Author: Matt Deegan

Since January, Albemarle County Supervisor Ken Boyd has organized meetings with area business leaders to craft an economic “action plan.” The plan seeks to foster a more business-friendly culture in Albemarle that would attract more companies, expand the county’s commercial tax base and increase tax revenues without facing the potentially volatile issue of raising tax rates.

While some claim that Albemarle County Supervisor Ken Boyd’s economic plan opens the door for Mr. Apple or Mr. Google, others want to be sure it stays open for local input.

Some of those meetings, however, were conducted without the knowledge of other supervisors. And during a June 2 meeting—less than a week before a June 8 GOP primary pits Boyd against other Fifth District Congressional candidates—Boyd’s plan took a few hits from education and environmental advocates who felt excluded from the plan’s drafting.

“This is a revision to the comprehensive plan without the important and necessary public process,” said Jeff Werner of the Piedmont Environmental Council.

Tom Olivier of the Piedmont Group of the Sierra Club questioned the connotation surrounding the plan’s “open for business” declaration.

“Does that mean business trumps education and the environment?” he asked the supervisors. “Or that the county will cut environmental regulations to promote business growth?”

To encourage that business-friendly culture, the plan aims to assess which business sectors would fit the skills of the area’s work force, and simplify and shorten the application process for potential new businesses. And while the plan had its critics, some who spoke at the meeting praised its tone. 

John Lowry, chairman of the Albemarle County Economic Development Authority, liked how the plan sought to be more proactive in the county’s outreach to potential businesses.

“All of us in this room would invite into our homes someone who knocks at our door,” Lowry said. “That’s called being courteous. If we had a knock on our county door from a major West Coast technology firm wanting more East Coast presence, say a Mr. Apple or a Mr. Google, would we not be polite? I say we should figure out a way to ask them to be a part of our community.”

During the supervisors’ discussion of the proposed plan, Supervisor Dennis Rooker strongly emphasized the need to include more community groups before bringing it to a vote.

“We need to concentrate on what the people expect government to do, and that’s provide a good education and good infrastructure,” Rooker said. “We need to continue to look at this for a couple more months to make it more acceptable to the entire community.”

The board’s discussion featured several direct exchanges between Rooker and Boyd, two veteran supervisors. In January, Rooker and Supervisor Ann Mallek voted against a broad to-do list presented by Boyd that ranked economic development as the main fiscal priority for Albemarle. Boyd’s economic plan is a more specific extension of that to-do list, which the board approved by a 4-2 vote.

“You want to produce jobs,” Rooker said to Boyd, “but you approved a budget that resulted in laying off 41 people in education. Those are jobs.” Boyd replied that the economic plan and his vote on the county budget are separate issues, and he noted that the plan is “not anti-education.”

Boyd, Rooker and the other supervisors made minor revisions to the plan and agreed to organize roundtable discussions in the coming weeks that involve more community groups. The board will host a public hearing on the revised plan during its regularly scheduled July 14 meeting. 

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

 Representatives from Schnabel Engineering Associates on Tuesday showed Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority board members the early designs of a new dam for the Ragged Mountain Reservoir.

Cost estimates for Schnabel’s earthen dam at Ragged Mountain Reservoir fall between $28 million and $36 million—roughly the original price proposed by Gannett Fleming in 2008.

Two Schnabel spokesmen made the case that an earthen dam—essentially an embankment of compacted earth—would be a cost-effective option to manage the area’s water supply, and would not greatly disturb the reservoir’s neighbors once construction began. The new earthen dam would raise the reservoir’s water level by 45′.

Schnabel rep Randall Bass addressed concerns about the dam’s sheer size. Of the roughly 80,000 dams in the U.S. that are more than 25′ high, about 90 percent of them are earthen, according to Bass.

“If you have the earth, it is a lot cheaper to move dirt than place concrete,” he said—contrasting Schnabel’s plan with an earlier concrete model proposed by former dam designers Gannett Fleming.

The total cost of the dam would fall in the range of $28 million to $36 million, RWSA Executive Director Tom Frederick said. He added that the price tag could be lower if local bodies act quickly to take advantage of low construction costs.

