Area legislators were hard at work during this year’s General Assembly session,
which concluded on Saturday. Supplied photos
Virginia’s General Assembly session ended its regularly scheduled 60-day run on Saturday. The work of the legislature is far from over, however—the divided assembly has not yet agreed on a state budget and has left a number of bills on the table. Once the budget is complete, a special session can be held later in the year to continue ironing out the remaining bills.
For the moment, let’s take a look at some notable bills the six state delegates and senators who represent Charlottesville and Albemarle have been able to pass so far.
Delegate Rob Bell (R) was the chief patron of a bill aimed at limiting the amount of information law enforcement has to turn over under the Freedom of Information Act. The bill passed with broad Republican support and a handful of Democrats, including both Deeds and Hudson, on board as well. The bill means criminal investigative files can’t be disclosed to requesters unless the requesters are family of the victim or an attorney petitioning for the accused party’s innocence. The bill had been opposed by the Virginia Press Association and the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, but supported by the families of Hannah Graham and Morgan Harrington.
Delegate Matt Fariss (R) put forward a bill to increase the penalty for stealing a catalytic converter from a Class 1 misdemeanor to a Class 6 felony, increasing the potential penalty to one to five years in prison. Fariss’ bill was tabled in the House, but the Rustburg delegate was a sponsor on a very similar bill from Bell that did make it through. The bill passed the Senate unanimously but was more controversial in the House, where it advanced 57-38.
Delegate Sally Hudson (D) was the chief patron of more than two dozen bills, but almost all were squashed in the Republican-controlled House, including bills to fund school renovation via local sales taxes and to allow localities to conduct local elections through ranked-choice voting. She was the chief co-patron of two unanimously passed bills that will make hospital pricing more transparent.
Like Hudson, Delegate Chris Runion (R) had some tough sledding in the divided legislature—his bills to tighten ballot access and weaken civilian police oversight bodies passed the Republican House but died in Democrat-controlled Senate committees. Runion was the chief patron of a unanimously approved bill requiring the state’s Department of General Services to prioritize purchasing recycled plastic when it acquires plastic for use by state agencies.
Senator Creigh Deeds (D) was the chief patron of a bill that bans health care providers from collecting debt from patients until after the Criminal Injuries Compensation Fund, a state program to help victims with medical expenses, has had a chance to decide if those patients are eligible for relief. The bill comes the year after UVA hospital received national negative attention for its aggressive bill collection practices. Deeds’ bill passed the Senate 24-15, with much of the Republican caucus opposing, but passed the House 91-7.
Senator Bryce Reeves (R) proposed multiple bills aimed at loosening gun laws. His initiative to allow concealed carry without a permit was killed in a Senate committee, but he did pass a bill declaring that retired law enforcement officers can purchase service weapons without undergoing a criminal background check. The bill passed the Senate unanimously and the House 61-37.
Gabe Silver, co-owner of the Rivanna River Company, says recreating on the river is a great way to get to know nature. Photo: Tom McGovern
There are no leaves on the trees, but signs of spring are visible at the Rivanna River. A dozen turtles sit on a log on the riverbank, their shells bluish, almond-shaped dots from a distance.
“What really has inspired us all along is just the wildness that’s accessible right from the city,” says Gabe Silver, co-owner of Rivanna River Company, which rents kayaks, tubes, and other river equipment. “Great blue heron, green heron—people see river otters right in city limits on the Rivanna. We have bald eagles that nest on the river right outside of town.”
Recently, more and more people have joined these critters. Silver reports that the pandemic “drove a really significant jump” in river usage, and that interest has remained high. The same dynamic has been visible across the region—1.7 million people visited Shenandoah National Park in 2020, a 17 percent increase from 2019.
On this Sunday afternoon, one of the year’s first truly warm days, squeals of joy can be heard from the playground in Riverview Park, and an intrepid young swimmer is splashing around in the river’s rocky shallows as a parent watches from the orangey-brown dirt of the bank.
The high level of interest makes the river’s health and accessibility all the more important. In January, the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission released an 86-page Urban Rivanna River Corridor Plan, packed full of recommendations for the river’s future. Both Charlottesville and Albemarle officially approved the plan in February. The river has flowed through the central Virginia hills for thousands of years—what will it take to keep it healthy for the next thousand?
Clams and worms and mayflies, oh my
“If you’re looking at just water quality, the river is impaired for biological health,” says Lisa Wittenborn, executive director of the Rivanna Conservation Alliance, a nonprofit that aims to clean and protect the river.
Her group, staffed by an enthusiastic corps of volunteers, tests the river’s biodiversity and bacteria levels multiple times per year. They monitor the presence of tiny river creatures—larva of dragonflies, damselflies, mayflies, stoneflies, plus clams and worms and crayfish and more—to see how the river is doing. Right now, “the little organisms that live in the river don’t have the diversity and abundance that we would like to see,” she says, and the bacteria levels are higher than ideal.
Water quality issues can be exacerbated if people litter and behave badly when they visit the river, but it’s the built environment around the water, rather than the recreational swimmers and boaters, that is most responsible. Four miles of river runs along the eastern edge of the city, and the river’s watershed covers 769 square miles, from the western edge of Albemarle County all the way through Fluvanna. From its headwaters in the Shenandoah, the river eventually feeds into the James and then the Chesapeake Bay.
“In such an urban system, with a lot of impervious surfaces, rainfall hits the ground and runs off immediately into our stormwater system, into our streams, and into the river,” says Wittenborn. Fast moving rainwater increases the amount of sediment in the stream, which makes it hard for river creatures to see and eat. The runoff also “picks up things like dog waste and trash, and washes those into the waterways. And that’s where a lot of the bacteria issues are coming from,” she says.
