Author: graelynbrashear

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News

UVA to fight pair of wrongful death suits

UVA has been named as a defendant in two separate wrongful death suits in three months, fallout from a tragic year at the University. But how much blame lies at school’s doorstep in the unrelated 2010 deaths of lacrosse star Yeardley Love and Virginia Quarterly Review managing editor Kevin Morrissey?

Love’s mother filed a $30 million suit against UVA in May, claiming the coaches of killer George Huguely were partly to blame in her daughter’s death, because they should have known Huguely posed a threat. Morrissey’s family’s $10 million lawsuit alleges former VQR editor-in-chief Ted Genoways caused Morrissey emotional distress that eventually led to his suicide. In both cases, families have named defendants far above the University employees’ heads, with UVA and the Commonwealth itself topping the list.

Proving the liability of an institution like a university—or any third party—often isn’t easy, but it’s not uncommon for people to try. The families of two students slain in the 2007 shootings at Virginia Tech won damages when they sued for negligence. Penn State is bracing for a flurry of claims from sex abuse victims in the wake of a guilty verdict for former football coach Jerry Sandusky. And the University of Colorado is facing questions about its failure to follow up on concerns about Aurora movie theater gunman James Holmes’ mental state while he was still a student there.

There is case history to back up such claims, said Charlottesville civil attorney Robert Yates, pointing to a 1970s ruling known as the Tarasoff case in which the Supreme Court determined college psychiatrists had a responsibility to report a man’s intent to kill a fellow student. But for the Love family to prove George Huguely’s coach Dom Starsia had a duty to protect Love, they would have to prove Starsia knew there was a specific threat against her, said Yates.

The Morrissey case is even more complicated, he said. Morrissey took his own life, so proving the University was in some way to blame would require plaintiffs to show his employers were aware of the extent of his distress. “What it hinges on is how much everyone knew about this,” Yates said.

So if pinning responsibility on a school is tough, why name them? There are a few reasons, according to lawyers.

Local wrongful death attorney Yvonne Griffin said including an entire chain of command is a common legal strategy. “In law school, they tell you to put everyone and the kitchen sink [in a suit], because you don’t know who’s going to be kicked out,” said Griffin. “Better to have everyone who’s playing on the team, so to speak, in the ballpark when the game starts.”
Yates said there’s another factor at play. “It all starts with one issue, and that’s money,” he said. “Lawyers look for a deep pocket, and institutions tend to be that target.”
Details on the legal arguments employed in the cases may not be clear for some time.

Criminal proceedings in the Huguely case are still going on, and UVA said last week that the Morrissey suit had not yet been served to anyone at the University. Plaintiffs have up to two years after filing to serve parties with a suit. Attorneys at the Richmond firm Hairfield Morton, which is representing Morrissey’s family, did not return calls for comment.

But consequences may come before court appearances. Becoming the subject of wrongful death suits can have negative effects beyond bad press, said Yates.

“Is there going to be a knee-jerk reaction every time somebody gets upset?” he asked. “It becomes a balancing issue on how much it affects the overall institution.”

And then there’s the issue of the financial burden, said Griffin, whether it’s legal fees or a settlement. Should the tab add up for the University, the state legislature could conceivably withhold funding to counter the expense.

“The costs of a case like this are going to be huge,” she said. “The taxpayers are totally on the hook.”

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News

On Facebook and mea culpas

Notes from the news desk

Usually, the best way to correct a misstep is to talk about it. We found ourself in that position last week, so we’re here to start a conversation—and eat a little crow.

Last week’s story on a dispute over permitted partying in the Market and Meade area included some quotes that it shouldn’t have, quotes that, it turned out, were taken from a private Facebook page.
Our unwritten rule has been to use input from Facebook only if the post is publicly viewable, i.e., only if it’s visible without having to “friend” the person first. And that’s pretty standard for news outlets these days.
But on a busy deadline day, when we were short one news team member, we made a bad call. We saw the posts we ran with only as screen shots, and thought they were public. The poster explained that they weren’t. They were written with privacy settings adjusted so only friends could see them, and they were taken down not long after they went up.
The poster, Victoria Dunham, was understandably upset—I, too, am very careful about social media, especially what’s visible to whom on my Facebook page—and she called us. We had a good conversation about it, talked about the value of revisiting the issue, and decided we should—for several reasons. Chief among them is simply setting the record straight, and letting Victoria respond in her own words, which should have happened before. Here are her thoughts.
“When I contacted Graelyn Brashear regarding the Moto story, I had two major concerns. First, to set the record straight regarding my Facebook comments and the strange journey they took on their way into the media. Second, this: Before a story in our local media reaches the public’s eyes, we need to know that all facts have been checked, and reporters and editors have performed their due diligence. I was personally disappointed and upset regarding the events that had transpired prior to getting this story to press,  and saddened for the general public. The media shouldn’t print anything that’s been thrown over their transom unless those items can be verified first.  In this particular case, verification didn’t happen.To set the story straight, here’s a brief timeline of the events. A neighbor, then a Facebook friend, grabbed screen captures of some comments I had made over the course of a conversation with others. He then cropped and edited the comments, removing the original context and his own angry commentary, and sent the new (his) version to two members of my board and Matteus Frankovich. He included spin on both the meaning of the comments and whom he felt were the intended targets. Shortly thereafter, one of the recipients then sent the edited comments to the C-VILLE Weekly and Hook, along with additional spin.