“The construction market is highly favorable at this point,” said Frederick. “Most people believe that that’s going to continue for a few more months. Beyond that, it gets fuzzy. To some degree, delaying decisions could become more costly.”

However, Betty Mooney, a member of Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan and a perennial critic of the water plan and of Frederick, urged RWSA board members to examine whether a lower-cost option will be sound, both structurally and economically, in the long run.

In 2006, RWSA asked the firm Gannett Fleming to start designing a new Ragged Mountain Dam. After suggesting a pricey concrete dam, to the tune of roughly $72 million, Gannett Fleming’s project was halted in 2008. After a team of independent consultants found that a dam could be constructed for “substantially” less than Gannett Fleming’s estimate, RWSA hired Schnabel last September.

Schnabel’s earthen dam design will be on display during a RWSA public information session at 6pm on June 1 at CitySpace in the Market Street Parking Garage.

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

As its June 30 closing date approaches, the Charlottesville Ice Park faces the real possibility of lying dormant. There are currently no interested buyers or tenants for the venue, according to co-owner Roberta Williamson.

“I’m anticipating that it will be empty for a while,” Williamson told C-VILLE.

A darkened ice park may give families one fewer reason to visit the Downtown Mall, and it might even trigger the demise of the Mall’s vibrancy, says the park’s brainchild, Lee Danielson (with no apparent irony, given his role in the vacant tower known as the Landmark Hotel). Danielson and Colin Rolph co-developed the ice park and oversaw its opening in 1996. Roberta and Bruce Williamson purchased the park for roughly $3.1 million in 2003.

Bowling alley? Arcade? Or one more vacant sign of the times? With only a month before its closing date, Ice Park co-owner Roberta Williamson says the space is yet to find a future.

“When I first came to Charlottesville, Downtown was a place that people didn’t want to bring their children,” Danielson told C-VILLE. “I saw the ice park as an important piece of the jigsaw puzzle that gave families something to do. And if the Mall ends up being nothing but bars and restaurants, and it loses its family appeal, it will eventually degrade.

“You’ll start seeing [retailers] closing up more so. You’ll have blight again.”

The ice park has become a parent-approved hangout for local teenagers. Children under 12 must be accompanied by an adult, and those under 16 must let staff members know the whereabouts of their parents. The park also has security cameras and filters its music choices.

“Our biggest constituency on Friday and Saturday nights is middle schoolers,” Williamson said. “And it’s a safe place, a good place to be independent for two hours. Parents can go down the mall and have dinner, and pay $10 for skating for their kids. It serves a real function.”

And that function is worth preserving, according to Danielson, who said city and county officials should consider subsidizing the ice park’s operating shortfall. Danielson pegs the shortfall at $200,000 a year, “a very insignificant cost for the community.”

“If you look at the sales tax generated prior to the ice park versus the sales tax over the last decade, there’s no comparison,” Danielson said. “I wouldn’t let that thing go dark.” City spokesman Ric Barrick said that while revenue for Mall businesses has increased since 1996, “it would also be impossible and unrealistic to attribute it to any one source.”

Williamson is certain that the two local governments do not want to add the ice park to their tabs.

“If they wanted to take it over,” she said, “they would have come forward when we made it available. And I would not ask the government to underwrite a private business. To me, that would be like ACAC asking for underwriting from the city and county.”

With local government intervention unlikely, the question becomes: Without the ice park, what activities could fit in its place that would attract families—and business—to the Mall?

For answers, C-VILLE enlisted the acumen of Alloy Workshop architect Dan Zimmerman, who mentioned a few possibilities for the 31,000 square-foot space. Among them: a bowling alley, an indoor farmers’ market, a mini golf course, a go-kart track and a Dave & Buster’s-type hangout—a combo restaurant and arcade. However, he saw the most promise in a multi-purpose sports park.

“The building doesn’t have to be one thing,” Zimmerman said. “It’s big enough that you can subdivide it into many uses.”

A sports park that could transition from artificial turf to ice to half pipe to roller rink to bowling alley might serve the Charlottesville Derby Dames, who are forced to call their next roller derby in Fishersville a home bout, or skaters who are unsure where McIntire Skate Park will be relocated once the Meadowcreek Parkway is built.

