Author: Matt Deegan

On January 4, about 20 local parents sat in Greenbrier Elementary and peppered Charlottesville Superintendent Rosa Atkins with questions about the school division’s middle school revamp. With the consolidation of Walker Upper Elementary and Buford Middle formally approved, city officials must now decide where to house a new sixth- through eighth-grade school, and how to repurpose the building that is not chosen. Early plans call for a preschool center and an adult learning center to eventually fill the vacant space.

Local parent Grant Brownrigg perused a packet of costs and dates and posed a question to Atkins that seemed to encapsulate the gathered parents’ sentiments: “One problem for me is understanding what’s important and what’s not from all this data. Does one location have a clear advantage over the other?”

When it comes to size, Walker and Buford are “almost the exact same school,” according to Jim Henderson, assistant superintendent for administration services. The schools’ gyms, auditoriums and athletic fields can hold about the same number of students. The debate seems to boil down to three distinguishing factors: convenience, cost and access.

If school officials opt to renovate Buford to accommodate another grade level, the estimated price tag would total $20.9 million, according to VMDO Architects. A Walker revamp would cost about $2.7 million less.

As for access, the two-minute walk from Buford to the newly refurbished Smith Aquatics and Fitness Center and the Boys & Girls Club makes the Cherry Avenue school a “very attractive” location, said Atkins. The expanded club—which includes the $10 million, 24,000-square-foot LeRoi Moore Teen Center—offers study lounges, technology stations and a fine arts studio. About 350 of the club’s 500 members are students at Buford or Walker, according to James Pierce, Executive Director of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Central Virginia.

“Those are the ages that seek out after-school activities the most,” Pierce said. During the last two months, Buford teachers have used the club’s space for CPR and physical education classes during the school day.

“We thought the amount of community resources put into this site gave the edge to the Buford location,” Pierce said. “We do provide daytime opportunities to expand its operating capacity.”

Atkins was mindful of families who live near Walker and would relish the convenience of a middle school in their neighborhood. She insisted that a location has not yet been chosen and that school officials will pay careful attention to parental feedback and survey results. (Reconfiguration surveys can be found at www.ccs.k12.va.us)

“If it’s not something the community wants, it will not create the healthiest learning environment for our students,” she said. “I don’t want our community split.”

Atkins and her staff will host a Town Hall Teleforum on January 24. The School Board will start discussing the move at its February 3 meeting.

The average American teenager sends or receives six text messages for every hour they’re awake.  Extrapolated, that’s 3,339 texts per month, according to a recent study by Nielsen Co.

“That statistic does not surprise me,” says Amy Hoppenjans, a world history teacher at Charlottesville High School. “My co-teacher and I are constantly on the lookout for cell phones, and, in some cases, have had to refer students to the office for their refusal to comply to put their cell phone out of sight.  For some students, it’s like an addiction.”

In a teenage culture where texting is sometimes more common than talking, Del. Rob Bell, R-Albemarle, wants to ensure there are clear ways to police the perverse. Bell has authored a bill that would update Virginia law so that texted threats or lewd photos are accounted for.

If Bell’s bill is enacted, Virginia law would treat obscene or threatening text messages the same as traditional phone calls, closing what he says is an antiquated loophole.

“We want to make sure the law addresses these new technologies,” Bell told C-VILLE.

The early feedback surrounding the bill appears positive.  

Dewey Cornell, Director of the Virginia Youth Violence Project at UVA’s Curry School of Education, lauded Bell as “a champion of efforts to reduce bullying and threats of violence in schools.” 

Cornell also emphasized the nuances of patrolling inappropriate texts and the need for schools to strike a balance between their own prevention efforts and law enforcement involvement.

“There must be a way to distinguish the small number of very serious cases that may rise to the level of a criminal offense from the majority of cases that can be addressed through prevention, counseling and ordinary school disciplinary measures,” he told C-VILLE.

In another act of support, the Virginia Joint Commission on Technology and Science recently endorsed Bell’s proposal, meaning that the General Assembly will now consider it during the body’s next legislative session that starts in January.

Though optimistic about the bill’s success, Bell said 10 years spent sitting in his delegate seat have taught him there is no sure-fire proposal.

“We’ll see what the House and Senate think,” he says.

They met in living rooms to craft arguments, stood on the curb of Route 250 to plot traffic flow and conferred with hydrology experts. And on October 13, roughly 40 concerned Crozetians endured a six-hour Board of Supervisors meeting to voice their concerns.

In the end, residents largely got what they wanted: a scaled down plan for a gas station on Route 250 West that will not significantly disrupt the area’s rural character or deplete the local well water supply. The initial plan for the Re-Store ’N Station would have created the second largest gas station in Albemarle County.

