Emergency Communications Center supervisor Taylor Ashley worked 922 hours of overtime
last year. Photo by Sanjay Suchak
The center that handles all of the city, county, and university’s 911 calls is severely understaffed, and now it’s calling for help.
“At this point, it’s basically an emergency,” says Taylor Ashley, a supervisor at the Emergency Communications Center. “It’s difficult because we have almost no time off work…If you’re not on call, then you’re probably working overtime.”
Last year, Ashley says he racked up 922 hours of overtime, and more recently he’s worked approximately 15 days straight. Some of his colleagues have put in more than 20.
On the call center floor, the lights are low, and the six people on duty are illuminated only by multi-colored string lights and the five computer screens at each of their work stations. The sounds pouring from their radios range from voices to sirens.
The staff wants to have a minimum of seven people answering 911 calls during each shift, so today, another person working overtime will soon come in to meet that goal. There’s also one new employee training on this day, part of the ECC’s campaign to hire at least nine more employees.
But that’s also part of the problem, explains Ashley. Because he or other staff members are asked to train the new hires, they either have to abandon their work stations or come in on their day off.
In response, Executive Director Barry Neulen plans to hire an independent contractor, Homeland Security Solutions, Inc., to train new workers—at a cost of $180,000. The move raised questions at a January 8 board meeting, in which other board members, including Charlottesville Police Chief RaShall Brackney, questioned Neulen’s decision to hire people he knew from his time in the Marine Corps without investigating other groups that could potentially do it for less. She also questioned why they wouldn’t keep the training in-house.
Neulen says he did get specs on a few other contracts, but that his experience with Homeland Security Solutions meant he could trust them to do a good job.
“I didn’t have the time or the inclination to cast a wide net because I knew what this company was capable of doing,” he says. “They came in and met my folks, and my folks were impressed by what they were saying.”
Emphasizing the need to hire someone quickly, he adds, “I spent my entire year’s budget in six months for overtime. That’s how bad it is.”
The majority of board members eventually agreed to the hire. And Ashley says employees are “excited” for the contractors to come in and take some of the weight off their shoulders. Especially because low morale is one reason they’re in that situation, he adds.
“We were going to keep losing more good people if something didn’t happen, and bringing in new people that we’ve hired will help fix that,” says Ashley.
The ECC is accepting applications, and recent advertising efforts have led about 100 people to apply.
“We really want people to know that this is a good place to work, but also know that this isn’t a job for everybody,” says Ashley, who’s seen multiple people throw in the towel during their training. The ideal candidate will be able to “change gears” and “go with the flow,” he adds. One call may be a complaint about a barking dog, “and the very next phone call you take is a mother who found her child not breathing,” he says. But it’s a great job for people who want to serve their community.
“We like to consider ourselves the first first responder,” he says. “We are that lifeline between the person having the emergency and the responder. Without us, I don’t know how else you’d get help.”
Corrected January 29 at 1:22pm. The original version said Charlottesville Police Chief RaShall Brackney eventually agreed to the hiring of Homeland Security Solutions, which she did not.
Jerrod Smith announced his run for the Rivanna District seat on the Board of Supervisors with a campaign theme called the "dream infrastructure."
“We all begin with a dream,” said Albemarle native Jerrod Smith at the start of his January 18 campaign announcement. He’s hoping to snag the Rivanna District seat on the Board of Supervisors with a campaign called the “dream infrastructure.”
And it starts with finding new solutions to an age-old issue in Albemarle: lack of high-speed internet access across its rural areas, he said.
“If we’re not connected to the world, we won’t be able to succeed,” Smith told a crowd of about 30 people who came out to support him.
The PRA Health Services employee and former Albemarle Democratic Committee co-chair, who also serves on the Places29 Advisory Committee, said he also wants to make Albemarle more friendly to businesses.
And when it comes to education, this candidate, who grew up in the Albemarle public school system, said he wants to increase focus on technology in the classroom, and destigmatize trade schools such as CATEC, which often aren’t thought of as an economic pathway to success, he said.
“I know this because it is my personal experience,” said Smith. “These people are the backbone of our society.”
Upon graduating from Albemarle High, Smith attended Bucknell University, and then received a master’s degree in public policy at UVA’s Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy in 2013. He became a mayoral fellow the following year in Chicago, where he said the major issues regarding inequality, public housing, and infrastructure are very similar to those in Albemarle.
Among those who attended Smith’s announcement was Supervisor Norman Dill, who currently holds the Rivanna chair and is not seeking re-election. Several family members also filled the room.
“We’ve been supportive of Jerrod since he was yay high,” said his aunt, Tawuan Smith, while extending one hand below her knee. She said her nephew has always been very knowledgeable about the issues in the community.
Added his aunt, “He knows how to make things happen.”
Albemarle County officials are proposing new regulations for local homestays—and local homestay operators don’t understand why.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. That seemed to be the overall consensus of community members who spoke up at a crowded January 8 roundtable to discuss potential “homestay” (read: Airbnb) regulations in Albemarle before they go before the planning commission in February.
County staff members say many local homestays aren’t following existing regulations, and in addition to trying to enforce those they’re proposing even more new rules. But residents say these aren’t necessary.
“We are looking to regulate an issue that’s not a big enough issue for us to be investing the time,” said an Old Trail resident and realtor speaking from her seat. She said she has clients on both sides of the argument about whether the county should further manage these types of transient occupancies. “I try to be Switzerland, but I’m also about less regulation and less government involvement in my life.”
For popular homestay sites such as Airbnb, several folks argued that business regulates itself through a guest rating system.
“You live and die by your reviews,” said one attendee. Added another: “Let good old business take place, and it’s going to fall out on its own.”
The second man was perturbed by a seemingly arbitrary 45-day limit the county wants to impose on whole house rentals. The county is also proposing that whole house rentals may only take place where the dwelling is situated on more than five acres, and any rental on a smaller property will be limited to two guest rooms.
He said he inherited a 75-year-old family property. To only be able to rent the whole house for 45 days a year greatly restricts his profit margin.
Amelia McCulley, the county’s director of zoning, attempted to clear up some confusion. Homestay owners with rentals on properties greater than five acres can rent rooms for an unlimited number of days per year, just not their entire houses. Outside of the 45 day limit, an owner or manager must also reside on the property.
That was also a point of contention for some of the 75 attendees, who filled every chair at the meeting.
“Renters tend to be a little more subdued if there’s a responsible party nearby,” explained chief of zoning Bart Svoboda.