Pipe dreams aside, Downtown parking issues and the high cost of maintaining operations on the Mall would make any endeavor challenging. Additionally, potential venture capitalists have told Williamson, she says, that they are reluctant to buy, despite a price tag of $4.1 million—$2 million less than the city’s assessed value and “somewhat of a bargain.”

“Those sorts of people are saying, ‘The business model just isn’t good enough to warrant the investment at this point,’” she said.

Pundits throughout the media realm are pontificating on Arizona’s new immigration law, and Virgil Goode recently added his voice to the fray.

Will former congressman Virgil Goode throw his hat in for a third-party run? Seems unlikely, but he can still combat political correctness around the Fifth District.

Goode, the Fifth District’s former Republican congressman, told supporters at a rally for Second District candidate Kenny Golden that Virginia should use Arizona’s new law as a model. And, while Goode has said he will not seek a rematch with Tom Perriello in November, he showed May 11 that he still has political fire in his belly.

“The first thing we ought to do is get every state in the union to lock arms with Arizona and say, ‘You’re exactly right,’” Goode said at the Spring Creek Sports Club in Gordonsville. “We have got to stop the illegal invasion.”

The former representative said that the Obama Administration has been so brazenly critical of the new law—unusual, since it is state legislation—because Democrats benefit from the amnesty of illegal immigrants. 

“The feds want to keep the states from doing anything,” Goode said. “It’s about gaining control of the country. What Obama wants, and what I think most of the Democrats want, is to give citizenship to all those who came in illegally so they will be a voting bloc and expand the Hispanic caucus. That’s what it’s all about.”

However, the former Congressman’s criticism was not reserved solely for Democrats. Goode also scolded Republican leaders for allowing politics to weaken their principles.

“You’ve got half the Republicans who are frozen like they’re standing in concrete because they think they’re going to capture the Hispanic vote,” Goode said. “They don’t want to say anything that is politically incorrect, and I think that makes it a fertile field for others to come in and make large-scale changes.”

Goode’s frustration toward the GOP was evident recently when he appeared as a keynote speaker at the Constitution Party’s Spring National Committee meeting in Minneapolis. On its official Web site, the Constitution Party says its main goal is to “restore American jurisprudence to its Biblical foundations and to limit the federal government to its Constitutional boundaries.” The party also supports a moratorium on legal immigration.

Some have speculated that Goode’s speech in Minnesota was the first step in a Fifth District run as an independent or third-party candidate, a claim he has denied.

However, the Second District candidate that he travelled to Gordonsville to support, Kenny Golden, recently dropped his GOP affiliation and has joined the independent ranks. Goode commended Golden for making the switch. If Goode were to run as an independent or third-party candidate, he would have to send 1,000 valid signatures of registered voters to the State Board of Elections by June 8. 

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

 If money is power in the realm of political campaigns, Robert Hurt is mighty powerful. The state senator from Chatham raised $101,109 in the first three months of 2010, according to the Federal Election Commission. The six other GOP candidates seeking to unseat Fifth District Democratic Congressman Tom Perriello in November were not even close to matching Hurt’s fundraising clout.

Tom Perriello

Ivy native and real estate investor Laurence Verga, who was endorsed by former Jefferson Area Tea Party Chairman Bill Hay (who now manages his campaign), was a distant second, collecting $31,523 in the first quarter of 2010. Albemarle County Supervisor Ken Boyd raised $19,305, construction businessman Jim McKelvey amassed $13,375, and airline pilot Mike McPadden drew $29,556. 

EducationPartners.biz founder Ron Ferrin told C-VILLE he collected roughly $5,000. Feda Kidd Morton’s campaign did not return C-VILLE’s calls requesting fundraising figures, and her quarterly total was not available on the Federal Election Commission’s Web site.

Hurt’s substantial financial advantage over all other GOP candidates seems to reinforce his frontrunner status. In a February survey of 400 likely primary voters conducted by Public Policy Polling, 22 percent said they would vote for Hurt, while 12 percent said they would cast a ballot for Boyd. About 51 percent of respondents were undecided.

