More features: Caught! How Thomasine Wilson got trapped in the payday lending cycle Advance America’s pocketbook The numbers on America’s biggest payday lender Leading the lending fight Virginia Organizing Project has headed the charge against predatory practices Q: Why go to a payday lender? A: Because there aren’t better options You call this reform? Legislation moves interest rates from bad to worse

Thomasine Wilson went to a payday lender to avoid dinging her credit. She was saving to purchase a home. Most payday lenders operate independent of credit reports, but your ability to borrow money from more conventional lenders depends on your credit score.

Thanks to the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act of 2003 [PDF], you’re guaranteed one free credit report from each of the three national credit bureaus every 12 months. And if you’re not checking your credit reports, you should be. Aside from knowing your credit before you apply for a loan or make a big purchase, it’s a good way to guard against identity theft.

There’s only one place to get your free annual credit report. But there are lots of impostors.

There are three main credit bureaus that report on your credit: TransUnion, Experian and Equifax. These are the companies that lenders and businesses are checking when you apply for credit. Your credit report contains the information that will affect whether you get a loan or line of credit and how much it’s going to cost you to borrow that money.

While you’re entitled to one free report a year from each bureau, the process of getting these reports is a little murkier than it should be. The federal government authorizes only one place to get your report—www.annualcreditreport.com. Unfortunately, there are a lot of impostor sites.

Other websites, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), claim to offer free “credit reports,” “credit scores” or “credit monitoring.” Many times they will set up cyber shop just a mistyped letter away from www.annualcreditreport.com in hopes that a typo will redirect unsuspecting customers their way. Be careful, the FTC warns. Some of these “free” products come with strings attached, ask you to give them credit card information or collect your personal information.

You can also request your credit report over the phone by calling 1-877-322-8228. If both of those options make you uneasy, you’re also able to request a report by mail by going to the website and downloading a printable request form.

More features: Caught! How Thomasine Wilson got trapped in the payday lending cycle Advance America’s pocketbook The numbers on America’s biggest payday lender Know the score Credit reports 101 Q: Why go to a payday lender? A: Because there aren’t better options You call this reform? Legislation moves interest rates from bad to worse

Much of the credit for mobilizing legislators and community leaders against payday lending goes to the Virginia Organizing Project (VOP), which has been out front on the issue of payday lending for years. After seeing its efforts to cap loans fail in the last Assembly session, VOP used a wide range of activities to make citizens aware of predatory lending practices and lobby Richmond legislators.

VOP volunteers spent the summer canvassing local neighborhoods, raising awareness about payday lending and urging people to ask their state senators and delegates to cap loans. Along with presentations to community groups, VOP also held around a dozen demonstrations statewide outside payday lending centers. VOP organized two of those demonstrations in Charlottesville.

The group’s efforts extended to Richmond, where VOP was party to more than 60 constituent meetings with legislators.

Joe Szakos, the executive director of VOP, says the legislation passed by the General Assembly is a “slight improvement in the system, but there is more work to be done.”

VOP still hopes, says Szakos, that Governor Tim Kaine will hold off on signing the bill until some changes can be made to give it more teeth. Szakos says that more credit unions are coming out with short-term loans, and faith communities are also stepping in to fill that need.

Meanwhile, VOP is working to address other predatory lending practices such as car title loans and what Szakos called the “secondary mortgage lending disaster.”

“There’s no fine lines,” he says. “To us, it’s the whole context of what happens to people when they get kicked around economically. How do we make life better?”

The fact that two members of the Virginia Freedom of Information Advisory Council voted to keep the names of anonymous donors to UVA from public eyes could mean a couple things. Since both Senator Edward Houck and Delegate Morgan Griffith know the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) so well, they could have seen nothing wrong with exempting UVA, a public institution, from FOIA requests for names of anonymous donors.

Or it could be a sign of just how much pull UVA has in Richmond. Jennifer Perkins, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, is leaning toward the latter.

“It was clear when you had former FOIA champions turning a blind eye to the issue that, clearly, this was something people made a decision on for reasons other than freedom of information,” she says.

This session, the General Assembly passed two identical bills that exempt UVA from making public the names of donors who give to the school anonymously. Both bills passed unanimously in the Senate. They faced their only opposition in the House, where three delegates voted against one and six delegates voted against the other.

