Author: graelynbrashear

Charlottesville’s Human Rights Task Force is staring down a deadline. Two public meetings remain—one on November 14, another on December 5—before its members are to issue a recommendation on whether the city should establish a Human Rights Commission, and what that agency should look like. The local Chamber of Commerce has raised concerns about the effect a quasi-judicial commission that can levy fines would have on businesses, but Chamber officials in at least one Virginia community that has embraced an enforcement model say they’ve seen no problems.

For almost two decades, the Prince William County Human Rights Commission has been receiving and resolving discrimination complaints. Debbie Jones, executive vice president at the Prince William County Chamber of Commerce, said the commission’s work hasn’t raised the hackles of the business owners her organization represents. “I’ve been in the Chamber world for 22 years, and I don’t recall there being anything negative about it,” she said.

Phyllis Aggrey is president of the Virginia Association of Human Rights Commissions and executive director of Prince William’s commission. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 included language that gave communities the power to establish local-level agencies to police reforms as a way to lift some of the pressure from the court system, Aggrey said, and commissions started springing up around the country in the decades that followed.

Four municipal-level human rights commissions that have the power to exact fines for acts they deem discriminatory grew out of that era in Virginia—in Fairfax, Arlington, and Prince William counties and the city of Alexandria. There’s also a Richmond-based state commission.

Prince William was relatively late to the game, creating its commission in 1993 following a push by a group of local residents led by the head of the local NAACP chapter. Aggrey said a planning committee met for a year to map out what the agency would be responsible for, how it would work with existing government, and what it would cost.

In its final report to county officials, the study committee pointed to economic justifications for a more streamlined, locally administered system for gathering up employment-related discrimination complaints. Prince William needed to bring in more industry to ease the tax burden on residents, the committee members said, and the key to making that happen would be making sure the increasingly diverse workforce felt like they had a fair shot. “The attractiveness of the environment in which County residents live, grow, and compete for the better life will, in the long term, determine whether the study committee can expect to attract light industry as it migrates from the North toward the sun belt regions of the South,” the report reads.

County officials adopted a human rights ordinance that established an enforcement-centric commission with a staff that could essentially act as a satellite office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Nearly 20 years later, the Prince William County Human Rights Commission has a budget of half a million dollars, a staff of five, and takes on about 145 cases a year, said Aggrey.

Of those, she said, “the lion’s share are no probable cause”—that is, she and her staff don’t pursue them. The cases that do move on are almost all resolved through mediation. Just 1 or 2 percent go to what’s called the conciliation phase, she said, where the commission awards damages, like lost wages.

The process can still be slow—when there’s probable cause, it usually takes two years to get a resolution—but Aggrey said there’s value in bringing the application of federal and state laws to the community level.

“This allows for a local entity, a local base, to be looking at your own businesses and your own community and hopefully doing things to try to dissuade potential human rights or civil rights violations,” she said.

So does it work? Aggrey said that even though she’s been with the Prince William commission almost from the start, it’s hard to answer that question, because there are no real empirical measures of success. But it’s important to look beyond the complaints and cases, she said. Like its sister agencies around the state, the commission acts as a nerve center for tackling tolerance issues and takes on an educational role, hosting workshops with businesses on preventing discrimination and forums in the wake of a racist leaflet campaign.

“I think there’s value in any community looking at some of these tough issues,” she said.

And it goes beyond black and white. Dennis Sumlin, an investigator with the Arlington County Human Rights Commission, said that despite the fact that tensions over racial discrimination have historically fueled interest in setting up human rights commissions in Virginia and elsewhere, the scope is far broader than that. He said his office handles many complaints each year from women claiming they weren’t hired because they were pregnant and people claiming they were passed over because of disabilities or illness, from cancer to HIV.

“A lot of times people get blinded by the race issue, but a lot of other people benefit,” Sumlin said.

Advocacy and education-focused commissions exist, too, like those in Virginia Beach and Chesapeake, but enforcement agencies are a phenomenon of Northern Virginia, which is a little more diverse than Charlottesville—and a lot more wealthy. The median family income in the four communities with commissions that have significant staff and enforcement powers ranges from $80,847 in Alexandria to $105,416 in Fairfix, which has Virginia’s oldest Human Rights Commission. Charlottesville, by contrast, has a median family income of $42,240.

The task force in Charlottesville that will soon make a recommendation on whether to create a commission here knows all of this. Aggrey visited the city in June to talk about her experience in Prince William. Ultimately, though, she said the agency has to fit the community.

“Charlottesville will have to decide what’s best for Charlottesville,” she said.

