Author: c-ville-weekly-writers

Commons grounded

Council tables controversial project, promising change is on the way

For now, at least, the stretch of Preston Avenue in front of the Monticello Dairy Building will stay as it is—a triangle-shaped island of grass and empty beer bottles, bordered by the convoluted intersection of Preston, Grady Avenue and 10th Street, along with parking lots, cars and shops ensconced in the 1937 dairy building.

On Monday, March 1, a group of Preston business owners effectively thwarted a City plan to turn the 1.4 acre parcel into about 50,000 square feet of condominiums and office space.

Blake Caravati joined fellow Councilors Rob Schilling and Meredith Richards in a 3-2 vote to kill City plans for the project, with Mayor Maurice Cox and Kevin Lynch opposing; also, Council unanimously voted to form a committee that will study redevelopment opportunities on Preston, from the 10th and Grady intersection eastward.

“I hope there’s as much momentum to create something [on Preston] as there has been to stop something,” Cox said after the vote. The lame duck Mayor and retiring City planning director Satyendra Huja had championed the controversial plan, known as Preston Commons.

Contending with opposition from residents and apathy from developers, Cox formed a toothless “Mayor’s Advisory Committee” last year. Its task: to receive responses to a “Request for Qualifications,” a rarely extended invitation from the City that asks developers for their resumés, but doesn’t ask for specific ideas.

Only two developers submitted proposals; both asked to buy the property, and one asked the City to forget Preston Commons and begin redevelopment on sites to the east.

After killing Preston Commons, Councilors agreed that redevelopment would nonetheless come to that area. A 2000 study by the design firm Torti Gallas recommends mixed-use redevelopment for Charlottesville’s “commercial corridors” on Preston, Cherry Avenue, Fifth Street Extended and River Road. But local business owners disparaged the study, because it does not mention extant businesses that could be displaced or disadvantaged during construction.

Cox says Preston is “certainly underutilized,” and said during the Council meeting that Charlottesville must redevelop, given that the swelling City budget relies heavily on property taxes. “If we wait until the market says it’s O.K. to build on Preston Avenue, we’ll have had to make some severe cuts,” said Cox.

Hey, big spender

More than 35 percent of City revenue comes from real estate taxes—that’s too much, said City Manager Gary O’Connell on March 1 as he introduced Charlottesville’s FY 2004-05 budget, adding that there are few places left to turn for money.

The budget totals $105,813,350—a nearly 7 percent jump from 2004. O’Connell says Charlottesville is facing new expenses (namely, school construction projects and Ivy Landfill clean-up), as well as declining revenues from Richmond for the Regional Jail and youth services.

O’Connell has proposed the following to cover the mounting costs:

n Increase cigarette tax to 25 cents per pack;

n Increase the E-911 tax to $3 per phone line;

n Increase trash fees by 5 percent;

n Increase various building permits and fees;

n Increase public safety fees for finge printing, false alarms and copying reports;

n Increase commercial utility rates.

The Commonwealth’s financial woes may also impact the City’s bond rating, which determines the rate at which the City can borrow money. O’Connell says that given the State’s shakiness, the credit rating agencies will look skeptically at Virginia cities now. Charlottesville’s proposed budget suggests issuing $10 million in bonds for capital projects.

The current and proposed budgets are available on the City’s website, www.charlottesville.org. Click on the “Resident” link, locate the budgets, then register your thoughts with the online Budget Forum.—John Borgmeyer

Passage to India

Local companies send jobs to South Asia

Senator John Kerry, the newly anointed Democratic nominee for President, has been fulminating over “Benedict Arnold CEOs” who are “sending American jobs overseas.” Kerry and other politicians have leveled these charges at the growing trend of “offshoring,” in which American firms send information technology or other white-collar jobs to developing countries, often India.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) recently found itself in the crosshairs when The Wall Street Journal wrote about the company’s plan to move 3,000 high-paying programming jobs out of the United States this year.

Smaller companies are also taking advantage of an increasingly wired globe, including some based in Charlottesville, with at least three local firms now hiring help in India.

Through a contract with an Indian data collection firm, SNL Financial has operated an office of 40 workers in Ahmedabad, India, since last summer, according to Mike Chinn, SNL’s president. And Brad Lamb, the president of InteLex, an academic publishing firm headquartered in Charlottesville, says his company has employed an Indian data entry firm for more than a decade. A third local company, the National Law Library, declined to discuss its work in India, but did not deny hiring help overseas.

InteLex produces electronic versions of scholarly texts, the hard copies of which are scanned by the company, sent to India and then typed-in twice by workers there to create accurate electronic versions. U.S. companies commonly outsource this process, which is called “double keying.” Lamb says that if any American companies are double keying, it’s with offshore subcontractors.

Tim Grubbs, a text editor for InteLex, traveled last year to see his company’s contractor operation in Bangalore, India. Though Lamb and Grubbs say the company took steps to assure that its contract workers were treated well, such as paying them 30 percent more than the local industry standard, Grubbs says he had some worries before the tour.

“I really went into it with some apprehension,” Grubbs says, admitting that he wondered, “Is this going to be a sweatshop?”

The office is located in an upscale suburb of Bangalore, a city of about 6.5 million people. Grubbs says the well-dressed workers were typing on about 50 computers in a room that looked like it could be located on the second floor of a building on Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall. He says the employees took regular Chai breaks on the rooftop.

“[I] was very impressed,” Grubbs says. “It seemed like a dream job for a lot of those people.”

Chinn at SNL stresses that his company’s contractors in India are not replacements for liquidated local jobs, but are part of an overall expansion of the company. SNL trained the employees, who are hired through a contractor, even bringing several of the “team leaders” to Charlottesville. He says the data analysis done in India is “largely still manual” and is most helpful when SNL crunches data around the quarterly reporting cycles of the financial corporations it analyzes, a time when “the sheer volume of information that becomes available is overwhelming.”

The appeal of hiring help in Ahmedabad, a city that is home to more than 5 million people and massive pollution problems, is that the English-speaking population includes “a large pool of people with accounting skills,” Chinn says. Also, the time difference between the two countries can be helpful, because, as one Indian data processing firm says on its website, “While the U.S. sleeps, India works, and vice-versa.”

Cost is obviously an important factor in offshoring. Chinn says that for the work in India, SNL spends about 25 percent to 30 percent of what it would to hire comparable American employees for the job. Furthermore, Chinn says the cheaper skilled labor is important for SNL to stay competitive, particularly because he says industry rivals such as Bloomberg, Thompson and Reuters are also engaging in offshoring.

“In order to sort of stay ahead, we felt like we had to do this now,” Chinn says, adding that he feels that most local SNL employees “understand why [offshoring] should benefit them in the long run.”

Chinn says SNL’s operations in India have been a success, and that “we expect the office to grow.” The company is also looking at new offshore locations in countries such as Pakistan and the Philippines.

Analysts predict that many U.S. companies will join SNL in ramping-up overseas outsourcing. A recent report from Forrester Research estimates that 3.3 million U.S. jobs and $136 billion in wages will have moved to developing countries between 2000 and 2015.

Charlottesville resident Ariel MacLean has been a private job search consultant for almost 15 years. She says the skills of many of her tech-oriented clients are becoming obsolete, partially because of offshoring. However, she stops well short of blaming that trend for local and national employment woes, calling the protectionist rumblings from Kerry and others “just rhetoric.”

“It’s a one-world economy,” MacLean says. “It’s the way of the dollar. It’s nothing personal.”

Grubbs of InteLex says he hopes the backlash caused by offshoring doesn’t fall on India.

“It’s a very intelligent culture that’s just starting to shine now,” he says.—Paul Fain

Popular click

Meet George Edward Loper, gentleman journalist

Aquick Internet search for any Charlottesville newsmaker is likely to yield dozens of links to www.loper.org/~george. For example, Google finds a whopping 63 links for City Councilor Rob Schilling on the site, which is run by George Loper, 57, a local liberal and media maven.

“I saw things I’d forgotten I’d even written,” says Lloyd Snook, local Democratic Party chairperson, of the links his name turned up on the Loper page.

With deep archives stretching back to 1996 and beyond, and a daily drumbeat of content, some of it original, the Loper webpage has become a repository of information on local politics and personalities, as well as national issues that are hot in progressive circles.

“It’s completely arbitrary,” Loper says of the material on his site, most of which are links to news articles and letters from readers. On a recent sunny morning at his office, which is on the second floor of his home in the Greenbrier neighborhood, Loper points to a two-foot-tall stack of newspaper clippings that is to be scanned and uploaded to his website.

Loper sporadically hires two writers to help him write for the free webpage, and regularly sends e-mails to a list of about 350 people who signed up to receive updates. And though Loper works with and has served on the boards of several local groups, including Planned Parenthood and the Piedmont Housing Alliance, running the giant website is his chief calling.

Loper may be the site’s editor, but he says he doesn’t personally agree with the majority of its material.

“If you’ve got a good discourse, then things will come out right. My contribution is not about advancing agendas,” Loper says.

So what drives Loper to be the de facto archivist of local politics?

Loper, who has a master’s degree in social work, says he created the site in part because he missed the “intellectual dialogue” of the UVA community, which he had not been directly involved with since he finished postgraduate work there in 1982. (Loper’s wife, Ann Booker Loper, is a professor and director of programs in clinical and school psychology at UVA’s Curry School.)

“I had some time on my hands and I wanted to see what was going on,” Loper says of his decision to start the website about a decade ago. “By giving other people voice, it also gives me voice.”

Loper’s political ideology has shifted a great deal since his teenage days in San Antonio, Texas, where he says he was a “Barry Goldwater conservative.” While at the University of Texas at Austin during the Vietnam War, Loper, a conscientious objector, decided that certain situations require Federal involvement, and a devout Democrat was born.

When asked if he ever wishes he’d become a professional journalist, Loper says, “Oh absolutely.” But though his site, which he admits is about what interests him, might not qualify as pure journalism, it certainly pursues several journalistic goals, including holding local figures accountable. When a noteworthy statement is made in Charlottesville, it likely lands on Loper’s site—and stays there.

“If you ever thought that e-mail is not a permanent thing, you’re sure wrong where George is concerned,” Snook says.—Paul Fain

High expectations

Independent Vance High wants to drop science on City Hall

The notion that Charlottesville is getting too big too fast isn’t uncommon. Nor is it unusual, as election season draws near, for squeaky wheels to get louder.

