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Row by row: City community gardens get kudos

Buford's City Schoolyard Garden
Students nibble carrots at the Buford City Schoolyard Garden, one of two Charlottesville community gardens recognized by the Piedmont Environmental Council following a yearlong contest. Photo courtesy of PEC.

When the Piedmont Environmental Council kicked off a contest to seek out and recognize the best community gardens in central Virginia last spring, its members weren’t quite sure what to expect. By year’s end, they were holding 22 applications: big plots, small plots, old ones, new ones.

The diversity and strong showing, especially from Charlottesville and Albemarle, made it hard to pick winners, said PEC staffer Jessica Palmer. But ultimately, they selected six standouts, including two thriving urban gardens from the city—the City Schoolyard Garden at Buford Middle School and The Haven’s PATCH Community Garden.

Both the Charlottesville winners are exemplary for a number of reasons, Palmer said. They’re active and food-focused, she said, growing herbs and veggies that eventually make it to tables, and those tending them also make an effort to provide pollinator habitat with flowers and other plants.

But most importantly, they’re designed to be much more than a place to grow veggies.

The Buford City Schoolyard Garden, which won a $500 award from PEC, was started in 2010 with financial help from the Local Food Hub and has since become a much-loved outdoor classroom where middle schoolers can get their hands dirty learning about the science of gardening and tasting the fruits of their labors.

Teachers there “really do a great job of incorporating it into their lesson plans,” Palmer said.

Less than a mile away is the 2-year-old PATCH Community Garden run by The Haven, the Downtown day center for the homeless, which won one of PEC’s $300 awards. Lee Johnson has been The Haven’s “garden guru” for a year, and has helped turn the two-acre plot into an integral part of The Haven’s mission.

On donated land adjacent to the Oakwood Cemetery near the intersection of Ridge Street and Elliott Avenue, Haven guests, staff, and volunteers work together to grow vegetables and berries and tend a beehive. Nearby residents have pitched in by redirecting their rainwater to two cisterns that are tapped for irrigation—one way the urban setting has worked in the gardeners’ favor, said Johnson.

The 60’x100′ garden offers a supply of fresh, local food to The Haven’s kitchen, and has been remarkably productive. More than 400 pounds of potatoes were harvested this year, Johnson said—“a real truckload.”

But their toil in the soil is about more than growing food, he said. “The really wonderful part of it is the community that’s built, and the sense of pride and ownership it brings.” Giving people the chance to take responsibility for their lives is a big part of what The Haven does, said Johnson, and the garden is a natural extension. “It’s been a really empowering and ennobling thing for some of the guests to be able to grow their own food and support themselves in a tangible way. When people are sitting down for breakfast in the morning and eating their hash browns, it’s cool for them to say, ‘Yeah, I grew these, I watered them, I harvested them, I cut them up.’”

There’s still room to expand, Johnson said, and the award money may go to more fencing and tools to turn over more ground. The spirit of the garden is growing along with its footprint. Some of the neighbors supplying rainwater have been inspired to start their own plots, Johnson said—more evidence that, as PEC found, the city and surrounding areas are fertile ground for the backyard garden.

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Off to Richmond: David Toscano on what to expect in 2013 session

Delegate David Toscano
David Toscano talks with supporters at a sendoff event at Escafé last week. The delegate from Charlottesville is in Richmond this week for the start of Virginia’s 2013 legislative session. Photo by John Robinson.

Delegate David Toscano left Charlottesville for Richmond and the 2013 legislative session last week, his campaign coffers well padded with the checks of more than 100 supporters who turned out for a fundraising sendoff dinner at Escafé last Thursday. And he carried plenty of requests with him, too.

For local government, the asks have ranged from the highly specific (amending state law to let the county restrict how many broken-down cars can be parked outside a building) to the broad and predictable (an end to unfunded state mandates). Last week, the big buzz among his constituents as they opened their wallets was the Assembly’s confirmation vote on UVA Rector Helen Dragas, said Toscano. Among those bending his ear here, “it’s nine to one against,” he said.

