Author: graelynbrashear

Two Charlottesville fitness clubs’ suit against the city and county over plans for a new YMCA facility heads to the Virginia Supreme Court this week. (Photo courtesy Piedmont YMCA)

More than four years after the Piedmont Family YMCA inked deals with the city and Albemarle County that would allow the group to build a permanent facility in McIntire Park, the project’s future is still up in the air as a legal battle over the agreement forged with the municipalities goes before the Virginia Supreme Court June 7. Lawyers for the city and county are defending the deal from a challenge spearheaded by ACAC owner Phil Wendel, whose attorney says the municipalities should have let for-profit companies bid to build, too. But YMCA leaders say the fight is about bigger issues.

Plans for a home for the local Y, which currently runs most of its programs in school gyms, have been in the works for years, said YMCA board president Kurt Krueger. In January of 2008, city and county officials agreed to let the YMCA construct a $15 million facility with a pool and diving well on the west side of the park. The municipalities each pledged more than $2 million toward the project, and the city agreed to lease the land for $1 per year.

But a group of local fitness clubs, which now includes only ACAC and Gold’s Gym, filed suit in 2010, saying the agreement violated the Virginia Public Procurement Act. A local judge ruled in favor of the city and county. But just when Krueger and others were sitting down with contractors last summer, they got word that the state Supreme Court had agreed to hear the clubs’ appeal.

ACAC and Gold’s contend in court briefs that because the YMCA hammered out a deal with the city and county to provide fitness memberships to residents at discounted rates in return for financial support, the exchange amounts to a procurement of services.

Thus, they argue, the municipalities should have done the same thing state law requires they do when seeking any other service for residents: they should have allowed anybody interested to submit a bid. Instead, said Edward Lowry, who is representing the clubs, the city and county structured their request for proposals so narrowly that only one entity qualified—the YMCA—and called their contributions gifts.

“What’s happening here is not a gift, because they’re procuring services in exchange for the money,” Lowry said, and the law says the privilege of providing the service goes to the lowest bidder. “If a nonprofit can do it cheaper because it’s a nonprofit, that will show up in the bidding process,” he said. “That’s what the VPPA is there for—to be sure the best price can be achieved,” Lowry said.

As for the fact that the same arrangement has been used to set up more than two dozen YMCAs around the state, “All that says that to me is that nobody has challenged it,” Lowry said.

Attorneys for Charlottesville and Albemarle are sticking by the argument that a local judge upheld, saying the financial support is, in fact, a gift, and state statute allows municipalities to give such charitable donations to nonprofits.

“Presumably, whenever those donations are made, there’s a benefit in some respect to the residents of that locality,” said city attorney Craig Brown. “We don’t think that makes it a purchase of services.”

YMCA leaders said they don’t think the clubs ever intended to make a bid for a public contract. ACAC and the other gyms never complained about the bidding process while it was happening, said Piedmont Family YMCA CEO Denny Blank. They could have submitted a plan for a nonprofit venture to compete with the Y, he said. The fight is really about for-profit clubs fearing the nonprofit Y will poach their potential members with lower rates.

“Their view is that a YMCA is basically a not-for-profit ACAC fitness club, but a YMCA is a hundred times more than that,” Krueger said. ”Fitness just happens to be the means to that end.”

But Krueger and Blank said Wendel has a history of doing battle with the YMCA. He’s an active member of the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association, a professional organization that has long lobbied Congress to restrict YMCAs’ tax-exempt status, saying subsidized fitness operations undermine their members’ businesses.

Wendel declined to comment. But his club’s spokesperson, Christine Thalwitz, said ACAC is focused on the legal question at hand.

“At a global level there is indeed a conversation within the fitness industry about tax laws as they pertain to the non-profit and private sectors,” said Thalwitz in an e-mail. “Our issue, however, is a local one.”

There’s been opposition to the plan to build a YMCA facility in the park from other quarters, too. Members of the Coalition to Preserve McIntire Park initially fought the proposal, in part because some believed it would mean the loss of the park’s softball fields.

“The park belongs to all of us,” said Bob Fenwick, who spoke out against the new building. “I have nothing against the YMCA, but not everybody appreciates the YMCA. In putting it in McIntire Park, you would be taking something from everyone.”

He and other Coalition members think the Y would reach more people if it were closer to Downtown, he said.

But Blank said the planned location will allow city and county residents of all backgrounds and income levels to come together, he said, whether they’re kids from nearby Charlottesville High School walking in for swim practice or families from suburban neighborhoods.
“If you’re down there for noonday basketball, you could have the CEO of Wells Fargo Bank next to a homeless kid next to somebody from the projects next to a farmer from Albemarle County, all on the same team,” said Blank.

