Author: graelynbrashear

Critical mass.

With 35 biotechnology companies currently doing business in the city, members of Charlottesville’s biotech industry say they’ve got it.

Two years after the University of Virginia retooled its intellectual property regulations to encourage more researchers to move their ideas to market, biotech is bigger than ever here, and looming large in the financial future of the city and the University. The growth is both the result and cause of an increasing culture of commercialization around UVA’s biomedical sciences—a change officials and many researchers are welcoming with open arms.

Just what the sector’s long-term impact on Charlottesville will be isn’t clear. The high-risk industry is defined by change. But with about 20 percent of the state’s biotech companies located here, a steady supply of high-quality concepts from UVA, and the potential for start-up capital from big donors, biotechnology is already shaping the city’s present.

W. Mark Crowell, who has been UVA’s chief innovation guru for two years, speaks at a recent Tom Tom Founders Festival event on the growth of the biotechnology industry in Charlottesville—a who’s who of big names in the industry locally. The city is home to about a fifth of the state’s biotech companies, and Crowell’s efforts to encourage commercialization of UVA research is part of the reason. (Photo by John Robinson)

R. vs. D.
Public universities owning and profiting from the intellectual property of faculty is a relatively new phenomenon. Discoveries coming out of research institutions that received federal funding were government property until 1980, when the Bayh-Dole Act turned the system on its head.

The act gave institutions first crack at patenting their researchers’ inventions, though that right comes with some strings attached: Universities must offer the discoverer a cut of any patent royalties and use whatever’s left for more research and education; and they have to work to develop the discovery, or license it to someone who will.

Since Bayh-Dole, public universities have increased their focus on what’s known as technology transfer—the complex business of shepherding inventions and discoveries from idea stage to commercialization—by creating their own patent and licensing organizations. And despite the fact that biotechnology is costly to develop in terms of money and time, the sector accounts for a large and growing piece of the tech transfer pie.

W. Mark Crowell has watched the changes unfold.

He’s UVA’s man in the middle of it all, hired two years ago to be the University’s first executive director of innovation. His task: strip down and overhaul the University’s approach to handling intellectual property.

Crowell spent 21 years in similar roles in North Carolina’s research triangle. First at Duke, then at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina, he watched and lent a hand as the the area grew into one of the top tech transfer regions in the country. In 2008, he joined the Scripps Research Institute outside San Diego, an even hotter market.
Over that period, Crowell saw a dramatic change in how top research universities view their patenting and licensing departments.

“It’s gone from being a sort of misfit, gotta-find-somebody-to-do-it thing to being front and center,” said Crowell. Now, when university presidents talk about their responsibilities to state and private funders, “one of the first things they talk about is innovation and research capacity, and how we’re using that to create jobs, products, services, companies—essentially, a return on investment.”

And while the revenue stream is important, he said, it’s not all about the money. There’s a growing mentality that simply collecting ideas doesn’t cut it anymore, Crowell said, and to compete for grants and top talent, schools have to throw more energy into commercializing research. “I think people realize that having a strong tech transfer program is like having a good library,” he said. “If you’re going to be a big research university, you’ve kind of got to do this.”

By the time UVA’s vice president for research, Tom Skalak, hired him in 2010, Crowell said the will to make the shift was already present at UVA. His first priority on arrival was to take an axe to what he saw as outdated regulations.

Since its founding in the late 1970s, just before the passage of Bayh-Dole, the UVA Patent Foundation’s formula for dispensing earnings from licensed inventions had been the same. In Crowell’s eyes, it was cumbersome, confusing, and didn’t incentivize disclosure. If an idea—a drug, a computer program, or any other kind of intellectual property—became profitable, the inventor, his lab and dean’s office, and the UVA scholarly activities fund all got money, but the Patent Foundation always took 40 percent. And as profits went up, the inventor’s cut went down.

Not only did the model discourage researchers from taking the time-consuming and often expensive leap to patent their findings, said Crowell, it also sometimes spurred the Foundation to act in its own self-interest instead of driving local growth and innovation.
For instance, he said, imagine a University lab churns out a new drug. Crowell could license the patent to big pharma for a $200,000 fee with a promise of a $100,000 milestone payment when the drug hits a certain point in development, or he could offer it to a small startup—perhaps founded in part by the researcher—in exchange for an equity stake, and wait a decade for a return.

“One of those is good if I’m getting 40 percent of the cash,” he said. “The other is good if I’m looking for economic development, and trying to create opportunities for faculty and staff to be entrepreneurs.”

So they rewrote the rules. Inventors now get a flat 35 percent return, no matter how much money their ideas generate. Another 30 percent is divided evenly between the inventor’s lab, department head, and dean. The final 35 percent goes straight to the University. The Patent Foundation no longer gets the cut with which it earned its keep—instead, it receives steady funding from UVA.

And it got a new name: the UVA Licensing and Ventures Group, a rebranding that advertised the shift away from patents for the sake of patents.

“We decided we really needed to bury that old mentality,” Crowell said. There’s an increased focus on pushing startups, too. About 10 percent of the 140 to 150 disclosures his office deals with each year are licensed to new companies, many located in Charlottesville.