Despite Hurt’s strong financial showing, Ferrin told C-VILLE that the value of a candidate’s campaign coffers matters less than it used to. The Web has enabled smart, targeted and inexpensive campaigning to succeed, he said.

“If you’re running a campaign the way they’ve been run for the last 50 years, then you need $100,000,” Ferrin said. “If you’re running a campaign similar to the way President Obama ran his, which was using a lot of the Internet, you don’t need a lot.”

The GOP primary is slated for June 8 and, based on forecasts from the political punditry, the winner of that contest will have a legitimate shot at replacing Perriello in Washington. The National Journal has ranked Perriello’s Fifth District seat as the 14th most likely to switch parties in November, and UVA political guru Larry Sabato has labeled Virginia’s Fifth a “toss-up.” 

However, if judging solely through a fundraising lens, Perriello has the early advantage. He collected more than $600,000 in the first three months of 2010, which his campaign called its “most successful fundraising quarter ever.” As of March 31, the Ivy resident’s campaign contribution pot totaled $1.4 million. The campaign claimed that 88 percent of the contributions were from donors who gave $200 or less.

“We are proving that a people-powered campaign can win over the big insurance companies and big energy companies that have dominated our political system for so long,” Anna Scholl, finance director for the Perriello campaign, said in a statement.

However, Federal Election Commission data revealed that Perriello’s first-quarter contributors also included larger interest groups. Among them were the largest federal employee union, the American Federation of Government Employees, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and a Democratic political action committee called Synergy that is led by Democratic Representative John Larson of Connecticut. The employee union contributed $2,500, the electrical workers paid $5,000 and Synergy gave $5,000.

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

 When he began leading the University of Virginia’s investment management firm, he oversaw roughly $2.5 billion in assets. More than five years and one Great Recession later, Chris Brightman, CEO of the University of Virginia Investment Management Company, resigned for “personal reasons,” with an endowment pool totaling $4.4 billion, according to a January 31 investment report.

Chris Brightman, who recently resigned as CEO of UVIMCO, was hired in December 2004. At the time, UVA President John Casteen said that “there are few more critical jobs at the University.”

“My five years serving the University were an honor and the highlight of my professional career,” said Brightman in a statement. “I regret that my personal situation prevents me from continuing to serve.”

Brightman oversaw UVA’s endowment in the throes of the economic downturn, when it plummeted from $5.1 billion in value in June 2008 to $4.2 billion in October 2008. Furthermore, UVA’s endowment fund lost 22.7 percent of its market value from fiscal year 2008 to fiscal year 2009, according to a survey done by the National Association of College and University Business Officers and the Commonfund Institute. 

The sharp decline was due in part to UVIMCO’s investments in private equity and hedge funds, a practice many universities with substantial endowment funds have undertaken in recent years. While the decline in endowment dollars somewhat strains UVA’s budget in the near term, UVA’s endowment only provides just north of 5 percent of the school’s total operating budget.

Former UVIMCO CFO Henry Kaelber told C-VILLE that mixing riskier investment practices with more conservative ones usually proves worthwhile in the long run.

“It’s always easy to slap people in a down market, especially if they’re an investment professional, but I think [UVIMCO] takes a really thoughtful approach,” said Kaelber, who worked at UVIMCO from 1997 to 2003.

Though he did say investing endowment dollars in more illiquid assets like private equity and hedge funds is a “bold strategy,” Kaelber also said it “wasn’t a bad idea,” either.

“I don’t look at university endowments as 70-year-old retiree money,” he said. “They have a unique advantage over most other long-term investors in that endowments’ time horizon is in perpetuity. Volatility is what should concern constituents of an endowment, not risk tasking.”

In addition, UVA officials pointed out in 2008 that UVIMCO’s losses were less severe than what the Standard & Poor 500 index hemorrhaged over the same time span.

UVA spokeswoman Carol Wood told

C-VILLE that Brightman did “an outstanding job of leading UVIMCO.” Wood would not comment on whether his departure was in any way linked to the arrival of Teresa Sullivan, who replaces John Casteen as UVA’s next president on August 1.