He also said he’s troubled by the tone of some of the arguments from residents against the Y.
“There’s been an element to this that nobody really wants to address,” he said. For years, he said, McIntire was Charlottesville’s white park. Black residents used Washington Park. It’s been a long time since language supporting the segregation was stripped from the city code, Blank said, “but there’s still a strong segment of the population in this town who still have that mindset.”

It baffles him, he said, that the YMCA has had to fight—first at community meetings and now in the state Supreme Court—to establish a home in Charlottesville. He’s worked with other YMCAs around the country for more than 30 years, he said, and he’s never seen so much opposition.

“I’m a lifetime Y guy,” he said, “and this is the first place I’ve ever been where people have fought to keep the Y from being productive and fruitful.”

Alice Anderson is the new executive director of Mental Health America of Charlottesville Albemarle, a local chapter of a national advocacy organization that works to find solutions for those with mental illness. The group is organizing a mental health expo at CitySpace that will take place from 10am to 4pm this Friday, May 25. (Photo by John Robinson)

Alice Anderson believes that if you want to solve a problem, the first step is shining a light on it.

As the new executive director of the local chapter of Mental Health America, she’s joining others to draw attention to the issue of mental illness in the Charlottesville area and the difficulties sufferers run into when trying to get help. From 10am to 4pm this Friday, May 25, the group will take over CitySpace for a mental health expo that aims to bring the discussion front and center, and offers resources for those seeking treatment for themselves or others.

Anderson, a Presbyterian minister, has been involved in a number of local advocacy organizations since moving to Charlottesville from Washington, D.C. more than five years ago. Her work with the interfaith activist group IMPACT introduced her to MHA of Charlottesville Albemarle, which has been active in the area since the 1940s, and she became the chapter’s director earlier this spring.

Charlottesville has a strong social services network, said Anderson, but there are gaps in the system, especially for those who need help with mental illness.

Compared to inner city Detroit and Washington, D.C., “we’re in great shape when it comes to programming for people who are poor,” Anderson said. And those with severe illness can also often find help. “But we don’t have a lot of services for people who have moderate mental illness who don’t have much income,” she said. Even with health insurance, “the cost of mental health care may be prohibitive.”

There are other barriers too, Anderson said. There are very few minority therapists in Charlottesville, she said, which is a problem. Many people feel far more comfortable seeking help from someone who understands their cultural background, said Anderson, in part because it helps avoid a sense that they’re “betraying the group” or showing weakness.

Raising awareness of these holes is a key step to mending them, said Anderson. At MHA, “we’re trying to find the places where there are gaps in the fabric of services that are available to people, and we try to put pressure in the right places to get things done,” she said.

They also do battle against stigma, a fight that’s been at the core of MHA since its founding in 1909 by a man who suffered abuse at multiple mental health institutions. Public events like the expo are a good way to “normalize” the conversation about mental illness, said Anderson.

To that end, the event is aimed at everyone in the community, not just those thinking about treatment options. All are invited to stroll through vendor exhibits and sit in on presentations, including one that will give attendees a sense of what it’s like for a schizophrenic to hear voices—a revealing experience for anyone who knows or works with someone living with the illness, Anderson said.

There will also be practical, info-based sessions, including a talk on how to create a future directive to help guide care for those who know they might have to be institutionalized, and a chance for a “rapid roundtable” of quick, private interviews with local mental health providers—“like speed dating with therapists,” said Anderson. For a full schedule of the day’s events, visit mha.avenue.org.

Mental illness affects more than just those who suffer from it, Anderson said, and MHA’s approach involves reaching out not only to those with illness, but also their families and care providers. “We try to speak for the needs of all those groups and help them work together to create the best system that can be available for everybody,” she said.

Three months after the conviction of George Huguely, the public got to see the evidence that helped convict him of the murder of Yeardley Love two years ago.

The reporters and members of the public who gathered in Charlottesville Circuit Court this week to see key evidence from the trial of George Huguely knew the details of the case already. His ex-girlfriend, Yeardley Love, was found dead two years ago this month after Huguely drunkenly kicked her door in late at night, wrestled with her on the floor, and left after tossing her, her nose bleeding, onto her bed.

But this was a chance to judge the jury’s decision for themselves, based on the details previously hidden from sight: Huguely’s face as he recounted their strained relationship, his animated telling of their fights, his storm of emotions on learning she never survived the night.

