C-VILLE Weekly

Q: Ace, to what extent can someone take the law into their own hands? Are citizen’s arrests or citations legal in Virginia? Can I bust someone for littering or parking in the fire lane if they are returning videos or going to the liquor store? What about more serious crimes when you know the police will not act as quickly?—Goober from Mayberry

A: “There’s no such thing as citizen’s arrest,” Charlottesville Police Sgt. David Jones tells Ace. “Someone’s been watching too much ‘Mayberry.’” Alrighty, then. But his blunt answer left Ace wondering. Certainly there must be something to the idea of citizen’s arrests, as most people have heard of them. Just look at pop culture: In “The Andy Griffith Show,” a notable episode featured Don Knotts’ off-duty Deputy Barney Fife busting Jim Nabors’ Gomer Pyle for pulling an illegal U-turn, and Pyle returning the favor later screaming “Citizen’s arrest!” In the movie Coming to America, Eddie Murphy pulled a citizen’s arrest after busting a punk trying to rob the MacDowell’s fast food store. And who could forget Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol, in which everyday folks were encouraged to take part in the war on crime? Better yet, maybe we should all try to erase that from our collective memories.

A quick search of the Internet offers plenty of info on the legality of citizen’s arrests—but good luck finding any kind of consensus. The website constitution.org features an article by constitutional attorney David C. Grossack that traces the concept from medieval England to the American legal tradition. He argues citizen’s arrests are protected under the Ninth Amendment right of self-preservation, but that the statute varies per state.

A search of the State of Virginia’s website (virginia.gov) turns up a ruling from a 2003 Circuit Court of Chesterfield County case in which Judge T.J. Hauler ruled that a citizen’s arrest was legally performed in the stopping of a suspected drunk driver. (It’s important to point out, though, that the arresting individual was a plain-clothed, off-duty cop in a civilian car.)

So what’s the deal? Ace will level with you, Goober: There’s no simple answer. The City police say no, the Legal Aid Justice Center didn’t know, and a call Ace put in to the State police in Appomattox ended with a confused officer saying, “It’s complicated.”

That policeman, who would not give Ace his name, reminded Ace that the word “cop” derives from “citizens on patrol” (there’s that Police Academy reference again!), and that officers are just citizens with greater authority granted by the State Code. So if any citizen sees a crime being committed, he can technically get involved. But there are a variety of legal issues—warrants, magistrates, lawsuits, etc.—that need to be considered, and can end up making the cops’ jobs and the do-gooder’s life incredibly complicated.

Ace’s advice? If you see someone breakin’ the law, get on your cellphone or hoof it to the police station. We all appreciate your wanting to do the right thing, but when it comes to crime it’s best to leave it to the professionals. Unless you live in Mayberry, of course.

Architecture and politics. To anyone acquainted with Charlottesville’s history, it’s a familiar combination. In 1996, Maurice Cox joined the ranks of those who wed the two disciplines in the name of the greater good. That’s the year Cox, an architect and UVA professor, was first elected to City Council. Last July, Cox, who is now 43, added the title Mayor to his accomplishments, chosen by his peers on the five-member Council to the two-year position.

Cox and his family moved to Charlottesville in 1993, fatefully taking up residence on Ridge Street in the onetime home of the former president of the NAACP (something Cox did not know when he purchased the house). Like others on Council, Cox’s journey to elected office began in volunteer activism with his neighborhood association, which he says these days is stable and optimistically anticipating the development of the first middle-income housing to go up around Ridge Street in more than a decade.

Although he lives and leads in the shadow of Thomas Jefferson, it was The Duomo, not Monticello, that shaped Cox’s understanding of civic life. Born and educated in New York City, he spent 10 formative years in Florence, Italy, where, Cox says, he worked and learned among architects who “had taken over the planning of cities” and exemplified for him the “perfect marriage of using your discipline to create a better physical environment.”

“Quite frankly, coming back to the States,” he says, “I found there was a contrast to that reality. I thought that if I was going to have some influence and effect some change here, I was going to have to be engaged in the political arena to do it.”

Cox, a devoted bicyclist who is often spotted on West Main Street on his way to or from the University, announced in July that transportation would be at the top of his mayoral agenda. While he has neither veered from that priority nor from his opposition to the Meadowcreek Parkway, he and Council have been busy on other fronts, too, including housing and long-term urban planning. A recent trip to Burlington, Vermont, for instance, has re-energized Council’s plans to replenish Charlottesville’s low- and moderate-income housing stock.

C-VILLE Weekly Editor Cathryn Harding recently talked with Mayor Cox about his agenda for 2003, including his top priorities and how to effectively communicate them to a sometimes-skeptical public. And he pinned down several results that Charlottesvillians can expect to see this year. An edited transcript of that interview follows.