While UVA conducts a national search for Brightman’s replacement, current UVIMCO board member John Macfarlane will take over as chairman of the group’s investment committee. In addition, Leonard Sandridge, UVA’s executive vice president and COO, will assume Brightman’s administrative roles in the interim. Sandridge is slated to retire from his post in December.

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

 Contentious words were exchanged. A lobbyist was hired. A City Council resolution was passed. And in the end, Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris liked the outcome.

READ MORE Charlottesville and Albemarle are locked in a battle over $2.6 million in school funding. Who will come to the breaking point first?

The General Assembly thwarted Delegate Rob Bell’s attempt to move roughly $2.6 million from Charlottesville schools to Albemarle County’s school coffers. The state legislature did not include Bell’s proposed amendment in its final budget, which was passed March 14.

“Maybe some people didn’t expect us to fight this amendment as hard as we did,” Norris said, “but we knew this was going to result in a major hit to our schools, so we spent a lot of money and staff’s time and energy lobbying the General Assembly to defeat it, and they made the right choice.”

County officials see it differently. Since 2007, they have created amendments trying to convince the state legislature that Virginia’s school funding formula shortchanges Albemarle schools because it doesn’t factor in the city-county revenue-sharing agreement. If the formula counted the agreement, Albemarle would annually receive more state education dollars.

This year, the House of Delegates included the school funding amendment in its version of the budget, which Albemarle School Board Chairman Ron Price said was a “surprise.” Price also said that the county School Board will work with Bell to propose a similar amendment next year.

But with the debate that Bell’s latest failed amendment ignited, why risk another round of regional infighting?

Mayor Dave Norris said the city “spent a lot of money and staff’s time and energy lobbying the General Assembly” to defeat Delegate Rob Bell’s budget amendment.

Price holds steadfast to the view that this is an issue of basic fairness: The county pays 10 cents for every dollar of real estate property tax to the city each year—a total of $18 million in the current budget cycle—and the state should count that transaction when deciding how many education dollars to dole out to each locality.

“It’s up to the School Board to make sure the revenue from the state is being calculated correctly,” Price said, “and we’ve been aiming our comments completely at the [school funding formula.] Maybe the City Council and the Board of Supervisors would want to debate the revenue-sharing agreement, but that agreement is binding and permanent. I don’t see that changing.”

Talk surrounding the revenue-sharing agreement has been galvanized by Bell’s amendment. Conversation has centered on how the city and county can share costs amid a challenging budgetary climate, and school consolidation has been offered up as an idea. 

Delegate David Toscano is aiming to organize that talk in an April 24 meeting with school board members, city councilors and county supervisors. Both Norris and Supervisor Ken Boyd see the meeting as a chance to brainstorm ways the city’s revenue-sharing funds—$18 million this year—can be used to benefit both the city and county.

As for how the two localities should use the funds, Boyd suggested investing a slice of the revenue-sharing dollars into Albemarle’s Acquisition of Conservation Easements (ACE) program, which allows the county to purchase development rights from rural landowners in order to keep that land undeveloped.

“A year ago, when we said we would have to cut back on ACE, we were getting a lot of e-mails,” Boyd said, “and a majority was coming from city residents.”

Norris, meanwhile, talked about how the city and county could share services within Albemarle’s urban ring, the more developed area bordering Charlottesville. To help the county cut costs, he suggested having the city fire department serve the urban ring and have county volunteers cover more rural parts of Albemarle. He also proposed that city police could cover the urban ring and relieve the county of those costs.

While Toscano’s meeting could be a constructive way to air such ideas, Boyd made sure to temper the starry-eyed notion that the meeting would solve all city-county problems.

“It’s an awful lot of people to put in a room at the same time and expect to come out with too much of an outcome,” he said. 

Boyd will likely attend the meeting, “unless something in my campaign for Congress precludes me from being there,” he said. “That’s a major priority of mine right now.” Boyd is running for the GOP nomination to unseat Democratic incumbent Tom Perriello, and Toscano’s April 24 meeting falls on the day of the Dogwood Parade, a prime meet-and-greet chance. Price and Norris plan to be at the meeting.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli recently slapped second-year University of Virginia student Seth Kaye in the face. Not literally, but Kaye said that was how he felt when he awoke to an e-mail outlining a letter Cuccinelli sent to the state’s public colleges on March 4.

