Author: Scott Weaver

As any Comcast cable subscriber who regularly tunes in to Channel 10 knows, city meetings can rise to the stuff of Shakespeare—except that everybody involved doesn’t die at the end. Well, get ready for more prime-time city drama. The Charlottesville City Council is looking at the possibility of televising even more of its meetings.

City Council meetings are broadcast live every first and third Monday night. Councilors recently heard a report from the city’s director of communications, Ric Barrick. The report stemmed from complaints the city received about the cable and Internet service (or lack thereof) from Comcast.

The city has an agreement with Comcast that runs until December 31, 2013. In the staff report, the city found that the number of calls to City Hall regarding service have fallen in the past two years. According to Paul Comes, a director of public affairs for Comcast, the company has spent $19 million to upgrade its system in the Charlottesville area to a one-gigahertz machine of TV entertainment, online research, and of course, pornography. Comcast says that it is the only system in the state with this much capacity.

But that didn’t keep councilors from requesting access to public complaints of service, which the contract stipulates is their right. They also expressed interest in upping public access channels to six from the three the city currently has.

And while Councilor Kendra Hamilton said she was happy with her basic Comcast package (rumor is she’s more of a reader), Kevin Lynch inquired about the possibly of creating a new package of channels for households with young children, preferably one where tots can watch the Discovery Channel in wide-eyed awe without the temptation of flipping over to VH1 to see "I Love New York" contestants spitting/cursing/choking on or at each other when they’re not rubbing up on the show’s star.

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The court date for the city man who was hit by an Albemarle Police car while crossing the street in his wheelchair—and then ticketed—has been moved to January 3. Gerry Mitchell appeared in Charlottesville General District Court on the morning of December 6, only to learn that the court had issued a continuance of his case.

Mitchell, a local painter, was hit while crossing W. Main Street where it intersects Fourth Street. The police car, which was turning left, hit him in the back, knocking him out of his wheelchair. He was taken to the UVA hospital, where he says city police informed him that he was being issued a ticket.

Gerry Mitchell says he was originally ticketed for failing to yield to a pedestrian. "So I failed to yield to myself," he says, "because I was the only one in the crosswalk."

That ticket, says Mitchell, was for failing to yield to a pedestrian, though he was alone in the crosswalk. (The intersection is in the city jurisdiction.)

"So I failed to yield to myself," he says, "because I was the only one in the crosswalk."
The charge, he learned when he got to court December 6, had been changed to failing to obey a pedestrian crossing signal.

His interaction with city police, Mitchell says, has been very frustrating. After he was hit, multiple officers arrived at the scene.

"I looked up and there was a sea of officers around us, eight or nine people," he says. "I couldn’t believe there was so many police there."

According to Ric Barrick, director of communications for the city, when county police are involved in incidences like traffic accidents, city police respond and the county officers are considered civilians.

When a witness to the accident tried to give Mitchell his contact information, Mitchell says that a city officer took the witness’s card away.

"He handed it to me, put it in my hand, and the police officer grabbed it out of my hand," he says. "It was like a struggle."

As he was taken to the hospital, his wheelchair was moved to the nearby grocery store, Feast. At the hospital, Mitchell says he asked the police officer how he would get home. The officer, according to Mitchell, said he would take him to Feast to pick up his wheelchair. But when Mitchell was released, the officer was not there.

"Then I got really angry," he says. "It was like ‘Godammit, they ran over me, damaged my wheelchair. I could have been killed. And they don’t have the decency to give me at least a lift.’"

Barrick declined to comment on the incident because it is still a pending legal matter. But he says if Mitchell has complaints about police treatment, he should file a formal complaint with the department. Those complaints are then investigated by the internal affairs unit of the police department.

As Mitchell awaits his January 3 court date, he is working on a show that will begin next month at Mudhouse. His right shoulder was fractured in the incident, and he is left trying to figure out how to complete the rest of the paintings for the show.

"My painting style has changed because I can hardly use my arms now," he says. "And it’s very frustrating because I had half of a show done and now I’m scrambling around, trying to figure out how I can paint because I can’t hold the brush very well. So the figures have all changed a great deal."

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Ronald Powell was sentenced to two years in prison on December 4 for two counts of perjury that stem from testimony he gave during the 2006 trial for the murder of his then 18-year-old girlfriend, Azlee Hickman. In that trial, Powell testified that he had been in the room when his friend William Marshall strangled Hickman, contradicting earlier testimony he had given during a preliminary hearing.

