Author: c-ville-weekly-writers

Blood on the tracks
Are the CSX tracks the most crime-friendly spot in Charlottesville?

Every community has its proverbial “dark alleys,” mysterious places where boogiemen live.

   One of UVA’s scary spots is a half-mile leg of CSX railroad that arcs northeast from University Avenue to Rugby Road. The tracks form a popular, but potentially dangerous, shortcut from the Corner bars and restaurants to the houses and apartments in the student neighborhoods north of campus.

   “It’s like an urban legend,” says Jen Silvers, a junior and president of the Delta Delta Delta (“Tri-Delt”) sorority on Virginia Avenue, located just yards from the CSX line. During rush, she says, the older sisters tell prospective Tri-Delts that “a bad little sorority girl got eaten on the tracks.”

   Silvers is joking, of course. Yet there’s a serious undercurrent to the conversation about safety along the popular informal thoroughfare.

   On April 2, three male students were robbed on the CSX tracks in two separate incidents that occurred within minutes of each other. In both cases, the robbers reportedly flashed a silver handgun and demanded money. At 2:30am on Friday, April 16, another male student reported getting robbed near the tracks on Chancellor Street.

   “I can tell you it’s not the pit of Charlottesville,” says Charlottesville Police Department Detective Tom McKean. “But it is an area for crime convenience.”

   He says UVA students walking home from the bars along the tracks make easy targets, and drunken students are unlikely to clearly remember the incident the following day. The setting doesn’t help, as the tracks are dark and vegetation creates shady hiding spots for prospective perps.

   Statistics are unavailable, because officers record incidents on the tracks as happening on one of the nearby streets. Plus most tracks crimes go unreported, McKean says. “They figure they’re not going to get their money back anyway, so why bother,” he explains of the victims.

   Students get mixed signals about hiking the tracks. As they are property of CSX, walking on the tracks is technically trespassing. Since it’s not an official campus walkway, there are no lights or emergency phones. Yet the lack of fences and the absence of visible “No Trespassing” signs indicate a tolerance of pedestrians. Walking the tracks saves about three minutes on the journey from the Corner to student neighborhoods.

   Flotsam of college life litters the tracks—discarded containers from all manner of snacks and beverages, beer cans of every variety, broken bottles, cigarette butts, the nearly decomposed carcass of an old sofa. Beyond Rugby’s famed Beta Bridge, there are rusted paint cans, a smoke detector, tent stakes and the guts of broken televisions.

   Like many students, Silvers frequently uses the tracks as a shortcut. She warns new house members that the tracks can be dangerous.

   “I walk there all the time myself, so I can’t really tell people not to do it,” says Silvers. “I think there’s better ways to keep people safe than just telling them not to do something.”

   Most students, especially women, say the best way to travel safely on foot—along the tracks, or anywhere else—is to walk in groups.

   Senior Stephanie Sanders says news of the robberies and the serial rapist saga has made her more skeptical about safety at UVA, but she still walks the tracks—alone during the day, in groups at night.

   “It’s crazy that these tracks are so open,” says Sanders. “Trains come through here all the time.” Three a day, according to CSX officials.

   Junior Tri-Delt Alexis Geocaris says she’d like to see school and police officials acknowledge that students use the tracks and take steps to make the area safer. A pedestrian bridge, she suggests, or more police patrols.

   “It seems like the police just pick a target, like the serial rapist, to make it seem like they’re doing something,” Geocaris says.—John Borgmeyer

Election? What election?
Media snoozes through campaign season

In two weeks, Charlottesville’s voters will choose among six candidates—three Democrats, two Republicans and an independent—for three open spots on the five-member City Council.

   If this information is a news flash, don’t feel bad. The candidates haven’t seen much attention in recent weeks.

   “It has certainly been very quiet,” says Jon Bright, owner of the three local Spectacle Shops and a Republican Council candidate in 2000, of this year’s election. “I would be interested to know why the local press doesn’t get more into the Council campaign.”

   A notable media washout was the candidate forum hosted by the Fry’s Spring Neighborhood Association on Tuesday, April 6. Joe Mooney of the group says the event “turned out pretty well,” with about 33 residents and all six candidates attending. But no reporters showed up. Other forums have received little or no mention by local media.

   Besides a few issue-specific interview pieces by Elizabeth Nelson in The Daily Progress, the “Hot Seat” interviews in The Hook, a weekly news piece in this newspaper and a smattering of coverage on radio station WINA-AM and in other media outlets, this campaign has been hard to find in the news.

   George Loper, a Democrat activist, says the candidates are not to blame for any lack of interest in the campaign.

   “The candidates are really out there at the forums and they’re accessible,” Loper says.

   Loper thinks the complexity of common campaign topics, such as affordable housing and the education “achievement gap,” as well as the lack of “any defining issues,” could be keeping candidates out of the news.

   Though he admits the candidate forums have shortcomings, such as the lack of follow-up questions, John Conover, who runs the Democrats’ campaign, says the media, particularly The Daily Progress, has a responsibility to cover the Council race.

   “How can people participate if the fourth leg of government isn’t there?” Conover asks.

   Both campaigns are likely to spend cash on advertising in coming days. WINA reported that Republicans were planning to begin broadcast advertisements last week, and Conover says the Dems will buy television ads.

   “It’s expensive stuff,” Conover says of ads on Channel 29, which he says can cost as much as $1,200 a day. Conover says the campaign is still deciding whether to run radio ads.

   Charlottesville Registrar Sheri Iachetta says the election has been slow for her office as well, with only 40 absentee votes trickling in thus far. Iachetta suspects many people are waiting to make up their minds on who to vote for until after the candidate forums. With three forums scheduled between April 20 and April 26, Iachetta says, “I’m expecting a busy week.”

Jon Bright hopes Iachetta is right. He says he’s surprised by the apathy about the Council election, which he likens to a vote for the board of directors of a $100 million corporation.

“It seems like we just don’t care,” Bright says. “It’s sad.”—Paul Fain

Home business
Residents and nonprofits clash over zoning

On the 500 block of Grove Ave., one home has a kid’s playhouse in the yard. There’s a home with plywood boards astride sawhorses, one with a “Say No to War” sign and one with overgrown bushes.

   Viewed from the street, the Victorian house at 506 Grove Ave. is no different than any other home in the neighborhood, except for the wheelchair ramp climbing to the front porch past yellow flowers and an American flag.

   What’s unusual about 506 Grove is its owner, and its occupants. In October, a non-profit brain-injury center called Virginia NeuroCare bought the house for veterans of the Iraq war who returned home with head injuries. Up to eight veterans, whom the company calls its “clients,” live in the house, and two NeuroCare staff work there 24 hours a day.

   Is 506 Grove a business or a residence? The City isn’t exactly sure, and the uncertainty has prompted conflicts over nonprofit group homes moving into neighborhoods zoned for single-family residences.

   Richard Myers, who lives next door at 504 Grove, calls NeuroCare’s group home “a business,” and he says the company shouldn’t be allowed in the neighborhood. Grove is zoned R-2, for single- and two-family residences.

   Technically, Myers is right. Armed with a petition signed by 20 of his neighbors, he asked the City to review the group home. The City’s law is designed to encourage permanent, instead of transient, residents in R-2 neighborhoods. But the law is awkward, and the City seems unwilling to enforce it.

   Section 34-1200 of the City’s zoning law distinguishes between “residential treatment facilities,” which are licensed by the Department of Mental Health, and “adult assisted living facilities,” which are licensed by the State Department of Social Services. Because NeuroCare is licensed by the latter, City Zoning Administrator Barbara Venerus told the company it was prohibited on Grove, and Deputy City Attorney Lisa Kelly backed her up in a letter to NeuroCare on December 9.

   The next day, Kenneth Bucci, NeuroCare’s lawyer, sent a letter to the Virginia Office for Protection and Advocacy, asserting that the City’s zoning ordinance violates the Federal Fair Housing Act and the Virginia Fair Housing Law. In what seems like a legal warning shot to the City, Bucci copied his letter to Kelly.

   Kelly sent the VOPA a letter explaining that NeuroCare had not provided enough information about what exactly would happen at 506 Grove. But after meeting with NeuroCare representatives, Kelly decided the City could not legally prohibit the group home.

   “They got intimidated,” says Myers.

   Kelly says she changed her mind when she learned customers would not be coming to 506 Grove for services.

   “From a PR perspective, [NeuroCare] could have handled things differently,” says Kelly. “But my opinion would have been the same whether or not they threatened to sue.”

   NeuroCare was founded five years ago by George Zitnay. It was known as the John Jane Center until 2002. That year, according to the company’s most recent IRS 990 forms, it was $135,000 in the red, and Zitnay paid himself a salary of $174,694.

    “I did not threaten the City,” says Zitnay. “We didn’t contact the advocacy group until we were threatened.

   “To discriminate against people on active duty from the United States military is absolutely shameful,” says Zitnay. “It’s like what happened after Vietnam.”

   Myers says he’s not discriminating against the injured soldiers. “That keeps getting thrown in my face. It’s bullshit,” he says. “It’s not about the cause. NeuroCare is a business.”—John BorgmeyerEye on Charlottesville

City considers security cameras on the MallIt’s becoming a rite of spring around here—the weather warms up, people of all ages flood Downtown and City officials start fretting about safety on the Mall.

   According to the City police website at www.charlottesville.org, the Mall is statistically no more or less dangerous than any other City neighborhood. (It’s a different story for your car, however. The Mall leads all neighborhoods with 49 towed vehicles in 2003). Yet, every spring, it seems business owners and patrons ask the City to beef up Mall security.

   “You have packs of kids whose language is different than adults. Some people feel intimidated by that,” says City Manager Gary O’Connell, summing up an oft-heard bellyache.

   The City is considering a variety of different security measures, including a neighborhood watch program, citizen patrols, more police officers and—at the more Ashcroftian end of the spectrum—security cameras.

   The City’s 2004 budget, which Council approved by a vote of 4-1 on Tuesday, April 13, shifts control of the Mall to the City’s new Department of Parks and Recreation, and out of the public works department. The change will consolidate maintenance into one department. Along with this shift, the City will consider a host of other changes for the Mall—replacing bricks and trees; revising the trash and maintenance routines; and adding new lights, signs and security measures.

   “We love seeing all the activity, but at the same time it means you have to be able to provide enough oversight to make sure everything is good,” says Bob Stroh, co-president of the Downtown Business Association.

Schilling’s budget redux

Last year, sparks flew after Council approved its FY 2003 budget. In a post-vote press conference, Councilor Rob Schilling announced that Council hadn’t worked hard enough to reduce the budget, while Kevin Lynch countered that it was Schilling who was the slacker.

   Although this year’s budget approval process on Tuesday was more civil, Schilling was again the lone nay vote, and an argument over his effort surfaced in interviews afterwards.

   “Basically, [Schilling] doesn’t show up anywhere unless there’s going to be media there,” says Lynch.

   Councilor Blake Caravati says Schilling did even less work on this year’s budget than he did last year, his first budget session. “It’s gotten a lot worse,” says Caravati. “He’s not at the wheel. He’s not even in the bus.”

   This year, Schilling presented City staff with a list of more than 150 questions. Although staff answered them all, it is unclear how Schilling used that information to reduce the City’s budget, which he claims is one of his priorities.

   In an e-mailed statement, Schilling says his work has focused on suggesting ways to change the budgeting process. Council, he says, should tell staff how much money to spend instead of scrutinizing the budget themselves.

