Month: July 2023

After months of financial turmoil, Siren restaurant has closed its doors.

Since taking sole ownership of the business in December of 2022, restaurateur Laura Fonner has been fighting to keep Siren solvent.

“I had a big investor meeting with new people [recently], and there was potential to get money to save us,” says Fonner. “But at the same time, I was completely transparent and honest, saying that I wasn’t sure if this was the end of what was coming, if there was going to be another financial, tax thing that would happen. And so I left the meeting with the plan of closing for a week-long summer break. … But I talked with my GM, and we made a deal that if anything else happened, then we would have to make a decision.”

“I opened the mail that came that day, and it was like $9,000 unpaid unemployment taxes from 2021 and 2022—since we opened—and so it was like the final nail in the coffin,” says Fonner. “That upped the amount of money that I would need from an investor with no guarantee or promise of it ending.”

While Fonner has been involved in the restaurant since its conception, Champion Hospitality Group was previously responsible for Siren’s accounting and bookkeeping. Although she has had access to Siren’s financial information since December, Fonner claims that CHG didn’t provide full disclosure of the restaurant’s financial situation, including unpaid taxes and outstanding balances with vendors.

When she announced the restaurant’s closing on Instagram, Fonner shared an image of herself flipping off the camera with a sign reading “DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES, (HUNTER SMITH) SIREN RESTAURANT IS CLOSED PERMANENTLY.”

As the owner of CHG, Smith has come under heavy scrutiny after the closure of several CHG-connected local restaurants and breweries, including: Champion Brewing Company, Brasserie Saison, Passiflora, Champion Grill, Champion Outpost, and Reason Beer. While she had not previously named Smith directly, Fonner made a scathing March Facebook post directed at the businessman, addressing him as “you, sir.”

“I am stuck now, more than likely filing for bankruptcy, Business Bankruptcy. I don’t even know about personal yet, I have meetings with my lawyer today to discuss all that,” says Fonner. “I’m not sorry about my sign. … I don’t necessarily expect everyone to understand or agree with my choices, but it’s not their choices, they’re not the ones cleaning this mess.”

As Fonner continues to attribute Siren’s closure to Smith, the businessman argues that CHG supported the restaurant during their partnership, but there were significant accounting issues. “I will say that it wouldn’t have been long into Siren’s existence that we had major accounting changes at Champion. But I absolutely refute there is an unwillingness to share anything,” says Smith. “There were plenty of unclear, and, I would say, inadequately run and prepared financials—so much so that it was hard for anyone, myself included, to have any faith in them. And that was the result of poor work and poor supervision on my part. But the conflation of poor management and poor accounting work with anything nefarious or any sort of wrongdoing is total hogwash. That doesn’t do anything to take away from the fact that I feel personally like we let Laura and Siren down.”

While Fonner says Smith has not reached out to her following the restaurant’s closure, Smith says he regrets the dissolution of their relationship. “I don’t know why it has become such a personal issue for Laura other than I know … owner/operators and chefs like Laura are extremely passionate,” says Smith. “If the business is looked at as a failure, it is taken personally. I understand she thinks it was not a fair shake on her part because Champion was running the business side of things, but if there were delusions that it was a very successful restaurant, that’s just not true.”

“I am not naming names, but we have always had folks in charge of the hospitality division of the business, and there was no shortage of pushback from Siren when it came to wanting to be managed,” says Smith. “When I hear that in hindsight that we weren’t very helpful, well help wasn’t wanted. This was Laura’s restaurant and her baby, and Hunter or anyone else wasn’t getting in the way. To me, it was clear that my role was just the guy running the company.”

As she works through the logistics of closing Siren and filing for bankruptcy, Fonner is trying to figure out what’s next for her and the restaurant. “I never imagined when we opened that this would be where it was in two years. I don’t know if this place can be saved, I’m not sure,” she says. “Even if it is, obviously it’ll be Sirens or something else, a whole brand new version of it. I don’t have another plan. I planned on this.”

“There’s different versions of bankruptcy, there’s restructuring, there’s complete bankruptcy where the business just shuts down fully,” Fonner continues. “I’m going to have to figure out whether it’s worth restructuring. Unfortunately, there’s a bad taste in my mouth right now with this place, and it has nothing to do with the community or with my staff, or what we were providing here.”