One attendee then said that he’s been renting a property he lives only 15 minutes away from. He said he’s had no problems. “We’re there every day, we just don’t sleep there.”
Besides requiring the owner or manager to live on-site, the county only allows homestays to operate in single-family detached homes and only five guest rooms may be rented. Those in favor of not imposing more regulations pointed out the small number of complaints the county has received.
Approximately 350 results turn up on Airbnb for Albemarle County—but it’s difficult to determine whether they’re actually in the county, or just nearby. The county has processed 134 applications for homestays, and senior planner Rebecca Ragsdale says they’ve received 33 related complaints since 2012.
Asked one man at the meeting, “Shouldn’t there be hundreds of complaints and issues if this is a real issue?”
The planning commission will hold a work session on the proposed regulations February 12.
A lawsuit to help prevent those unable to pay court fines from spiraling into further debt and prosecution got a significant boost last week.
Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania announced January 4 that he will no longer prosecute people charged with driving on a license that was suspended solely for failure to pay court costs or fines.
Platania’s announcement comes on the heels of a December 21 preliminary injunction by a federal judge in Charlottesville, which ordered Department of Motor Vehicles Commissioner Richard Holcomb to reinstate the driver’s licenses of three plaintiffs who automatically lost their licenses when they were unable to pay court costs and fines. Judge Norman Moon predicted attorneys will win the case, and said such automatic suspensions are unconstitutional.
Platania said the injunction raises “significant concerns” about prosecuting people who have had their licenses suspended in that way. He will continue to prosecute other suspensions for DUIs or restitutions, he says.
“I think Joe did the right thing and I’m really proud he did it,” says Liz Murtagh, head of the public defender’s office. “It’ll make a big difference for people,” she adds, particularly her clients, who often can’t afford to pay their fines as they’re leaving the courtroom, starting a “vicious, vicious” cycle.
Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney Robert Tracci says his office put a halt to prosecuting the cases because of the injunction. The cases have been continued in general district court until the constitutional issues have been resolved or the injunction is lifted.
Before Tracci confirmed that his office was not prosecuting those cases, local immigration attorney Tanishka Cruz predicted it wouldn’t happen in the county “as long as Robert Tracci is the commonwealth’s attorney.”
She says Tracci’s office has historically taken a “one size fits all” approach and has sent many of her clients to jail for such an offense.
Says Tracci, “Commonwealth’s attorneys have no more discretion to ignore a federal injunction than to ignore federal immigration laws.”
Attorneys with the Legal Aid Justice Center are representing the three plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit against the DMV.
“We are very hopeful that between the judicial ruling and the bipartisan momentum for repeal, the time has come to end this destructive practice,” says Legal Aid Executive Director Angela Ciolfi. “Meanwhile, the ruling casts doubt on the constitutionality of all suspensions flowing from the statute, and it makes sense for law enforcement to press pause on enforcement.”
Updated January 9 at 12:12pm to clarify that Robert Tracci stopped prosecuting these cases when the injunction was issued.
Activists in Buckingham have been fighting the pipeline since 2014. On Sunday, they won.
PC: Friends of Buckingham
All is quiet along the proposed path of the 600-mile Atlantic Coast Pipeline, now that five federal permits have either been thrown out or put on hold.
A vote on a permit that would allow a 54,000-horsepower pipeline compressor station to be built in Buckingham’s historic African American community of Union Hill, on a former slave plantation, has now been deferred twice by the Air Pollution Control Board.
“If they had voted in favor of the permit the other week, it would have been a riot up in there,” says Pastor Paul Wilson, who leads the Union Hill and Union Grove Baptist churches.
Anti-pipeline activists in Buckingham have called Dominion’s plans to build one of three ACP compressors in that community a stark example of environmental injustice and racism, and have alleged that when looking for a sparsely populated place to build, the energy giant intentionally erased a large percentage of the Buckingham population in its application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
The number FERC used in its final environmental impact statement on the ACP was 29.6 people per square mile in the area surrounding the pipeline’s path in Buckingham. Dominion asserts that number was provided by the U.S. Census Bureau, but residents say it was off by about 500 percent.
At a December 19 meeting, the State Air Pollution Control Board again kicked the can down the road by rescheduling the compressor station vote for January 8, when it has declared that public comment from attendees—like the 150 concerned citizens who showed up last month—won’t be accepted.
“From what I’m seeing, unless the [previous] comments changed peoples’ minds on the board, it appears that Dominion will probably get that air permit,” says Wilson. After this story went to press, the board voted unanimously to approve the permit, but Wilson says, “the pipeline can still be stopped.”
In fact, construction—which never started in Virginia—has been halted along the entire 600-mile route from West Virginia into North Carolina as other legal battles play out.
The Southern Environmental Law Center is involved in several of the cases and represents a small coalition of local conservation groups.
SELC attorney Greg Buppert notes a December 13 decision handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that threw out a U.S. Forest Service permit that would have allowed the ACP to cross two national forests and the Appalachian Trail.
Buppert says, “Dominion doubled down” by proposing a route—and nearly all of its alternatives—that went through the same point on the trail because it thought it could get around requirements that apply to national parks.
“It gambled the project on this one location,” says Buppert. “I think the decision sends the route and the company back to the drawing board.”
Dominion spokesperson Aaron Ruby says 56 other oil or gas pipelines already cross the trail. Dominion is appealing the ruling—and he’s confident it will prevail.
“Opponents’ tactics in the courts are not doing anything to provide additional protection of the environment,” he said in a December 13 statement. “They are only driving up consumer energy costs, delaying access to cleaner energy, and making it harder for public utilities to reliably serve consumers and businesses.”
While Forest Service employees were initially very skeptical of that permit, they decided to approve it, and the court called their decision “mysterious.”
“Part of the story in that case was several years of concern about the Atlantic Coast Pipeline from the Forest Service, and then political pressure from Washington caused the agency to back down on its concerns,” says Buppert. “Dominion went to political appointees to bend the rules for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. With that kind of gamesmanship, the company shouldn’t be surprised that a federal court has thrown out its permit.”
As Pastor Wilson puts it, “Dominion is trying to beat out the clock.” He adds, “This thing is costing more money each day.”
Dominion’s Ruby told the Washington Post that the once-$6.5 billion project is now looking like $7 billion. His company has had to lay off or delay hiring 4,500 construction workers, and the pipeline that was once scheduled to be fully built by the end of the year is now looking at a mid-2020 completion. Ruby did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The SELC also has plans to challenge the pipeline’s entire approval permit because of what Buppert calls “mounting evidence” that it isn’t necessary to meet future energy needs.