As his voice has been elevated, so has the importance of the priorities and the checkbooks of his constituents. But this year—his eighth in Virginia’s House of Delegates and his second as its minority leader—Toscano is solidifying his role as chief Virginia Democratic delegate. It’s up to him to wrangle minority support for a platform in a body that’s overwhelmingly Republican, and he has 30 days to do it.

The years-old battle over how to shore up the Commonwealth’s transportation fund is one battleground. The state’s transportation projects are now underfunded by about $3 billion, Toscano said, but lawmakers can’t agree on how to close the gap. It’s the urban crescent that’s bleeding the most, but the trick is getting rural Republicans to agree to help foot the bill.

“Many of them have taken these no-tax pledges, so they don’t support raising any money that’s over and above what economic growth provides to us,” Toscano said. “And I think trying to convince them otherwise is a huge challenge.”

In 2013, all eyes are on the gas tax, which hasn’t been adjusted to match inflation since 1986. Many Republicans see it as an unacceptable tax increase, but Toscano said he sees potential for compromise.

Beyond the Sisyphean task of wrangling minority consensus on transportation, Toscano is planting the party’s flag in a few other major issues. Even after nationwide fury over a requirement that would compel some abortion seekers to get transvaginal ultrasounds resulted in Republicans backing off some of their more extreme pro-life proposals in 2012, some abortion restrictions passed, and Toscano wants Democrats to push to repeal them.

Also on the agenda is legislation that he says will make it easier for Virginians to vote—a progressive answer to last year’s right-backed voter I.D. law. Expect to see measures like expanded absentee voting, and longer voting hours on election days, Toscano said.

Then there’s the debate over lifting the moratorium on uranium drilling in Virginia. Toscano is opposed to ending the ban, saying he wants more convincing evidence it’s safe, but he said it will be hard to predict how the Assembly will vote. Analyst Geoffrey Skelley of UVA’s Center for Politics agrees.

“That’s kind of a fun battle, because the sides are not evenly drawn by partisanship,” Skelley said. Conservative legislators in and around Pittsylvania County, home to one of the world’s largest untapped uranium deposits, are pushing for an end to the mining ban, but many members of their own party disagree with them.

But Skelley said the broader fight in Richmond will continue to be how best to shift existing general fund resources to cover the state’s most pressing necessities in a lean economy.

“You’ll probably get into a spot where Democrats will be fighting the Governor based on the fact that money should be used for things like education,” as opposed to closing the transportation funding gap, said Skelley.

The governor has said he wants teacher pay raises, but Toscano remains wary, and said protecting education funding is one of his main priorities. And he said the still-looming threat of sequestration casts a shadow on any budget discussion. The potential for massive federal spending reductions remains, and that’s bad news for the Commonwealth.

“We didn’t really get any answers,” Toscano said. “Virginia’s ox is about ready to get gored here in the form of very large defense cuts. So we really don’t know the full impact of that until we know how much precisely there’s going to be.”

Meanwhile, everybody back home is hoping to get their money’s worth. Keeping all the balls in the air becomes a big part of the job, Toscano said. “You’re juggling these things and another gets tossed to you, and you try to catch it and move it forward,” he said.

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For outdoor enthusiasts, specialized first aid course could be a lifesaver

