Georgia is not alone in removing voters from the rolls—Virginia does too, affecting tens of thousands of voters. —Jessie Audette
Georgia fell under the notoriety spotlight for removing an estimated 107,000 voters from its rolls in a tight election year under the state’s “use it or lose it” law, which starts the process if a voter skips one election.
In Virginia, if you get a notice from the state Department of Elections asking if you’ve moved from the address used to register and don’t respond, you could find yourself purged from the voter rolls —although it will take a few years for that to happen.
People are typically taken off the list of registered voters if they move or die. “If a local registrar gets a notification from a reliable source, the Department of Elections will send a notice to ask if you’ve moved,” says Albemarle registrar Jake Washburne.
A reliable source includes the U.S. Postal Service, which provides the names of those who have filed forwarding addresses. Social Security and Vital Records let the elections department know about deaths, and courts report felony convictions and adjudications of incompetency.
If the voter does not respond to the notice asking if she’s moved, that voter is put on the inactive list, says Washburne, and is purged if she doesn’t show up to vote in two successive federal elections.
The purges are done in odd-numbered years after the federal elections and they’re done by the state, says Charlottesville Registrar Rosanna Bencoach.
According to state voter registration statistics for 2017, the elections department purged 3,272 Albemarle voters, 685 of whom died and 1,467 moved out of state. In Charlottesville, the statepurged 3,975 voters. Of those, 233 were deaths and 978 moved out of state.
Hannibal Buress is a comedian, actor, writer, and “Handsome Rambler” podcast host. He brings his stand-up act to the Jefferson on Friday.
Image: Marcus Price
Since Hannibal Buress began his comedy career in 2002, he has hit screens in a variety of ways—from the series “Broad City” to the films The Secret Life of Pets, Tag, Blockers, Baywatch, and Daddy’s Home.
Though Buress is booking big gigs and taking his stand-up tour nationwide, he’s unsure about fame. Even his bio jokes about his “mild” popularity.
In his Netflix special “Comedy Camisado,” Buress berates the media, police, and a hotel receptionist who doesn’t believe his identity. Last summer, he hired a double who arguably looks nothing like him to stand in during the Spider-Man: Homecoming premiere. Though the lights have been bright on Buress recently, his comedy is down-to-earth and celebrates the mundane, absurd, and everyday life stuff to which we all can relate.
C-VILLE: What was your first stand-up performance like?
HB: It was an open mic in Carbondale, Illinois. I went to one and watched a friend perform and kind of saw the open mic stage demystified. Anybody could get up. It made it so I could at least try it in a low stakes environment. I tried it out, had fun with it, and kept going from there.
You mentioned that a lot of your stand-up material is based on your life. Anything that’s happened recently that you’ve been noodling over?
Parking garages. The ones that make you get a ticket and then say, “Hey, before you go back to your car, please pay at machine.” You can pay at exit, too, when you’re driving out. [Laughing.] They make it seem like you can’t, but you always can.
That bothers me. [Laughs.] You always can. I guess it’s for speed purposes. They don’t even have it in small print. “We also make it very easy for you to pay at exit.” They say you must pay at machine before you go back to your car. It’s like, “You know I don’t have to!”
In “Comedy Camisado,” you talk about a police officer “fangirling” over you. Have you ever had a fangirl moment?
That bit was about my conflict in thinking about police brutality and what energy you put on that job. You don’t know if someone is a good person if you meet them on the street. Depending on where the job is, I get uncomfortable if a cashier asks me to take a picture. [Laughing.]
The other day I was voting and was in the booth for a while. A bunch of different judges in Chicago are up for re-election, so I was Googling them. I was in the booth for a half hour. I wasn’t in my normal mental state when I stepped out.[A woman taking my ballot asked] “Can I get picture?” I said “No.” In that moment that was the last thing I was thinking about. I was researching judges! …Anywhere else I would have been fine with it. I felt bad about the way I said it. I was just there doing my civic duty like everybody else.
If you were that lady at Lovett School in Chicago, and you so happen to be angry Googling me since that moment, I apologize for my tone. But I don’t apologize for not taking a photo with you.
