Author: graelynbrashear

 

The Tom Tom Founders Festival includes weekly innovation panels leading up to the May 11 and 12 festival weekend. (Image by Tom Tom Founders Festival)

The weekend of music that caps off the Tom Tom Founders Festival in May will draw 40 acts and has generated plenty of buzz, but over the course of the next month, festival organizers are steering the city’s attention to a series of talks that put business innovation, not bands, in the spotlight.

Expanding the scope of Tom Tom to include weekly innovation panels satisfied a twin itch for Oliver Platts-Mills, an analyst at a Charlottesville  investment firm. When he met Tom Tom co-founder Paul Beyer during Beyer’s City Council campaign last year, Platts-Mills said the two Charlottesville natives talked a lot about the city’s image, which, to the rest of the world, tends to center on Monticello, UVA and the Blue Ridge.

“It starts to sound like a retirement community, or a place where the wealthy come to play,” Platts-Mills said. That’s part of the city’s identity, he acknowleged. “But that image didn’t entirely match up with what we were seeing, which is a lot of people churning ideas, being creative and trying to do things here in Charlottesville.”
He also wanted to make sure that the month-long celebration of all things creative cast a wide net.

“When people talk about creativity and creative people, they’re often thinking of artists and musicians,” he said. “It bugs me, because I think creativity is much broader than that. Some of the most creative people I know are doctors, or are starting small businesses.”
Enter the innovation panels: weekly gatherings of entrepreneurial minds getting together to talk about how to keep pushing Charlottesville to be an incubator for small business startups and emerging industries, and how to keep great thinkers in town.

The foundation is already here, said Platts-Mills. Charlottesville makes up for what it lacks in proximity to major markets with a quality talent pool, he said, and the city’s small size can be an asset. Consider the model of tech superpower Bell Labs, whose scientists developed everything from lasers to C++ programming and have netted seven Nobel prizes in the last century: “They basically created this place where they’d bring talented, creative, smart people together and designed a space where they’d have to run into each other,” said Platts-Mills. “Charlottesville is that place.”

What’s more, it’s a small enough network that aspiring entrepreneurs can rub elbows with doers, and learn from them directly. “In San Francisco or New York, you can meet people who are doing stuff, but in Charlottesville, you can meet the person,” Platts-Mills said.

The idea of accessing the city’s brainpower helped them select panelists for the weekly discussions at the Gleason Building on Garrett Street. Oliver Kuttner, head of the Automotive X Prize-winning engineering firm Edison2, will talk sustainability with Joey Conover of green design-and-build firm Latitude 38. The founders of microlender Community Investment Collaborative will discuss social entrepreneurship alongside City Councilor Dave Norris, whose Charlottesville Institute aims to put UVA’s brainpower to work solving city problems. Tobias Dengel of app-maker Willow tree will take aim at social media with media marketing firm VibeThink’s Ryan Derose. And executives from a handful of biotech startups will share thoughts on Charlottesville’s role as a new industry hub, with input from Mark Crowell, UVA’s patent and innovation guru.

Martin Chapman, the Indoor Biotechnologies founder who is turning the old Preston Avenue Coca Cola bottling plant into a lab space for startup biotech companies, said the innovation talks foster the kind of conversations that have to happen before ideas turn into action.

“Those kind of social interactions are really important,” Chapman said. And crossover is key: He’s a panelist for the biotech talk, but he thinks the festival founders did well to include a range of topics, because the thought processes for dreaming up new solutions are similar whether the thinker is a PhD developing a new drug or a kid with an idea for a new smartphone app.

“There are all sorts of areas where they might overlap, and someone might throw in an idea out of the blue and say, ‘I don’t know anything about it, but what if you did this?’” Chapman said. “It challenges peoples’ ideas, and it can strengthen what they finally end up doing.”

 

A rendering of what the finished Landmark could look like, courtesy of court documents detailing the future costs and timeline of the revived project. (njb Architecture)

Get ready for a resurrection.

The terms of a court-ordered auction are set, and the Landmark Hotel goes on the block June 18, according to a final order approving the sale signed by a bankruptcy judge here on Friday, April 6. The terms say anybody willing to meet the starting bid of $3 million and able to bare all when it comes to financial backing can join the party, which creditors hope will mean a new life for troubled investor Halsey Minor’s money-pit property on the Downtown Mall.

One attorney said there’s interest among several prospective buyers, each apparently with plans to see through to completion something akin to the original vision of a 100-room boutique hotel.

“Viewed at that level of $3 million, it’s a heck of a bargain,” said Bill Schmidheiser, who represents interior design and architecture firm R.D. Jones & Associates, one of Minor’s creditors.

Minor, a local entrepreneur who made millions co-founding tech website CNET.com, started the project in early 2008 with then-partner Lee Danielson, the developer behind the Main Street Arena. The first whiff of trouble came four years ago this month, when Specialty Finance Group, the Atlanta bank that put up $23.7 million for the project, informed investors that the loan was already out of balance.

The cost estimate for the project was scaled down and the timeline pushed back, but by September 2008, the project was $3 million over budget, according to the bank.

Construction slowed that November when contractors stopped getting paid, then ground toa total stop in late 2009. The Landmark never regained consciousness.