The next big change was staff. Crowell’s pick for director of the newly renamed group was Michael Straightiff, whose biomedical engineering background had served him well as a young head of tech transfer at Case Western Reserve University. He’s the first person to hold the job who isn’t a patent attorney, Crowell said. Other new recruits have similar science backgrounds—more evidence of where the new priorities lie.

Often, before you can bridge the gap between scientists and investors, “you have to be able to understand the technology coming out of these labs,” said Aswin Sundaram, a licensing associate with the Licensing and Venture Group. “We want to bring on folks who can dissect the technologies and understand them on a fundamental level, and then turn around and be able to promote them to other people in the community.”

The changes weren’t easy, Crowell said, and there was some pushback from people invested in the old model. But the thing about the new structure, he said, is that it works. The Licensing and Ventures Group is pulling in an average of $4 to $8 million a year. Financial records show 2011’s earnings were more than $6.3 million. That means the group is more than breaking even, said Crowell, which is actually rare in the university tech transfer world.
And that’s fine by him. He’s not here to deliver a cash cow to the University.

“We’d still love the income stream to generate a surplus, but if that doesn’t happen, that’s fine,” Crowell said. They’ve converted UVA’s old Patent Foundation from a revenue center to a service organization, he said, “and I think that’s the critical part of the business model that changed.”

The University is more than ready for the shift, said Crowell. Well before his overhaul of the patent payout formula, some UVA researchers were moving from Grounds to private labs. Their approaches to business might be different, but they took the leap.

Martin Chapman (above) was a professor of medicine at UVA when he founded Indoor Biotechnologies to explore commercial applications for a line of allergen antibodies. (Photo by John Robinson)

Going rogue
Martin Chapman got the entrepreneurial bug early.

Chapman, an immunologist and allergy specialist, arrived at UVA in 1985 by way of the University of London and UCLA. In 1998, he set up Indoor Biotechnologies to explore ways to spin out his allergy antibody research into allergen testing technology and other marketable products. Around the same time, he said, he felt like he’d hit a glass ceiling at UVA as a PhD in a clinical department.

“I was a fully funded, tenured professor,” he said. “Where else was there to go?”
His company offered him more control over his research, and soon it was bringing in more money than his UVA lab was getting in grants. The choice seemed clear. He parted ways with the University in 2001, and secured small business innovation grants.

Today, Indoor is one of the companies at the heart of the Charlottesville biotech hub. It’s a business success story—its environmental allergen test kits are used all over the world, including in research at the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—but it’s also a poster child for the community-minded approach to growing local industry.

Chapman hasn’t just put down roots; he’s planting a forest. Last spring, his company bought the abandoned Coca Cola bottling plant on Preston Avenue for $2.5 million, both to allow Indoor to expand, and to be an incubator for young startups needing commercial lab space—a precious commodity here. Growth is good, he said, “but the real issue is, how much of this stays in Charlottesville?”

But Chapman acknowledges that there’s more than one way to build up biotech. “Everybody’s approaching it differently,” he said.

Dr. Eric Houpt, an associate professor at UVA, studies infectious diseases and parasite immunology. Studying the epidemiology of specific pathogens—especially in far-flung corners of the developing world, as he frequently does—requires reliable diagnostic testing, so researchers can know as quickly as possible what bugs they’re up against. Molecular diagnostics—identifying pathogens via DNA—is the gold standard, he said. No waiting around for cultures to grow, no microscopes needed. But there was a problem: Everybody knew DNA testing was the future, but nobody was providing the products to let them do it.

Chapman left the University to run Indoor full-time in 2001, and is now turning the vacant Coca Cola building on Preston Avenue (above) into a vast lab space to house his growing company and other local biotech companies. Some startups aim for acquisition, but Chapman said he’s here to stay. “I feel like we have a responsiblity to our employees,” he said. (Photo by John Robinson)

“There’s often a lag between the technology and the laboratories that use them,” Houpt said. “It takes time for the latest cutting-edge technology to make it to society in bulk.”
By 2005, Houpt was tired of waiting. He wrote a small business grant to fund the development of testing products from some of his own research, and Phthisis Diagnostics was born.

But while Houpt was more than happy to go commercial with his most promising technology, he remained a man of the medical school. “I’m 99.9 percent MD and researcher at UVA,” he said. Running a business wasn’t in his game plan.

Enter Crystal Icenhour. A PhD specializing in infectious disease, the Arkansas native was Houpt’s pick to head up his fledgling company. She built Phthisis from the ground up, taking charge of everything from finding office space to aggressively pursuing NIH and venture capital funding to hiring a staff of five. She described the intensity of those first couple of years in blunt terms.

“It’s painful,” she said. “When you survive on government grants, it’s year-to-year drama.”
But Icenhour grew up in a family-owned business, and combined with her science background, that experience has helped her navigate a biotech company, she said. It’s a challenge she’s grown to love. And though it hasn’t always been easy convincing investors to take a chance on a young executive with only postdoctoral experience under her belt, she’s managed to keep the money flowing in—including a new infusion of venture capital earlier this month —and the product advancements marching on. The company now offers a kit that lets labs do quick, simple DNA extraction from human stool samples, and next year will launch DNA-based testing products that can rapidly detect a pair of nasty intestinal illnesses.
But long-term success may well look different for investor-hungry Phthisis than for Indoor Biotechnologies, which is guided by Chapman’s commitment to growing in place.