“I know that I will be given an opportunity somehow or another, but I’ve got pretty bad trust issues,” says Fonner. “I don’t know what the next step will be, but this is definitely not the end. This doesn’t put a bad enough taste in my mouth for me to ever stop what I do.”—with additional reporting by Shea Gibbs

In brief

More mental health services

On July 24, The Women’s Initiative announced that it had received $50,000 from Sentara Health “to assist with providing culturally responsive mental health counseling and treatment.” In a press release, the WI said the funds will be used for its Bienestar, Sister Circle, and LGBTQ+ programs. Speaking about the contribution, Executive Director Elizabeth Irvin said, “through our programs and their support, we are working to address health disparity, so that all members of our community have an opportunity to heal and thrive.”

UVA gets gold   

In an outstanding week for the Cavaliers, University of Virginia athletes medaled at the World Aquatics Championships and the 2023 World Rowing Under-23 Championships. At the WAC in Fukuoka, Japan, UVA alum Kate Douglass took home gold in the women’s 200-meter IM, with fourth-year Alex Walsh close behind in second place. Swimmers Gretchen Walsh and Maxine Parker led Team USA to a silver medal in the 4×100-meter freestyle relay. In Europe, graduate student Eva Frohnhofer rowed her way to bronze as part of Team USA in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

Death of a mogul

The memorial service for local business and property owner Phil Dulaney was held on July 23 at the Coffman Funeral Home Chapel in Staunton, Virginia. As the owner and president of Charlottesville Realty Corporation, Dulaney owned several properties, including a ramshackle hotel on Afton Mountain. Dulaney died on July 15 of complications from diabetes and heart disease.

On July 19 and 20, the University of Virginia hosted the Virginia Cybersecurity Education Conference, which brought cybersecurity educators together from across the state.  

“It’s just good to connect these educators together to share resources and lots of interesting talks,” says David Raymond, director of U.S. Cyber Range, the event’s creator and organizer. “They get new ideas for things to use in the classroom. … It’s a fun opportunity to run into a whole bunch of people over and over.”

Funded by the state, Virginia Cyber Range provides cybersecurity education resources to Virginia’s public high schools, colleges, and universities at no cost. While the program is based out of Virginia Tech, students and educators across the commonwealth benefit from the company’s free, cloud-based programs.

Since the first conference in 2018, Cyber Range has increasingly incorporated cybersecurity educators into planning the VCEC, including on its executive committee. The committee is composed of 19 educators from Virginia community colleges and universities, including UVA professors Angela Orebaugh and Yuan Tian.

“I attended the very first conference at James Madison and learned about Cyber Range,” says Orebaugh. Over the past six years, Orebaugh has steadily incorporated resources from the conference into her teaching, and become more involved in the conference’s planning process.

“Since we didn’t have anything like Cyber Range, in order to do fun and interesting hands-on activities I actually had to put everything on a CD-ROM, and give each student a CD-ROM, and they booted it up on their computers in the classroom and worked through a series of exercises that way,” she says. Now, the computer science professor is able to create her own labs for her courses and draw on pre-existing courseware on the company’s resource cloud. “It’s a really great free resource for Virginia educators. … Other states don’t have this resource, sometimes their students have to pay.”

Attending the conference and serving on the executive committee has also allowed Orebaugh to connect with other educators in her field. “Depending on where it’s offered, I get to meet a few new people as well,” she says. With UVA hosting this year, Orebaugh took the opportunity to show some of her colleagues around town. “I get to tell them a little bit about the local area, see if I can get them to tour Grounds, see if I can get them to support our local businesses while they’re here as well.”

Beyond networking, Orebaugh also presented results from the inaugural Virginia Cyber Navigator Internship Program at this year’s conference. Funded by the NSA, VA-CNIP is run by six Virginia schools—UVA, VT, George Mason, Virginia Commonwealth University, Norfolk State University, and Old Dominion University—and teaches students about cybersecurity in elections before sending them on 10-week internships to local registrar offices.