Which isn’t to say nobody’s tried to revive it. Even as Minor sued Danielson and SFG for colluding against him and the bank filed suit in return demanding repayment, the principal investors insisted they wanted to see the project completed. Minor Family Hotels, LLC filed for bankruptcy in September 2010, but a year later, Minor announced he was hiring Tim Dixon, whose success with his Iron Horse Hotel in Milwaukee won him accolades. At the time, Minor and Dixon promised the bankruptcy court that they’d have new plans for the Landmark by mid-January 2012.

Instead, Dixon proposed buying the property and the hulking steel-and-concrete skeleton for $2.8 million. Creditors cried foul.

“The offer Mr. Dixon made did not feel to us like a genuine, enforceable offer, because it wasn’t accompanied by a deposit,” said Schmidheiser. The company Dixon formed to buy the project, Virginia Hotel Fund LLC, had no assets, Schmidheiser said, and the contract put forward by Minor and Dixon promised Dixon a payout if somebody ultimately outbid him for the property—a win-win for him, it seemed, but not the slam dunk the creditors wanted.

Dixon’s offer was surprisingly low, said Schmidheiser, considering he estimated Minor had sunk $13 million or more into the failed hotel. That got other potential buyers sniffing around, he said.

“People who had been kind of vaguely looking at it said, ‘Really?’” Schmidheiser said. “They had no notion it might possibly go that low.” The interest delighted creditors, but they demanded an even playing field to harness the most competitive bid possible.

On March 19, Robert Maxwell, attorney for Minor, was back in court with counsel for SFG and the host of creditors still owed money on the project to argue the details of the sale contract. Federal bankruptcy judge William E. Anderson called for an auction, and told the parties to come together and agree on terms, or they’d end up in another hearing.

Ultimately, they found some common ground. After contractor Clancy & Theys offered details on what was needed to finally finish the Landmark—nine months of work and another $16 million—Anderson signed the order approving a sale by live auction at 11 a.m. Monday, June 18 in the Charlottesville bankruptcy court.

According to the order, to join the party, potential buyers must agree to a starting bid of $3 million, accompanied by proof of financial backing and a deposit of $200,000 by June 8.
Richard Maxwell, Minor’s attorney, said there’s interest, “but until they put the deposit down, you never know.” Whether the pending auction is a good or bad thing depends on who you ask, Maxwell said, “but it’s movement in a case that hasn’t seen any in a long time.”

Schmidheiser said creditors are confident at least three prospective purchasers will step up. One is likely to be Minor’s initial partner, Danielson, who was named in court last month as a potential bidder and who claims to have the backing of billionaire investor Alexander von Furstenberg. If he’s successful, it would be the third time Danielson has bought the property in 12 years. Omni Hotels has also expressed interest.

And there’s Dixon, whose initial offer drummed up the renewed interest in the property. The Boutique & Lifestyle Lodging Association named his Iron Horse Boutique Hotel of the Year in 2011, and awarded Dixon the title of Hotelier of the Year. He’s received praise within the industry for a concept that ties the community to the property with a well-loved restaurant, and has touted his own creative financing method, which involves seeking out what he calls “funky money”—federal and state tax credits for everything from building in historic districts to new-market construction.

So will the so-called stalking horse in the sale pony up?

“I hope he will,” said Schmidheiser. “The more the merrier.”

Whether one bidder shows or 10, the long-stalled hotel will likely have a new owner by lunch. “I think the whole thing will take five minutes,” said Schmidheiser.

The interest makes sense now, he said, even considering whatever’s required to revive a skeleton that’s been exposed to the elements for four years. And while the project was born at the wrong moment, just before the markets crashed and dragged the country into recession, it could be that the time is right for the long-neglected hotel to come back from the dead.

“We’re in—and I’m crossing myself as I speak—a better economy,” Schmidheiser said. “Now is the time for bold entrepreneurs.”

Meanwhile, bold enterpreneur Halsey Minor is mired in yet another Virginia bankruptcy saga. His purchase of the historic Carter’s Grove plantation from Colonial Williamsburg has gone south, the Virginia Gazette reported, and another judge rejected a proposed settlement last month and steered the property toward foreclosure.

There’s hope of a future for his Charlottesville hotel, even if Minor’s out of the picture. But just how much more an investor will slap down for the right to breathe life into the Landmark at long last is anybody’s guess, Schmidheiser said. “That’s why they play the game, as it were.”

 

The governor says a last-minute bill requiring higher retirement contributions from public workers will save the pension system, but local officials say the measure puts too much strain on schools and municipalities. (Photo courtesy of Office of the Governor)

A planned fix for the state’s struggling public worker pension fund has local school and county leaders crying foul and warning of tax hikes as they brace for required raises meant to offset increased employee retirement contributions.

SB 497—passed quickly at the tail end of the 2012 legislative session and heralded as an effective reform by Governor Bob McDonnell—will require public employees covered by the Virginia Retirement System to contribute 5 percent more toward their pensions, while also requiring employers to up workers’ pay by 5 percent.

McDonnell claimed the new contributions will be a much-needed shot in the arm for the chronically underfunded system. “We are all in this together,” he said via press release at the start of the session in January, “and this is a basic matter of math.”

