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UVA study testing ultrasound surgery treatment on Parkinson’s patients

Researchers at UVA have embarked on a new study to determine whether an advanced, noninvasive surgical procedure could help alleviate some of the debilitating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

Dr. W. Jeffrey Elias, a UVA neurosurgeon, is overseeing the placebo-controlled, FDA-approved study, which is treating patients with focused ultrasound waves. Treatments involve pinpointing a trouble spot in the body with concentrated sound waves that can superheat a tiny area only a centimeter across and burn away tissue. Tissue removal techniques have been successfully used to treat Parkinson’s in the past, but the process is much more invasive. With focused ultrasound, patients go through something similar to a long, involved MRI procedure—no cuts, no anesthetic, no long recovery.

Exploration of and advancements in the technology has been spurred in recent years by the work of another UVA neurosurgeon, Dr. Neal Kassell, who founded the Focused Ultrasound Surgery Foundation in 2006, and has since steered $20 million in investment dollars toward studies like the one underway at UVA, exploring various applications for what he believes will be a technology that will change surgery forever.

The current study follows an exploratory clinical trial Elias conducted earlier this year that treated 15 people with essential tremor—shaking of the hands and body associated with Parkinson’s and other neurodegenerative diseases.

The trial was promising: All 15 patients saw a reduction in their tremor symptoms. But the placebo effect is known to be strong with many Parkinson’s treatments. While it’s not well understood, researchers have noted that in some studies, patients saw improvement even when they didn’t get a treatment dose—though those improvements usually aren’t as strong or as long-lasting as those seen in patients who got actual treatment.

That makes determining the effectiveness of a particular Parkinson’s treatment more difficult. The best way to get past the placebo is through a carefully run double-blinded study, which is exactly what Elias is overseeing now. It involves 30 patients who will be randomly divided into either a treatment group or a control group, and neither patients nor those in charge will know which participants are receiving the real treatment.

“The essential tremor trial was our first experience with MR-guided focused ultrasound, and we were very encouraged by the results,” said Elias in a press release. “We’re eager to extend our investigation and evaluate the technology’s use in alleviating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. A treatment without incisions could offer new options and new hope to patients worldwide.”

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News

From sign theft to voter fraud, silly season takes a turn for the crazy

Allegations of voter fraud, intimidation, sign theft, and other reprehensible electoral doings are about as common at this time of year as Halloween decorations. As Election Day approaches in Virginia, the flapping and hollering has started to get pretty intense—and the misbehavior pretty serious.

Last week, the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office arrested a young man from Pennsylvania after tying him to the trashing of bags of voter registration forms in Harrisonburg. Colin Small was allegedly working for the staffing company Pinpoint, a subsidiary of a consulting firm that until last month was on the payroll of the Republican National Committee.

The Republican-dominated State Board of Elections quickly promised to look into the incident, and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli agreed to the Board’s request for an investigation.

Conservative Charlottesville radio host Rob Schilling and former 5th District Republican chairman Randolph Byrd have been circulating a video (complete with typeover sound effects and dramatic freeze-frames) of a man stealing a Romney-Ryan 4’x8′ sign from the Preston Avenue Shell station, calling the thief one of “Charlottesville’s most wanted” and offering a $100 reward to anybody who can identify him. They’re not alone in their complaints about theft and destruction. Democrats, too, have been reporting disappearing and damaged signs, as well as plots by opponents to illegally place yard signs to get Dems in trouble.

Then came Wednesday’s release of a video by Project Veritas, the organization headed by far-right operator James O’Keefe, who set up a sting to ensnare ACORN workers accused of enabling prostitution and veered off into wacko territory with a 2010 prank intended to lure a CNN reporter into a sex dungeon on a yacht.

(Incidentally, I went to college with O’Keefe, and he was just as charming an individual then.)

This time, the Veritas folks appear to have struck muckraking gold: They caught Pat Moran, the son and campaign field director of Democratic 8th District Representative Jim Moran, on a hidden camera giving an undercover volunteer advice on how to fake utility bills in order to vote on behalf of dozens of other people. (Moran also encouraged the man secretly recording him to devote his efforts to get-out-the-vote operations instead, but he didn’t try too hard to dissuade him from committing fraud.)