“That evidence is significant enough that it’s getting the attention of important elected officials,” says Buppert. He mentions a January 2 newsletter from Delegate David Toscano, in which the legislator compares the ACP to an old automobile in need of a valve job: “It is leaking serious oil, suffers by comparison to newer, more advanced models, and even if it can be made roadworthy, you and I will pay the bill for decades.”
Toscano also notes in his letter that a recent filing from the State Corporation Commission said Dominion’s projections of demand for electricity and gas “have been consistently overstated,” and that existing pipelines are sufficient to meet future needs.
“It’s hard to justify a load forecast prediction that shows aggressive energy demand growth when the actual numbers for the last 10 years are flat,” says Buppert. “It’s an issue that we’ve worked on for a long time, and I think the data and the facts have caught up with Dominion.”
He wore a construction helmet that said “commie killer” as he joined in on a brutal beating in a downtown parking garage, striking the already downed DeAndre Harris with a stick until it broke as Harris struggled to pick himself up off the ground.
And though two out-of-town men already found guilty of malicious wounding for participating in the same beating have been sentenced to eight and six years in prison, this one—Daniel Borden, the Ohioan who was 18 years old when he hitched a ride to Charlottesville for the August 12 white supremacist rally—will only serve three years and 10 months.
“I absolutely don’t think my son did anything wrong,” testified his father, retired U.S. Air Force pilot Rick Borden, about the younger Borden’s involvement in what Judge Rick Moore has repeatedly referred to as “one of the worst beatings I’ve ever seen.”
The father, who started his testimony by saying he’d done “quite a bit of comprehensive investigation on this,” told the judge his son was separated from his friends when police declared an unlawful assembly and ordered everyone to leave what was then called Emancipation Park.
Borden joined another group of alt-righters and began making his way toward the Market Street Parking Garage. He picked up the stick along the way for protection, according to his dad.
“I’m not sure that I would have walked out of that park with anything other than an M1 Abrams tank,” said the father. He laughed at the mention of the “commie killer” hardhat, and said it was a reference to the film Full Metal Jacket.
“Back in the day, when I was a B-52 pilot, the Soviets were our mortal enemy,” he added.
A visibly frustrated defense attorney Mike Hallahan told the judge he was “on edge” as he questioned the elder Borden.
Judge Moore then called for a recess. As Borden’s father stood and left the witness stand for the break, he passed this reporter, who was seated in a back row. Making eye contact, he made an aggressive gesture somewhere in between starting a lawnmower and ripping apart a newspaper.
Returning to the stand, in an unusually tangential testimony, the father ranted about other aspects of August 12, including that Harris was allegedly seen throwing bottles of soda that day, and about how “antifa personnel” apparently specialize in “gang beatdowns.”
Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania noted that a lot of the testimony seemed irrelevant, but that he wasn’t objecting. “I think Mr. Borden has a lot he wants to get off his chest,” he said.
And Hallahan argued that everything is relevant.
“Everything is not relevant,” said Moore. “I’m not going to let this sentencing hearing be made about something else.”
Getting back on track, Borden’s father said his son had “tunnel vision” or “target fixation” during the attack. Said the elder Borden, “Dan has no recollection of anybody even around him. He was that full of fear and anxiety.”
But in a video taken after the parking garage beating, Platania said Borden appeared “gleeful,” and that he could be heard saying, “Fuck Antifa. Fuck communism. They got their ass kicked multiple times.”
Prosecutor Nina Antony noted that Borden was half a block away when he saw the beating and decided to join in.
Hallahan, who argued that Borden was drawn to the parking garage because one of the alt-righters was also being beaten in a separate fight, asked the judge to “take out all the drama” and “take out all the politics,” to see that this case is just about a “guy in the parking lot hitting somebody with a stick.”
And the defense attorney said that from the sounds of the video, Borden likely missed Harris with at least one of his swings.
“I don’t think that matters,” said the judge. “He kept swinging because he hadn’t done what he needed to do.”
The defendant’s mother, Kelly Borden, said she didn’t know her son had gone to Virginia for the Unite the Right rally until a friend sent her an article by civil rights activist and independent journalist Shaun King, which identified Borden as one of the men who assaulted Harris. She testified it was “fake news.”
Though Borden faced a max of 20 years in prison, the sentencing guidelines presented to the court that day suggested a year and six months on the low end and four years and two months on the high end.
His attorney recommended the lowest: “Get him out of this community. Charlottesville didn’t want him here in the first place,” Hallahan said.
Antony noted Borden’s young age, lack of criminal history, and voluntary guilty plea, but she still asked for at least the highest sentencing recommendation. She also said she was trying not to let Borden’s parents’ testimony sway her to ask for more time.
Moments before the judge pronounced the nearly four-year sentence, with 20 years of good behavior, and five years of supervised probation after release, Borden gave his own statement—one that seemed more remorseful than his parents’.
He said he cried in his dad’s kitchen when the photos of him on August 12 surfaced on the web. He had only come to town to protest the removal of the Confederate statues, he added.
“I did not know how overwhelmingly against the statues Charlottesville was,” he said. “If I did, I would have thought twice about coming.”
Though Harris wasn’t present in the courtroom, Borden had a message for him: “You didn’t deserve that.” He gave the prosecutor a personal letter that he wanted Harris to read.
He also apologized to Harris’ parents, his own parents, and the entire city.
Said Borden, “I’m truly sorry this has happened to your town.”
Dwindling enrollment at Molly Michie, the city’s oldest co-operative preschool and the first to integrate, casts a pall on its future.
Courtesy Molly Michie
Faced with a recent decline in enrollment, the city’s first co-operative preschool, which has operated for more than 50 years, is struggling to stay on its feet.
Molly Michie Cooperative Preschool was founded in 1967 as the city’s first integrated preschool, with an emphasis on learning through play. Being a co-op means parents are deeply involved in running the school, serving as classroom assistants to two professional teachers and taking on other tasks. Supporters say this builds community as well as allowing the school to offer more affordable tuition.
Teachers and parents say it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what led to the drop in enrollment.
“There were a lot of changes that came at once,” says Casandra Wendell, who teaches the four- and five-year-old “butterflies.”
She says a former teacher who wasn’t as committed to the co-op model negatively affected parent involvement. And right around the time that teacher left, the school was forced to move from its home of 45 years, the Unitarian Universalist church on Rugby Road.