A recent New York Times article discussed your “prickly” relationship with the press. Is that how you’d describe the relationship?
No. I don’t know if it’s prickly. I’m just in several years of doing a lot of media. A lot of it isn’t rocket science. You know there are patterns, techniques, and strategies. Sometimes people lead you to a certain subject. …Make certain things be the headline to get more traffic, even if that was a small part of the interview. After doing hundreds of interviews I’ve been misquoted before. That’s part of the job. I don’t begrudge anybody.
Tell me about your body double at the Spider-Man: Homecoming premiere.
[Laughs, a lot.] I thought you were going to ask me about my body. I was about to say I’ve been working out. I’ll tell you about my body. I went to Thailand and got in the best shape of my life. I won’t say it all fell apart. I went out there to reset after a bunch of press in May and June.
But I can talk about the body double. I was filming Tag in Atlanta when the Spider-Man premiere happened. Everybody thought I didn’t want to go. I was on set in Atlanta.
There was a lot of downtime that day, so I was able to put this together. [Laughs] That’s how boring movie sets can be sometimes. You have enough time to put out an ad, respond, book the person, and get the info. Yeah, movie sets can be slow motion.
It was so fun because I remember watching him on Instagram live. It was really exciting, like Avatar or something. …I was laughing really hard. It was gratifying seeing fun ideas come together, really dope. I have to figure out more fun stuff like that.
Why is Virginia the only state with multiple independent cities? The city/county split here seems to lead to more difficulties than not. —David Moltz
Why did Charlottesville become an independent city in the first place? What ridiculous conflicts and duplication of services have we had over the years? Why does it persist? What’s the future for the Charlottesville-Albemarle relationship?—Nathan Moore
The whys of independent cities appear to be a burning issue over at WTJU, from whence these two inquiries came—although GM Moore assures us he and Moltz were not in cahoots with the questions and that this is not an official WTJU inquiry.
Here’s what we know: Out of 41 independent cities nationwide, 38 are in Virginia. These cities got charters from the General Assembly and are not part of the surrounding counties—in our case, Albemarle.
In England around the time this country was founded, entities like the Dutch East India Company were created as corporations and given special powers. Former mayor Frank Buck says cities in the new Virginia colony, which was largely developed by the English, followed that model. Cities went to the legislature to ask for an act to incorporate as independent bodies, while counties were land grants and considered part of the state government, he says.
Cities had more power and could facilitate growth by annexing land, which did not make surrounding counties like Albemarle happy.
That became the genesis of the revenue-sharing agreement, the question we thought we would get from readers but didn’t. We’ll take this opportunity to explain anyway.
Charlottesville wanted to annex land on U.S. 29 north to the Rivanna River, east to Pantops, south to I-64, and west to Farmington, says former city manager Cole Hendrix. Not surprisingly, Albemarle was freaking out with the potential loss of land—and tax revenue—in its urban ring.
So City Council and the Board of Supervisors sat down to find an alternative, and revenue-sharing, in which Albemarle pays 10 cents of its property tax rate to Charlottesville every year, was the agreed-upon solution and was approved by the county voters in 1982.
Ironically, five years later in 1987, the General Assembly put a moratorium on annexation. But Albemarle was still stuck paying out millions to Charlottesville every year.
“Newcomers come into town and say, ‘This doesn’t make sense,’” says Hendrix. Nonetheless, Albemarle can’t get out of it unless the city and county merge, they mutually agree to cancel or alter the agreement, or the General Assembly decides to change the concept of independent cities and make them part of a county’s tax base.
Delegate Steve Landes added a budget amendment in 2017 that would have invalidated the agreement, but ended up withdrawing it because of unintended consequences to other localities. This year, he carried a bill that was signed into law and requires localities like Charlottesville to report how it spends the money, and for city and county to talk annually.
The revenue-sharing agreement led to a petition for Charlottesville to revert to town status in 1996 because of declining revenues. That would have allowed the city and county to combine duplicate government services like schools and police. “No one wanted to do that” as far as the schools, says Hendrix.