“After the neighbor’s outburst on my page, I deleted the post entirely. The post was up for fewer than 2 hours and seen by a limited number of my friends. In printing it, however, this brief blip in time has now become immortal via the marvel of internet searching. The fact that the intent of the neighbor and sender was to harm, has only made matters worse.

“As WMNA president over the past years, I’ve been an unpaid volunteer.  I’m not rather than an elected official or a public figure.  When I took the position, I didn’t agree to give up my privacy. The Woolen Mills has faced many challenges through the years, some of them quite serious. We’ve met them head on and have succeeded for the most part.  My recent resignation as president was primarily driven by my work schedule and resulting lack of time for volunteer activities. My decision to resign preceded the media stories and they did not factor into that process. I’ve been disheartened that the most disputed issue in the Woolen Mills is a nightclub zoning variance rather than increased transit, cut-through traffic, or affordable housing.

“From the moment I contacted Ms Brashear, she has been professional, responsive, and considerate.  In making this an open and transparent conversation, it’s obvious to me that she feels a high degree of responsibility towards her readers as well as the public. The C-VILLE Weekly editorial staff could have chosen to act defensively and circle their wagons. They didn’t, and for that they have earned my respect.”

This is also a good opportunity for us to explore how we use social media, and what’s OK and what isn’t. We realized we needed a stated set of rules: Before quoting somebody’s comment or post, confirm it’s a public statement with our own eyes, give the poster a fair chance to respond, and then use it only if it contributes something significant to the story that we couldn’t get elsewhere.
But the discussion can’t really end there. The way people—reporters, editors, readers—use social media is always shifting and evolving. Ten years ago, Facebook didn’t even exist. Who knows where we’ll be in another decade. Point is, it’s something we should talk about, and often. Would you be upset to see a news outlet take a public comment you made on Facebook and use it in a story? In my last job as a web reporter and editor, I once used a photo and a comment from an 18-year-old convicted arsonist’s Facebook page when I couldn’t reach him any other way, or get a mugshot. Was that an overstep? (His family and friends sure thought so, and I can tell you they weren’t nearly as gracious about it as Victoria was.)
What do you think?
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News

Crowdfunding site Kickstarter is popular here, but does the model hold up?

Use of the crowdfunding site Kickstarter is booming in Charlottesville, and it’s no wonder. The website was created in 2008 as a low-risk fundraising platform for creative projects, and it’s been embraced with a good deal of success here, where indie-minded artists and musicians—and those willing to shell out a few bucks to support them directly—are thick on the ground.

More than 50 projects started in the Charlottesville area have had successful Kickstarter campaigns. Local band Sons of Bill financed its third album through the site, and other area musicians have followed suit. Singer John Thackston, a UVA fourth year whose Kickstarter campaign footed the bill for his first record, deemed the site “the single most important development in the music industry since magnetic tape.”

But as Kickstarter has grown, some see it facing a kind of mission creep, making the company and observers revisit the question of what defines a creative project—and what’s reasonably enforceable.

Unlike other crowdfunding initiatives, Kickstarter doesn’t offer backers a cut of project revenues. Instead, creators post projects online and offer rewards to entice donors. The better the incentives you offer, the better the odds of reaching your funding goal. Fall short of your goal, and those who pledged won’t get charged, and you won’t see a dime.

The model has proved popular—and successful. Since its launch, Kickstarter users have funded 26,000 projects. Two Kickstarter-funded films have received Oscar nods, and site-funded art exhibits have been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art and the prestigious Whitney Biennial.

Still, backing a project is always a gamble, because creators aren’t obligated to complete their projects as promised. Kickstarter spokesman Justin Kazmark said most people organizing campaigns do follow through when they get funded, largely because there’s a good deal of accountability in small, creative networks. “A lot of times the backers are actually people the creator knows—friends, family, fans,” he said. “It takes a lot of work to get fans and maintain friendships, and you don’t want to burn those bridges.”

Local photographer Peter Krebs used Kickstarter to fund his exhibit Monticello Road, which debuted at The Bridge PAI in April. Krebs wanted his photographs to be “completely accessible to everyone—far beyond the usual suspects who go to openings.” He explained, “Everything was either free or pay-what-you-can. Yet it all cost money.” That’s where Kickstarter came in.

“I wanted to find a way to fundraise that was completely optional and that would allow people with little means to make small contributions and have it be really meaningful,” Krebs said. “The whole thing is about community, and this allowed really wide participation.”

Crowdfunding liberates artists from the traditionally sales-driven art world, said Krebs, who praised Kickstarter for “taking the whole selling business out of the equation.”

But some are seeing serious profit potential in the model. While Kickstarter doesn’t allow people to request money for general support—“fund my paycheck” pitches get pulled down from the site—businesses are increasingly using the site to boost sales and launch new products. Here in Charlottesville, clothing company Robert Redd launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise nearly $300,000 to fund a new T-shirt line. Director of operations Todd Campbell explained, “We’ve been mulling different ways to finally launch our ladies’ offerings, and Kickstarter crowdfunding is really catching on right now.”