Even considering Veritas’ penchant for heavily-edited videos of alleged wrongdoing, it’s pretty damning stuff—as evidenced by Pat Moran’s swift resignation and his father’s campaign’s firm confirmation that Moran had shown “an error in judgement.”

The incident, which came within a week of the elder Moran’s demands in Congress for an investigation into the company behind the Harrisonburg voter registration dumping, doesn’t help Democrats in their argument that Republicans’ efforts to stomp out voter fraud with ID law and other measures are part of a “battle in search of a cause.” Despite the fact that documented incidents of in-person voter fraud are extremely rare, the issue has cropped up again and again this year—here and elsewhere. No doubt the Moran footage will be fodder for the fight for a long time to come.

Even for so-called silly season, this kind of mayhem is pretty nuts. A side effect, maybe, of Virginia becoming a serious swing state—though it hardly speaks well of us as a society when the response to poll pressure is repeated attempts to game the system.

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News

Virgil Goode to debate Tuesday with other third-party candidates

Virginia’s own Virgil Goode is taking the stage for a debate tonight with three other third-party presidential candidates in a token nod to—I mean, late-in-the-game look at America’s alternative options in the race for the White House.

Goode, the former Republican (and before that, Democratic) 5th District representative who narrowly lost to  Tom Perriello in 2008, is running on the Constitution Party ticket, and will join the Libertarian Party’s Gary Johnson, the Green Party’s Jill Stein, and the Justice Party’s Rocky Anderson in Chicago for a debate moderated by Larry King.

If you want to watch on TV, too bad. None of the major networks picked it up. You can follow along online at 9pm EDT, however, as three websites will be streaming it live: Ora TV, the on-demand Web TV site that carries Larry King’s show; the Free and Equal Elections Foundation, which organized the event; and, somewhat inexplicably, Russia Today.

The exclusion of the third-party candidates from mainstream presidential debates is nothing new. The Commission on Presidential Debates requires Thirds to show 15 percent of the public support them in five national polls before they’re allowed up onstage with the Democratic and Republican picks. That’s only happened three times in debate history, most recently in 1996, when Ross Perot managed to qualify for a second time.

The fact that it’s extremely rare for third-party candidates to gain that kind of foothold in the first place, and thus nearly impossible to get in the debate door, condemning them to further obscurity, regularly causes hand-wringing in certain circles. But in Virginia, it’s safe to assume that many of those who might otherwise be pushing for more publicity for a Goode presidential campaign—at least hypothetically—aren’t too miffed that his debate appearance isn’t making primetime.

Like Johnson, a former governor of New Mexico, Goode is a well-known former Republican running as an outlier in a crucial swing state, and both have drawn the ire of the GOP establishment over worries that they may siphon votes away from Romney.

Whether any of the four will move the needle on election day is kind of beside the point. If you thought watching Romney and Obama sniping at each other or Biden and Ryan trading barbs was good TV, this four-way should hold some serious entertainment value.

 

 

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In a time of wobbly endowment returns, UVA bucks the trend

America’s universities sit on an ocean of assets, holding on to hundreds of billions in long-term investments. With an endowment worth more than $5.4 billion, UVA is one of the world’s richest institutions, and it’s seeing success where other higher ed investment funds have stumbled.

“Over the last one year, three years, five years, we’re in the top decile,” said Larry Kochard, CEO and CIO at the University of Virginia Investment Management Company.

In 2011, endowments everywhere were on the rebound. UVA’s grew more than 28 percent, a bigger jump than at any other school on the list of those with the 50 biggest endowments. It was the second year of double-digit growth, erasing the shocking losses of 2008 and 2009, when the University’s endowment lost more than $1 billion and returns were at -21 percent. Annual investment reports are now rolling in from universities around the country, and while the pace of growth has slowed, UVA is still ahead of many peer institutions. UVIMCO watched the endowment in its charge return 5.1 percent this year and grow 1.6 percent to $5.4 billion, putting it ahead of two of the famously rich Ivy League schools and all but a dozen or so other institutions in the U.S. in size, and giving it relatively high marks for performance.

Kochard, a former McIntire School professor who came to UVIMCO from Georgetown’s investment fund in 2010, said that’s partly due to a strong basic recipe with the right balance of long- and shorter-term investment: 60 percent of assets are in equity—ownership shares in businesses—and the rest is allocated to real estate, bonds, and other investments. The other part of success is just selecting the right managers to move the money, he said, and when you’re UVA or one of the other top shops, you can afford to do that.