   Most of Council’s labor on the budget happened in three work sessions during March. According to the minutes of those sessions—which are still in draft form and have not been approved by Council—Schilling didn’t offer many suggestions for cutting.

   On March 17, Schilling, who sits on the School Capital Projects Committee, asked whether proposed renovations to Charlottesville High School could be postponed. He also suggested cutting funds for improvements to McIntire Park.

   According to the minutes, both Caravati and Lynch proposed various cuts. Schilling said Council “should not micromanage” the budget, and that “it comes down to what we want to do versus what we need to do.”

   On March 10, City Manager O’Connell seemed to agree with Schilling, saying that if Council wanted to significantly reduce the budget, they should have set priorities in the fall.—John Borgmeyer

Tuesday, April 6 – Heckling the ambassador
Rich Felker, a UVA grad student, spent a night in the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail for his role in a Students for Free Tibet protest of a campus appearance by Yang Jiechi, the Chinese ambassador to the United States. Felker, who was released this morning, was arrested while attempting to chain himself to a banister inside the Rotunda during Jiechi’s speech on Monday. Another demonstrator briefly shouted over the speech. Felker was charged with disorderly conduct and attempting to incite a riot.

Wednesday, April 7 – Time to pay the bills?
The House of Delegates made strides toward ending the budget standoff when a committee today passed a compromise budget featuring a tax increase that would net an additional $972.5 million. The new plan, backed by 17 House Republicans, will be up for a vote in coming days. Special interest groups on both sides of the debate turned the screws on wavering Republicans this week, with conservative gadfly Grover G. Norquist of the D.C.-based Americans for Tax Reform warning that the proposed tax increase “will endanger the political position of at least 32 delegates.” Norquist, who helpfully listed the delegates’ names in a letter to legislators and the media, says each politician signed a pledge promising not to raise taxes—at all. Albemarle Del. Rob Bell, who told Bob Gibson of The Daily Progress that he would “listen” to next week’s debate over the compromise, did not sign the no-tax pledge.

Thursday, April 8 – Marching on the Mall
About 100 supporters, mostly young women, came to the Downtown Amphitheater tonight for the annual Take Back the Night march to the Rotunda, where a vigil was held. The rally is an international affair seeking to protest violence against women, and was first observed in Charlottesville in 1989. Kobby Hoffman, the president of the Charlottesville chapter of the National Organization for Women and one the local event’s four original organizers, said last year’s event did not feature a march because of a last-minute difficulty in getting approval from the City. Hoffman says a call to Meredith Richards, the City’s vice-mayor, smoothed over any hassles this year, and participants again marched along the Downtown Mall.

Friday, April 9 – Milestone at Monticello
Like celebrities flashing past the velvet rope at a swanky New York City club, the Wang family of Cresskill, New Jersey, was led past an hour-and-a-half-long line of visitors and into Monticello today. Huaihai Wang, an interpreter for the United Nations, his wife and their son got the high-roller treatment, which included an exclusive visit to the dome room and a basket of souvenirs, because one of the Wangs marked the 25 millionth visitor to Jefferson’s manse since it opened to the public in 1924. That year, 20,091 visitors forked over 50 cents each for the tour. In 2003, 464,733 visitors dropped $13 for adults and $6 for children to see Jefferson’s digs.

Saturday, April 10 – Raymond L. Bell’s funeral
A throng of well-wishers came to First Baptist Church on W. Main Street today to pay their respects to Raymond L. Bell, a prominent African-American leader who died on April 3. Bell, a Charlottesville native, was the first black member of the City School Board and was active in the local National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter. After serving in World War II and attending Boston University, Bell came back to Charlottesville to work at and later run his family funeral home, one of the oldest African-American owned businesses in town.

Sunday, April 11 – All Mel, all the time
After having fallen back in the pack for three weeks, Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ reclaimed the top box-office spot over Easter weekend. Christian moviegoers, looking to make a first or second viewing of the crucifixion drama part of their holy week, helped The Passion net another $17.1 million over the weekend. With $354.8 million earned so far, the movie is now the eighth most popular flick on the all-time U.S. chart, and clearly the biggest Aramaic language film in history.

Monday, April 12 – Life on $7.25 an hour
Democratic City Council candidate Kendra Hamilton and author Barbara Ehrenreich were among the people slated to speak today at a campus rally hosted by the UVA Living Wage Coalition and the Staff Union at UVA. The event tried to address the struggle of making ends meet on $7.25 an hour—the minimum wage for employees of Sodexho, the food services provider for UVA.

—Written by Paul Fain from local news sources and staff reports

Electoral college
The Sorensen Institute cranks out candidates

If future public officeholders learn one thing from the Sorensen Institute’s candidate training program, it should be this:

Politics is applied ethics.

“It’s a question of truth versus loyalty,” says Sean O’Brien, the Institute’s deputy director who runs the candidate training program.

Sorensen’s candidate training program, a three-day crash course for aspiring politicians offered once a year, is becoming a popular warm-up for aspiring City Councilors. Two of this year’s six City Council candidates—Republicans Kenneth Jackson and Ann Reinicke—graduated from the candidate training program in March 2004, while Democrat Kendra Hamilton attended two of the three days. (Democrats Kevin Lynch and David Brown and independent Vance High are also running for Council this year.)

In 2002, sitting Councilor Rob Schilling took O’Brien’s course and scored a surprise victory in the May election. So far, 124 people have graduated from the candidate training program. Of those alums, 100 have actually run for office, and 27 won.

“That’s not too bad,” O’Brien says, “considering that these are generally first-time candidates running against incumbents.”

The Sorensen Institute started in 1993 as the Virginia Institute for Political Leadership. It was the brainchild of Charlottesville attorney Leigh Middleditch, who at the time was serving both in the Chamber of Commerce and on UVA’s Board of Visitors. He got the idea from a magazine article.

“I was intrigued about getting more business people involved in elected politics,” says Middleditch.

The name was changed in 1997, when Tom Sorensen, a friend of the Institute’s first and only executive director, Norfolk newspaper magnate William Wood, bequeathed the organization $800,000.

Charlottesville Senator Emily Couric graduated from Sorensen’s first 10-month class on political leadership in fall 1993. Three years later, the Institute opened the candidate training program to prepare people seeking local office for the first time.

“I want them to make a decision about what kind of campaign they’re going to run, and about how they’re going to vote,” says O’Brien, who holds a doctorate in environmental science from UVA. “You have to decide what line you’re not going to cross to get elected. And when you’re there, are you going to vote the way you perceive the public wants, or do you vote your conscience?”

The three-day course costs $250, with scholarship and payment plans available. O’Brien says attendees must be seriously planning to enter a race. Besides helping the candidates think about ethics, the course also teaches them how to fine-tune a message, raise money and talk to the media.

O’Brien’s first pop quiz, however, is the training program’s rigorous schedule. It begins at 9:30am on Friday and ends at 9pm. Saturday is another 12-hour day, followed by seven more hours on Sunday.

“If you can’t handle the pace of this weekend, you better not try to run a campaign,” O’Brien says.— John Borgmeyer

The unkindest cut
You’ve just been stabbed. What happens next?

A knife-wielding UVA student allegedly committed Charlottesville’s only murder of 2003. This year, only a few hours passed before the City saw its first stabbing, which occurred on New Year’s Day. Since then, there have been at least three other knife attacks in Charlottesville, including stabbings outside of the Outback Lodge and, across Preston Avenue, at the Firehouse Bar and Grill.

Victims of the rash of local stabbings ended up at the UVA Medical Center, where doctors such as William Brady Jr., the vice-chair of the department of emergency medicine, deal with the damage.

“There’s really a huge spectrum of severity in terms of stab wounds,” says Brady, who helped treat several recent stabbing victims. But though some stab wounds might seem minor, such as one caused by a sewing needle in the arm, Brady says any stabbing victim needs to go to the emergency room, likely by ambulance.

“A stab wound in the chest and a gunshot wound to the chest can both be equally life threatening,” Brady says.

The appearance of a wound can be deceiving when it comes to a victim’s chance of surviving a stabbing. As Brady explains, “The size of the hole is not indicative of the underlying injury.”

For example, someone stabbed in the chest with a centimeter-wide letter opener could have a relatively innocuous-looking wound, Brady says. But, with a six-inch-long blade, the letter opener might have lacerated the victim’s heart, which is often fatal.

On the other hand, “a huge gaping wound may look dreadful,” Brady says, but may pose little threat to a victim’s life and require only stitches and cleaning.

The first step doctors at the UVA Medical Center take in determining how to treat a stab wound is to decide whether to call a “trauma alert.” Brady describes this as a “total hospital response to a very sick patient” that brings in trauma surgeons and nurses, activates the operating room and gets the blood bank ready.

The criteria for calling a trauma alert sounds fairly simple. If a stabbing patient took the knife in the chest, abdomen, back or head, the alert is automatically triggered (if the victim has been stabbed in the head, doctors will also summon a neurosurgeon). Brady says the alert is also called if a stabbing wound to a leg or arm causes enough bleeding to produce low blood pressure in the patient.

The first priority of the trauma team is to protect or restore a patient’s breathing. When a knife rips into the lungs or severs a major airway, a stabbing victim can be in big trouble, Brady says.

The first attempts to stabilize the victim take place in the E.R. “Thankfully, in most cases, that’s successful,” Brady says. However, patients with serious wounds may be sent to the operating room. This can occur after several hours of being worked on by several doctors and nurses, or after only three minutes.

In the worst-case scenario, even a trip to the operating room can’t save a stabbing victim. And, unlike the outcome of many episodes of the NBC television drama “E.R.,” when a patient dies in the hospital, they can rarely be resuscitated.

Brady cites a recent medical journal study that found when hospital television shows depict the struggle to save a patient whose heart has stopped, 80 to 90 percent of the time the patient is revived. According to Brady, the actual resuscitation rate in emergency rooms is typically 5 to 20 percent.

“Many laypeople take medical information from the television set,” Brady says. “In reality, people do die from stab wounds.”—Paul Fain

Upon further review…
Controversy rages over ward system

During budget season you expect partisan battles between Council Democrats and the lone Republican who pledged to keep an eye out for wasteful spending. But during Council’s meeting on Monday, April 5, a party-line battle emerged over something more than money—the very nature of Charlottesville’s government.

On Monday, Council finally approved Republican Councilor Rob Schilling’s plan to study switching to a ward system—or did they?

That night, Council considered two competing proposals: one from Schilling, which would charge a task force with exploring the direct election of the mayor, switching to a ward system and increasing the number of City Councilors; the other, from outgoing Mayor Maurice Cox, added more than a dozen bullet points further refining the task force’s charge.

The task force passed 3-1, with Blake Caravati opposing and Kevin Lynch abstaining because he says the whole thing is a waste of time. Meredith Richards, Schilling and Cox voted for the task force, but there was confusion over which charge they approved.

Schilling apparently believed he was voting for his own version, while Cox believed he was voting for his own version. At press time, City Council Clerk Jeanne Cox and City Attorney Craig Brown were reviewing the tape of the meeting to determine what happened.

“It’s still confusing,” says Jeanne Cox. “Part of the problem is that it was 12:30am, and we’re not at our best. One option is for Council to consider it again at our next meeting.”

Regardless, it looks like a battle is brewing over the issue. Cox has fought Schilling’s move to reform City government. “I oppose the implication that something’s broke here,” says Cox. “It’s an odd debate because it’s not coming from the population, it’s coming from one Councilor.”