 

Cathryn Harding: Urbanism has been a defining element in your work as an architect and you say it influences the work you do as an elected official. Would you define urbanism in the Charlottesville context? And how does it inform your policy agenda?

Maurice Cox: I’m glad you recognize that there’s a local context for urbanism, that urbanism in Washington, D.C., for instance, would be different than urbanism in Charlottesville. Our Downtown district has a wide variety of scales of architecture and uses, but it’s all somehow anchored by a typical street grid that’s very much in the scale of our City. The typical Charlottesville Downtown block is 200 feet x 200 feet, and that has accommodated everything from a single high-rise building to a library, to shops, to houses. This grid has been around for hundreds of years. The social mix of everything that happens is based on the scale of that grid and the mix of uses that you have there. So we’re very fortunate that we have an ideal example of an urbanism for Charlottesville that works. It’s based on retail on the ground floor, offices and residential above, and tends to vary in height from three stories to nine and 10 stories. The important thing is that it is something that, despite the fact that the grid was picked hundreds of years ago, has been able to change and evolve to the point where it’s the eclectic mix that we enjoy today. The Mall is really an elongated plaza or a square and it sets a different aesthetic that probably cuts back to times when the car was not so predominant in our lives. I think that’s the model that we should try to emulate for new development. Quite frankly, that’s the model that others in the region, like Albemarle County, are trying to emulate as well.

You have talked about your growing awareness during your time in Italy of the intersection of public and political life. How do you get from buildings that are constructed on a grid to political citizenship?

It has to do with that space between the facade of one building and the facade of another building across the street and the social interaction that is created there. In a very simple way, how many times will you walk down the Mall and encounter someone and stop and talk and effectively do business? That’s the way that a physical environment can actually affect the number of times you will encounter someone. Or the fact that there’s an environment that is so tranquil at moments and then so dynamic that in your people watching you want to sit outside and have your meal instead of sit inside.

It’s also incredibly democratic in its basic idea that anyone from somebody who’s got time on their hands all day to sit on a bench to someone who’s there doing a business lunch are mixing in the same place. You just contrast that to the way that a shopping center works. Chance encounters? No way.

You’ve also talked about how, as Mayor, you would put transportation at the top of your agenda. Is that still true, six months into the job?

Yes, the big story in 2003 will be Charlottesville embracing two alternatives that will allow our bus system to run more rapidly and to be a lot more interesting to ride. We’ve been looking for a way to decongest our core in the same way that paving the Downtown Mall decongested Main Street for pedestrians. Now we’re looking at bus rapid transit, which is a concept that has buses operating more like rail transit. They have a very intriguing technology that uses a magnetic force field that guides buses along a designated track. I’m talking about an entirely different fleet that would look more like a fixed rail fleet, but on wheels. Eugene, Oregon is experimenting with this system and they have a similar size population to Charlottesville. The wonderful thing about it is you can implement at a fraction of the cost of rail and yet it sets up the infrastructure so that if, 15 or 20 years from now, you have the population density, you can translate the system easily to rail. It has some of the same appeal that a trolley does.

For better or worse, choice riders want to ride on something that’s a little more novel. So you can get people to ride on the trolley, but you can’t get them to ride on the bus. You can get them to ride on a bus that looks like the rail car, but you can’t get them to ride on the bus. We have to acknowledge that and respond to it.

The transportation piece goes hand in hand with population growth. You’ve got to have levels of density of people living in a place in order to transport them, and then you’ve got to have a place where they shop close enough that they can get there by a quick ride using transit.

Where will the money for this come from?

It’s going to have to be a mix of State and Federal grants. We have a system to renew our transit fleet where the City pays a fraction of the cost. It’s going to take a fair amount of lobbying by our State legislators to look at Charlottesville and Albemarle County as a pilot for this type of alternative transit. It’s not something that we can pay for ourselves.

I think there are positive signs. The governor is advocating the greater use of rail and other transit alternatives.

The first thing, however, is there has to be a public will to say if you are going to grow more densely. In the next 20 years, do you really envision that everyone is going to be moving around in the same way they’re moving today? If the answer is “No,” then we have to make that commitment now for something that may come to fruition five or 10 years down the line. 

In your vision of what the Mayor of Charlottesville does, is he a strong force to shape that public will?

There’s something interesting about the shortness of our political terms and the length of time it actually takes to get anything done. They are not consistent. So either you become a slave to trying to have some immediate success or you simply realize that most of the things that you envision for your community are not going to happen for years to come and all you can do is set the infrastructure in place for it to happen. In order to do that, you can’t make small plans. Nobody gets excited about them; no one gets upset about them. You have to make big plans. In order for the plan to be so compelling that a Council or a community sticks to it for decades, the idea has to be extraordinary.