Despite these issues, Wittenborn says the data suggests that the conservationists are “holding the line.” A recent analysis of the last 15 years of biological data didn’t reveal many trends, suggesting that the river’s water quality issues aren’t getting worse.
“Actually, in four areas we identified places where the stream health scores had improved, statistically,” Wittenborn says. The group was able to connect those healthier locations to specific restoration projects and upgrades to the wastewater treatment plant. “All of those things seem to have made improvements in the stream health conditions downstream, so that was very encouraging.”
It’s difficult to come up with long-term solutions for these water-quality issues, since the area isn’t going to get less developed as time passes. Still, Wittenborn says, there are things people can do on their own properties to limit the amount of harmful runoff hitting the water. She encourages planting rain gardens or collecting rainwater in barrels. And larger developments should install bioretention areas, “big rain gardens that allow the water to collect and infiltrate down into the ground rather than running off.”
“Everything we do in the watershed is affecting the health of the river,” she says. “So we need people to think about what they’re doing in their own backyard, and how that is affecting our waterways. Because it all compounds.”
According to data from the Rivanna Conservation Alliance, recent projects have improved the river’s water quality in a few spots. Photo: Jack Looney
Touching the river
With Charlottesville’s next sweltering summer approaching, more and more people will be drawn toward the water.
“We have been open now for six years,” says Silver. “In that time, we have seen a steady increase in the usage of the river recreationally, with on-the-water recreation, but also on trails and recreation adjacent to the river.”
As that interest continues to flow, it’s crucial that everyone can safely and easily access the water.
“To some extent, the public resources for enabling recreation on and around the river haven’t really caught up with the demand, or have never kept pace with the demand,” Silver says. Parking lots at Riverview and Darden Towe parks fill up, it’s not always easy to reach those places on public transportation, and the river’s steep banks make it difficult to get down to the water.
When the Rivanna River Company, the Rivanna Conservation Alliance, and the city worked together to install a better water access point at Riverview Park, it “instantly became a place for people to go with kids and families to just wade around and play in the river, and touch the river,” Silver says. “We need more spots like that. It’s free, it’s always there in the summer when it’s hot, it can be a great place for kids to get to know nature, get to know rivers,” he says.
From the perspective of outdoor recreation, Silver isn’t yet concerned about human overuse. In an urban river corridor like this, “summer Saturdays being busy with human beings playing on the water is pretty typical,” he says. “If you go upriver or downriver from that main stretch between Darden Towe and Riverview Park, you still find, I think, a fairly peaceful experience.”
Moving forward, “It’s worth thinking about [how to] leverage the interest and enthusiasm for the Rivanna into caretaking for the Rivanna,” Silver says. His company is helping to organize Rivanna RiverFest on May 1, which will feature food trucks, live music, and opportunities to learn more about the river’s past and present.
“I think all of us in the outdoor recreation world want to believe that there is a connection between using a natural resource and coming to care for it both in our hearts and in our actions,” he says. “We can continue to work on ways to connect the dots for people who are newly using the river.”
Planning for the future
The Urban Rivanna Corridor Plan aims to “build a vision and develop an action plan for the urbanized section of the Rivanna River,” according to the report. Sandy Shackelford, director of planning and transportation at the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission, says the plan was created to facilitate coordination between the Charlottesville and Albemarle governments when it comes to policymaking in the Rivanna area.
The document doesn’t dictate which stretches of the banks are best for new development. “The local Land Use plans and the Comprehensive Plans have already identified where the development and redevelopment is appropriate,” Shackelford says. “We’re not changing that. But where development and redevelopment is already allowed, there are ways to do that with greater context sensitivity and awareness of environmental impacts.”
Since 2014, the planning agency has been researching the river and conducting community outreach in order to create a set of recommendations for the city and county.
The goals fall into a handful of different categories. The Environmental Protection section includes aims like “Encouraging the use of locally native plants for landscaping at parks and businesses,” and “Identifying and protecting the most sensitive biological and ecological areas by limiting access and installing signage.” In the Multi-Purpose Trails and Bridges section, the planning commission recommends “Providing seating areas at regular intervals along trails throughout the corridor.” In Development and Redevelopment, the report urges the city and county to “maximize the environmental sustainability and context sensitivity of new development.” The plan also encourages the localities to apply for grants to fund some of these initiatives.
In February, Charlottesville’s City Council amended the city’s Comprehensive Plan to include the Urban Rivanna Corridor Plan. Albemarle, currently in the process of updating its Comprehensive Plan, saw its Board of Supervisors endorse the plan and direct staff to consider it as the new Comprehensive Plan is ironed out.
Supporting the plan doesn’t mean its recommendations have become law, or even guarantee that the localities will follow the plan’s proposed course of action. “It doesn’t necessarily commit resources,” Shackelford says, “But it does give additional weight to staff being able to pursue some of these resources. That could be things like applying for grants or prioritizing work programs, or things like that.”
Shackelford says the planners tried to include realistic, short-term goals. Installing erosion control and flood prevention infrastructure like fencing along the bank could go into a parks department work plan “at a fairly low cost,” she says, and could have a big impact on the river’s health.
In some areas, like transportation, the plan recommends additional study. “We tried to think about things from an equity lens,” Shackelford says, “Things like increasing access by different modes of transportation, and thinking about who is going to have access to the park.”
She also points out that the river’s historic resources are not adequately cataloged. The report offers a cursory history of the river: Monacan Indians live throughout the region, and their historic capital, Rassawek, was located on the Rivanna, about 30 miles southeast of the city. In the antebellum era, enslaved laborers worked on plantations along the river’s banks. In the 19th century, Woolen Mills and Union Mills developed into major economic engines for the region. “So much local history happened around this really small section of the river corridor,” Shackelford says, and additional research will be required to ensure that history is well told.