Cox says he suspects Republicans want to divide Charlottesville into wards so they can carve out at least one section that will consistently vote Republican, helping the GOP break the Democrats’ tight grip on local government.

“That accusation is just coming from the party spin machine,” says Schilling. “This is about centralized versus decentralized power in Charlottesville. If that’s the best argument they’ve got, then let’s go.”

That’s Bond. Triple-A Bond.

Way up in New York City, there’s a group of people making important decisions about Charlottesville. They decide, in effect, which leaky roofs get patched, which bridges get repaired and whether the City can afford to fix those loose bricks on the Mall.

Who has all this power? Analysts working for two companies—Moody’s Investors Service and Standard & Poor’s Ratings Services—assign a credit rating to Charlottesville. This year, the City will issue bonds worth $10 million to pay for a litany of capital improvements projects, including Charlottesville High School, Jefferson School and the Downtown Mall. The investment analysts decide at what interest rate the City will repay the money it borrows.

That’s why City Council has made such a big deal about Charlottesville’s triple-A bond rating during this budget season. “A triple-A bond rating is like a financial Oscar,” says Rita Scott, the City’s finance director. She says the rating cuts our interest rate by a half-point. “If you’re talking about a $10 million issue that’s being repaid over 20 years, that’s a lot of money.”

The analysts’ reports indicate that “a stable economic base anchored by the vast presence of the University of Virginia, steady growth in the property tax base with no taxpayer concentration, a low debt burden and continued strong financial performance” factor into Charlottesville’s high rating.

The City’s high bond rating isn’t guaranteed, however. During Council’s Monday meeting, Meredith Richards suggested that the State’s financial blundering could bring Charlottesville down with it.

“The State has no budget, and they’re on watch with the credit agencies,” she said. “As Virginia goes, so goes Charlottesville.”—John Borgmeyer

Totally tubular
Monticello High School takes to the airwaves with WMHS

On a recent Friday morning, Will Cabot-Bryan, a student at Monticello High School, is in “Studio B” of the school’s television station—call sign WMHS—disassembling a malfunctioning Xerox machine. “Everything is totally dusty,” he says of its insides, looking up at Denny Barberio, the operation’s faculty coordinator, and back down at the grime on his pants. “Does this stuff come out of my clothes?”

Someone without a license in copy machine repair would have been scared by the number of parts on the floor. But Barberio explains that this sort of improvisational self-reliance is the essence of the success of the student-run station, which just completed its second year of producing “Heart and SOL,” a commercial-supported, “Jeopardy!”-style quiz show designed to help students pass Virginia’s Standards of Learning tests that runs on PAX’s Charlottesville affiliate.

Each episode of “Heart and SOL,” which airs at 9:30am on Saturdays and 7:30pm Mondays, puts three casually dressed students from Albemarle County’s high schools in relaxed competition answering multiple-choice questions drawn from the multi-disciplinary SOL curriculum. The fifth show of the current season featured questions prerecorded by football commentators Howie Long and Terry Bradshaw, who insouciantly fumbled over cue cards and tittered over a question about the effect of air resistance on “smooth balls” made of different materials, as if to make sure the stress level stayed low.

WMHS is the descendant of a program Barberio began at Walton Middle School about 10 years ago when the school’s student council asked to change its news bulletin from an audio to a video format. Barberio, a New York native and former professional musician with experience in television and film production, said the initiative’s core ingredients—highly motivated and self-sufficient students and a supportive community—were immediately in evidence. “Doing this for a grade meant nothing,” Barberio observed of Walton students who routinely put in long hours after school and on weekends.

Barberio was recruited to launch Monticello High School’s video and broadcasting program in 1998, when the school opened. A staple activity of WMHS is its daily morning news program, which is piped through the school’s closed-circuit network and includes a weather report with graphics and radar maps spliced in behind student forecasters. WMHS is run by a largely autonomous student staff of about 25, five of whom currently work after school as part-time production assistants at Charlottesville’s NBC affiliate, WVIR.

In addition to “Heart and SOL,” WMHS has a full schedule of upcoming student-produced projects. For example, the station is working on expanding a story on the Paramount Theater restoration into a full-length documentary film with hopes of airing it on Charlottesville’s PBS affiliate. Of his view of the future of WMHS, Monticello High School Principal Billy Haun says, “My only strategic plan is to keep Denny employed.”—Harry Terris

The call of the Web
Katherine McNamara brings quality publishing to the Internet with www.archipelago.org

Katherine McNamara has just returned from driving Michael Ondaatje to the airport after a weekend of “book festivaling” (now officially a verb). They’re old friends, her late husband having edited one of The English Patient author’s books. Clearly, McNamara, who lives in Charlottesville, is not just one of the masses who went from lecture to lecture at the Virginia Festival of the Book buying books and getting them signed. No, she is the founder and editor of the Web journal www.archipelago.org, an online, nonprofit quarterly, the spring edition of which came out April 6.

Archipelago is the online equivalent of the Paris Review, DoubleTake and The Atlantic Monthly, all rolled into one. Having started with only 12,000 unique visitors per year, the website today draws around 14,000 unique visitors per month and has published everything from an interview with Umberto Eco at Prague Castle to Senator Russ Feingold’s speech on why he voted against the PATRIOT Act. It publishes well-known and unknown writers from around the world, McNamara’s only requirement being her sense of quality.

As she relates in Archipelago’s first issue, McNamara christened the site as such because she tried to place where a “literary colony” might currently exist and decided that “if one exists at all, geographically and culturally it would be an archipelago… evoking rock-ribbed peaks with green life clinging to their slopes, rising from some vast, erosive ocean.”

This bleak attitude is, in many ways, McNamara’s response to the commodification of trade publishing in the 1990s, which she witnessed through her own experiences, as well as those of her late husband, Lee Goerner, an editor at Knopf. She saw the practice of nurturing young writers over time tossed out the window in favor of “the big splash,” thus alienating serious readers that publishing houses had by then come to view as “niche marketing.” This made McNamara fighting mad.

“I didn’t like what I saw happening,” she says. “I thought I knew something about what should be offered or what could be offered, so why not do it?” Thus, she launched Archipelago in 1997 to glowing reviews from everywhere from the Times Literary Supplement in London to USA Today.

While the website has always been international in perspective and tackled major issues, since 2000 Archipelago has become notably more politically outspoken. This new focus is mostly due to McNamara’s reaction to Bush’s preemptive war doctrine. She remembers thinking, “I’m not going to be a ‘good German.’ It’s so important from this moment on to register as much opposition as vocally, as clearly as possible.”

Since then she has applied the same “get up and go” attitude she took in creating Archipelago to her criticisms of the Bush Administration and the Iraq war, expressing herself in Archipelago’s endnotes. “There seems to be so little comprehension here of how we’re viewed from outside,” she says. “So it’s nice to have Archipelago to formulate my own thoughts about this.” —Nell Boeschenstein

Budget boondoggle
Albemarle wrangles with ledger while State funding remains uncertain

On Wednesday, April 14, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors will vote on the County’s fiscal 2005 budget, finalizing an even balance between $241,073,047 in expenditures and revenue. The problem, however, is that 26 percent of the County’s revenue—the chunk requested from the State—remains stuck in limbo as budget negotiations drag on in Richmond.

Only 10 people spoke during a lightly attended public hearing on the Albemarle budget last Wednesday, most of them firefighters making the case for an unfilled request for five new positions. After the 45-minute hearing was over, Supervisor Sally Thomas asked Robert W. Tucker, the County executive, to describe the resulting snafu should the uncertain State funding not come through.

“It will put localities in a very, very precarious situation,” Tucker said of the scenario in which State funding has not been secured by July, the beginning of the next fiscal year.

If the more than $61 million in projected funds from Richmond are held up beyond July, Tucker said “at best” the County would run out of money by next January. At that point, “we will be faced with borrowing funds to finish the year,” Tucker said.

An additional solution, if the drained coffer scenario plays out, would be for Albemarle to consider a tax-rate hike. Earlier in the year, the Board of Supervisors had considered knocking two cents off the real estate tax rate of 76 cents per $100 of assessed value. That proposal was later dropped. At last week’s budget hearing, Tucker said an emergency tax increase brought on by a potential State funding hole “could be significant.”

If Supervisors pass an emergency tax hike, it would affect next year’s collection, which is slated for June of 2005. Tucker says the County would likely seek to move the collection date closer to January, the month in which he says the County could run out of money. Asked if there is a precedent for a bumped-up tax collection date, Tucker says, “I’ve never done that before. Never had to.”

After closing last Wednesday’s public hearing, Board Chairman Lindsay Dorrier Jr. said he wanted to “work with” County firefighters to perhaps funnel more money to the department, particularly to the Scottsville Rescue Squad, which serves Dorrier’s district. In response to Dorrier’s suggestion, the Supervisors again raised the uncertainty caused by the State budget impasse.

Supervisor Kenneth Boyd asked what sort of wiggle room Supervisors would have to adjust items in the budget after Richmond’s contribution materializes. Tucker said Supervisors could go back to the budget and pencil in more money for firefighters or other County services if the State meets the projected $61 million for Albemarle, or exceeds it.

But, as Boyd noted later in the meeting, this flexibility “works the other way too.” When the State budget is finalized, it could include less for Albemarle than budget planners had expected. As Tucker said, “local government does not fare well” under the budget plan championed by the Republican-dominated House of Delegates.—Paul Fain

Tuesday, March 30

We’re No. 61!

In addition to scoring big in the much ballyhooed “best places to live” ranking, our area was rated in today’s release of an annual toxic chemical survey from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. First place was definitely not desirable in this list, which tallied the amount of toxic chemicals released into the environment in 2002. Albemarle County ranked an impressive 61 out of the 97 counties and cities with any recorded chemical pollution (Charlottesville was not on the list). The leader, Chesterfield County, which borders Richmond to the southwest, had more than 41 times the pollution of Albemarle. Fluvanna County ranked 17, with Lynchburg and Waynesboro at 24 and 30, respectively.

Wednesday, March 31

Governors invade the Mall

The Nook was the place to be this morning, as politicians, teachers, police officers and reporters filled the Downtown eatery to hear Virginia Governor Mark Warner speak on the budget impasse in Richmond. Warner brought a PowerPoint presentation, but instead spoke mostly off-the-cuff, stressing his decades of business experience in championing his plan to fix a State budget that “is structurally out of balance.” Warner’s colleague, Lt. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, also visited the Downtown Mall today. Kaine, a former Richmond mayor, spoke at the launch of the Democrats’ new Council campaign headquarters and voiced his support for candidates Dr. David Brown, Kendra Hamilton and Kevin Lynch, who joined him behind the podium.

Thursday, April 1

Gillen gets another go

We’re not foolin’, UVA men’s basketball coach Pete Gillen will be back next year. Despite the team’s 104-78 record over his six-year tenure and disappointing performance in the Atlantic Coast Conference, UVA Athletic Director Craig Littlepage has elected to stick with Gillen. It appears that Littlepage, himself a former hoops star and coach, was swayed by the team’s late season surge in the fully loaded ACC, a conference that sent two teams to this year’s Final Four.