Connecting with consumers is crucial, and crowdfunding could help bridge the producer-consumer divide. “It gives your customers an opportunity to validate what you’re doing and give their input at each step,” Campbell said. In e-mails promoting the campaign, the company called on people to “support Robert Redd’s growth.”

But the approach didn’t appear to be paying off for the company. With a little more than a day left for pledges, the project had still garnered less than $20,000.

The growth in use by those pushing business ventures has also opened the door to flops, and even scams. People looking to fund tech projects have raked in millions for their inventions—even though many lack the know-how to turn their wild ideas into tangible products.

Take Seattle company “Eyez” for example. Last year, the would-be creators of video-recording glasses earned a whopping $343,415, meeting their goal, but the backers have yet to receive finished products, and many fear the creators have abandoned the project altogether.

Who’s to stop them? No one, it seems. Kickstarter can’t take legal action, and since the average donation is small, few backers have a big enough stake to sue the project’s creators.

So are companies twisting Kickstarter’s original mission by painting purely profit-driven projects as creative exercises? And does the chance for scams make the business model suspect?

No and no, says Kickstarter. According to Kazmark, there’s room for everyone. “Kickstarter is in some ways arts patronage,” he said. “In some ways it’s commerce.”

And though Kickstarter employees aren’t scouring the site for scammers, Kickstarter users act as their own police force.

“You’re not on something like eBay where it might be one-to-one, and in order for something bad to happen, you just have to pull the wool over one person’s eyes,” Kazmark said. “On Kickstarter, there’s a lot of people looking at the projects, making sure they are who they say they are.”

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Arts

Josh Ritter talks about songwriting, novels, and the open road

Josh Ritter.
C-VILLE Weekly’s Graelyn Brashear sat down with singer/songwriter and novelist Josh Ritter for a radio interview live on WTJU before his show last night at the Jefferson Theater. Ritter, a remarkably candid interview and a compelling communicator, talks about his friendship with C’ville musicians, his attachment to Appalachia, and his love of writing.
Graelyn Brashear: Glad to have you back in Charlottesville. We were talking about the fact that you’ve had several visits here recently, you’ve been back in this area a couple of times, and you set your novel, Bright’s Passage, in Appalachia. Do you have connections to Charlottesville in particular and this part of the country in general?
Josh Ritter: Well this is pretty mythic American country out here, you know, with the history of some of the intellectual fiery cradle of this country. So it’s pretty great to be here. And it’s an amazing town. There’s so much good food, and there’s music, and it doesn’t hurt to come back.
GB: I wanted to ask you about your novel. It was a really interesting change of hats for you. I know you get asked about that a lot, the difference between songwriting and moving into a different writing style. What was that like, and what’s it like to take different tacks with your storytelling?
JR: I’ve thought about it a lot. When I was growing up, a teenager, I had a lot of words, and I had a lot that I felt like I wanted to do, but I didn’t know what it was, you know? And I discovered songwriting, and it was like i found a bucket for the words. It was a form, and it was so exciting. But I never really thought that that was the only way that a writer could write.
For me, I find that it’s mostly a temperament thing. You have to adjust your temperament. With songs there’s  chance you’ll write a song in an afternoon, or a week. I’ve had a few songs I’ve written over a long period of time, but in general, songs are short things. and a novel takes years. I think that finding your freedom and the excitement of creating something in the morning and then setting it down and coming back to it the next day is something that I had to learn how to do. In general, the two things are very similar—you have words, and you’re trying to put the right word after the right word after the right word, like a tightrope walker.
GB: With Bright’s Passage, I was curious about the juxtaposition of the settings and the themes there. It follows the story of a man really traumatized by World War I who comes home to West Virginia, and the trauma sort of weaves its way into his life. So what drove you to juxtapose those two settings—Europe in World War I and Appalachia at the time?
JR: Well World War I was this moment at the cliff’s edge there. In 1913, we thought we had everything figured out. We thought we had things pretty much sussed. Niels Bohr was told not to go into physics, because physics had all been figured out. So all these things happen, and then suddenly the world explodes, and the modern world came in like a rush of water and washed everything away. Horse and cavalry, cannons—these things, they disappeared and were replaced by new things, by planes and poison gas, and all these technologies that have gone on to be good for us as well.
And I think Appalachia has always been a symbol, I  think for me, of a place that is at the edge of time. it’s always on the edge. If the future happens, it’ll happen in Appalachia, and the past is happening, too. It’s a place that stands for something, where time is under different laws. I thought the two worked well together.
GB: Do you think you have more books in you?
JR: Definitely. I’m working on a second one right now.
GB: Can you tell us about it?
JR: it’s a big, rowdy novel with lots of terrible language. My mom’s going to be mortified. It’s gonna be fun.
GB: And you’re working on other projects. You were saying you’ve wrapped up your next album as well.
JR: Yes, it’s getting real close. There are still some finishing touches to go, but I hope to have it out in the first part of next year.
GB: What can you tell us about it? From what you’ve been saying, it opens a door into a more personal part of your life than fans might be used to.
JR: I’d always shied away from that, with the very specific idea that there is more to write about outside your own personal experience, and that’s good. It’s good to write that way. Autobiography makes the focus a little smaller a little tighter, and sometimes that’s uncomfortable for the listener and the writer. So I haven’t always done that, but now with this one, I feel it—it’s a lot of short, sharp little songs. I’m pretty excited about it.
GB: Big rowdy novel, short sharp songs— a lot of emotion in both.
JR: Yeah.
GB: Bringing it back local again—you actually toured in ireland with Love Canon, a local band.
JR: I am very proud of my assoc with Love Canon. They’re amazing. Zack Hickman, who I’ve played with for almost half my life, on the bass here, he knows some incredible musicians. Two of them are fantastic—Adam Larrabee and Jesse Harper. They’re (from) right around here, and we got to play some great songs together.
GB: What was it like to tour alongside them?
JR: It’s like standing in the middle of a hurricane. You’ve got to hold on.
GB: Thinking about the arc of your career—you’ve come along way since your first album, which you recorded while you were in school. Do you miss anything about the early days, and the process of figuring out who you were as a musician?
JR: It’s really interesting. Nobody’s ever asked me that. What I really get out of playing music and why I do it…to be creative and impress yourself and entertain yourself, is the idea that it should always feel new, hopefully. The two things you have as an artist that really matter are confidence in your work and excitement about the future. If you don’t have that, what’s the point? You’d end up doing medleys. It scares me to even think about it. So I always hope that things are just getting more and more exciting.
GB: Anybody’s who’s seen you live would feel that you bring that to the stage still. Is that a conscious effort? You’re a performer for sure—you interact and you smile a lot, and its very much a live show. Is that part of channelling that energy and bringing newness to it?
JR: Absolutely. If you love somebody, hopefully every dance you have with them is your first one—you know, that feeling. And that’s how it is with songs, and that’s why it’s really important to write and write until you get thing exactly how you want them, because when you do that, that’s your partner for the next 40 years, or 50 years, and you want to always be proud of it. Some songs, they start to lose their love, and other ones gain more love with your experience in life. I love performing. You write a song, and it’s like making an animal in a laboratory. And when you’re performing, it’s like the animal’s out there on the stage, and you don’t know what it’s going to do.
GB: So it is new when you bring it to the live audience.
JR: Every time, depending on what’s going on in the audience, us—it’s totally crazy.
GB: You’ve lived a lot of places in the country. Is it strange to go back to them as a performer, as a musician, and go back to a place where you spent time before this career really started?
JR: Yeah. It’s said that Abraham Lincoln said he had more hometowns than anybody else in the world. The great thing about being a musician, a traveling musician, is you get to see the whole place. You get to see how it’s stitched together. And it’s funny, what we learn as a band about places that we go. We’ll learn about places to eat, or the place that gave us a free coffee last time. Its great. There’s all kinds of memories that get rolled up into this. You may not remember the stage, but you definitely remember the good sandwich you had, and the good show.
GB: Your songwriting influences are clearly varied. I wonder how much comes from seeing new places all the time, and how much that influences your writing and how you go about the process of bringing these things to the page.
JR: I used to get so wound up about it. I write prose stuff on the road a lot. But I used to get the physical act of putting words on a page confused with the act of writing. Writing is 90 percent listening and picking things up and reading and watching and meeting people, and 10 percent reorganizing those ideas. It’s like visible light. There’s so much more light that’s going on that we can’t see, but that 10 percent is what we see by, and that’s how we judge ourselves. Being out on the road is a chance to meet all kinds of crazy people, do all kinds of crazy things and have experiences, see things out the window, walk down the street, see a movie, hear music. It’s all in there. And for me touring is what powers this, the writing. I don’t know what I would do without it.
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News