During the trial, the screen showing the evidence—Huguely’s hourlong interrogation by police and a slideshow of photographs, forensic documents, and e-mail and text transcripts—was turned toward the jury and away from the courtroom audience. A group of media companies has been petitioning for access to it since, and this week, the court allowed them and any other observers a two-day window to see what the jury saw.

What they watched was Huguely’s life as he knew it ending.

In the video, recorded May 3, 2010, Charlottesville Police Detectives Lisa Reeves and Ed Pracher sat for more than an hour in a narrow cinderblock room with Huguely—disheveled, dressed in a dark shirt and shorts, and sounding at least a little drunk—and asked him about the night before.

Huguely, then 22, talked animatedly about his relationship with Love, the fights they’d recently had, the messages they’d sent back and forth. He mimed shaking her after he broke into her unlit bedroom and demanded they talk, and mimicked how he claimed she threw herself against the wall.

“She was flopping like a fish out of water,” he said, twitching his whole body and gripping his own arms to show how he’d grabbed her.

When the detectives pressured him on details, Huguely froze and stared ahead, apparently thinking hard. Finally, after leaving him alone in the room more than once, the detectives looked at one another, then dropped the bombshell.

“She’s dead,” Reeves said matter-of-factly. “You killed her. She’s dead.”

Huguely sat perfectly still, a hand under his chin. The courtroom of spectators was as silent as the interrogation room in the video. Then, still frozen, he echoed Reeves’ words.

“She’s dead?” There was another pause, then: “How is she dead? How the fuck is she dead?”
“You just told us,” Reeves replied.

For the next 20 minutes, Huguely appeared to go from stunned silence to disbelieving horror and anger, weeping and raging at the police and insisting they were lying. When they stood him up to cuff him and formally charge him, the band name on his T-shirt was finally visible: The Police. He leaned his head against the wall where he stood. “Oh my God,” he said. “Kill me.”

Over and over, he repeated his disbelief. “She’s not dead,” he said, grimacing, stomping one foot, rocking back and forth in his chair, gasping and sobbing. “I know she’s not dead. She’s not dead.”

His interrogators quietly assured him she was. “I’m not lying to you,” said Pracher. “It’s true.”
The tape ends with Huguely pitched forward, his face on the table in front of him. “There’s no way,” he said in his last recorded words. “There’s no way.”
Seeing the evidence changed at least one person’s opionion of the case.

Elizabeth Blake sat directly in front of the TV screen throughout the video and the half-hour slideshow that followed, showing messages that revealed Huguely’s and Love’s bitter, nasty verbal fights and crime scene photos depicting their typically messy college apartments and Love’s bloodied bed. A former UVA Student Health Center employee, Blake said she’d met both Huguely and Love and sat through much of the February trial, which ended with the jury convicting Huguely and recommending he spend 26 years in prison. She felt different about Huguely after watching him react on the tape.

“After seeing it, I don’t think he meant to kill her,” Blake said after leaving the courtroom. At the same time, she said, her sympathy for Love’s mother Sharon Love, who has filed civil suits against not only Huguely but his lacrosse coaches and UVA, is waning.

“Going around suing people isn’t going to bring Yeardley back,” said Blake.

The property at the corner of Ridge McIntire and West Main Street, pictured here in a 2007 photo, is slated to become a 70′-tall hotel—a project the city says will help establish a gateway to Downtown at one end of the overlooked corridor. But the project will displace a number of young startups, some of which may find themselves priced out of the neighborhood they’ve helped revive. (Photo by Eric Kelley)

The fact that the properties at 301 and 315 West Main Street are again before the Charlottesville Board of Architectural Review this week for renewed demolition approval isn’t surprising.

The West Main Street parcel at the corner of Ridge McIntire, owned by three generations of the Mooney family, has been on the market for about $4 million for years, and a sale to Marriott Hotels is considered imminent—a proposed site plan for a 70-foot building on the spot went before the BAR in April.

But the development of the old auto sale and repair site, spared in the razing of Vinegar Hill in the 1960s, has developed a new life and character in the hands of its entrepreneurial tenants in recent years. Even as discussion of how to move development on the historically overlooked West Main corridor continues, some are worried that the loss of the creative startup culture that has helped boost vitality in the area may be the price of progress marching on.

For the most part, the tenants in the so-called Random Row Warehouse and the adjacent former garage said they understand why they have to move on—possibly as soon as September—and they don’t feel ill-used. “We all knew,” said Tara Koenig, who opened SweetHaus Cupcakes in the warehouse last September. “Every single person knew that building was for sale when we signed the lease.”

Still, for some, it’s tough timing. While anchor tenant Random Row Books was established in the fall of 2009, a few of the tenants have been operating out of the strip for less than a year.