The school has now lived at the Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church for about five years, but co-op supporters fear it isn’t as recognizable as it once was.
And “the economy has something to do with it,” says Krista McMullen, who teaches a group of “caterpillars,” as the two and three year olds are dubbed. She says there are more working families now, who don’t have the availability to pitch in at school.
“There’s nobody but teachers and parents who keep the school afloat,” says Wendell.
While the school can accept approximately 30 families, and used to have a waitlist at its old location, she says only 15 families are currently enrolled. And though she calls it a “low point” in the preschool’s history, she’s confident they’ll bounce back.
“We’re not at that place anymore,” she adds, referring to the school’s earlier troubles. “Now we have an amazing support system.”
On a cold December day, the playground at Molly Michie is nothing short of chaos for those not used to being surrounded by a dozen small children. A girl in purple leggings whizzes by, making shrill monkey noises that echo throughout the neighborhood. She chases a boy in and out of a miniature wooden cabin as two of her friends attempt to defy gravity by climbing up a bright green slide. Another girl flings herself into fast rotations on a tire swing.
McMullen watches the kids play while chatting with their parents. She recently transferred from the “very traditional” Daylily Preschool in Crozet, and says the difference has been astounding.
“I feel really supported,” she says, adding that parents are able to observe what she’s teaching their kids and take those practices home with them. And since parents take on jobs like cleaning and preparing lunch, she’s able to focus on her lesson plans and time with the kids.
In an effort to grow and increase enrollment, the school hopes to be able to accept six year olds next year who are taking a “kindergarten gap year,” says Wendell. And they also plan to start a summer program in June.
The school, McMullen adds, has a very rich history. “We don’t want to lose that.”—Samantha Baars
Thousands of migrants are camping in Tijuana for a chance to present themselves to U.S. immigration officials at the border. Local advocates visited them to provide humanitarian aid and legal assistance. Courtesy Kristin Clarens
Early this month, a caravan of more than a dozen local lawyers, clergy, and other advocates set out to assist migrants seeking asylum at the Tijuana border, where the mayor has declared a humanitarian crisis, and where thousands of camping refugees wake up every morning hoping they’ll get their turn to present their cases to federal immigration agents.
Kristin Clarens, a local attorney specializing in international law, says some migrants, who are “subjecting themselves to this process out of desperation,” have a very low-level understanding of how unlikely it is that they’ll be granted asylum—and about how they’ll be treated if they’re allowed to cross the border.
“They’re fleeing violence, and that’s all they know,” says Clarens. “And they assume that we’re this beacon of freedom—that we’re open to helping them—and it’s pretty heartbreaking to have to be the bearer of this tiding.”
From morning until night, Clarens observed those camping near the PedWest port of entry waiting for their assigned numbers to be called “like when you go to a deli,” she says, so they can make their asylum case to the immigration officials.
“The people standing in line have literally no idea what’s happening to them on the other side,” says Clarens. The best case scenario is that they’ll pass their credible fear interview and background check, and they’ll be released into America with a year to officially apply for asylum. But often they either don’t pass their interview or aren’t granted one, and some migrants are detained, locked into holding cells, loaded onto buses, and driven overnight to different detention centers across the country, where many will remain for months without understanding the process.
Clarens has also been to one of those detention centers: Tornillo in Texas, “this weird internment camp” in the middle of the desert, housing thousands of immigrants, including a large number of unaccompanied children.
“Every morning, it’s just so heartbreaking,” says Clarens. “A bus shows up and all of these people file out.”
In Tijuana, local folks also offered humanitarian aid or legal advice to droves of unaccompanied children—two of whom they recently learned have been murdered. Mexican authorities have arrested three people suspected of kidnapping, stabbing, and strangling the two Honduran teens to death, as reported by an ABC News affiliate in San Diego.
The Trump administration recently changed part of its policy to make it easier to reunite immigrant children with their parents, but Clarens says many kids—like the ones she met at the YMCA where the recently killed boys were staying, and at Tornillo—won’t be released anytime soon, because ICE is actively detaining their sponsors, or undocumented relatives, who attempt to pick them up.
It’s hard to tell the children that she doesn’t know how long they’ll be detained in what are essentially cages, says Clarens, or that their sponsors might not come.
“These kids flee violence in their home countries with no idea that they’ll be treated so callously in ours,” she adds.
Reverend Brittany Caine-Conley, a lead organizer of Congregate Charlottesville, describes accompanying a group of approximately nine “very courageous boys” who tried to present their asylum cases in Tijuana, but were promptly turned away—an event that made national news.
“We feel a real moral obligation to be in solidarity with those who are simply trying to survive,” she says.
The clergy members and young refugees were on Mexican soil at the entrance to the Otay Mesa port of entry, which is a long, heavily militarized corridor on the border that asylum-seekers must traverse before meeting with American immigration officials.
“A few of them stepped across the invisible line into the corridor, but were pushed back by border control, so border control can continue to claim that they can’t ask for asylum because they’re not on American soil,” says Caine-Conley.
The boys were visibly frightened, and “some of them had begun to cry,” says the reverend. And when Mexican police came to remove them, the officers threatened to arrest the accompanying clergy members and force them into America if they continued to protect the minors.
“It was an incredibly disheartening experience,” says Caine-Conley. “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a situation like that where I felt so incredibly helpless.”
Caine-Conley, who also officiated 10 weddings at the border, says the migrants’ stories have been “harrowing.”
“I can’t imagine at the age of 15, traveling thousands of miles across countries because I saw my father, my uncle, and my brother executed in my front yard, and I know that if I’m forced to go back there, I will be executed as well.”
And while some people can’t seem to understand why immigrants flee, the reverend says, “It’s because they’re trying to choose life and there’s zero opportunity for them to live where they were.”
Clarens says there’s no real reason for the way American officials are now treating asylum-seeking migrants, creating a hostile situation at the border, forcing thousands of refugees into detention centers, and subjecting people who have already spent their lives in danger and trauma to more of that.
“This isn’t improving our safety, this isn’t improving our economy,” she says. “It’s a very broken system and the price is being paid by the most vulnerable people in our world right now.”
When Maria Chavalan-Sut talks about her life, she smiles. She laughs. Sometimes she cries.
The Guatemalan refugee came to America in 2015 and passed a credible fear interview at the border, meaning ICE believed that she would face persecution or torture if she was sent back to her country.