He points out the two jurisdictions do have joint agreements for services such as the airport, Rivanna Water and Sewer, and libraries.
Here’s another city/county divide factoid: “The original Grounds of the University of Virginia by fiat were in the county,” says Hendrix. When UVA began buying land in the city, it took that property off the tax rolls. “We had a gentleman’s agreement with the university,” he says: If the land was for educational purposes, it wasn’t taxed. If it was for non-educational purposes, for example, a football field, UVA paid taxes on it.
Updated November 30 with Nathan Moore’s clarification that he and Moltz were not representing WTJU when they posed the questions about independent cities.
Charlottesville is fairly unique in having its own pension plan. Just about every other jurisdiction in the commonwealth uses the Virginia Retirement System, which offers employees the ability to transfer retirement accounts to any other VRS jurisdiction. [Does] the fact that the city has its own plan discourage experienced employees of other jurisdictions from applying for city positions?—Harold Timmeny
True, City of Charlottesville employees are not part of VRS, while Albemarle County and county and Charlottesville City school employees are. But Charlottesville is not that much of an outlier: Many of the localities listed as “participants” on the VRS website may also have their own independent pension plans.
City Treasurer Jason Vandever says that historically, independence has been seen as an advantage. “By running its own plan, the city, instead of the General Assembly, is in control of its benefit structure and funding strategy. Having local control allows the city to react to market conditions and employee culture here in Charlottesville and consider benefits and pay together when making compensation decisions.”
And it seems to be working: Returns for both plans, after accounting for costs of investment management fees, show Charlottesville’s plan has done better (see table below).
And in fact, the city’s retirement plan does allow for portability with VRS. Vandever says that he has seen many employees come from (or go to) a VRS locality, or retire on one system and then build equity in another. He notes that the city also offers a defined contribution plan that employees can choose and then take with them if they leave the city’s staff.
While Charlottesville does not maintain a website for its retirement plan as VRS does, there is an internal website managed by the city’s HR department where employees can access plan information. And retirees, employees, and members of the public can contact their designated representatives on the city’s Retirement Commission, which holds monthly meetings that are open to the public and where attendees can request information about the city’s pension plans and investment strategies.—Carol Diggs
The goal of foster care isn't to get a child adopted, but to reunite her with her parents.
Here’s what readers asked for:
I would love to see an article about the changing shift in philosophy regarding foster care, as well debunking common misperceptions. —Marnie Allen
A common misperception about children in foster care is that the goal is to get them adopted. But Alicia Lenahan, the president of Piedmont CASA, says reunifying kids with their parents is the priority.
Piedmont CASA, which stands for court-appointed special advocates, is a local group of volunteers who act as independent advocates for abused and neglected children in the child welfare system. Volunteers stick with a child as his case winds its way through the courts, and they present the judge with a report on what would be in the best interests of the child.
Lenahan, who has 16 years of legal experience, says it’s frequently believed that the parents of foster kids are “bad,” or that they deserve to be punished.
“Very often, the real problem is that the parents were themselves victims of abuse, and they are simply raising their children the way they were raised,” says Lenahan. And because the primary goal is reunification, advocates should recognize that parents essentially have what she calls “an untreated injury.”
“So instead of asking, ‘What’s wrong with you?,’ we need to ask, ‘What happened to you?’” Lenahan says.
Lastly, there’s a perception that parents who neglect or abuse their children can’t possibly love them.
“But they do love them, and their children love them back,” says the advocate. “Without exception, the safety of the child is paramount. But no matter how good the reasons are for removing children from their homes, there is a high cost, and that is the trauma the children experience when they are separated from everything they know and love.”
The story Charlottesville tells through its most prominent public monuments was largely written by one man: Paul Goodloe McIntire.
“C’ville is awash with monuments. Why no statues to women besides a cowering Sacajawea (who happened to be pregnant but still led the white guys through the wilderness)?” – Donna Lucey
“We do have three statues of women, you know,” says former mayor Virginia Daugherty, her soft Southern voice a bit sly. She’s referring to Sacagawea, crouching at the foot of Lewis and Clark on West Main Street; an angel at the foot of the Jackson statue; and the head of an anonymous woman that appears, along with a man’s, on an abstract statue called “Family” in front of the old jail.