UVA is one of the few universities in the state that still keeps most of its donor information public. Anonymous donors make up just 1.5 percent of all donors, but, says UVA spokesperson Carol Wood, of the $1.45 billion UVA has raised in its $3 billion capital campaign, anonymous donors have contributed $75 million.

“What we began hearing from our donors is that many of them might not have made these gifts without the benefit of anonymity,” says Wood. That anonymity was challenged when The Daily Progress submitted a FOIA request for a copy of the UVA fundraising database, which contains not only names but personal information on each donor, sometimes down to college records, health status or marital history.

Naturally, UVA was loathe to give up this info, but officials also didn’t want to disclose the names of anonymous donors. According to Perkins, opponents of the legislation weren’t interested in the personal information—they only wanted to be able to know the names.

Perkins echoes the objections of Delegate Terrie Suit—who voted against both bills—in questioning UVA transparency when it comes to vendors.

“If you have someone who wants to do a contract with the University,” says Perkins, “we’ll not be able to know if they also donated a bunch of money and helped that process along.”

Wood points to internal checks and balances within UVA that would guarantee everything is on the up-and-up, even if there isn’t outside verification.

“We would never risk the reputation of the University by allowing a donor to dictate inappropriate decisions,” she says. “We would never do that because that would hurt the University.”

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According to a 2005 study, female students at UVA experienced “high rates” of sexual violence. Sociology researchers Jacqueline Chevalier and Christopher Einolf found that among a sample of 750 senior women, 17.6 percent were victims of rape, 10.8 percent were victims of attempted rape and 34.3 percent were victims of unwilling sexual contact.

But if one is to believe a February 24 Op-Ed piece in the Los Angeles Times by conservative writer Heather Mac Donald, universities like UVA are manufacturing what she called a “campus rape crisis.” She claims that schools inflate the number of rapes, a crime typically viewed as one of the most underreported.

Mac Donald took aim at a national number, known as the “one in four” statistic, which claims that around 25 percent of college women will be victims of rape or attempted rape by the end of their college years. “Such a crime wave…would require nothing less than a state of emergency.” She went on to decry what she called the “campus rape industry”—mainly schools’ sexual assault support systems—and to walk a fine line between blaming assaults on booze and short skirts and retaining some sort of rational credibility.

UVA senior Patrick Cronin—a member of UVA’s One In Four, an all-male sexual assault education group—published his own Op-Ed piece in the L.A. Times on March 4, calling Mac Donald’s piece “damaging and demeaning.”

28.4 The percentage of UVA women who identified themselves as victims of rape or attempted rape in a 2005 study of 750 seniors.

“Heather Mac Donald made a lot of broad statements and lumped a lot of people into that category that don’t belong there,” Cronin says. “The people who act immorally are the people who assault others. Period. Full stop.”

Walker Thornton, the executive director of Charlottesville’s Sexual Assault Resources Agency, asks why some people continue to place the blame of a sexual assault on the victim. She pointed to recently sentenced serial rapist Nathan Antonio Washington’s statement, “I thought I was good until I was tempted,” as an example of how blame for rape is shifted from rapist to victim.

“I really don’t know where we came to the place of saying, ‘It is the women’s burden,’” she says. “I mean, you could even go back to the Bible. …Nathan Washington saying, ‘I was tempted,’ that goes back to that whole idea of Eve tempted Adam, and therefore men are not responsible for their actions.”

Cronin says that while working at UVA, he runs into resistance characterized by Mac Donald’s piece. A quick Internet search shows sundry websites that have picked up Mac Donald’s piece as proof of a false crisis manufactured by the “campus rape industry.” Like Mac Donald’s piece, there is a lot of ugliness couched in the language of cool logic and hard statistics, leading one to wonder: Where is this resistance coming from?

“For someone who’s never talked to someone who’s been assaulted, particularly someone who’s been assaulted by a friend or boyfriend or an RA or any kind of acquaintance…[she] can be very difficult to believe,” says Cronin, who got involved in this issue in high school after seeing things happening to his friends. “It’s really hard to look at a kid next to you and say, ‘This person may have acquaintance-raped someone.’

“You don’t feel like you’re in happy, fun college land with that reality. And I think it’s therefore very understandable for someone to reject that notion, because it’s easier to deny it than accept it and say, ‘What can I do about it?’”

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It’s hard to compete with Flannery O’Connor. Even if it is just a letter to a librarian, bitching about critics and lamenting the brain-dead old ladies that populate her town, as up-and-coming writers go, “O’Connor” is never a name you want to follow in a journal.