Friday, April 2

Our Bulgarian buddies

Charlottesville City officials and a delegation from Bulgaria today announced a formal sister city relationship with Pleven, Bulgaria. Pleven, which is home to about three times more residents than Charlottesville, is the site of a former Roman fortress and sits about 20 miles from the Danube River. Bulgaria had hard luck in the 20th century, having fought on the losing side of both world wars and lived under Soviet rule. But the country’s economy is growing, and leaders from Pleven hope Charlottesville can advise them on bulking up the city’s tourism.

Saturday, April 3

Hair cuts for a cause

After working from 8:30am to 2pm at the JCPenney salon at Fashion Square Mall, hair designer Maria Sotherden donated two more hours of hair-cutting time to Good Cuts for a Good Cause. Proceeds from the $8 haircuts given by Sotherden and other stylists were donated to organizations that help victims of domestic violence. Virginia Attorney General Jerry Kilgore trumpeted the event, which continues throughout the State this month. Hair salon employees are on the frontline of domestic abuse, says Cartie Lominack, the director of the Shelter for Help in Emergency, a Charlottesville organization that participated in the program. Lominack says hair stylists can identify domestic violence by speaking with their customers or by seeing hard-to-spot bruises underneath hair.

Sunday, April 4

Dwindling City services?

Elizabeth Nelson in The Daily Progress today reports that Mayor Maurice Cox is warning that next year’s City budget may tilt toward cuts in services for residents. Balancing the proposed budget for 2004-2005, which goes into effect on July 1, has been a difficult process for City Councilors, in part because of declining funds from the State. But while Cox says the trend might mean less money for City services in coming years, Republican Councilor Rob Schilling told the DP that the Council should have already started planning “to live within our means.”

Monday, April 5

Honoring MLK

The City Council tonight opened the floor to public hearings on the budget and on the School Board’s unanimous vote to rename the Charlottesville Performing Arts Center the Martin Luther King, Jr. Performing Arts Center. Supporters of the proposal have gathered hundreds of signatures to bolster the name change since the campaign began in January. Tonight, proponents of the change made their case to Councilors, who have the final say on the matter. The hearing occurred one day after the 36th anniversary of the civil rights leader’s assassination in Memphis.

—Written by Paul Fain from local news sources and staff reports

We rule! Those guys drool!
Charlottesville tops best cities list. Authors cite “dignity”

When author Peter Sander rolled into Charlottesville last October to do research for a book, he had to share hotel space with a pack of brass-wielding teenagers.

“There was a high school marching band competition going on,” Sander says. “We had trouble finding a room, and when we did it was a godawful racket.”

For better or worse, Sander didn’t hold a grudge about his sleepless night. On Wednesday, March 31, Sander and co-author Bert Sperling released their book, Cities Ranked and Rated, which proclaimed Charlottesville the best place to live in America. The authors touted their book that morning on NBC’s “The Today Show,” and an article appeared in USA Today.

“We’ve done about 40 interviews today,” Sander said on Wednesday.

Last week, local media disseminated the news with the usual mixed emotions, declarations of “We’re No.1!” tempered with dread. In recent years, Charlottesville has dominated these “best places” lists the way Duke dominates the ACC, and while it’s always nice to see our town get its props, there’s the underlying fear that such accolades will bring new waves of Yankees, Hummers, soccer moms and chain restaurants.

City Hall immediately posted the news in its trophy case on www.charlottesville.org, Charlottesville’s official website, along with similar findings from magazines like Outside, Money, Tennis, Golf Digest, Modern Maturity and Reader’s Digest that throw an arbor of laurels on Charlottesville—Best Place to Live, Healthiest City for Women, Best College Town, plus some awards that might make locals say “Huh?” such as Best Retirement City for Golfers, and Best Tennis Town.

Authors Sander and Sperling used a combination of statistical analysis and subjective observation to rank more than 400 cities. In 1985, Sperling developed a computer program called “Places, U.S.A.” that allowed people to enter their personal preferences and find their own best city. Sperling offered his services to businesses and real estate agents, and later began writing magazine articles and books.

Sander, the book’s principal author, says he provided the “on-the-ground” observations of the various cities. He spent a single day in Charlottesville, enough time to see the Corner and the Downtown Mall, and to drive through some neighborhoods. He didn’t see the Wal-Mart, and claims he didn’t see any “bad” neighborhoods.

“I see it as having an understated dignity that other places don’t have,” says Sander.

Aw, yeah suck on that, Lynchburg!

Actually, our southern neighbor came in at number 15 on the list, and other Virginia cities were highly ranked—Roanoke (11), Virgina Beach (17) and Richmond (35).

What makes a great city? It’s not more highways or bigger Target stores. If local leaders want to take a lesson from his book, Sander says, the best cities use public resources to control growth.

The best cities, he says “have a strong focus on the past and the future.” States like Virginia and Washington mix a friendly business climate with government growth controls. “They’re careful about their growth patterns,” he says. “Because they know that if they’re not, they’re in trouble.”—John Borgmeyer

Clean slate?
Computerized voting machines raise tampering concerns

How secure is your vote? When George Bush lost the popular vote to Al Gore, but won the presidency anyway in 2000, it proved that botched elections and allegations of fraud are not just for obscure South American republics anymore. The fiasco prompted many localities (including Charlottesville) to replace human imperfection with what many argued would be failsafe electronic voting machines.

Now, some researchers say that many of the voting machines contain flaws that make them vulnerable to tampering: Votes can be changed, they say, ballot boxes stuffed, or whole elections rigged by a brainy teenager with $100 worth of equipment. The technology that was supposed to solve all our problems could be a huge mistake.

Could it happen here?

“When people start talking about fraudulent elections, I take it personally, because I’m the one who’s responsible,” says Sheri Iachetta, Charlottesville’s registrar.

Federal law mandates that all localities switch to computer voting by 2006, and a variety of companies have already put machines on the market. In 2002, Iachetta purchased the Hart Intercivic machine, which she says is “the lesser of all evils. Hart’s risk factors were much less than other voting machines.

“We got the best equipment that was out there,” Iachetta says.

In fact, a study commissioned by the Ohio Secretary of State found that Hart is more secure than its competitors.

The market leaders in the voting machine business, Diebold, Sequoia and ES&S, have become lightning rods for critics, of whom the most vehement is Bev Harris, who chronicles the many problems with electronic voting on her website www.blackboxvoting.org.

Several studies found the Diebold AccuVote machine extremely vulnerable to tampering (Diebold then infuriated Maryland researchers by issuing a press release claiming that their critical study actually praised Diebold machines). Further, Harris claims that software errors or mechanical failures have caused problems in more than 100 elections where voting machines have been used.

Further, Diebold chief executive Wally O’Dell is a Republican with close ties to Bush, giving rise to conspiracy theories that the company is out to rig elections.

“It gives electronic voting a bad rap,” Iachetta says. “People shouldn’t lump all voting machines together.”

Charlottesville has used Hart machines for its past four elections with no problems, Iachetta says. The City paid $252,000 to buy 60 voting machines in 2002. The City made $25,000 back by selling its old punch-card voting system to Virginia Beach, and more money is on the way from the Federal government, Iachetta says.—John Borgmeyer

Small things considered
Trivia nights reward the clutter in your mind

Do you know the color of lobster blood? Do you know which television show was the first to display bare bottoms, or which country singer met his first wife when he threw her out of a bar for fighting? Are you one of those know-it-all drunks?

If you said colorless, “NYPD Blue,” Garth Brooks and “Hell, yes,” you might have what it takes to win Charlottesville’s hottest new watering hole competition—trivia night.

The local trivia phenomenon started nearly three years ago, when Mellow Mushroom owner John Adamson decided he needed a way to boost Wednesday night business at the Corner restaurant. It caught on after just a few weeks, says Adamson, and now Buffalo Wild Wings hosts a trivia night on Wednesday as well, and Jabberwocky hosts a trivia night on Tuesdays.

Each Wednesday at around 9pm, trivia MCs Andrew Irby and Deeke Shipp run the show at the Mushroom like shock-jocks—asking questions, making jokes, then cranking up the music. Teams hand in squares of paper with their answers, and they win points for each correct response.

“It’s fun, and you can drink a little,” says UVA undergrad Doug Winnard. On a recent Wednesday evening, Irby and Shipp awarded Winnard’s five-person team a free pitcher of beer for the best team name, which is as long as it is raunchy and unprintable.

Over at BW3, the atmosphere is slightly less rowdy. For the past year, the bar has hired DJ Mike Beene, a.k.a. “M&M Express,” to host trivia contests. Like other trivia hosts, he comes up with his own questions. However, instead of offering one final prize, Beene gives $10 gift certificates to the winners of each round.

“This way, even if your team sucks for a couple of rounds, you get a fresh chance,” says Beene.

Back at Mellow Mushroom, wadded answer slips are piled at Irby’s feet, and the competition is heating up. The crowd boos too-easy or too-hard questions.

“The best questions are ones where the answer is right on the tip of your tongue,” says Adamson. “My favorite reaction is when everyone’s head collapses to the middle of the table, and they all start talking.”

In fact, the search for the perfect trivia question has spurred a rivalry between Mellow Mushroom and Jabberwocky, which started its trivia contest more than two months ago and offers identical prizes—$50, $25 and $15 gift certificates.

“Those cheesy bastards,” Mushroom’s Adamson says. “Whatever we do, they do it.” He even suspects that Jabberwocky’s trivia MCs copied a Mellow Mushroom question, one about the movie Dude, Where’s My Car?

“Maybe it’s a coincidence, but it was kinda funny,” Adamson says.

Jabberwocky manager Jason Reynolds replies: “Any question that’s the same would be purely coincidental.” The rivalry, he says, “is more on [Mellow Mushroom’s] part.”

On this Wednesday, Irby’s final question produces the head-dropping discussion that the MCs crave—put the following films in descending order according to 2002 DVD sales: Black Hawk Down, Lord of the Rings, Monsters Inc. and Training Day. The correct sequence: 3, 2, 1 and 4.

A team of law students named “It’s all relative in West Virginia” gets it right and wins the match, earning the right to participate in Mellow Mushroom’s “Tournament of Champions,” to be held later this month. The winning team actually includes a ringer—UVA law student Dave Hampton, a two-day “Jeopardy!” champion in 1999.

How many questions did he answer right tonight? “I got part of one right,” he says. “Tonight it was harder than ‘Jeopardy!’”—John Borgmeyer

Where’s the super?
Charlottesville schools set to wrap up search for new superintendent

Though the search for a new superintendent for Charlottesville City Schools is behind schedule, Linda Bowen, chair of the School Board, says the position should be filled in early May, about two months before July 1, current Superintendent Ron Hutchinson’s last day on the job.

“We think that gives us sufficient time,” Bowen says.

Last November, Bowen told C-VILLE Weekly that the Board hoped to have the new super hired by March. Bowen says the delay was due, in part, to scheduling difficulties caused by this year’s spring break. But Bowen says the hiring schedule is still on-track, “if everything works out according to plan.”

The search firm selected by the School Board to find Hutchinson’s replacement will stop accepting applications on Thursday, April 8. The recruiters will then present the resumés of top applicants to Board members in an April 21 meeting.

“We asked them to bring all the quality candidates, whether it’s five or 15,” Bowen says.

Board members will conduct interviews with their favorite candidates the week after meeting with the search firm. Then in early May, the Board hopes to make an offer and hire the new superintendent. This final stage was a debacle for the School Board during their last attempt to hire a new superintendent, in 2002, when the three top choices turned down the job offer. Hutchinson, a longtime City schools official, stepped in as an interim superintendent, and was later hired for the full two-year stint.