Vance High isn’t mad mad. Irked is more like it. When the City began considering plans for a new residential development in a wooded area near his home on Cleveland Avenue, High realized he would lose the sound of horned owls at night and the sight of blue herons in the morning. Charlottesville can’t afford to keep paving natural areas, he says.

“Green space needs to be protected, and the neighbors need to be addressed when developments are coming,” says High. “That’s what got me off the bench.”

That the City needs better public relations is an oft-heard complaint—witness last week’s demise of Mayor Maurice Cox’s plans to redevelop Preston Avenue [see “Commons grounded,” p. 9]. Local business owners opposed that project, Preston Commons, and decried the City’s “arrogance.”

High, who is 46, doesn’t seem like a ruckus raiser. Bespectacled and slight, he fits the image of a science teacher, a job he’s done in both Charlottesville and Snohomish, Washington. High’s scientific background (he has masters degrees in epidemiology and science education) earned him the support of Council-watcher Peter Kleeman.

“He wants to know: How much pollution is in our waterways? Is the City concerned about it?” says Kleeman. “He’s willing to take his camera and his chemistry set out and ask, ‘What’s really going on out here?’”

Last week, as High struggled to obtain the 125 registered voter signatures he needed by Tuesday, March 2, he posted a message on George Loper’s website (http://george.loper.org) offering to buy dinner at C&O for whomever helped him round up signatures. High got help from both Kleeman and Dudley Marsteller, but High says neither accepted the dinner offer. [For more on Loper, see page 13].

With no party apparatus to help raise money and mobilize voters, High is at a clear disadvantage compared to the other five candidates. No independent has won a Council seat in recent elections. James King ran as an independent in 1998, and won 34 percent of votes cast in the four-man race for two seats. He finished fourth, 140 votes behind Republican Michael Craifac. In 2000, independents Kevin Cox and Stratton Salidis earned 14 percent and 6 percent, respectively, of 5,220 votes cast.

Cox, who ran to oppose “the City’s long neglect of working class people who pay their own way, and public policy that treats renters as second-class citizens,” says he feels the other Council candidates ignored his ideas, in contrast to the voters.

“I think people took some satisfaction that there was a voice there,” says Cox.

High’s message to preserve green space may indeed resonate in neighborhoods that oppose Council plans to increase density and building heights. As a newcomer to politics, High can afford to ignore, for now, the fact that the City’s budget is demanding a wider real estate tax base.

All that will come later, says High, who adds he’s studying the issues and fine-tuning his platform. “Right now I’m just happy I had a chance to get on the ballot. It’s nice to be able to get involved on this level,” he says.—John Borgmeyer

The South shall rise
Downtown goes modern with newest building projects

During contemplative moments, John Gibson looks up from his desk on the fourth floor of the City Center for Contemporary Art on the corner of Water and Second streets, and gazes out the window at the bricks of the Jefferson Theater’s fly loft. During the vaudeville days of the early 1900s, scenery backdrops arrived there by train, and workers loaded them into the pulley system via that strange door high in the back of the Jefferson.

“It’s meaningful for me,” says Gibson. “Two theaters, side by side. The first ‘theater alley’ in the history of this community.”

The two buildings couldn’t be more different. Built in 1901, the Jefferson Theater’s Ionic columns and rusticated brickwork reflect the Greek Revival architecture dominating much of Downtown Charlottesville. The City Center for Contemporary Art opened last year to a buzz of controversy over its unabashedly modern design and periwinkle/orange/ metallic color scheme. Some have clucked that the building doesn’t “fit in,” but Gibson loves the contrast.

“It shows that Charlottesville is not a monolithic uniculture,” he says. “Thomas Jefferson is an important influence, but not the only identity for this community.”

Gibson also sees meaning in the fact that the Jefferson Theater faces north, while the C3A, as the building is dubbed, faces south—toward the Friendship Court public housing block (formerly known as Garrett Square) and the warehouses lining the CSX tracks. “It’s like we’re opening up to the community,” Gibson says.

Indeed, the stylistic divide between North and South Downtown is ultimately a reflection of the social, economic and racial divides. “The cultural divide on Water Street is at least as strong as the stylistic,” says Jeff Bushman, who designed the C3A building. Gentrification, Bushman says, is intertwined with the stylistic changes afoot south of Water Street.

The C3A building represents a radical change for Downtown architecture, and its appearance heralds the increasing importance of Downtown’s south side. The area roughly bordered by E. Main, Avon and Ridge streets and Elliott Avenue is poised to become Charlottesville’s hip new district, where a modern, playful style of architecture will offer a contemporary counterpoint to the staid historicism in North Downtown. Along the way, the Mall’s “Jeffersonian” tradition will be redefined.

When Shannon Iaculli first walked into the Glass Building on Second Street S.E., she knew it would be the perfect home for the funky clothing store she hoped to open. The open ceiling in the refurbished warehouse reveals steel I-beams and shiny heating ducts, complemented by the cinderblock walls that Iaculli painted silver when she opened her store, Bittersweet, in the Glass Building more than two years ago.

“For what I wanted to sell, it made sense to be in a funkier, lofty industrial space,” Iaculli says. Her store sells retro clothes, cheeky t-shirts, trucker caps and other apparel with a vintage look and modern price tag. “I couldn’t get that on the Mall. Everything there had that ‘office’ look. Yuck.”

When Iaculli moved in, Charlottesville’s South Downtown was “like tumbleweeds,” she says. But since then, the area’s transformation into Charlottesville’s SoHo has picked up speed.

“I can’t think of a time when Downtown has been more exciting,” says developer Bill Dittmar. Naturally, he’s stoked—in January he and partner Hunter Craig began leasing apartments in Norcross Station at Fourth and Water streets. Dittmar and Craig renovated the 1924 grocery warehouse into 32 apartments, adding sleek steel kitchen appliances while retaining the building’s original old-growth pine beams and the maple floors that still bear scratches from handcarts. Next door to Norcross, Dittmar is putting up another 32-unit warehouse-style apartment building.

Norcross Station is one of several “adaptive reuse” projects coming to South Downtown, including Phil Wendell’s plan to move his ACAC fitness club into the Ivy Industries building on Monticello Avenue, and Gabe Silverman’s reoutfitting of the former Frank Ix & Sons textile factory (Silverman has three partners in that massive venture—Dittmar, Ludwig Kuttner and Allan Cadgene). On these sites, abandoned relics of Charlottesville’s bygone industrial age will be reintegrated into the urban fabric as homes, businesses and stores. Frank Stoner’s Belmont Lofts condo project on Graves Street is a brand-new construction, but the design reflects the hip warehouse look.

“We’re capturing feels from other urban areas, that Tribeca loft feeling,” Dittmar says. “We’re getting away from staid Jeffersonianism. That had it’s place. Where we have it, lets protect it then let’s make an urban statement.”

The epicenter for Jeffersonianism is North Downtown’s Court Square district. The 1781 Albemarle Courthouse, where future presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe each began his legal career, is a textbook example of the North Downtown style—the brick-and-column architectural motif that Monticello and the Rotunda popularized, to which Charlottesville seemed forever wedded.

Many of the buildings and homes in North Downtown display the brick facades and standing seam metal roofs that mark the Federal period. But the most relevant aspect of North Downtown architecture is its small scale, says Chad Freckmann, who has lived on Northwood Circle for five years with his wife Jacky Taylor and their three children.

“It’s very pedestrian friendly,” says Freckmann. “It allows residents to walk through the streets, to spend time in their yards and meet their neighbors. We’re able to access the Mall very easily on foot. It provides a great sense of community.”

Although many architectural styles have come and gone since the 19th century, Charlottesville has never lost its love for Jeffersonian architecture, writes UVA professor K. Edward Lay in his 2000 book Architecture of Jefferson Country. North Downtown is thus full of 20th-century buildings designed to look older.

The Palladian windows in the high-rise still known to some as the Monticello Hotel and located on the south side of Court Square, for example, are indeed very Monticello-esque. Built in the 1920s, that project demolished historic buildings and was greeted with great fanfare, Lay says.

“I think everyone was happy about it. Now attitudes have changed about history,” says Lay. “Some people still have the old attitude that progress is worth anything, but most people don’t anymore.”

Indeed, in the late ’80s and into the ’90s the City’s Board of Architectural Review (BAR) seemed so fiercely devoted to tradition that many developers complained the body wouldn’t approve a new building unless it was built with bricks and Palladian windows—consider, for example, the Queen Charlotte Square Apartments on High Street. More recently, developer Lee Danielson wrangled with the BAR over his company’s designs for the Charlottesville Ice Park and the Regal Cinema, complaining to C-VILLE at the time that if City planners didn’t “get out of his way,” he’d “never build in Charlottesville again.”

When the BAR approved the Bushman Dreyfus design for the C3A building in September 2001 by a margin of 6 to 2, it signaled that a change was underway—but it wasn’t painless. Some BAR members weren’t going gently into the realms of terne-coated stainless steel and purple-hued, ground-face concrete block.

“These decisions shouldn’t be seen as noncontroversial,” says Lynn Heetderks, vice-chair of the BAR, who describes herself as “probably the most traditional member” of the board.

“I favor buildings that use more traditional materials, and I’m sensitive to things that are more human in scale,” says Heetderks. “Some huge modernist buildings seem more evocative of machinery than people.”

Still, Heetderks says, the BAR’s membership increasingly favors modern designs. That change led to an unexpectedly warm reception recently for Danielson, the BAR’s onetime nemesis, when he returned to Charlottesville from California this fall announcing plans for a nine-storey boutique hotel on the Mall’s former Boxer Learning site. When he appeared before the BAR on December 16, chair Joan Fenton actually encouraged Danielson’s architects to experiment with the hotel’s design.

“We want you to be creative,” Fenton told Danielson. “Don’t design it a certain way because you’re afraid we won’t approve it otherwise.”

Mary Joy Scala, a City planner, says there’s a new theory abounding as to how modern buildings can fit into traditional surroundings. “New buildings take their cues from historic images,” Scala says. “They reinterpret designs of traditional decorative elements.”

For example, an important feature of historic design is articulation—tiny details that make a building more inviting. Plans for Danielson’s new hotel call for it to be built with a limestone base and bricks laid in an alternating “Flemish bond” style; the yoga studio in the old Grand Piano building incorporates transoms and sidelights to spruce up its orange façade. Even the C3A building borrows from traditional forms, Scala says. The modernist metal façade, in her interpretation, recalls the standing seam roofs of many North Downtown structures—sort of. “Maybe that’s a stretch,” she concedes.