Wilderness First Aid course
Students learn to support a broken leg in a wilderness first aid course. Photo by Matt Rosefsky.
Matt Rosefsky was on a Washington mountaintop on a 70-mile stretch of trail last September when everything went wrong. One of the group of four he was leading on an excursion with the local Outdoor Adventure Social Club injured his knee and had to slow to a hobble. Another hiker started to get hypothermic as ice and snow began to fall —the first flakes of a coming blizzard. The trail was rough and hard to follow. As the group leader, he had to decide whether to hunker down and risk getting stranded, or try to keep the suffering group moving to escape the storm.
“Any way I looked at it, there was no magical right action where everybody was going to be set,” Rosefsky said. “There was a risk in any possible answer.”
Fortunately, that’s what he’s trained for. Rosefsky, 40, a UVA alum who founded the OASC after graduating in 2004, is a certified wilderness EMT, and now teaches classes in disaster and wilderness first aid all over Virginia and elsewhere. His next two-day instructional course starts January 12 here in Charlottesville.
Rosefsky first got interested in wilderness first aid when he started leading hiking trips. In 2007, he got certified as an EMT and instructor by SOLO, the country’s oldest wilderness medical school, and soon forged a partnership with Charlottesville-based Blue Ridge Mountain Sports to offer affordable classes in the communities where the outdoor apparel company has stores. The course costs $175, and Rosefsky and BRMS team up to donate 10 percent of the proceeds to a local charity­—in this case, the Piedmont Group of the Sierra Club.
The 18-hour course is about half lecture, half hands-on work, said Rosefsky. It goes a lot further than your basic first aid instruction, because it’s designed to teach you what to do when you might be the only help a victim will get for a long time. The obvious application is in the backcountry, so the course is popular with local hikers and outdoors enthusiasts. But the skills you learn could be just as applicable in a city hit by an earthquake or a hurricane, said Rosefsky.
“Imagine if some big disaster happens,” he said. “First of all, your cell phone probably doesn’t work. There are 300 people who are hurt, and there’s 10 ambulances. Do the math. They’re not coming anytime soon. So you need to know what to do until that help arrives.”
For that reason, SOLO trainees learn to do some things even most ambulance crews don’t, he said, like set broken bones and do a spine test to see if even a severely injured victim might be able to walk out, instead of being backboarded. The instructional process is intense—think fake blood and a screaming actor who can’t tell you what’s wrong. At its core is a method called the patient assessment system—an observation-based recipe for dealing with any crisis.
It might come in handy some day, as it did for Rosefsky and his hiking companions on that snowy peak. What he’d learned helped him know what to do then: wrap the injured knee, get the hypothermic hiker bundled up as best as possible, and head out of the storm to find a safe place to camp and get warm. Eventually, he said, “everyone was fine.”
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Austin trip for city and county is on, despite concerns of some

Austin sign
City and county officials head to Austin with members of the local business community in February. File photo.

Despite a last-minute flap over cost, Charlottesville and Albemarle are sending staff and elected officials to Austin next month for talks and tours they hope will help city and county replicate some of the Texas city’s economic successes here. But even as details of the trip take shape, some are still concerned it’s a waste of money.

Local travel agent and Charlottesville-Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau board member George Benford came up with the idea for the Austin outing, and said about 20 people are expected to go. Six of them are elected officials and senior planning and development staff from the city and county, and at about $1,550 a head, their participation in the two-night trip will cost taxpayers in both municipalities a total of about $9,000.

So what will they be doing?

A lot of listening, said Benford, whose travel agency will get a commission of $80 for each member of the delegation—not enough to cover the time he’s put into the trip, he said, but he doesn’t mind. The schedule is pretty packed: They fly in Tuesday, February 26, and participate in paneldiscussions from 1 to 5pm. Talks start again at 7:30am Wednesday and go until 5pm, and there are two seminars and a debriefing Thursday before everybody flies home at noon.

There are dinners and visits to music scenes scheduled for the evenings, including a potential behind-the-scenes tour of the set of Austin City Limits, which is filmed next door to the posh W hotel where the delegation is staying—at a special reduced rate of $259 a night, Benford pointed out. But “there’s no free time whatsoever,” he said. “This is not a fun trip.”

Benford has had help in planning from the Richmond Chamber of Commerce which organized a similar trip to Austin last year. The schedule isn’t finalized, but Benford rattled off a list of more than 15 Austinites who had agreed to meet with the delegation, and it’s diverse: the city’s deputy director of economic growth and redevelopment; the music editor for the Austin Chronicle; the dean of the business school at the University of Texas at Austin; the superintendent of the city school system; venture capitalists and angel investors; and many others. They’ll cover a lot of topics, Benford said, but there will be a strong focus on the development of the technology, music, and film industries; energy efficiency; redevelopment; and ways to get government, schools, and private companies working together.

Austin is a decade or more ahead of Charlottesville on a number of economic development fronts, said Benford, and there’s a lot to inspire when it comes to urban planning. There’s the Pecan Street Project, a grant-funded initiative to develop smart-grid technology that officials hope could inform a total overhaul of the way the city delivers electricity, and has given rise to an entire neighborhood of homes with advanced energy technology. There’s busy, beloved Zilker Park, 350 acres of bikeable, walkable waterfront. And there’s Rainey Street, where tiny, shabby bungalows have been renovated into a string of little bars, helping create a thriving street scene and nightlife.