“It was community activism at its best,” said Bruce Kirtley, a Crozet resident whose white house sits across the street from the proposed station’s four-acre site. Supervisors agreed to shrink the two-story station from 5,750 square feet to about 3,000. Overnight parking was also banned to prevent the station from becoming a hub for tractor trailers seeking respite from I-64.

“We want to have moderate and manageable growth in the area,” Supervisor Ken Boyd told C-VILLE, “and I think [Crozetians] had a very good point in leading us to revise this.” The compromise, said Boyd, maintains “a viable business opportunity”—15 to 18 jobs that the station owners say their business will create, as well as “opportunities for county tax revenues to help us offset some of the strain on personal property taxes.”

Recent development in Crozet—and the accompanying traffic and demand for stores and restaurants—has compelled long-time residents to scrutinize new projects. With the Re-Store ’N Station, residents’ major concerns surrounded traffic and water supply. The sizeable station would attract I-64 drivers to a location less than a mile from Western Albemarle High School, Henley Middle and Brownsville Elementary, which residents feared might add to the congested morning drop-off and afternoon pick-up. Additionally, if the station surpassed its allotted water usage, neighbors’ wells could dry up.

Neither the county nor the station’s owners provided a detailed traffic study. And while the owners did supply a groundwater study by a certified geologist, the county did not conduct an independent analysis. Albemarle’s website shows that its “Groundwater Manager” and “Transportation Planner” positions are both vacant—which irked Mary Rice, former member of the Crozet Community Advisory Council.

“A lot of our analysis helped educate the board because the planning staff didn’t do much homework on this,” Rice told C-VILLE. “As we know from the staff report, all they could say was that they didn’t have sufficient data to say whether or not the wells nearby would fail.”

The lack of county data prompted Tom Goeke, owner of a house that sits 1,000′ from the proposed station, to generate his own water usage study. Goeke, CEO of Gordonsville-based Klockner Pentaplast, studied transportation engineering journals, interviewed station owners and consulted with hydrology experts to produce a thorough overview showing that the station would use about 2,600 gallons of water per day.

Goeke’s findings were crucial because water usage was the reason the issue was sent to the Board in the first place. The county’s deputy zoning administrator was uncertain whether the station would stay within its 1,624 gallons per day limit, so he required that the station’s owners acquire a special-use permit asking for more water usage.

Supervisors’ consideration of citizen data and concerns showed Kirtley that government competence exists in Albemarle.

“If you have an issue and you’re realistic in your approach, you apply a little common sense and talk it over one-on-one with the elected officials, generally speaking, they’re probably going to get it as right as they possibly can,” says Kirtley. “And I think that’s what happened here.”

The revised proposal now returns to the desks of the county’s planning staff and its Architectural Review Board, who will work with the Re-Store ’N Station owners to craft a formal request that the Board will vote on during its November 3 meeting.

He took his idea to the people with an eight-city “Exit the Liquor Business” tour. His team unveiled a formal plan, chock-full of financial projections and answers to concerns.

Yet even with all that bustle, Governor Bob McDonnell’s push to privatize liquor sales still faces bipartisan scrutiny—and it’s not because the proposal’s premise is outlandish. Philosophically, it’s hard to argue that selling liquor should be a function of government.

However, when eyed through a financial or social lens, the governor’s plan begins to lose its luster. State lawmakers might find the plan more credible with recent endorsements from Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., the Virginia Fraternal Order of Police and the Virginia Wineries Association. But when the stumping ends and the squawking over conflicting studies is pushed aside, one truth remains: The governor and his policy team must convince lawmakers to abandon one of the state’s most profitable assets for an untested private model.

“People don’t like more uncertainty,” says Delegate David Toscano.

McDonnell’s detailed proposal, released September 8, attempts to eliminate that uncertainty. According to projections from the governor’s policy team, privatizing liquor sales would generate $229 million annually, and it would create $458 million in a one-time windfall that would be devoted to sorely underfunded state transportation projects.  

To generate that $229 million revenue stream, the proposal stipulates fees for wholesalers: a $17.50-per-gallon excise tax and a 1 percent tax on gross receipts. It also contains a 2.5 percent “convenience fee” on restaurants and bars that buy liquor directly from wholesalers instead of retailers. Whether those fees would trickle down to Average Joe Mojito Fan remains to be seen.

To boot, the state would auction 1,000 retail liquor licenses to the highest bidding stores, and the licenses would be divided into three unequal categories based on size and location: 600 to major retailers, such as Kroger and Wal-Mart; 250 to pharmacies and convenience stores; and 150 to mom-and-pop package stores. The state would set minimum bids based on the three categories, and winning bidders would hold licenses in perpetuity.