Bowen is optimistic that this year’s search will have a happy ending, and says the search firm has received many applications for the job.

“We’re just really excited to begin the [hiring] process,” Bowen says.—Paul Fain

Attention, Giant shoppers
Wal-Mart-fueled benefits dispute comes to local groceries

Checkout lines might not be the only lines Giant Food shoppers spot during visits to the two Charlottesville stores this week. Workers from the region’s Giant and Safeway grocery stores will vote on a new contract on March 30, and signs are pointing to a potential strike or lockout of employees, which could bring picket lines to the stores.

The two supermarket mammoths have wrangled with the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 400 over worker wages and health benefits in recent weeks. A key sticking point has been the amount clerks and meat cutters must kick in for health coverage, according to trade publication Food World.

“The Giant propaganda machine is geared up to try to convince you that you are not entitled to what you have earned. Health care, wages, pensions, premiums and many other issues are being discussed at the bargaining table,” C. James Lowthers, the president of the UFCW Local 400 said in a recent letter to Giant employees. “Giant will try to convince you that you should sacrifice things you have earned while they rake in millions of dollars in profits.”

One reported proposal from the two companies is to require new employees to work three years before they can take New Year’s Day as a holiday.

Employees at the Giant on Pantops kept mum when asked about the looming strike on a recent morning, and a union spokesperson refused to comment on contract discussions. The company negotiator did not return a call. However, both sides were preparing for a strike or lockout, with the union selecting strike captains and Giant advertising online for temporary clerk and cashier positions.

Labor costs for non-union supermarkets in the region, such as Food Lion, Whole Foods, Harris Teeter and the ever-encroaching Wal-Mart, are typically less than those for Giant and Safeway, prompting the two companies to cite the need to cut costs to maintain a competitive edge. The lead negotiator for Giant, Harry Burton, told The Washington Post that the two chains spend twice what non-union stores spend on labor, and three times more on health care.

Giant has long been the largest supermarket chain in the region, with 67 stores in Virginia. In the mid-Atlantic, the company earned $5 billion during a recent 12-month stretch, $2 billion more than Food Lion, its closest competitor, and more than double the grocery-related revenue of the region’s Wal-Marts, according to Food World. But though Securities and Exchange Commission documents show increasing sales for Giant in recent years, non-union grocery stores are closing the gap. —Paul Fain

Best laid plans
Funding questions remain after passage of Crozet Master Plan

After 12 meetings and more than two years of work, the Albemarle County Planning Commission on Tuesday, March 23, unanimously approved a comprehensive “master plan” for Crozet that seeks to shepherd the community’s growth by encouraging a focus on downtown, pedestrian options and distinct neighborhoods.

Before the vote, planners sat through a lengthy public hearing in which several Crozet residents bashed the plan. Though unmoved, planners strongly agreed with critics’ call for funding for the planned roads, sidewalks, libraries and schools.

Voicing that oft-heard refrain, longtime resident Paul Grady said the plan “is not going to amount to a hill of beans unless there is going to be infrastructure funding.”

Commissioner William Rieley added a request for the Albemarle Board of Supervisors to prioritize funding for the plan. But as Bill Edgerton of the Commission said, financial support for the plan would “require, probably, an increase in taxation. And that’s not a popular thing in Virginia right now.” (The Board of Supervisors decided, also that day, not to cut the County real estate tax by two cents, as had been discussed in earlier budget planning.)

The master plan is based on growth projections that see the rustic village growing to 12,000 residents from its current population of 3,000. During the hearing, Jack Marshall, the president of Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population, said the pace of growth requires either more funding or significant slowing. But several commissioners and residents said a rush of transplants was coming to Crozet with or without a master plan.

“This is the attempt to bridle some of the growth,” said Marcia Joseph of the Commission.

During the hearing, Crozet native R. Carroll Conley perhaps best expressed the belief that changes to the Crozet way of life were inevitable. Conley owns the J. Bruce Barnes lumber company, which he says is Crozet’s oldest business.

“We know we can’t stop growth. Crozet was the best-kept secret there ever was, I think,” Conley said. Though Conley stoically said he doesn’t oppose Crozet’s development or the master plan, he did have a beef with a proposed road that would bisect part of his lumberyard.

However, planners sought to assuage residents’ fears about road sites by saying the exact locations were not final. “We can’t draw these lines as firm lines at this point,” Edgerton said.

But though commissioners downplayed the finality of some specifics, they also stressed the plan’s overall importance. With other similar plans perhaps looming for the County, Rieley said the Crozet plan’s success “was critical for future planning in Albemarle County.”

On this point, Rieley’s fellow commissioner, Calvin Morris, again brought up money, saying the County should not draw up other master plans, “unless we’re willing to put our money where our mouth is.”—Paul Fain

Money talks
Democrats seek funds for yard signs and other “necessary evils”

Two years ago, Rob Schilling defeated Alexandria Searls to become the first Republican in 12 years to capture a City Council seat. Democrats didn’t take defeat well—Searls claimed the party let her down, and Lloyd Snook suggested he wanted to surrender the party chair. It seems the Dems are still smarting.

On March 17, former Mayor and Dem finance chair David Toscano sent out a letter apparently designed to scare the party faithful into opening their checkbooks.

“As we are all aware, our last City Council campaign had mixed success, as one Republican was able to win a seat,” Toscano writes.

“Much of this failure was caused by our own inability to organize an effective campaign from the start. We cannot afford to repeat that experience. Much is at stake.”

Specifically, the letter claims that Democrats “in recent years have pledged up to 40 percent of new revenue to meet the budget request of the school board; our Republican member would abandon that pledge.”

Snook told C-VILLE that the Democrats want to guarantee the school board a percentage of new money, while “Republicans from Washington, D.C. to Richmond to City Council are going to talk about cutting.”

The slam is misleading, counters Schilling. “Does that mean funding will be anywhere from 0 percent to 40 percent? That’s not a policy,” he says.

“Maybe some years the schools need 50 percent of new revenues, maybe some years they need 20 percent,” says Schilling. “Instead of asking for what they think they can get, the school board needs to ask for and justify what they really need.”

Regardless, Toscano’s letter indicates the Democrats plan a more aggressive stance against their Republican challengers this year. In 2002, Searls and her ticketmate Blake Caravati (the incumbent who was ultimately re-elected that year) seemed to spend more time arguing with each other than with Schilling, the lone Republican candidate.

“The single biggest difference [from two years ago] is that we have three candidates this time around who are comfortable with each other, who largely agree with one another and can share the same stage,” says Snook. “Last time, the most interesting battles were between the two Democratic candidates.”

Those intra-party rivalries also cost the Dems money in 2002. Snook estimates that six Democrats spent about $17,000 fighting each other for the party nomination then, while the Caravati-Searls campaign spent a meager $11,000 in the race against Schilling.

This year, former Councilor John Conover is running the Dems’ campaign, and he says the party’s three candidates—David Brown, Kendra Hamilton and incumbent Kevin Lynch—need to raise $30,000 to take on Republicans Ann Reinicke and Kenneth Jackson. (Independent Vance High has also declared his candidacy.) Conover estimates that about a third of the money will be spent on mailings, which he says is the best way to reach people. The rest will pay for radio and television ads and “other things.” Yard signs, says Conover, “are a necessary evil.”

In the past, Conover says, Democrats and Republicans had a friendly agreement not to put out yard signs until after the Dogwood Festival, which this year ends on April 25. No such agreement exists anymore, Conover says. Indeed, some Republican yard signs have already sprouted on City lawns.

“We’re trying to raise funds,” says Republican chair Bob Hodous, although he wouldn’t say how much the party is seeking. “We’re contacting people in ways we believe are appropriate. We’re out working.”

Democrats say they will start putting out yard signs this week, and claim they’ll be worth the wait. In what may foreshadow the tone of this spring’s race, even aesthetics has become a partisan issue.

“We took a little bit more time in terms of design aspects,” says Snook. “The graphic content of the Democratic yard signs and bumper stickers will show there has been a little bit more planning than the Republicans did.”—John Borgmeyer

Disc-o inferno
UVA’s women’s ultimate frisbee team is hot

A “huck,” in ultimate frisbee jargon, is a deep throw into enemy territory, much like a “long bomb” in football. But a frisbee can stay aloft much longer, and the dramatic moment between the throw and the catch is stretched out interminably, causing a viewer to hold several breaths instead of just one.

At a Wednesday night scrimmage, Beth Oppenheimer throws a beauty—a slightly arcing half-field huck right into the waiting hands of a teammate in the endzone. Oppenheimer, a law student, is co-captain of the UVA women’s ultimate team, Agent Orange, a little-recognized squad that has grown to 25 players from eight in 1998. For the first time ever the group is ranked the No. 1 women’s team in the country.

For those who don’t understand how frisbee can be a competitive sport, a short primer might help: Two teams put seven players on opposite ends of the field, and one team “pulls” the disc to the other (essentially a kickoff). The other team receives the disc and works it up the field toward the opposite endzone. A player may not walk with the disc—it can only be advanced by throwing it to a teammate. Meanwhile, the players on the other team try to intercept it or knock it down, resulting in a turnover. A team scores a point when one player passes the disc to a teammate in the endzone. Games are usually played to 15, and can last more than two hours.

Charlottesville has recently become a hotbed of ultimate. Besides the men’s and women’s collegiate teams, the City is home to two coed club, or post-college, teams: Monkey Knife Fight, a new squad that won two of its last four tournaments (and of which, in the interest of full disclosure, I admit to being a member), and Blue Ridge Ultimate, which competed in the national championships the past three years and took fourth place at the world championships in 2002. The Charlottesville ultimate organizers also sponsor summer and winter community tournaments for the more than 200 local players.

This is a breakout year for UVA ultimate, with Agent Orange the only undefeated team in the country at 24-0, and the men’s team, Virginia Disorder, ranked sixth in the open (a.k.a. men’s) division. “It’s an exciting time for everyone,” says Oppenheimer. “We have been working hard in our practices and I know we have the potential to do very well at nationals.”

While there is no shortage of talent on either squad, there is a dearth of resources—it’ll cost each team about $450 per player to go to the national championships in Seattle in May, where the top 16 teams in both the open and women’s divisions will battle it out for the title of national champion. With a likely spot at nationals, the UVA women are already holding fundraisers for the trip. For more fundraising information, e-mail efo5c@virginia.edu.

No matter the tournament outcome, Oppenheimer looks forward to the growing future of frisbee in the City. “I think UVA is going to have a strong women’s ultimate program for many years from this foundation we have built,” she says.—Chris Smith

Tapped out
The RWSA is running out of options

For at least one more summer, this will be the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority’s official drought management policy: Pray for rain.

It’s true. Charlottesville and Albemarle are no better equipped to handle a major drought than we were in the summer of 2002, when long showers and car washes were strictly verboten.

Don’t blame water officials, they say. Blame the State and Federal regulators instead, not to mention that nasty ol’ drought for long delays in improving the region’s water supply.

Two years ago, RWSA officials tried to implement a $13 million plan to expand the capacity of the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir in two ways: by building a 4-foot bladder across the dam to raise water levels, and by dredging out the sediment that flows into the reservoir. Sediment has reduced the reservoir’s 1.68 billion-gallon capacity by more than 500 million gallons since it was built in 1966—the last time the area expanded its water supply.