The city has also had some big ideas that have paid off. SXSW—now a $167-million-grossing festival of music, film, and ideas—“started out like Tom Tom,” said Benford.

The Charlottesville City Council unanimously approved the trip in November, and the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors gave it the O.K. shortly before, despite the objections of Supervisor Duane Snow. Some are still unhappy with the use of taxpayer dollars. Albemarle County Board of Supervisors Chair Ann Mallek unsuccessfully tried to push the Board to reverse its support earlier this month after she said she realized too late they’d be paying to send an elected official—Supervisor Ken Boyd—as well as two staffers.

“My initial reaction was ‘Why?’” Mallek said. She participated in a lot of continuing education programs as a teacher, “and I know how difficult it is to carry substantive information home and put it to work.”

She’s also less than starstruck with the destination. For one thing, Austin’s metropolitan area population of more than 1.5 million is about 10 times that of Charlottesville’s. And Mallek said it’s important to note that the Texas city’s big strides in development aren’t seen as good news by everybody. “There are many people in Austin grievously concerned about their rapid growth,” she said.

A far cheaper way to get some insight would have been to head to Richmond and learn about the city secondhand from officials who traveled there last year, she said.

They could, said Benford, but to immerse yourself in a new place with peers is much more valuable, as local officials have found during other planning retreats and city visits.

“It’s sitting down to dinner and talking to somebody next to you and saying, ‘What did you think of that discussion’—that’s where so much of the value comes from,” he said. “If they come back with one idea for, let’s say, sustainable energy, it could save every taxpayer so much money.”

Mallek said she’ll remember that argument when Board members balk at giving money to groups like the Piedmont Council on the Arts, which she said offers a great return on taxpayers’ investment. In the meantime, she’s calling for “a real schoolteacher session” when the travelers return, with serious presentations of what they learned in Austin. “That’s their challenge and their assignment,” she said. “That they’ll make it worth our while.”

 

Community leaders—including city and county elected officials and staff traveling on the taxpayers’ dime—are headed to Austin next month to see how the city’s successes could inform policy here. They’ll meet a lot of movers and shakers in Texas, but some at home are still not pleased with the plan.

 

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Local officials, state eye the unthinkable as fiscal cliff deadline approaches

Potential impact of sequestration, by state.

Congress has yet to defuse the time bomb it created last year with the passage of the Budget Control Act, a package of automatic spending cuts and tax hikes that will propel the country off the so-called fiscal cliff if lawmakers can’t agree on budget reduction measures before the end of the year. With the deadline fast approaching, Charlottesville and Albemarle officials are trying to plan for the possibility of massive cuts in a state that would be hit especially hard by sequestration.

Albemarle County receives $16.7 million in federal funding annually, said county spokeswoman Lee Catlin—about 5 percent of its revenues. More than half of that goes into the school budget, which gets about $7 million to support special education, free and reduced lunch, and other programs. Because those programs are mandated, the district would have to find the money for them elsewhere, said Albemarle County School Board Vice Chair Diantha McKeel. And county schools are already running lean.

“It sounds trite to say, but we don’t have a lot of places to go,” McKeel said. The big sequestration question mark also affects the district’s ability to map out its future. “It’s very difficult to do any planning,” said McKeel.

People in the public and private sector all over Virginia are facing the same uncertainty. The Commonwealth ranks second in the nation in federal payroll and procurement dollars, according to Stephen Fuller, a public policy expert at George Mason University and director of the school’s Center for Regional Analysis. Nearly 10 percent of all federal employment pay goes to Virginia residents, and the state sucks up a huge portion of U.S. defense contract spending, Fuller said. Most of that money is concentrated in Northern Virginia and the Hampton Roads area, as Fuller found in a study of the potential impact of the Budget Control Act earlier this year.

That doesn’t mean the rest of the state won’t be hurting. Albemarle County now has a large and growing defense and intelligence industry. It’s home to the National Ground Intelligence Center, a station of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and numerous private companies that have put down roots here, including big names like Northrop Grumman. All would face big cuts, said Fuller, but defense spending isn’t the only thing that would be slashed.