That’s what passes for female representation in Charlottesville’s dozens of monuments, from Homer and multiple likenesses of Thomas Jefferson scattered across Grounds at the University of Virginia, past explorers George Rogers Clark on University Avenue and Lewis and Clark on West Main, and over to the most prominent statues in town: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Johnny Reb.
“When you look around, you just think it’s not right, the way that it is,” says Daugherty.
So why hasn’t the city, which is 51.6 percent female, honored any women?
In part, this is a national problem. “Statues of women never get names,” notes journalist Kriston Capps in a CityLab story called “The Gender Gap in Public Sculpture.” “They’re archetypes, symbols, muses, forces.” Of the hundreds of statues in New York City and Washington, D.C., he writes, each city has just five statues that depict historic women. “There are 22 statues of men in Central Park alone, but not one (non-fictional) woman.”
The explanation has to do with who, historically, has commissioned the building of monuments, and for what reasons.
In Charlottesville, the story we tell through our most prominent public monuments was largely written by one man: Paul Goodloe McIntire. As a 5-year-old boy, McIntire reputedly shook his fist at Union troops as they marched past his house in 1865, marking the end of the Confederacy. Decades later, McIntire got his revenge by gifting the city a series of segregated parks and installing the now-infamous statue of Lee, along with Stonewall Jackson, Lewis and Clark, and George Rogers Clark. (McIntire himself is memorialized in a bust behind the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society).
On a recent chilly Saturday morning, roughly 50 people turned out for a Confederate monument tour led by Dr. Andrea Douglas, director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, and Dr. Jalane Schmidt, associate professor of religion at UVA.
Beginning at the barely legible plaque commemorating black history at the site where slaves were bought and sold, and ending at the graceful, imposing statue of Lee on his pedestal, Schmidt noted that our monuments show “whose history matters in the community.”
Defenders of our current Confederate monuments often express the desire to “preserve history.” But much of our local history is buried, Schmidt and Douglas said. Court Square Park, for instance, was once the site of a multiracial community called McKee’s Row. Fifty years before the more famous destruction of Vinegar Hill, McKee’s Row was demolished to make way for McIntire’s whites-only park, anchored by the statue of Stonewall Jackson. “You’d never know it,” Schmidt said. “You’re not supposed to know it.”
The Jackson statue, she also pointed out, was erected in 1921, the same year the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan was founded.
The Johnny Reb statue, one of hundreds of similar statues planted in front of courthouses throughout the South after the end of Reconstruction, was erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy but paid for in part by city and county funds. Among those on the statue committee, said Schmidt, was the prosecutor who declined to charge anyone in the lynching of John Henry James, which was attended by 150 unmasked white men.
“These are monuments to Jim Crow,” she said.
Other Southern cities have found ways to broadcast new values through their choice of monuments. “What they’ve done in Richmond is really great,” Daugherty says, referring to the way that city has balanced its boulevard of white male Confederate leaders with more recent monuments to female African American heroes like Maggie Walker, a teacher and the first African American woman to charter a bank, and Barbara Johns, who, as a high school student in Farmville, led a student strike to protest separate and unequal schools. Here in Charlottesville, she suggests, the city could recognize a local writer, like Amélie Rives or Julia Magruder, or an activist like Grace Tinsley or Otelia Love Jackson.
“There’s lots of good ideas,” Daugherty concludes. “I think it just takes a little organization.”
Some local women have been recognized in other ways—for instance, Jackson-Via Elementary in the city and Greer Elementary in the county are both named for female educators (Nannie Cox Jackson, Betty Davis Via, and Mary Carr Greer). And in 2011, UVA dedicated a memorial to Kitty Foster, a free black woman who worked as a laundress at the university. (A metal “shadow catcher” sculpture now demarcates the family’s graveyard.)