“I think it’s delightful that someone would make those kinds of connections,” says Bushman.

In South Downtown, the City wants architects to play with the sleek warehouse forms, Scala says, and developers are willing to bet they can profit from a new generation of suburban refugees who demand stylish urban housing.

“We’ve got a lot of talented architects here, and the BAR wants them to use their talents,” says Scala.

“I think the reason those spaces are so popular is that they’re stark, streamlined, no-nonsense,” she says. “Young people are attracted to that type of architecture because it’s open and flexible, and it’s right Downtown where people want to be.”—John Borgmeyer

The write stuff
Can write-in votes resurrect Meredith Richards?

City Dems may not have seen the last of Meredith Richards. The two-term incumbent bowed out of the City Council race after her party dumped her from the Democratic ticket on February 7, and in her concession speech Richards said she would not run as an independent.

Days after the convention, flyers started to appear on local bulletin boards urging voters to “write in Meredith Richards.” Some flyers were stapled to an editorial photocopied from the February 10 edition of The Daily Progress, which lamented her ouster and floated the idea of a spontaneous “grass-roots write-in campaign.”

Richards says she hadn’t seen the flyers until C-VILLE asked her about them. “I’m not planning to mount an active campaign,” she says. “That would be hard for me to contemplate, because I’m a Democrat. Certainly I encourage people to support the Democratic ticket.”

Even so, Richards is not exactly discouraging people from writing her in on election day, May 4. The petitions, she says, are coming from “people who are angry at the party, who just can’t understand how the party could do this.

“I’m not taking a position on it one way or the other,” she says.

Dem chair Lloyd Snook says party rules forbid Richards—who serves on the Democratic finance committee—from approving a write-in campaign. Richards signed the party’s pre-convention pledge promising not to support any candidates opposing Democrats. But she points out that the pledge has been violated “repeatedly,” most recently in 2000, when some Democrats formed a group to support Republican John Pfaltz for Council that year. Besides, says Richards, the pledge only “refers to an intention you have when you come to the [nominating] convention.

“I tried to run as a Democrat, and they turned their backs on me,” she says.

City registrar Sheri Iachetta says there hasn’t been a successful write-in campaign in recent Charlottesville history. But that doesn’t mean it’s without local precedent. In 1993 Sally Thomas staged a last-minute write-in campaign and upset Carter Myers for the Samuel Miller district seat on the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors. Incumbent Ed Bain dropped out of the race seven weeks before the election, leaving too little time to add new names to the ballot. Thomas says she was “the only one foolhardy enough” to run as a write-in.

Thomas’ campaign was handicapped because write-in candidates can’t buy voter registration lists as other candidates can, making it difficult to send out direct mailings (still, write-in candidates must follow the same fundraising reporting rules as other candidates).

Many saw Thomas’ victory as a referendum on the Western Bypass, which she opposed. Could Richards’ support for the Meadowcreek Parkway, which cost her the nomination, similarly energize write-in voters? Richards predicts the write-in buzz will dwindle with the anger over her loss at the party convention.

Iachetta isn’t so sure. “In the past 10 days, we’ve received numerous phone calls on how to write in names. More than normal,” she says. “I’m not making any interpretations. I’m just saying it’s been interesting.”

Criminal past passed?

The Daily Progress on Monday, February 23, reported Republican candidate Kenneth Jackson’s admission that he had been convicted of assault and battery four times, and that three of those incidents involved him wielding a knife.

According to the story, the first incident happened in 1985, when Jackson was 18. Then, in 1990, he was convicted for misdemeanor assault on a police officer.

Records in Charlottesville District Court show Jackson was arrested for felony assault in 1993 after a fight in a restaurant kitchen with Charles Sands—who was arrested for misdemeanor assault in that incident.

The Progress reports that Jackson’s last arrest occurred when he stabbed a man in Richmond—also a felony—in 1994. According to Richmond General District Court records, however, the incident happened in 1995, when Jackson was 28.

“I’m not very good with dates,” says Jackson. The 1993 charge was dropped and in 1995 Jackson pled guilty to a misdemeanor.

Republican party chair Bob Hodous tells C-VILLE Jackson acknowledged “some run-ins with the law” when the two first met. When Jackson came forward as a candidate, Hodous says he didn’t ask for details about his past.

“That stuff was in the early part of his life. He’s turned himself around,” says Hodous, although he could not give specifics about the turnaround.

Jackson, who stresses public safety in his campaign, says he’s “learned” from the experiences. “It helped me see I was too intelligent to be getting in this kind of trouble. Situations still arise that could become violent, but I’ve learned to walk away from them.”

As for the other Council candidates, C-VILLE finds that Democratic incumbent and cycling advocate Kevin Lynch has two driving convictions—one for improper driving and one for failure to obey a highway sign. Democrat Kendra Hamilton also had a bit of driving trouble—two parking tickets and a speeding ticket. David Brown has three speeding tickets. Ann Reinicke has a spotless record, according to Charlottesville and Albemarle general district courts.—John Borgmeyer

Company man
UVA professor wrote the script for indie drama troupe Offstage

If you’re an aspiring playwright living in Central Virginia, you probably know Doug Grissom. If not, you should. Having written dozens of plays and worked with countless would-be Mamets and Wassersteins as a professor in UVA’s Drama Department, head of the Southeastern Theater Conference’s playwriting division and co-founder of Offstage Theatre, he knows a good script when he reads one.

“I kind of backed into it,” Grissom says of his career in theater. He had planned to study journalism, but got bitten by the stage bug instead. After earning degrees at the University of Tennessee and Brandeis University, he joined the UVA faculty in 1986.

In 1989 he attended a theater conference in Richmond with two playwright friends, Tom Coash and Mark Serrill. While the three waited in a bar for a producer who never showed, an idea took hold among them. After a healthy amount of drinking, they decided to start their own theater company using “found spaces” around town. Voila! Offstage Theatre was born, and a few months later, Chug, its first production, took the “stage” at Miller’s.

Since then Offstage has found homes in bars like Orbit and Rapture for the popular Barhoppers series (plays about bars set in bars) and more abstract locations like studio apartments or in front of the Paramount Theater. Last week Offstage concluded a run of Pvt. Wars at R2, the disco at the rear of Rapture.

Grissom, who remains an Offstage board member, is proud—if a little surprised—at the group’s success. “We’ve been able to go out and take audiences into non-theater locations and open their ideas of where theater can happen,” he says.

More than that, however, he’s proud of Offstage’s success in producing new works by local authors.

“We have to have produced more original works than anybody else in Virginia,” he says. “Most of them, granted, are small 15-minute plays. But still, if we do a list of new plays we’ve premiered, there are few other theaters that have done as much as we have.”

The opportunity to stage work, and Grissom’s mentorship specifically, have been a boon for countless local playwrights. One is C-VILLE theater critic Joel Jones, who, at the urging of several of Offstage’s members, began writing with no professional training. Since then, several of his works have been produced by Offstage locally and in New York.

“My favorite thing Doug ever said to me was after my third play,” Jones says. “Like most beginners I was addicted to blackouts. So Doug was criticizing me for using blackouts at the end of every play, and I was whiningand Doug said, dryly, ‘End the fucking play, Joel. Just end the fucking play.’”

Grissom keeps busy with his own work, singling out as highlights his collaborations with the Sexual Assault Resource Agency, Because I Said No and I Never Saw it Coming. Both plays toured widely, and “I know they had such a profound impact for the people I wrote them for,” he says. Next up, look for a piece tentatively titled Elvis People, which he workshopped last fall with Offstage.—Eric Rezsnyak

“My way or the highway”
State pols try to force unwanted Western Bypass on stubborn City Council

The first order of business for Council on Tuesday, February 17, was to appropriate about $550,000 that flowed into the City from Commonwealth and Federal coffers. The money was granted for police equipment, walking trails and financial aid for low-income families. While Council was counting its blessings from the Commonwealth, however, Richmond was putting on the heat in other areas.

Just three days earlier, the Virginia Senate had passed a bill demanding that the State build the U.S. 29 Western Bypass around Charlottesville, regardless of opposition from local transportation planners. Leaders from Lynchburg and Danville have long demanded the bypass, but strong local opposition and money troubles at the Virginia Department of Transportation have stalled the project.

A great deal of Charlottesville’s fate is bound to the will of bureaucrats and legislators in Richmond and Washington, D.C., who have the power to infuse local schools, police and social services with extra funds as well as the muscle to push local officials around. The relationship with the higher rings of government is crucial for Charlottesville’s prosperity, and that relationship will change soon, when at least two new people join City Council in July.

“It’s quite important to know the State process in terms of funding—to have some connections and people you can talk to in various agencies,” says Harrison Rue, president of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission. “Any official needs to do their homework and learn the system to be effective.” Rue’s group oversees regional planning initiatives.

Meredith Richards has a high rank in the Virginia Transit Association, is a member of the Metropolitan Planning Association (MPO), the Virginia E-Communities Task Force, and a policy committee established by the Virginia Municipal League. She likely knows more about playing nice with the higher-ups than her fellow Councilors, but earlier this month her bid for a third term was quelled as Democrats elected two first-time politicians—Kendra Hamilton and David Brown—to share the May ticket with incumbent Kevin Lynch. Republicans also put up two new faces—Kenneth Jackson and Anne Reinicke—to run for two of the three open seats. The preponderance of newcomers means the next Council will have at least two new members who, like many rookies before them, will surely be too busy learning about local politics to handle the intricacies of State and Federal affairs.

Negotiating the State system will fall to the veteran Councilors—Blake Caravati, Rob Schilling and perhaps Lynch. Schilling, a four-year City resident, still seems to be learning how things work in Charlottesville. Caravati’s resumé includes stints on the Planning Commission and the Housing Authority board, but he’s probably more familiar with the streets of Charlottesville sister city Besancon, France, than the General Assembly in Richmond. As chair of the MPO, a regional transportation body, Lynch knows how Federal and State money trickles down to localities. Should he win reelection, however, Lynch is favored to be the next mayor, a job that leaves little time for searching out Federal grants or bickering with VDOT.

Council’s change in State and Federal expertise will come at a time when outside hostility to the region seems on the rise. At press time, the U.S. 29 bill, sponsored by Lynchburg Sen. Stephen Newman, was awaiting its fate in the House of Delegates. Even if Newman’s bill fails, it reveals impatience with this region’s local government, to which some local politicians are sensitive.

In November, Albemarle voters elected two new supervisors—Ken Boyd and David Wyant—who seem more likely than previous supervisors to play ball with VDOT on the bypass.