“We are teaching students specifically what to think about in terms of cybersecurity, to secure election offices, the voting machines themselves that you and I go in and vote on, but also just think about the election offices,” says Orebaugh. “They’ve got laptops, they’ve got desktops, they’ve got printers all running in these election offices. What do we have to think about with securing them and securing the humans that are running those? That’s usually the most important piece.”

Between presentations, educators were introduced to innovative uses of Cyber Range resources through events like capture the flag or Catching a Cyber Criminal—A Digital Crime Scene Activity. For many instructors, these interactivities are not only fun, but serve as a source for classroom inspiration.

For organizers, inspiring instructors is a key part of VCEC. “We want to be able to help somebody teach some concept in a way that they hadn’t thought of before, or do some new interesting thing in the classroom that they haven’t done before that’ll help their students,” says Raymond.

“Every time I attend, I always bring something home with me to be able to incorporate into my classrooms. And that’s actually my goal for coming,” says Orebaugh. “Just solving the challenges that are being presented here today, I’ve already captured a bunch of ideas to incorporate it into my capture the flag final exam, or just into my labs or just classroom instruction.”

The VCEC will be held in Blacksburg next year, but Orebaugh says cybersecurity education and opportunities are available in Charlottesville. “A lot of times people don’t think about it, a lot of our students graduate from UVA and they move up to northern Virginia, New York, some of the other bigger cities,” she says. “There’s a lot of cybersecurity opportunity here in Charlottesville.”

Canada is burning, and we’re all inhaling the smoke. The worst wildfire season in our northern neighbor’s history began in the spring and has raged into summer, with winds carrying smoke down the northeastern United States, along the East Coast, and into the Midwest. New York City took on a horrid red Martian hue as people were once again advised to mask up and stay indoors. More than a dozen states, plus Washington, D.C., have been under National Weather Service air quality warnings simultaneously. And at one point in late June, Chicago and Detroit shared the dubious honor of experiencing the worst air quality on the planet.

The wildfires aren’t just a North American problem, though. Almost as soon as they began, the smoke made its way across the Atlantic to Northern Europe, drifting through Scandinavia and even hazing up the Western European sky. 

The smoke’s descent on Charlottesville has been markedly less apocalyptic than in Washington, D.C., or New York, but the blanketing haze has still altered the course of our daily lives. Air quality changes day to day, and on the worst afternoons you can see the haze hanging over the city like a gritty smog. Some days, you can even taste it.

“Sigh,” wrote one user on the Charlottesville subreddit. “So over it.”

The wildfire smoke may be hazing up our view of the mountains, but that’s the least of our problems. Breathing it in can be dangerous. The smoke contains particulate matter harmful to our bodies, which when inhaled gets deep into our lungs and affects the way oxygen enters our bloodstream and how carbon dioxide exits.

Both the National Weather Service and the City of Charlottesville look at the Air Quality Index to judge when air pollution reaches unsafe levels. The AQI takes the form of a color-coded dial, with green indicating “good” air quality, onto yellow (“moderate”), and worsening conditions represented by orange, red, purple, and maroon.

This summer, the city made it all the way to purple—“very unhealthy.” That was on June 8, when Charlottesville Parks & Recreation canceled all afternoon outdoor activities. June 29 saw the Office of Emergency Management issue a notice that air quality levels were a notch lower—“unhealthy”—and on July 17, the city warned that the air was at least hazardous for sensitive groups, and that “those with pre-existing conditions may experience health effects and should limit their time outdoors.” 

Just because the AQI seems to have dropped from the most alarming levels doesn’t mean we should be less vigilant with our respiratory health. Dr. Kyle Enfield, a pulmonologist and medical director of the medical intensive care unit at UVA Health, told UVA Today in June that even if you don’t have a condition like asthma, “poor air quality increases hospitalizations and health care visits.”

Are we all going to develop chronic ailments from the smoke? Not necessarily, said Enfield. You’d have to be breathing this stuff for months or even years. But temporary exposure, like that of this smoky summer, can up your risk of experiencing a heart attack or stroke, or being hospitalized for a respiratory illness.