“When you get investors, they want to know, ‘When am I going to get my money back?’” Icenhour said. “The most likely way that happens is if another company comes in and acquires you.”

Crystal Icenhour, president of 7-year-old Phthisis Diagnostics, is both the head scientist and chief investment seeker at the biotech startup. The company was founded to develop the research of UVA MD Eric Houpt, who patented molecular diagnostic techniques through the University in the hopes that they’ll translate to marketable tools for labs around the world. (Photo by John Robinson)

Follow the money
Nobody denies it: The biotechnology and biomedical sciences industries are full of turnover, and, quite often, failure. Drug development in particular is a years-long process that could go wrong at any number of stages. Many small biotech firms are created solely to cook up promising business plans and get them past what the entrepreneurial world calls the “valley of death”—the stretch between potent idea and appealing prototype where funding wells dry up. Once they come out intact on the other side, their product looks far less risky to a big, established company, and often, it’s at that point that they get snapped up.

So is Charlottesville setting itself up to create a graveyard marking good ideas that left town?
Maybe, said Crowell, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“I think success will mean that more go,” he said. “And I think we need to guard against thinking it all has to stay. I think our deals need to end up where they’ll be successful.”
Upheaval and change can be great for innovation, he said. While in the Research Triangle, he witnessed periodic mergers among big pharmaceutical companies, which inevitably led to talented scientists staying behind when their employers relocated. And each time, good things followed.

“Every time Glaxo had a burp, we’d see this spike in startups,” Crowell said. Similarly, when companies sell up, he said, they’ll leave experienced and business-savvy people in their wake who want to stay local, and who will be ready to tackle and polish the next raw idea that comes along. Stability might mean jobs that stay in Charlottesville, but instability breeds serial entrepreneurs.

That’s a term Martin Chapman isn’t wild about. Neither was Steve Jobs, he said. The Apple exec was a notable critic of the start-and-sell model.

“The feeling is they should really do the work of building a real company. And that’s kind of the attitude we have. Otherwise it just becomes a kind of money game, and there’s not really a lot of fun in that.”

What everyone agrees on is that there’s been a profound shift in the way people in higher education view the commercialization of research, and their own respective roles and responsibilities. It’s happening everywhere, said Crowell.

“In the early days at Duke, I spent half my time convincing professors not to toss me out of their laboratories,” he said. “People said, ‘Why would I think of patenting?’ Today, our best scientists are involved in this.”

Chapman agreed that during his tenure, colleagues were dismissive of the Patent Foundation.

“Whenever it came up, the attitude was ‘Don’t even bother going there, it’s just a waste of time,’” he said. “That has been a dramatic turnaround.”

The fact that there’s money here helps, too, especially considering funding from the NIH and other federal sources is contracting. While it’s not Silicon Valley, there are plenty of people in Charlottesville with high net worth who are interested in biotech investments, Chapman said.

Whether scientists embrace commercialization may now determine whether they even get in the door at UVA. Crowell said he was recently called in to consult on a possible new hire for the department of medicine, to help assess the candidate’s ideas for innovation.
He concedes that some don’t have such a rosy view of a push to recruit entrepreneurs from the halls of academia.

“It’s a fair question,” he said. “Are we selling out? Are we pursuing science in order to get rich?” Crowell doesn’t think so. But he readily acknowledges that he measures his success as chief innovator in part by his ability to create conflicts of interest. The antidote is disclosure, he said, and vigilant watchfulness on the part of the University, which has a strict conflict policy.

But UVA will continue to allow professors to publish on scientific findings they have a stake in, and allow researchers to fund their labs with money from their own startups.

“I just think progress is too important to stop progress because we want to legislate morality,” he said. “If you don’t figure this out, then are you sitting on innovation capacity that has the potential to create not just wealth and jobs and companies, but to create better health and help the environment and create a stronger economy? And I think the answer is yes. So we have to figure it out.”

There’s a story Abigail Turner likes to tell about her early days working as a civil rights attorney in 1970s Alabama.

With the Democrats’ Fifth Congressional District caucuses wrapped up and the first debate before the Republican Senate primary out of the way, we’re staring down a long summer of campaign rhetoric. UVA’s Center for Politics’ Geoff Skelley is keeping an eye on the U.S. Senate and Fifth District House race—both of which are getting national attention as the country shoulders into the next phase of the seemingly endless ramp-up to election season.

The Democratic nominee to face Republican incumbent Robert Hurt for the Fifth District seat in the House of Representatives won’t be finalized until next month, but now that Peyton R. Williams Jr. has taken himself out of the running, retired Air Force Brigadier General John Douglass, who took the majority of caucus delegates, is the sole candidate going into the party convention.

Can Douglass turn the Fifth blue again? Probably not, said Skelley.
Tom Perriello’s surprise 2008 victory was tied to a strong showing for Obama, he said, and most observers expect Hurt to keep his seat.

Still, he said, “the dynamics of the district aren’t super safe.”