The not-so-secret secret to making big endowments bigger, Kochard said, is that you have to ride out the good times and the bad without succumbing to the desire to cash out.

“That’s usually what leads to horrible mistakes,” he said. “You have to resist the temptation of panicking at the bottom and getting euphoric at the top.”

But this has not been a banner year for most university endowments following the equity-heavy model. Many of the top-tier investment funds with assets greater than $1 billion saw returns come in relatively low and endowments shrink. Number eight Columbia’s returns were at 2.3 percent, and its endowment dipped from $7.8 billion to $7.65 billion. Yale, at number two, had returns of 4.7 percent, but shaved about $100 million off its endowment.

The numbers that got the most attention were Harvard’s. Its $30 billion endowment gave up a negative return and shrank by $1.1 billion in FY2012—more than the vast majority of universities have in their investment coffers, total.

Considering the Ivies rely very heavily on their endowments—more than a third of Harvard’s operating budget comes from its annual payout, compared to 11 percent at UVA—the latest reports have worried some. They prompted a New York Times story last week questioning the strategy now imitated by institutions the world over of diverse portfolios packed with slow-burn investments, pointing out that the model was on the whole outperformed by much simpler stock-centric investments over the last few years.

But Kochard said to get a true sense of how well the model works, you have to take a longer view. Harvard has had a 12.5 percent return over the last 20 years, and UVA can boast 12.1 percent. And with interest rates at all-time lows, more conventional and presumably safer investments just won’t pay off, he said.

That’s not to say what works at UVA will work everywhere, said Donald Lindsey, who worked on the University’s investment team in the ’80s and is now CIO at George Washington University. “The difference between one $5 billion endowment and another $5 billion endowment may be significant,” he said. “It really comes down to having a strong understanding of the institution as a whole and finding a model that works,” Lindsey said.

UVA seems to have done that. It’s always been what Lindsey called a progressive investor, with an early interest in diversifying. And you can’t forget that returns aren’t the only thing that grow endowments. Deep pockets do, too. “UVA has a very loyal alumni base, and they have been extremely successful in their fundraising,” Lindsey said.

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News

Fighting for the 5th: Can Democrats retake Virginia’s largest district?

Hear audio of our discussion of this story on Soundboard, our weekly radio show on WTJU 91.1, here.

Analysts say the contest for Virginia’s 5th District will probably go to Republican incumbent Robert Hurt, and with a number of factors working against the challenger, newcomer General John Douglass, it’s hard to believe any but the most ardent Democrats disagree.

But it’s a close race in a split and newly gerrymandered district that runs from Danville to Warrenton, home to broken down mill towns, tony horse farms, and NoVA commuter villages. You don’t need to go far to hear about Virginia’s critical role as a swing state. Could the 5th hold the secret to Virginia’s influence?

The general
John Douglass tends to talk in military terms. He tells anecdotes about his stints overseas, his time as a White House advisor, his work overseeing the development of stealth bombers. It surfaces in talk on policy and on personal moral character—he wants to see more support for veterans, and he often wonders aloud how someone who’s never served can call ardently for war.

The 71-year-old Miami native ascended to the rank of brigadier general before he left the Air Force in 1992, but his career still defines him in many ways. He also says it’s a big part of why he chose to run for office.

“There are parts of our society that are so essential to the efficient and orderly operation of life that are becoming less and less represented in Congress,” he said during a one-on-one meeting this month at the joint Democratic campaign headquarters above a fabric store on Route 29. “One of them is veterans.” He’s the only senior officer running for a seat this year, he pointed out. And for the first time, there are none on the House Armed Services Committee.

Douglass is selective about the pieces of his unusual life story he trots out. He was orphaned as a kid, lived out of his car as a homeless teenager, and was eventually taken in by a foster family. He was ROTC during his undergraduate years at the University of Florida, where he studied science and engineering, and was commissioned as an Air Force officer after graduating, kicking off a long military career.

He did not see combat in Vietnam—he’s quick to point that out—but he spent time overseas in the Philippines. Not long after he returned home from overseas, he and his wife divorced, and he was left to care for his two young children alone.* He’s developed a sense of humor about those years. “I really liked women’s magazines,” he said. “I really got into plants and decor and things. How to make a nourishing meal for $1.29 in 20 minutes.”