A weak spot within McDonnell’s privatization pitch has been addressing social implications. Critics have asked: Wouldn’t upping the state liquor store tally from 332 to 1,000 increase alcohol consumption, burden local law enforcement and open a Pandora’s box of social ills, such as increased underage access? 

The Virginia Interfaith Center is circulating a petition urging Virginians not to “trade your values for a few pieces of silver.”  According to the petition, privatization “will give our state a short-term financial high with a big long-term hangover.”

But the son of an iconic Christian leader doesn’t think so.

“Virginia’s private sector, its families, churches and businesses will be better served and protected by eliminating government-sanctioned monopolies,” Falwell Jr. said recently in support of the plan.

The proposal also drew backing from the state’s 8,000-member Fraternal Order of Police, which chose to focus on the projected $458 million that the plan would create for transportation projects, rather than on the potential social ills that would affect policing.

“The problem for the governor is that as more people examine the proposal in greater detail, they are becoming increasingly concerned about it,” said Toscano, who told C-VILLE he would not support privatization if the vote were today. “Originally, the thought was that the problem in getting this passed would be in the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats. But it now appears that a number of conservative members of his own party in the House also have concerns, and it is not clear how many votes he has in the House for the proposal.”

For a lawmaker such as Toscano, however, seeking a factual foundation from which to root a stance on the issue, conflicting studies are adding to the uncertainty. McDonnell & Co. cite a study from the Virginia Institute for Public Policy that shows little difference between rates of teen drinking, binge drinking and alcohol-related deaths among states that manage liquor sales versus states that have a privatized system.  

However, a recently released report from the VCU Institute for Drug and Alcohol Studies found that alcohol consumption does indeed increase with wider availability and marketing, as do rates of alcohol-related accidents and chronic disease.

Despite the lingering question marks, McDonnell and his team seem set on resolving the issue before the ball drops on 2011.

They have dismissed the idea of holding a voter referendum to give Virginians the final say. McDonnell’s 59 percent slice of the gubernatorial vote last year was privatization’s referendum, the governor’s point man on privatization, Eric Finkbeiner, said recently at a forum in Richmond.

The administration aims to call a special session of the General Assembly in November to send privatization to a vote. According to Toscano, the governor “would really like to convene a special session to pass this prior to January so he can move into the next General Assembly session with some momentum.”

According to a level-headed Roanoke Times editorial: “The Commonwealth has gotten along with a publicly controlled monopoly in liquor sales for 75 years. If it takes a year or two to undo it properly, so be it.”

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

 Soon after U.S. Senator Mark Warner took the microphone September 9 in the atrium of the new Bavaro Hall at UVA’s Curry School of Education, it became clear that the intent of the Democratic senator’s visit was not to wax poetic over the status quo.

In a one-hour town hall meeting, Warner emphasized the need to “dramatically rethink” how high schools, community colleges and four-year universities collaborate in order to prepare students for an increasingly competitive working world. Through this collaboration, students could save money, transition more smoothly into a college course load and have better training for a specific technical skill, Warner said.

The senator and former governor directed particularly sharp words at the leaders of four-year universities, challenging them to be more willing to admit and support students who are academically capable but whose SAT scores and Advanced Placement resumés might not reflect that ability.

“Top-tier universities have been pretty complacent,” he said. “You don’t need to [admit] that student who needs remediation, or if you do, you can put a few aside in some little program, tout it and say, ‘Oh, look what we did here.’”

In addressing cost, Warner labeled the country’s higher education financing system “broken” and noted that it is “rapidly pricing higher education out of the reach of lots and lots of our middle class families.”

To save money for families and assure college remains accessible to all who qualify, the senator suggested that four-year colleges partner more closely with high schools to allow 11th and 12th graders to take courses that would fulfill basic bachelor degree requirements.

Current high school options—such as the College Board’s Advanced Placement program and dual-enrollment arrangements with community colleges—are part of the solution, Warner said, but he feels four-year colleges need to become more accommodating and not require students to re-take classes they mastered in high school.

In addition to addressing the affordability of a bachelor’s degree, Warner challenged educators to acknowledge that four years of college might not suit every student.

“Over half of the jobs being created now do not require a four-year degree,” he said.

The senator advocated following an education model similar to those used in Europe, most notably in Germany, in which interested 10th and 11th graders would start planning their coursework for a certain skill or trade. That way, their high school diplomas would also give them certification in a specific industry, whether it be auto mechanics or plumbing.

This system could be thought of as a “K-13” model, Warner said.