But her attorney says that, like in many other cases of asylum-seekers, the notice to appear in immigration court for her first hearing did not include a date or time. When she didn’t show up, a judge ordered her removal from the country.
The 44-year-old from Guatemala City was supposed to leave the country by September 30, but with a campaign called “Hands Off Maria” and dozens of local supporters behind her, she’s instead fighting her deportation order through the legal system with a motion to reopen her case, which is currently pending before an immigration judge in Arlington.
As Charlottesville’s first undocumented immigrant taking public sanctuary in a local church, she now wakes up every morning in a Sunday school classroom-converted-apartment at Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church.
It was in the same church’s sanctuary that she held a press conference in October, where she told reporters and community members her story through a Spanish interpreter.
“I have lived all of my life with violence,” she says. “My children are the reason I am fighting. I want them to live without all of the suffering I have experienced. Living in the church—this is the first time I can breathe; the first time I can sleep; the first time I have not felt afraid.”
Chavalan-Sut comes from a persecuted ethnic group—Guatemala’s indigenous Kaqchikel community—which makes her a good candidate for asylum, according to Richmond-based attorney Alina Kilpatrick, who represents her.
Though she survived the first-hand violence of a long-running civil war in her home country, in which her uncles and cousins were buried alive, and the persistent pressure of persecution, marginalization, and poverty, the final straw was when a local group pressured her to sell her property and threatened severe consequences if she didn’t.
When she refused, they lit her house on fire with her entire family inside of it. This is what Chavalan-Sut fled. This is what the judge has ordered her to go back to.
Under attack
As anti-immigration rhetoric ramps up across the country, largely thanks to the president and his supporters, many local groups have emerged to help protect and advocate for Charlottesville’s often unnoticed, but ever-present, community of undocumented immigrants.
Donald Trump, who called Mexican immigrants “rapists” and “drug dealers,” in his very first speech as a presidential candidate, has continued to demonize immigrants throughout his presidency. He has said the country’s undocumented people are, in fact, “not people,” but “animals,” that they “infest our country,” and that they’re coming into the United States from “shithole countries.” More recently, he’s repeatedly attacked the “migrant caravan” of men, women, and children seeking asylum at the U.S./Mexico border.
Perhaps surprisingly, Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s own data shows fewer deportations during the current president’s administration than during Barack Obama’s—from 240,255 ICE removals of undocumented immigrants in fiscal year 2016 to 226,119 in fiscal year 2017.
But under Trump, ICE has stepped up deportations of those already living in the country, from 65,332 people in fiscal year 2016 to 81,000 in fiscal year 2017 (the other deportations involve those turned away at the border). And the total number of ICE arrests went up 42 percent between those two years, according to the federal immigration agency.
That means that in Charlottesville, as elsewhere in the country, undocumented people who have built lives and families here are living in fear.
The greatest challenge they face isn’t one insurmountable obstacle, advocates say:It’s the everyday struggle of making a living without being noticed. It’s an ever-growing mountain of small, mundane tasks made more complicated by increased pressure from ICE and the current administration. It’s the struggle to stay under the radar, to live in the shadows. Because unlike the rest of us, if they make one wrong move, or if they’re at the wrong place at the wrong time, it could all be over.
In response, local organizations have stepped up to help. Some draw hundreds of affiliates and allies, and some have fewer than 10 members. Some are faith-based. Some are nonprofits. Some are made of young leaders and some host a more mature base of volunteers. But there’s at least one thing they all have in common: the shared idea that no human is illegal.
“This [undocumented] community has always done the work others with privilege won’t do, but we’ve created laws that exclude people and make them illegal.” –Edgar Lara, director of community engagement at Sin Barreras
The silent struggle
“When we talk about the undocumented immigrant population, we’re really talking about a community that’s been part of the United States since before there was a United States,” says Edgar Lara, the director of community engagement at Sin Barreras, a small nonprofit that, among other things, connects Charlottesville’s community of migrants to immigration, health, legal, education, and banking services.
For Lara—who grew up in California with an undocumented single mother, and who spent several summers as a migrant worker in largely undocumented West Coast communities—the notion that immigrants have always been in the U.S. is important to consider when scrutinizing who has the legal right to live in this country.
As Lara puts it, a lot has changed throughout American history, and laws and borders are just two examples. “But the people have been here. This [undocumented] community has always done the work others with privilege won’t do, but we’ve created laws that exclude people and make them illegal.”
It’s not any different here in Charlottesville, he adds. A diverse community of undocumented people work, rent homes, and go to school in this city. And says Lara, they’re “just normal people living their lives, but under very difficult conditions.”
Here’s an example: Lara recently talked with a man at Sin Barreras who needed to have a document notarized. When a notary wasn’t immediately available, Lara says he explained to the man the simple process of how to go elsewhere for the service.
“And the person just kind of, they paused for a bit,” says Lara, adding that the man eventually said he’d rather wait in the Sin Barreras lobby, or come back another time. And when Lara asked why, the client said, “Well, it’s just different.”
When you’re undocumented, everything is different—and folded with layers of difficulty that most people don’t think about as they go through the minutiae of everyday life, whether that’s fear of being stopped by ICE, trouble navigating U.S. culture, or the fact that “people do look at them funny,” or judge them for their accents, Lara says.
The real struggle is “just the everyday living.”
“There’s small things, but it’s every day,” he adds, and while folks can sometimes work through them on their own, “other times, those little things can become big things. A lot of them are really huge things. And to everybody else, it’s something small.”
Like the inability to get permission to drive, which some advocates say is particularly inhumane.
In Virginia, unlike other states, undocumented people may not obtain driver’s licenses. But with few options for public transportation, that means they must risk driving illegally to get to work, or a medical appointment, or a child’s engagement.
“It’s the way most [undocumented] people around here get in trouble,” says Lara. “They can’t make a mistake or be in the wrong place without facing extra levels of punishment. Our government goes to great efforts to highlight and exaggerate the mistakes the undocumented community makes.”
He adds that they’re actually more likely to be the victims of crimes than to commit them. For instance, a study by the libertarian Cato Institute earlier this year found that native-born residents in Texas were much more likely to be convicted of a crime than either legal or undocumented immigrants. And a March study in the journal Criminology showed that places with higher percentages of undocumented immigrants tend to have less violent crime.
“There are over 10 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and that scares a lot of people, but if they were really criminals, we would all truly know about it,” he says. “Using fear to create hate and anger has been an effective tool.”