Often, you’re pointing to things that people can’t see. As a result there’s a lot of misunderstanding and inevitably that turns into controversy. I expect our vision to be controversial, and I expect to work that much harder to persuade people.

And how do you do that?

It’s tough in a community where the players change so frequently, where the citizens change so frequently. The forums change. I think we have a stable appointment with the public every two weeks. Then there is e-mail. You’d be amazed by how many people bring concerns to us electronically. We are determined to get people who are technology savvy to use our website as a way to access information. At this point, you can get everything from minutes going back to the 1980s to the latest economic development plan. It’s an incredible array of information.

I grew up in New York, too, and for me the definition of a mayor, for better or worse, will always be Ed Koch. He might not have been everybody’s cup of tea, but you always knew what he thought about everything. Is it possible in a place like Charlottesville, where we don’t even elect the mayor, to expect that kind of charismatic leadership?

In the model of governance we have, mine is one of five votes. So you have to operate as a member of a team, and it’s very different than someone who has an absolute mandate from the public as an individual.

But we still inevitably have to deal with the fact that there’s a public expectation that the mayor leads. There is a conflict between the public perception of a mayor as the leader and the reality of the mayor as a part of a collaborative team that is trying to build consensus to move forward, always checking if you have the votes.

I understand the benefits of the continuity and stability of the local governance, but, hey, yeah, it’s nerve-wracking for people who need to have a specific spokesperson who can say, “Yes” or “No.”

But on the subject of speaking in a loud, clear voice, these are insecure times, even in Charlottesville. Gun crimes. Unfunded mandates from the State. An understaffed police force. An overflowing jail. A sluggish economy. The collaborative model you describe starts to feel a little weak in that context.

Charlottesville is one of these little pockets of America where the unemployment is low, there are no peaks and valleys and when a recession happens we kind of hum along the middle. With UVA as a main employer, the City is stable in many ways. Even when we have the worse drought in a century, what do the people of Charlottesville do? They roll up their sleeves and cut water consumption. On the brink of disaster, the citizens made it less painful.

You almost have to artificially induce the fact that we have to have a goal and we have to do it in a context where there doesn’t appear to be a big threat. We’re talking about the hard times in the State, but you know what? Charlottesville will be all right. Once again, it’s because of the stability of our economy, the stability of the government here, our Triple-A bond rating, which just talks about how financially sound the place is. I hear what you’re saying about the strong leader, but if you think about when strong leaders come into being they’re around moments of incredible crisis. It may simply be that this environment is not conducive to that kind of leadership because there’s not that kind of panic in the air.

But for some people who can’t afford housing, for instance, or who have crime in their neighborhoods, the idea that Charlottesville is a “World Class City” is just an empty slogan.

We are constantly working and working on this. Part of the attraction of working in a public position in a community of this size is that inevitably no problem appears to be an insolvable crisis. All of them are manageable to the point where you actually believe when you wake up in the morning that you can get out there and solve it.

I have to walk by subsidized housing everyday, and I have to see the guys who are chronically unemployed everyday. That’s my reality check every morning. That problem is staring me in the face, and in my position I have to do something about it. That translates into our support of a social safety net in this community that is extraordinary given that we’re in a conservative state like Virginia. That concern translates into investment to help stabilize subsidized housing. When Charlottesville invested $500,000 in the local acquisition of Garrett Square to make that community stable for the people who live there and who will continue to live there, when we go in and work on neighborhoods like 10^th and Page by helping non-profits to buy up rental units and flip those to increase affordable home ownership, we are improving the quality of life in those neighborhoods.

I believe fundamentally the kind of mixed-use, mixed-income, higher density housing that I’m envisioning is going to create a more equitable community. One reason we’re creating this housing task force, of course, is we’d like to figure out how do you create an ownership opportunity for someone who, for example, makes $35,000 a year? I know a lot of people who make less who would love to buy their apartment. That would be an investment that they’re making and they would be paying real estate taxes—yet another way of contributing to the community.

Only recently have we been hearing that you can’t find a house for less than $150,000 in Charlottesville. So it gives me the impression that we are not too late, and particularly when we’re getting ready to do this rezoning effort that is going to build greater capacity to accommodate our needs.

All of these paths can appear quite overwhelming but the reality is, with the scale of Charlottesville and the amount of social contact that you have with the people who are out there working on these projects, you can’t help but be optimistic. I’ve talked about this kind of civic vibe—a place that creates a climate where people actually think they can get out there and change the world. Charlottesville’s got it.

The issues that you raise regarding the people who are affected by crime, those are the very people who often live in public housing, who we’re looking at ways to elevate their quality of life. The City’s reaction isn’t, “Well, we need 10 more police officers there.” Our reaction is to weed out the social ills that they have to face, and I think that’s a more empowering response.