“We’d give you up to a free semester in community college to get that industry certification,” he said. “[Certification] would increase earning power by $5,000, and that would be a net value add in terms of additional tax revenue.”

UVA education professor Brian Pusser told Warner that leaders within the education realm are acknowledging that “too many” high school students are not college-ready. Pusser then issued a challenge of his own, asking the senator: “What can you do legislatively?”

Give less funding to those schools that see a drop in retention rates, Warner suggested.

The senator also wants to incentivize four-year universities so they form stronger bonds with community colleges.

“You can’t look down your noses on community college education,” Warner said.

With speculation swirling that White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel may leave the Obama Administration to run for mayor of Chicago in 2011, Warner has been mentioned by some media outlets as a candidate to replace Emanuel.

C-VILLE asked the senator directly whether he has any interest in the job. Without pause, Warner emphatically responded, “No,” while his aides erupted in laughter around him.

With the economy at the top of Obama’s agenda, Warner would bring to the post the business acumen he developed when he was a telecommunications industry executive. However, he is not up for re-election until 2014, and it would seem that Democrats would not want to risk losing a vote to Republicans should Warner vacate his seat to take over for Emanuel.

If you walk through the doors of the ABC store on West Main Street with fantasies of mojitos and margaritas watering your mouth, you’ll find your buzz is soon killed. The store has more in common with the sterile confines of a dentist’s office than a tropical paradise.

Sure, there are random glimmers of personality: hand-held American flags taped to shelves, orange and red streamers dropped from the ceiling and plastic Christmas garlands hugging the walls. But it does little to excite the palate and compel a splurge purchase. It’s a hardware store for spirits, and that certainly doesn’t set the stage for maximizing profits.

The store’s bland ambience is a 76-year-old remnant of Prohibition. In owning liquor sales, Virginia now has 332 ABC stores, seven of which are in the Charlottesville-Albemarle area.

Candidate Bob McDonnell vowed in his gubernatorial campaign to lead the charge to take Virginia out of the liquor-selling business and hand over sales to the private sector. In doing so, he said he could generate a onetime $500 million windfall through private retail licenses and wholesaler fees. He promised to allocate those monies toward underfunded transportation projects.

As governor, McDonnell has remained committed to the privatization plan, in words and deeds. He has organized a Commission on Government Reform & Restructuring, which by September 15 will present to the General Assembly a detailed privatization proposal. Also, behind the scenes, the governor’s policy team has been meeting with police, faith-based groups and alcohol industry reps in an attempt to clarify misconceptions and allay concerns.

McDonnell is also investing his own time and energy in the issue, much more than previous governors who have considered privatization. He has embarked on an eight-city, late-summer town-hall meeting tour to convince state residents that now is the time to privatize. 

The ideological premise behind McDonnell’s case is compelling: Selling liquor is not a core function of government. Even Democratic Senator Creigh Deeds, who ran against McDonnell last fall, acknowledged as much in an interview with C-VILLE.

But upon further probing, it emerges as an issue more complex than any “Reduce Government” bumper sticker. Over the last 10 years, ABC’s oversight of liquor has generated, on average, $220 million in excise taxes and profits that are deposited into the General Fund, a flexible pool of state money that can be used at the discretion of the governor and the General Assembly. If privatization is approved by state lawmakers, then that guaranteed annual stream of revenue would disappear.

“Assure me that you’re not going to rob the General Fund, and I’d consider it,” Deeds says. “But there’s no way this thing produces half-a-billion dollars up front for transportation. That number was pulled from the air last year during the campaign.”

Deeds’ financial reservations are shared by state Democrats and Republicans alike, though McDonnell and his team are confident that the effects of privatization will more than recoup the $220 million in annual intake.

In addition, privatization is facing opposition from the Virginia Assembly of Independent Baptists, a lobbying presence in Richmond concerned about how social ills might fester if liquor sales are put into the hands of the private sector.

How McDonnell and his team take the financial complexities and social concerns, wrap them in a lawmaker-friendly box and tie around it a politically palatable bow will determine whether privatization succeeds and a campaign promise is fulfilled.

However, under a challenging budgetary climate for states, the governor and his team face the tall order of assuring Virginians that taking away a proven revenue source will make The Old Dominion money in the long run.

Not a full exit

The governor’s reform commission is debating four privatization plans: offering liquor licenses to all 3,000 state businesses that already sell beer and wine—the most laissez-faire of the four; selling liquor assets to one private entity, which would sign a lease controlling the operation for a set number of years; having many private companies act as agents of the state, which would get a cut of liquor profits; and auctioning 500 to 1,000 retail licenses to the highest bidders.