A UVA graduate who settled in Fifeville, Koenig said she knew she wanted to set up shop on West Main. If Downtown is Charlottesville’s Manhattan, “West Main has more of a Brooklyn vibe,” she said.

Starting from a blank—if filthy—slate suited her creative spirit, too. “I can’t begin to tell you how raw it was,” she laughed. Photographer Cat Thrasher, who turned the space above Koenig’s shop into a 1,000-square-foot studio, had a similar experience.

“There was an inch of dust on the floor, and a wall full of nasty shelves,” Thrasher said fondly. It didn’t really matter, she said. “I fell in love with the place.”

They plan—or at least hope—to stay in the neighborhood if the hotel project goes forward. Koenig has discussed moving her shop into Main Street Market developer Gabe Silverman’s new Market Annex property just down the street. Thrasher is still searching. So is City Clay owner Randy Bill, a retired St. Anne’s Belfield art teacher whose ceramics school and studio also had a September 2011 opening. But Bill said pickings are slim for people like her, a fact she discovered during her initial search for space.

“I looked at other places that were normal rent, and I was terrified,” she said. “I couldn’t even conceive of starting at that amount, not knowing if I had a business that was viable.”
Like her fellow tenants, Bill said she understood the Mooneys’ desire to sell. But she’s one of a number of locals who worry that the loss of the ragged-but-renovated strip is a serious blow to the city’s small startups—both current and to come.

“The issue that’s really on the table is how the city can support this kind of business,” Bill said. “As somebody with a creative idea that’s maybe a little off the charts, it’s hard to get started.” Independent businesses big and small are having an increasingly hard time standing up against corporate-backed chains, she said.

“Everywhere you go there are Gaps and Targets and big box stores, and the same gas stations and the same fast food places,” she said. “How do we differentiate ourselves regionally if those are the only ones who can do business, because they’re big enough? This is part of the character of Charlottesville, and in one fell swoop, it’ll be gone, and we’ll have a chain—Marriott.”

Spencer Ingram, who opened Cville Bike Lab in the warehouse last December, echoed the sentiment. He’s always called his hybrid bike-shop-cum-advocacy center an experiment, and he’s ready to move on to a new adventure. But Charlottesville’s paucity of raw space is a problem, he said.

“Whatever industrial space the city had has long since been knocked down or developed,” he said.
Neighborhood Development Services Director Jim Tolbert said the city is taking aim at the problem, and is eyeing some underdeveloped areas immediately south of Downtown as potential new homes for those seeking studios and inexpensive retail space.

Meanwhile, when it comes to the future of West Main, officials are looking beyond gritty appeal. Tolbert said the pending hotel project is just the kind of anchor property that’s needed at the eastern end of the corridor that connects UVA to Downtown. The city has long wanted to push more projects forward there, he said, and in 2003, it rewrote the local zoning ordinance to allow more mixed-use development. The fact that the streetscape has remained stagnant since is largely the result of the stalled economy, Tolbert said.

He said he’s seen a number of good plans for new developments between the train station and Downtown, “but the dollars and cents just aren’t there.”

And he said there’s only so much the city can do. “We’re not developers,” he said. Officials can make it easier for property owners to plan and execute projects, “but we can’t make them do it. There’s not a lot more that we can do other than get out of the way.”

Gabe Silverman doesn’t buy that argument. As one of the chief West Main property holders—only Coran Capshaw can claim peer status when it comes to owning buildings here—he said he feels the city could do more to make the area a more appealing destination for retailers and shoppers. According to him, the problem is a lack of leadership.

“If we want a future for the citizens of Charlottesville, a vision of what Charlottesville can be for future residents…then we have to acknowledge what is missing,” he said. “If you assume someone else will do it, you have complacency.”

Fancy new builds aside, those who live and work on and near West Main say there are simple things the city can do to polish the image of what many see as a still-seedy part of town, like improve parking and increase police foot patrols. Thrasher, the photographer who put plenty of sweat and blood into making her Random Row space habitable, said some of that has happened already, and she’s amazed at the change she’s seen since she moved to Fifeville in 2005.

But she’s acutely aware of the flip side of gentrification. Thrasher may be priced out of the area once she loses her beloved studio—a space she felt such an attachment to that she and her husband chose to get married there. Still, she thinks West Main will continue to draw entrepreneurs and their patrons precisely because it remains a little rough around the edges.

“You get a little bit of dirt with your culture, a little more imperfection,” she said. “And that’s where inspiration comes from.”