In order to mount a political comeback and beat fellow former governor Tim Kaine in the closely watched Senate race, George Allen will have to beat a trio of Republican hopefuls: Tea Party organizer Jamie Radtke, minister E.W. Jackson, and outspoken abortion opponent Bob Marshall. Few see them as real threats to Allen, Skelley said.

Presidential politics will likely drive the race, he said. Virginia almost unfailingly pushes back against the party in the White House in midterm elections, Skelley noted, but in a presidential year, people tend to vote down the ballot.

“There’s just not a lot of cross-over,” he said.—Graelyn Brashear

Fifth District

John Douglass (D)
A Florida native who now lives in northern Fauquier County, Douglass rose to the rank of Brigadier General in the Air Force before retiring in 1992. Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research under Clinton, he also served as CEO of the Aerospace Industries Association, a massive defense-spending lobbying organization. His opponent for the Fifth District Democratic nomination, Peyton Williams, hasn’t conceded defeat, but Douglass is expected to carry the majority of the delegates at the distric’s Democratic convention in Nelson County May 19. He’s played up his experience working with presidents while presenting himself as the best candidate to beat Hurt.

Robert Hurt (R)
Hurt, an attorney originally from New York, has steadily climbed through the Virginia political ranks the old-school way: Chatham Town Council, General Assembly, State Senate. In 2010, he moved to the national stage when he grabbed Tom Perriello’s House seat. While in office, he voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act and pushed for major cuts in the federal budget. He cites job creation and lowering gas prices as key issues.

U.S. Senate

Tim Kaine (D)
A Harvard Law grad from Minnesota, Kaine served as Virginia governor from 2006 to 2010. He served as Chairman of the Democratic National Committee from 2009 to 2011, and has maintained close ties to the Obama administration through Organizing for America, the President’s grassroots political operation. Unopposed in his bid for the Democratic nomination for Senate, Kaine wants to see Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthy expire and has blasted Allen for supporting oil company subsidies.

George Allen (R)
After serving as governor from 1994 to 1998 and being elected to the Senate in 2000, Allen was considered a rising GOP star and a possible 2008 presidential candidate until his “macaca moment” and loss to Jim Webb in the 2006 Senate race. Since then, he’s been pursuing candidate-friendly endeavors—running a conservative think tank and penning a book. Ahead of the Republican primary, Allen’s playing up his social conserva-
tism and underscoring Kaine’s ties to Obama.

Bob Marshall (R)
An 11-time Virginia Delegate from Prince William County, Marshall narrowly lost the Republican Senate nomination in 2008 to former governor Jim Gilmore. He leans hard to the right, especially on social issues—he supported Virginia’s controversial ultrasound bill, and has spoken in favor of banning some kinds of contraception and all abortion, even in cases of rape and incest. Marshall has gone up against Kaine in his own way in the past: He personally—and successfully—sued to block a Kaine-backed 2007 bill that imposed taxes to fund Northern Virginia road projects.

Jamie Radtke (R)
A Richmond resident and graduate of Liberty University, Radtke is a conservative political consultant turned Tea Party activist who’s playing up her outsider status. She announced her intention to run against Allen early, and has since offered up a steady stream of anti-Republican-establishment op-eds in state newspapers. She’s pushing for Washington to cut its way to a balanced budget, and has vowed to oppose the federal debt ceiling.

E.W. Jackson (R)
Another graduate of Harvard Law, Jackson studied to be a Baptist minister before founding his own nondenominational Christian church. Aligning himself with Virginia’s Tea Partiers, Jackson has railed against the Obama administration on conservative talk shows and his own radio show. He’s named repealing the health care bill and “protecting Judeo-Christian values” as top priorities.

When Chris Gensic has his way, park-hopping in Charlottesville will be as easy as getting on your bike.

After years of acquiring land parcels, planning, mapping, and securing grants, Gensic, the city’s park and trail planner, is poised to launch a spate of projects that aim to link a string of parks and greenways on the north side of Charlottesville within two years, creating more than seven miles of continuous off-road paths.

Gensic was hired in 2006 to help implement Charlottesville’s 2003 Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan, which outlines the city’s cycling and walking infrastructure needs, from bike lanes to off-street trails.

One key aspect of the plan involves creating a network of multi-use paths—flat, commuter- and family-friendly, and free from the traffic that so often scares off people otherwise eager to use something besides a car to get around.

So far, only scattered sections have made it to completion. The quarter-mile Schenk’s Greenway path along McIntire Road is done, as are two sections in McIntire Park West. To the east, a finished path along the Rivanna River traces a section of the popular, but only partly city-owned, Rivanna Trail, the volunteer-built footpath that circumnavigates Charlottesville.

The dead-end sections of crushed gravel and asphalt trail seem far from being part of a greater whole. But in 2014, bikeable paths are expected to connect Pen Park and the Downtown Mall to a united McIntire Park, the western section of the restored Meadow Creek, Greenbrier Park, and the Meadowcreek Parkway, with bike-and-pedestrian-only bridges spanning streams, roads, and rail beds.

So why the piecemeal approach? The main problem, said Gensic, is that it’s hard to back into bike infrastructure. In the central and western U.S., newer cities were built for bikes as well as cars, he said, and miles of abandoned railways have been reclaimed as trails. But Charlottesville poses some problems.