The auction plan has emerged as the clear frontrunner, which is curious given that it includes a layer of governmental regulation and intervention—not McDonnell rallying cries. In addition to limiting how many stores sell liquor, the state would set minimum bid prices for three kinds of licenses, depending on the store’s size. That way, a mom-and-pop liquor depot would not be bidding alongside Walmart.

Eric Finkbeiner, a senior policy advisor for McDonnell who is spearheading the privatization effort, told C-VILLE that the auction plan reflects the governor’s commitment to privatize “in a very Virginia conservative way.” He defined that as ensuring both tasteful marketing and a sensitivity to underage access.

“We don’t want to see a jump from 332 to 3,000 [liquor stores],” Finkbeiner said. “We don’t want to have a liquor store on every street corner. We don’t want the gawdy neon signs or the floating blimps of various bourbon and vodka products flying over roadways.”

By capping the number of stores, the state might be leaving money on the table, and it risks ruffling the band of laissez-faire lovers known as The Tea Party, whose anti-big-government sentiment McDonnell appears to be channeling with his privatization push.

However, Carole Thorpe, chairwoman of the Jefferson Area Tea Party, suggests that the cap is a compromise aimed at social conservatives who are concerned about the social cost of additional liquor stores.

Thorpe did not disparage the plan’s free enterprise impurities.

“Few things aren’t regulated to some degree, otherwise you’d have anarchy,” she told C-VILLE.

Speaking generally on privatization, Thorpe added: “It’s refreshing to see an effort that is eliminating an unnecessary function of government to fund a necessary function of government, which would be in this case to fix our infrastructure.”

A Pandora’s box of social ills?

If the number of liquor stores in Virginia doubles or triples, it might stand to reason that Virginians would buy and consume more spirits. Such proliferation could increase alcohol abuse and could also lead to increased time and energy that local police spend on alcohol-related cases.

“The societal cost of alcohol abuse concerns me,” Deeds said.

The Virginia Assembly of Independent Baptists, a group of about 500 Baptist churches, share his concerns and has helped kill liquor privatization legislation in the past.

Jack Knapp, the executive director of the assembly, says that on “95 percent to 99 percent of the issues,” he and McDonnell “agree completely, but this is one area where we disagree.” 

Biblical principles promote personal responsibility, Knapp said, and that tenet aligns with the political and economic notions of smaller government and free enterprise. However, alcohol is a different animal, he said, and the ills it can create should compel government to intervene and practice its duty “to protect us from both internal and external outlaws.”

“If ABC stores are sold,” Knapp said, “then we move away from an agency whose primary concern is control to a free-enterprise system whose primary concern is making a profit, and that’s exactly what they should be concerned with. That’s what private enterprise is all about. But we all know the problems that alcohol causes: drunk driving, child abuse, spousal abuse, loss of work time, diseases that come from consumption. Why would we promote a product like that? Why would we encourage more sales of it?”

To assuage Knapp’s concerns, as well as those who share his beliefs in the General Assembly, McDonnell & Co. say that the health and safety and policing aspects of the state’s Department of Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) would remain at full strength if privatization passes. The administration would also empower localities to institute stricter alcohol-related sanctions, if that’s what a community agrees on.

McDonnell and his team have data to back up their claim that privatizing liquor sales does not increase alcohol consumption, nor meaningfully increase drunk-driving deaths or binge-drinking rates.

“In terms of the likelihood of harmful effects from alcohol, it really has nothing to do with privatization,” Finkbeiner said.

Among the findings McDonnell & Co. cite is a recent study from the Virginia Institute for Public Policy. The think tank found that in the 18 states that still control liquor distribution, an average of 33.8 people per 100,000 died each year from alcohol-related causes for the years 2001 to 2005. Meanwhile, in the other privatized states, that figure was 34.6.

Finkbeiner also claims that in northern Virginia, the state is losing 15 percent to 20 percent of liquor sales to D.C. and Maryland due to convenience. With more liquor outlets opening as a result of privatization, Virginia would win back those customers—and the taxes they would pay – without increasing consumption, he said.

“In our scenario, Virginians are still consuming the same amount of alcohol, but they’re purchasing those spirits in Virginia stores,” Finkbeiner said.

Knapp is among those who aren’t buying the argument.

“Figures don’t lie, but liars figure,” he said. “If you look hard enough, you can find a study to support whatever position you want to take, and I think that’s exactly what has happened here. I believe that reality will show that.”

Finkbeiner contends that even with the social concerns, many of the General Assembly’s social conservatives with whom the administration has spoken are troubled by government bloat. In their minds, the act of reducing government will prevail over their anti-alcohol beliefs when they cast votes on the issue, he said.