The most striking thing about seeing Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein sit side by side and talk about the Watergate scandal and their Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting that brought it to light is that even after 40 years of talking about it, they still get excited. Or if they don’t, they do a good job of sounding like they do.

The famous pair took the stage with Miller Center director and former Virginia Governor Gerald Baliles at the Paramount Friday following a screening of the movie based on their book about Nixon’s downfall, All the President’s Men, as part of the Virginia Film Festival’s “Presidency in Film” series. The packed house had laughed its way through the movie—for a political thriller, it got a lot of appreciative chuckles—and was rapt during the Q&A with Baliles, which touched on the long-term impacts of Watergate on politics and the media.

Woodward and Bernstein teamed up again this year to take another look at Watergate four decades later, and after spending a lot of time with White House tapes, they’d gained a better understanding of the vengeful rancor that inspired the tactics known as “ratfucking.” From plotting takedowns of members of the media to considering blackmailing Nixon predecessor Lyndon B. Johnson, Nixon and his top advisors were all about payback.

“There’s no ambiguity,” Woodward said. “He says, ‘I want the safe cracked. I want it blown. I want that file.’”

It’s often said that the cover-up of Watergate was worse than the crime. Not so, said the journalists.

“The crime was worse,” Woodward said. “Far worse,” Bernstein chimed in. The Nixon administration waged all-out war on the media, the anti-war movement, and their Democratic opponents—and in the last instance, their goal “was to undermine the very idea of free elections,” said Bernstein.

A lot has changed since then. Woodward pointed out the rather extraordinary show of bipartisanship in the Senate’s 77-0 vote to set up a committee to investigate the Watergate burglary, something that “just wouldn’t happen” today, he said.

Newsrooms have changed, too. The depictions of the Post’s floor in the movie—a crowded, squalid place ringing with the cacophony of typewriters—drive that home. But Woodward and Bernstein both said the real shift is in reporting. Too many journalists, especially young people who have grown up never knowing a world without the Web, rely too heavily on the Internet, thinking of it as a “magic lantern” that holds all the answers. Real reporting, he said, requires the kind of plodding methodology he and Bernstein employed to crack open Watergate.

But those on the other end of the media pipeline aren’t off the hook, Bernstein said. “There’s a huge difference today in how news and information is being received by readers, viewers, and consumers, too many of whom—many many more of whom—are not looking for the best obtainable version of the truth,” he said, “but information that will reinforce their previously held prejudices, ideologies, and political beliefs.”

The redevelopment of the former Martha Jefferson Hospital in North Downtown may be running behind schedule, but the anchor tenant is eager to show work is underway. The CFA Institute, currently headquartered just outside the city limits, held a “wall-breaking” ceremony yesterday with city officials and neighborhood association reps to mark the start of major construction on what it says will be its new home within a year.

Charlottesville developer Octagon Partners purchased the main Martha Jefferson campus for $6.5 million in September 2010, and when CFA was announced as an anchor tenant, the company said it would move in by spring 2013.

Sweetening the deal was a tax incentive agreement with the city that required Octagon to secure $40 million in investments and bring in 400 high-paying jobs with a minimum average salary of $75,000 in return for a 50 percent break in property taxes. CFA pledged to recruit 45 new positions in addition to its existing 400.

The international nonprofit—a professional organization for investors—got its start in Charlottesville more than 50 years ago. Today, the company has offices in New York, Brussels, Hong Kong, and London, and is the organization responsible for granting the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.

In a press release, CFA addressed a big concern of its soon-to-be North Downtown neighbors: parking. The makeover at Martha Jefferson will include 526 parking spaces, the company said, “eliminating the potential for spillover parking in the surrounding residential neighborhood.” They hope to get LEED certification for the project, which will more than double their office space to 144,000 square feet.

Months after thousands of people in the eastern U.S. were given back injections tainted with black mold, more than 300 have contracted fungal meningitis and 28 have died, including two in Virginia. As doctors scramble to treat those affected, regulators are trying to unravel what happened at the Massachusetts pharmacy that produced the drug. Whatever the cause, technology that could prevent a similar disaster already exists—and it was developed right here in Charlottesville.

Jim Veale was fresh out of UVA’s graduate physics department when he started Lighthouse Instruments in 1995 with a patent for a high-sensitivity laser. Five years later, he’d developed a revolutionary way to use the technology to check the integrity of sterile pharmaceuticals.

Injectables and other drugs packaged in small vials usually have a cushion of pure air, or “headspace,” sealed in above them. If the gas balance in that space is off—if there’s suddenly too much oxygen, for instance—it’s a clue that there’s a leak, and if air can get in, so can microbes. In Lighthouse’s early days, Veale learned that the standard method of testing headspace was, by necessity, destructive: In order to get a sample, pharmaceutical companies had to break open random vials. If they found a problem with one, they might have to scrap tens of thousands of doses.