“We’re hundreds of years older,” he said, “and we don’t have abandoned railroads”—freight and passenger trains still use the tracks that criss-cross the city on a daily basis—so there are few opportunities for rail-to-trail projects.

“We’re retrofitting an old, old city that used to be a little town, and became much more populated,” Gensic said.

David Stackhouse of the Charlottesville Area Mountain Bike Club said the persistence of a car-centric design culture here has been a stumbling block, too.

“We’re in an age when we really need to encourage cycling, especially within the city limits and its close surroundings,” Stackhouse said, but too often, two-wheeled travel is an afterthought at best. Consider, he said, that 50 years after the completion of the 250 Bypass, there’s still no way into the east side of McIntire Park except by car.

“It’s mind-boggling,” Stackhouse said.

Attitudes about what’s feasible are shifting, though, said Scott Paisley of Bike Charlottesville, another cycling group that continues to put steady pressure on the city to build better bike and walking routes.

When he and other volunteers led a push for more bike lanes a few years back, “a lot of people said, ‘That would be wonderful in a perfect world, but there’s no room,’” said Paisley, who co-owns Blue Wheel Bicycles. But after volunteers hit the streets with measuring tape to prove that existing roadways could support a sliver of space for cyclists, he said, more city leaders got on board.

In January, the city hired Amanda Poncy as a part-time bicycle and pedestrian coordinator to help build on existing infrastructure and make the bike and pedestrian master plan a reality. Poncy said it’s a slow process. Bike lane additions are tied to repaving projects, so they’re getting built bit by bit. All the while, the city’s working to tie on-street cycling routes into the developing network of trails.

“We’re doing everything we can to try to close the gaps in the network as quickly as we can,” Poncy said. “All this stuff takes time.”

Gensic knows that all too well. The walls of his cubicle in the City Hall Annex are papered with maps that chronicle years of efforts to greenlight and build the trail system.

There are still question marks in some spots. It’s unclear whether the city will be able to build a railroad underpass to close a gap in Greenbrier Park. Parts of the Rivanna Trail, which Gensic hopes will eventually have publicly-owned, multi-use path paralleling much of its mileage, are in the hands of property owners who don’t want to sell easements to the city. And the closing of section of his northern loop relies on the construction of a controversial interchange at the planned Meadowcreek Parkway and the Route 250 Bypass, a project that would offer the much-looked-for access to McIntire Park East, but which is currently tied up in federal court. Some of the outstanding “hyphens” in the loop should be closed by 2015, Gensic said.

But the plan is to go on building, piece by piece. The city dispenses $100,000 a year for new construction, and Gensic has so far successfully sought more than $1 million in federal and state grants that will pay for the lion’s share of the more expensive bridge projects—some of which will be done as early as July.

Gensic said he’s aware that most city residents won’t know what’s in store until they stumble across a new path themselves, but he believes people will come to use and value the trails once the parts become a whole. It’s satisfying, he said, to be able to move from the low-hanging fruit to the serious sections of trail he’s been planning for so long.

“Now it’s finally at the point where I can start building the big ones,” he said.

One of the largest plots of undeveloped city-owned land near Downtown—long used as a dumping ground for fill dirt and debris—is slated to become a new 47-unit mixed-income neighborhood, ushered into being by a builder-nonprofit partnership that some say is a model for the future of low-income and public housing development in Charlottesville.

In a hearing last week, City Council expressed initial support for a joint proposal from Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville and Southern Development to clear and build on the 3.5-acre lot on Elliott Avenue next to the old Oakwood Cemetery. The city has debated selling off the parcel for years, said Neighborhood Development Services Director Jim Tolbert. Last spring, the city met with residents to talk about what they would want to see on the site—no high-rises, sustainable design, appropriate density—and the city started requesting proposals in October.

Habitat Director Dan Rosensweig said the will to build affordable was evidence that the city has the right idea about development.

“There’s no NIMBY here in Charlottesville,” he said, referring to the “not-in-my-backyard” attitude some communities have toward low-income housing. “We continue to break the mold and find new ways to partner.”

But not everybody agrees on the details.

Besides the Habitat team, one other set of players stepped up with a plan for the site. Local development services company Milestone Partners partnered with the Piedmont Housing Alliance and the Jefferson Area Board for Aging, calling on a professional team that included architect Giovanna Galfione who lives near the site with her husband, former mayor Maurice Cox.

The Milestone team also had the support of adjacent property owners, including former City Council candidate Brevy Cannon, former mayor Blake Caravati and Barbara Pilkey, all of whom agreed to throw in their lots with the Milestone team. The partnership would almost double the site size, allowing it to stretch all the way to Oak Street to the northeast and making room for a total of 50 to 60 housing units.

Both proposals offered up good ideas for the vacant site, said Tolbert. Both planned for a relatively high-density neighborhood with mixed-income units and shared green space. But Tolbert said the Habitat team’s plan came with less risk attached for the city, and forged better partnerships with city and nonprofit agencies.

