Author: mark-meier

Only U.S. citizens can vote for the next American president. However, Charlottesville’s foreign guests and legal resident aliens have done what they could to influence the outcome before sitting on the sidelines on November 4.

Tanya Omeltchenko and her husband received green cards after six years in the United States. She asks, “Why is it that living, working, paying taxes, and being part of the community, we are left out for five years between getting a green card and applying for citizenship, unable to impact the political process which will touch our lives no less than others?” Omeltchenko’s frustrated by not having the vote, a privilege she considers the last and “highest” of citizenship. However, she followed the debates, got an Obama bumper sticker, and tried “to dissuade our Russian friends who are Republicans” from backing McCain.

In contrast, Barin Kayaoglu, a Turkish graduate student at UVA, doesn’t “mind not voting at all.” He does mind that Palin could become president should McCain be elected and not finish his term. Palin’s experience in Alaska, Kayaoglu emphasizes, “does not qualify her to become the most powerful person in the world.” Turkey especially has complex relations to the Middle East, Europe and America. Hence, Kayaoglu volunteered to help the Obama campaign with voter registration before October 6.

Another foreigner, Victoria Barr, came to Charlottesville solely to campaign for Obama. The 244-page U.S. election law forbids “a foreign national, directly or indirectly, to make a contribution or donation of money or other thing of value” to a political candidate, party, or action committee. However, the law explicitly allows donations of “volunteer services.” Barr, from Oxford, England, finished a degree in September; her new job starts in January. “I thought, When else would I have a month free to work on a campaign in the United States?” She considered other battleground states like Ohio and Colorado but decided travel would be much easier on the East Coast. She’s been staying with a local family since October 16 and will return to England a week after the election. For the most part, Barr’s been organizing in the background. “Having someone with a British accent go door-to-door might,” she concedes, “reinforce the stereotype of Obama and world socialism.”

Where are the foreigners for McCain? When I asked that question, the McCain campaign put me through to their regional office in Fairfax. The woman said, “We don’t have a count, but we do have exchange students. In Crystal City, we have a British brother and sister and another student.” If McCain has foreign help in Charlottesville, it’s receded further into the background.

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

Once a novelty and now a rather pedestrian online encyclopedia, Wikipedia triggered its news avalanche when someone rewrote the entry about Sarah Palin shortly before she joined McCain’s presidential bid. The Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors (CAAR), however, doesn’t anticipate that much controversy when it creates Wikipedia entries for the area’s neighborhoods.

CAAR President Judy Savage says the association hopes to “demonstrate the power of Web 2.0” and to give real estate consumers more—and ideally more objective—information to better evaluate “the biggest purchase in their life.” She finds current resources like blogs and sales sites do not focus on the neighborhood level or have motives other than neutrally informing the consumer. Thus, CAAR sees a need for “factual, historical references” that Wikipedia and its readers could fill.

Savage emphasizes the project is still taking shape, but the basic concept is that CAAR would begin a Wikipedia entry with some information about a neighborhood and expect “homeowner associations, people who live or used to live in the neighborhood, realtors, and other locals to contribute.” CAAR would pilot the idea initially with about 10 neighborhoods. “If you were planning on buying a home in a neighborhood, you would probably appreciate reading about it.”

Meanwhile, Savage affirms, “CAAR has no plans to exert any editorial control of these sites.” CAAR starts them; after that, internet users take over. “The beauty of wikis and Web 2.0,” Savage explains, “is that it is self-policing. That is scary, but if you look at the success of Wikipedia, you will understand incorrect information is not allowed to stay around very long. This is not a blog and is not the proper environment for negative posts, spam, or opinions.”

Jim Duncan, “speaking purely as a realtor and blogger,” lauds CAAR for “stepping into Web 2.0.” Yet despite considering himself “really quite indifferent to the whole matter,” he can imagine two problems. First, placing editorial power in the hands of readers, sometimes called crowdsourcing, does not entirely eliminate the possibility that “realtors could go on Wikipedia solely as a venue to advertise themselves.” If nobody revises a glowing self-report, it remains for others to find.

Second, and probably the larger obstacle, is the benefit of creating Wikipedia entries at all. “I don’t see the value in it,” Duncan says. “Plenty of good resources are already out there. I think that if neighborhoods want to do their own wikis, they’re more than welcome to do them themselves.” Without anyone specifically dedicated to keeping CAAR’s entries rolling, those entries may languish unused.