Bad math, according to Albemarle County Board of Supervisors Chair Ann Mallek.
“Only on the surface does it look like a wash—it is not,” she wrote this week in a letter to McDonnell blasting the bill.

County Executive Thomas Foley said the required pay increase could cost Albemarle and its schools up to $1.6 million—about a penny on the tax rate, he said. It’s a sum they would have to cover in one-time expenditures this year, he said, since the budget process is nearly complete. While Charlottesville employees aren’t in the VRS and thus aren’t affected, city schools will be on the hook for several hundred thousand dollars, said Ned Michie, chair of the Charlottesville School Board, which will have a significant impact on the budget in an already lean year.

But because Federal Insurance Contribution Act withholdings will also go up, Mallek said, employees will actually see a decrease in their total incomes. The result is that nobody’s happy, she said.

“There’s general outrage across all different political persuasions, even on this board,” she said. Her letter to the governor was part of a rising tide of bipartisan frustration over the mandate statewide, she said. “Everyone universally said ‘Knock it off.’”

City and county leaders said some of their frustration stems from their feeling that McDonnell and the legislature dug the hole, but are asking taxpayers and public workers to fill it.

“The governor chose to borrow money from the VRS a couple of years ago,” Mallek said—a $620 million deferment approved by the legislature to plug holes in the state budget. “Instead of paying it back, he called it a surplus. It’s completely irresponsible.”

Michie said it’s one more unfunded mandate that leaves local government holding the bag.

“It’s just another example of the state backing off its commitment to funding education,” he said. “It drops more in the laps of municipalities, and that’s tough on municipalities.”
Officials have asked the governor to amend the bill to let them to phase in the raises over five years—currently allowed for school employees, but not local government workers. They’re also asking for a year’s grace period, considering the changes are coming after many municipalities have already advertised their tax rate.

Foley said the objections go beyond counties, cities and schools bristling at the state meddling in how they compensate employees. They know the retirement system needs a fix, he said, but he and others think the governor and the legislature offered up a poor solution that sets a bad precedent.

“It’s not just local government crying and moaning and groaning,” Foley said. “This has a huge impact, and I don’t think they’ve really assessed the costs.”

Deborah Adams, 44, joins a discussion in her American Literature class at Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women. The course is part of an associate degree program offered at the prison by Piedmont Virginia Community College. (Photo by John Robinson)

At 2:30 p.m. last Monday, Piedmont Virginia Community College professor Ben Sloan’s American Literature class was deep in an analysis of feminist writer Marge Piercey’s poem “To Be of Use.”

The 13 students leaned forward over their books and papers, picking apart a few lines that held their attention: “The work of the world is common as mud,” Piercey wrote. “Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.”

The discussion that unfolded—work is universal, sure, but why “common,” and why mud?—could have taken place on any campus in the country. The classroom was standard, too, with a Voltaire quote scrawled on a whiteboard and identical copies of the Norton Anthology of American Literature open on desks.

But the students weren’t what you’d call typical: felons currently serving terms at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, a maximum security prison in Troy, half an hour east of Charlottesville. Some were in for robbery or drug offenses, others convicted murderers.

All of them were there to learn.

Virginia Manning, 31, said she wants to have something other than drugs and crime to return to when she gets out. In her rural southwestern Virginia community, sometimes it seems like those are the only options.

“I just want to be able to overcome that, and not have to go back to that and expect that’s all that I am and all that I can be,” she said. “I want to try and inspire other people, and show them, look, you screwed up, but it’s O.K. You can overcome that, and be better than this.”

Inside out

“People make mistakes,” said John Donnelly, vice president for instruction and student services as Piedmont, which partners with the prison to provide a degree program to inmates. “Whatever the situation was that’s landed them here, we’re providing them with something that’s beneficial.”

Piedmont’s partnership with the prison began in 2004, when the college started offering classes taught by professors on site. The courses were popular, and since then, the prison and the school have developed a two-year general education associate degree program that allows inmates to transfer to four-year schools after their release. Next May, the two institutions will see their first class of graduates.

Jennifer Patteson, the prison’s college and vocational coordinator, said there’s stiff competition for a handful of scholarships provided by private foundations, and the rest of the inmates have to pay their own way. While imprisoned, they don’t qualify for Pell grants.* They know the deck is stacked against them, Patteson said, and they want to do something about it.

“A lot of the ladies we work with are very scared of going back out,” she said. “They don’t want to get back into the same habits. They’re afraid they’re going to end up back here.”
Others were locked up when they were 17 and have spent 10 or 20 years in prison, said Patteson. The world has moved on without them.

“They have no idea what’s out there,” she said, so whatever the system can offer, “I think it just helps them get prepared as best they can before they’re released.”
But the women in Sloan’s class said it does a lot more than that. Getting the chance to study biology, math and literature gives them a sense of worth that vocational classes—which used to be the only further education offered at Fluvanna—never did.

“Internally, it gives us a sense that we’re not being looked at just as, ‘Hey, you’re a felon, you can only be an electrician or a plumber or whatever’s offered here,’” said Candace Knott, 28. “It gives us a greater sense of what we can accomplish, instead of just being boxed in.”