“That’s the feedback we’ve gotten so far,” Finkbeiner said.

The artisanal liquor bump?

Social consequences aside, for some small businessmen who currently sell beer and wine, adding high-end, artisanal liquor to their shelves is an attractive, and potentially profit-boosting, idea.

“It’s a gigantic untapped market for Virginia,” said Will Richey, who owns Revolutionary Soup and is a founding member of The Wine Guild of Charlottesville, a buying club.

“Virginia is a tourism state,” Richey said. “We really bank on our wineries and our history. And if you look at the wine shops and breweries that have opened up all over the state and the interest out there for wine and artisan beer, to have such a controlled ABC system I think is ridiculous.”

To boot, Richey’s gut feeling is that the introduction to the Virginia market of more varied high-end liquors would increase alcohol profits without increasing consumption.

“The people who drink for volume are already getting what they want; there’s nothing holding them back,” Richey said. “What most of the wine and beer retailers go for around here is higher quality and smaller quantity, to some extent. It’s more interesting to me to sell half-a-case of a $50 bottle of Burgundy than to sell two cases of Australian Yellowtail. Grocery stores can do that. With privatization, I think we’d see higher sales on higher-dollar alcohol that people more naturally drink in moderation.”

With liquor sales in private hands, Richey noted, distilled spirit marketing could also become more personalized and creative.

“I’m not criticizing ABC employees, but right now there’s no incentive for them to up-sell or give you the history behind a bourbon producer,” he said.

Another question is whether in Charlottesville and Albemarle there’s demand for more than the seven liquor stores currently run by the Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

The answer is “yes,” according to John Woodriff, co-owner of Beer Run.

“I think we could support more liquor stores,” Woodriff said. “If more people were selling liquor, we’d have much more diversity.”

ABC figures show that Charlottesvillians do indeed enjoy their spirits. In 2009, the city’s four ABC stores sold 164,025 gallons of liquor—that’s  4.67 gallons per person, which amounts to $12.1 million in gross sales.

Albemarle’s sales were not nearly as high. The county’s three ABC stores sold 75,286 gallons of liquor, or 1.02 gallons per person, which totaled $5.1 million in gross sales. 

Not all local adult beverage connoisseurs are enthusiastic about the possibility of selling liquor, however.

Robert Harllee, owner of the Market Street Wineshops, objects on philosophical and aesthetic grounds. If privatization passes, liquor will not appear on his shelves. Harllee calls wine “a living thing” and liquor “a dead thing.”

“Every time they make it, it’s exactly the same,” he says. “It’s an industrial process. The only thing living that’s done is putting them in barrels to age them.”

What about ABC employees?

Another tentacle to privatization is the fate of more than 2,000 ABC store employees, about 30 percent of whom work full-time. With privatization, ABC clerks and store managers would face job uncertainty.

The state is not allowing ABC workers to speak freely to reporters about privatization, but Del. Bob Brink, D-Arlington and member of McDonnell’s reform commission, offered his opinion.

“I think we have a moral and legal obligation to make sure any employee who might be displaced is treated fairly,” Brink told C-VILLE.

Compounding the issue is the fact that full-time ABC workers are in the state retirement system, and the average age of an ABC employee in fiscal 2009 was 47. If these employees opt to cash in on retirement benefits, expenses would be added to the state’s ledger.

For his part, McDonnell policy advisor Finkbeiner downplayed the impact that privatization would have on ABC employees.

“We’ve talked to wholesalers and retailers out there on the private side,” he said, “and they’re very interested in hiring current ABC employees, because you would have a built-in pool of folks with experience and expertise who know the industry.”

All about the Benjamins

Local lawmakers Deeds, Del. David Toscano, D-Charlottesville, and Del. Rob Bell, R-Albemarle, have acknowledged that their top privatization reservations revolve around finances. 

“The risk is that we’ll be in a worse situation, from a revenue standpoint, than we are right now,” Toscano said.

Bell noted: “You don’t want to make short-term decisions that have long-term consequences.”

And if one dives deeper into the minutiae, it’s easy to understand their uneasiness.

In looking at the $220 million or so in annual ABC revenue that lawmakers are reluctant to part with, half is generated from ABC store profits, including the 69 percent mark-up that Virginia currently applies to each bottle of liquor. The other half originates from a 20 percent excise tax on liquor, one of the highest in the country. Simply put, the government has created for itself one heck of a cash cow.

To match the ABC intake, a leading idea within McDonnell & Co. is to shift the tax structure post-privatization so that the excise tax is replaced with a per-gallon fee that private wholesalers would pay the state. Proceeds from that fee would offset the loss of the $220 million, they say.