In 2009, after several protests, the city added a plaque to the Lewis and Clark statue commemorating Sacagawea’s contributions. Performance artist Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell, who organized a “theatrical protest” there in 2007 and started a petition that garnered 500 signatures, says the plaque was “a very minor concession to our protest,” and that she had hoped the city would make a bigger gesture.
As for new monuments to women, she says, “I would say I’m ignorant, like a lot of people, about what that would look like.”
But she’s not so sure about statues.
“I think a living way where you have artists who are paid to keep these things alive,” she suggests. For instance, she and other female artists were commissioned by UVA last spring to perform pieces at the Lee and George Rogers Clark statues, in response to August 12.
“In terms of countering a lot of the male statues I guess it’s important,” she says of the idea of women monuments. “But putting a lot of land into memorializing people…I don’t know if that’s the way to go.”
While Jackson and Lee never set foot in Charlottesville, there are plenty of notable women who actually lived here whose stories are largely unknown. Here are just a few:
Nancy Astor
1. Nancy Astor Nancy Witcher Langhorne was born in Danville and moved, at age 13, to an estate in Albemarle County. After an early, unhappy marriage to socialite Robert Gould Shaw II, Nancy moved to England, married fellow expat Waldorf Astor, and became the first woman to serve in Parliament.
Sarah Patton Boyle
2. Sarah Patton BoyleBoyle was born on a former plantation in Albemarle County, the granddaughter of Confederate veterans. She attended the Corcoran School of Art, married, and raised two sons. As she got older, she began questioning the views she was raised with and became an outspoken advocate for desegregation, writing hundreds of articles and speeches for the cause, and drawing attention from both Martin Luther King, Jr., who mentioned her by name in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, and the Ku Klux Klan, which burned a cross on her yard. The first white person to serve on the board of Charlottesville’s NAACP, Boyle was later recognized by the city as a “Bridge Builder,” with her name on the Drewary Brown Bridge.
Frances Brand
3. Frances Brand An artist and activist once known around town as “the purple lady,” Brand was born at West Point and attained the rank of Army major, doing liaison and intelligence work. In later life she became an activist for peace, women’s rights, civil rights, and other causes. Her “First” series of paintings commemorate more than 150 notable but under-recognized local citizens, many of them women or African Americans. (The paintings were bought by the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, but are not currently displayed, and were removed from the organization’s website after a recent redesign).
Queen Charlotte
4. Queen Charlotte There are two statues of Queen Charlotte in one of her other namesake cities, Charlotte, North Carolina, but none here in Charlottesville. Legend has it that the German monarch, who married the British “mad King George,” wrote a widely circulated anti-war letter to Prussian king Frederick the Great, and was committed to social welfare. But in recent years, especially after Meghan Markle’s wedding to Prince Harry, Queen Charlotte is perhaps best known for being (possibly) the first black British monarch.
Isabella Gibbons
5. Isabella Gibbons Born into slavery, Gibbons managed to learn to read and write, and taught her children to do so as well. After the Civil War, she established a school for freed blacks, earned her own diploma, and then taught in the newly established (segregated) public school system for more than 15 years.
Alice Carlotta Jackson
6. Alice Carlotta Jackson Jackson was the first African American to apply to UVA, in 1935. After earning a BA in English and taking additional courses at Smith College, Jackson applied to UVA for a master’s in French, which was not offered at any of the black colleges and universities in Virginia. The Board of Visitors denied her application, but it set off a series of public arguments, and the threat of a future lawsuit led the Virginia General Assembly to pass the Dovell Act, which paid qualified black students the additional money required to attend schools out of state. Jackson used her grant money to earn a master’s degree from Columbia University, and taught at a Florida college for 45 years.
Grace Tinsley
7. Grace Tinsley Tinsely was the first African American woman elected to the Charlottesville School Board. “[She] used her voice on the board to make sure that people were treated fairly,” her daughter told Charlottesville Tomorrow. She was also the first nurse to work at Charlottesville High School. After her retirement, Tinsley successfully lobbied to establish a public defender’s office in Charlottesville. The Charlottesville Democratic Party named a scholarship in her honor, which is awarded to Charlottesville High School seniors from low- or middle-income households, and her name is on the Drewary Brown Memorial Bridge.
Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy
8. Amélie Rives Troubetzkoy The goddaughter of Robert E. Lee, Rives was born in Richmond and grew up at Castle Hill, in Albemarle County. She began writing as a young girl, and her bestselling first novel scandalized many for its portrayal of a woman who experienced sexual feelings. She went on to write more novels and, later, Broadway plays. After divorcing her first husband, she married Prince Pierre Troubetzkoy, an artist and aristocrat, and the couple moved back to Rives’ childhood home.
Kardinal Hall’s open-air tables with flexible seating, plus bocce and ping pong, add up to a place where the whole family can stretch out and relax. Photo by Rammelkamp Foto
Family-friendly local restaurants and breweries! Some places go out of their way to make family outings enjoyable for parents and kids too.—Maria Redieske
Charlottesville overflows with great spots for a grown-up night out. But you don’t have to give up your social life just because you have kids. Parents with small children simply face a different calculus: Is there something on the menu the kids will eat? And even more importantly, something to keep them occupied so you can actually relax and enjoy your meal?
We crowd-sourced this question and added our own favorites to give you a look at the best family-friendly places around town (because babysitters are expensive!).
Beer Run No kids’ menu per se, and yes, the beer is off-limits. But locals prize the Carlton Road spot’s relaxed vibe, and outdoor picnic tables mean the wee ones have a little room to roam while you’re waiting for the food. Plus, the nachos are some of the best in town and the breakfast tacos are fun for all ages.
Bodo’s One preschooler we know sticks with butter on plain whole wheat, while another has been known to order liverwurst and onion. Either way, low prices, kid-friendly options, and seat-yourself dining rooms make this Charlottesville favorite a no-brainer for kids.
Brazos Tacos Texas-style tacos, a sneaky-good chicken and tortilla soup, and chips with queso and guacamole are best enjoyed on a sunny day at picnic tables on the outdoor patio. Grown-ups can finish off their margaritas and Tecates while their younger relations explore the porch swings and book installation across the grass at this Ix Art Park spot. And if everyone behaves, there’s the promise of a Sweethaus cupcake around the corner.
Chew Chew Town A recent addition from the owners of the wildly popular Seminole Trail chicken joint Al Carbon. This railroad-themed offshoot features a super-cool train set overhead, while a separate countertop train delivers the food. There’s standard kids menu fare like mac and cheese for the picky eaters, while grown-ups can enjoy their favorites from the much beloved Al Carbon kitchen.
Firefly This lively restaurant/bar/arcade is perennially popular with families. Commenting on Facebook, C-VILLE reader (and Feast! owner and Local Food Hub board member) Kate Collier calls out Firefly’s abundant games—from foosball to Donkey Kong—and its local food, plus “a wood stove to keep you warm and toasty.” Chase your chicken tenders and tater tots with a Shirley Temple from the dedicated kids’ drink menu.
Fry’s Spring Station Every Tuesday at this historic former Jefferson Park Ave. service station is family night, when you can get either a $33 family dinner or a $3 kids’ meal. The place is a neighborhood fixture with a unique character, but young people may be most interested in the desserts that come bundled into the $6.50 kids’ meals. Try “The Wookie,” a warm cookie with chocolate sauce and whipped cream.
Kardinal Hall Open-air tables with flexible seating, plus bocce and ping pong, add up to a place where the whole family can stretch out and relax. The kids’ menu has the usual grilled cheese/chicken nuggets/hot dogs, plus organic carrot sticks and ranch dressing for the pint-sized vegetarian in your life.
The Nook This Downtown Mall stalwart won’t be setting any speedy-service records, but the staff is warm with kids and, aside from the basic children’s menu, it has what must be the longest dedicated mac-and-cheese menu in town. Diner staples like the BLT on toast are a step up in quality from standard greasy-spoon fare, and the outdoor patio is a short hop from the Virginia Discovery Museum carousel and the free speech chalkboard while you’re waiting for your meals to arrive.