Chloramine complaints drive decision to go with costlier water filtration

A months-long debate over whether to add a new disinfectant to the area’s water supply or implement a more expensive purification system came to a head last week as elected and appointed officials from four local regulatory bodies heard a final wave of impassioned arguments against the use of chloramines. By the end of the lengthy public hearing at the County Office Building Wednesday, policy makers acquiesced to public outcry, voting unanimously to take the objectionable chemicals off the table and instead explore the more costly alternative of a carbon filter. Chloramine opponents hailed it as a victory. But several on the dais made it clear it was outrage, not evidence, that guided their decisions—and some remain concerned about rising water costs.

The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority announced earlier this year that it planned to start using chloramines, a compound of chlorine and ammonia, as a secondary disinfectant—the chemical added to water to keep it clean as it travels between the treatment plant and the tap. The EPA is rolling out stricter regulations that scale back the amount of carcinogenic chlorine byproducts allowed in drinking water, and the RWSA said the cheapest way to stay in compliance was to swap out chlorine for the longer-lasting chloramine in the last stage of water treatment and delivery. Switching to the new chemical would cost an estimated $5 million, according to the RWSA.

But local residents began raising concerns, voicing their fears at a series of meetings: The chemicals could cause skin rashes and other acute reactions, can contribute to lead leaching from pipes, and can create harmful byproducts. These include nitrosamines, the same nasty carcinogens that doctors warn are found in much higher levels in cured meats, and hydrazine, used in pharmaceutical manufacturing and as rocket fuel.

A core group of city and county residents urged the RWSA and the elected officials who appoint its members to consider an alternative—a granular activated carbon system that would act like a giant Brita filter—and responded with rebuttals when the authority said such a project would cost more than $18 million.