“There are impacts from these cutbacks that are less visible to the citizens of the Commonwealth,” Fuller said. “They come in forms that are more subtle.”

Some may seem more inconvenient than apocalyptic—it will take a lot longer to get a passport, for instance, and smaller regional airports may have to close as air traffic controllers are laid off. But other services we depend on but barely notice will also slow, like port inspection and meat inspection, Fuller said.

And then there’s the ripple effect. Fuller’s analysis puts the total sequestration-related job cuts in Virginia at well over 207,000, and the businesses where those government employees spend their money will suffer too, he said.

The hanging sword is already affecting the state and national economy. Federal agencies—especially those concentrated in Virginia, said Fuller—are holding off on hiring and filling contracts. “The economy is slowing down in anticipation of uncertainty,” he said.

The same uncertainty is plaguing local government, where federal money supports many social safety net programs. In Charlottesville, where schools, social services, and public housing rely heavily on federal funds, the situation could be dire, said City Manager Maurice Jones.

Part of the problem, he said, is that the city would have to plug the holes left by the cuts within its current fiscal year, which ends June 30. “We’d have to eliminate services immediately, or find the money,” he said.

Albemarle County schools spokesman Phil Giaramita said a few factors might help the district avoid catastrophe. Albemarle schools have seen a steady reduction in federal support in recent years, aside from a recent stimulus bump, so the potential hole isn’t that big, he said. And unlike the city, county schools could expect to see the cuts phased in gradually. Still, he agreed that trying to plan for a future that may or may not include big revenue gaps is taxing—and it’s becoming the new reality.

“You think you have it right, and then a week later you’re surprised and starting all over again,” he said.

And that’s the frustrating part, said local officials: Ultimately, the responsibility to keep the wheels from falling off rests with them. Congress may swing the sequestration ax, but it’s local government that must figure out how to keep the pain of the blows at bay. They’re not the only ones worrying.

“A year and a half ago, the rating agencies put all of us on notice for review here in the state of Virginia,” said Jones. Even the triple-A bond-rated communities had to go through a review process “because of the vulnerability of the state when it comes to federal funds,” he said.

Right now, Jones said all he can do is hope for a deal in Washington. “But if it does happen, we’re the ones who have to carry the burden,” he said. “We’re immediately responsible for our citizens.”

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Matteus Frankovich reinstates live music at Moto Saloon

Matteus Frankovich
Matteus Frankovich, owner of Black Market Moto Saloon. Photo by John Robinson.

Live music has returned to the corner of Market and Meade, and yet another battle over zoning might be brewing at the Black Market Moto Saloon.

Two months ago, City Council denied Moto Saloon owner Matteus Frankovich a special use permit that would have given his bar and restaurant music hall status and allowed him to host concerts. Despite being shot down, Frankovich has since started putting on acoustic events, and says he’s within his rights according to his certificate of occupancy.

“As it stands, my C of O says, in quotes, ‘No amplified music without an approved special use permit,’ so I have nothing in writing that says I can’t have acoustic shows,” Frankovich said. He’s confident enough that he’s posting notice of the unplugged shows on his Facebook page and in this paper.

But Charlottesville Zoning Administrator Read Brodhead said that’s too broad an interpretation, and he intends to make sure Frankovich knows it. The city ordinance defining restaurants says music has to be incidental to the business’ primary operation, said Brodhead.

“If I went down there and everyone was sitting at the tables eating their dinner and listening to someone play acoustic guitar, O.K.,” he said. “But if we go down there and there’s a basket of pretzels and that’s it and everyone’s listening to the show, I’d say ‘No.’”

Noise ordinance violations finally pulled the plug on late-night parties at Belmont’s Bel Rio in 2010, but Brodhead said the Moto Saloon issue hinges on that zoning language, “and I intend to enforce it,” he said.

City Councilor Dave Norris—the sole vote in favor of Frankovich’s music hall application back in October—had a different opinion. Norris said that in his “very clear understanding” of the city code, amplification is what triggers the need for a special use permit.