Early in the morning of March 13, 2004, Hickman was found dead from asphyxiation in the Carlton Avenue trailer that she shared with Powell, laying just feet from her sleeping infant daughter. Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman argued that Marshall, who had been out drinking that night with Powell in violation of an earlier probation, killed Hickman when she threatened to report Marshall.

Powell and his then-teenage daughter, Heather, testified against Marshall, whose DNA was found under Hickman’s fingernails. But Chapman struggled with unreliable witnesses. After the 12-person jury split with five wanting to convict Marshall, Judge Edward Hogshire declared a mistrial.

Chapman decided after the mistrial that he couldn’t prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, due in large part to the unreliable testimony of all the material witnesses. Instead of retrying Marshall, in 2006 Chapman reached a plea bargain with the defendant in which Marshall pleaded guilty to accessory. The deal, for which Marshall got 12 months on the misdemeanor charge, meant that prosecutors could not try Marshall for Hickman’s murder.

Chapman says now that he believes Marshall was the killer.

"We believe that we put on trial the person who killed Azlee Hickman," he says. "But we’ve come to acknowledge that we’re not able to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt."

Powell is no longer a suspect in the killing. Chapman says no further charges will likely come out of the case.

"I don’t know of any that we could seek," he says.

The biggest obstacle to getting a murder conviction, according to Chapman, was the unreliable testimony of Ronald and Heather Powell and Marshall himself. When police arrested them, he says, they gave no "obvious and clear" information that would have lead police to "start the investigation down a path that would have led to a better result," Chapman says.

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After the December 3 City Council meeting, Charlottesville Chief of Police Tim Longo stood outside the chamber talking to a woman who expressed her support for Longo’s plan to install closed circuit TV cameras on and around the Downtown Mall. Minutes before, it appeared that councilors were close to killing that plan, which would cost roughly $300,000. But a last-minute revision to the system, proposed by Councilor Kevin Lynch, kept it alive, albeit in a different form.

"The outcome was better than what looked like was going to come out of the meeting [on Mall security cameras]," says Police Chief Tim Longo.

Councilors voted 4-1 to let Longo request bids for a camera system that, unlike the original, does not feed into a centralized system. Instead, Council approved a plan for individual cameras that could be moved between different locations as their use dictated. Mayor David Brown was the only councilor to vote against the revised plan.

Longo calls the plan "something I can work with."

"The outcome was better than what looked like was going to come out of the meeting," says Longo. "We can go to venders and say, ‘Here’s our limitations,’ and see what they can fit into that."

Longo says that the major disadvantage for the police of such a system is its inefficiency. Instead of going to a central location to retrieve data from a certain camera, police would have to access each camera individually—sometimes via ladder.

Despite vocal support from the public—many of them Mall business owners, some of whom painted a questionably bleak picture of a crime-ridden Downtown—councilors first appeared ready to deny Longo’s proposal to install 30 high-resolution cameras with the ability to zoom, pan and tilt on and around the Mall.

Dave Norris, who would go on to second the motion to approve the revised plan, questioned whether businesses could install their own cameras for safety. In fact, Longo pointed out that Virginia National Bank (VNB), which has a branch on the Mall, offered to pay for its own camera.

"When we heard that the city might be entertaining a project of some cameras for the outside Mall," says VNB President Glenn Rust, "we said if they needed a camera by our area, we would gladly donate it to the city."

Norris also asked Longo to address the question of a surveillance slippery slope. What’s to keep the city, he asked, from eventually putting cameras in all of its neighborhoods? Though Lynch sided with the use of cameras, he agreed with Norris that centralizing data goes down that slippery slope.

"I see too many problems with bringing all [data] into one place," he said.

Councilors apparently were more comfortable with the decentralized system that Lynch suggested, though Brown voted against the plan.

"I’m just personally uneasy with public surveillance," he says. "It’s not something that makes me feel comfortable moving forward with. I don’t want to see the United States become sort of a Britain, where there are cameras everywhere. Because I don’t see any clear benefit, I don’t really want to move forward with it."

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As officials from the state, city, county, UVA and FEMA sat at tables in fleeces and jackets, munching on potato chips, a woman stood up and said, "Today is May 15. The event has already happened." Behind was a screen with the words "Flood 2007 Table Top Exercise" projected across it.

The event in question wasn’t your typical disaster: Woolen Mills had been flooded, a dam had burst, a propane tanker had hit Free Bridge and exploded. Reports of a tornado touching down at UVA had yet to be confirmed. But then the situation grew grim: UVA’s graduation was scheduled for that week. Roughly 30,000 extra people were in town.