Last week, with all the decision-makers in one place, the anti-chloramines crowd came out in force. More than 200 people filled Lane Auditorium in the County Office Building, where the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority, the Albemarle County Service Authority, the Charlottesville City Council, and the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors gathered to listen. For about three hours, dozens of people, many toting signs, offered the same concerns about the chemicals.

City resident Colette Hall said there are still too many questions. “The EPA says chloramines are safe,” she said. “But what will they say in 10 years?”

Sarah Vose has heard that argument—and many more. Vose is Vermont’s state toxicologist, and she’s had a front-row seat as the debate over chloramines has unfolded there. When one Vermont water district switched to chloramines in 2006, complaints started rolling in, and vocal anti-chloramine groups started bringing up the same concerns about acute reactions and long-term byproducts heard here.

Things got so heated that Vermont’s health department invited the Centers for Disease Control to conduct a public health study in the Champlain area. But results were inconclusive, and a survey of 172 area physicians turned up only two who said they believed patients had been affected by the water.

Vose explained that a little understanding of water chemistry goes a long way in dispelling many chloramine concerns. The chemical’s cancer-causing byproducts only form under certain unlikely conditions, she said—specifically, when the pH is about 10 times more alkaline than baking soda. Lead leaching and the formation of potentially dangerous chloramine compounds also only occur at pH levels outside the normal drinking water range, she said.

“There are a lot of things in our environment that we should be concerned about,” she said. But when people go at the issue from the gut, it’s not easy to argue back with science alone. “It’s hard to communicate that when people have already convinced themselves that it’s toxic,” Vose said.

After receiving thousands of complaints and listening to residents for hours last week, some officials said they felt the need to protect against perceived dangers, if not real ones.

Charlottesville Vice Mayor Kristin Szakos said she wasn’t convinced the chemicals were harmful, but said she saw value in paying more for the public’s peace of mind. “It didn’t pose a clear and imminent danger to use chloramines,” she said. “But being known for something different—that is important in this community.”

The more palatable alternative put forward by RWSA director Tom Frederick was a hybrid system in which a limited carbon filter would be used to reduce the need for chlorine in the water, bringing down the total byproducts but avoiding the need for more disinfectant. The vote to explore the alternative with a three-week, $9,500 study was unanimous, but the jury’s still out on how much extra cost officials will be willing to swallow. Frederick said the final tab would likely fall somewhere between the $5 million chloramines would cost and the $18.3 million projected for a full-scale carbon system. The most expensive option would raise the average water bill in the area from $1.20 to $4.83 per month, he said.

Dave Thomas of the Albemarle County Service Authority said that if the estimate comes in on the high end, he’s still going to question the sense of going forward without strong evidence that chloramines cause problems.

“Any time you do a public works project, you’re balancing the best possible outcome with the price the community can bear,” said Thomas, and there are many local families for whom any extra cost is a burden. He offered an analogy: Local officials had the option to go for a cheap sedan or a luxury car. “We went with the Audi A6,” he said. “Look around the parking lot at Western Albemarle, and you don’t see that many Audi A6s.”

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News

Stonefield developer will keep fighting permit violation from city

A cross-jurisdictional fight over storm-water runoff has pitched one developer against another, and city and county are taking sides as the dispute appears headed for court.

Edens, the developers of Stonefield, a 65-acre shopping center underway at the intersection of Route 29 and Hydraulic Road in Albemarle County, was told by city staff last month that it was in violation of an erosion permit. But at least one county official says the city is holding them over a barrel at the request of another developer.

Edens’ site development plan proposed running a pipe under Route 29 to carry runoff from its site and the land just uphill to an existing channel across the highway that eventually flows into Meadow Creek.

The 72″ pipe, which came out about 30′ from an existing 42″ culvert, ended up within city limits, which meant Edens had to get a city permit to move forward. In late 2009, the company presented its soil erosion plan to the city. Before it unplugged its new pipe, the company would create a channel of loose rock called riprap, designed to slow down the flow of water, to bridge the gap between the pipe and the existing stormwater channel that flows into Meadow Creek.

The city approved the plan, but a property line caused problems in its implementation. The new pipe opened up onto land owned by the U.S. Post Office, which granted permission for the work. But the channel receiving water from both outfall points is on the property of Seminole Square Shopping Center. Seminole owner Great Eastern Management Company refused to grant Edens the easements needed to remove a fence separating the properties and merge the new channel with the old one, saying the rival developer would have to pay extra to safeguard against flooding Seminole’s property downstream.

Edens built to the fence, stopped, and pulled the plug. On June 1, the city notified the company it was in violation of its permit. Edens has appealed to the City Planning Commission and the City Council in turn, both of which have upheld planning staffs’ judgement.

The dispute has come down to language. Does tying in the new riprap mean laying rock to the property line, or to the existing channel itself? Charlottesville Neighborhood Development Services Director Jim Tolbert points to a June memo that shows Edens knew it had to build more than it did.

“If they didn’t think they needed to do something, there would have been no reason for them to plug the pipe in the first place,” he said.

But everybody involved seems to agree on one thing: The riprap may be the sticking point, but the dispute is about more than rocks.

Great Eastern attorney Fredrick Payne said his client has been raising concerns about additional stormwater on its property throughout the development process.