Milestone and the PHA offered $550,000 for the site, less the cost of cleanup, but they wanted the city to offer them a $500,000 loan to help cover the substantial cleanup. Habitat and Southern, however, proposed paying $10 for the property and assuming all costs of cleanup—no city funds required.

“They’re both very good projects, but our best estimate is that the cleanup costs are probably going to approach a million dollars,” Tolbert said, and if someone else was willing to shoulder all the risk, then all the better.

He said the city also liked the Habitat team’s Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority-backed plan to set aside a quarter of the approximately 20 affordable units for residents coming out of public housing.

But the partnership with adjacent landowners could be salvaged.

“Our first call would be to the other team,” Rosensweig said. He hopes the other property owners will get behind his project, and he said his partners are open to incorporating ideas from the other proposal. They’re delivering a kit of parts to the city, he said, but the site plan is still very much a work in progress.

“All the designs are conceptual at this point,” he said. “All ideas are on the table.”
Cooperation is in the cards, according to Cannon. Caravati and Pilkey, who rent out nearby properties, have been figuring out how best to use their lots for years, said Cannon.

Everyone wants to see the land put to good use.
But they have concerns. They want more points of entry for proper traffic circulation, Cannon said, and they’d like to see another developer besides Southern—responsible for numerous new developments in the neighborhood in recent years—take a crack at building in the Ridge Street area.

But the biggest issue, he said, is the amount of affordable units Habitat and Southern plan to squeeze into the plot.

“For a development this small, the understood best way to do it is to have no more than a third affordable housing,” he said. The Milestone team hit that ratio, but the Habitat plan calls for 43 percent affordable units in what Cannon said is “public housing central.” Another development with a high percentage of low-income housing south of Downtown could do more damage than good, he said, bringing down property values and jeopardizing the long-term viability of the project.

City Councilor Dede Smith offered a similar opinion at the Council hearing.
“I live on the south side of Charlottesville,” she said. “The south side bears the biggest brunt of poverty, and we’re putting more poverty there.”
But she and her fellow councilors ultimately indicated they’ll vote in favor of city staffers’ suggestion to pick the Habitat proposal when they meet again May 7.

Habitat’s Rosensweig said the cooperation bodes well for Charlottesville. He and local officials agree that the city has a high hurdle ahead when it comes to the pressing need to update public housing. The key to paying for it, they say, is forging partnerships between the city and community-minded developers willing to forgo some profit in order to supply new homes for struggling families—with some help from nonprofit groups.
The Elliott Avenue site is a good first step, said Rosensweig.

“I think this is an amazing template for how it should happen,” he said. “Taxpayers won’t have to pay a penny, and the risk is borne by a private entity who at the end of the day will make a little bit of money. Everyone is playing to their strengths.”

Not everyone tackling redevelopment projects is going to agree on every detail, he said, “but there are certain fundamentals where there’s a high degree of consensus.”

Six months after former director Randy Bickers quit, the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority has a new leader—and a new take on how to plan for the future.

Connie Dunn, who has spent 23 years in private property management in Central Virginia and Norfolk and who served on the CRHA’s board in 2003, started as the housing authority’s new executive director last week. As the sixth person to hold the job since 1999, Dunn is inheriting a history of troubled agency-resident relations and a future of uncertain funding, but CRHA board chair Hosea Mitchell said her hire and a new partnership with the city will put the CRHA on firmer footing going forward.

The CRHA has a city-appointed board, but is funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and generally operates outside the scope of the city’s oversight. But Mitchell said a team of city staffers led by Director of Neighborhood Development Jim Tolbert is joining a CRHA board subcommittee to tackle the single biggest task ahead of the housing authority: the implementation of a public housing redevelopment plan. Passed in 2010, the plan to inject $100 million into 376 aging public housing units has languished as the CRHA has struggled to find a way to secure funding.
Mitchell and others agree that partnering with the private sector is the way to replace

Charlottesville’s deteriorating public housing. But to do the legwork needed to convince developers to build mixed-income neighborhoods that include subsidized housing, they need extra help. He’s seen it working in communities around the country, he said.

“Every successful redevelopment effort was a holistic effort, an effort that involved the housing authority, the city government, NGOs, and the private sector,” Mitchell said. “We need to get every stakeholder involved, and having the city take more of a lead in that will help us move ahead.”

He said the partnership will allow Dunn and her staff to focus on day-to-day operations, including making sure regular HUD money keeps flowing. That’s not an easy task at a time when Washington is steadily scaling back support for housing subsidies, Mitchell said.

But Mitchell acknowledged Charlottesville’s public housing problems go beyond funding. The high turnover in the top spot contributed to operational problems and fed a feeling of mistrust between the CRHA and residents, said Mitchell. The last two directors—Noah Schwartz, who left in 2008, and Bickers, who stepped down last October—told interviewers the job wore them down to the quitting point.

“We were a troubled agency when Randy took over,” Mitchell said. Bickers helped get things back on track, he said, pulling the housing authority through HUD audits it had failed in the past. But poor communication between the CRHA and the people it serves persists, Mitchell said. He believes Dunn will change that with a service-oriented approach.

“She comes from a background where if you don’t give the customer what the customer wants, you lose them,” Mitchell said.

