impact his leaving had on the institution, on his wife and family, and on a community in which everyone knew him… or at least thought they did.

Not only had the act of disappearance held a fascination for me ever since I read of Huck Finn’s desire to “light out for the territory,” but so had the fierce, often overwhelming desire to reinvent one’s self, borne out of the fervent hope, ever present and however misguided, that the proverbial grass will be greener on the other side. It’s an old, romantic American story that, somehow, never gets old.

As I dug deeper into the subject, I was also fascinated to learn of how many people, both men and women, actually do this every year, and of the countless more who fantasize about doing it, but who stop short for a variety of reasons. To me, on some level, it is a form of suicide, social suicide, and I found myself reflecting on whether it is an act of courage or cowardice, an act of sanity or insanity, or some strange mixture of all four. But most interesting, and haunting, of all was the biggest question it raised: How well do any of us really know someone else?

That question aside, there was of course one significant difference between the college president’s disappearance and Jim Baldi’s: Jay Carsey was not running from the law. He was free to go wherever he pleased. If one chose to view his leaving as a crime, given how upset so many people were at the time, it was a moral one at best.

I was curious if Baldi had read Exit the Rainmaker, and he had. He didn’t go straight to California, he said, but had stopped and worked along the way; he had chosen his places carefully but did not say where. The restaurant industry was something he knew as a world unto itself, a world that he and Throckmorton, a blonde who is now in her late 20s, could easily blend into without being scrutinized. She was still in California, he said, and they were still together, speaking on the phone on a regular basis.

After his arrest, Throckmorton had begun working at another restaurant nearby, but when I phoned to speak with her, I was told she was no longer working there. The couple had reportedly forged green cards from Canada which bore their aliases, but the U.S. Marshals have not confirmed that. (When I recalled that Baldi’s dissertation concerned the Free Trade Agreement between the U.S. and Canada, this detail made a certain amount of sense.) Contrary to what was reported in 2010, Baldi insisted that Throckmorton had never returned to Charlottesville. He was fairly emotional in speaking of her, saying that “Kristian’s a good girl, a very good girl,” expressing how much he missed her. A close friend of mine recalled often seeing them together in Beer Run, holding hands. When I asked if he wanted, or expected, her to wait for him, Baldi said that was his hope. Another hope for one more day.

In the meantime, Baldi is looking ahead, looking forward to getting his legal troubles behind him and “turning the page.” Determined “to remain thoughtful and quiet and focus on my case,” he was glad to have a radio to listen to and books from the jail library to read—George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Graham Swift’s Waterland, and particularly and perhaps tellingly, C.S. Forester’s acclaimed series of books about Horatio Hornblower, the fictional Royal Navy officer whose global adventures spanned the Napoleonic Wars.

“On every single level, this has been a nightmare,” Gina Baldi said last week on the phone. “I love my father very much, I truly do. But he abandoned us. To be 16 and 17 and not know if he is dead or alive, we had to deal with the fallout of that. It will take me a very long time before I can trust him again. And I will do everything I can to prevent him from hurting me and Nick anymore. He is much more fragile than I am, and it is my job to protect him.”

The deep hurt in Gina’s voice was unmistakable and heartbreaking; her voice itself was older than her years. It was the hurt of a daughter whose father had not been present last May when she graduated summa cum laude and was given the highest award Piedmont Virginia Community College bestows on a student. Who had not shared in the joy she experienced at receiving a coveted research internship at Johns Hopkins last summer, and is unlikely to have any knowledge of her plans to pursue a degree in either medicine or public health when she graduates from UVA.

“My mother has had nothing to do with our not visiting him yet,” she emphasized. “Nothing at all.” Just because he is back, she said, she and Nick were in no hurry to see him, though she had recently gotten a note from him and they were planning to go soon. She was nervous at the prospect of feeling upset all over again.

“I have no idea what to expect,” she said. “I do know that I don’t want to go out there and just have him ask me about school and my grades and mundane things like that.”

If there has been any silver lining in the whole ordeal, in this story of loss, it is this: It has not only brought Gina and her brother closer to their mother, stepfather, and four half-siblings, but it has brought them closer to the Baldi side of the family, especially with the death of their grandfather, Albert Baldi, three days before Christmas (a mere two weeks before Jim Baldi’s arrest).