“We don’t care what happens on the west side of 29 as long as it doesn’t impact the east side of 29,” he said. “Our consultants are of the opinion that both the county and the city have an obligation to protect against flooding, and they haven’t done so.” The underlying and more basic issue at hand, he added, is one brought up by Council members: “Does this mean that the owner of a commercial property has a right to put his surface water onto another property owner without the property owner’s permission?”

Tolbert put it more bluntly. “If you own property and someone said, ‘I’m going to build a big development that’s going to compete with you, but I’ve got to flood your property to do it,’ do you not think they’ll want some compensation for that?”

But the threat of flooding is a red herring, said Edens managing director Steve Boyle. His company has spent millions on stormwater management features that will ensure slow release of water through the drainage pipes. His company is more than willing to install additional riprap where the drainage channels meet, he said—they’ve even bonded for it.

All of Edens’ plans and work have met state guidelines, Boyle said, and because Seminole and the city can’t win the war over water, they’re picking a fight over rocks. His company is likely to appeal in Charlottesville Circuit Court, he said.

“We’ve done the right thing,” said Boyle. “We’ve contemplated the impact such a big development would have. We’ve tried to be good stewards and new people in the community, but for whatever reason, this particular neighbor has been resistant in a way where we can’t see eye to eye.”

The neighbor is Charles Rotgin, owner of Great Eastern, and his own public comment record shows he’s not always been a proponent of strict stormwater regulations. In 2009, Rotgin wrote to the state Department of Conservation and Recreation opposing amendments to Virginia’s stormwater permitting rules that would have further restricted developers.

The increased regulation would slow business investment, he said, and he argued for “latitude for local engineering departments to modify or waive certain requirements in instances where they are impractical to implement,” among other modifications.

Rotgin did not return calls requesting comment. But Albemarle County Supervisor Dennis Rooker, whose district is home to the Stonefield development, said he didn’t think Rotgin would insist on the same standards for his own developments.

“There’s not a requirement that I’m aware of anywhere in the state of Virginia when a developer…has to account for all the impacts of a 100-year storm,” Rooker said. “And I would suggest that the development community would never let it get through.”

Rooker said he understands Rotgin is just protecting his interests. But he also said he believes the city has been doing the bidding of the Seminole owner in putting its foot down over the erosion permit. Rotgin might have legitimate concerns about future flooding, Rooker said, but Edens shouldn’t necessarily be on the hook.

“Whether that should be a concern that’s compensable from the other property owner—that to me is a question of private property law,” he said.

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Is Coursera the key to online learning at UVA?

Last week, UVA announced it was the latest university to partner with Coursera, an online learning company started last fall by a pair of Stanford professors. The deal is being presented as a win-win: since no money is exchanging hands, it’s a way for UVA to expand its brand for free, administrators said. But the timing has raised eyebrows, and some faculty want to make sure the University isn’t limiting its options when it comes to online learning.

Coursera made headlines in April, when it announced partnerships with four top-tier universities and a $16 million round of venture capital funding from investors. The news caught the attention of a group of Darden professors already planning a visit to Silicon Valley.

The faculty members decided to drop in at Coursera’s Mountain View headquarters to chat with its Stanford professor founder, Daphne Koller.

They liked what they heard, said Peter Rodriguez, an associate dean and professor of business administration at Darden, including the fact that they were making everything free—University’s didn’t have to pay, and neither did online students.

“They had a positive goal to get as much good knowledge out into the world as possible,” Rodriguez said. And some Darden courses could lend themselves well to Web-based learning, his colleagues thought—the school already offers non-resident programs and courses for current managers that could potentially be taught online. They left the meeting planning to do more research and follow up.

That was June 7. Three days later, UVA announced the sudden departure of President Teresa Sullivan, and online learning quickly became a hot button issue in the debate over the ousted president’s leadership. Both on the record and in private e-mails released under the Freedom of Information Act, Rector Helen Dragas claimed UVA lagged behind its peers when it came to embracing web-based learning, and laid the blame at Sullivan’s feet.

Based on those e-mails and recent comments, it appears neither Dragas nor Sullivan knew faculty were already exploring the option of partnering with Coursera on their own. And, as it turned out, the Darden leaders weren’t alone. Professors from the College of the Arts and Sciences were also calling the company with questions.

Odd coincidence? That’s precisely what Rodriguez says it was. “There was this massive interest in online education which was legitimized when Stanford and Princeton got into it,” he said. Now everybody wants in.

If there was a buzz around online options before Sullivan was forced out, it only got louder once she returned. The faculty already interested in Coursera pooled their efforts and took their findings to central administration. Vice Provost for Academic Programs J. Milton Adams said there was likely pressure to sign on the dotted line last week, because Coursera was preparing to announce its next batch of partner universities.

Now, four faculty members are preparing web-based classes for 2013 on business management, history, philosophy, and physics that they hope will appeal to a broad population.

“This is the way it’s supposed to work,” Adams said. “Faculty members were asking questions and exploring possibilities, and the administration was saying ‘Our job is to help

you, and make this work.’”
William Guildford wants to see that kind of ground-up input continue. Guildford chaired the Faculty Senate’s task force on online education, one of a number of groups assembled last month to examine the financial and leadership concerns cited by Dragas as justification for the ouster. The group released a report the day after the Coursera announcement showing that the use of the Web as an instructional tool is widespread at UVA, with everything from video lectures to full graduate courses offered online.