But for all the offerings of the latest Meridian, O’Connor’s letter, found in a section of the UVA literary journal called “Lost Classic,” sets standards of wit and intimacy with the reader that, unfortunately, many of the modern-day offerings fail to live up to in a large way. Critics of MFA programs like to point out that the piles of paper graduate writing students pump out are, if technically proficient, lacking in certain qualities of discovery and a more visceral communion with the reader. To say this a different way, a lot of writers can carry a well-observed detail for three pages without telling a goddamn story.

What most of the short stories in the latest issue of Meridian lack in character or exploration of emotion, they make up for in atmosphere and voice. This, however, is not an even trade. Daniel Hoyt’s short story “Big Springs” is not quite flash fiction—it runs three-and-a-half pages—but not long enough to build any tension to play with. Like most of the fiction here, it is so aware of itself as a story that it puts the reader at such a great distance that it is hard to connect with not only the characters and the first-person narrator, but the voice and tone of the story.

“We didn’t so much make love as jerry-rig it,” says the narrator. “Staple it together. Spit on it and add friction.” This rhetorical jump doesn’t obscure the writer and inform the character; it does the opposite.

Tyler Stoddard Smith has the bad luck of having an epistolary short story appear in the same issue as the O’Connor letter. “War is a Dish Best Served Haute” is a series of letters between the head chefs of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Hitler as World War II rages on. It’s the type of story that starts with a wonderful idea but goes absolutely nowhere, relying on the juxtaposition of haute cuisine talk and total war for heavily manufactured absurdity that grows old fast. The two chefs, separate characters the writer would have us believe, sound an awful lot alike in their letters.

But Maryse Meijer’s story “Home” hums along with little commentary by the author, and this straight-ahead style puts the two main characters, a young woman and an older man in a confusing and semi-threatening new relationship, starkly in front of the reader. The pull of the story, and there is plenty, comes not from overt writerly devices but from the tension that Meijer is able to create with pinpoint description, the right word and the right moment and, most importantly, knowledge of and sympathy for both characters.

In an issue so prose-heavy, it’s easy to overlook the poetry, so I’ll do just that. But Jenny Gillespie’s poem “Driving Back with No Map” bears mentioning. She wrings enormous amounts of energy and tension from short lines and breaks at both natural and surprising grammatical places. The best poems here are the quietest, like Jolee G. Passerini’s “After Eleven Years.”

Like most journals, there are one or two pieces that make picking up Meridian worth the effort. Meijer’s story is one. David McGlynn’s meditation on competitive swimming is another. The rest leaves one to wonder what the editors value in writing—the Kabuki-like plume of writers writing to write, or writers grabbing the reader by the collar with something to say.

After 10 years and seven violent sexual attacks that had been linked to him, Nathan Antonio Washington stood up in Charlottesville Circuit Court in his striped jail uniform and offered apologies to his family, his victims and the community he had kept on edge for nearly a decade.

Nathan Antonio Washington will serve four life sentences.

Previous coverage: Washington gets four life terms Albemarle man pleads guilty in serial rapist cases Serial rape suspect linked to a third attack DNA match made to 1997 Waynesboro motel assault Grand jury indicts Washington City expects to request additional charges in other area attacks Rapist suspect tried in the media Washington linked to serial rapes in varying degrees of guilt County man arrested in two sexual attacks Local media offer conflicting reports, link arrest to serial rapist

“I didn’t mean for these things to happen the way they did,” he said. “I accept my punishment, life in jail—” And here, Washington, a married father of four, caught his slip: “—in prison,” he said, clearly emotional. “I accept that.”

On February 26, Washington was handed sentences from the city and county that will effectively lock him up for the rest of his life. As part of a plea agreement that spared his victims the ordeal of appearing in court, Washington received four consecutive life sentences for four attacks in the city, plus 20 more years for a breaking and entering charge in the county.

“The sentencing in these cases close a chapter of devastation that this community has never seen before,” said city Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman in court. “We certainly won’t see it again from this man.”

Before Washington was sentenced, Chapman read from one of the two victim-impact statements. “I never sleep in the dark,” wrote one of Washington’s victims. “I never go outside alone. I feel like I see you everywhere.”

After the sentencing, Chapman said that in the statements, one sees the spectrum of reactions to being sexually assaulted.

“Some have coped with their victimization in a way that leaves them remarkably healthy after a period of five or more years,” he said. “Other people never recover. Ever. They’re devastated. And that’s true for one of our victims. She’ll never recover from this.”