When I recently looked over the electronic guest book that funeral homes put online for people to send their condolences, I couldn’t help noticing this entry (and being reminded how each family deals with things in their own peculiar way):

Aunt Judy, Jimmy, and Katie

Our family is deeply saddened to hear of the loss of Uncle Al. He was always warm and welcoming whenever our family visited Maine and New Hampshire. We will keep you and your families in our prayers during the difficult days ahead.

Loads of love,

Terri and Dan and Family

Jim Baldi’s relatives apparently never knew, or never were told, that “Jimmy” had ever been gone.—Jonathan Coleman 

Jim Baldi is expected to appear in Albemarle County General District Court on March 28 at 10:30 a.m. and again, on April 1, in Albemarle County Circuit Court at 9:30 a.m. 

Categories
News

School spending, Stonefield suit, and City races: News briefs

The city has settled with Stonefield developer Edens over a stormwater dispute, allowing the largest development project in Albemarle County history to move forward. Photo by Jack Looney.

Check c-ville.com daily and pick up a copy of the paper Tuesday to for the latest Charlottesville and Albemarle news briefs and stories. Here’s a quick look at some of what we’ve had an eye on for the past week.

County schools face budget gap

The Albemarle County School District is facing a $1.2 million budget shortfall for the coming fiscal year, which officials say will mean cuts in classroom spending, according to a Daily Progress report.

The schools are planning to spend $2.4 million on raises for faculty and staff, and must increase spending by $1.5 million to keep up with expanding enrollment, according to the report. They must also create a mandated online course system, which will come with a $250,000 price tag.

It’s all part of a proposed $155 million school budget—up 2.77 percent from last year. County Supervisors have called for a 76.6-cent tax rate, a slight increase that would steer about $600,000 in new revenue to the schools—not enough to prevent some cuts, officials said, which may mean larger class sizes.

A public hearing on the county budget is set for 6pm Wednesday at the County Office Building on McIntire Road.

Stonefield suit settled

A legal dispute over stormwater management between The Shops at Stonefield developer and the City of Charlottesville has been settled, and according to Charlottesville Tomorrow, Edens will soon proceed with a second phase of the project—the largest in Albemarle County’s history.

Stonefield, the long-anticipated shopping center featuring an IMAX theater, a Trader Joe’s, and several restaurants, is situated in the county, but its stormwater flows into the city. The city issued a citation last June after Edens placed a 72″ pipe underneath U.S. 29 as part of its stormwater management plan. Great Eastern Management, which owns Seminole Square Shopping Center across the street and within the city limits, argued that the pipe would unfairly dump water on its property and could cause flooding.

After months of mediation, Edens posted a $150,000 bond to cover the next five years’ worth of potential stormwater damage, and Charlottesville Tomorrow reported that the city now believes the shopping center presents no downstream threat.

Race for City Council heats up 

A third Democratic candidate is announcing his candidacy for one of the two seats opening on Charlottesville’s City Council. Lifelong city resident Melvin Grady is the nephew of former Mayor Charles Barbour. Grady, 44, graduated from Charlottesville High School and the University of Virginia, and is a math teacher at Buford Middle School. As a father of two, he said giving all children a head start will be one of his top priorities. He told C-VILLE that if elected, he wants to examine Charlottesville’s infrastructure, and focus on providing access to jobs and places like community gardens and the City Market.

Current Vice-Mayor Kristin Szakos announced in February that she will run for a second term, and 26-year-old Wes Bellamy announced his candidacy earlier this month. Bellamy, an Atlanta native, teaches computer science at Albemarle High School, and is the founder and chairman of youth mentoring group Helping Young People Evolve and president of the Charlottesville-Albemarle National Alliance of Black School Educators. Both are running as Democrats.

The Democratic primary for the November election will be held June 11.

Transit study, take two

Charlottesville City Councilors got a first look at the updated results of a long-awaited transit study last week, and while the commissioned report on the city’s bus system didn’t propose major changes, the plan isn’t without its detractors, according to Charlottesville Tomorrow.

San Francisco-based transportation consulting firm Nelson Nygaard first held a public hearing on its findings and recommendations in December, but the city sent the company back to the drawing board. At a presentation last Monday, representatives from the firm told Council that much of the city’s transit system works well already, but offered a few suggestions, including a new transit hub at the corner of Jefferson Park Avenue and West Main Street, increased service to Piedmont Virginia Community College and CATEC, and changes to the Route 11 bus circuit that would bring service through either the Greenbrier neighborhood or along Park Street and Rio Road.