“It was brought up several times in the course of that whole discussion about how he was allowed to have unamplified concerts,” said Norris. “I don’t imagine that would be a problem. I hope he gets a good turnout and it generates some business for him.”

Bill Emory, a resident of Woolen Mills —home to the most vocal opponents of Frankovich’s bid for a music permit—said it would bother him if people were disturbed by noise at night, but “as long as they’re functioning as a restaurant or bar, I think everyone is fine with that.”

So far, Frankovich said he’s had no complaints about the revival of live music at Moto Saloon. “The fact of the matter is, our music never bothered the neighbors,” he said, and a sound test showed he wasn’t violating noise restrictions. He plans to hold his ground. “We’re going to continue to have dance parties, special events, acoustic music,” he said.

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Human Rights Task Force votes 6-4 to recommend Commission with enforcement powers

Human Rights Task Force
Human Rights Task Force co-chair Jesse Ellis listens to colleagues during a recent Task Force meeting. Photo by Graelyn Brashear

After more than nine months of study and debate, Charlottesville’s Human Rights Task Force decided in a divided vote to recommend the city create a Human Rights Commission with the power to investigate and resolve complaints, but the issue is far from decided.

The 10-member Task Force was established earlier this year to investigate whether the city needed to establish an ordinance and a special body devoted to addressing discrimination—primarily in employment. There’s plenty of precedent in Virginia for such a move. Many Northern Virginia communities have long-established human rights commissions set up to act as local enforcers of national anti-discrimination laws. But Charlottesville’s Task Force had been deadlocked on the fundamentals.

The Cavalier Daily reported on the final meeting of the Task Force Wednesday night, when members voted 6-4 in favor of a Commission with enforcement powers, as opposed to one charged only with educating the community, advocating for victims of discrimination, and referring complaints to state-level authorities. That basic question of the mission and power of the eventual Commission has been the source of debate within the Task Force for months, and up until last month, members were split on the issue 5-5.

The Task Force vote was merely on the recommendation members will make to City Council later this month, and some members made it clear they wanted Council to hear about the dissent among the decision-makers.

Walt Heinecke, a UVA education professor and outspoken advocate for what he calls “a Commission with teeth,” called the vote “promising,” and urged officials to adopt the Task Force majority’s recommendations.

“I think it will also send a message to professionals considering whether or not to relocate to C’ville that we are a sensitive, caring, and diverse community. Our most disadvantaged citizens will be given access to justice and equity,” Heinecke wrote. “I feel it’s time for significant action by Council.”

City Council is expected to address the Task Force recommendations at its December 17 meeting.

 

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Forest focused: SELC attorney works to protect public lands

Sarah Francisco
Francisco is a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville, and leads SELC’s national forests and parks program. Photo courtesy of SELC.

Sarah Francisco first came face to face with the aftermath of clear cutting when she was a kid at a summer camp in the George Washington National Forest. On a hike, she came across a swath of what had once been woods. “The forest was gone, and there was just this tumbled array of logs and logging slash,” she said. “You couldn’t even really walk through the clear cut. You had to climb over everything.” At the time, she said, it might not have registered to her younger self as a watershed moment. “But it was this new piece of information to me about our forest.”

Some two decades later, Francisco, 33, is a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville, and leads SELC’s national forests and parks program, working with other outside groups to advocate to the U.S. Forest Service to improve management and protect publicly held lands. That includes the forest where she first saw what indiscriminate logging could do. In the last few years, much of her work has focused on the George Washington, the million-acre forest now at a turning point as the Forest Service prepares to release a new management plan that will determine how it’s accessed and used for the next 15 years.

Francisco grew up on a 200-acre farm in Augusta County, where she spent much of her time outside, riding her horse and hiking in the woods. She originally studied English, but her early connection to the land eventually helped steer her to a career in environmental law. “I wanted to do something that I viewed as having a more concrete impact on peoples’ lives and on our community and the world in general,” she said. She landed a fellowship at the SELC’s Charlottesville headquarters right out of school in 2002, and has been there since.