The attitude is spreading, Knott said. She and her classmates have become ambassadors for higher education within the prison, encouraging other inmates to stay in line and study so they can qualify for the degree program. “I’ve seen unlikely people who never thought they could do this,” she said. “But you see it in their eyes. They start to believe, and say, ‘Maybe I can get a scholarship,’ or ‘I never thought to take this class.’”

For some students, helping others find their way is the beginning and end of the college experience.

Nancy Van Kluyve is effectively a lifer, sentenced in her 30s to 49 years in prison. She knows her chances of applying what she learns at Fluvanna to a job on the outside are slim, but she’s still taking classes, largely so she can set an example and guide other inmates. Tutoring has made her feel like an effective member of society for the first time, she said.

“I’d never really felt a real sense of accomplishment before,” Van Kluyve said. “It’s so easy to get lost when you first get here, because it’s a huge stress to be incarcerated. And there are losses all over the place. Depending on what your personality is, you can be picked up and herded off in the wrong direction or the right direction.” She’s happy to have helped point some women toward a future that doesn’t look bleak. “It’s been what’s given me quality of life while I’m in this institution,” she said.

She and her classmates have also had a profound effect on their teacher. Sloan said he always learns from his students, but the women he teaches at Fluvanna are an inspiration. “They’ve had some painful and difficult experiences, and they bring that to the literature,” he said. Through their eyes, “I see the poems and the stories in a new way—in a new light.”

Like the way inmate Denise Holsinger saw Piercey’s words. The poet speaks of mud, she pointed out during class, but also of pretty and useful items fashioned of it: amphoras, vases.

“All these things are made from clay, from mud,” Holsinger said. “If you do it right, it turns into this beautiful thing.”

*PVCC has noted that individuals with criminal records can qualify for Pell grants and other financial aid following release.

Darden graduate and businessman Toan Nguyen is one of several local residents giving entrepreneurs a leg up through the Community Investment Collaborative, an organization offering education and microloans to small business owners. (Photo by Ashley Twiggs)

Toan Nguyen has seen a lot of good business plans fail.

As a student at UVA’s Darden School of Business and as an entrepreneur, he’s heard plenty of sound pitches. “But the brick wall that everybody runs into is money,” he said. “It’s always the money.”

Now, as the chair of an organization offering business education and microfinancing to the owners of small start-ups, he’s hoping to tip the scales in favor of local entrepreneurs by arming them with knowledge and helping them get past the catch-22 of needing funds before qualifying for loans.

The Community Investment Collaborative took shape last year during regular meetings at C’ville Coffee, the Harris Street business Nguyen co-founded 12 years ago. About three dozen people gathered weekly to hash out their ideas about what Charlottesville’s would-be small business owners needed to succeed—especially in underserved and minority neighborhoods. Some were already tackling the problem through initiatives like the Piedmont Housing Alliance and the Orange Dot Project, which aims to alleviate poverty by increasing self-sufficiency. They were entrepreneurs, nonprofit leaders, Darden graduates. Some, like Nguyen, were all of the above.

By late 2011, CIC had a staffer and a board of six, including Nguyen, local Web businessman Gordon Bennett, and Center for Nonprofit Excellence founder Wendy Brown. And they had a game plan.

To turn ideas into businesses, people need access to start-up loans, Nguyen said, but the group recognized that they also need solid training and a support network. CIC is poised to offer all three to its first group of entrepreneurs, who begin a three-and-a-half-month training course this week. At the same time, the group is planning a community-wide coming out, of sorts, by joining in a series of talks on grassroots innovation in the weeks leading up to the Tom Tom Founder’s Festival May 11 and 12.

Their guiding principal, said Nguyen, is an extension of the old Chinese proverb: Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. “What this does is not only teach a man how to fish, but fund the buying of that fishing pole,” he said.

CIC’s first class of trainees includes 23 residents from Charlottesville and the surrounding counties, said CIC Program Director Hebah Fisher, who studied microfinance at Darden. Some are established business owners who want to take their project to the next level, she said. Others have only a concept and a desire to will it into reality.

To make the cut, “you had to have a very clear idea of what you wanted,” Fisher said. “And the other criteria was that we wanted the passion and commitment of someone who could put in the hours.” Business ideas include a handyman co-op, an alternative taxi company for low-income and handicapped city residents, and a fresh juice cart. And like the group that’s shepherding them into the business community, they’re looking beyond the bottom line.

“One of the most beautiful things about the entrepreneurs in this first class is when you ask them to share their business ideas, they’re not just saying, ‘I want to start a barber salon,’ or ‘I want to start a soul food catering business,’” said Fisher. “They talk about this vision of the community they want to live in, and how their business fits into that picture.”

CIC negotiated a partnership with the New York-based Workshop in Business Opportunities to use the nonprofit’s acclaimed curriculum, created in the ’60s to give entrepreneurs in Harlem a fast-paced but comprehensive small-business education. Guiding students through WIBO’s chapters, which detail everything from consumer targeting and cost structure to ethics and the law, is a team of volunteer instructors—successful business owners, marketing strategists, members of the UVA community, and others, who will lead classes held at CitySpace, the Downtown meeting venue the city offered to CIC for free.