A member of the Transit Riders Association of Charlottesville criticized the report for not taking a comprehensive, ground-up approach, and several people raised concerns about route shifts leading to loss of service for some residents.

Council will vote on the proposed changes next month, Charlottesville Tomorrow reported.

HUD says Norris in the clear

The Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development says that City Councilor Dave Norris’ work for the Public Housing Association of Residents while Norris was chair of the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority did not pose a conflict of interest.

HUD had noted Norris’ close relationship with PHAR and the fact that the group had paid him nearly $10,000 out of a HUD grant for consulting work in a recently released report that was highly critical of the CRHA. Norris maintained that his long relationship with the residents’ association did not conflict with his work as an elected and appointed official. On Monday, a HUD official confirmed that after looking into the issue, it had deemed there was no financial conflict of interest.—C-VILLE writers

Categories
Living

Men in the kitchen, beer on the table, kids in the hoophouse: This week’s restaurant news

File photo.

The Craft Brewers Conference is being held in Washington, D.C., this year—a big enough deal to begin with, but news of one of our own breweries being highlighted in a Symposium Ale collaboration is even more exciting. Jason Oliver of Devils Backbone Brewing Company is working closely with brewers of DC Brau and Brewers Art to create Beggars & Thieves (formerly called Symposium Ale) Anti-Imperial Rye Lager. This specialty beer will be served in bottles and on draft throughout the conference from March 26-29. They’ve been brewing since February at Devils Backbone’s satellite spot in Lexington to create a flavorful beer that’s lower in alcohol (a.k.a. a session beer). The idea for an anti-imperial (the opposite of imperial, meaning high gravity) style of lager comes from the desire to drink more without getting sloshed. This beer clocks in at a non-punishing 5 percent ABV, and combines the pumpernickel-like spiciness of European-style beer with Sterling hops, which tend to impart fruity and floral flavors often found in the Northwest. Visit craft brewersconference.com.

MACAA (Monticello Area Community Action Agency) is celebrating its 26th annual “Men Who Cook” event on Saturday, April 6, at the Omni Hotel. Sixty amateur chefs will present an array of culinary treats to benefit the organization, which helps low-income families escape poverty. Pre-dinner cocktail hour begins at 5:30pm with music by the Trius Jazz Trio and hors d’oeuvres, moving into a silent auction, and dinner from 6:30-10:30pm. Tickets are $125 each, or a table for $1,000. Visit macaa.org for information and reservations.

The Clifton Inn is beckoning spring weather with a five-course beer dinner in collaboration with Beer Run on Monday, April 8. Highlights include crispy rabbit with lavender vinaigrette and endive paired with Founder’s All Day IPA. Other beers include Victory Swing Saison and Augustiner Brau Maximator. Canapes begin at 6:30pm, with dinner seated at 7pm. Tickets are $62 and can be reserved at cliftoninn.net.

Hill & Holler is kickstarting its 2013 dinner series season in collaboration with Beyond the Flavor on Sunday, April 21, with an urban farm dinner at Old Metropolitan Hall. Chef Dean Maupin of C&O Restaurant will serve four inventive family-style courses sourced from local farms and paired with Virginia wine. “Cocktail” hour will begin at 5pm with music by Red & the Romantics, passed canapés, and cider from Potter’s Craft. Tickets are $100 and proceeds support the local farm and food enthusiast community. Visit hillandholler.org to score a seat.

Help the Buford Middle School City Schoolyard Garden “Hoist up their hoophouse” via Kickstarter by April 10. It’ll take a village to raise $6,000 to build the 13’x28′ hoophouse used to grow seedlings for the school and neighborhood gardens in Charlottesville. The City Schoolyard Garden is dedicated to providing year-round educational and hands-on opportunities to students in the city of Charlottesville to learn about seed saving and the lifecycle of plants. The gathering space will be heated in winter and shaded in summer, which will also allow the school to expand its programming and capacity. For more information or to donate, visit kickstarter.com/projects/ 828385493/hoist-up-our-hoophouse.

Categories
News

What’s coming up in Charlottesville and Albemarle the week of 3/25?

Notes from the news desk

Each week, the news team takes a look at upcoming meetings and events in Charlottesville and Albemarle we think you should know about. Consider it a look into our datebook, and be sure to share newsworthy happenings in the comments section.