Success in her line of work doesn’t involve dramatic courtroom scenes. “It’s a long administrative process,” she said—a lot of reading and a lot of meetings. One such success was a challenge to a timber sale several years ago in the Cherokee National Forest in Tennessee, when the SELC convinced an appeals court to require the Forest Service to apply its own new and stricter forest management plan to a logging project it was planning to grandfather in.

The great thing about those long-slog lawsuits is that they often have a ripple effect, Francisco said, by establishing precedent. “I think we’ve been able to build on that,” she said. “We’ve seen this improvement in forest management without always having to resort to litigation.”

Sometimes, the job doesn’t involve a suit at all. Francisco has been closely involved in making recommendations to National Forest Service staff on drafting the new George Washington plan for years, trying to keep the SELC’s priorities—especially preventing natural gas drilling and fracking—front and center as the government maps out how the forest’s natural resources will be tapped in the coming decade and a half. She doesn’t see the Forest Service staff as adversaries, though. After all, most of them got to where they are because they love the land.

“In general, we often want the same outcome. We want thriving, sustainable forest ecosystems,” she said. “We don’t always have the same idea of how to get there, and we might have different ideas about what’s sustainable,” but they can usually find a wide middle ground. Often it’s in person. One of the best parts of the job is visiting the forest, sometimes with Forest Service staff. “We all love to get out in the field, and it’s always informative to look at things ‘on the ground’ and talk about it,” she said. “We can often come to an understanding.”

The George Washington management plan is now in the government’s hands. The Forest Service was expected to release the final plan before the end of the year, but it may take several more months, the SELC says.

Whatever the plan dictates, Francisco’s mission is the same. She said a Tennessean she met while battling the Cherokee National Forest logging project summed it up well.

“He said, ‘We’re seeing the forest the way it could be and it should be,’” she said. “That stuck with me. That’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to protect and conserve the southern Appalachian National Forests for what they can be, and they should be.”

 

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County schools look ahead to looming crowding issues

Maxed out: Western Albemarle and Albemarle high schools are set to exceed their enrollment capacity sooner than county officials anticipated.

As the Albemarle County Public School District works to find a short-term fix to overcrowding at two local elementary schools, parents and officials are eyeing a capacity crunch down the line. The writing is on the wall: When the ever-growing classes of school kids across the county hit ninth grade, the county will face costly expansions and redistricting. But there are no easy fixes.

A pair of committees convened by the district and made up mostly of local parents are tackling capacity issues at Agnor-Hurt and Meriwether Lewis elementary schools, and will offer suggestions for redrawing neighborhood feeder patterns for the coming school year at public meetings on December 10 and 11. At the behest of the district, the volunteers looking at the Western Albemarle feeder patterns are also looking beyond short-term reshuffling.

At a Redistricting Committee meeting at Murray Elementary School last Tuesday, county schools Chief Operating Officer Josh Davis flipped through maps showing Crozet neighborhoods where more young families than expected have arrived in recent years: Wickham Pond, Western Ridge, Grayrock, Bargamin, and others. The neighborhoods currently send kids to Brownsville Elementary—some 380 students, by what Davis says is a conservative estimate—but may shift to the so far less-crowded Crozet Elementary. It’s what happens when this group moves past grade school that has many worried.

“This is a growing area for the county, and it’s going to continue to grow,” Davis said. “It’s going to influence not only the elementary, but middle and high schools.”

And maybe sooner than the district is prepared for. The district’s long-term capital improvement plan calls for an $8.6 million addition to Western, but it wouldn’t be completed until at least 2020. The school is expected to exceed its capacity four years before that.

There are two other options to avoid overcrowding, Davis said. One is a brand-new high school. Superintendent Dr. Pamela Moran has been scoping out land in the northern part of the county along Route 29. A new school there would alleviate capacity issues at all three existing high schools, said Davis, “but it’s the most unlikely option, because of the cost.”

The tool employed first, he said, will be the same one the committees are struggling to use to ease enrollment pressure at area elementary schools—steering one school’s overflow to another’s empty seats—but on a bigger scale. Committee members took a first look at the task last week, examining neighborhoods that could be peeled off the Western feeder and added to Monticello High School’s instead.

Some members balked at the piecemeal approach, saying it was likely to anger families.