Not everyone is as optimistic. CRHA board member Joy Johnson, who has lived in Westhaven since 1983 and serves with the Public Housing Association of Residents, said the relationship between the authority and its residents has gone from bad to worse in recent years, damaged by a lack of leadership and a board and staff that dictate but don’t listen.

“There’s still that whole dynamic of us versus them, based on how they deal with the residents,” she said.

Johnson said she’s not thrilled with the choice of Dunn as the new executive director. Board members knew her and shepherded her through the hiring process, she said, but Johnson would have preferred to see somebody with experience dealing with HUD. She’s willing to give Dunn a chance, but she’s worried that without a firm, savvy leader, nothing about the CRHA will change.

“I feel like if you have an organization where there is no strong leadership and no sense of where it’s going, it’s going to have a shipwreck,” Johnson said.
Mitchell said everyone knows there is work to be done.

“The change Joy seeks won’t happen overnight,” he said. But there is the will for an institutional shift, he said. “I pray we will find patience and give Connie the time she needs to impact the authority’s culture.”

Dunn said she’s aware of the issues the authority faces, and she wants to address them by soliciting as much community input as possible. She’s working early to forge relationships with neighborhood associations, she said, and improve staff-resident communication.

For her, it’s personal. She grew up here, and it’s home.

“I look at this as the opportunity to contribute to the Charlottesville community,” she said.

Attorney Mahlon Funk appeared before Judge Edward Hogshire in Charlottesville Circuit Court Thursday on behalf of Love’s mother, Sharon Love, to argue for the court’s release of trial documents, saying they were necessary for the family’s pending wrongful death suit against as-yet unnamed plaintiffs. His was the second hearing on the release of the evidence that afternoon, coming on the heels of another round of arguments for and against making the court documents available to six media companies who filed for access before the trial ended and have been fighting for it since.

“We now don’t have the luxury of time,” said Funk as a shackled Huguely, who awaits an August 30 sentencing date, looked on. “There’s a pesky little thing called the statute of limitations,” which gives the family until May 3 to file their civil suit.

“Unlike the media, my client presents no danger whatsoever of sensationalizing (the evidence) in any way,” said Funk. “They intend to honor the memory of Yeardley.”

Their intent doesn’t really matter, said the other attorneys.

Huguely lawyer Francis McQ. Lawrence said the media and the family have the same standing when it comes to court-ordered access to the evidence, and he reiterated the defense’s argument: Making the evidence available now would infringe on Huguely’s Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial if his request for a new one—as yet unrequested by his lawyers—is successful.

Robert Yates, the local attorney representing the media companies, agreed that Love’s family has no greater right as litigants than the public does.

“The public’s right, even though nobody up there wants to admit it, is pretty strong,” he said.

Hogshire didn’t rule in favor or against the release of documents and exhibits to Love’s attorney, but according to Funk, Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman can—and will—share the evidence in order to allow the civil case to go forward.
Whether the media will get to see what jurors saw remains up in the air.
Yates offered up two options for granting access to the trial evidence, which he has argued was presented to jurors in such a way that the media and the public couldn’t see it, creating a de facto closed trial.

One plan was to load everything, including photographs, text message transcripts, and the video of Huguely’s interrogation by police, onto a read-only computer terminal in the court clerk’s office and allow the media and the public to access it at will—not for reproduction, but just for viewing.

Acknowledging that such an approach would require the clerk to spend an enormous amount of time chaperoning viewers, Yates offered another suggestion: Put the transcripts and other non-sensitive evidence—no autopsy photos—on a CD and distribute burned copies.

But Huguely’s lawyers said that given the high-profile nature of the trial, there would be no way to keep even the sensitive material from making its way to publication. That, they said, would deny their client the right to an unbiased jury pool if he ended up back in court.
“If we make a mistake with the handling of this evidence, we can’t take it back,” said defense attorney Rhonda Quagliana.

Yates argued that the proverbial cat was already out of the bag.

“The trial already happened,” he said. “Everybody knows a jury found him guilty,” and the evidence is now part of the public record. The law is clear, he said. In order to block access, “you have to articulate a reason, and not a hypothetical reason. The threat of a new trial is a hypothetical reason.”

Hogshire said he was sensitive to the rights of the public to see the trial evidence, but needed more time before he issued a ruling.
“I don’t have a lot of guidance here, and I want to give it some really careful thought,” he said.

Yates maintains precedent is on his clients’ side. He’s been proceeded with patience and accommodated the court, he said, because that’s what you do here.

“I should be up on my First Amendment soapbox saying we should have access to everything,” he said. “But this is Charlottesville.”

“Tennis ball lettuce, prickly-seeded spinach, Prince Albert pea, pineapple melon.”

The names of the 330 varieties of plants Thomas Jefferson tended at Monticello roll off Peter Hatch’s tongue like a litany, the chant of a man as devoted to green and growing things as the one who first planned and planted the mountaintop garden outside Charlottesville.

Hatch, Monticello’s longtime director of gardens and grounds, is intimately familiar with the vegetative roll call. For the last 34 years, he’s collected them and brought them back to life in a meticulous restoration of Jefferson’s garden, and now, they play a starring role in Hatch’s latest book, “A Rich Spot of Earth” Thomas Jefferson’s Revolutionary Garden at Monticello.