The students pay at least a small sum to help cover the cost of the WIBO workbooks, though virtually all of them will get financial assistance, said Nguyen. When the course is done, they’ll keep meeting regularly with their fellow start-up students and with business mentors. The guidance and networking are key, said Fisher, but so is the companionship.

“Entrepreneurship is a really lonely pathway, and you need your friends there with you,” she said.

Kathryn Sharpe, assistant professor of business administration at Darden, will dispatch 70 students from her market research class to guide the CIC entrepreneurs. When she’s overseen similar collaborations in recent years, she said, everyone has benefitted. Business owners get the dignity of the focused attention of their own team of advisors, and her students gain confidence and real-world experience.

“It’s been empowering for them to see projects through from start to finish,” Sharpe said.

When CIC’s crop of students completes the course, they can apply for incremental loans of $5,000, $10,000, and finally $35,000, which will be approved by a loan committee and administered by CIC. The group is still drumming up the support needed to offer the loans, but Nguyen said they’re confident the business models they’re fostering will speak for themselves and draw local investors.

With each infusion of capital, CIC will help its members build credit. Ultimately, they’ll be able to turn to banks for bigger loans, he said.
That’s good news for everybody, said Glenn Rust, president of Charlottesville’s Virginia National Bank. His is one of several local banks working with CIC and preparing to receive its first crop of loan applicants.

Rust admitted it’s tougher than ever for start-up operations to get those crucial first loans of a few thousand dollars. New small businesses usually don’t have a solid enough track record to make the loan worth the administrative effort required on the bank’s side, he said, “but $35,000 is a big enough amount to grab people’s attention, and an amount some banks can tolerate some risk on.”

The whole community will ultimately reap the benefits of a corps of savvy, well-prepared business owners, said Rust.

“You get several small businesses going that truly meet a need, and those small businesses begin to employ three, seven, 12 people—that’s the economic engine of every town,” he said.

Nguyen and his colleagues know boosting the local economy by empowering business owners is not something one group can do alone. They wouldn’t have come as far as they have if not for the support of other individuals and organizations, he said. Going forward, he wants CIC to kickstart even more partnerships, and offer inspiration to others.

“That’s the power,” he said. “It’s hope. Without that, it’s hard to move forward.”

 

Talking Tom Tom: “When people think of innovation, they think of biotech and IT,” Nguyen said. “But we want to look at innovation from the ground up.” Join in Wednesday night panel discussions on innovaiton in business and design with CIC founders and others as part of the Tom Tom Founders Festival starting April 18. For more info, visit www.tomtomfest.com.

 

City of Promise director Sarad Davenport has come home to 10th and Page, the first neighborhood he can remember, to guide a project he believes will ultimately hand local kids a road map out of poverty. (Photo by John Robinson)

This city has a way of drawing home its native sons. It’s something of an old saw: Grow up in Charlottesville, and even if you strike out for distant horizons, chances are good you’ll end up here again.

For Sarad Davenport, getting out was no joke. His family’s first home was in Westhaven, the city’s oldest public housing complex. He came up through the city school system, succeeded in college, got a master’s degree, and dove into a career in education in Washington, D.C.
And now he’s back.

The city hired 32-year-old Davenport last month to head the City of Promise initiative, a federally funded, from-the-ground-up project that aims to guide underprivileged kids in Westhaven, the surrounding 10th and Page and Starr Hill neighborhoods and ultimately all of Charlottesville through life from birth to adulthood. The city was one of 15 communities nationwide selected for a Promise Neighborhoods grant at the end of last year, and Davenport is tasked with shepherding the project through to implementation stage, with help from a coalition of contributing agencies. For him, it’s personal.

“Had it not been for my connection to the Westhaven and the 10th and Page community, and my passion for the people here, I wouldn’t have taken this position,” Davenport said. “I wanted to see people do better on a broader scale.”

Promise Neighborhoods is a Department of Education-funded program designed to create networks of support services for kids in underserved communities. The approach is modeled after the one taken by the Harlem Children’s Zone, a 42-year-old nonprofit that offers families access to free health and educational resources throughout a child’s life.

Charlottesville’s Children, Youth & Family Services was tapped to administer a more than $470,000 planning grant last December, and started exploring how a similar “cradle-to-college-and-career” approach could help kids in Westhaven and the historically black neighborhoods that surround it.

There are a lot of players contributing to the project. Besides CYFS, nearly a dozen nonprofits and government agencies are on board, and the initiative’s steering committee is co-chaired by Vice Mayor Kristin Szakos and includes representatives from the city school district, the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority, the health department and the Dialogue on Race.

At the helm is Davenport, now focused on rallying the stakeholders and answering the question at hand: What will break the cycle of poverty in Charlottsville? Educational programs for parents, all-day preschool, structured after-school programs, health clinics—it’s all on the table.

Davenport has chops, but maybe more importantly, he has history here.

“My earliest memories are of Westhaven,” he said, flicking a faded Polaroid across his desk in an office at CYFS’s High Street headquarters. In it, his father holds a toddler version of him outside one of the development’s two-story brick buildings. His grandmother’s apartment was his family’s home in the early 1980s, up to around the time Davenport started kindergarten.