From here, Shackelford says the next phase is creating an even more detailed master plan, with specific projects and cost estimates from engineers. Responsibility for undertaking some of the more complicated recommendations laid out in the plan lies with the area’s municipal governments.
“I thought the recommendations were great,” says Wittenborn. “I think the real question is just, are they going to be implemented? It doesn’t matter if you don’t follow through.”
A collection of private citizens pooled cash to pay for a vinyl wrap on the exterior of the
abandoned Dewberry Hotel. Photo: Eze Amos
Charlottesville’s gargantuan downtown eyesore, the half-finished and abandoned Dewberry Hotel, got a face-lift last week—the front and back of the building have been sheathed in a colorful nine-story vinyl wrap showing an abstract pattern of musical instruments.
The art installation was funded by Friends of Cville Downtown, a new nonprofit working on “an array of projects that can invigorate the downtown environment with lights, art, paintings, seating, events, banners, sanitation,” and more, said Michael Caplin, co-chair of the group, at a Monday press conference in front of the artwork.
The wrap, which leaves the building’s sides exposed, “demonstrates the power and the glory and the value of art,” Caplin continued. “We thank the Dewberries for allowing us to use their giant easel.”
Those hoping for answers on the long-term future of the building left the press conference disappointed. The owners of the property, Atlanta-based developer John Dewberry and his wife Jaimie, were scheduled to attend the event but did not appear. Caplin said the couple had been exposed to a positive COVID case over the weekend and were in quarantine.
The building bearing the Dewberry name has stood dormant since 2009. The project was initially conceived as the Landmark Hotel by developers Lee Danielson and Halsey Minor, but financial difficulties and litigation ground progress on the building to a halt. Dewberry purchased the half-finished building skeleton at auction for $6.25 million in 2012, and no construction has taken place since then.
The Dewberry Group’s website says the building “is poised to become the city’s premier luxury mixed-use retail, office, and residential property,” and will be called Dewberry Living.
Caplin said the idea for the art installation came from local businesspeople, and when he presented the idea to the Dewberries, they enthusiastically green-lit the project. Two paintings from artist Eric Waugh were enlarged and printed on 13-foot-wide vinyl mesh rolls, which were carried to the top of the building and then affixed to its exterior by workers rappelling down the side of the tower. The wrap is scheduled to remain in place for 14 to 16 months.
Mayor Lloyd Snook was in attendance to pull a tarp off the sign on the front of the building. “It is really exciting for me to know that we have such commitment from the private sector to match the kind of commitment we’ve been trying to display from the public sector,” Snook said.
The mayor admitted he doesn’t have any “inside information” about the future of the building, but “the fact that we’re here with the Dewberries’ support” makes him hopeful that more news could follow.
The installation is comprised of 12 banners and a 130-foot wrap around the building’s base, and cost $45,000 in total.
The project’s “anchor donors” include major Charlottesville developers Ludwig Kuttner, Hunter Craig, Keith Woodard, and others. Many of those donors sit on the executive committee of Friends of Cville Downtown, along with other local entrepreneurs like Joan Fenton, owner of J. Fenton Gifts, and Alex Bryant, executive director of IX Art Park. The group absorbed the former Downtown Business Association, a collection of merchants and restaurateurs with a similar mission to the new organization.
Caplin says the group plans to unveil more murals near the Dewberry in the coming days, and is also financing a new coat of paint for the chipped-up exterior of Oyster House Antiques.
The Dewberry Foundation, the charitable component of Dewberry’s business, has made a $10,000 donation to the nonprofit, says Caplin, and is listed on the building’s exterior as a sponsor of the project.
As a percentage of its annual budget, $10,000 is a major outlay for the Dewberry Foundation. According to the company’s 990 IRS returns, the only contributor to the foundation in 2019 was John Dewberry, who put in $100,000. The only employee listed is Dewberry, who apparently devotes five hours per week to the position. The foundation’s donations totaled $106,323, with the largest chunks headed for Atlanta’s Synchronicity Theater ($25,000) and the Children’s Museum of Atlanta ($16,000). The 2018 return tells a similar story, listing Dewberry as the sole contributor to the foundation, having given $125,000.
(For comparison’s sake, we glanced at the 990s of a few other local big shots—John Grisham’s Oakwood Foundation gave $5,041,440 to charitable organizations in 2018, and the Chris Long Foundation dished out $1,852,376 in 2019.)
Kuttner was also in attendance at the event on Monday. (Caplin introduced the fedora-wearing developer as “the true mayor of Main Street,” which got a chuckle out of Lloyd Snook, the elected mayor.) “We, the citizens of Charlottesville, want to get the mall back,” said Kuttner. He expressed optimism about the state of affairs, and praised Dewberry’s work on a recently completed hotel in Charleston.
Caplin says he hopes Dewberry will see his plan through to the end—“The energy at the Quirk [on West Main] shows you what a cool boutique hotel can generate.” In the meantime, a steel and concrete shell half-wrapped in vinyl will have to do.
Charlottesville is getting more expensive, and fast. In the fourth quarter of 2017, the median sales price for a home in the Charlottesville area was $286,000. In the fourth quarter of 2021, the median sales price for the region was $369,000—a 29 percent increase in just four years.
Those rising prices affect everyone in the city, whether or not you’re buying or selling a home. Increased sale prices drive up the value of neighboring homes, which in turn increases the amount homeowners owe in real estate taxes. In January, the city announced that average residential property assessments rose 11.69 percent from last year to this year.
Meanwhile, seeking to generate revenue for major projects like a renovation of Buford Middle School, the City of Charlottesville is considering raising the real estate tax by as much as 10.5 percent. Currently, Charlottesville taxes real estate at 95 cents per $100 of assessed value. The city has said it could raise the rate to $1.05.