Here’s the snag: At least 11 different Federal and State agencies—including the Army Corps of Engineers, the Federal Emergency Regulatory Commission, the Federal and State departments of Fish and Game and the Department of Natural Resources—have a say in any local plan to alter the water supply. The agencies required the RWSA to include information on how a “drought of record” would affect water supply. Since the 2002 drought eclipsed a drought in 1930, the Authority had to take more time to update their data.

Then, in January, with the new “drought of record” data figured into their studies, the RWSA discovered that a 4-foot bladder on the South Fork Rivanna wouldn’t be enough to meet the region’s projected 2030 demand of 16.5 million gallons a day.

“We had to back up,” says RWSA interm director Lonnie Wood. “We can’t build this thing, then tell people we can’t meet projected demand.”

Dredging sediment out of the Rivanna reservoir was also nixed, Wood says, because the resulting pile would cover 200 acres with nine feet of muck. “There’s just no place to put it all,” says Wood.

This is just the latest in a series of wrong turns that have plagued the RWSA, as detailed in a C-VILLE cover story published on December 2, 2002.

The Authority spent $6 million and most of the ’80s planning a reservoir on Buck Mountain Creek, only to have the Environmental Protection Agency shoot down the project. Today, a new reservoir is not an option. “The regulators have told us they won’t consider any new impoundment,” says Bill Brent, director of Albemarle County’s Service Authority.

Now the RWSA is looking to raise water levels at Ragged Mountain Reservoir instead. Water officials say they understand people’s frustration, but that the RWSA is trying to both satisfy the regulatory agencies and give residents the most water for their dollar.

“We’re trying to be methodical,” says Brent. “We’ve come to many forks in the road, and we’re trying to make sure we take the right fork.”—John Borgmeyer

Green house
NatureNeutral stocks eco-friendly building supplies

Charlottesville’s newest eco-entrepreneur, John Meggs, sits among cans of nontoxic paint and samples of natural cork flooring in the new showroom of NatureNeutral, a modest but growing environmentally friendly home-improvement store in Berkmar Crossing.

Instead of delivering a slick sales pitch, Meggs emphasizes what’s missing from NatureNeutral products, including harsh chemical compounds, skin irritants and allergens. To wit, Meggs tosses a small square of fluffy blue cotton insulation from hand to hand, stopping for a moment to bring his face closer, inspecting it carefully. “See? It’s made from recycled denim,” he explains.

Sure enough, the blue coloring is not an artificial dye, and small shreds of denim are visible to the eye. Yet the biggest difference between this natural cotton insulation and its traditional fiberglass counterpart is that you don’t need to wear a respirator, safety glasses, work gloves or full skin protection when handling it.

Meggs, 42, moved to Charlottesville with his family in 2003 and launched his green business last month with NatureNeutral.com, an online store that he says gets in excess of 10,000 hits per week. That was followed by a warehouse on Greenbrier Drive and a showroom in Berkmar Crossing that opened to the public Monday, March 22.

As president of the company, Meggs started with “products that we felt people would be most comfortable with and would get the most benefit from” and stocked the shelves with bamboo flooring, nontoxic paint, eco-friendly carpets and his favorite, richly colored natural cork flooring harvested from live trees, without damaging them.

The market for environmentally friendly products is “wide open,” according to Meggs, and although green home improvement stores dot the West Coast, he admits “there’s really not a whole lot east of the Mississippi.” He’s counting on the “above average awareness about environmental issues” of local residents to sustain his business. Research from the Natural Marketing Institute confirms Meggs’ business instincts, finding that the market for eco-friendly products is 30 percent of all U.S. households.

When asked if NatureNeutral’s products cost more than traditional home products, Meggs is quick to answer, “A typical can of premium paint costs about $20-30 and our paint costs about $25-35. There is a premium to be paid in one sense, but I think you see enough of a benefit to justify the price.”

Although some people choose green home products because they find them aesthetically interesting or good conversation pieces (“Aren’t our kitchen cabinets lovely? They’re made from compressed straw”), others pick them for serious health reasons.

Scott Snow did. When building his house Stuart, Virginia, he knew he wanted nontoxic materials. After working around pesticides, Snow’s skin became irritated and developed into a condition that can occasionally flare up. “If I stay in a house that’s been newly built with conventional materials, I can feel the sensitivity in my skin coming back,” Snow says. He bought natural cotton insulation, wood stains and sealers through NatureNeutral—and drove more than two hours to pick them up.

For the chemically sensitive, green products aren’t a fad or a symbol of environmental values, they are a necessity. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Indoor Air Quality website, “building materials” are listed among common products that can “release pollutants more or less continuously” in the home. It’s for this reason that Meggs personally scrutinizes every product NatureNeutral sells, saying, “the goal in the long run is to give people safer and healthier alternatives.”—Kimberly Wilson

The home front
Foster parents open their doors while localities search for cash

Evelyn and George Riner want more kids. From the prodigious amount of laundry flapping from sagging clotheslines in their backyard, it would seem their household is already overflowing. In fact, 11 people, nine dogs and eight cats live in the Riners’ house and a double-wide trailer on the 10 acres they own in north Albemarle, but it’s not enough for Evelyn.

“I come from a big family16 kids,” she says. Evelyn grew up in Greene County with her grandfather, a Pentecostal preacher who took in runaway children. “It didn’t matter if they were kin or not,” she says. “If they were hungry, he’d take them in.”

Early in their marriage, the Riners plucked homeless kids straight off the street. Since moving to Albemarle 10 years ago, however, the family has grown by accepting foster children from the local social service system.

Both Charlottesville and Albemarle routinely remove children from troubled households and send them to live—sometimes permanently—with foster parents. The 1992 Comprehensive Services Act (CSA) requires the Commonwealth and localities to share the cost of caring for foster children, which includes living expenses, therapy and special education.

Those costs have been skyrocketing, largely driven by an increasing number of children with severe physical, mental and emotional handicaps, say local officials. In 1995, the City spent about $310,000 on CSA services, while the County spent about $450,000. By 2002 those bills climbed to about $1,705,000 for the City and more than $2,250,000 in Albemarle. In both jurisdictions, the per-child CSA service costs are climbing, although the number of Albemarle children receiving CSA services is declining. In Charlottesville, CSA cases have climbed from 189 in 1995 to 360 last year—which is about 33 percent higher than the maximum recommended by the Child Welfare League of America, according to a recent report by the local Commission on Children and Families.

“We’ve got more complex kids coming into the system,” says Kathy Ralston, Albemarle’s social service director. “It’s not just your regular foster kid that needs some loving care. They’re more disturbed. They need psychiatric care, maybe even lockdown.”

In January, a City-County report on CSA costs reported that the best way to control the climbing social services budget is to prevent the family problems that put kids in foster care in the first place—a challenging solution in times of tight State and local budgets.

In the meantime, the task of caring for troubled children falls to people like the Riners, many of whom literally devote their lives to rearing other people’s kids. Tri-Area Foster Families is a joint Charlottesville-Albemarle-Greene agency that, along with private agencies like DePaul Family Services and People Places, trains foster parents and matches them with children. The agencies provide moral support and small stipends, depending on the severity of a child’s handicaps. Children who can’t find local foster homes are sent to more expensive group homes around the state.

Most children arrive with intense histories, such as a 5-year-old boy who came to the Riners after attempting suicide. Others need almost around-the-clock attention, such as a severely handicapped boy whom Connie Tomasso took as a foster child.

“These kids have always been told they’re no good, and they come to you feeling wrong about everything,” says Tomasso, a former nurse who has fostered seven children. “You give them warmth and love, and when you make that breakthrough with them, its fantastic.”

When juvenile court judges order children into foster care, the court gives the birth family a chance to get their kids back by following a plan to correct their dysfunctions. Social service workers say they prefer that children live with either their birth families or relatives, but many times foster parents adopt their children permanently.

The Riners currently have two foster children and one adopted child in their home—a total of 12 have passed through their care (24 if you count the kids they take on weekends to give other foster parents a few days’ respite). Evelyn says she’s got no problems with the local foster system, except one—a rule that limits the number of children one household can accept. “I’d like to have five or six more if they’d give them to me. The more the merrier,” Evelyn says.—John Borgmeyer

Slice and dice
Council takes a knife to the budget

For the second time in as many Council meetings, on Monday, March 15, City Manager Gary O’Connell introduced his proposed budget to the public with what he called “a whirlwind tour of City government, from A to Z.” The short film that followed, narrated by O’Connell and produced by City public relations director Maurice Jones, featured a pulsing techno soundtrack and information on 26 highlights of City government, from its AAA bond rating to the zoning ordinance.

For those of you who missed the flick during Council’s regular meeting that night, don’t fret—you can still catch the video on Adelphia Channel 10, Government Access Television, alongside Jones’ other shows, “The Talk of Cville” and “Inside Charlottesville.”

Does Charlottesville really need two television programs emanating from City Hall? That’s the kind of question City Councilors will have to ask as they examine O’Connell’s proposed budget, in preparation of voting on a final version April 13.

When reached by C-VILLE, Councilor and incumbent candidate Kevin Lynch said he “looked at” the communication department’s $263,470 budget. (At a time when other City departments are looking for places to cut, the communications department will add a new position next year, to be financed by Adelphia as part of the cable company’s franchise agreement with the City.)

But that’s not where Lynch proposes cuts. Instead, he might take his scissors to the Charlottesville-Albemarle Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, which is asking for a 20 percent increase in funding. “I’m not convinced their outcomes warrant that,” Lynch says.

Another agency on Lynch’s list is the Thomas Jefferson Regional Partnership for Economic Development, which receives $12,500 each year from the City. “I just don’t see the return,” says Lynch, who also supports charging higher rents for artists at McGuffey Art Center and postponing some one-time capital improvements, such as undergrounding power lines.

Other Councilors have less specific ideas of where to trim the fat.

Blake Caravati wants to slice $25,000 chunks out of various programs and agencies instead of cutting whole programs. He suggests applying the savings to reduce the 911 tax (proposed to climb to $3 from $1) and provide property tax relief.

Outgoing Councilor Meredith Richards also favors more property tax relief for the poor, elderly and disabled. Simply cutting the property tax rate only helps big property owners, she says.

Council’s other lame duck, Mayor Maurice Cox, favors more property tax relief for the indigent, too, and he supports raising fees instead of cutting the budget. “We’re at the point where further cuts mean we’ll have to stop delivering certain services that people have come to rely on,” says Cox, citing as examples the City’s free pickup of leaves and big trash items.

All four Democratic Councilors blamed the City’s growing expenses on State budget cuts for police, social services and the regional jail.

Republican Rob Schilling couldn’t be reached by deadline, but last week he told WINA 1040 AM he questions the City’s plan for a major computer upgrade. Schilling actually joined his colleagues in unanimous support of the upgrade last month.—John Borgmeyer

Always on track
Holmes Brown dipped into his athletic past to name Head Start

At 90 years old, Holmes Brown still plays tennis every week. Slight, spry and sitting in his office wallpapered with tennis racquets, the lifelong public relations guru is as ready to talk about capitalism in Russia as he is to talk about the bust he is sculpting of his neighbor. On the wall hang personal letters from Lady Bird Johnson and Ronald Reagan, a copy of the famed Dean’s List of Nixon’s enemies on which his name is marked as business enemy No. 2, his track shoes from 1936, and a Head Start flag. Brown is not merely a collector of Americana: Among countless other things, he helped establish the preschool poverty-intervention program known as Head Start. In fact, he named the thing.