“That’s when I had the idea,” Veale said. “Why couldn’t we do that measurement with this laser we have? The end user wouldn’t have to destructively test or open up the vial.” And what’s more, the technology would allow for 100 percent inspection.

Today, said Veale, Lighthouse employs 26 people, and its headspace systems are widely used by pharmaceutical companies around the world. “We have some competition, but we’re really the only ones offering this kind of laser technology,” he said.

And advancements are marching forward. They’re running final tests on new equipment designed to detect big drops in oxygen in vials, which would indicate the presence of microbes or other contaminants sealed in during the manufacturing process.

It’s possible that’s what happened at the New England Compounding Center, the source of the tainted drugs blamed for the meningitis outbreak. Officials have found problems at the plant, including puddles and dirty floor mats near areas that were supposed to be sterile.

Tom Thorpe is CEO of Afton Scientific, a small-batch drug maker. He’s also one of Veale’s best friends, and their companies share office space in Belmont. He knows full well how vigilant manufacturers have to be to avoid contamination. From air filters to fingertips, everything has to be cleaner than clean.

“You have to be constantly afraid of making a mistake,” he said.

But compounding pharmacies like the Massachusetts company are regulated far less strictly by the FDA than pharmaceutical manufacturers, Thorpe said, even though they often make similar products. Unless the government says test, companies won’t test. But the meningitis outbreak—and the arrival of technology that can assure safety while reducing waste—might shift the risk-benefit analysis for everybody in the industry.

“A lot of this technology adoption is driven by regulatory requirements,” said Veale. “Right now, I think everybody’s taking a wait-and-see attitude about how that regulatory environment is going to change.”

Fourteen months ago this week, I spent a long night hunkered down with my laptop in a middle school gym on the Jersey Shore as Hurricane Irene, roaring like a freight train overhead, made landfall a few miles to the south.

At the time, I was the editor of a local news website covering a town on Barnegat Bay, which separates the mainland from one of New Jersey’s long, skinny, overdeveloped barrier islands. Like the rest of the Jersey Shore, the community had grown accustomed to watching potentially devastating storms die in their tracks or pass them by. The Ash Wednesday nor’easter of 1962, which killed dozens along the eastern seaboard and destroyed most of the beachfront towns near where we lived, was ancient history; with typically short memories, people rebuilt, populating the dunes with miles of mansions.

You can only bypass doom for so long. We waited for Irene last August with real fear, thinking she might be the Big One. She wasn’t, but she was no cakewalk. The kicked-up tides flooded the beaches and bayfronts, the power blinked out and stayed out for days, and when the storm itself hit, it brought powerful winds that toppled trees, tore off a few roofs, and kept me and my fellow reporters awake through the night, talking to the cops out on patrol and filing updates to the Web.

This time, it really is the Big One for the Jersey Shore. And I’m realizing that there’s an even more exquisite torture than waiting for a hurricane to trundle toward your home, and that’s watching a hurricane all but obliterate your former home from 300 miles away.

I don’t own any property in Sandy’s path. My husband, who stayed in New Jersey for work and has been calling Long Beach Island home these past many months, was safe on the other side of the state. But I still spent yesterday glued to my laptop, checking and re-checking the news outlets I used to work for, hungry for updates, photos, anything. Everybody else in the country was looking at Shore footage, too, as the storm—the largest tropical cyclone ever recorded in the Atlantic—took direct aim at the South Jersey coastline.

I know I’m not the only one whose anxiety rose with the water. Live somewhere long enough, and your love for it is sewn onto you like a badge. But this compulsion I’m feeling to keep refreshing half a dozen news sites doesn’t come from worry alone. All day Sunday, as I headed home from a weekend in Maryland with friends, I was plagued by the feeling that I was driving in the wrong direction. All day Monday, I was wishing I could swap places with my exhausted former coworkers.

As a reporter, you just want to be where the story is. That itch to see something with your own eyes and share it may essentially be born from the same dangerous mix of bulletproof hubris and voyeurism that drives people to ignore evacuation warnings, but it’s hard to shake it. It got harder as the night went on and the reports got worse: storm surge meeting bay across the narrow strip of LBI, piers disappearing into the ocean, cars floating away, and, most terrible of all, first responders forced back by powerful water from houses where people screamed for help.

I’m not sure what we’ll see today when the sun rises on Sandy’s wake. All I can do is refresh the page, and wait.