A little back-of-the-napkin math shows how the increased assessments and potential tax increase might affect an average homeowner. If you own a property that was assessed at 350,000 in 2021, you owed $3,325 in real estate taxes. If that property’s assessment increased by 12 percent, and real estate taxes increased by 10 cents, your 2022 real estate taxes would be $4,116, or $791 more than you paid the year before.
End of fourth quarter median sale price, Charlottesville area (2017-21)
Sale prices in the CAAR region, which includes Charlottesville, Albemarle, Fluvanna, Louisa, Nelson, and Greene, have risen in recent years. Source: CAAR
“There are lots of wealthier people in Charlottesville who can afford it,” says City Councilor Michael Payne, “but there’s also definitely a lot of people who it’s going to be a real hit for.”
Real estate assessments are entirely based on the real estate market, says City Assessor Jeff Davis. “We witnessed, this year, a very strong real estate market,” Davis says, and the increased assessments reflect the increased sale prices of homes in the city over the last year. From 2020 to 2021, residential property assessments rose 3.8 percent, compared to the 11.69 percent increase from 2021 to 2022.
“We have the city broken up into neighborhoods, and we look at these neighborhoods and determine from the sales where assessments need to change,” Davis says. Neighborhoods where assessments rose at particularly sharp rates include Orangedale—comprised of Orangedale Avenue and neighboring streets, on the city’s map—which saw assessments jump 24 percent. Rose Hill, the neighborhood between Burley Middle School and Preston Avenue, and University/Maury, which encompasses Jefferson Park Avenue and its smaller offshoots, each saw 18 percent increases.
Orangedale, Rose Hill, and University/Maury are three neighborhoods that saw particularly sharp increases in residential real estate assessments this year. Photos: Eze Amos
“It’s like any other product,” says Pam Dent, president of the Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors. “Supply and demand is going to result in rising prices…The market has been really strong, and we’ve had extremely low inventory.”
It’s not just a Charlottesville phenomenon. Assessments jumped in Albemarle County, too. The county, which taxes real estate at 85.4 cents per $100 of assessed value, saw residential real estate assessments rise by 8.4 percent this year. Around the country, the median home sale price has risen 21 percent since the end of 2017.
The tight market “hasn’t happened overnight,” says Dent. The 2008 recession slowed new construction, just as Charlottesville was becoming an even more popular place to live, she says. Rising interest rates encouraged people to stay put, and the onset of the pandemic “put it all on steroids,” as supply chain issues disrupted construction further.
“You’ve got the same dynamics that have been creating the affordable housing crisis just accelerating,” says Payne.
CAAR’s fourth quarter report for 2021 provides more detailed data on the lack of new homes for sale. “In the CAAR footprint, there were 436 active listings in the region at the end of the fourth quarter, which is 213 fewer active listings than a year ago, a decline of 33%,” the report states. “The Charlottesville region remains one of the tightest housing markets in the state. Inventory is now just a third of what it was four years ago.”
The average time a house spends on the market has fallen significantly over the last few years as well. In the fourth quarter of 2017, houses stayed on the market an average of 79 days. In the fourth quarter of 2021, the average time was just 31 days.
A few days after the year’s new assessment data was published, City Council took the first steps toward raising the real estate tax. The councilors have not yet decided how much to raise the rate, if at all, but in order to meet their ambitious capital improvement goals, council will need new sources of income. A public hearing is scheduled for March 21 to discuss the potential tax rate increase further.
Payne says improving the city’s real estate tax relief program is one crucial way to ease the pressure caused by increased assessments and potential new taxes.
“We don’t have any plan to make our real estate tax relief programs robust enough to prevent harm to those who can’t afford this,” he says.
Currently, those with homes assessed at $375,000 or below can qualify for real estate tax relief. Expanding that program requires an amendment to pass through the Virginia General Assembly.
Dent says CAAR does not take a position on real estate tax increases either way, but posits that a tax rate increase will have knock-on effects. “Renters will see increases in their leases based on tax increases, and consumers will see increased costs for services and labor from increased overhead.”
Payne also says it’s important that the city consider creating other forms of revenue beyond raising taxes, and thinks looking to the general assembly and UVA could be crucial. With so much turnover in the city’s management, long-range planning has been difficult.
Creating revenue “without putting the squeeze on working class people in the city” is “not an easy task, and it’s not going to happen in one budget cycle,” says Payne, “but one of the realities we have to confront is we haven’t done nearly enough long-range strategic planning.”
For the moment, “it’s the strongest seller’s market that I’ve ever seen,” Dent says.
Updated 2/23 to correct an error in reporting the real estate tax rate in Albemarle County.
House of Delegates Speaker Todd Gilbert is leading the Republican charge to undo much of what Dems did during their time in power. Photo: Virginia House of Delegates
The 2022 General Assembly session is in full swing. In November’s election, Republicans flipped the House of Delegates, taking a 52-48 lead after two years in which Democrats controlled all three chambers of government. In recent weeks, GOP House members have worked to undo many of the laws Democrats put into place during their time in the majority.
In 2020, Democrats passed a law allowing localities to disallow possession of firearms on city property. Both Charlottesville and Albemarle have since taken advantage of that law, passing ordinances banning guns from parks and government offices. Last week, House Republicans passed HB 827, which would “remove the authority for a locality by ordinance to prohibit the possession or carrying of firearms” on that locality’s property.
Democrats also passed bills to increase Virginia’s minimum wage. The Dems’ new $11 minimum wage went into effect this January, and the party had set up a schedule that would see the minimum wage hit $12 an hour starting in 2023 and $15 an hour in 2026. A GOP bill which passed the House 51-48 last week cancels those increases and leaves the minimum wage at $11.
Expanding ballot access was a major component of Virginia Democrats’ platform, but new laws in that area are now on the Republicans’ chopping block. Last week a party-line vote saw HB 185 pass the house—the bill repeals a 2020 law that made it possible to register to vote on the day of an election.