“824H,” he said. “I go see it all the time now.” His parents moved out to the county and then back into the city over the next couple of years before divorcing, Davenport said. But life still revolved around Westhaven.

“That was always the hub,” he said. “That was home for me, the community I grew up in.” With aunts and uncles all over the neighborhood, there was always somebody keeping a watchful eye on him. It was a safe childhood, he said, and an upbringing where everyone had high expectations of him.

His history is his passport in a neighborhood where residents are wary of yet another newcomer pushing social reform. Talking about his past flips a switch for a lot of people.
“First, they’re off,” he said. “You’re just another person—what are you selling this time? But when I tell them my story, it changes the current. They light up. They listen.”

But for now, Davenport wants them to do the talking. The grant awarded a few months ago funds a year-long planning period, during which City of Promise is gathering data —from truancy and teen pregnancy rates to the percentage of parents who read to their kids—and gauging public opinion. They’ll use what they find to craft a plan for a social support network for kids and families in 10th and Page, and then they’ll try for a Promise Neighborhoods implementation grant. Last year, the DOE awarded only five nationwide, for up to $6 million.
For Davenport, phase one translates to a lot of mornings at the Westhaven school bus stop talking to parents, and many meetings with the initiative’s long list of partners.

“People already have passionate concerns about their community,” Davenport said. “And you need to listen to those, authentically listen, and allow them to be heard.”

Parts of his personal history could be a template for success.

Learning started early for him, he said. His parents sent him to preschool at Westminster Presbyterian Church on Rugby Road, and he was reading by the time he started public school. “From the time I was born, they strategically planned my life curriculum,” Davenport said. His youth was spent in city schools, and he graduated from Charlottesville High School in 1997.

Davenport studied communications at Old Dominion University, where he met his future wife, Cortney, and landed an internship with an internal communications publication for the New York Times in Norfolk. After graduation in 2001, he worked for Charlottesville’s CFA Institute designing web-based informational programs.

He liked his job, and he was good at it. But it didn’t move him. “I knew I needed to work more with people and less with things,” he said.

Davenport describes himself as a man of faith. He’d attended Mount Zion Baptist Church since childhood, and was teaching Sunday school there and working with local youth. At one point he realized he cared far more deeply about his off-hours efforts. “There was a shift where I knew I needed to make this my life’s work,” he said.

He entered the master’s degree program at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology at Richmond’s Virginia Union University, with an aim to end up in education. A heavy course load and a conviction that he’d switched to the right track led him to quit his job at CFA in 2007.

“It was risky,” he said. “I had to kind of step out on faith.”

But things fell into place. Within weeks, he got a job with Region Ten, a local social services agency, offering counseling services to kids struggling in school. A little over two years later, degree in hand, he was working as a preschool teacher for the Knowledge Is Power Program, an acclaimed charter school network in Washington, D.C.

He learned the nuts and bolts of community engagement on the job. Mandatory home visits with his school’s students—most of them from underserved areas of the city’s Southeast quadrant—helped him understand the scope of the kids’ needs.

When a friend called him last summer and told him City of Promise was looking for a director, he didn’t immediately jump at the idea.

“I wasn’t looking for a job,” he said. “I thought, ‘I’m happy here. My family’s happy here. Things are great.’”

Still, the idea of returning to the neighborhood as an agent of change appealed. Davenport applied, and when the city asked him to join the project, he said yes. And he bought in. He, his wife and their three children—ages 9, 5 and 3—are settling into a home on Page Street, just blocks from where he spent his early years.

Not every kid in the neighborhood is going to go to college. Not everybody who succeeds will do it the way he did it. This he knows. But he’s working to give as many kids as possible a fair start. Some days it’s frustrating, because for now, everything exists as an outline of an idea. But he knows the dream has to come before the reality.
“It’s work,” he said. “But it’s good work.”

C-VILLE Weekly has a new news team. Graelyn Brashear (right) recently joined the staff as news editor, alongside staff writer Laura Ingles. (Photo by John Robinson)

I left Albemarle County nearly 11 years ago in a station wagon crammed with bags, a dog, and my teenage self. My family moved me to New Jersey from Crozet in my junior year, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t happy to have called the Garden State home for the past decade. I got a top-notch education at Rutgers University, explored the parts of the state you can’t see from the Jersey Turnpike, and met enough wonderful people to fill a lifetime—including my husband.

I also got my start in a career I’ve come to love deeply. I cut my teeth at one of New Jersey’s biggest daily papers, the Asbury Park Press, as it was shrinking, and went on to run one of Patch.com’s many local news websites as the company launched its new media offensive. I developed a passion for community journalism and the way my job offered a backstage pass to exlore the places I lived and meet the people who made the news.
Being a reporter and an editor helped me love my adopted state even more, but I never stopped longing to come back to central Virginia.

This city and the mountains to the west have always been home. Throughout my long absence, I followed local happenings from afar, kept up with dear friends, and made the drive down I-95 when I could. I saw growth and change on my periodic visits, but mostly, things looked wonderfully the same. I watched and I waited for my chance to come back. And here I am.

I’m fortunate to be joining C-VILLE as news editor alongside staff writer Laura Ingles, whose name readers will recognize from recent stories she’s written as a freelancer. A North Carolina native and a Virginia Tech graduate, Laura, too, has come to love Charlottesville. She juggled half a dozen part-time jobs to get by while working toward a full-time writing gig, and she’s earned her spot on the editorial staff.