The Pub by Wegmans The Fifth Street Station grocer with a cult-like following has a restaurant where kids eat free on Tuesdays. Reader Betsy Hernandez praises its casual seating without a rush to finish and its quick service—and a kids’ corner with cartoons on the TV.
Three Notch’d, Champion, and Random Row Who says breweries are just for beer drinkers? All three of these local craft taprooms have dedicated fans in the parent scene. Champion’s comfort-food-oriented menu has pretzels and cheese dip and a hella-good hot dog, while Three Notch’d, with its kid-zone play area, serves a $7 kids’ meal that includes an entrée, a side, and a scoop of Virginia-made Homestead Creamery ice cream. Random Row serves pizzas from Mona Lisa Pasta with juice boxes and milk for the kids to sip, plus board games and a chalkboard coloring wall.
Wild Wing Café Young’uns who like to watch sports will thrill to the battery of TV sets showing live athletics, while parents will be pleased to know items from the extensive “Wild Child” menu are just $1 apiece for kids 10 and under all day on Mondays. Leave the Little League team home, though: There’s a limit of two dollar-kids’-meals per table.
I’ve heard that it’s all a sham and it all just goes into a landfill, that the processes are super inefficient compared to regular recycling programs. I know many folks who don’t bother recycling at all because they don’t believe the city separates the recyclables from the garbage.—Kathleen Herring
By Jonathan Haynes
Charlottesville’s recycling system has confused many of our readers. Here’s what you need to know.
In short, residents who “don’t believe the city separates the recyclables from the garbage” are correct, and if your office claims to be recycling but doesn’t provide a separate recycling bin, it is probably just throwing everything in the trash.
Single-stream recycling means you don’t have to sort your recyclables (i.e., you don’t have to separate glass, paper, cardboard, and plastics), but you do have to keep recyclables separate from general trash. The term has been a source of confusion since Peter van der Linde used it to describe his processing plant, which accepted waste and recyclables in the same bag and tried to separate them later, resulting in high contamination levels for the recyclables. Van der Linde closed his household waste processing facility earlier this year.
Charlottesville offers free curbside single-stream recycling collection except at buildings that have dumpsters. That means recyclables must be in a separate bin from your regular garbage (the city provides carts for this, which it collects every two weeks). Albemarle County, by contrast, does not provide collection services at all. Residents must contract a private service, and many of those offer single-stream recycling.
Another option for recycling is the McIntire Recycling Center, which is operated by the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority, a joint city-county program.
McIntire uses a source-separation model, which requires patrons to deposit glass, paper, plastics, and general waste into different bins. According to the RSWA website, it processes 98 percent of recyclable materials.
RSWA sells reusable material to private buyers and ships the remaining waste to a landfill in Amelia County.
“What we’re really doing with recycling is creating feedstock for certain industries,” says Phillip McKalips, director of solid waste at the RSWA. “Companies that produce aluminum cans would want recycled cans, because they’re at the right alloy levels.”
According to McKalips, single-stream is popular among trash haulers because it expedites the drop-off process. “Certain trash haulers only do single-stream recycling because they don’t have time to source separate at McIntire,” he says.
But critics say the single-stream method makes it harder for plants to categorize and process their recyclable inventory. “The quality of the materials is so poor, there are no real buyers,” says Albemarle Supervisor Liz Palmer. “The recovery rate is too low; China doesn’t buy it anymore.”
While McKalips doesn’t know the recovery rate for the city’s single-stream operation, he confirms that between 25 percent and 40 percent of recyclables in similar programs across the country are bound for the landfill.
We're approaching the 10th anniversary of when construction ceased on the Landmark Hotel in January 2009.
Photo by Ashley Twiggs
Here’s what readers asked for:
Landmark Hotel…I would like to see someone address each City Council meeting with the question, “What have you done this week to move this project forward?”—Ida Simmons
Ah, the Dewberry Hotel. Somehow we knew there’d be inquiring minds, and while there’s not much new to report, we can tell you where it stands now.