READ MORE Click here to read this week’s Odd Dominion, with more on Ken Cuccinelli.

The letter said that Virginia public colleges lack the legal authority to protect their gay students and employees from discrimination, and advised all colleges to “bring their policies in conformance with the law and public policy of Virginia.” Kaye, president of the student group Queer & Allied Activism at UVA, was floored by what he read.

“The symbolism of [discrimination protection] goes a long way,” he said. “Having a policy on the books sends a message to everyone, gay or straight, that, ‘We’re an inclusive place.’”

Cuccinelli’s letter ignited a backlash from gay advocacy groups throughout Virginia. It even compelled Governor Bob McDonnell on March 10 to issue an executive directive that condemned discrimination of state employees based on sexual orientation.

However, an executive directive is more of a symbolic letter, and does not carry the force of law the way an executive order does. In February, McDonnell opted not to include sexual orientation in an executive order involving workplace discrimination protection, unlike his two predecessors, Mark Warner and Tim Kaine.

Still, Kaye noted that by evoking the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, the governor’s directive “set the proper tone.” 

UVA President John Casteen was also encouraged by the governor’s statement. In UVA’s first official response to Cuccinelli’s words—nearly a week after they were written—Casteen said March 10 that McDonnell’s “eloquence and clarity set it apart from many policy statements.” The president acknowledged that he was personally “alarmed” by Cuccinelli’s letter since it “cuts to the core of our common claims to the most fundamental kinds of personal security under the rule of law.”

Casteen was not the only Cavalier shocked by the attorney general’s letter. UVA Pride, a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender advocacy group comprising faculty, staff and grad students, met March 9 to discern the letter’s meaning.

Edward Strickler, an organizer of the university’s LGBT advocacy group UVA Pride, says discussion of Cuccinelli’s letter “is about people who are experiencing disorientation in their lives.”

Edward Strickler, Jr., one of the head organizers of UVA Pride and the programs coordinator at UVA’s Institute of Law, Psychiatry, & Public Policy, said the letter had created “fear and anxiety” surrounding job security.

“This is not an abstract legal battle about who’s got the best law,” Strickler said. “This is about people who are experiencing disorientation in their lives.”

Despite the tumbleweed-worthy quiet on grounds because of spring break, the meeting drew roughly 30 participants to Thornton Hall. The overriding question: What prompted the attorney general to write a letter that so directly dismissed sexual orientation protection?

“He did seem to be hand-picking one particular phrase,” said Ellen Bass, another lead organizer of UVA Pride and a professor within UVA’s Department of Systems and Information Engineering.

C-VILLE asked Cuccinelli directly why he wrote the letter.

“The attorney general’s office is a very reactive office,” he said, “and we were responding to inquiries from several different directions at once in the higher ed system about [non-discrimination policy]. Honestly, we don’t know why they came in so close in time to one another, but they did, and when that happens, we tend to think that issuing some general advice to all our similarly situated clients makes sense so that everyone’s on the same page legally speaking.”

The letter was merely a reminder to universities that they have no more authority than what the state legislature grants them, Cuccinelli said.

“No one has contested the accuracy of the legal advice,” he said. “And my first job as attorney general is to give accurate legal advice, regardless of the circumstances or whether it’s popular or whether I even like it. All we did was identify the current status of the law, which hasn’t changed for decades. We gave the same advice as five AGs before us, including three Democrats, and consistent with one Virginia Supreme Court ruling.”

Cuccinelli’s vague explanation as to why the letter was needed has fueled conjecture that it was a political missive. The attorney general denied such claims, noting that his office did not publicize the letter.

“We issued confidential legal advice to our clients, and one or more of our clients chose to release the advice,” he said.

For her part, Bass felt that more clarity into who asked the attorney general for advice would have limited speculation.

“When I looked at the letter,” she said, “it wasn’t clear to me who asked the question, what the question was and why it caused him to create this advice. That whole trail is sketchy to me, and it shouldn’t be. It should be super clear because he’s a legislative official answering people’s questions and helping them to apply the law.” 

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