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Earlier this year, the state approved a new $1.8 billion, 585-megawatt coal-fired power plant in southwestern Wise County, and Dominion Power began construction this summer—yet a coalition of environmentalist groups continues to fight it. Wise Energy for Virginia hopes both to halt the current plant and prevent future ones from being approved. Consequently, the coalition launched the Wise Energy Tour, which stopped in Charlottesville Monday, October 6.

The point of the tour? Co-director Kayti Wingfield of the Sierra Club wants the tour to transform the fight against the Wise County plant into “the largest grassroots effort Virginia’s ever seen to work on clean energy.” She told the 20 participants in the Tandem School auditorium, “Talking to our legislators is the most direct and most effective way to make change.” She called the coalition’s “Clean Energy Future Pledge” for lawmakers a “gold standard. Whether they sign the pledge or not is not nearly important as you educating them on the issues and building a relationship.”

Wise Energy for Virginia considers coal plants particularly dirty because they emit relatively large amounts of pollution and may encourage mountaintop removal, which blasts away mountaintops to get at coal. The coalition also cites a study by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy that suggests improving Virginia’s energy efficiency would save money and create more long-term jobs than building another power plant. Finally, the group believes that the $1.8 billion would be better spent on renewable sources like wind, especially since both presidential candidates support reducing carbon dioxide emissions and Dominion rate payers will pay first for the plant and again for its emissions.

Dominion counters that the plant will be one of the cleanest coal-burners in the country and that Virginia cannot meet its electricity needs from conservation alone, as it already imports more electricity than any state except California.

The tour’s attendees clearly disagree with Dominion. They role-played meetings with delegates and explained their interest in the fight. One was a forester who wanted to protect the region’s natural beauty and ecosystems. A cancer victim worried that air and water pollution from mining and burning coal would expose more people to cancer. Many shared the sentiment that building a coal plant now was “moving backwards instead of forwards” in the face of global warming.

“I grew up in Southwest Virginia,” says Jennifer Johnson, one attendee. “I’ve seen the coal dust and the coal trucks go past every few minutes. These groups have reached out to us, and we’re getting mobilized.”

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The financial markets are reeling, some universities have found their funds frozen, and more professionals are retreating into MBA programs even as fewer emerge from them with their dream jobs. How are UVA’s finance-minded undergrads doing? Not panicked—yet.

Tom Fitch, assistant dean for the McIntire School of Commerce’s career services, says that with seven months till graduation, “over 10 percent of our current fourth year students are reporting that they have received full-time offers from their summer internships. Of those, approximately 8 percent have accepted already. As of today, I’ve heard of no rescinded offers.” However, internships this past summer appeared down versus last year, when nearly two-thirds of commerce undergrads interned before their fourth year, and almost half of those interns eventually accepted jobs with their host company.

Prospects look scarier for this year’s graduates when you consider what else the class of 2008 did. Almost one-third went to New York City, and almost 40 percent of the class toiled in investment banking for an average compensation worth $85,000. Chances are those numbers won’t be repeated without a U-turn on Wall Street. Moreover, two companies that have imploded, Lehman Brothers and Wachovia, were tied for fifth place among companies offering the most jobs to UVA last year. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae also stood high on the list.

Fitch suggests that UVA’s McIntire School does buffer the potential blow. It recently held a “very successful career fair” and, before the drop in the financial markets, developed a program called Careers in Finance 101. That program now looks prescient, since, as Fitch explains, “it’s meant to provide information on jobs in finance beyond the typical investment banking role. We’ve had three sessions so far with three more to go.”

Brooke Bandy, president of the undergraduate Commerce Council, believes that the McIntire School’s prestige and efforts insulate students somewhat from the market carnage. She hasn’t noticed a change in recruitment by major companies. Indeed, on a recent Friday, Starbucks was full of young recruiters from Deloitte talking to students eager to schmooze for their own travel mug and possible employment offers.

Bandy herself plans to go into account management at an advertising agency after she graduates.

“While the current financial crisis is worrisome, it hasn’t affected my career plans,” says Bandy. “Many companies enhance their marketing and advertising efforts during economic downturns.” Her peers in the finance-heavy Sales and Trading student organization declined to comment for this article.

Bandy, meanwhile, can empathize with poor sales. When “monitoring my portfolio,” she says, “it has the majority of my savings for after college and watching the value drop has been stressful.”