Douglass considered leaving the military once he came home, largely due to deep disappointment in leadership. “I thought the generals at the Pentagon had failed us in Vietnam,” he said, through poor decisionmaking and a lack of transparency. “But it came to me that if I leave, who will fix the system from the inside out?”

So he stayed, and he climbed. He oversaw procurement and contracts at a string of bases around the country, and in the early ’80s, went to work for Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Defense. He served on the National Security Council, and as a NATO officer in Belgium. After retirement, he was a staff member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, then at the Pentagon. He later secured the top spot at the Aerospace Industries Association, a massive defense spending lobbying organization. He was briefly registered as a lobbyist there—a fact his opponent has used to paint him as a Washington insider.

Douglass said there’s a reason he stands alone. Other former ranking officers are too turned off by the system to run. “They all say, ‘Are you crazy, John? You’d subject yourself to the kind of things they say about you?’”

But just as he decided to try to change the military from within the ranks—“the institution is healthy, and always boiling from within,” he said—he believes he can bring change to government by getting elected.

At the center of his platform is his “Help Virginia Families Plan,” which corrals a wide range of goals for job creation, expanded access to education, and support for veterans and the elderly: Yes to more loans for small businesses, more low-interest college loans, and faster access to care for soldiers returning home; no to a Medicare voucher system.

He’s also spent a lot of time setting himself firmly opposite Robert Hurt—and Mitt Romney—on a few highly politicized issues important to Virginia: abortion and alternative energy. Douglass has spoken scornfully of Republicans’ efforts to restrict access to abortions in the Commonwealth, and has attacked Hurt for his support of a proposed uranium mine in Pittsylvania County, pushing instead for green energy incentives for farmers.

And Douglass has painted himself as a Democrat unafraid of challenging party rhetoric. He says he’ll support Second Amendment rights, and wants to “beef up” border security and the use of special operations to combat terror, but he’s also called for an end to “stupid wars” and said he’d pull all troops out of Afghanistan overseas today if he could.

He said he doesn’t care if being outspoken doesn’t endear him to the party establishment. At his age, he’s not looking for a long career in politics. “I have a vision of what the 5th should be,” he said. “I want to fix my district.”

And if he doesn’t carry it in November, so be it. Campaigning has been a tough slog, he said. “It’s not what I thought it would be. It’s much harder in every way—in terms of the commitments you have to make, the degradation of your quality of life, the time it takes, the money it takes, the number of negative things said about you that you have to work through.” He’d consider a win a wonderful capstone to a life of public service. But it would also mean he wouldn’t see much of his high school-age boys—children of his marriage to his second wife, Susan—or their Fauquier County farm.

But he plans to fight and fundraise to the end. He knows he’s an underdog, and he’s O.K. with that.

“People used to say to me when I was a captain, ‘You’re never going to be a major. You’re too outspoken,’” Douglass said. “Then I get to be a major, and it’s ‘You’ll never be a colonel.’ Every time I got a promotion, everybody would say, ‘Wow, how did he do that?’ I think a lot of the same is true here. People say ‘You’ll never get to be a Congressman.’ We’ll see on November 6.”

The country lawyer
Robert Hurt squinted into the sun in a shopping center parking lot off Route 29 one recent October afternoon, answering a TV reporter’s questions before accepting the official nod of the state chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business.

The endorsement—coming from a firmly anti-tax, anti-regulation lobbying organization that skews strongly Republican—was a natural fit for the 5th District representative, who is aiming to return to Congress for a second term.

“When you look at the state of our economy and the jobs picture in this country and in the 5th District, I think everyone would agree we need to do more to make it easier for small businesses to succeed,” he told the camera. “We need to do more to make it easier for our farming families to succeed.”

Hurt, 43, towers over most of those around him, and he’s got a powerful grip of a handshake and a booming voice to match his stature. And though he went to Episcopal High School, a posh all-boys Alexandria boarding school, and the famously exclusive Hampden-Sydney College, which issues a handbook to all incoming freshmen titled To Manner Born, To Manners Bred: A Hip-pocket Guide to Etiquette, Hurt’s down-home accent and straightforward manner is more in line with the southern Virginia farmers who helped elect him to the House in 2010.