“I don’t like the idea of the State coming in here and telling us what to do with local matters,” says Boyd. But, he adds, “I think we need a bypass in our county. We need to get that on the fast track.” The State, Boyd says, “thinks we’re a bottleneck.”

The rest of Virginia seems to view Charlottesville as a place where plans grind to a halt. Surely the 36-year-old Meadowcreek Parkway saga reinforces those opinions, and the City is feeling tremendous pressure from VDOT and the County to build that long-delayed road.

But while Albemarle County is cozying up to the State, City Council is moving in the opposite direction. The Dems ousted Richards largely because of her aggressive pursuit of the Meadowcreek Parkway. (Lynch opposes the road. Hamilton says it’s “not on her radar screen,” while Brown says he will support the Parkway only when cash-strapped VDOT can afford to build an interchange for it at the Route 250/Ridge-McIntire intersection.)

Butch Davies, the local representative to the State’s Commonwealth Transportation Board, says Richmond is getting fed up with Council’s delays.

“Local needs indicate the road ought to be built,” says Davies. “The people who are applying the brakes now create a real problem.”

Davies does not support Newman’s bill to build the Western Bypass, but he sees it as the result of “deep-seated resentment” that’s building against the region. The City should take the bill as a warning, he says. The public transportation projects the Democrats want to initiate in Charlottesville, such as a bus rapid transit system, will require County participation and extensive cooperation from the Feds and Richmond, as well. Those entities may not be inclined to deal with Charlottesville if they feel Council won’t return the favor.

Davies warns that Charlottesville’s stubbornness may cause VDOT to restore its “iron fist” approach to local transportation issues.

“When you focus solely on your own objectives and you ignore the political realities around you,” says Davies, “things happen that you cannot control.”—John Borgmeyer

Indy bandwidth
Cvilleindymedia.org publishes all the news you won’t see on CNN

Media mergers and the oft-cited charge that cable TV and other news sources beat the drum for war in Iraq have fueled a growing belief that the media have become shills for corporate America.

Though CNN has yet to answer these complaints with a “think you can do better?” taunt, a group of local activists has attempted to do exactly that.

In an effort to fill a perceived void in news coverage, the group has created www.cvilleindymedia.org, which will officially kick off on Tuesday, February 24, at a launch party at the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar. The site is part of a network called the Independent Media Center, an international collection of at least 130 sites, all of which encourage people to “be the media” by posting their own reporting.

“It’s a source for information that I don’t think [Charlottesville residents] are going to find anywhere else,” says Alexis Zeigler, a founder and driving force behind cvilleindymedia.

Though Zeigler says he hopes the site will get the scoop on local news, he says the worst hole in media coverage is on foreign policy or big-ticket environmental issues.

“The tone gets set in the mainstream media by corporate America,” Zeigler says, adding that coverage of the war in Iraq is usually “patriotic bullshit.”

Following the method of “open publishing,” cvilleindymedia posts the thoughts of any contributor, as long as the submissions are not blatantly racist or intended to undermine the site, according to Zeigler.

“Basically, people are free to post,” Zeigler says. “We haven’t taken anything down yet.”

The site went through an upgrade on February 10. That same day, a posting on the site drew international attention, not all of it welcome. The post, which was an announcement of the recent Earth Liberation Front attack on equipment and vehicles at the Hollymead Town Center construction site, beat local media to the story by a day.

“It hit the global site immediately,” Zeigler says of news of the local ELF attack, which he says he does not support. “That’s not exactly what I had in mindIt just puts a shadow over us all.”

The most disconcerting part of that shadow is possible scrutiny by Federal law enforcement, Zeigler says. The Federal Bureau of Investigations is handling the ELF attack.

“It just makes me nervous,” Zeigler says of the investigation, adding that he fears possible suppression of the new website by law enforcement.

So far the Feds have yet to touch cvilleindymedia, which is currently posting several stories and event listings each day. At the Tuesday launch party, the new site will celebrate its link to the global network. Zeigler says the international group “didn’t bat an eye” at the Charlottesville organization’s proposal to join the network.

Zeigler says the ultimate goal of the local news venture is to engage residents through several different mediums, including radio. And to join the group’s leadership, people need only come to its biweekly meetings.

“Whoever walks through the door becomes part of the consensus,” Zeigler says.—Paul Fain

Is race an issue in the race?
Yes, though candidates say it shouldn’t be the only issue

There are two African-American candidates for City Council in this year’s election. And though both Republican Kenneth Jackson and Democrat Kendra Hamilton say their priorities as Councilors would extend far beyond issues of race, the topic will likely surface during the campaign season.

There has been a black Democratic voice on Council for all but two of the last 34 years—always a Democrat. And maintaining this representation is clearly important to many people in Charlottesville, which is 22 percent African-American, including Mayor Maurice Cox, who sought a black candidate among Democrats prior to deciding to bow out of this year’s race, as previously reported in C-VILLE.

The May 4 election won’t be the first time two black candidates have vied for seats on Council. The most recent occurrence was 20 years ago, when two parties fielded African-American candidates. However, the second black candidate, Margaret Cain, who joined Democratic incumbent Rev. E.G. Hall in the 1984 election, belonged to the liberal Citizens Party.

A law student at UVA, Cain failed in her bid for Council, drawing 1,713 votes. Her tally prompted some Democrats to hold her responsible for the failed reelection bid of John Conover, a Democrat who lost to upstart Republican Lindsay Barnes by only 22 votes. Democrats charged that Cain pulled black voters and female voters away from their candidates. Think Ralph Nader in the last Presidential election.

David Toscano, who would later serve as a Democratic City Councilor and mayor, ran Cain’s campaign. Toscano disputes the claim that Cain’s candidacy tanked Conover’s reelection bid.

“I don’t think there was block voting based on race in that election,” Toscano says of the possibility that black voters may have voted for both Hall and Cain back in ’84. Furthermore, Toscano thinks a similar block vote by blacks for the current black candidates in May’s election is unlikely. “I just don’t see it happening,” Toscano says.

The spoiler tag wasn’t the only beef Democrats had with the Cain campaign. Prior to the election, a mysterious flier supporting Cain appeared in primarily black neighborhoods. The flier included a picture of Rev. Jesse Jackson with Cain, and touted a Jackson endorsement, which said, “Sunshine or rain vote for Cain.”

Rev. Jackson had never officially endorsed Cain, and Cain’s campaign said it hadn’t distributed the flier.

“That created quite a flap,” Toscano says of the “infamous” flier, which he says was “never authorized” by the Cain campaign.

Controversy has revisited Cain, and this time, authorities say she had something to do with it. Cain, a lawyer in Charlottesville since the ’80s, had her law license revoked in November by the Virginia State Bar over allegations that she settled a client’s personal injury claim and then deposited the check into her own account. According to the Bar, Cain never notified her client about the judgment. Cain was indicted on Tuesday, February 18, by a grand jury on fraud charges in Charlottesville’s Circuit Court.

“Not a black candidate”

Republican candidate Kenneth Jackson says his campaign isn’t about representing a certain race. Instead, Jackson says, he intends to give voice to a class, specifically working, lower-income people.

“Really, I never looked at it on a black or white basis,” Jackson says of his candidacy.

“I’m one of those average, working class people who’s trying to make ends meet,” says Jackson, who is disabled and only able to work part-time. Jackson was a Democrat until two years ago, and attributes his party shift to Republican Rob Schilling, whom he says “asks common-sense questions” in the role of Councilor.

Though she says she cares about the concerns of black residents, Democratic candidate Kendra Hamilton stresses that her goal is to listen to the concerns of the broader community and to represent people who support her positions on issues such as the achievement gap, community-police relations and housing affordability.

“These are not black issues—they’re community issues,” Hamilton says via e-mail (due to illness, she was unable to speak on the phone). “In an at-large system you have to be accessible and listen to all the voices.”

Corey Carter, the editor of Reflector, a local newspaper aimed at African-Americans, says having black candidates from both parties means more diverse viewpoints in the election. “That’s a good thing. Not just for the African-American community, but for the community on the whole.”

Jackson and Hamilton’s statements on race are reminiscent of those made by Charles Barbour, the first African-American elected to City Council in modern times. Barbour, who still lives in Charlottesville, was elected in 1970, served two terms and was also mayor. According to The Daily Progress, upon accepting his candidacy in April 1970, Barbour said, “I’m not a black candidate. I’m one of two Democrats running to represent all people.”—Paul Fain

Gay rights clears another hurdle
Assembly passes domestic partner

insurance reformVirginia’s gay rights advocates had something to cheer about on February 16, just two days after www.dontgivetouva.com officially kicked off its campaign for gay partner benefits at UVA. The victory was a 50-49 vote by the State House of Delegates to allow private employers to offer health insurance to partners of gay employees.

The General Assembly is hardly cozy with gay rights groups, having reinforced the existing State ban on gay marriage only a week prior to the health insurance vote. However, the change in direction from Richmond seems unlikely to provoke a shift from UVA, which, as a State agency, is not directly affected by the vote.

Victoria Cobb, director of legislative affairs for the Family Foundation, says the Delegates’ vote for partner benefits so soon after the marriage ban is “at best contradictory and at worst disingenuous.”

But according to David Lampo, the vice-president of the Log Cabin Republicans of Virginia, a gay rights organization, the key to the insurance bill’s passage was that it dealt with the decisions of private Virginia companies to pay for health insurance. Several corporations, including credit card giant Capital One, publicly supported the measure.

As a result, Lampo says, lawmakers were able to look at the bill “through the eyes of free-market Republicans,” instead of “through the eyes of homophobia.”

Cobb, whose organization strongly opposes the bill, concedes that its passage is a “large step forward for those advancing a homosexual-rights agenda.” Cobb rejects the argument by the bill’s proponents that health benefits for gay partners is primarily a free-market issue, claiming that governments regulate many business practices. For instance, she cites child labor laws, and adds “protecting marriage is on that level.”

The State Senate is set to consider the bill in the next two weeks and Lampo says he’s “cautiously optimistic” that the bill will pass.

But even if gay partner benefits clear the Senate, the bill will not remove legal impediments for State agencies such as UVA to offer domestic partner benefits to employees. And according to Lampo, changing the rules for State agencies on partner benefits would be far more challenging than for private companies. He says opponents will come down hard on any effort to allow an institution that receives taxpayer money to give benefits to gay partners.