The day after Washington’s sentencing, the Thomas Jefferson Area Crime Stoppers announced that it would give a $60,000 award to a person whose tip proved instrumental in linking Washington to the serial rapist’s seven attacks. It was the largest award that the local Crime Stoppers has given to one person, said treasurer Fred Payne.

“Until this tip, things didn’t come together,” said Payne. “There was a lot of really excellent police work that went on after it.”

Crime Stoppers does not identify recipients of awards. But Payne did say that this recipient was able to recognize Washington and give police the license plate number of the car he was driving. At the December plea hearing, prosecutors said that an Albemarle County woman who Washington sexually assaulted in 2004 was able to get the license plate number.

As part of the plea agreement, city and county police investigators interviewed Washington regarding any unsolved assaults of the same or lesser magnitude. Lt. Greg Jenkins of the Albemarle Police Department declined to say how many open cases they are looking at in light of information Washington may have provided.

“We are still evaluating information from that particular interview,” he said. “We’re going to see how that interview impacts other cases that might be pending.”

Even after Washington’s sentencing, the fallout from the serial rapist case continues. On February 20, U.S. District Judge Norman K. Moon dismissed a lawsuit filed by Larry Monroe against the city, Police Chief Tim Longo and Officer James Mooney. Originally filed in 2004, Monroe claimed police violated his constitutional rights by asking him to submit to a cheek-swab DNA test as part of a controversial police effort to catch the serial rapist. City police approached nearly 190 African-American men in what Monroe’s lawyers argued was a “virtual dragnet of black males.”

In October 2007, Moon shot down Monroe’s efforts to certify his lawsuit as class action. One of Monroe’s attorneys, Debbie Wyatt, says that they asked Moon to dismiss the lawsuit, which contained only a secondary claim, so that they could move forward with an appeal of the claims that matter the most to Monroe, including the class action certification.

“We decided to forgo holding up this case to go to trial on a claim that was secondary to us,” says Wyatt. “So we will go ahead and appeal to get a ruling on the ones that matter. There was no ruling against us. We asked that the claim be dismissed.”

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As the county grows, building out its open land with retail, residential and mixed-use projects like Hollymead Town Center and Albemarle Place, small local businesses are feeling the downside of development and getting pushed out of the county. According to the county’s Light Industrial Demand Analysis, there are just 111 vacant acres that are zoned for light industrial use, space that is essential for the service industry, whether it be HVAC contractors or plumbing supply companies.

“What I think is happening, as people are finding it difficult to find that kind of space, reasonably priced, they are going out into the outlying areas where such space is less expensive and more easy to find,” says county Supervisor Dennis Rooker. “Small businesses in the county are finding it difficult to find light industrial zoned property that is reasonably priced.”

Since 2004, nine businesses have been turned away from locating in Albemarle County because of this lack, according to the demand analysis, among them Carter Machinery and two local biotech companies. Rooker says that two factors have compounded the county’s lack of light industrial space: The county has rezoned some parcels out of the designation and built out others.

The zoning designation itself is a contributing factor. Office buildings fall under light industrial zoning and generate more money per square foot than the warehouse space the county needs.

“There is a big demand here for office,” Rooker says. “And so there’s an alternate use for which there is a demand, that is generally a high-price use.”

At the February 13 Board meeting, county staff recommended increasing the available land for local business expansion, with an emphasis on light industrial zoning. That leaves the Board with the problem of finding land for small business use in a time when county land is at a premium in both amount and price.

Rooker brought up the idea of downzoning existing light industrial property to take out the office space use of the designation. Such a plan might bring down the price of light industrial land, making it more affordable to small businesses, but it was met with skepticism at the Board meeting.

“Of course,” says Rooker with a little laugh, “the people that own that kind of property aren’t going to be happy about that.”

At the February 21 Planning and Coordination Council meeting between city, county and UVA officials, Supervisor Ken Boyd floated the idea that the county might use some of UVA’s Blue Ridge property for buildings that would serve small businesses. UVA Executive Vice President Leonard Sandridge seemed less than enthused, telling Boyd that he would look into it.

Light industrial land uses

In case you don’t have it memorized

Compounding drugs and biological products

Manufacturing

Major publishing

Research and development

Technical or scientific education facilities

Assembly

Contractor’s office and storage yard

Business and professional office buildings

Warehousing

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