The new partnership could be a good way to test out one form of Web-based learning, Guilford said, but he doesn’t want to see things end there.

“Focusing down on one model of a set of models is fine if you have evidence it works,” he said. “But online learning is very far from that.”

What UVA needs, he said, is somebody to keep an eye on everybody’s efforts to teach online and track what works best.

“We’re really just looking at a grand experiment,” Guildford said. “You don’t figure these things out without trying them.”

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Green Dot to tackle income inequality with job hub

On a recent sweltering July morning, Toan Nguyen and Fabian Kuttner stood in a vast basement in the IX complex on Second Street Southeast. As forklifts rumbled across the warehouse floor above them, they explained how the raw space could be a catalyst for change.

Despite its relative affluence, Charlottesville has an income gap problem, Nguyen said, and the way to close it is with jobs. The city needs a light industrial hub, a central spot where people can find meaningful work. Nguyen, an entrepreneur, and Kuttner, part owner and manager of IX, are among a number business-minded residents ready to make it happen with the Green Dot Cooperative, a partner-owned corporation that will steer jobs and wealth to where they’re needed most.

The effort is in its infancy, but it’s gaining key supporters. Kuttner is offering the IX warehouse at a low rent, and Charlottesville City Councilor Kathy Galvin brought a group of young architects onboard who are volunteering their time to design the space. Supporters feel like they’ve hit on a winning formula.

“It’s a deeper understanding of poverty, and a deeper understanding of how to end it,” Kuttner said.

The challenge was laid out last September in a report created by former Tom Perriello aide Ridge Schuyler and colleague Meg Hannan. Dubbed the Orange Dot Project, it tracked income disparities revealed by the newest census data. Among the city’s wealthier green-colored neighborhoods were pockets where the household incomes fell well below the city’s median—concentrations of poverty delineated by orange dots.

The cure, according to Schuyler and Hannan’s report, was employment. They envisioned a job hub that could act as both a bridge and a buffer by rallying lower-income entrepreneurs and workers around small businesses capable of winning big contracts with UVA and the City, while absorbing some of the risk inherent in doing business with small startups.

Toan Nguyen wasn’t willing to leave things there. The C’ville Coffee owner and Darden grad has already poured time and energy into finding ways to solve Charlottesville’s income inequality problem. This spring, he and partners kick-started the Community Investment Collaborative, a nonprofit that offers education and loans to low-income entrepreneurs. But organizing businesses is one problem. Winning major contracts is another.

Nguyen said local and state governments and UVA set aside big chunks of their budget for contracts with minority-owned businesses, and a cooperative corporation could capture a lot of those contracts and give the work to Charlottesville’s unemployed—many of them poor minorities.

The setup could solve a lot of the problems that often stymie startups, and create more jobs at the same time. “You have to scale it up,” he said. “But it’s doable.”

A brand new catering company would have a hard time getting hired by UVA, for instance, Nguyen said. But if people pooled their capital, built a shared commercial kitchen, and brought on a team of job-seekers, they could land big contracts and help their neighbors in the process.

“It provides stability; it provides insurance,” he said. “No matter what happens, you’ll fulfill that contract.”

Nguyen and his partners and supporters—Kuttner, Galvin, the businesses involved in CIC, and members of Charlottesville’s growning start-up community, including Darden School leaders—have named the corporation the Green Dot Cooperative, because it aims to turn the orange parts of Schuyler and Hannan’s map green. It doesn’t yet have a board or a CEO. But thanks to Kuttner, it has a home, and there’s a talented team working to give it shape.
The Virginia Society of the American Institute of Architects’ Emerging Leaders in Architecture program, which each year gives up-and-comers the chance to work on a design challenge somewhere in the Commonwealth, is focusing on turning part of the IX space into the kitchen Nguyen said will be a key first step in launching Green Dot.

Eventually, the warehouse could also house textile production, woodworking, and computer repair enterprises. Before that, there needs to be a business plan, and that’s going to require time and money.

But Nguyen is working to build interest in the idea among public officials, UVA leaders, and members of the business community, from potential big investors to the entrepreneurs who might soon be co-op members.

Bernard Whitsett II, a financial consultant, chair of the local Minority Business Council, and a Green Dot supporter, said getting the people who will benefit most to buy in will be a challenge—but a winnable one.

Whitsett grew up in the 10th and Page community, one of the city’s historically black neighborhoods and a spot that remains stubbornly orange on the income gap map. He said it can be hard to convince people that building wealth isn’t a zero sum game.

“We have to bring this before a lot of different folks,” he said. “You have to allow people to see the vision.”

Nguyen has vision in abundance. He sees potential, he said—in the dusty warehouse, and in the neighborhoods Green Dot wants to empower.

“I’m so excited about what this can be,” he said.

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Albemarle approves visitors bureau marketing plan

The Albemarle County Board of Supervisors has backed off its threat to yank hundreds of thousands of dollars in accumulated tax revenue from the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau, instead agreeing to spend the money on a marketing push to draw tourists to the area.