“That’s going to be a much tougher road to go down,” Lampo says. —Paul Fain

Benefits struggle begins again
“Insure our families,” say gay UVA staff

When Ellen Bass, an assistant professor in the department of systems and information engineering at UVA, came to the University two years ago, she knew she and her lesbian partner would have problems with the school’s stance on domestic partner benefits.

“I knew I was going to fight this battle,” Bass says. “I didn’t realize it was going to come to a head so quickly.”

The new publicity over UVA’s long refusal to offer domestic partner benefits, which also came to a head when professors challenged the University on benefits more than a decade ago, was stoked by a website created by two 2003 UVA graduates. The site—www.dontgivetouva.com recently went live in its request for alumni donations to fund health benefits for partners of gay UVA employees.

Currently, domestic partners of UVA employees do not receive health insurance or other perqs like the use of gym facilities. And because of Virginia’s strict laws against second-parent adoption, many children of gay couples do not qualify for benefits.

UVA spokesperson Carol Wood says, via e-mail, that the school will be studying the benefits issue “for some time.” In the meantime, Wood says that as UVA is a State agency it must follow Virginia laws, which deem that only married couples qualify for partner benefits. Further, she says, the State has ruled that benefits are “a matter of State law rather than of University policy.” (UVA tabled its efforts to gain more autonomy from the State during the current legislative session.)

The new website’s co-founder, Andrew Borchini, wrote his senior thesis on the domestic partner benefit issue at UVA. Borchini says UVA is losing professors and students to schools that offer benefits, such as the University of Michigan and many others.

“It’s not just a gay thing, it’s a good business decision,” says Dyana Mason, the executive director of gay-rights advocacy group Equality Virginia, of partner benefits.

Borchini and Mason’s claims may prove true in the case of Jenny O’Flaherty, a doctor and associate professor of anesthesiology and pediatrics at UVA Health System. O’Flaherty’s partner and three children do not qualify for benefits at UVA. Purchasing health insurance for the kids imposed a substantial financial drain on the family. Recently, O’Flaherty and her family left for New Zealand, where she is currently on sabbatical.

“One of the reasons we’re in New Zealand is that we were so fed up with the way UVA was treating our family,” O’Flaherty says via e-mail. “We felt we needed to take a break from the place.”

In Bass’ case, she says she chose working at UVA over the University of Michigan because of location and quality of life. Bass says her partner, a social worker, was “really mad” when she learned that she would not qualify for benefits. For several months, the couple had to pay for health insurance for their son, because Bass is “the non-biological co-parent, as we like to call ourselves.

“You hate to choose your job based on the benefits,” Bass says, adding that she shouldn’t have to waste energy on the issue. “I should be worrying about mentoring my students.”

Many Virginia employers that are chartered in other states can and do offer domestic partner benefits. For example, Gary Campbell, the human resources manager at Lexis Publishing, which employs 500 people in Charlottesville, says the company has offered domestic partner benefits for about three years.

In addition, Washington and Lee University and Hollins University, both private Virginia schools, offer benefits to same-sex couples, according to the Human Rights Commission. As does Capital One, a credit card company based in Richmond.

“We believed it was the right thing to do,” says Hamilton Halloway, a spokesman for the company.

Prominent UVA psychology professor Charlotte Patterson and her partner, Deborah Cohn, aren’t buying the school’s excuse that the State has shut the door on domestic partner benefits. Patterson and Cohn, who have three children, both say that UVA, which employs more than 11,000 full-time staff and faculty, has made progress in the equal treatment of gays, but that it is falling behind other elite universities on the benefits issue.

“We’ve been hearing it for 20 years,” Patterson says of UVA’s naysaying on benefits. “I don’t think anybody wants to see UVA become a dinosaur.”—Paul Fain

Meter made
Website Poetry Daily nears a decade of posting verse for the masses

Breaking news: Poetry lives. And so does its audience. Charlottesville too has people snapping their fingers, and “hmmming” to last lines in reading rooms. And Poetry Daily, www.poems.com, the brainchild of Charlottesville residents Don Selby, Diane Boller and Rob Anderson, and self-described as “the world’s most popular poetry website,” points to the existence of those who even like to read the stuff.

Every day since it began in 1997 the website has posted news and a poem a day. Visitors range from military men on research boats in Antarctica to former heavy machine operators logging on from the couches of unemployment in North Dakota, according to a self-conducted survey.

In 1995, Boller and Selby, neither of whom writes poetry, were investigating Web technology for Lexis, the law publishing company where they were working. Behind The Federal Rules of Evidence Manual in Boller’s office, Selby caught a glimpse of a volume of poems by W.S. Merwin. It was fate. Within two years, postings like “Old Man Leaves Party,” by Mark Strand, from Blizzard of One, were appearing on their homepage.

Today, Poetry Daily verges on legendary in certain circles. In 2003, the site got 13.7 million page views and it’s on pace to repeat that volume this year with 1.2 million page views during January. For local furniture maker and poet John Casteen (who shares a name with his better-known father, who runs a certain local university), the website serves him in his roles as both reader and poet. “As a reader it’s a real pleasure to get a daily digest that presents a broad cross-section of contemporary poetry. I use it to keep an eye on individual poets, literary presses and literary journals,” he says.

“As a poet, it gives you an audience roughly 10 times as large as the press run for a first book, which is invaluable if you want people to read your work.”

While it’s a popular site, Selby and Boller aren’t about to dumb-down poetry to suit the masses. The aim is to represent contemporary poetry, plain and simple. “If we hear the bells go off in a poem it goes on [the website],” says Selby. Since the poems are selected from magazines and review copies, Selby and Boller work primarily with publishers for blanket permissions, so they don’t have to pursue copyright permissions each time they want to post a poem.

Last November, the editors and their associates—including co-editor Chryss Yost (who lives in California) and poets Rita Dove and Dana Gioia—released a book, Poetry Daily: 366 Poems from the World’s Most Popular Poetry Website, an anthology of website poems. The poets included run from Wislawa Szymborska to Mark Doty—an illuminating overview of contemporary poetry.

In an oft-quoted essay about poetry, Gioia once promised, “If poets venture outside their confined world, they can work to make [poetry] essential once more.” That pledge underpins Poetry Daily.

“There’s a general audience for literature and fiction,” says Boller. “And we believe that there’s a general audience for poetry and that poetry can be a part of everybody’s life. It’s not just a forum reserved for poets and academics. All literate people can enjoy it.”—Nell Boeschenstein

Camera shy
ACAC bans camera cell phones for privacy’s sake

Citing concerns about the more than 6 million camera cell phones that Americans are now toting, local fitness giant Atlantic Coast Athletic Club recently decided to ban cell phones in the locker rooms of their two locations. Members have thanked ACAC employees for the move, says Hunter Schwartz, ACAC’s director of fitness and wellness. But that’s not because members are grateful to be free of the worry that photos of them in various states of undress will wind up on the Internet. No, most members have said they’re thankful they won’t have to listen to loud cell phone monologues in the locker room anymore, Schwartz says.

The spreading trend of camera phones might not be a big privacy concern in Charlottesville, but the phones have sparked the interest of companies, government agencies and lawmakers in several states. For some, such as automakers in Detroit or the U.S. Air Force, the phones have been banned in restricted areas.

In the case of ACAC and many health clubs around the country, the phones are a problem because of the discreet ease with which a photo can be snapped and then sent to other phones, or even instantly uploaded to a website.

“Most clubs are trending toward” banning cell phones in locker rooms, Schwartz says.

There are legitimate uses for the camera phones, which were first introduced in the United States in late 2002. In addition to snapping and sharing a photo with a friend, camera phones can be used as memory tools, to document accidents, or to help people ask for directions, according to tech guru Alan Reiter, president of Wireless Internet & Mobile Computing, a consulting firm based in Maryland.

The phones have even spawned a new form of blogging—the popular practice of posting musings on the Internet. Called moblogs, the Web sites are produced by Text America, Buzznet and other companies, and work by allowing subscribers to quickly post their pictures on a personalized site.

Though Reiter admits that privacy and security concerns with camera phones are “not to be dismissed,” he says the backlash is “overblown.” Reiter says far smaller, more sophisticated cameras are better tools for industrial espionage or other forms of nosy photography. But with camera phones set to triple the resolution of their photographic capacity in the next year, Reiter says the phones are hardly just a novelty.

“They’re going to explode,” he says. “We have not seen anything yet.”

Ethan Sutin, a 23-year-old research assistant at UVA, bought a Sprint camera phone about four months ago. He says the camera phone was initially a fun way to keep in touch with his sister, who lives in California.

“I never really had any nefarious purposes in mind when I got it,” Sutin says. However, the novelty of the phone quickly faded for him. “I didn’t get that much of a thrill out of it,” he says. —Paul Fain

And then there were three…
Dems oust Richards for new faces

Meredith Richards believes that a referendum to build the Meadowcreek Parkway would pass in Charlottesville, but on Saturday, February 7, the only votes that counted belonged to the 530 people who showed up for the Democrats’ nominating convention for May’s City Council election.

“It’s a shame that it came down to a single issue, but that’s what happened,” Richards said moments after party chair Lloyd Snook announced that David Brown, Kendra Hamilton and Kevin Lynch had beaten her for three positions on the Dems’ May 4 ballot, effectively writing the ending to her eight-year term on Council.

Hamilton won with 429 votes. Incumbent Lynch took 341, and David Brown beat out Richards 322 to 300 for the third position on the Democratic ticket. It will be the first political campaign for both Hamilton, president of the Rose Hill Neighborhood Association, and Brown, a chiropractor, youth soccer coach and former party chair.

That the Dems chose to oust the two-term incumbent Richards in favor of newcomers reflects just how seriously the party faithful opposes the Meadowcreek Parkway, which Richards wants to build. On the other big-deal Dem issues—affordable housing, public transportation, social activism and environmental policy—Richards sounded all the right notes. She shucked her party only on the controversial road, which for local Dems has come to symbolize the City’s battle with the County for middle-class homebuyers.

“It’s not just a single issue,” explained Mary MacNeil, an outspoken Parkway opponent. “The Parkway is about who’s going to live in Charlottesville, who’s going to pay the taxes,” she said. The City should be coaxing the middle class into Charlottesville, MacNeil says, so why should Council approve a road that sends more of them into Albemarle? “What does it do for the City? Zilch!” she declared.