And indeed, Hurt—married with three sons—has lived a good deal of his life in the district he now represents. His family moved to Chatham when he was a kid, college brought him back to Prince Edward County, and after graduating from Mississippi College School of Law, he landed back in Pittsylvania County as a prosecutor in the office of the county Commonwealth’s attorney.

He entered private practice at a Main Street law firm in Chatham a few years later, and soon was on a familiar step-stone path through Virginia politics. He spent a year on the Chatham Town Council, and three terms in the House of Delegates, where he cultivated a record as a tax cutter. In 2007, he had a successful state Senate run, securing three-quarters of the vote in the Pittsylvania-centered 19th District. Two years later, he was challenging Tom Perriello for the 5th District.

If Douglass has spent a good deal of time being the un-Hurt and the un-Romney, Hurt has spent easily as much time running against Barack Obama. And despite disclaiming fidelity to the Republican party, Hurt’s main talking points square nicely with the GOP’s. His arguments against four more years of an Obama White House mirror those of other Congressional Republicans, and his priorities lean toward Tea Party territory: Cut taxes and dial back regulations as a way to speed economic growth and reduce unemployment.

Forget cap and trade and let energy companies drill at will. Reform Medicare somehow, but keep the system intact for those 55 and older. He’s pro-life and pro-gun—if his A+ rating from the NRA doesn’t convince you of that, the blaze orange “Sportsmen for Hurt” signs up and down Route 29 will.

But above all, he says, he wants to shrink the federal government. Hurt is a vocal proponent of amending the Constitution to force a balanced budget—he’s co-sponsored an effort to do so—and champions his efforts to beat back earmark spending.

He said he’s been consistent, and that’s won him respect among his constituents. “I ran on certain things in 2010,” he said. “I said if I won, I’d do them, and I did.”

Running as a challenger is different than running as an incumbent, he said, but it’s still exhausting—hard on candidates, hard on cars.

“How many miles are we up to this week, Pace?” he asked a young staffer. The response came immediately: 1,427. (That was Friday; it would be above 2,000 by the time Sunday rolled around.)
It doesn’t end on election day, either, Hurt said. The drive home from Washington, D.C. takes four and a half hours. And he said he makes every effort to get out in the district as much as possible.

“I take my position as a representative for the people very, very seriously,” he said. “It’s not easy, but I signed up for it.”

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Arts

The Avett Brothers Interview: I and Love and Charlottesville

The Avett Brothers have enjoyed a trajectory of success since the indie-Americana crowd picked up on their album, Emotionalism in 2007. Known for energetic live shows and musical versatility, the brothers from North Carolina and their band of ace players can incite the audience into a frothing mosh in one song, and then break their heart with a lullaby in the next.

Seth and Scott Avett sat down with C-VILLE Weekly before their show at the nTelos Wireless Pavilion on October 19.

C-VILLE Weekly: Welcome back to Charlottesville. What do you like about performing here?

Seth: Avett “The people are really nice. I guess as we’ve grown, Charlottesville’s been a stop on the way the whole time.”

Do you miss the small shows?

Seth: “I don’t know that we miss anything necessarily. Once you do something, to go back and try to re-live it is impossible. We’ve tried that. Really terrific memories can only be lived once.”

What can you tell us about the Cheerwine partnership?

Seth: “It started back in 1998 when I was in college…no 1996, I was flunking out of East Carolina University. I started as a student and turned into more of an alcoholic musician. In my lost way, I got into radio broadcasting which led me to old-style radio broadcasting and I studied radio broadcasting performance, before going on to finish my art degree.”

“Cheerwine approached us with an idea for narration of their legendary tales ad campaign. I said ‘wow this really sounds like old radio.’ But, I can’t be a spokesperson for a product without a long relationship…and I went and did these spots and a relationship was born. So when Cheerwine brought this idea to us, we jumped on it. It’s a family organization. One of family well-being and family goodness.”

Can you talk about your family and your father’s influence on your work?

Seth: “Well, it means a lot. I think that’s pretty obvious in our a lot of our lyrics. Clearly we’ve been at it for a number of years. Scott and I apparently get along with each other. Our family was very tight growing up and still is very tight. That’s proven to be our most obvious set of allies, our family members.“

“Our dad gave us a lot of lessons growing up and we’ve applied a lot of them to touring, to meeting folks and how we treat people. I couldn’t overstate the affect both of our parents have had on who we are and how we’ve approached this whole band thing.”