The CACVB is funded by both county and city, which each direct 30 percent of hotel tax revenues to the five-employee department. That money—a little over $1 million per year—is intended for visitor services, promotion, and other efforts to draw tourists to the area. But a big portion of it has instead been rolled over in recent years, leading to a 2011 fund balance of more than $700,000, a snafu director Kurt Burkart said was the result of staff reduction and restructuring since his arrival in 2009.

The county called the department on the carpet last fall—announcing it would scale back the fund balance to 20 percent and use the reclaimed money for its own initiatives—and the city supported the move.

But the CACVB board wasn’t wild about the idea. In December, it presented the Board of Supervisors with an alternative: a marketing plan that would include a website overhaul and rebranding and would, over the course of three years, slash the fund balance to 20 percent of the CACVB budget.

Mollified, the Board agreed to see the plan, and last Wednesday, supervisors nodded approvingly through a presentation by Susan Payne. Her PR firm, Payne, Ross & Associates, has already landed $55,000 in contracts to develop the marketing effort, which will ultimately cost more than $623,000. The vote to leave the fund balance intact was unanimous. The decision goes before the City Council in August.

“I think they’ve come forward with an excellent plan,” said Supervisor Dennis Rooker. “Perhaps the fact that they didn’t spend this money in previous years has turned out to be a blessing.”

Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce Chair and longtime CACVB board member Tim Hulbert agreed. “The bad news is the money didn’t get spent,” he said, “and the good news is it didn’t get spent. Now there can be a really aggressive marketing effort.”

It remains to be seen whether the ambitious return on investment projections that encouraged political support of the plan will come to fruition. State tourism officials say every dollar spent on marketing brings in $5 in tax revenue. According to the 2004 agreement between the city and county to jointly fund the CACVB, the bureau is required to meet a 7 to 1 ratio of direct visitor spending for every dollar of tax revenue pumped in—or run the risk of having either municipality scuttle the funding agreement. According to year-end reports, the CACVB hasn’t quite met the requirement recently—the ratio ranged from 6.56 to 6.96 in the last three years.

BOS chair Ann Mallek said she’s hopeful the payoff will come. But elected officials will be watching to make sure the money gets spent and the returns roll in.

“I think there will be a large amount of oversight,” she said.
“There’s no question that we stumbled, board and staff,” Hulbert said. “But that fumbling came to a halt five months ago. The plan is in place and the team is energized.

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UVA grapples with GE in electronic records suit

More than three years after it filed a $30 million lawsuit against the software company hired to design an electronic records system for its hospital, UVA heads to Charlottesville Circuit Court this week, and while the suit is expected to suck up an unusually large amount of the court’s time, it’s just the latest chapter in a battle over new technology that’s lasted 13 years.

According to UVA’s complaint, the deal dates to 1999, when UVA contracted with tech firm IDX to develop an electronic medical record system, or EMR, for its hospital. But problems started early, UVA claimed, with IDX failing to hit milestones on the multi-phase project. When technology company GE took over IDX in 2006, the parties got together to rework the contract. But UVA said the issues continued, and it ultimately pulled the plug, saying GE failed to meet its obligations.

GE, meanwhile, claimed it was UVA that broke contract. The two parties had agreed to work together on the complicated project, according to the company’s counterclaim. UVA was to act as a development partner, collecting and processing two decades’ worth of patient data and building and testing the system. But the medical center didn’t hold up its end of the bargain, said GE, making it impossible for the company to stay on schedule.

By 2007, UVA was dragging its feet, said GE, pushing off its own deadlines and quietly looking for another company to finish the project. GE said that in June 2008, the University announced it was searching for a new vendor.

In February 2009, UVA awarded a $60 million contract to Epic Systems Corporation and filed suit against GE, demanding the $20 million it had paid the company and $10 million in damages. GE wants $1.6 million it claims it’s still owed by UVA, as well as unspecified compensation for lost profits and expenditures.

Besides involving big names and big numbers, the suit also highlights the fact that contract squabbles slowed the UVA medical center’s adoption of a comprehensive system for digitized medical records—technology that industry and the government now consider essential. Many large teaching hospitals, including those at Duke, Vanderbilt, and the University of Wisconsin, had patient and prescription records in place for years before UVA fully implemented EMR in 2010 and 2011.

Neither UVA’s nor GE’s attorneys responded to requests for comment, and a medical center spokesman said he couldn’t discuss current litigation. But Charlottesville civil attorney Robert Yates, who isn’t involved in the suit, said that in a battle over who broke a deal first, it’s rare to find litigants settling out of court.
“It’s very difficult for these parties to get together, because they get entrenched in saying who owes who money,” said Yates.

In many ways, the suit isn’t that different from any other contract dispute, but it’s generated some buzz in the local legal community, he said, because it’s got a very big footprint.

Circuit Court Judge Edward Hogshire has been sifting through thousands of pages of filings in the case, and has set aside three weeks to hear it because of the amount of complex technical testimony involved. The sheer volume of evidence attorneys will be slogging through was a big part of why it took so long to get the case on the docket, Yates said.

“You can imagine the scope of a contract of this magnitude in terms of the data—20 years of medical records, and however many hundreds of thousands if not millions of patients,” he said. “The legal issues are not that complicated. It’s the evidence that’s complicated.”