That’s where the familiar mantra comes in—mask up outside and stay indoors. But it’s more complicated than protecting ourselves from a human-spread virus. The kind of mask matters—N95, naturally—but even in our homes, the air we breathe is affected by what’s going on outside (like, say, massive wildfires). Using air filters with a “MERV” rating of 8 or higher can help, according to Enfield. The city has warned residents to “keep any doors, windows, and fireplaces shut to reduce fine particle build-up indoors,” and recommended running your air conditioning on a recirculation setting.

Experts expect that this ebb and flow of smoke, where some days may be clearer and less polluted than others, will continue for the rest of the summer. As Canada has experienced a long period of drought and higher than average temperatures, the soil, trees, and vegetation have all dried out. And dry heat brings on lightning. Thus, fires.

According to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, as of July 23, more than 1,000 wildfires are burning across Canada, and while hundreds are being batted back by firefighters to protect at-risk communities, the majority are considered out of control and being left to burn. Some fires are in remote locations, and Canadian officials say it would be too expensive to combat them.

While firefighters from at least 10 countries, including the U.S. and Mexico, are helping in Canada, affected international communities are left to deal with the resulting smoke. In Charlottesville, some believe this crisis has put the reality and effects of climate change directly on the public’s doorstep.

“It’s like when there used to be smoking and non-smoking sections in a restaurant. Just because you sat in the non-smoking section didn’t mean that you didn’t have smoke,” says Susan Kruse, executive director of the Community Climate Collaborative. “It’s a tangible example that climate impact is global. Just because you don’t have some of the problems that other places do doesn’t mean you won’t be impacted by them.”

“This is it, right? This is climate change,” says Emily Irvine, the city’s climate protection program manager. “It’s happening right here and right now. … This is not gonna get any better until we stop dumping greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.”

Irvine says that while working on the climate change risk and vulnerability assessment for the city a few years ago, “wildfire smoke didn’t even come up as a hazard that we’re looking at in our area.” (Though it is a small risk in Albemarle County, which has more tracts of forest.)

“There’s just not the data and modeling on it,” she says. “It’s not what we think of as an acute or a chronic climate hazard traditionally.”

But Irvine says that the events of this hazy summer have prompted the city and county to push wildfire smoke up on their list of climate crises to prepare for. Smoke is also a new topic that they want to engage the public with during this fall’s planned meetings on adapting to and building resilience to climate change. 

For those who are wondering what they can do to alleviate the effects of the climate crisis—especially in a small town—Irvine says that help can often take the form of setting an example.

“Climate change is a collective action problem,” she says. “When we work here locally as a community to lower our emissions, and also to adapt to the climate disruptions that are coming because of the warming that’s already happened, we are contributing and doing our part to the global effort to address this issue.”

Irvine remains optimistic even now. Here at home, the city plans to launch a website on the in-progress climate adaptation plan in the next few weeks, and begin public engagement as early as September. While fires rage across Canada, she sees a bright—and hopefully less hazy—future for our city.

“Charlottesville, for being such a small community,” says Irvine, “is really being forward-thinking about how to address these issues.”

New Charlottesville City Manager Sam Sanders was sworn in at the July 17 City Council meeting. Sanders, whose first day on the job is August 1, has served as the deputy city manager of operations since July 2021, and succeeds interim city manager Michael Rogers. 

“When we launched the search for our next city manager, we had some characteristics that we all agreed on,” Mayor Lloyd Snook said at the July 12 press conference announcing Sanders’ selection. “We wanted someone with experience, with solid judgment, an innovative and problem solving spirit, a strong commitment to making government help people who need help, a servant’s heart, a sense of humor, and the ability to walk on water was seen as a plus.”

Addressing the crowd at the press conference, Sanders shared his vision for the city and his optimism about Charlottesville’s future. “Charlottesville has a rich and complicated history, and I acknowledge that,” Sanders said. “Our little city is on the world map, and I am encouraged that it is not simply because of the events of 2017. What I want to see is us achieve an evolution from that series of events, to reclaim our narrative, and one that will inspire us and other communities will desire.”

As city manager, Sanders will oversee the Office of Budget and Performance Management, the Office of Communications, the Office of Economic Development, the Office of Housing and Redevelopment, and the Office of Human Rights for Charlottesville. One of his first tasks will be to fill his previous role as deputy city manager of operations. Sanders will work closely with Rogers during a two-week transition period to ensure the change goes as smoothly as possible.