All of these bills have yet to be debated by the state Senate, which Democrats still control 21-19. Stay tuned for more updates as the legislature continues to work in the coming weeks.
Other House bills aimed at rolling back Democratic reforms are coming up down the pipe too, even if they haven’t reached a vote yet. Democrats expanded the authority of civilian review boards to investigate reported police misconduct, but a bill introduced by the GOP would completely remove the ability of towns and cities to set up civilian oversight review boards at all.
In addition to the ballot access measure mentioned above, House Republicans also have bills in the works to repeal absentee voting by drop-off ballot, require an excuse for voting by mail, shorten the early absentee voting period, and require photo ID to vote. All of these measures, if passed, would invalidate Democratic reforms from the last two years.
Can’t we all just get along
Virginia’s legislature passes most of its bills unanimously or close to it. State-level legislatures are responsible for running the day-to-day operations of their states, not just arguing over high-profile issues. That work is very much ongoing, too. Thus far, unanimous votes have included extending the duration of oyster farming season, requiring law enforcement to train in human trafficking prevention, allowing Bath County to charge for solid-waste removal, establishing the position of mental health care coordinator at the Department of Veterans Services, and many more.
Virginia’s legislative session began on January 12 and will conclude on March 12.
Shana Sugar and Jahnavi Wraight, hairdressers at La Vie en Rose, celebrate an early Bills touchdown at Champion Grill. Photo: Eze Amos
“You’re in Bills Country,” announced a blue-red-and-white banner hanging near the entrance to Champion Grill.
Geographically, I was nowhere near Bills Country. I was here in Charlottesville, more than 400 miles from the cold and snowy home of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills.
And yet, just as the banner promised, the bar was packed with Bills fans, decked out in gaudy team colors, buying beer and taking their places before the Bills’ playoff game against the Kansas City Chiefs. The Charlottesville Buffalo Bills Backers were out in force, same as every other Sunday, all season long.
“It started out because I just wanted to watch Bills games,” said group founder Patrick Webb. “I figured if I could find a few Bills fans, we’d have some camaraderie, a little bit of community.”
That was in 2007. Since then, the club has grown from just seven original members to the robust crowd in attendance at Champion. There are a handful of other out-of-town sports teams with fan clubs in Charlottesville—the Browns Backers meet at the Livery Stable, and the Charlottesville Reds watch Liverpool FC games at Random Row—but the vast majority of teams don’t have any fan club at all. Webb says he thinks the Bills Backers are the biggest crowd in town.
After all, Bills fans have a bit of a reputation. Known for braving the snow, smashing tables, and drinking copious amounts of booze, the team’s ravenous fanbase is affectionately nicknamed the Bills Mafia.
“We’ll do more harm to tables than we will other people,” Webb stressed. The Charlottesville Bills Backers is a family scene—Webb’s elementary-school-aged son is next to him, wearing a Bills jacket. This year, through game day raffles, the group has raised almost $3,000 for local charity Waterboys.
“This is a normal crowd,” said Brian Lewandowski, another of the group’s organizers, scanning the 70-plus blue-clad fans in the bar. “We’ve had [up to] 150.”
The passion of the Bills Mafia, both in Charlottesville and around the country, is even more impressive given the team’s historic struggles on the field. In the ’90s, the Bills made the Super Bowl four times in a row, and lost all four. Starting in 2000, they missed the playoffs for 17 consecutive seasons.
All that has changed in the last two years, however. Suddenly, the Bills are good. Josh Allen, a fantastic young quarterback, has become the team’s talisman. Last year, for the first time since 1993, the Bills made it to the AFC Championship Game. They lost to the same team they were set to play on Sunday—the Kansas City Chiefs.
Meet the Mafia
The Bills and Chiefs traded touchdowns in the first half. As the teams fought to a 14-14 scoreline, I made my way around the room, trying to figure out how all these Bills fans had ended up in this bar in central Virginia, so far away from their homeland in icy Buffalo.
Software engineer JP Scaduto grew up in upstate New York. Everywhere he’s lived since then, he’s found a Bills Backers group to watch games with. “Wherever you go, there’s somebody from Buffalo there,” the young techie told me. “We’ve got the best fanbase in the country.”
For Scaduto, the losing is an important ingredient in the intoxicating Bills cocktail. “If you can live through 17 years without the playoffs, you are a true fan through and through,” he said. “Our sense of community comes from our ability to have gone that long while being that mediocre.”
Richard Sargent, a security integrator wearing a Bills T-shirt under a blazer, was a little more succinct: “Misery loves company.”
As we spoke, a train horn blared over the Champion sound system. The train horn plays in the Bills’ stadium when the Bills are defending a third down, Webb explained, so the Bills Backers have hooked up a digital version for the watch parties.
I chatted with Dale Sadler, who’s been a Bills fan for as long as the team has been around—60-plus years. The retired engineer has been coming to Charlottesville Bills Backers meetings for a decade. He waxed poetic to me about the Bills greats of yore: O.J. Simpson, Jim Kelly, Doug Flutie.
Florence Sadler, a retired schoolteacher, caught Bills fever from Dale, her husband. On Sunday night she showed up to Champion in a Bills cap, Bills earrings, and a Bills facemask, with a Bills Snuggie folded across her arm. “I’m more fair-weather than he is,” she said.
As time expired in the first half, the Chiefs attempted a field goal, but the ball glanced off the right upright and missed. A lucky break—“that never happens for us!” cheered one fan.
Jahnavi Wraight also found the Bills through a loved one. Her best friend and business parter, Shana Sugar, is a longtime Bills fan, and insisted that Wraight accompany her to a game for her birthday.