We’re thrilled to be your newly minted news team. Each week, we’ll aim to bring you stories you need to read—and won’t find anywhere else—about the issues, events, and people shaping life in Charlottesville.

Keeping up a conversation with you is a big part of this job. If you’ve got a news tip for us, or want to talk about a story, drop us a line at editor@c-ville.com or writer@c-ville.com.

See you around town!

George Huguely (pictured) got his day in court, but a group of media companies said the public still doesn’t have the full story because nobody but the jury saw key evidence. (Photo by Nick Strocchia)

George Huguely was back in court March 16, and the headline that came out of the motion hearing that brought him there ran in publications around the country: Attorneys for convicted murderer to seek retrial.

But Huguely’s fate wasn’t the focus of the proceedings. At issue was the evidence in his 13-day trial, which ended February 22 with a guilty verdict and a recommendation of 26 years in prison for the murder of ex-girlfriend Yeardley Love. Despite the fact that the First Amendment protects the public’s right to open criminal proceedings and common law dictates trial documents be public, too, the evidence in the Huguely case has remained sealed.

Several media companies, including the Washington Post and Gannett, the parent company of USA Today, are still pushing for access to that evidence. Charlottesville attorney H. Robert Yates III, who is representing the companies, said the fight actually started weeks ago, on the day the prosecution showed the video of Huguely’s interrogation by police conducted the morning after Love was found dead in her apartment.

Everyone in the courtroom heard the exchange between the police and Huguely: the questions about what happened in Love’s bedroom, the nature of the cuts and bruises on his hands and arms, and his apparent shock upon learning Love was dead.

There was just one problem: Nobody but the jury could see the TV. Ditto the graphic showing the layout of the apartment, the incriminating e-mails between Huguely and Love, the text messages.

Trial observers—press included—have a well-established right to see what the jury sees, Yates said. Plenty of U.S. and Virginia case law says so.

“It’s a check on the judiciary, and it makes sure that there aren’t secret decisions,” said Yates. “People need to be able to determine whether the jury got it right or wrong. To do that, you need to be able to see the evidence. If you can’t see or interpret the evidence, what’s the point?”

It wasn’t supposed to fall out this way, said Yates. The prosecution and defense had approved a media plan that directed trial documents be posted to the Web the day after they were offered in court. But Yates said the plan changed, quietly and without input from the media, via a hearing before testimony began. When it became clear the court had effectively pulled the curtain, Yates filed a motion to review the original media plan. But Circuit Court Judge Edward L. Hogshire said he couldn’t interrupt court proceedings to address the issue.
Understandable, said Yates, in a high-profile murder trial in a small city. But not really acceptable.

Hearing police describe a diagram of Love’s apartment “doesn’t mean anything unless you can see the diagram,” he said. And how can observers have a true understanding of the merits of the case without seeing something as key as Huguely’s reaction to police questioning?

“Each day that this goes on, it’s a separate First Amendment violation,” said Yates.

He took his clients’ complaint to the Court of Appeals in Richmond to ask for a writ of mandamus, an order commanding an official to follow established law—in this case, letting the public and the press have the same view as the jury. The effort failed, Yates said, because the Virginia Supreme Court recently decided courts shouldn’t go the mandamus route when issues of access arise during an ongoing trial.

Instead, the appeals court said complaining parties should wait until the trial’s end and request the documents again. So wait they did. And they’re still waiting.

Opposition to the release of the evidence exhibits and documents created a rare moment of unity between the prosecution and the defense in the case. According to reports out of the March 16 hearing, Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman told the judge he thought the evidence should stay sealed for now. In agreeing, Huguely lawyer Rhonda Quagliana dropped the bombshell: Making the evidence public could hurt Huguely’s chances of finding a fair jury for a retrial.

Quagliana also said releasing the documents now could result in “irresponsible” online reporting of the details within.

That argument doesn’t hold water, Yates said.

“There have been good journalists and bad journalists since the advent of writing,” he said, and a media circus isn’t a good enough reason to shut down access.

William & Mary law professor and constitutional scholar Timothy Zick said Yates has a pretty solid argument.

“The purpose for having the right to access is so the public can be fully informed,” Zick said. “If you weren’t able to see the proceedings, you could argue it wasn’t open.” The issue gets sticky, he said, when you take into account that any access going forward will likely have to mirror the kind of viewing experience the public should have had at the trial. How do you mimic real-time exposure to the evidence? A TV set up in a courtroom basement showing the Huguely interrogation, watchable on request?

Actually, that might be exactly what happens, Yates said. Hogshire asked him to come up with a plan to make the evidence public. Yates has until this Friday to complete it. His clients don’t have any interest in examining bags of DNA, he said, but offering access to a computer where reporters could view the e-mails and texts and watch the interrogation could solve the problem.

Even then, the legal wrangling may not be over, he said. He and the companies he represents are still considering filing an appeal to the Virginia Supreme Court on the writ of mandamus issue. They think the tool should be available as a remedy for First Amendment challenges during criminal trials.