At press time, only Republican Kenneth Jackson, a Parkway supporter, had unofficially declared his candidacy (the Republicans’ nominating meeting was to take place during the evening on Monday, February 9). Jackson, a restaurant worker, says he will attack the Democrats for wasteful spending. “We have schools in disrepair,” Jackson says. “We need to spend our money on necessities.” On the Parkway, Jackson says it’s time to start construction.

Richards knew her stance on the Parkway would cause hard feelings within her party. Before the convention, she presented a Parkway referendum as democracy in action. “I want to let the people decide,” she said at a candidates’ forum on February 5. Fellow Councilor Lynch argued on that occasion that he didn’t want the issue to be decided by a California-style “battle of sound bites.”

Richards’ line played well on WINA, which advanced the notion that Richards was the only Democrat who would “allow the people to choose,” but Richards knew that outside AM radio-land she was in trouble with the party. At the February 5 forum, Richards backed away from a plan to ease VDOT land for the Parkway.

“It’s been misreported that we would vote for an easement,” she said. “That’s not the case. I want to have a public discussion about it.”

The conflict provided the only interesting debate during that night’s two-hour event, moderated by Virginia Organizing Project Director Joe Szakos. About 30 people braved freezing rain to meet in City Hall, where Szakos gave each party hopeful two minutes to answer audience questions.

Though the forum’s theme was ecology and social justice, no one asked any questions about water.

The Democrats would rather not talk about the water supply, says Jock Yellott, a Republican who attended the forum and who says he might consider a run at Council as an Independent. “They’d rather not remind us that 30 years of irresponsible Democratic rule has left us vulnerable, and we remain so,” Yellot said via e-mail. “Next drought we’ll be flushing our toilets with bottled water again.”

Instead, the questions allowed the candidates to wax philosophical: What is the best way to achieve social justice? How will you protect citizens from the PATRIOT Act?

“Let’s do something about gentrification in our traditionally African-American neighborhoods,” Hamilton said, in response to a question about racism and classism. A Ph.D. student in English, Hamilton’s eloquent speeches about a diverse City “dreaming the same dream together” helped win her the nomination on Saturday. As a newcomer to politics, however, Hamilton has yet to face the paradox that confronts every Democratic activist who would sit on Council—the party values social programs, but the City must court a middle-class tax base to pay the bills. As City leaders, Councilors encourage gentrification. But in the company of fellow Democrats, they can’t be too enthusiastic about it.

“It takes one term to make you a Councilor, two terms makes you a leader,” outgoing Mayor Maurice Cox said on February 7, to the cheers of Democrats who packed the Albemarle County Office Building auditorium for the convention. As he spoke, he was endorsing Kevin Lynch, but he could have been talking about Richards, too.

Regardless of Charlottesville leaders’ attitudes toward sprawl-favoring County pols, the City can’t pursue its interests without the cooperation of the County and the State. In ousting Richards, the Dems lose a politician with expertise outside the City limits. Cox personally courted Hamilton to oppose the Parkway, and her nomination now means that this summer Council will gain at least two rookies. And who knows? Maybe the Parkway will prove to be as popular as Richards thinks, and Republicans will ride the road to a Council seat.—John Borgmeyer

Progress returns to pooch patrol
Daily paper all worked up over old issue

Controversy has heated up around a dog lab at the UVA School of Medicine in which students practice surgical techniques on dogs that are later euthanized. Animal welfare activists held a protest in front of Jordan Hall and later met with the Dean of the School of Medicine, who refused to shutter the lab.

That was more than 15 years ago.

Now the dog lab flap has been resurrected. A new group called the Citizens for Humane Medicine is taking it on. And this time, leaders of the campaign have succeeded in saving the dogs’ lives—for now.

Key to the campaign’s success has been local media coverage. The Daily Progress has led the charge with at least three news articles and an editorial denouncing the lab. However, the DP made no mention of previous debates over the pooch lab.

“We had a lot of coverage back there, 15 years ago,” says Susan Wiedman of the Jordan Hall protest in which she participated.

The difference with the current campaign, say Wiedman and Marianne Roberts, a co-founder of the Citizens for Humane Medicine, is the leadership of Rooshin Dalal, a fifth-year M.D., Ph.D. student at UVA, and the fact that since the mid-’80s many medical schools have moved away from using dog labs.

“I think the time was not right,” says Roberts of previous efforts to shut down the lab.

Supporters of the dog lab surely will be disappointed by the February 4 announcement from the medical school suspending the lab “until after the review has been completed.” Troy Mohler, a UVA medical student, who was enrolled in the optional lab a month ago, says working with live tissue is invaluable. Of the 30 students in his class only three opted out of the dog lab, Mohler says.

“I think it’s a great lab. I learned a lot,” he says.

The supposed shift by medical schools away from dog labs was highlighted at a forum at UVA just more than a year ago. Arranged by Dalal, the forum sparked several editorials in the Cavalier Daily. The Daily Progress, however, failed to cite the debate’s long tenure on campus in its recent articles.

The keynote speaker at least year’s forum was Neal D. Barnard, M.D., the president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine—a group that opposes live animal labs. Barnard’s group argues that only 18 percent of the approximately 125 medical schools in the country use live animals to train students. This claim has been central in the current donnybrook over the UVA lab and features prominently in DP coverage. And though the survey was conducted by the PCRM, hardly the most unbiased of sources on animal labs, it appears to be mostly validated by other research. For example, a 2002 USA Today article cited an academic survey that found only 30 percent of medical schools still offer live animal labs.

Dalal says that instead of cutting into dogs, the common standard these days is for medical schools to use more “human-based models” such as high-tech dummies or cadavers.

Besides the PCRM, Dalal and his group now have allies among other national organizations, including the Humane Society and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). But although the local campaign has widely distributed the group’s e-mail alerts, they did not actively seek the high-powered support of them or other national activist groups.

“I have not spoken to PETA once,” Roberts says. “I guess The Daily Progress contacted them.”

PETA’s controversial tactics, such as putting naked women in cages to protest the circus, have been known to provoke backlashes. Though Dalal says he appreciates the support of groups like PETA, he admits he’s concerned that the group “won’t get the full facts” in its Web material or elsewhere. Indeed, PETA’s action alert drastically overstates the number of dogs put to death by UVA each year, which officials say is fewer than 100. —Paul Fain

Creative differences
Local screenwriter leads Hollywood types against the FCC

With almost a decade in Tinseltown and nine television movies under his belt, screenwriter Jonathan Rintels knows a bit about Hollywood. But as a lawyer who has practiced in Washington, D.C.—and also worked as a cab driver there—the Keswick resident also knows his way around the nation’s capital.

Armed with this bicoastal experience, Rintels came to believe that Federal regulators are doing little to stem the snowballing growth of media conglomerates. Furthermore, the homogenized content controlled by these companies means less work for writers.

“The things that were happening in Washington were having an obvious negative impact on creative writers,” Rintels says. “All these issues were having a hell of a lot more impact on my destiny than what was going on in L.A.”

In the fall of 2002, Rintels decided to actively combat the big media trend by forming a nonprofit advocacy group comprising Hollywood writers, producers, actors and directors.

The group, originally called the Center for the Creative Community, first hit the scene during the hubbub prior to the Federal Communications Commission‘s decision last June to loosen the rules on how many television and radio affiliates a media company can own in each media market. That ruling sparked a massive backlash, with an estimated 2 million complaints deluging the Beltway agency.

In the last year, Rintels has put together a board of directors with several Hollywood heavy-hitters—including Warren Beatty, Fay Wray and director Blake Edwards—and recently changed the name of his organization to the Center for Creative Voices in Media. Rintels, a UVA Law School graduate, has represented the group on National Public Radio, C-SPAN and at an FCC hearing in Richmond.

Besides Rintels, other Charlottesville luminaries occupy positions on the board of the upstart Hollywood group, among them Sissy Spacek and filmmaker Paul Wagner, who won an Oscar for a 1984 documentary. Wagner says he has “libertarian leanings” and admits that he hesitated when asked by Rintels to join in calling for government action on media consolidation. But Wagner says his belief in the need for a true “marketplace of ideas” won him over.

“I wish that we didn’t have to ask the government to do these things,” Wagner says.

In early January, Rintels, Beatty and other members of the group met in Hollywood for a discussion with Senator John McCain (R–AZ) and network executives. And in March, Rintels’ group will host a conference in Los Angeles on media consolidation that will feature numerous bigwigs from both Hollywood and Washington.

Though energized by his organization’s role in a hot issue that he sees as being “the new environmental movement,” Rintels acknowledges that the Center has its work cut out for it. For example, he says people often believe that having hundreds of cable channels means that they have more media choices than ever before.

“It’s like the cereal aisle. There’s a hundred brands, but they’re all made by three companies,” Rintels says.—Paul Fain

It’s ’Hoo you know
UVA shows its love with hot tickets for pols

It’s not what you know, it’s who you know—nowhere is that more true than the back-scratching world of Virginia politics. As a State agency, UVA needs the support of elected leaders. What better way to make nice with good ol’ Virginia boys than free tickets to the big game?

UVA invites local leaders like Creigh Deeds, Rob Bell, Steve Landes and Mitch Van Yahres to every game. “They usually meet for snacks or lunch at Carr’s Hill beforehand, then they’re taken by bus to the game with University leaders,” says University spokesperson Carol Wood. Also, UVA invites every member of the General Assembly to the Virginia Tech game, which is known as “Commonwealth Day.”

Other legislators apparently get tickets when UVA wants something from them. In 2003, for example, UVA entertained Delegate Bob Marshall and Senator Mark Obenshain and likely encouraged them to back off on their efforts to ban emergency contraception pills at all Commonwealth universities. Marshall and Obenshain must not have been too impressed by the Cavalier victories—this year Marshall introduced a bill prohibiting emergency contraception at all public colleges.—John Borgmeyer

First and foremost our goal is to bring the best overlooked films that we can to Charlottesville, films that aren’t going to show here, films that for the most part don’t deserve to show here—by that I mean that it’s just not a market that’s pushed that heavily by the film world.

“But I think it’s a market where there’s tremendous appreciation for film, despite the fact that it’s small.”

So says Wesley Hottot, the artistic director for Offscreen, a student-run film society which is preparing for its tenth season showcasing independent, foreign and classic film at Newcomb Hall Theatre on UVA Grounds. The season kicked off late last month with a showing of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and continues through the end of April.

The schedule for this spring features a number of eclectic, imposing titles—plenty to make the eyes of curious filmgoers water with gladness. The controversial documentary The Trials of Henry Kissinger is on the agenda, as is Derrida, a film about the legendary French philosopher, and In the Mirror of Maya Deren, an Austrian import about the experimental filmmaker.

