Former guv on Dem ticket
Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton chose former Virginia governor and U.S. Senator Tim Kaine as her vice presidential running mate July 22. The former Democratic National Committee chair heads to the convention in Philadelphia this week.
Killing on Earhart Street
Denzel O. Morton, 23, was shot early July 17, Charlottesville’s first slaying this year. Isaiah James Franklin, 23, was charged with first-degree murder and is being extradited from an undisclosed state. Markwin Taleek Howard, 21, was charged with attempted malicious wounding and two other counts.
Not attending the funeral
Morton’s brother, Brian Morton, was in Charlottesville Circuit Court to see if he could get out of Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail to attend the July 27 funeral. The judge refused to suspend his sentence for one day, and the electronic monitoring device he proposed takes two to three weeks to obtain, according to his lawyer, Bonnie Lepold.
City lawyer’s fee revealed
After twice rejecting C-VILLE’s Freedom of Information Act requests for the hourly rate of Richmond lawyer Tom Wolf, who is representing the city in its litigation against Mark Brown’s Charlottesville Parking Center, City Attorney Craig Brown relented. The city is paying Wolf $425 an hour, a large discount, says the LeClairRyan attorney, and had paid nearly $20,000 through May.
Reserved for parks & rec
Although a fire gutted the building it used for storage in 2013, Charlottesville Parks & Recreation still commands three spaces on First Street to move equipment in and out of a shed, according to city spokesperson Miriam Dickler. She reiterated there “is no parking crisis downtown,” two days after a July 12 meeting of the Downtown Business Association of Charlottesville, which disagreed, and wondered what’s up with these primo spaces.
Voting bloc
The 2016 election finds 80 million millennials of voting age, the largest generational group in the United States. A majority of Virginia millennials—55 percent—are not happy with the way the country is going, according to a Wason Center for Public Policy report co-authored by Christopher Newport U’s Quentin Kidd and Rachel Bitecofer. What role will they play in the upcoming election? Check back in November.
Quote of the week
“Once again, the Virginia Supreme Court has placed Virginia as an outlier in the struggle for civil and human rights. It is a disgrace that the Republican leadership of Virginia would file a lawsuit to deny more than 200,000 of their own citizens the right to vote.”—Governor Terry McAuliffe after the state Supreme Court ruled 4-3 July 22 that his blanket order restoring voting rights to felons is unconstitutional.