Hundreds of UVA students, faculty, and other allies attended a September 2017 rally in support of the university’s undocumented students when President Trump announced plans to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which had temporarily protected them from deportation. Photo: Eze Amos
Fighting stereotypes
A University of Virginia group called DREAMers on Grounds is working to extinguish those negative stereotypes, says fourth-year student Katherine Soba, who is president of the organization.
“Political rhetoric is becoming a lot more aggressive and violent,” she says, and many people have a false perception of this community of “hard-working people.” Oftentimes, undocumented people pay taxes for benefits like Social Security and Medicare that they can’t even use. Andthey don’t benefit from any federal aid or welfare, she adds, because they don’t have Social Security numbers.
Once a month, DREAMers on Grounds holds a well-attended “UndocuAlly” training for students, faculty, and community members that addresses those stigmas and stereotypes. The group takes its name from the DREAM Act, or Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, a piece of bipartisan legislation first introduced in 2001, that sought to help immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. After several versions of the bill failed to pass in Congress, the Obama administration established a stop-gap policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. DACA has allowed the children of undocumented immigrants to be eligible for work permits and deferred action from deportation.
In September 2017, when Donald Trump announced his plans to rescind DACA, hundreds of UVA students and community members, including folks with DREAMers on Grounds, met on the steps of Garrett Hall to call for permanent protection for all DACA recipients and their families.
Soba estimates that more than 50, but fewer than 100, UVA students have DACA status. And they’re ready to tackle the administration head-on.
At the rally, immigrants and their allies shouted in unison, “undocumented and unafraid!” Their calls reverberated off the columns of the surrounding buildings and amphitheater in the moment of solidarity.
“The phrase, as a concept, is there to empower the [undocumented] community and allies,” says Soba. “But being completely unafraid sometimes isn’t an option.”
That’s a sentiment echoed by Lara, who also attended that September 2017 rally, and who says those student leaders have a different mindset than other undocumented people living in Charlottesville.
“They’ve taken a lead and I think they’re a great example of what we hope for the entire community,” says Lara. “But I don’t think they’re there. …There’s still a lot of fear.”
ICE in Charlottesville
An ICE representative says agents haven’t conducted any raids here, and advocates of undocumented immigrants say most local ICE activity happens at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail.
The jail is required to notify ICE when an undocumented person is first taken into custody. But they also voluntarily give the federal agency a “courtesy call” immediately before an undocumented inmate’s release date, so agents can be there waiting for them.
Several local groups, including Sin Barreras and the newly formed ICE Out of Charlottesville, are aggressively advocating for an end to this voluntary cooperation.
According to the jail’s records, ICE picked up 25 people between July 2017 and June 2018 who were charged with crimes from the serious—malicious wounding, domestic assault—to those that are essentially a consequence of being undocumented, such as driving without a license or failure to appear in court.
A majority of ICE arrests across the country happen when undocumented people are released from jail, according to the Charlottesville-area Immigrant Resource & Advocacy Coalition. CIRAC’s stance is that immigration is a federal civil matter, not a state or local criminal matter, and therefore a local jail has no reason to voluntarily cooperate with federal immigration agents.
In October, the group launched the Cville Immigrant Bond Fund—a product of their previous work with a local undocumented man for whom they use the pseudonym Eduardo.
Last December, Eduardo’s attorney called on CIRAC for help when he was detained by ICE.
The Guatemalan man, who had lived and worked in Charlottesville for a decade, was stopped on Route 20 and arrested for driving without a license. When he left the local jail after serving his sentence, federal immigration agents were there waiting for him. They took him to the Farmville Detention Center—the closest one to Charlottesville—and then moved him to a facility in Texas.
Eduardo’s bond was then set at $10,000, according to CIRAC. His family was deprived of his income, his 2-year-old wouldn’t eat, his attorney was representing him by phone, and his family was ready to accept a bond loan from a private company that charges high fees and requires ankle monitoring. But the folks at CIRAC raised enough money to pay his bond just in time, and now he’s back home while he awaits his next immigration hearing in 2019.
Citing numbers released by the jail, CIRAC representatives say he’s just one of the 24 to 40 people annually whose arrests in Charlottesville place them directly into the “deportation pipeline.”
One law enforcement representative in the city agrees that the local community of migrants doesn’t create a threat to public safety, and is on board with ending the jail’s voluntary notifications to ICE.
Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania wrote in an August 10 letter to the jail board that its position on voluntary reporting and the media coverage surrounding it has left many community members “legitimately feeling angry, scared, and isolated.”
“In some cases, primary caretakers or breadwinners are removed and are no longer able to care for their children, who are oftentimes citizens,” wrote Platania. “I am also concerned about witnesses and victims looking at voluntary notification as a reason to be uncooperative with local law enforcement and not report crimes or participate with prosecutions because they fear the deportation of charged individuals.”
Platania noted the “significant concern” of two immigrants recently deported—one charged with DUI and the other with assault and battery—whom a judge had released on bond prior to their trials.
“They are currently considered fugitives from justice,” Platania said. “One problem presented by this scenario is that individuals who may not be guilty of the crime they have been charged with have no ability to assert their innocence and stand trial.”
Platania also said he “concurs wholeheartedly” with a July 1 letter from the jail board—signed by Superintendent Martin Kumer and board chair Diantha McKeel—in which they said undocumented immigrants don’t pose an inherent danger based solely on their citizenship status.
“If the board agrees with the letter it wrote, it may be useful to have ICE articulate with specificity how the voluntary notification policy furthers legitimate local public safety needs,” Platania said. And after examining available data on city cases, “I am unable to see the positive impact the current policy has on family stability or public safety.”
Echoing the local activists’ position, he said, “If community safety is one of our guiding principles, and it must be, it seems unwise to have a policy that perhaps unintentionally (albeit foreseeably) undermines it.”
Though Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail Superintendent Martin Kumer has said notifying ICE of inmates’ release dates keeps the community safe, advocates against the voluntary policy, including the city’s commonwealth’s attorney, say it does the opposite. Photo: Eze Amos
But the man who holds the top prosecutor job in the county, Commonwealth’s Attorney Robert Tracci, continues to advocate for the jail to keep its voluntary reporting practice because he says he’s opposed to obstructing the enforcement of federal immigration practices. And so have four of the six law enforcement representatives asked to weigh in on the practice, including Nelson Commonwealth’s Attorney Daniel Rutherford and the sheriffs from Nelson, Albemarle, and Charlottesville.