If you’re sensing a theme, you should be, Hottot says. “All at once, distributors just started dumping biography films on exhibitors, and they’re all over the place,” he says. “There’s a lot out there right now; there’s about 10 or 12 that I just kept seeing in the catalogs and on the websites and in The New York Times.

“And so it just makes sense when that is happening in the distribution world to pick up on that and say to people, ‘This is what’s going on in the world outside of Charlottesville,’ which is what we try and do.”

It’s not all biography. Offscreen is also showing two David Lynch films, Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart, part of a regular collaboration with UVA professor Walter Korte in which a couple of more well-known titles are shown in 35 millimeter.

“We try to do something that people have probably seen, but haven’t seen in its full glory,” Hottot explains.

There’s also a screening of Decasia, a film composed entirely of nitrate-based archival footage from old Hollywood films, and a presentation by the filmmaker, Bill Morrisson.

“Over the history of American film, studios have been really bad about preserving things,” Hottot says. “They just throw it in a rubbish heap. Morrison went back and has been collecting that for years and years and years. So the film itself is sort of about cinema’s memories, and then it has its own themes of bodily decay and emotional decay.”

So how do the films get chosen? Hottot has the final say-so, as artistic director, which to a movie lover sounds like a pretty great job.

“Yeah, it is, but it’s a lot of responsibility too,” he says. “Just in my tenure I’ve been trying to make the process slightly more democratic by bringing in screeners and distributors well before the season starts and showing them to the whole group and seeing what people think, and nixing some stuff and really getting behind other things.

“Over time you start to put a series together.”—Paul Henderson

The voice for choice

Planned Parenthood faces hostility in the Assembly

Virginia’s General Assembly is wrestling with a massive budget deficit this year, yet many legislators will spend an unprecedented amount of time debating what still remains a woman’s legal right to abortion. In 2001, the General Assembly considered eight anti-abortion bills; last year, there were 12 such bills. In 2003, legislators are scheduled to consider about 25 bills aimed at restricting abortions and limiting reproductive choice.

Planned Parenthood is the only group sending lobbyists to Richmond to advocate for continued abortion rights. David Nova is president of Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge, which operates five sites in Central Virginia, including one in Charlottesville. Planned Parenthood offers medical care, birth control, free pregnancy tests, counseling, prenatal care, adoption services and abortions to all women for a nominal fee. Nova is also chair of Planned Parenthood’s statewide lobby organization. This week, he talks with C-VILLE about the hostile climate he faces in Richmond.

John Borgmeyer: What’s behind this increase in abortion bills?

David Nova: Election politics is driving some of this. Another thing is that redistricting brought a lot of new social conservatives into the Virginia legislature, so some of the newest members have the most pernicious anti-abortion or anti-family planning bills.

Over the past 15 years, a number of Supreme Court decisions have weakened the original Roe v. Wade decision. There are far more possibilities and far more creativity involved now in anti-abortion legislation.

How do these bills limit abortion or family planning?

There are three different categories. First, there are measures to make it harder for women to access abortion. A good example is parental consent with a notarized signature. A parental notification law exists already, and I can’t think of any medical procedure that requires a notarized signature. It seems bizarre, but it’s designed to make it harder for women to keep their privacy, especially in small communities, and increase the hassle factor.

The second category of measures, known as TRAP bills, are designed to impose burdensome regulations on abortion providers. Among other things, they require all clinics that provide abortions to have hospital-wide corridors, wide enough to have two gurnies wheeled past each other unencumbered. In our clinics, we have one gurney, and we’ve never used it. The effect isn’t to boost a woman’s health, but to force clinics to close, move or undertake expensive renovation. Again, the lawmakers are trying to make it harder for women to receive a legal medical procedure.

In the last category are laws designed to change the status of a fetus. For example, there’s one that makes the fetus the patient in pre-natal care, instead of the mother. Another bill would recognize a fertilized egg as a child before it’s implanted in the uterus––in essence, childhood comes before pregnancy. What’s really going on is an attempt to define childhood at conception. They’re preparing for a post-Roe v. Wade world.

It’s not an ineffective strategy.

What is Planned Parenthood doing?

Our strategy right now is just trying not to be overwhelmed. It’s a matter of rallying our supporters to keep the floodgates from opening any wider. The bills most likely to pass are the parental consents with notarized signature and the so-called “partial birth” abortions.

We’ve introduced the Family Planning Protection Act, which says laws applying to abortion won’t apply to contraception. I’m cautiously optimistic it will pass in the Senate. The question is whether it can pass in the House, which is more socially conservative.

There are a number of anti-abortion bills that may not survive because they cost money, and right now there’s no money. Also, the budget deficit makes legislators wary of passing bills that may provoke an expensive legal challenge from Planned Parenthood or other groups. That’s what happened last year with the so-called “partial birth” abortion ban. It cost American taxpayers over $100,000 before it was found to be unconstitutional. Last year, Governor Warner vetoed a ban passed by the General Assembly; the House voted to override the veto, but it was sustained in the Senate.

This year, Virginia’s “partial birth” bills are trying to be more constitutional, but we don’t think they go far enough. Actually, no one’s ever heard of a “partial birth” procedure happening in Virginia. The procedure exists, but in reality it happens very rarely.

There’s currently a bill that would allow people to get the slogan “Choose Life” on their license plates. This is political speech. In all likelihood, we wouldn’t be able to get “Let A Woman Decide” on a license plate. There’s some question as to whether this is constitutional.

Can the government permit one side of the debate but not the other on what is, arguably, government property?––John Borgmeyer

No payoff on Lobby Day
The Assembly’s Christian Right doesn’t let science get in the way of its anti-abortion agenda

On the corner of his desk in the offices of the Virginia Legislature in Richmond, Senator Mark Obenshain (R-Harrisonburg) keeps a copy of Why One Way: Defending an Exclusive Claim in an Inclusive World by John MacArthur, an evangelical pastor whose brand of angry Christianity has made him a popular author and radio personality.

MacArthur sells books by claiming God wants us to hate everyone who’s not a fundamentalist Christian (forget that wishy-washy “love thy neighbor” stuff). As a politician, Obenshain exudes a similar God-is-on-my-side vibe, so the group of James Madison University students who filed into the Senator’s office on Pro-Choice Lobby Day weren’t expecting a compromise.

“We don’t expect to change his mind. He’s a hard-liner,” says Erin Coughlin, a JMU senior.

On Wednesday, January 28, about 200 abortion-rights advocates descended on Richmond for the annual pro-choice event. At 9:30am, 79 people from Charlottesville, Harrisonburg and southwest Virginia arrived in Richmond on a pair of chartered buses, just minutes before the JMU students were scheduled to meet Obenshain. It was bound to be an interesting session.

Last spring, Obenshain was an aspiring senator sitting on JMU’s Board of Visitors. With encouragement from Del. Bob Marshall (R-Manassas), Obenshain pushed the board in April to prohibit the school’s student health center from distributing “emergency contraception” pills without a doctor’s prescription (last month, the JMU Board of Visitors responded to student outrage by reversing the ban). In November, Obenshain won the 26th District Senate seat, and in his first session he seems poised to support Marshall’s HB 1414, which would prohibit any Virginia public university from distributing EC pills—with or without a prescription.

There are currently more than 20 bills before the General Assembly that would restrict access to abortion and birth control—such as the so-called “TRAP” legislation that would effectively close all but one abortion clinic in the Commonwealth and other bills that would require any doctor prescribing EC to students to seek parental consent. The young women who would mostly be affected by these measures don’t know what’s afoot in the legislature, contends Mandy Woodfield, a JMU senior.

“I don’t think the majority of women my age are aware their rights could be taken away,” she says.

Woodfield and her fellow student lobbyists wanted Obenshain to know that most young people support the right to choose. But no sooner did they take a seat on Obenshain’s sofa than the Senator let them know they were wasting their time.

“You and I have a fundamental difference of opinion,” Obenshain told the students. “With respect to you, I think you’re wrong.”

Obenshain sat on the edge of his desk, crossed his arms and spoke to the students in the soft voice of a shepherd coaxing wandering sheep back to the fold. During the polite but occasionally tense exchange, Obenshain told the visibly nervous students that he believed emergency contraception pills constitute abortion—and murder—because they flush a fertilized egg from the woman’s body before it attaches to the woman’s uterus. “It’s a definitional issue,” said Obenshain.

“Not according to science,” replied JMU senior Tim Howley. Pregnancy, as defined by scientists and Virginia’s Attorney General, begins with implantation, not fertilization. Emergency contraception is nothing more than a high dose of conventional birth control pills, and an advisory committee to the Federal Food and Drug Administration recommended that EC was safe enough to be sold over the counter.

Obenshain countered with his version of Pascal’s Wager. “Look at it this way,” he said. “If I’m wrong, then we’re imposing hardships on some families. If you’re wrong, then we’re taking literally millions of lives.”

Obenshain, who supports the death penalty, told the students that “people want leaders with a moral compass,” apparently referring to the 29 percent of registered voters in the 26th District who put him into office. The message was clear—college kids may know their science, but they don’t vote.

After 40 minutes, the two sides agreed to disagree. Nevertheless, the JMU students were lucky. The hallways pulsed with lobbyists, all wearing issues on their sleeves—Planned Parenthood’s army of co-eds, trial lawyers waving little red flags, health care advocates with helium balloons and fortune cookies. Most spent their time simply waiting for legislators who were stuck in meetings.

Planned Parenthood missed Albemarle Republican Delegate Rob Bell, for example. The 36-year-old Bell comes from the old school of Virginia Republicanism—cut taxes and cut the budget—and he keeps his religion private. David Nova, president of Planned Parenthood of the Blue Ridge, sees Bell as a Republican who can be reasoned with.

“He’s very smart,” says Nova. “But he’s under intense political pressure to vote with the party line on these issues.”

Last year, Bell joined Planned Parenthood in supporting a bill that would add language to the Code of Virginia stating that “contraception does not constitute abortion” and that abortion restrictions like parental consent and notification would not apply to birth control. A similar bill, SB 456, is on the table this year.

However, Bell has also introduced HB 671, a bill specifically punishing “feticide” and “fetal injury.” There are currently nine bills referencing “feticide” or “fetal injury,” which critics say are steps toward equating abortion, which is Constitutionally protected, with murder, which is not. These bills teem with Virginia’s far-Right lawmakers’ fetish-like preoccupation with the unborn fetus.