  • City Council holds the next in its series of town hall meetings tonight from 6-8pm at Jackson Via Elementary. The “Our Town” meetings are an open session for residents to bring ideas and concerns to councilors.
  • The Albemarle County Planning Commission holds a public hearing on its Comprehensive Plan from 6-8pm Tuesday in Lane Auditorium at the County Office Building on McIntire Road. 
  • Another night, another hearing on a big document: On Wednesday, the County Board of Supervisors gathers from 6-9pm at the County Office Building for a hearing on the proposed 2013-14 budget and tax rate.
  • The PLACE Design Task Force meets from noon-2pm Thursday at the Jefferson School City Center, this time to tackle the topic of sustainable infrastructure.
  • Also on Thursday, Piedmont Virginia Community College holds a panel discussion at 7:30pm in the Dickinson Fine and Performing Arts Center at Piedmont Virginia Community College titled “Cultivating Community: A Dialogue of Farms, Health and Food.” Local farmers, growers, and food distributors will talk about the local food supply, the environment, and business. 

 

Categories
Living

What a pain! What’s the deal with growth spurts?

File photo.

The biggest growth spurts for children occur in the first year and then again around puberty. The first year of life is an incredible time of growth in all areas—height, weight, and head circumference. The most significant growth spurts usually take place around seven to 10 days of life and again between three to six weeks. Amazingly, most babies will double their birth weight by six months and triple their birth weight by a year of age.

After age 2, children have reached half their adult height and will continue to grow around two to three inches per year and four to seven pounds per year. As any parent of teenagers will notice, the last significant growth spurt occurs in conjunction with puberty—in general at about age 8 to 13 years old in girls and 10 to 15 years old in boys. Parental height (genetics) still plays the most important role in predicting ultimate height for children.

Growing pains occur in about 25 to 40 percent of children, most commonly in children age 3 to 5 years old and again in 8 to 12-year-olds. No link has been found between growing pains and growth spurts—in other words, it is not growing muscles and bones that cause the aching.

Growing pains are most likely due to the running, jumping, and increased physical activity that occurs daily in the lives of active children. Most kids describe these pains as sharp, throbbing, and occurring at night, and usually complain of the pain in thighs, calves, or behind the knees. They can be one-sided but typically occur in both legs (and much less commonly in arms). Growing pains usually respond well to massage, stretching, heating pads, and the occasional dose of ibuprofen or acetaminophen. If the pain occurs during the day, in the joints, or if the legs appear red or swollen, the child should be evaluated by your pediatrician.

What does it mean when your doctor whizzes through percentiles during your visit? Growth charts help to compare your child to other children the same age and gender. Percentiles help to show how your child is growing compared to the average heights and weights for his/her age and gender. It is not better to be bigger (percentiles greater than 50 percent) or smaller (percentiles less than 50 percent). However, it is most important that your child be proportional and that she grow consistently from year to year. A dramatic change in percentiles warrants a visit to your pediatrician. An even better measure of your child’s individual growth is the body mass index (BMI), a calculation that uses height and weight to estimate how much body fat a child has. Pediatricians use it to determine how appropriate a child’s weight is for a certain height and age and to determine if a child is underweight, appropriate for age, overweight, or obese.—Paige Perriello

Categories
Living

Will you still feed me? Facing the challenges of an aging pet

File photo

It can feel so unnatural to watch our pets grow old. It’s just not what we imagine when they first come into our lives. I was in high school when I got my first dog—a Lhasa Apso puppy I named Opus. I loved him dearly. He became part of my identity through college, vet school, and the start of my career in Charlottesville. He was the common thread that ran through so many changes in my own life. After all those happy and healthy years, I wasn’t prepared to see him become a tiny old man. He was supposed to keep playing with toys and chasing his tail, forever oblivious to such trite human concerns as aging. But there he was, losing his sight, sprouting little growths all over his body, and repeatedly turning up lame in his left front leg. Ready or not, he had gotten old.

These changes are hard to grapple with at first. They are sad and unwelcome. But our pets should be sources of comfort and happiness, not sorrow. It may take some time to refocus in the harsher light, but there is a lot of joy to be found in caring for older animals. It is, in many ways, a privilege to see them whole—to know them in all their stages of life, to meet them where they are right now, and to be with them when they need us the most. To live with an aging animal can be bittersweet, for sure. But it can be beautiful all the same.