Do you have any family traditions that you keep?

Seth: “We do a family reunion, in a different family members house every year.”

There’s a lot of love in the new record. Can you reflect on that for us? Is there a change in your songwriting?

Seth: “I don’t know that there is a conscious change in our songwriting, or at least in the compilation of songs for a record.”

Scott Avett: “We really try hard not to let our songwriting be dictated by conscious thought. “

A lot has changed in your lives.

Seth: “A lot has. I mean more things than we can count. Even since the record was finished. More life changing things have happened since then. It has also made some things that we wrote about, and recorded, more relevant. In foresight, we were setting ourselves up to understand something that we didn’t yet, in our writing.

Scott: “We are much more into the ‘now’ perspective than we’ve ever been.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=aE7rkSELM3I

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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News

The Meadow Creek valley as a pedestrian corridor

When Charlottesville Parks and Trails Planner Chris Gensic gave a presentation in September on the future of the Meadow Creek stream valley, he flipped through a series of aerial shots that showed almost a century of evolution in the northern spur of the city that surrounds the waterway.

In all the photos—from the late 1930s, when 29 North was still a rural route and the 250 Bypass nonexistent; to the ’50s and ’60s, when the fields and forests half-encircled by the arc of the stream gave way to the neatly ordered streets of Greenbrier; to today’s big box stores and tree-filled neighborhoods—the unassuming ribbon of Meadow Creek is visible, winding its way toward the broader stretch of the Rivanna River.

A natural dividing line during the city’s growth over the last century, the stream corridor hasn’t exactly been overlooked. The city had an eye on preserving land along the creek as far back as 1930, when it bought a 10-acre parcel from a developer that’s now Meadowcreek Gardens. In the 1960s, the 28-acre Greenbrier Park was created a mile downstream to the east. Since the early ’90s, walkers and bikers have followed a narrow dirt track along the streambank, part of the 20-mile loop of the Rivanna Trail.

But now the stream and the land around it are entering a new phase. The Meadow Creek Restoration project—a $4 million, multi-year effort to clean up and realign the stream, jointly funded by the Nature Conservancy and the Army Corps of Engineers—will wrap up soon. Thanks to steady acquisitions over the last decade, the city has cloaked the newly healthy creek in protected land: Charlottesville now owns or has seen the securing of conservation easements on nearly 40 acres between Hydraulic Road and Greenbrier Park.

Staff are now bringing city residents into the conversation as they determine how best to use—and not use—the new park land. Gensic has already hosted two public meetings to talk design, and a third is scheduled for October 30.

“It’s been pretty harmonious,” Gensic said, especially compared with the knock-down, drag-out fight over the future of McIntire Park, just half a mile away. Local residents know what they want, he said. They asked for an open field, a playground, and some community gardens to the east, near the quiet dead-end of Michie Drive, and there’s been a request for a disc golf course in a wooded patch nearby.

And they want the corridor to be just that: a place to move through. That fits well with the city’s decade-old trails plan, which Gensic has been nibbling away at piece by piece for years. His department’s recommendations for the new park will include a paved multi-
use path suitable for bikers and stroller-pushers that will parallel the existing Rivanna Trail —at a distance, as much as possible, to preserve a buffer between people looking for speed and those out for a quiet stroll.

The improvements will likely cost about $250,000, said Gensic, which City Council will have to approve. That probably won’t happen until late next spring, and there’s more land downstream that he hopes to see the city acquire. But just seeing the Rivanna Trail right-of-way secured through ownership and perpetual easements is a relief, Gensic said, because in the past, segments of trail have been offered for public use through casual agreements only.

“If a property owner said, ‘I don’t want that any more,’ they could have just obliterated that portion of the trail,” Gensic said. “Now it’s public land, and that permanently protects that whole arc of the city’s trail property. We’ll never close it.”

And the improved stretch along Meadow Creek will be an important link in a linked system of bike- and pedestrian-friendly paths that, thanks to the Parks Department, is gradually connecting Charlottesville’s public spaces and main roads in a city-wide alternative transportation network.

“That’s the neat thing,” said Gensic. “We’re basically locking up this whole section of the loop.”