“Going to this game, I was convinced no one was going to be there,” Wraight recalled. “It was freezing, it snowed the night before.” But sure enough, Buffalo showed up. The parking lot was full of tailgaters, the stands were jammed with rowdy fans, and the concessions booths ran out of alcohol before halftime.
“I like Bills fans,” said Wraight, a tattooed hairdresser. “They’re my people.”
The extreme conditions are an important part of what makes the Bills so special, said Jonathan Amato, a lifelong fan and upstate New York ex-pat who works as a government contractor. “A lot of these Rust Belt cities, football’s a big part of their life,” he said. “It’s snowy and cold. What are you going to do all winter but watch football?”
Patrick Jurewicz, a UVA athletic trainer, roots for the Giants. Even so, after a co-worker introduced him to the Bills Backers, he’s become a regular at the watch parties. “I’m new to town as of August,” he said. “So it’s good to have a good community. It’s what I’m looking for.”
Everyone wants in on the action. “See this guy over here in 27?” Webb said, pointing to a jersey-wearing member of the crowd. “He was here last week. He’d only just heard about us. And [today] he came back with like six people.”
(I did find two Chiefs fans in the crowded bar. They weren’t wearing any gear, but let out a yelp after a Kansas City touchdown. Turns out they’d wandered in by accident. “We thought we’d go out and get some dinner and watch the game,” one said. “We had no idea it would be like this.”)
As the game progressed, the Bills Backers grew more and more absorbed. A Chiefs field goal gave Kansas City a 26-21 lead with nine minutes to play. It was clear the Bills had a tight finish on their hands, but I don’t think anyone could have anticipated what happened next.
When the Bills scored a late touchdown, Brian Edison tore off his shirt in celebration. As the game’s final whistle sounded, he was left consoling his daughter, Emily. Photo: Eze Amos
An instant classic
After the Chiefs’ field goal, the Bills moved down the field confidently, chewing up time as they went. The drive stalled in Kansas City territory. All seemed doomed. Then, with just under two minutes left, on fourth and 13, Allen dropped back, scanned the field, and fired a throw to a wide open Gabriel Davis in the back of the end zone. The bar went wild.
“God I love this team,” said Webb. “But then I hate them. But then I love them.”
Kansas City, trailing 29-26, wasn’t done yet. Five plays after the Bills’ TD, Chiefs wide receiver Tyreek Hill caught a short pass from Patrick Mahomes and zoomed into the end zone from 64 yards out.
The Bills had a minute to work with, trailing by four. Allen connected with Davis twice, then hit Emmanuel Sanders at the Kansas City 19 yard line. Seventeen seconds were left in the game. This was really the end, one way or another.
Allen took the snap, dropped back, and quickly released a laser beam, once again finding Davis in the end zone for the lead.
The bar erupted. Decades of heartbreak were released in elated, manic screams. Fans hugged, high-fived, sprinted around the room, reveled in the collective thrill unique to sports. A middle-aged father tore his shirt off and roared with joy.
But 13 seconds remained on the clock.
Unbelievably, 13 seconds was just enough time for Mahomes and the Chiefs to cover 44 yards and kick a game-tying field goal as time expired.
It got worse from there. The Chiefs won the coin toss to start the overtime period. They sliced down the field, gaining yards on every play until Mahomes found tight end Travis Kelce for a walk-off touchdown.
It was one of the greatest football games ever played. And the Bills lost.
Just minutes after the sheer ecstasy of the last Bills touchdown, the bar fell into a shell-shocked murmur. Kids started crying; adults stared blankly at the TV screens, mouths agape.
As he closed his tab at the bar, Scaduto spoke the die-hard sports fan’s simplest, most poignant refrain: “Next year.”
Fans shuffled past Webb’s table on their way out. With one arm wrapped around his crying son, Webb waved goodbye to his beloved Bills community. “See you next year,” he said. “Just follow us. We’ll be here next year.”
Near the door, Florence Sadler, with all those years of Bills fandom behind her, leaned over to me. As the cold night air poured into the bar, Sadler adjusted her Bills facemask. “If you’re gonna lose,” she said, “you gotta lose good.”
New Mayor Lloyd Snook says filling Charlottesville’s city manager vacancy is among his top priorities. Supplied photo
“To be effective leaders of change, we need two things,” said Councilor Lloyd Snook during last week’s City Council meeting. “We need vision, and we need the ability to build a team to realize that vision.”
Snook will now get a chance to lead that team-building effort. At the beginning of last Wednesday’s meeting, City Council members chose Snook as the next mayor of Charlottesville.
Snook, an experienced local defense attorney, was first elected to City Council at the beginning of 2020, and will serve a two-year term as mayor. Newly elected Councilor Juandiego Wade will be vice-mayor.
In Charlottesville government, the five city councilors choose the mayor from amongst themselves every two years. The mayor sets the meeting agenda, but doesn’t have much more power than the rest of the councilors. The city manager, who is not directly elected, runs the government’s day-to-day operations.
Snook was elected by a vote of 3-2. Brian Pinkston and Juandiego Wade voted for Snook, while Sena Magill and Michael Payne voted for Payne.
Magill said she supported Payne because of his ability to express complicated topics in a clear manner, and because of his ability to reach many different people.
“In my two years on council, I’ve seen firsthand that we are a divided community,” Payne said, “divided along race, class, ideology, education level.”
Payne said he hopes efforts to stabilize the city government’s operations don’t mean sacrificing the progressive vision that has animated the city for the last few years. “I’ve seen us have critical, difficult conversations that we haven’t had in years,” he said. “I’ve also seen us make real policy progress,” citing the adoption of the Future Land Use Map and the city’s affordable housing projects, which represent “one of the highest per-capita affordable housing expenditures in the country.”
“I think it’s vital for us going forward…to have stability with a mission and goal in mind,” Payne said.