Beyond appointing his replacement, Sanders plans to address major issues including housing, gun violence, and the income divide. While he believes that Charlottesville is “punching above its weight class” on many things, Sanders acknowledged that there is still work to be done. “We absolutely do have two life experiences here in Charlottesville, and we can do what we need to do to bridge that divide.”

Following Sanders’ remarks at the press conference, all five city counselors expressed enthusiasm about the new city manager. “I can stand here and honestly say I have never felt more optimistic about the future of city government,” said Michael Payne.

On July 17, Sanders told C-VILLE that “Council is working on its Strategic Plan, so we have some work to do in support of concluding that progress and transitioning into an implementation phase. Also, we have our ongoing work with implementing the Compensation and Class Study. There is a new compensation policy and pay structure that we will be presenting to staff and council over the next few weeks. This will be a multi-step process, so we hope to produce a timeline on this project as well. Lastly, we have begun collective bargaining negotiations, so the work with the three bargaining units is also a priority at this time.”

As he settles into his new role, Sanders will work with City Council and staff to organize his long to-do list.

“Traditional local government focuses on service delivery, financial operations, and business climate,” says Sanders, addressing the different needs of Charlottesville residents. “All of that is important, critically important. But it is imperative that we concern ourselves with the conditions of people’s lives. If they cannot make ends meet, we can close those gaps.”

Sanders says the city has begun working on several key initiatives. “​​We are already doing things like housing production, tax relief, and climate action. We have a solid list of things that have moved from ideas to action, so we have to continue to keep those things moving forward and evaluating the results achieved.”

Regarding future areas of focus, Sanders’ work “will also include closing gaps, such as impacting the unhoused, assisting more families on the edge of financial devastation, and engaging residents in matters of justice around policing, climate, and culture.”

For those interested in meeting Sanders, the city will host a town hall on Thursday, July 20, from 5 to 7pm at Carver Recreation Center. It will also be available as a livestream. To submit a question for the town hall, email clerk@charlottesville.gov.

On July 12, the 125th anniversary of a white lynch mob murdering John Henry James, a packed courtroom in Albemarle Circuit Court applauded when a judge dismissed an indictment for rape that was handed down in 1898, even after the prosecutor and grand jury knew that James was dead.

“A mockery of the justice system,” said Judge Cheryl Higgins.

Albemarle Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Hingeley’s motion to dismiss more than a century later is in itself pretty much unheard of. “It’s an effort to set the record straight 125 years later,” says Hingeley, who was “particularly disturbed” by the complicity of the justice system.

On July 11, 1898, Julia Hotopp, a 20-year-old white woman from a prominent family that owned what is now Pen Park, had been riding her horse and alleged a dark-complexioned, heavy-set man sexually assaulted her, Hingeley told the court. 

James, a Black ice cream vendor, whom The Daily Progress said “somewhat fit” the description of the assailant, was arrested that day and moved to jail in Staunton to avoid already angry white citizens. 

He was returned to Charlottesville the next morning, and when the train stopped west of town at Wood’s Depot, property now owned by Farmington Country Club, he was greeted by a mob of around 150, pulled from the train despite the presence of the Albemarle sheriff and Charlottesville police chief, and hanged from a locust tree while pleading his innocence, according to the Progress. 

His body was then riddled with bullet holes, and people took pieces of clothing, his body, and the locust tree as souvenirs.

While James was being murdered, a grand jury met. Despite knowing James was dead, it proceeded to indict him for the alleged rape, which Hingeley believes was a false accusation. 

The Albemarle commonwealth’s attorney at the time, Micajah Woods, acted improperly by indicting a dead man, and did so to create justification for the lynching, says Hingeley. “They still wanted to put a formal accusation in the public record to justify the taking of his life. That bothers me.”

Another thing that bothers Hingeley is that no effort was made to bring the perpetrators of the lynching to justice, and he figuratively indicts then-Albemarle sheriff Lucien Watts and Charlottesville police chief Frank Farish, both of whom were present at the attack, but claimed not to recognize any of the small town’s unmasked assailants. The coroner’s inquest the next day found James’ death was at the hand of “persons unknown.”