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News

Perriello touts report on Romney’s budget math

Charlottesville and Albemarle residents may have spotted a familiar face talking politics at events and on the airwaves earlier this month when former 5th District Representative Tom Perriello swung through town. He’s stumping across the country—but not for any candidates.

Perriello now works for the Center for American Progress, and is CEO of its Action Fund. He’s been touring swing states with CAP’s data-driven message, hammering home a report on taxes arguing that when you do the math on Romney’s budget plan, it adds up to more costs for the middle class.

According to CAP’s analysis (read the full report here), Romney and Ryan’s plan would have to cut 58 percent from tax deductions like the child tax credit, the mortgage interest deduction, the exemption for employer-provided health benefits, the deduction for state and local taxes, and—one CAP emphasizes a lot—deductions for college education costs. At the same time, a rollback of the Affordable Care Act would reinstate some health care costs. That would have a direct effect on middle-income families, Perriello said: Families with incomes lower than $200,000 would see taxes rise by an average of $2,000, according to the report. Meanwhile, it says, Romney’s top donor would get more than $2 billion in direct tax benefits from the same plan.

Drilling down on specific benefits lost, Perriello said Virginians would see the most pain when it came to college costs, which would go up by an average of $5,600, and Medicare, which he said would sustain costs that would require people still in their prime to save $200,000 over their working lifetimes to keep the same level of benefits on retirement.

The report may get dismissed by Republicans, he said, because CAP leans left. “But if a liberal group says two plus two equals four, two plus two still equals four,” Perriello said. “When you have a think tank like mine, maybe people can focus on the message.” But Bush economic advisors at the bipartisan Tax Policy Center has weighed in, too, Perriello pointed out, and their analysis of the Romney-Ryan budget plan comes to similar conclusions—based on the information the former Massachusetts governor has provided, trillions in tax cuts would, TPC has said, affect the middle class.

So how do you hush the naysayers? “Unlike a lot of groups out there, we’re 100 percent transparent about our math,” Perriello said. “People can read the report themselves, see how the conclusions are drawn, and make their own judgement. We’re not hiding anything.”

Perriello said the and compromised ideals of professional politics wearied him. Doing the math on everybody’s budget plans is antidote to what ails races, he said—even if it’s not as fun and flashy as covering gaffes and smear tactics. “The media’s going to cover process stories, because it’s cheap, and it’s safe,” he said. And the only response to political spin is to keep throwing the math at politicians.

Spin isn’t what he calls Romney’s repeated debate claims about being able to cut taxes for everyone and reduce the deficit. Those, Perriello said, are lies. “That’s sort of like deciding, ‘I want to get in shape, but tonight, I’m going to have cake, ice cream, and a couple of Scotches. You’ll probably have a fun night, but you’re probably going to regret it in the morning.”

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News

West Main Street is starting to look very different, but can the growth keep up?

After years of sluggish growth, a string of new projects is poised to transform West Main Street from an underutilized row of dead buildings into a thriving retail corridor. A new annex to the bustling Main Street Market is now home to restaurants and shops, and there are plans for an eight-story hotel at the corner of West Main and McIntire. The newest proposal is for the Plaza on West Main, a 200-plus-unit student housing complex on the south side of the street just west of the Amtrak station.

That’s a lot of change in a year. But whether there’s really a Renaissance afoot largely comes down to the will of the developers who can make the big projects happen—and they’re not all on the same page.

The property that will house the Plaza was once a tire center, but has belonged to Coran Capshaw, the corridor’s biggest property owner, since 2002.

“I think he’s just been waiting to do the right thing over there,” said Alan Taylor, head of Riverbend Management, a Capshaw-owned development company. Riverbend is partnering with a student housing builder, and while Taylor said he’s been in close conversation with UVA, the University doesn’t have a stake in the project.

According to Taylor and to plans presented to the Planning Commission last week, the Plaza on West Main will have approximately 600 beds—maybe fewer—in about 200 units. The 9,000′ building section fronting the street will be five stories high, but a second structure, separated by a courtyard, will rise to eight stories and 101′. A wide sidewalk will allow room for bike storage, and a couple of retail spaces—probably a restaurant and a small market, said Taylor—will share the ground level with amenities for residents, including a fitness center and an open plaza with a cafe.