Pinkston, Wade, and Snook—the coalition that joined to select Snook as mayor—have all been involved in local Democratic Party politics for years. Snook and Pinkston have served as chair and vice-chair of the Charlottesville Democratic Party, respectively, while Wade was been a school board member from 2006 to his election to council last fall.
“I’ve worked with Lloyd for many years. I think he has the knowledge of city government to handle this position,” Wade said. “I think he has the time to take on this responsibility.”
Two years ago, Nikuyah Walker was elected mayor 3-0, with Snook and Councilor Heather Hill abstaining from the vote. Snook and Walker clashed during the pair’s overlap on council; Walker called Snook “inept” during a meeting in September.
Juandiego Wade was elected vice-mayor unanimously. “Juandiego Wade has courageousness but also humility,” said Pinkston after nominating Wade, citing his long school board tenure. “I’m grateful for his leadership in the city.”
In his speech accepting the nomination for mayor, Snook emphasized the need for collaboration across city government, and said finding “a city manager who can lead Charlottesville for a decade or more” is among his top goals.
“We have a lot of smart people in Charlottesville,” Snook said, stating that he’d like to set up advisory committees of residents to advise Charlottesville on matters like transit, historic resources, and more.
“We have a good vision, we need to build our team, I’d like to be the next mayor to lead that rebuilding,” he concluded.
What traits would you like to see in Charlottesville’s next police chief? What seasonal events are you excited to see return? If you had a warning label, what would it say?
These are among this year’s C-VILLE Question of the Week. For most people, the answers to those questions would cover a pretty broad range of topics. But for the Twitter account @Luffa_Klein, all these queries come back to the same subject: The Dewberry Hotel.
All year, multiple times per month, the avatar-less Twitter account has responded to our question, almost always finding a way to tie our prompt back to the unfinished steel shell that’s been sitting on the Downtown Mall for more than a decade, neglected by owner after owner.
When asked to describe the perfect burger, @Luffa_Klein wrote, “My perfect burger is made with ‘organic meat’ from the Jungle Project fed ‘cows’ at the unfinished disaster Dewberrry Living!” To a question about the very best theater experiences, @Luffa_Klein responded, “Recent favorite theater experience is the Dewberry Mystery Drama. A dark scary unbelievable saga about an unfinished screaming disaster jungle project in mid C’Ville with a tragic NO ending. Get ready C’Ville it’s scare!” And on, and on, and on.
We delighted in the creative, off-the-wall answers—and we started to wonder. Who was behind @Luffa_Klein? And what did the Dewberry ever do to him?
Well, I’m pleased to report that we were able to track down our man of mystery. The person behind the @Luffa_Klein account wants to remain anonymous, but C-VILLE can confirm that he’s a longtime Charlottesville resident—and he’s been having just as much fun with the Question of the Week as we have. “I made it a sport, so to speak,” he says.
When it comes to the Dewberry, “I think it’s ridiculous,” he says. “It appears unsafe, it doesn’t make sense. I’m not a lawyer, I’m not an activist, I’m not politically involved, really… [But] it just sits there as a graveyard monument.”
As it happens, there’s been some movement around the building in recent weeks—graffiti has been removed, and so has the sign on the front of the building that said “Coming summer 2009.”
“The current work being done is a temporary art installation by The Friends of the Downtown Mall,” says city spokesman Joe Rice. “As far as the status of the building, it is my understanding that the owner is actively looking at options and a plan could materialize at some point in 2022.”
For @Luffa_Klein, anything is better than what’s there now. “I don’t mind a hotel,” he says. “I just want to see it finished. Whoever comes up with a good idea.”
The Best of @Luffa_Klein
What’s your go-to karaoke song?
“My karaoke success is always the Dewberry Serenade. Always full of surprises and no solutions. Refrain goes ‘unfinished (14 years) disaster jungle concrete monument not removed from beautiful downtown.’ Sing along C’Ville.”
How do you expect the UVA basketball teams to fair this year?
“UVA basketball teams will do just fine this season as long they don’t have to practice at terrible incomplete concrete rumble monument Dewberry (many names) in C’Ville center…FIRE ALL INVOLVED!”
What’s been the biggest success in your garden this summer?
“My success grow this summer has been Jungle Weed growing for FREE at the down town C’Ville unfinished (14 years) disaster Dewberry concrete monument that wasn’t taken down or removed. Shame on you C’Ville!”
What’s your beverage of choice this summer?
“My best all time drink is Dewberry Sour but hard to make sense of. Hard to learn because ingredients changes name all the time. Hard to make because it takes time (14 years) and hard to drink because you can swallow the unbelievable nonsense in a empty glass.”
“This is really just the bare minimum that could be done for a community of people who are responsible for these institutions existing,” said Justin Reid of Virginia Humanities in our most-read story of the year.
Former police chief RaShall Brackney was fired in September, after her attempts to reform the department were met with pushback from the rank and file.
This lighthearted listicle garnered more angry phone calls than any story we ran this year. We wrote, “You know you’re from Charlottesville if you’re so over Thomas Jefferson.” Let me tell you: Some people here are still really big fans of Thomas Jefferson.
The building’s amenities include various co-working spaces, rooftop terraces, and a 200-seat theater. Photo: Stephen Barling
From the seventh-floor balcony of the CODE Building, downtown Charlottesville stretches out in front of you, misty blue mountains visible in the distance. Up here, North Downtown’s brick buildings, with their shingled roofs and quaint steeples, look like Monopoly pieces. And the seventh floor isn’t even the top of the office tower—two more floors of shimmering windows and black concrete rise above.
After years of construction, the place is just about open for business. Tenants are arranging their desk chairs, and the lobby’s coffee shop—Millisecond, an offshoot of Milli Coffee Roasters—is pouring joe as of this week. The caramel-hued foyer looks like the lobby of a high-end boutique hotel, with Bauhaus-style lamps hanging over leather couches. Before long, anywhere from 400 to 600 finance and tech workers will move in.