“It’s not just that we disagreed with the decision, it’s that the process is also flawed,” Yates said. Since it’s unlikely the state Supreme Court justices would change their minds, he said, it’s conceivable this leftover argument from Charlottesville’s most notorious trial in decades could end up before the United States Supreme Court.

Otherwise, he said, the cycle of judges denying access unreasonably only to have their decisions overturned later when the damage is done could continue indefinitely, “and this could go on forever,” he said.

 The 2012 state legislative session was David Toscano’s first as top Democrat in the House of Delegates, and though Republicans came out of the high-profile session claiming victory for Governor Bob McDonnell’s agenda, Toscano said Democrats saw some triumphs of their own as he helped push for a more unified party.

David Toscano (pictured) just wrapped up his first legislative session as the Minority Leader in Virginia’s House of Delegates. (Photo by Kelly Kollar)

“The Virginia General Assembly is one big adrenaline rush,” he said. “It feels like your whole life is consumed for those two months. You get up early and stay up late, and it’s a constant balancing of various pressures and trying to meet various deadlines.”

The heat’s only increased since he became House Minority Leader ahead of his seventh year in the House. Toscano’s duties now go beyond representing Charlottesville as the 57th district’s delegate. He’s also the voice of the Democratic party in an elected body where red outnumbers blue nearly two to one.

“My primary role is to represent this district,” he said. “But I’ve always seen my role as going a little beyond that. I’ve always thought it was important to think about the region and to go beyond to think about the Commonwealth.”

Sometimes that means taking up the banner for causes that don’t matter much to his Charlottesville supporters, but that those from Democrat-rich northern Virginia count as key issues, including securing funding for new road construction in traffic-choked northern counties and ensuring cost-to-compete dollars—intended to flesh out teacher salaries in high-cost-of-living areas—flow to those school districts.

That’s part and parcel to building party unity, he said, something he took seriously this session.

“There are always going to be fissures to some extent, but I think we’re more unified now than we’ve been any time since I’ve been there,” said Toscano. He’s arranged more regular meetings within the House and with Democratic counterparts in the Senate, and said that as a result, “we tend to vote together more often.”

But Toscano said his duties as top House Democrat haven’t been at odds with what his constituents expect of him. “They’ve always dovetailed,” he said. He’s continued to push for upping funding for education, a key issue among district Democrats. And when it came to the high-profile pro-life bills put forth this session, local supporters “went absolutely ballistic,” he said, “and that’s very consistent with what my role was as the Democratic leader.”

Toscano said he believes those measures affecting women’s rights—an ultrasound bill that sparked national backlash when it became clear the language would require some women to get a transvaginal procedure, and the “personhood” bill, which was carried over to next session to await a vote in the Senate—are the unfortunate legacy of this session. That impression won’t help Republicans, Toscano said.

“My take is the whole session was about legislative overreach in the social arena,” he said. “If you think about it, what is this session going to be known for? It’s going to be known for ultrasound.”

And, perhaps, Republican backpedaling. In the face of outcry and protests in Richmond, McDonnell ultimately supported stripping the bill of language that would have required what some labeled as state-sanctioned rape. Toscano said what was left wasn’t a good bill, either, and he said Republicans are set to keep pushing legislation that restricts women’s access to abortion and contraception into the spotlight.

“I think they do it at their peril,” he said. “The legislature has the lowest favorability rating of any time in recent memory. McDonell’s favorable ratings have dropped, while his unfavorables have risen. I think it’s pretty fair to say that that’s a reflection of peoples’ reactions to socially divisive legislation being pushed through.”

But with the close of the session earlier this month, Republicans were quick to point out victories. In a press release, McDonnell said 88 percent of his legislative agenda passed in the General Assembly, highlighting measures he said are creating jobs and shoring up the Virginia economy.

“The focus of this session has been getting Virginians back to work, putting our economy back on track and enacting significant reforms,” McDonnell said in the release, pointing to measures that gave businesses more acccess to captial and changes to the state’s retirement system he said will correct long-term unfunded liabilities.

Toscano doesn’t share the GOP’s perspective.

“Every bill the Governor wanted this session doesn’t take effect until July 1,” he said. “Job creation is a function of the national economy turning around. It has very little to do with what the Republicans are pushing through the general assembly.”

And the legislature managed to stymie some of McDonnell’s other efforts, Toscano said. “The budget he proposed had dramatic cuts in the safety net and shortchanged education,” he said. “And it doesn’t look like he’s going to win on that front. He proposed a transportation package, and all that’s left of it is naming rights for bridges. That’s not much of a success.”
Locally, he said, the city dodged a bullet when a budget amendment proposed by Albemarle Republican Delegate Rob Bell that would have slashed funding by $2.6 million failed to pass. “That was huge for Charlottesville schools,” Toscano said.

But with an amended budget still up for negotiation between the House and Senate as of this story’s deadline, the session’s work isn’t over yet. Toscano said he believes lawmakers will come together and ultimately pass a spending plan that restores some of the social safety net and education spending that McDonnell’s bill cut. Because besides trying to rally Democrats, he said, he’s also worked to reach across the aisle on key issues.

“I try to be inclsive,” he said. “That’s just my style, and so I tend to reach out to people to see what’s on their mind and build consensus.”