The event itself was purely hypothetical, an exercise of the Charlottesville Area Emergency Preparedness Initiative. And anyhow, the area emergency operation center had already handled the response operations back in May (the actual month of May, not the disastrous, hypothetical month currently in front of officials).

"Our response is over, and now we’re in to the recovery mode," said Marge Thomas, the area’s Emergency Management Coordinator, as she stood outside the room in UVA’s Zehmer Hall where area officials were taking their lunch breaks. "It’s like what’s going on still in Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. They’re still recovering, and it’s very expensive."

The room was dotted with officials from various area agencies: police departments, city managers, city parks, UVA facilities management and the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority. They were being briefed on the aftermath of the hypothetical storm.

There was good news: No loss of life was reported from the flooding. But hospitals were reporting injuries due to everyday clean up and citizens were still boiling water.

Officials were presented with two different situations to work with, one that occurs five days after the storm, another that looks at the area after 10 days. According to Thomas, officials must deal with issues such as sheltering those without housing, cleaning up debris from the flood and assessing property damage. In looking at a disaster like this before it happens, area officials hope to find and fix potential problems before they discover them during a disaster.

The exercise is to "identify areas where we can work together to mitigate hazards and things that don’t work well," says Marge Sidebottom, UVA’s emergency preparedness director. "I’ll also be looking to see what impact this has with other communities we work with fairly regularly, like Martha Jefferson [Hospital]. I’m not sure how this would impact them and what that would do with the health system in terms of response."

As the briefing went on, the next slide looked at the media situation. One problem that officials were having—hypothetically, mind you—was "some issues with creating news" as the media ran emotional stories that put extra pressure on officials.

Roughly two minutes after that slide, the reporters in the room—the real media—were told that their time observing the program was up.

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As you’re hopping into your car, gearing up for the holidays, driving every which way to pick out shiny gifts, think about this: According to Robert Hirsch, a past senior energy program advisor for world oil production with Science Application International Corporations, the one resource that provides all those things could soon be in dangerously short supply.

Hirsch delivered a lecture at the UVA School of Engineering and Applied Science about the bleak prospect of "peak oil," the tipping point where the worldwide production of oil starts to fall short of world demand. From that point forward, said Hirsch, the entire world (not to mention all of its economies) is in for some serious trouble.

In the model that Hirsch presented to a roomful of UVA graduate students and professors, once oil production peaks, shortages will increase around the world. These shortages will drive prices up.

According to economists, this wouldn’t be such a huge problem. Using a purely economic model, such a shortage in supply and unusually high prices are nearly always negated by a surplus introduced into a market starved for product. One little problem, said Hirsch. Oil is a finite resource, and there won’t be any of it to put into the market to restore balance.

"Many economists," said Hirsch, "just don’t get it."

Opponents of peak oil write it off as a theory. To do so is misguided, said Hirsch.

He pointed out that while transportation gets a large share of attention when it comes to oil use, 99 percent of all lubricants depend on oil, as do 95 percent of all goods in stores and 99 percent of all food production.

"Peak oil is not a ‘theory,’" he said. "This is an actuality. We’ve been using much more than we’ve been adding in the way of reserves."

Predictions of when oil will peak vary widely. The International Energy Agency (IEA) forecasts that oil production will peak after 2030—one of the most conservative estimates. T. Boone Pickens, who at one time ran the U.S.’s largest independent oil company, has said that oil had already peaked two years ago.

Colin Campbell and Chris Skrebrowski of the federal Energy Information Administration (EIA) claim that spare oil production capacity will disappear around 2010-2012, Hirsch said.

So, we’re all dead, or if not dead, then running around in a postapocalyptic world with hunting knifes in our teeth looking for rusting cans of corn, right? Well, maybe not, said Hirsch.

He is advocating "crash programs" such as those used by the country during World War II to mitigate the effects of worldwide oil shortages. These include increasing fuel efficiency, using more unconventional (or "heavy") oil, moving forward with gas-to-liquid fuel technology and using enhanced oil recovery methods such as steam.

Hirsch said he sees such mitigation as a sort of temporary bridge to a more sustainable fuel in the future. As it stands now, that future is bleak according to those looking at the peak of oil production. The IEA has said that "we are on a course for an energy system that will evolve from crisis to crisis."

As far as finding a solution, Hirsh said, "we may be too late."

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