After the meetings, Planned Parenthood’s lobbyists retreated to a nearby pub for lunch. Holly Hatcher, a Charlottesvillian and director of statewide organizing for Planned Parenthood, arrived with some bad news—Marshall’s TRAP bill passed the 100-member House with 69 votes, four more than last year. The TRAP bill will likely die in the Senate again this year, but that wasn’t much consolation.

“We’re going in the wrong direction,” said Nova. “If we’re ever going to have a good vote, you’d think it would happen right after the legislators see 200 of us walking around their office. It’s scary.”—John Borgmeyer

Water into whine
Hollymead developer finds his wetlands mistake costly

The undeveloped land north of Charlottesville ain’t cheap—about $12 to $18 per square foot. But perhaps the most expensive piece of real estate of all along 29N is 17 feet of an unnamed tributary of Powell Creek, which runs through the Hollymead Town Center site.

In the fall, bulldozers cleared trees, bushes and grass alongside 2,517 feet abutting five creeks that run east to west through the Hollymead site. The problem? The State’s Department of Environmental Quality approved razing only 2,500 feet along the creeks. D’oh!

Project developer Wendell Wood says DEQ inspectors visit the site weekly, and on October 21 the State caught the mistake.

“We admitted it,” says Wood. “In situations like this we could go to court, but in this case we agreed we made a mistake. It wasn’t worth fighting over.”

Before construction companies can alter creeks or other bodies of water, they must first get permission from the DEQ. Usually, the State allows developers to destroy wetlands in one place if they promise to clean up and protect equivalent wetlands somewhere else, a process called “mitigation.” Developers may mitigate land anywhere in the State, as long as the plan meets DEQ approval.

The DEQ gave Wood permission to raze land along five streams that currently divert the site’s runoff into a holding pond. When the project is finished, those streams will live in pipes beneath the parking lot of the 165-acre site. To mitigate this damage, Wood agreed to plant trees and bushes along 2,500 feet of Powell Creek on land he owns just south of Hollymead. Wood says the plantings will extend between 70 and 100 feet on both sides of the creek. The DEQ tells developers what kinds of flora to plant and where. Furthermore, Wood must pay to put the mitigated land in permanent easement, so that any future development there will not disturb the creek.

With the violation, Wood’s company, United Land Corporation, was fined $2,000. But the real cost was paperwork and lost time, says Wood.

To make up for the extra 17 feet of damage, Wood must mitigate another 17 feet of Powell Creek. This change means his company needed to submit a completely new application to the DEQ, which meant Wood’s workers had to stay away from the Hollymead stream sites for 30 to 40 days while the new permit worked its way through the State bureaucracy, says Wood.

Wood declined to estimate how much the delay cost his company. “That 17 feet was pretty expensive, in terms of time and paperwork,” he says. “I wish we had never disturbed it, I can assure you.”

On January 14, the DEQ published a legal notice of the violation in The Daily Progress. According to the notice, the State Water Control Board will accept public comment about the DEQ’s action against United Land up to 30 days after publication of the notice.

Edward Liggett, an enforcement specialist with the DEQ in Harrisonburg, says people usually use the comment period to opine that the penalty is too harsh, or not harsh enough. But the penalty, he says, isn’t so much punitive as it is a “pathway to compliance.” So far, no one has used the public comment period to sound off about the controversial super shopping center project itself.—John Borgmeyer

There’s always next year
No charter for UVA this time around

Head honchos at the Commonwealth’s three top colleges have decided to put on hold their measures to gain autonomy from the State. On the advice of legislators who say this year’s General Assembly session will be crammed with tax and budget issues, the presidents of Virginia Polytechnic Institute, the College of William and Mary and UVA said last week they will wait until next year to try for “charter” status.

“This doesn’t change anything significantly. The University is just slowing down a little,” says UVA representative Carol Wood.

This fall, presidents of the three schools said they were fed up with the State’s dwindling financial support—especially as nearby rivals like University of North Carolina have been beefing up their college budgets. Faced with the nightmarish vision of top students turning (gasp!) Tarheel, the three Virginia colleges sought to decide their own tuition and out-of-state student enrollment levels, and control their own investments. In exchange, they would take less money from the State.

Each school would have to draft its own unique charter for General Assembly consideration, says Senator Creigh Deeds (D-Charlottesville). “It’s a big bite for legislators to consider in one year,” says Deeds. The General Assembly will consider more than 3,000 bills during the current 60-day session, and legislators are already expecting clashes over tax reform and budget cuts.

A draft of the charter bill has been introduced into both the House and Senate, where the Education and Finance committees of both bodies will study it. When this year’s session ends, Wood says UVA’s administration will work with the State to draft the particulars of UVA’s charter.

Wood doubts the Assembly will come through with any last-minute money that would make autonomy unnecessary. “If you look at how much we’ve been cut and the difficulty the State has had, it’s unlikely,” says Wood.

Don’t cry too hard for UVA, though. Between 2002 and 2003 its endowment grew nearly 7 percent to $1.8 billion from $1.69 billion, more than twice the national average increase of 3 percent, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers.—John Borgmeyer

Schooling the City Council
Everybody’s sick of the MCP. Won’t someone think about the children?

The acrimonious debate over the proposed Meadowcreek Parkway, which continues to roil City politics, has made the upcoming May elections for City Council look like a referendum over the controversial road that would go through McIntire Park. Candidates will likely pepper their election bids with words like “easement” and “VDOT.” But what if the jargon of City politics revolved around accreditation and SOLs—the buzzwords of education?

“I would welcome that more than anything,” says Linda Bowen, the chairperson of the Charlottesville School Board, of an alternate reality where public education ruled City politics. “I think it’s wise for [residents] to scrutinize what’s going on with the school system.”

Public schools should be of interest even to City residents who don’t have kids in the system, as about 31 percent of all of the City’s expenditures go to the schools.

Bowen and several other well-positioned observers of City schools agree that the hottest issue for any education debate would be school funding. According to Superintendent Ron Hutchinson, Charlottesville’s school system is facing a “worst case scenario” of being up to $2 million short for next year’s budget. The crunch is largely due to changes at the State level, including shifts in the retirement system and in the way Charlottesville’s comparative wealth is tabulated by the State. In order to make ends meet for a proposed $46 million budget that suggests increasing teacher salaries by 6 percent, Hutchinson has recommended several possible job cuts.

The City currently contributes two thirds of the schools’ funding, and Hutchinson says the Council “continues to be very generous to us.” But with the State not pulling its share of the load, several observers say schools need more help from local government when it comes to working with Richmond.

Bekah Saxon, a teacher at Buford Middle School and president of the Charlottesville Education Association, says her strongest plea for City Council is for them to push the State to send more money to schools. In the current school year, Virginia only kicks in $16 million of the school system’s total revenue.

After budget worries, other likely local education flashpoints cited by insiders include Virginia’s Standards of Learning (SOL) tests, achievement gaps, potential increases in enrollment and the ongoing search for a new superintendent for City schools.

In order for a Virginia school to be fully accredited by the State, 70 percent of its students must pass the SOL tests in all four core subject areas. Currently, four of Charlottesville’s nine public schools, including Charlottesville High School, fall short of full accreditation. Though the failing rating won’t officially kick in for schools until 2007, this year’s seniors will be the first to be denied diplomas if they fail to pass the SOL tests. Del. Mitchell Van Yahres (D- Charlottesville) recently introduced a bill to delay the diploma sanctions, but the bill was voted down on January 26.

The Federal government also has a hand in school achievement testing with the No Child Left Behind Act. The complicated Federal program targets school performance in several areas, with a range of dates for compliance.

“[School] divisions are not going to escape those mandates,” Hutchinson says of the Federal performance goals, adding that if Charlottesville schools did pull out of the Federal program, “it would have a potentially significant financial impact.”

The implications of the performance tests include an achievement gap between students from lower- and higher-income families, and the possibility of parents being able to remove their kids from failing schools. This issue could also intensify debates over the districting of elementary schools.

“I would love to see a discussion of allowing parents to choose elementary schools,” says Aileen Bartels, the co-president of the parent-teacher organization at Burnley-Moran Elementary.—Paul Fain

Scratchy record
A violent past becomes present for UVA student accused of murder

Witnesses on both sides of the verbal sparring that occurred in the minutes before volunteer firefighter Walker Sisk was stabbed to death on November 8 have testified that UVA student Andrew Alston, the accused murderer, did not appear likely to up the ante with any violence.

“I wasn’t concerned about Andrew getting in a fight,” said Jeffrey Cabrera, a member of the group of four young men that included Alston the night of the murder, at the January 15 murder hearing. “Andrew seemed cool.”

Cabrera might have been more concerned about Alston’s violent tendencies if he had been with him on Halloween night in 1998. That evening, Alston assaulted another juvenile in his suburban Philadelphia hometown. He was later charged with criminal conspiracy and aggravated assault, according to Frank Snow, deputy chief juvenile probation officer for Montgomery County, Pennsylvania.

Though officials with the Montgomery County Juvenile Probation Department are now withholding many of the details of the 1998 Alston assault case, Snow told Beth Cohen of The Reporter, a local newspaper, that the assault, “was a Halloween incident and [Alston] stole the kid’s candy, broke the kid’s nose and the kid ended up with a skull fracture.”

Snow confirms that on January 5, 1999, Alston was committed to a six-month stint at a farm-based juvenile detention program in the Philly area where participants are taught conflict management. Though the residential program is designed to last three months, Alston apparently did a double stint.

At Alston’s January 15 hearing in Charlottesville General District Court, his lawyer, Scott Goodman, introduced clarifying evidence that Alston did not, as had been said in a previous hearing, kick the youth on the ground in the 1999 assault.

Alston’s father, Robert A. Alston, attended the January hearing. The senior Alston is an accomplished corporate lawyer and an elected township supervisor in Andrew’s hometown of Lower Gwynedd. The legal team the Alston family has assembled for the alleged murderer’s defense, which will continue with grand jury proceedings beginning on February 17, includes Goodman, a local lawyer, and Barry Boss, a prominent Washington defense attorney. Among Boss’ most noteworthy defenses was when, in 1998, he and another lawyer persuaded the U.S. Attorney’s Office and Department of Justice to drop the Federal death penalty for a notorious D.C. drug kingpin who had been charged with six murders.

During Alston’s January 15 hearing Boss’ persistent examination of witnesses visibly perturbed Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney Jon R. Zug, who will handle the case as it moves to the grand jury in February.—Paul Fain