“We’ve spent how many months talking about a shift in the feeder pattern for one elementary school?” asked Mary Margaret Frank, a Murray Elementary mom. The pushback and uproar from parents has been intense, she said, and shifting kids to another high school entirely would be worse. “You’re moving people later in life, moving people to a completely different feeder pattern. That’s going to be exceptionally painful.”

And not particularly effective. A suggested redrawing of boundaries discussed at last week’s meeting that would move several swaths of Crozet and Ivy from Brownsville and Murray Elementary’s territory to Red Hill’s—a section south of Batesville, another along Dick Woods Road, and a third around the intersection of I-64 and the 250 Bypass—would shift only 59 high schoolers from Western to Monticello. To some, that might look a little like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, considering it would buy Western only about a year of avoiding its capacity ceiling. But that’s not quite a fair assessment, said Davis, considering it’s such a cost-effective measure.

“It’s the most efficient way to use our existing capacity,” he said. “That’s what our funding body, the Board of Supervisors, is going to want to make sure of—that we’ve efficiently used the resources we do have before asking for additional investments.”

But some concerned parents said it’s also on the heads of the Supervisors and other elected officials to think long-term, starting with the planning process.

“There are some political pressures that need to be brought to bear on the Board of Supervisors and developers in this area to help,” said Kelly Gobble, a Crozet committee member. “They are professionals, and we’re sitting here as volunteers trying to make sense of it all. It shouldn’t work in such a disparate way.”

Frank agreed that those who hold the purse strings have to be looking to the future. “No matter what we do next year and the next year, we need to keep an eye on this,” she said.

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Rivanna Solid Waste Authority faces changes as county makes plans to scale back support

The Rivanna Solid Waste Authority is at a crossroads. The joint agency was set up 22 years ago to oversee trash disposal and recycling in Charlottesville and Albemarle, but because of heavy competition among private haulers and a steady decrease in trash tonnage, the RSWA’s transfer facility in Ivy can no longer pay for itself. Now county staff and elected officials say they’re done propping it up.

“The county is saying right now that it’s time to reinvent the Authority,” said RSWA board member and Albemarle County Director of Neighborhood Development Mark Graham.

A consultant hired by Albemarle recommended the county look at finding a private partner instead of continuing to fund the RSWA’s transfer facility at the Ivy Materials Utilization Center, which charges a fee to allow local haulers to collect and then reload garbage before trucking it out of the area. Draper Aden Associates suggested the RSWA give up on running a transfer station at all, because the aging facility has been operating under capacity and at a loss—and the financial pressure has mounted for Albemarle since the City of Charlottesville opted to back out of what was a three-way agreement. County Supervisor Ken Boyd, who also sits on the RSWA board, said the costs for the county are soon expected to rise to more than $600,000 annually.

Instead, county staff said, the best option would be to make the Ivy facility a “convenience center,” where residents can pay by the load to dump things like yard waste and appliances.

But such a reinvention would mean a major scaling back for the RSWA, which currently spends $1.25 million a year to run the transfer facility. Boyd acknowledged that might mean some of the Authority’s 13 employees would no longer be needed. But private companies are doing the same work more efficiently, he said.

“The county would prefer not to be in the trash business,” he said.

The immediate task at hand for the RSWA is deciding whether to renew its contract with Waste Management, which currently enjoys deeply discounted tipping fees at the Ivy facility. Draper Aden suggested dumping that deal, whether the board decides to scrap the transfer facility or not. The contract renewal deadline is December 31, and the board has called a special meeting December 18 to make a decision.

But there will likely be a lot of discussion about the future of the Authority as a whole, too. Boyd and Graham said the county wants to hear from RSWA Executive Director Tom Frederick whether he believes the Authority can run the Ivy facility as a self-supporting operation. If not, it’s time to look at other options, they said.

“We’re considering their request in light of what we feel we can offer, while making sure we can maintain high quality of customer service,” Frederick said. “It’s complicated, but we’re working through those issues, and we hope to have a proposal on December 18.”

Ultimately, though, the RSWA’s services have to line up with what its municipal partners want. “If the county were not to extend a new contract with us, more than likely the Ivy facility will close,” Frederick said.