There is no magic moment that a pet becomes old. We know this, of course, but we struggle to quantify it anyway. Most people know the equation that grants seven “dog years” for every real one. But with small breed dogs aging so much more slowly than large breed dogs, this simplistic formula leaves much to be desired. And anybody’s guess is as good as mine when it comes to cats, some of which seem old by their tenth birthday, and others which reach voting age without a gray whisker. So when asked if an animal is old, my reply is simple enough. Does he seem old?

I’ve never diagnosed an animal as “old.” Age is not a medical condition. But as animals age, they naturally become more prone to health issues that chip away at their quality of life. It seems so unfair—these animals who have lived their entire lives in an effortless state of happiness are faced with such an awful dose of reality. We are charged with protecting that happiness. Challenging? Often. Rewarding? Always.

As animals age, the way they interact with their environment changes. Just like people, many pets suffer some degree of hearing and vision loss. And some will unfortunately develop cognitive dysfunction, altering their very perception of the world. Although most animals seem to tackle these challenges with remarkable cheer (they really are amazing), some can become stressed or frightened. These pets find great comfort in consistency and familiarity to help them keep their bearings. There is security in a dependable schedule of walks, playtimes, and feedings. And if they are losing their senses, remember that you may need to develop new ways of communicating. Deaf animals may try harder to maintain eye contact, and depend on you to return the favor. And simple touch may be the most reassuring thing in the world, so get cuddling.

It is important to keep the layout of your home consistent. If you live with an aging pet, this really may not be the best time to renovate the living room. And take care not to create unexpected obstacles. It used to break my heart to see Opus tripping over a carelessly abandoned shoe in the middle of his otherwise clean hallway. It’s not his fault he went blind while living with a slob. Animals are incredibly adept at navigating a stable environment, even when their senses are failing, and keeping surprises to a minimum can go a long way toward making them feel safe and comfortable.

Take particular caution if you have stairs in your home. Even when older animals can see the stairs just fine, the pain and weakness that come with arthritis can make them dangerous to navigate. Blocking off stairwells isn’t a bad idea—it may be time to break out those baby gates you haven’t needed since housetraining. And laying down carpet runners can be really useful for older dogs that are having more trouble keeping their footing on slick floors.

Don’t forget how well you know your own pet. After all these years, you’re intimately familiar with any habits and idiosyncrasies. If something seems “off,” it may well be your first signal that a medical problem is brewing. And don’t underestimate the value of routine veterinary examinations. Burgeoning problems like heart murmurs may be completely invisible at home, and finding them early can help head them off before they get out of hand. Many owners are understandably concerned about putting elderly animals through extensive testing and treatment. Rest assured, most veterinarians share that concern. Many diseases of old age can be managed very simply and effectively, but that can’t happen until they are properly identified.

It is a sad truth that our pets age too quickly, even under the best circumstances. But old animals have a charm all their own, and taking care of them brings its own set of rewards.

Categories
Living Uncategorized

Five Finds on Friday: Alex George of Commonwealth

On Fridays we and The Charlottesville 29 feature five food finds selected by local chefs and personalities.  This week’s picks come from Alex George, of Commonwealth Restaurant and SkyBar, who has resurrected his much-missed restaurant Just Curry, which recently opened in a new space across the downtown mall from Commonwealth.  George’s picks:

1)  Shrimp and Grits at Horse & Hound.  “Luther Fedora’s shrimp and grits  are amazing!  The best damn grits I’ve ever had.”

2)  Almond Croissant at Paradox Pastry.  “Jenny Peterson does an absolutely fantastic job with these croissants.  I have at least two a week.”

3)  Crispy Skate Wing with Linguini Aglio at Tavola.  “This is one of the best dishes I’ve had in a long, long time.”  (Note:  This was also a pick in The Charlottesville 29 feature on Tavola.)

4)  Prosciutto and Blue Cheese Sandwich at Market Street Market.  “With pear, honey, and basil on ciabatta bread, this is my favorite anytime sandwich.”

5)  Cornmeal-crusted Fried Oysters at Maya.  “Christian Kelly’s fried oysters are a must-have every time I go there.”

cville29_logo

 

The Charlottesville 29 is a publication that asks: if there were just 29 restaurants in Charlottesville, what would be the ideal 29? Follow along with regular updates on Facebook and Twitter.