C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

With a month to go before the election, you’ve probably pulled into the work parking lot with that Obama O on the side of your car or watched the Katie Couric-Sarah Palin interview on YouTube in your cubicle. But you might want to be careful if your boss’ politics run the other way: Virginia law doesn’t protect your job from political beliefs.

C-VILLE got a call from a disgruntled employee we’ll call Bob who claimed he had been fired from his part-time job by his boss, whom we’ll call Alan. In Bob’s version of the story, a work conversation degraded into “[Alan’s] ranting about Palin essentially being a college drop-out,” Bob says, so he “suggested maybe we shouldn’t talk politics.

“He kept going, so I say I’m voting for her—and he fired me on the spot. He said if I was going to vote for her, then it showed I was too ignorant to work for him. He made no bones that it was political. It was the most outrageous thing that ever happened to me in my life.”

A conversation with Alan cast plenty of doubt on Bob’s outline of the facts, but C-VILLE was piqued by the central question: Can you get a pink slip for your political affiliations? Might a Bob-like figure sue for being fired because he wanted to vote for Palin? No way, explains local civil rights attorney Debbie Wyatt.

“He has zero rights,” says Wyatt. “ZE-RO.” Bob concedes he didn’t have a written contract. Employment in Virginia is at will and typically eschews written contracts, especially ones that stipulate termination only for good cause. Therefore, as boss, Wyatt says, “you have the absolute right to do whatever you want. You could have only people who think the world is flat. Even if this guy is supporting Obama or has red hair, you could fire him for that.” On the other hand, if the employee felt discriminated against on the basis of age, gender, or race, he could try a civil rights lawsuit. “But,” Wyatt cautions, “good luck in the federal courts.”

Wyatt’s “seen a lot of sad cases from the employee’s point of view, but the other side of the coin is the employer.” Without Virginia’s rules, “any fired employee could go after him, and you don’t want him to spend his entire life in court.”

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The director of a pro-growth business organization is seldom invited to guest lecture the no-growth grassroots, but Michael Harvey of the Thomas Jefferson Partnership for Economic Development (TJPED) did just that September 18 at a meeting of Advocates for a Sustainable Albemarle Population (ASAP).

ASAP vainly opposed Albemarle County’s decision to join TJPED, which is funded by 80 banks, utilities, realtors, and other businesses, including UVA and community colleges, plus eight county governments. Nonetheless, when Harvey took over TJPED, he called Jack Marshall, president of ASAP.

“I had never encountered a group like ASAP before,” explains Harvey, who had managed an economic development budget in Knoxville 10 times his current one. “I thought it was important to immerse myself in the community to try to better understand what I was up against and how to move forward.”

Thus, an amiable but slightly nervous-seeming Harvey told audience members that “growth for the sake of growth is counterproductive to our goals. We need to focus on quality over quantity”—high-wage, low-footprint businesses in the region that stretches from Culpeper to Nelson to Louisa counties.

Since incoming businesses are only about 20 percent of the region’s annual growth, TJPED supports existing local businesses, entrepreneurs and workers. Harvey pointed out that “18,000 people leave the region every day to work somewhere else,” while local employers want more people than they can find and pockets of poverty persist. How can we keep those commuters closer to home and connect the underemployed with employers? “Is it transportation?” Harvey asked. “Skills? To me, that’s economic development—resolve local inefficiencies, take that local guy and get him into a higher-paid position with a chance to improve.” Thus, he hoped that TJPED and ASAP “might not see eye-to-eye on some things, but we might see eye-to-shoulder.”

Dave Shreve, leading the discussion for ASAP, was “pleasantly surprised” by TJPED’s emphasis on workforce training. Nonetheless, some eyes still only saw shoulders. What if local workers didn’t want or couldn’t do those jobs? “I would rather have them recruit someone to the region,” answered Harvey, “than employ someone in Bath, England, or India.” He chuckled at predictions that such moves could make the county’s population leap exponentially, noting that baby boomers are dying off.

Marshall observed, “An essential correlate of what ASAP’s organizing for, a sustainable population size, is an economic system that doesn’t demand endless growth and taking of the environment.” Harvey said he “can’t apologize” that economic growth, including attracting new businesses, is one of TJPED’s goals. He also could not say how much relocated workers cost in new infrastructure or environmental degradation versus the wages they spend.

Asked ASAP board member Steve Levine, wouldn’t sending workers to Wal-Mart’s distribution center undermine mom-and-pops that enhanced local life?

“I’m not playing God,” Harvey said, by supporting one business model over another. “I’m just trying to facilitate an opportunity.”

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