Initiated in 1964 through Sargent Shriver’s Office of Economic Opportunity, as part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty program, Head Start was founded on the belief that to break the cycle of poverty the government had to provide poor preschool-age children with compensatory tools to address their socioeconomic disadvantages.

In 1964, some expert PR work was needed to guarantee the 90 percent Federal funding this new program required. As with almost everything, the first public relations endeavor was finding the right name. Enter Holmes Brown, who had just accepted the position Director of Public Affairs at the Office of Economic Opportunity on a volunteer basis.

Brown and Shriver were riding in Shriver’s limousine one day and, Brown recalls, “[Shriver] says, ‘We got to think of the name of this thing before we go to Congress to pick up this dough. It’s got to be something athletic. Baseball,’ he said. ‘What about a Fourth Strike or a Base on Balls or Homerun?’

“And I said, ‘Sarge, you may be a baseball player, but I’m a track man, and what do you want in track? You want a head start.’”

Even this was not Brown’s high point, however. Everybody has one special talent, and he modestly claims his is letter writing. He’s referring specifically to the letter he wrote and mailed to 100,000 educators up and down the East Coast in one weekend, encouraging them to write back in support of Head Start’s creation.

“I worked like hell to get these things out over the weekend,” Brown says, laughing. “And when [Shriver and I] met on Monday and he said ‘Have you got any returns on any of those letters yet?’ and I said ‘No! I don’t think anybody’s even read one yet.’ Tuesday, two or three trickled in, and each day he kept asking. By the end of two weeks we had 13,000 acceptances and were able to turn every one into a Head Start program.”

The Monticello Area Community Action Agency (MACAA) provides Head Start in Charlottesville, serving approximately 230 children each year. Due to recent budget cuts, MACAA has had to eliminate a couple of its programs, but the leadership there hopes for a bit of a reprieve thanks to the proceeds earmarked for Head Start from this year’s Charlottesville 10-Miler. Holmes Brown, trackman that he is, will be there at the 10-Miler on Saturday, April 3, as the honorary starter. He’ll fire the gun, start the race and probably tell a couple of stories.—Nell Boeschenstein

Quotes for votes
Council candidates expound at first forum

All six candidates for Charlottesville’s City Council came together to speechify and answer questions during the election’s first forum Thursday, March 18, which was sponsored by the Virginia Organizing Project and other local groups. Though the candidates’ meeting at the Monticello Event and Conference Center lasted two hours, their statements were both substantive and entertaining enough to keep audience attrition relatively light.—Paul Fain

Best money line

Republican Kenneth Jackson, who in explaining how he would trim back what he sees as a City budget “filled and primed with pork,” said, “you cut the fat at the top.” Democrat Kendra Hamilton also had several good soundbites, including, “I think we’re spending too much to lock people up.”

Best use of brevity

Democrat David Brown, whose two responses to questions on gay marriage and possible new nuclear reactors in Louisa County lasted a combined total of about 10 seconds. Brown supports gay marriage and is concerned about the reactors.

Best “get tough on artists” line

Independent Vance High, who, when asked whether he would evict artists from the McGuffey Art Center in favor of housing, responded with a yes, saying “artists are artists” and “they can find another space.” The response was the first by a candidate not to garner any applause.

Best argument for incumbency

Democrat Councilor Kevin Lynch, who gave the “there is quite a lot that I think the City is already doing” response or something similar to several questions. Lynch often followed up with something along the lines of “Now have we done enough? Of course not.”

Best shot at high-dollar developments

Hamilton, who said kicking artists out of McGuffey to create housing would likely just “be another opportunity to sell $450,000 condos.”

Best appeal to populism

Republican Ann Reinicke, who mentioned the “high-crime neighborhood” in which she lives, her role as a foster parent and mentor, as well as her commitment to affordable housing and helping single parents and at-risk kids.

Best failed pop culture reference

High, who mangled the woefully outdated Wendy’s slogan “Where’s the beef?” with what sounded like “Show me the beef.”

Most inappropriate rejoinder to a question

When asked what he thought of the two competing State budgets, Jackson said, “I’m not going to get into this Democrat and Republican thing because I think it’s childish.”

Best smackdown

Jackson, who said that a Council ruling on gay marriage, which he does not support, would be a “fake” proclamation. “It doesn’t mean squat,” Jackson said. “That’s not my ball of wax.” “

Can we talk?”
Meeting in the works for Councilors and Supes

With controversial transportation projects dominating local politics, members of Charlottesville City Council and the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors think it’s time to get together for a chat.

“I personally think some dialogue between our groups is needed,” says Supervisor Kenneth Boyd.

Though members from the two groups of politicos meet regularly while working on as many as 25 joint panels and commissions, such meetings usually only include a couple representatives from both sides. A full joint meeting hasn’t happened for about two years, so Boyd and Councilor Kevin Lynch got the ball rolling for the huddle, which might occur before the end of the month.

According to Mayor Maurice Cox, likely topics for the discussion would include the proposed U.S. 29 Western Bypass, the Meadowcreek Parkway and a plan, which is being developed by the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission, for transportation improvements along the 29N corridor and Hydraulic Road. Cox says the County’s growth strategies for 29N and Crozet are taking retail revenue away from the City.

“I’m not sure if Albemarle is aware of the negative impacts of that type of development on the City,” Cox says. “As two bodies, we haven’t focused on it and addressed it.”

During the March 17 meeting at the County Office Building, Supervisors voiced support for a powwow with the City. But Supervisor Sally Thomas expressed wariness about a politically charged discussion that could be light on substance.

“They’re really eager to tell us what to do with roads in our community,” Thomas said during the Supervisors’ meeting.

Supervisor Dennis Rooker, who supports the meeting idea, says local politicians possess varying levels of expertise on roads and development. This is because Councilors and Supervisors can’t be experts on everything, and must choose issues on which to specialize, Rooker says. As a result, a full meeting could be a challenge.

“Often it’s easier to get things accomplished in a small group,” Rooker says.

With three City Council seats up for grabs in the May election, Supervisors had a mild disagreement Wednesday night about when to schedule the meeting. Rooker suggested waiting until after the election, when new Councilors would be on board. But Boyd said a preelection meeting would take advantage of the “tremendous experience” Council will lose with the departure of Cox, Meredith Richards and, perhaps, Lynch, who is up for reelection. Rooker later said he was amenable to an earlier date.

“Anytime’s fine,” Rooker says of the meeting.

If indeed a meeting can be scheduled during the busy budget season, Richards, the City’s Vice-Mayor, says she will push for the City and County to take advantage of a new Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) program that allows local jurisdictions to seize the reins of road projects from VDOT.

“I don’t think VDOT has the capacity in its culture to build the kind of parkway we have in mind,” Richards says. “We can do a better job and do it more effectively.”—Paul Fain with additional reporting by John Borgmeyer.

Fight club
UVA student sues his attacker

Perhaps UVA’s diversity training isn’t reaching its target audience. On March 17, UVA senior Luis Avila filed a lawsuit against senior Joshua Weatherbee and his fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi, after Weatherbee beat up Avila in an allegedly racially motivated attack.

According to documents filed last week in Charlottesville Circuit Court by Avila’s lawyer, Ed Wayland, the incident happened at an Alpha Delta Phi party on September 19. Weatherbee “drank a number of alcoholic beverages and became intoxicated,” and “stated to several members of Alpha Delta Phi during the course of the party that it was his intention to punch or strike Avila if he came to the party,” according to the suit.

The suit alleges Avila had been invited to party as a guest of Alpha Delta Phi, and when he finally arrived fraternity pledgemaster Weatherbee made good on his threat. According to the suit, Weatherbee attacked Avila without any provocation, “striking him with his fists in his face and body, throwing him to the floor, falling on him and striking him repeatedly.”

The suit claims Weatherbee told Avila, a native of Peru and a legal permanent resident of the United States, that he “should go back to Mexico” and that he “should be washing my dishes.” The suit also claims Weatherbee repeatedly told Avila, “I’m going to fucking kill you.”

The suit claims that “the members of Alpha Delta Phi, with one exception, took no action to protect Avila.” The suit says fraternity member Christopher Dow pulled Weatherbee off Avila, but Weatherbee renewed the attack. Dow pulled Weatherbee away a second time, and Avila escaped into the front yard, where a friend tried to drive Avila to the hospital. The suit says Weatherbee chased Avila around the car, reiterating that he was “going to fucking kill” the plaintiff.

The suit says Avila stayed at UVA Medical Center until the next afternoon, suffering cuts and bruises, a black eye and broken bones in his face. The suit also claims Avila suffered “pain, limitation of activities, emotional distress, fear, anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, humiliation” and he considered dropping out of school for the semester as a result of the attack.

Avila says his injuries were so severe he missed weeks of school and work. “The doctor said that if it was just a little worse, I could have actually lost my sight,” Avila told C-VILLE. “It was that severe.”

On December 12, Weatherbee pleaded guilty to assault and battery in Charlottesville General District Court. He was sentenced to 12 months in jail, with all but 30 days suspended.

Avila’s civil suit asks Weatherbee to pay $300,000 in compensatory and punitive damages for assault and battery and for racial intimidation. It also asks the fraternity’s parent company, Alpha Delta Phi of Virginia, Inc., to pay $300,000 for negligence, alleging that the fraternity had a duty to protect Avila, since he attended the party as a guest.

Weatherbee could not be reached by presstime and his lawyer, Robert Hagy II of Palmyra, declined to comment on the suit.—John Borgmeyer

Utility infielder
When it comes to local baseball, nobody pitches in more than Darrell Gardner

Charlottesville enjoyed a taste of spring sunshine on March 6 and 7, and, fittingly, the Lane Babe Ruth baseball league held its preseason tryouts that very weekend on Darrell Gardner Field at Lane Park on McIntire Road.

After the tryouts wrapped up on Sunday, 71-year-old Darrell Gardner—clad in a dusty black baseball cap promoting “The G Field at Lane Park”—parked a small lawn tractor near third base and hooked a rusty metal drag to the back. The tractor started with a sputter and Mr. G, as he’s known around the diamond, putt-putted toward second base at a painstakingly slow pace, the iron smoothing the dirt behind him.

In a town where many local sports venues bear the names of wealthy donors, Gardner’s investment in the local ballpark is measured in decades, not dollars.

“He eats, sleeps and drinks Lane League baseball,” says attorney Bruce Maxa, a local coach and longtime friend of Gardner’s. “He’s the backbone of the league. I guess that’s why they named the field after him.”

For 30 years, Gardner has coached, umpired, kept official statistics and belonged to the board of directors for the local Babe Ruth baseball league, for players ages 13-19. He is perhaps best known as the longtime groundskeeper who has overseen Lane Park’s evolution into one of the region’s best youth baseball fields. In 2001, the Lane Babe Ruth Board of Directors voted to name the field—which is owned by Albemarle County but maintained by the league—in Gardner’s honor.

“The board must have had a mental lapse when they did that,” chuckles Gardner, a lifetime baseball fan who “bawls like a baby” every time he watches Field of Dreams. “Having a farmer’s background, I like working with the grounds,” Gardner says.

Gardner is the first to admit he’s had some help making the field what it is. In the early ’90s, the league added grass to the infield. Later in the decade, local Boy Scouts renovated the bleachers, bathrooms and scorekeeper’s booth. And, in 2002, the league added a 25-foot fence along the McIntire Road side of the field to prevent home runs from hitting passing cars.