“As a first-generation American whose parents are both immigrants, I realize the emotion the issue of immigration evokes in many,” wrote Tracci in his own August letter to the jail board. But he believes releasing “noncitizens” back into the community is dangerous.
Federal immigration detainers are typically only issued for ACRJ inmates with serious felony offenses, according to Tracci. The county’s commonwealth’s attorney has also noted that the jail refuses to hold undocumented inmates past their release dates for ICE, which was a practice the board decided to end in March 2017.
Tracci condemns critics he says have called him and other supporters of the policy “Nazis” and accused them of violating the Convention Against Torture.
“Demonization of law enforcement coarsens public discourse, renders sensible discussion less likely, and affronts those who strive daily to fairly enforce duly enacted law they swore an oath to protect and defend,” he says.
Some local activists have also criticized Tracci for inviting people who support the jail’s current policy to speak during the public comment session at its board meetings.
At a September 13 meeting, “almost everyone who spoke in public comment was saying these really vitriolic, bigoted, racist things about migrants and about dangers that they pose to the community, and it was completely untrue and unfounded,” says Mark Heisey, an organizer with ICE Out of Cville. “Some of it was just speculative to the point of being absurd.”
For example, Heisey says he heard one speaker tell the jail board that even though UVA student Hannah Graham was murdered in 2014 by a U.S.-born citizen, it could have been an undocumented immigrant. “That kind of logic comes from a place of hate,” he says.
ICE Out of Cville has approximately 10 core members who have been organizing under that name for about five months, but they had independently been working on their campaign to end the jail’s ICE notifications since the beginning of the year. They believe ICE is unjustly, senselessly, and needlessly tearing apart local families.
While Tracci notes that some crimes undocumented people have been charged with locally include taking indecent liberties with a child, abduction, and strangulation, Heisey says “ICE is basically destroying people’s lives over…what are considered really low-level offenses,” such as failing to pay child support, failure to appear in court, being drunk in public, or driving without a license, like in Eduardo’s case.
The ICE Out of Cville representative doesn’t shy away from talking about the reputation of the federal immigration agency—especially under the new administration—which has racked up “innumerable documented cases” of human rights and sex abuses. It operates for-profit prisons and some of the worst detention centers in the country, Heisey says.
Russell Hott, the director of enforcement and removal operations at ICE’s D.C. field office, didn’t respond to questions about whether ICE had been unfairly characterized in the media. But he said “ICE’s mission to promote public safety and national security has remained unchanged since the agency was created in 2003.”
“A lot of the folks who are undocumented in Charlottesville are fleeing situations that are life threatening, and situations that the U.S. government is often complicit in, if not directly responsible for,” counters Heisey. “And so it’s just completely inhumane and indefensible that a community that is trying to have some kind of semblance of justice would voluntarily, and with no legal obligation whatsoever, work with an organization that’s so cruel and that has no regard for people’s humanity.”
One thing the community can do to resist ICE is to notice and challenge their tactics, he says. Showing up to speak at jail board meetings, and building more community involvement and engagement is a good place to start. After all, ICE is allowed to “do what they do” because “they largely operate in the shadows,” he says.
‘An underground railroad’
Bringing the plight of the undocumented out into the open is a core part of Lana Heath de Martinez’s work. In September, the Richmond-based immigrant rights activist called Pastor Isaac Collins of Wesley Memorial Church with a special request: Would the congregation grant Maria Chavalan-Sut, a refugee seeking asylum, public sanctuary?
The public sanctuary movement provides immigrants at risk of deportation with shelter in churches and other safe spaces. Heath de Martinez, who helped another immigrant take sanctuary in a Richmond church in June, says the goal of their campaigns is to make the asylum-seekers “household names,” so that people “feel almost like they’re part of the family—somebody who they find relatable and have some sense of empathy and compassion for.”
She also knows of at least a dozen local people offering their homes as private sanctuaries. And they’re not necessarily a secret—ICE knows where some undocumented people are staying as they go through legal recourse, and some even wear ankle monitors, like Maria.
But some are kept secret. “All over the country, you have people who are hiding in part of what we might call an underground railroad,” she says.
“And you have to realize being in sanctuary can create this beloved community, and that’s really beautiful, but it’s still being incarcerated. It’s still life without parole until the administration changes.”
For now, public sanctuaries remain safe spaces. The “sensitive locations” memo from the Obama administration asks, but doesn’t require, that immigration agents not make arrests in locations such as churches, schools, and hospitals, and so far no raids have happened in these places, she says.
“It’s put in place because the optics would be bad,” says Heath de Martinez, adding thatimmigration officers very rarely have a judicial warrant, and they can’t get in without one.
But when saying it’s never happened, she tacks the word “yet” onto the end of her sentence, partially because immigration officers often make headlines for bad optics, such as when a man granted sanctuary at a church in Durham, North Carolina, for 11 months was arrested during a routine meeting at an immigration office, and 27 church members there to support him were also put in cuffs. Or when officers tear gassed migrants—and their small children—at the San Diego/Tijuana border in late November.
Says Hott from ICE’s D.C. field office, “Sanctuary policies fail to recognize federally established processes for the enforcement of immigration law. These policies provide a refuge for illegal aliens, and they do so at the expense of the safety of a community’s citizens.”
Dozens of community members are rallying behind Maria Chavalan-Sut, a native Guatemalan refugee seeking asylum in America. When an immigration judge ordered her to leave the country in September, a local church opened its doors to grant her public sanctuary while she appeals the decision. Photo: Eze Amos
Granting sanctuary
Chavalan-Sut accepted an interview request, but because her case is pending, she can’t talk much about it. She says she’s thankful for the church and community for being so open to her staying for a while.
“Well, from the beginning, the first days weren’t very easy,” she says, while sitting on a couch in the basement of the church. Organ and trumpet music from upstairs spills into the room. “I’ve always been a hard-working person. I need to find something to occupy my time.”
As she waits for her next hearing, which hasn’t been scheduled, she’s been studying English—her fourth language—reading, talking to God, and knitting purses, for which she’s currently accepting donations. She says she’ll send the money back to her four children in Guatemala to buy them food, clothes, and school supplies.
When asked to describe ICE, she says it has “opened a wound.” Before she took sanctuary, she was afraid that representatives of the federal agency could be anywhere she went.
“I want to feel better,” she adds.
Says Pastor Collins, “The story of undocumented people in our community is one that is so easy to overlook if you’re privileged and of a certain social class, and by welcoming Maria in, we’ve not only heard her story, but countless stories from a community of people who are just like her.”