There will undoubtedly be shifts in design. There’s a sense that college students and balconies over busy streets don’t mix well, said Taylor, so the fifth-floor walk-outs currently drawn into the plans will probably go. But Riverbend is doing everything it can to keep the planning process open and flexible, he said, because they want zero hangups.

“The student housing business is very time-sensitive,” Taylor said. Miss some deadlines and you’ll miss a critical window for signing leases before students return to town —and thus an entire year’s worth of potential revenue. “If you’re not open for business in the fall, you’re screwed,” he said.

Construction is expected to take about 14 months, which means Taylor hopes to be signing leases in 2014. Before he can break ground, he needs special use permits required for height and density greater than what’s automatically allowed in the city and the go-ahead from the Board of Architectural Review.

Winning the approval of the BAR is something city developers are used to. The nine-member review board has a lot of say in the design of new construction within the city’s historic districts, and Taylor said he’s never had a problem with that. His Plaza project includes intentional Jeffersonian elements—red brick and white paint, a portico overhang—as a nod to the past. “I don’t think we’re going to have a Rotunda,” he said, but so far, the response has been positive.

Gabe Silverman has had a different experience. “Coran is more of a 600-pound gorilla,” said Silverman, a partner at development and design firm Townsquare Associates. “I’m just a chimpanzee.”

Silverman, who owns much of what Capshaw doesn’t along West Main, is behind several high-profile renovations of decrepit buildings there, including the Main Street Market and its newly opened annex across the street. Both are total overhauls of former garage and industrial sites, and both have been praised for their design. He said he’d never attempt anything like that again.

Silverman said he won’t make money on his latest $3.5 million renovation for 10 years. But the lack of return isn’t what frustrates him.

“If I’m going to bring attention to West Main Street, I’m going to build something that’s so good that it’s going to stop you from passing by,” he said. He’s tried that, and felt thwarted by the BAR, which shot down several elements of his latest project on the grounds that it wasn’t in keeping with the essence of an existing building, which, Silverman pointed out, “was a piece of shit garage.”

If the city wants to speed development of an underutilized corridor, he said, it has to embrace and encourage good design, and not cede big decisions to what he sees as a backward-looking and arbitrary panel.

Mary Joy Scala is Charlottesville’s preservation and design planner and the city staff member who advises the BAR. Its decisions might be slow and deliberate, she said, but they follow guidelines designed to make the process consistent and objective.

“We’re building a city,” Scala said. “It’s important work. We need to have it say the right thing, both in the historic districts and out of them.”

 

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UVA researcher wins whistleblower case, could get $1.7 million

A jury in a whistleblower case in federal court in Charlottesville last week awarded a former UVA researcher $660,000, determining he was wrongfully fired after drawing attention to alleged misuse of grant funds from the National Institutes of Health—and the plaintiff’s attorney says his client could end up with a much bigger payout.

As initially reported by C-VILLE, former psychiatry department researcher Weihua Huang sued two supervisors, saying he was given a non-renewal notice after he confronted the men after they adjusted the allocation of his grant funding. Another claim of a First Amendment violation was previously thrown out by judge Norman K. Moon, but the jury found Huang’s firing had violated the False Claims Act, which protects those who draw attention to misuse of federal funds from retaliation.

Adam Augustine Carter of The Employment Law Group, Huang’s lead counsel, said the judge is expected to double the jury’s award of $160,000, which comes on top of $500,000 in compensatory damages. Carter said Moon also opened the door to the possibility of $1 million in “front pay” for Huang—money he would have been entitled to had he not been fired—as well as attorney’s fees. All that could drive the final award to more than $1.7 million, he said. Huang’s initial NIH grant totaled $378,750.

Carter said the judge’s ruling sets a precedent for relatively rare federal whistleblower cases, and underscores the importance of careful oversight of NIH funds at research universities, which are supposed to hold such grants in trust for the researchers who have won them.

what htis canse makes clear is that they are holdign that oney in rust. its not that they have it and have earned it and can spread it around wherever they want. its that they have t, and they have it in trust and then they must apply it according to the needs of each indiv grant.

“What this case makes clear is that they are holding that money in trust,” Carter said. “It’s not that they have it and have earned it, and ca spread it around wherever they want…they must apply it according to the needs of each individual grant.”

The ruling—and the size of the eventual award—will likely make many people sit up and take notice, said Carter.

“My expectation is that we will be hearing about similar situations at other universities very soon,” he said.