Jon-Mikel Whalen, who will play in the Lane League’s 14-15-year-old division this spring, calls Gardner “the father of the field.

“I played all around the state on a traveling team this summer,” says Whalen. Gardner Field, he says, “is definitely the nicest.”

Although Gardner has spent the past 53 years in Charlottesville—where Major League loyalties seem split between Baltimore and Atlanta—the Illinois native remains a staunch St. Louis Cardinals fan.

“I used to hitchhike down to old Sportsman’s Park,” says Gardner, who keeps the left fielder’s glove he used in high school tacked to the wall in the scorekeeper’s booth, which serves as a display case for Gardner’s baseball memorabilia.

After a stint in the Army that sent him to Korea, Gardner returned to Virginia to attend Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University). In 1960, he began a 22-year career teaching marketing education to Albemarle High School students. As his three sons went through the local Babe Ruth League, Gardner discovered that hanging with kids on the diamond could be a lot more fun than doing it in the classroom.

“He would always ask us about the field. He would ask ‘How’s the mound? Does it need to be wider? Taller?’” recalls Larry Mitchell, a former Lane Leaguer who pitched for the Philadelphia Phillies from 1992 to 1997 before returning to coach baseball at Charlottesville High School.

“What comes to my mind is [Gardner] out on that tractor cutting grass on hot sunny days,” says Mitchell. “He’s a tireless worker. He’s definitely trying to build the field of dreams on a daily basis.”

For both farmers and ballplayers, spring is a time for sowing seeds. As the teenage players work out their arms and practice their swings in hopes of reaping victory this summer, Gardner tends the park as his gift to the future.

“I want to make this the best field I can for the kids,” he says.—John Borgmeyer

Bypass, what bypass?
Lynchburg has road worries of its own

Like most Virginians, Lynchburg residents get worked up over roads. However, the stretch of pavement that most rankles ’burg residents might not be the proposed U.S. 29 Western Bypass around Charlottesville, which has agitated lawmakers in Richmond of late, but the bypass currently being built in Madison Heights, a Lynchburg suburb.

When asked about the Charlottesville bypass debate, Dorie Smiley, who was strolling down Main Street in Lynchburg on a recent morning, quickly switches gears to gripe about the Madison Heights construction, which she says has created “impossible” traffic problems. Smiley has heard about the fuss over a Charlottesville bypass, but admits she knows little about the dispute, “other than that it’s taken 100 years.”

The battle over a stalled plan for a western bypass around Charlottesville is an old one, dating back about 17 years. The latest volley in the General Assembly last week resulted in a relatively toothless bill in support of the bypass. But the road war between Lynchburg and Charlottesville goes back further than 17 years, to an old spurning of the southern neighbor.

“It’s not so much about Charlottesville as it is that we’ve been bypassed, so to speak,” says Darrell Laurant, a longtime columnist for The News & Advance in Lynchburg, of resentment stemming from the 1961 decision to run I-64 through Charlottesville instead of Lynchburg. The State had endorsed the Lynchburg route, but was overruled by the Feds. Smiley and others cite a legend, popular in Lynchburg, that Charlottesville may have exploited a local resident’s connections with President John F. Kennedy to snag I-64.

Regardless of whether Lynchburg was cheated out of I-64, Laurant says some locals still carry a grudge about the decision. He jokingly says that all of the town’s woes are blamed on the lack of an interstate.

Lynchburg, a city of 65,000, certainly has its share of problems. According to Mayor Carl B. Hutcherson Jr., the city faces a budget gap of “unprecedented proportions.” Hutcherson supports the building of a bypass around Charlottesville, saying it “would enhance transportation all the way down the corridor” from Washington, D.C. to North Carolina. However, Hutcherson, who spent some time at UVA and whose daughter went to the University, says the money crunch and several local construction projects, including the local bypass, have surpassed the Charlottesville road on his list of priorities.

“We’ve had so many other issues that we’ve had to deal with,” Hutcherson says. “We’re looking at our own transportation. We’ve got to concentrate on that.”

But across town, in the office of the Lynchburg Chamber of Commerce, fighting for a bypass around Charlottesville is Job One. Rex Hammond, the chamber president, calls U.S. 29 “the lifeblood of our community” and says the manufacturing town depends on truck traffic, tourists and salespeople that travel on the road.

“These groups are not being served by being forced through a bottleneck,” Hammond says of the string of traffic lights along the road in Albemarle County.

Hammond’s main beef with Charlottesville’s leaders is that he claims they are pulling out of a longstanding agreement among several localities to build bypasses along U.S. 29. Hammond says he understands that the “political undercurrents” are different in Charlottesville than they are in Lynchburg. But though he says it’s prudent for Charlottesville’s leaders to listen to the “pro-environmentalist, anti-growth voices” that oppose the Western Bypass, he thinks it’s wrong “to have progress stymied by these opponents.”

The Lynchburg media has covered the Charlottesville bypass debate, and many local residents there are aware of the issue. But the mayor laughs at the question of whether people are stewing with anger at Charlottesville. As columnist Laurant sees it, if Lynchburg residents reflect on Charlottesville at all, they might think only that the neighbor to the northeast is expensive and perhaps a little liberal.

“We don’t even pay that much attention to Roanoke,” Laurant says. (Roanoke is about 55 miles east of Lynchburg.)

In a worst-case scenario, Laurant says, people sometimes lump Charlottesville in with Northern Virginia.

Angie, 45, of Lynchburg, calls the bottleneck in Charlottesville “a pain in the butt.

“It’s almost like being in Washington, D.C.—that one spot,” Angie says, adding, “Charlottesville’s screwy. You get lost there.”

But Angie, whose daughter attended Virginia Polytechnic Institute and who would not give a reporter her surname, may harbor resentments that go beyond bypass brawls. The schism over college allegiances is a common one in Lynchburg, with Laurant claiming that the town is split evenly between Hoo and Hokie fans. If you lean toward Tech in Lynchburg, perhaps you’re simply inclined to dislike that college town up north.—Paul Fain

Choice across party lines
Midwifery, it seems, is a reproductive issue many can agree on“

I can legally have a baby at home by myself, but it’s illegal to have a skilled professional assist me,” says Charlottesville mother Julia Weissman, who had her boys, Jonah and Tim, at home. “Does that make sense?”

Not legal, yet not prosecuted, home midwifery is underground in Virginia. But new light is being shed on its practice, due to bi-partisan support of an issue that traditionally divides legislators: a woman’s reproductive rights.

“Birth is part of the reproductive process,” says Delegate Phil Hamilton, R-93rd District, chair of Virginia’s House Health, Welfare & Institutions Committee. “If women have the right to abort, what about the right to birth?…A woman ought to have the right to choose the birthing method she wants.”

Earlier this year, Hamilton co-sponsored H.B. 581, a bill to legalize midwifery in Virginia and allow certified professional midwives to perform out-of-hospital births, as is done in all but seven states.

Interestingly, Hamilton and co-sponsor Delegate Allen Dudley, R-9th District, both Republicans, are endorsed by the Virginia Society for Human Life (VSHL), a pro-life lobby. The bill’s third sponsor was Adam Ebbin, a Democrat from the 49th District endorsed by the National Organization for Women, a pro-choice PAC.

“It’s not political,” says Hamilton of the unexpected alliance. “It’s a policy issue.”

According to state records, in 2002 there were 404 home births in Virginia. Legislators were facing an empirical reality. “People finally got the message that there were more and more of these births occurring,” says Hamilton.

In committee, Delegate Rob Bell, a Republican who represents Albemarle and whose sister was born at home, laments midwives’ current legal limbo. “The current legal structure is the worst of both worlds We should license it or outlaw it,” Bell wrote in an e-mail, adding that he favors the former. “If a woman wants to home birth, we should set up a system so she can do it.” Delegate Mitch Van Yahres, a Democrat from Charlottesville, agrees, as do many constituents in Charlottesville, which had 30 home births last year. Van Yahres says, “This issue generates more e-mail than anything else.”

The House passed H.B. 581 by a vote of 91-9. However, it was subsequently killed in the Senate Committee on Education and Health by a vote of 10-5.

What stopped the bill? “The medical lobby,” Hamilton figures. Among the “nays” was Senator Russel Potts Jr., R-27th District, chair of the Senate Committee, who received more than $50,000 in contributions from the Virginia Medical Society and the Virginia Hospital & Healthcare Association PAC.

The bill’s detractors largely follow the position of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), that childbirth presents hazards that can only be addressed by a hospital setting. In 2002, ACOG reported that the risk of death to infants delivered at home is nearly twice that of newborns delivered in hospitals.

Midwifery advocates cite major flaws in ACOG’s report, noting a previous study using virtually identical data that found no difference in outcome between home and hospital birth.

“It’s a draw,” says Jen Downey, a Charlottesville mother who gave birth to her daughter Lil at home, and testified in Richmond in support of the bill. “Anyone who looks at the data cannot help but accept that they appear to be on par.”

Coincidentally, ACOG is supportive of a woman’s right to birth choice—when it comes to cesareans. In a recent statement, ACOG disregarded evidence that c-sections lead to more complications, and suggested that doctors cannot ethically deny a woman an elective cesarean. But, by the same token, can they, or the State, ethically deny them a midwife?

“You get this feeling that everyone’s saying, ‘We can’t let these poor mothers make decisions for themselves,’“ says Weissman.—Brian Wimer

Turning the Page
New owner saves Batesville’s general store

For Realtor Norm Jenkins, it was more than a store. Sure, Page’s Store in Batesville was the town’s single outlet for grabbing a quick snack or beer. But as Jenkins and the rest of the town knew, as the last business in town Page’s also literally defined Batesville—and if someone didn’t buy the property soon the town would lose its identity. So with no other good options in sight, he bought it himself.

As C-VILLE reported last year [“Batesville RFD,” Fishbowl, May 6, 2003], the clock was ticking for Page’s Store. In 2001, the general store/post office, originally opened in 1914, closed shop. As the two-year vacancy mark approached last year, so did the impending loss of its grandfather clause exception to rural area zoning laws. If no commercial entity moved in it would revert to residential zoning, and Batesville would lose its own ZIP code and identity, like so many other hamlets before it.

The town’s response was informal and off the record, but residents yearned for the store to reopen as rumors floated about its next incarnation, everything from new housing to a recording studio.

The ideas just didn’t sing to many, especially not Jenkins. A resident of nearby Afton, who at one time lived in Batesville, Jenkins was disenchanted with the proposed transformation of the town center. So in January he bought the building for $200,000. Now, with help from Charlie Page, who ran his family’s former store from 1970 to 1994, he’s revamping its interior and stocking its counter with such modern delights as deli sandwiches and Greenberry’s coffee. As he prepares for the March 20 reopening, surrounded by new wood and old furnishings, Jenkins wants to make sure nothing gets lost along the way.

“Page’s has always been the place where, at the end of the day, people stop by to pick up a few things and catch up,” he says. While it may have been the only place within five miles to grab a quart of milk, the little market where neighbors said hello also served to remind people they were living in a community that isn’t defined solely by its conveniences.

Yet Jenkins knows that without those conveniences the center would not hold, but move outward, leaving Batesville less intact and self-sufficient than it was decades ago when it counted five stores among its businesses.

“It was my love for the store,” says Jenkins of his decision to cheat the clause and keep Page’s alive. “My love for Batesville.”—Sheila Pell