“The idea is that you have food, and sources of good energy, in the courtyard and also interior to the space,” says Rob Archer, who’s in charge of the co-working area on the building’s two bottom floors. The building itself—the Center of Developing Entrepreneurs, CODE for short—is the brainchild of mega-rich hedge fund manager and UVA alum Jaffray Woodriff. (The building’s general manager, Bill Chapman, is a co-owner of this paper.) The complex aims to “become the nexus of commercial and social enterprise activity in central Virginia,” according to the building’s website.
CODE sits at the end of the Downtown Mall, where the ice rink and Ante Room music venue used to be. The building’s floor plan is an irregular A-shape, drawn so that the tall office tower would be situated on Water Street. A triangular courtyard opens on to the mall. The architects went to great lengths to keep the original brick facade of the Carytown Tobacco building in place at the courtyard’s corner, though they painted the old bricks white with black trim, a sleek scheme to match the rest of the complex.
Photos: Stephen Barling
The new tech hub has aesthetic pedigree. Thomasin Foshay, who coordinated the building’s interior design, points out the courtyard fountain, designed by a member of the team that built the memorial at Ground Zero in New York; the rooftop garden terraces were installed with consultation from someone who designed the High Line in Manhattan. A dangling 21-foot interior sculpture, designed by an apprentice of Frank Gehry, lights up at night, offering passersby a glimpse of luminous floating polyhedrons through the window.
In the building’s red-carpeted, 200-seat theater, more bells and whistles become apparent. The chairs are “slim profile jump seats,” says Foshay. At first glance, each seat looks impossibly thin, but unfolds to create a two-part chair. When it’s time to divide the theater from the entryway, a partition appears from behind a hidden panel in the wooden-slatted wall.
“This is an amenity for tenants, co-working members, and also the community,” Archer says of the theater. The next event on the calendar is a holiday party for CAV Angels, a UVA alumni group of angel investors.
The building’s first two levels are dedicated to Codebase, the open-concept office space that allows members to buy access at a variety of tiers. At midday on a Monday, three or four people with computers sit here and there, plugging away. “What we’ve seen so far is that people are here, and they’re being extremely productive,” says Archer, a tech entrepreneur, UVA lecturer, and owner of Arch’s Frozen Yogurt. “That’s the whole point.”
Photos: Stephen Barling
A single individual can fork over $250 a month for 9 to 5 access to the office space, plus amenities like a kitchen, showers and a podcast studio. A four-person private office—with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out towards the Omni—goes for around $2,500. Twenty of the 38 offices are leased so far, and the co-working space could ultimately support as many as 200 people.
“In this space in particular, the pandemic has actually been an accelerator,” says Archer, citing companies’ desire for flexibility. The minimum membership period is two months.
Meeting spaces of various sizes are accessible from the co-working floor. “We call this a huddle room,” Archer says, opening the door to a green-walled space with a table and chairs. “But it’s really a conference room.”
Besides the lingo, other little hints of the entrepreneurial spirit are everywhere. In one conference room, ornate black and gold wallpaper shows vines curling around coffee cups and cell phones. One early tenant has hung a portrait of HGTV’s Property Brothers on their glass-walled office. Even the mailboxes have a touchscreen—you’ll need a QR code emailed to you to get your packages.
The building was designed to facilitate “collision,” says Andrew Boninti, a lead developer on the project. Central to that mission is the retail on the ground floor. Two restaurant spaces open into the courtyard: Ooey Gooey Crispy, which bills itself as a “grown-up grilled cheese” shop, is on the way, as is a storefront for organic Mexican fusion food truck Farmacy.
Will the restaurants be enough to draw passersby into the orbit of the looming building? “We like the concept that people understand that it is private property,” Boninti says, “that people are here on invitation. But that’s what we’re all about—collision of ideas. People running in to each other.”
The higher floors, four through nine, are designed as more standard office space for large companies. So far, three of the six floors are leased, with Woodriff’s firm, Quantitative Investment Management, taking floor four. Investure, a local financial planning and investment company, is fully moved in to floor five. Floors six through eight remain unclaimed, though Boninti says at least one more deal is imminent.
The pandemic has made large tenants a little hesitant to jump in. “They don’t know what they’re coming back to,” he says. “‘Are we gonna do three days a week at home?’ and all of that. I would think before the pandemic we would have had all of the spaces taken.”
Down at the bottom of the building, in the underground parking lot, 10 glowing green electric car chargers hang in front of the rows of spaces. (None of the 15 or so cars parked at the moment are plugged in.) Other environmentally conscious features include a rainwater collection system that catches water and pumps it back to the plants on the terraces. An elaborate air filtration network ensures that fresh air is always being blown in to every space—an expensive feature, but one Woodriff insisted on, citing research that fresh air boosts cognitive function.
Initially, Woodriff didn’t want to install a parking lot at all, says Boninti—“He thinks the future is going to be less cars, public transportation, and Ubers and everything else”—but the building has room for 74 cars, enough for the tenants’ bigwigs. “We have secured a lot of off-site parking,” says Boninti. “We have 100 spots at the Water Street garage, we have spots at the Omni, we have spots across the street at Staples.”
Most people, however, will encounter the building on foot, as they stroll down the mall. Amid two-story, red-brick storefronts filled with boutiques, restaurants, and used bookstores, the shiny, black, angular CODE building sticks out.
When Archer learns that C-VILLE asked about the building in its question of the week (p. 33), and one of the respondents said it reminded them of the Death Star, he says: “How do you respond to that? You don’t. You just say ‘hey, you’re entitled to your opinion. We love you, come check us out if you get a chance, the coffee’s good.’”