To understand the details of the issue, one needs a finance degree, a law background or a very adept teacher. The McDonnell administration has gathered all three types so that fiscal nuances are accounted for and presented to lawmakers and the public in a convincing, digestible way. Administration helpers include Goldman Sachs and other financial houses, as well as the ABC Privatization Coalition, which is made up of the law firm Eckert Seamans and the public-affairs firm Capital Results.

Brink, the Arlington Democrat who sits on the governor’s reform commission, has seen a similar movie before. He worked on Capitol Hill during Hillary Clinton’s push for health care reform in 1993.

The effort failed largely because the plan was “dropped on Congress without [the administration] having prepared them for it,” Brink said.

One can be sure that McDonnell’s team is well aware of how a communication breakdown can doom legislation, as in HillaryCare’s case.

Even so, Brink, who is more engaged with privatization than the average state lawmaker because of his role on McDonnell’s reform commission, feels the governor “has a lot of work to do before it’s ready for prime time.”

And prime time doesn’t mean the fall TV season, but rather a special legislative session in Richmond that the governor will likely organize in October or November. That session could lead to a decision on privatization.

Mark Brown had never stepped foot inside the Charlottesville Ice Park until roughly six weeks ago, when he approached the 25,000-square-foot building with an eye towards buying it. Now, the park has a new owner, a new name and, to hear Brown tell it, more than a few new ideas for its future.

On Friday, July 16, Brown finally confirmed a rumored interest in the ice park with a $3 million purchase—more than $1 million below asking price. According to Brown, the facility will be called the Main Street Arena, and will continue to offer ice skating from October through March. From April through September, the space will feature a turf field appropriate for soccer, lacrosse, field hockey and more.

Asked about planned renovations for the space, Brown said, “The biggest thing is, I’m buying a flooring system to put over the ice.” He estimates that the system will cost roughly $100,000.

Rumors of a deal for the ice park reached a peak last week. Tony Fischer, coach of the UVA men’s ice hockey club, told C-VILLE that a group of investors planned to purchase the park and transform it into a sports multiplex housing turf sports in the summer and hockey and ice skating in the fall and winter. According to Fischer, the arena would be ready for his team on Wednesday, September 15—a date confirmed in a press release from Brown.

In a news release, Brown extolled the potential uses of the arena. “You can have a concert, a trade show or a convention. You can play soccer, lacrosse, field hockey, kickball, ice hockey or figure skating,” said Brown. “You can have a major fashion show in there, an art show…anything that needs a large climate-controlled space.”

In addition to thanking former park owners Bruce and Roberta Williamson, Brown also thanked his “longtime lending partners who have helped me through the years”—a group of representatives from Cornerstone Bank, Old Dominion Bank and BB&T bank.

Brown represented a group of local investors in the deal, including local surgeon John Ligush and his wife, Donna. Brown declined to name additional investors, but said many have children who use the rink. The Williamsons purchased the park for roughly $3.1 million in 2003 and opted to put it on the market in February, acknowledging that if they operated it for another year, their losses would exceed $1 million.

The park shut its doors June 30 and its ice has been melted. The announced September 15 reopening, according to Fischer, puts the UVA hockey club “right on schedule.”

“We’re glad to see that there is going to be a rink in Charlottesville,” said Fischer. “Not only for the team, but for the whole community.”

Peter Dimmick, who has played in the local hockey league since January 2009, said rumors of Brown’s interest in a park purchase had been part of locker room chatter since May.

“There are not too many people who just play hockey on the side,” said Dimmick, who has played since the age of 5. “You either don’t play or you have an obsession. It gets in your blood and you just have to play.”
Hockey passion runs so deep, according to Dimmick, that fellow players told him they would contemplate moving away from Charlottesville if it had no ice rink. And for Dimmick personally, he chose to attend UVA for graduate school in part because he knew Charlottesville had a rink.

“It was definitely a selling point,” the Pittsburgh native said. Now, it looks as if Dimmick can begin sharpening his skates for the upcoming season.—With additonal reporting by Brendan Fitzgerald

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

This fall, the 78-year-old Jefferson Park Avenue (JPA) Bridge—long overdue for an overhaul—will finally receive more than lip service.

The renovation of the railroad bridge near Wayside Chicken on the south side of town is slated to start as early as October, so long as the project’s bidding schedule proceeds as planned, according to VDOT spokesman Lou Hatter.

VDOT had announced Spring 2010 as the start date for construction, but Norfolk-Southern Railroad asked the department to allow for more clearance for its trains, prompting VDOT to revise its blueprints and push back the start, Hatter said.