But allowing her to take sanctuary was a tough decision for the congregation of fewer than 100 people. And upon saying yes, they only knew three things.
“One is that even though we didn’t know how it would go, we felt like we had a moral obligation to say yes,” Collins says. And two, they knew it would forever transform the culture of the church. Hosting an undocumented immigrant might be out of some of the members’ comfort zones, “but we’re trying to figure out what it means to be a community where we’re called to serve others rather than be served.”
“And finally,” he says, “We knew we weren’t going to be in it alone.”
Supporters have consistently been in and out of the church for months—”people working every week on this project who would never be caught dead in a church because they’re skeptical of religion or because they’ve been burned by it in the past,” says the pastor.
He talked with his congregation about whether protecting someone who’s been ordered to leave the country should be considered illegal. And they’ve decided it shouldn’t.
“Christians have a moral obligation to speak out when the laws of the countries they’re living in are unjust or creating suffering,” Collins says. “Christians have to walk a delicate line when it comes to the way that we raise our voices because many people are not comfortable having a religious and political conversation, and yet, at the same time, from a moral standpoint, we have certain teachings that are very clear on what the laws of this country should be accomplishing.”
That includes the greater freedoms of people who are fleeing persecution, he says.
It’s the same spirit that has motivated a small group of local clergy and attorneys to travel to the U.S./Mexico border to meet the thousands of asylum-seeking men, women, and children traveling there from Honduras—the “migrant caravan” repeatedly demonized by Trump. They are joining other advocates from across the country who are heading to the border to provide humanitarian assistance, and help migrants understand their legal rights.
“When people are hurting, when people are wailing, we are called to be with them,” says the Reverend Brittany Caine-Conley, a local organizer with Congregate Charlottesville, who is joining the group at the border. “These asylum-seekers are desperate to live and we, as people of faith, should do everything in our power to assist them. To welcome the stranger is one of our greatest and most consistent religious commandments.”
Chavalan-Sut follows these stories from her sanctuary, and is paying close attention to the migrant caravan. She says those taking that journey are suffering from hunger, sickness, and extreme heat or cold. “And the only thing that’s left is just to keep going forward and to fight and to struggle to survive.”
“In order to be able to understand this, you have to put yourself in the other person’s shoes,” the Guatemalan refugee adds. “It’s not easy. You leave your country because you come to the point where there’s no other way forward.”
“[You’re] searching for another place where you can just live.”
Developer Justin Shimp wants to build a nine-acre urban farm and residential complex on a city floodplain, which worries some local residents. Photo by Stephen Barling
When Hurricane Camille dumped 10 inches of rain on Charlottesville in August 1969, folks were spotted rowing their boats up and down Nassau Street.
Now, developer Justin Shimp has proposed to build an urban farm and residential complex on the same floodplain. The project, called Hogwaller Farm, is in compliance with the city’s safety and environmental guidelines. But when Shimp went before the city’s planning commission December 11 to request the special-use permit and zoning change he needs to build it, the commission voted 3-2 against it. City Council will make the final call next year.
Shimp’s nine-acre development, which includes two multi-story apartment buildings, a greenhouse, a farmstand, and farmland, would straddle Charlottesville and Albemarle. The residential buildings and structures would be on the city’s side, with the county’s land saved for agricultural use. This is likely because Albemarle does not allow residential development in the floodplain.
The dangers of building in such an area are well-documented. A November 29 article in Slate, titled “How We Built Our Way into an Urban Flooding Epidemic,” says the country has seen approximately 3,600 instances of urban flooding over the past 25 years, or about one every two to three days. And it’s largely a result of man-made landscapes of asphalt, concrete, and iron.
“If you fill in a floodplain, the water is going to be pushed on somebody else,” says Kimber Hawkey, a community member who has advocated against the approval of Hogwaller Farm for mostly environmental reasons.
City floodplain administrator Tony Edwards says the city now receives between five and 10 applications to build on the floodplain each year, because that’s where the available land is. The city generally approves these as long as developers meet certain requirements meant to minimize the risk.
Shimp, as he told the planning commission, has already met the city’s requirements by demonstrating his project won’t raise flood elevations or cause erosion. He’ll use compacted soil that he excavates, or “native soil from the area,” he says.
The developer has had a fill permit for about a year, and he’s only recently started to hear any opposition to it, he adds.
“The floodplain thing never really came up,” Shimp says, adding that neighbors were previously “very concerned” about the potential for existing contaminated soils on his site.
“I spent a couple thousand bucks doing soil tests,” he says. The lab results came back clean, except for one test near the drainage output, which returned higher levels of hydrocarbons. Shimp says he’ll run more tests at that location before growing any vegetables there.
Community members are also concerned about the impact new development could have on nearby Moores Creek, which is already considered “impaired” by the city. The marshy Hogwaller site has long acted as a natural sponge and filter, which absorbs stormwater runoff and cleans it before it enters the creek, and eventually, the Rivanna River.
For this reason, Hawkey says the construction of Hogwaller Farm won’t jive with the city’s comprehensive plan, which has specific goals of protecting the riverine system and water quality, and managing stormwater runoff.
While planning commissioner Lyle Solla-Yates says the development would go against a land-use map (which he says is outdated), it does address a number of needs discussed in the plan’s housing chapter and an updated housing needs assessment “that we are not succeeding at.”
Hogwaller Farm’s apartments will include three units—10 percent of the total—of designated affordable housing. Shimp is requesting a rezoning from residential to highway corridor, because that’s the only type of zoning that would allow him to build a greenhouse. And he’ll need a special-use permit to build the apartments.
“Three units is not really gonna move the needle on the affordable housing crisis,” commissioner Taneia Dowell said at the meeting.
While Dowell voted against recommending Hogwaller Farm, Solla-Yates was one of the two commissioners in favor of it. He says city planners get “very few” opportunities to use special-use permits, and though they don’t get much housing out of issuing them, it’s one of the only tools they have for building affordable housing units.
“I know there are people in the city who have real concerns with projects like this in the floodplain, but we are out of land and out of options,” says Solla-Yates. “If we can’t use the tools we have, and we don’t have new tools, our problems will get even worse.”
Environmental review has been a priority for council for years, and the city is “amazingly well-staffed” for it, according to Solla-Yates.
“We have the resources to do floodplain development safely and responsibly,” he adds. “We paid for that, but if we don’t trust our staff to carry through we are wasting that public investment at a time when every dollar counts.”