The 1,000′ terraced vegetable garden at Monticello was Thomas Jefferson’s crowning horticultural achievement, a small miracle born out of careful site selection and near-religious devotion.

“When he used the word garden, he was always reserving the term exclusively for his vegetable garden,” Hatch said. Thanks in large part to Hatch’s efforts, Jefferson’s gardens now look as they did a full two centuries ago, when he retired to his mountaintop home to devote himself to his plants. And the man who took up the mantle of recreating and tending the edible oasis is ready to retire himself.

Hatch is a Michigan native and self-described jock who got a degree in English at the University of North Carolina before turning to gardening. When he first came to Monticello from North Carolina’s Old Salem Museum in 1977, the concept of historic restoration was changing and expanding. No longer was the historic estate merely about furniture and parquet floors. What was outside the walls of America’s great homes and early settlements began to matter as much as what was inside.

Under the leadership of Hatch and then-director Dan Jordan, Monticello embraced the new outlook. Shortly after his arrival, Hatch and a team of restorers and architects began prying up the ground on the south side of the estate where they knew the secrets of Jefferson’s beloved garden lay. They had his notes to go by—700 pages of journal entries and letters compiled in Jefferson’s Garden Book—but that wasn’t enough to ensure that what they created was accurate.

“Jefferson would often dream up or conceive of things that were never actually executed, so deciphering the vision from the reality is always complex,” Hatch said. The final evidence was in the soil itself: stains in the red clay where the dozens of fruit trees, the garden pavilion and even the fence posts had once stood.

Piece by piece, they rebuilt what once was. In adhering to a faithful reproduction, Hatch said he sometimes had to shrug off good gardening sense. “This was a restoration where history and documentation took precedence,” he said.

Jefferson had insisted on a grass-capped border wall, for instance. Fine in cool, cloudy England, said Hatch, but doomed for failure in a torrid Virginia summer.

“We attempted it,” he said, grinning. “It died.”

But the garden lived. As the years went on, Hatch oversaw the rebuilding of Jefferson’s library of heirloom herb and vegetable varieties, an unprecedented collection in the early 19th century.

Five years ago, an end to his tenure at Monticello in sight, Hatch took a sabbatical. He didn’t go far—at Jordan’s suggestion, he took up residence in a small cabin in a quiet corner of the vast estate and hunkered down for the winter.

“I really didn’t know what I was going to do until the day I got there,” he said. “I was scared I was going to end up butting my head against the wall for three months.”
Instead, he wrote a book. Hatch had published and contributed to several other works on Monticello and its grounds and plants already, but this one took aim at the patch of earth he and Jefferson had treasured and worked and written about more than any other: the vegetable garden.

He dove back into the Jefferson’s notes, read up on the gardens of his colonial contemporaries and studied the research of historians who were uncovering new insights into Jefferson’s later years. He pored over the vegetables and the recipes born of them in Monticello’s kitchens, dishes unfamiliar to most early American households, whose inhabitants were unaccustomed to the now-familiar subtropical and Mediterranean crops that Jefferson’s garden grew —tomatoes, okra, even peanuts. And, somewhat to his own surprise, Hatch found there was more to learn about the man whose centuries-old plans and dreams had given shape to a third of a century of Hatch’s own life.

“It was exciting that given all that time, I still had something left to contribute to the study of Jefferson and the garden,” he said.

The result is a 280-page tribute to an extraordinary collection of plants, and to a garden—and gardener—both revolutionary and practical. While Jefferson was evangelical about introducing, growing, and sharing new species that his colonial neighbors had never dreamed of, said Hatch, he wasn’t fussy.

“He wasn’t interested in a really tidy garden with vigorously edged beds and borders and fancy walkways,” Hatch said. “Jefferson was all about sowing and harvesting. To me, that was one of the truly American qualities—it was this peculiarly American, pragmatic garden.”

Perhaps more than any of his works, Hatch’s latest book offers insight into Jefferson himself. Especially in his later years, said Hatch, Jefferson’s almost obsessive attention to detail, his delight in noting each small thing, was focused largely on his rows of plants.

“His interest in gardening arose from a truly wide-eyed curiosity about the natural world,” he said. “Even at the age of 83, he was playing this self-described role of being an old man, but a young gardener.”

This was a man who trudged through red winter mud with surveying chain in hand, even when bent with age, to re-plot his garden. A man who, in his 80s, read about giant cucumbers in a Cleveland paper and wrote to the governor of Ohio to get the seeds, then grew them, measuring each one.

“It was sort of a barometer of his health to be able to write down when his peas were being harvested, or when his salsify was coming in,” said Hatch. “It was a kind of rage against the pathos of aging.”

Hatch is in his 60s himself, now, and ready to set down one spade in favor of another.

Thirty-four years has been long enough to hold a job, he said. He has plans to retire to some family acreage in Crozet to hike and play sports and, yes, botanize.

He’s leaving satisfied, he said, proud of what his hard work has wrought. But he knows that time moves forward, one growing season at a time.

“Gardens come and go quickly,” he said. “That’s what defines them. They’re perennially mutable. They’re always living and dying.”