 The Greene County GOP was in the media spotlight last week, though not, perhaps, for a welcome reason.

Ponch McPhee, editor of the party’s monthly newsletter, was dismissed after a particularly fiery piece he wrote earlier this spring drew national attention.

In the newsletter’s March issue, McPhee wrote that the upcoming presidential election was crucial for the nation’s future, and that “we shall not have any coarse [sic] but armed revolution should we fail with the power of the vote in November.”

After advocacy group People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch blog drew attention to the newsletter, the Huffington Post and other national media sites picked up the story. McPhee then spoke up, calling the response “media hype” and saying he meant the statement as a metaphor: “Yes, arm yourself with many voices for the people and by the people,” he wrote in a follow-up piece on the county GOP’s website.

His response and the link to his controversial newsletter were promptly removed from the site, and soon after, newly appointed Greene County Republican Committee Chair Gary E. Lowe posted a letter online saying the militant statement came from “the former newsletter editor” and reflected “the musing of one person, not the party.”

While Lowe, who is also the mayor of Stanardsville, made it clear his fellow Greene Republicans don’t intend to take up arms against the government, he did offer an attempt at an explanation.

“Perhaps the author was borrowing from Thomas Jefferson who wrote, ‘The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms, is as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government,’” Lowe said.

McPhee may have been stripped of his newsletter duties, but he still has a voice locally. He hosts a public affairs show on UVA’s WTJU radio station called “Freedom Watch” from 5:30 to 6 am Saturdays, and station manager Nathan Moore said he intends to keep working with McPhee.

“On WTJU’s airwaves, Ponch has never made statements anywhere near as problematic as the newsletter article that he penned,” Moore said in an email. “Unless on-air actions or statements violate station or University policies, we don’t censor our volunteers’ free expression in their personal lives, even if we strongly disagree with their opinions.”

 Both Albemarle County and the county school district are going full speed ahead on funding a new state mandate that gives to public employees with one hand and takes with another—but not without some griping.

New pension reform legislation passed just before the end of the 2012 legislative session requires public employees covered by the Virginia Retirement System to contribute 5 percent of their salaries toward their pensions, and also demands their employers give them 5 percent raises.

Last-minute adjustments to the bill made by Governor Bob McDonnell gave municipalities the same option schools had to phase in the increase, and originally, it looked as though the county might go that route. On the surface, a phase-in seemed to make financial sense, officials said: Start with a small raise to match a 1 percent contribution increase the first year, and then make yearly increases to meet the 5 percent requirement as soon as possible.

But that approach came with its own challenges, and at a County Board of Supervisors work session last Wednesday, the supervisors agreed to join the Albemarle County School District in funding full 5 percent raises for employees starting July 1.

“The biggest reason that the phase-in was problematic was administrative,” said County Supervisor Chris Dumler. Per the statute, newly hired employees will have to start paying 5 percent of the pension costs right away, and must be compensated accordingly, whether their longer-serving colleagues were being phased in or not. That would mean two different pay structures, which would be “an administrative nightmare for HR,” Dumler said.

“The other big issue is this Cold War race-to-the-bottom kind of thing with market competitiveness,” he said. If other parts of Virginia—especially other counties’ school districts—chose to jump straight to the full 5 percent increase while Albemarle ratcheted up slowly, it could put the county at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to hiring top talent, even if other districts and municipalities might seem to offer better pay on paper only.
One thing that’s certain, he said, is that nobody’s happy about the new law.

“The system’s not solvent,” Dumler said. “People have to pay into it. That’s one thing.” But what looks at first glance like a wash—employees pay more, and are paid more, thanks to taxpayers—really isn’t, he said. That’s because both municipalities and their employees have to pay Social Security and Medicare taxes on their full salary with the new “raises”—even though the entire increase is going straight to workers’ pensions, not their paychecks. As a result, the new rules deliver an effective paycut. In short, Dumler said, nobody’s happy—except the federal government, which sees a little more revenue for its struggling social services funds.

“This was the most expensive way to skin this cat, and it’s frustrating that they’d sign off on this route at the state level even though it’s not a real benefit for them,” he said. “I have not heard any local government officials say that this was the right way to solve the problem.”

Albemarle County Executive Thomas Foley said the $355,000 in initial unexpected salary increases would be covered this year with one-time funds, but that he his staff believe the county can incorporate the higher pay into the budget starting next year.

“The question is, are we putting the fund balance at risk?” he said. “And we don’t think we are.” Funding the “fake raise,” as some elected officials have branded it, will be a top priority, said Foley.

“We feel confident that our revenues are going to grow well beyond what we need,” he said.