“Of course that’s a lie,” says Hingeley. “The racial terror lynching was more or less officially sanctioned.”

James’ death wasn’t widely known until 2013, when historian Jane Smith was going through old issues of The Daily Progress. Nor was it the last time police stood by while white supremacists attacked, says Jalane Schmidt, director of the Memory Project at UVA’s Karsh Institute of Democracy. 

The violent Unite the Right rally in 2017 brought white nationalists, neo-Nazis, and fascists to Charlottesville to protest the removal of Confederate statues, left counterprotester Heather Heyer dead, and the city and nation shaken by the outpouring of hate. “We’re standing where white supremacists beat up activists and police stood by,” says Schmidt.

The mood was somber a year later on July 12, 2018, when local residents and officials gathered at the site where James was lynched. They dug up soil to carry on a civil rights pilgrimage to Montgomery, Alabama, and add it to the Equal Justice Initiative’s memorialization of the racial terror of America’s lynching past. The EJI has documented more than 4,400 lynchings between 1877 and 1950.

Schmidt organized the 2018 civil rights pilgrimage with Jefferson School African American Heritage Center’s Executive Director Andrea Douglas. Around 100 locals boarded buses heading south.

Schmidt, who led walking tours with Douglas of Charlottesville’s Confederate monuments before they were removed, testified about what she learned about James’ death from historical records. 

She noted that as part of the EJI’s Community Remembrance Project, a marker commemorating the death of James was erected July 12, 2019, outside the Albemarle courthouse where he was indicted. 

Black journalist Ida B. Wells reported during the Jim Crow era that many Black men were lynched as revenge for alleged assaults of white women—assaults that were “largely unfounded,” says Schmidt. 

And she’s haunted by the Progress account that James “somewhat fit” the description of Hotopp’s alleged assailant: a large, Black man. “That sounds like a boogeyman if I ever heard one,” says Schmidt.

Dismissing James’ indictment for rape acknowledges the legal injustice that was done and declares, “This does not represent our values,” says Schmidt. An EJI staffer told her Hingeley’s motion to right a 125-year-old wrong was “unprecedented,” she adds.

Many of those who made the pilgrimage were in Albemarle Circuit Court July 12. 

Former city councilor Wes Bellamy was one. Five years ago at the lynching site outside the exclusive Farmington neighborhood, he imagined the terror James must have felt as the train slowed. After the hearing, he felt relief. 

“I think it is important we do the right thing, and I appreciate Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Hingeley doing so,” says Bellamy. “Justice delayed is not justice denied. This restored a brother’s good name. There’s a sense of pride when we have these moments. There was a sense in the past that we’d never see these moments.”

Don Gathers also made the pilgrimage. “I’m elated we’re here, I’m sad we have to be here,” he says. “I’m extremely happy for the soul of John Henry James, but what about the families of others who were lynched?”

Albemarle County declared July 12, 2023, John Henry James Day “in remembrance of our shared community history and as a demonstration of our commitment that this tragedy will be neither forgotten nor repeated,” says the proclamation.

Board of Supervisors Chair Donna Price was at the courthouse, and she also had mixed emotions. “Justice was never truly provided to John Henry James,” she says. “When I think of the terror he had being ripped out of the train, and the desecration of his body. … What we did today was important because justice must be served, but insufficient because no one was held accountable. On the other hand, I feel great pride in our community’s commonwealth’s attorney.”

So why now? In April Hingeley traveled to Equal Justice Initiative’s lynching memorial in Montgomery with other prosecutors. “It’s a moving experience to go to the Legacy Museum and to see our community’s soil there,” he says. “I came back with an interest in doing something further” with the EJI’s Community Remembrance Project that recognizes the “racial terror lynching in our community.”

Hingeley, who is also prosecuting some of the torch-bearing marchers from 2017’s Unite the Right, says, “It’s important to deal with the legacy of white supremacy.” Outside the courthouse, he points to the spot where a Johnny Reb statue once stood, and says his predecessor, Micajah Woods, who indicted James posthumously, led the effort to install the statue in 1909. 

“White supremacy is still out there to harm our community,” says Hingeley. “Knowing the history of this is important, partly to respond to the injustice, partly to keep the community involved with our history.”