This winter, we’re approaching the 10th anniversary of when construction ceased on the Landmark Hotel.
The last time we wrote about its Downtown Mall skeleton, we said the Board of Architectural Review had approved more height in March—for a total of 117-and-a-half feet, with an additional 16-foot rooftop structure —for Waynesboro-born and Atlanta-based developer John Dewberry, who bought the derelict Landmark in 2012 and promised to put it out of its misery. It has obviously taken longer than he (and the city) imagined.
City spokesperson Brian Wheeler had no updates to offer. Dewberry, who dodged multiple calls during our last report, again did not respond to an interview request.
The developer had originally said he’d start building the Charlottesville hotel after finishing one in Charleston, South Carolina. But that happened in the summer of 2016, and we still haven’t seen any progress. Dewberry, dubbed “Atlanta’s emperor of empty lots,” by Bloomberg Businessweek, also holds an extremely valuable piece of land in Atlanta.
But if you ask the multitudes—presumably locals—who have left gag Google reviews for the uninhabited hotel, the place clearly has its quirks.
“Located in the heart of the historic Downtown mall, the Dewberry Charlottesville offers a unique opportunity for the adventurous traveler,” writes reviewer Lindsey Fogle. “You can experience the fine cuisine, art, and shopping of this celebrated area while also getting that once-in-a-lifetime feel of falling nails. The attention to detail cannot be overstated, from the beautiful patina of rusted steel to the incredibly lifelike rodents scurrying through dilapidated plywood. My only advice to management is to offer complimentary tetanus shots in lieu of a pillow.”
Adds Fogle, “This fine establishment stands alone among Charlottesville’s amenities, and likely always will. It’s truly the crown jewel of the Dewberry line of hotels.”
I would like to see a series of articles addressing the economic gap in our town and area.—Mo Nichols
By Jonathan Hanes
Income inequality has reached massive levels over the past few decades, as wages for poor and middle-class Americans have stagnated while those for top earners have skyrocketed. And the Charlottesville area is a leader in this unfortunate trend.
Income inequality is measured using a Gini index, with a score of zero being the least unequal and a score of one being the most. Charlottesville has a Gini index of .512, higher than both the Virginia index of .471 and the national index of .415.
This is partially due to Charlottesville’s economic dependence on the University of Virginia, the city’s largest employer. According to Hamilton Lombard, an economist at the Weldon Cooper Center, diversified economies tend to have less inequality. “Towns with coal fields have higher income inequality because there aren’t a lot of other jobs,” he says. “Similarly, small college towns tend to be prone to inequality because of the large pay range [at universities].” He points to the salaries of highly trained lecturers compared to those of service workers.
UVA has come under fire for how it pays low-level workers, though their current minimum, $12.38 an hour, is slightly above the living wage for one person working full-time, which is $12.02 an hour in Charlottesville, according to the Massachusetts Institute for Technology’s living wage calculator. (And it’s well above the state minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.) For a single parent with one child working full-time, however, the living wage baseline jumps to $27.09 an hour, or over $56,000 annually.
UVA recently garnered more criticism from living-wage activists when it posted a job listing for a “community resource specialist” that would help UVA employees “at or near entry-level hourly rates locate community resources such as housing, clothing, utilities, and food.”
Activists expressed frustration on the Living Wage Campaign at UVA’s Facebook page: “The administration knows workers are struggling and it seems they will do everything except pay workers a living wage. Disgraceful.”
Tech startups, which have taken off in Charlottesville in the last few years, can also contribute to the income gap. In a town where the median income is $31,850, a software engineer here averages around $87,000, according to Glassdoor. The spy center—National Ground Intelligence Center—inflates salaries too.
But the income gap here may not only be the result of highly unequal salaries: College students, who don’t tend to have a lot of income, can skew the data. “Small-town colleges tend to distort income levels in the surrounding community,” says Lombard. And he adds that Charlottesville, like most cities, tends to attract more poor and homeless people than rural and suburban areas because it offers more social services, such as public housing and homeless shelters.