It wasn’t the first time the JPA Bridge project has been delayed. The project has been on the city’s radar for years, and despite receiving one of the lowest federal sufficiency ratings in the state, the bridge has been repeatedly pushed down the priority list until this year.

It was last inspected by the state in September 2009 and scored a 2 out of 100 on its sufficiency rating, which factors in structural issues and “the level of service provided to the public,” according to VDOT.
Despite the snail’s pace of the project, Peter Hedlund, president of the Fry’s Spring Neighborhood Association, told C-VILLE that he was satisfied with how both VDOT and city officials have allowed residents a say in the planning process.

“The original plans had been worked out so long ago,” Hedlund said, “that when they went back to it two or three years ago, none of the neighbors who had been involved in the previous plan still lived there, so initially there was this tension over involving the neighborhood. But they have been very accommodating.”
The revamped bridge will be 67′ wide and have sidewalks and bike lanes on both sides. The initial plan featured a bridge width of 78’—similar to the scale of the Amtrak bridge on West Main Street—but Fry’s Spring residents worried that such a size would encourage nonresidents to use their neighborhood as a shortcut to Fifth Street.

“It seemed like it could lead to the possibility of the widening of the entire road,” Hedlund said. VDOT, city officials and residents reached a compromise on width in September 2008.

The bridge’s construction is expected to last 16 months and cost an estimated $10.5 million. That figure is about $2.5 million more than what the state projected two years ago, and Hatter attributed the uptick to “a significant increase in the cost of materials,” among other factors.

“It’s possible that when construction comes to bid, it may not come in so high,” he said.

During those 16 months of bridgework, a temporary passageway will be created for pedestrians and bicyclists, which will allow for access to Jefferson Park Avenue Extended during football Saturdays.

A detour will also redirect vehicles, and the goal of the alternative routes is to keep non-local traffic from I-64 out of the neighborhoods and on the main roads, Hatter said.

According to city spokesman Ric Barrick, detours will be mapped out for nonlocals on I-64 and Route 29. Meanwhile, local traffic will be re-routed within nearby neighborhoods. In fact, Barrick said part of the reason that a traffic light was installed at Jefferson Park Avenue and Shamrock Road was to prepare for the 16 months that the JPA Bridge will be out of service.

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

Ten UVA engineering students are interning this summer at a Rolls-Royce jet-engine factory in Indianapolis. Next summer, the same internship may be much closer to home—if still a distance from Charlottesville.

By early 2011, Rolls-Royce plans to finish constructing a new jet-engine plant on a 1,000-acre site in Prince George County which will eventually become the company’s largest manufacturing center in North America. When fully built out, the site, called Crosspointe, will employ about 500 and cost Rolls-Royce about $500 million. It will attract a broad spectrum of the workforce, ranging from technicians requiring associate degrees to Ph.D.-level researchers. 

UVA engineering professor Barry Johnson helped write the proposal that convinced Rolls-Royce to build the center in Virginia, and says he is excited that his students and colleagues will be linked to “some of the most advanced aerospace technologies in the world.”

In addition to the factories, UVA, Virginia Tech and the state have banded together to create two research centers that will complement Rolls-Royce’s work. The Commonwealth Center for Aerospace Propulsion Systems is already up and running at both schools and the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing is slated to open its doors in Prince George County—more than 90 miles from UVA—by early 2012. 

The propulsion center is where students and their professors will conduct initial research. Those ideas will be further explored by advanced scientists at the manufacturing center where they will refine the blueprints and craft proposals for Rolls-Royce and other companies to consider.

“By working side-by-side with industry to understand what the real problems are,” Johnson says, “we can work with concepts at our universities that can then be accelerated into solutions.”

Crosspointe may also solve the job-market jitters for some, according to Johnson.

“It will create opportunities for students who want to go straight from an undergraduate degree to employment,” he says. In addition, UVA Engineering will hire 11 faculty members as a part of the partnership, while three positions will be created within the McIntire School of Commerce.

In fact, UVA has already hired two faculty members—one from the University of Illinois’ well-reputed engineering program and one from NASA Glenn Research Center in Ohio.

“They are of very high quality,” Johnson says, “and Rolls-Royce has told us these first two hires are exactly the kind they had in mind.”

Virginia was among eight states that Rolls-Royce considered for the site, but in the end the company chose the Old Dominion because of its quality of life and the presence of two top-notch engineering schools, according to Rolls-Royce spokeswoman Mia Walton. In addition, the company recently moved its North America headquarters to Reston, Virginia.

“Throughout the selection process, Virginia was extremely competitive,” Walton said. 

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