Other touchpoints for the City are UVA and Albemarle County. What we can expect in terms of the City’s relationship and cooperation with each of those two entities in 2003? Certainly 2002 was not a banner year, for instance, for UVA/City relations, and relations with the County around questions of development always seem strained.

With regard to UVA, I would agree that 2002 was quite a learning experience for all parties. Talk about the challenge of communication! Part of the task I’ve taken on is to try and bridge these two communities. That was one of my initial desires when I ran for Council. I come from a perspective where I actually think the University is of great value to this community. The question is always, How do you acknowledge your interdependence in a way that is supportive of each other? I’m interested in the bricks-and-mortar kind of collaboration, a physical mix of town and gown. There’s no real place where that happens. The Corner is a University enclave and then you’ve got Downtown. I’ve often said that if those two places were in closer proximity, I think some of the collaborations would happen naturally.

Do you envision something concrete going on in 2003?

I do. I think there is a convergence of needs that is going to reach a crescendo in 2003. The City is interested in looking at West Main Street as a smart-growth corridor, with a new mix of uses. A place where the University’s program needs co-mingle with the City’s mixed-use residential and retail needs.

The City has hired Wallace, Robert & Todd, an urban design firm that is going to try to envision the space where the social interaction is going to happen. In the case of West Main Street, they know that the players are going to involve the University and Health Sciences communities, West Main Street and the larger Charlottesville community. The firm will try to create the public spaces where all of those people can mingle and easily get back and forth on public transportation. Making such a space is a prerequisite to creating good relations with UVA

When can we expect to have a proposal?

In the summertime, we will actually start to see images of how the designers think this can happen. So that’s a really exciting initiative. Another idea that I think is equally exciting is creating an environment where people naturally mix on our transit system. We’re going to put a proposal out there for how to merge the CTS and the University bus systems.

Tackling West Main Street, an area that is so close to the University cannot help but sponsor a kind of co-mingling. I think it’s going to challenge how development happens. I believe the anchor to this plan is going to be residential. Currently there is no critical mass of residential living on West Main Street, let alone Preston Avenue or Cherry Avenue.

Obviously not all these developments will take place in 2003.

No. The reality is, any plan that’s worth the public’s attention is going to have to inspire. But in order to get it built beyond this year, it’s going to have to be built in small increments.

When people see these plans and they see how much developable land there really is on West Main Street, they’ll be shocked because they’ve never seen this potential there before. 

How about the City/County relationship in 2003?

That is a really tough relationship and will remain interesting because the County has determined that is going to grow more densely along the edges of the City by millions of square feet. Yet they still don’t have the infrastructure to support it appropriately. Nor does the State seem to acknowledge the County is not all rural and needs the tools to build urban-style roads and communities with sidewalks. This presents barriers to the County to doing the kind of development that Charlottesville actually does quite well.

All things being equal, I would rather Albemarle County declare Charlottesville its growth area and simply say they are not going to grow as rapidly. That would be a real innovation. You’d see the residential concentration shifting toward areas that actually can sustain the transportation piece and all of the the urban agenda that goes with it. Charlottesville in turn would have to be willing to accept its fair share of the population growth in this area. Right now our growth is flat. We’ve got something that they don’t: We’ve already got the urban infrastructure in place, we’ve got the physical proximity of things to each other, all our sidewalks in place, our area is easily served by all public transportation. I don’t see the County’s development direction as misguided, but I simply don’t see them having the tools that are needed to guide that kind of development. 

Aside from aesthetic disagreements, how will this stance from the County create more conflict with the City?

Many of the negative impacts of development, none of the tax base.

Primarily what some City residents object to is having a fairly affluent tax base surrounding and using the City as its core and then going right back out. My attitude is, well, why don’t we just invite those people in to live in our City and share in providing the tax base for the services that we want? I think it’s too easy to locate high density on the fringe of the City for people who would like to benefit from being in an urban environment but then can go back out and pay a lesser tax rate.

I don’t feel that it is the City taxpayer’s role to subsidize suburban sprawl.

Do you have fruitful discussions with your County counterparts?

We certainly do on many levels and I sympathize with their development pressures. They often appear overrun with developers who want to build. They’re constantly besieged by this demand to do the wrong thing while they are busy trying to do the right thing. I respect them for trying to slow it all down, and I certainly don’t envy them. But I also am concerned about our overall quality of life in this region. I have a different take on whether I can solve the problems of the day when I start to look at the County side.

What will be the top three things that you expect Council to be able to effect in 2003?

Well there’s been a whole sector that’s probably more imminent than most: the renovation to the East end of the Mall. This year, as the project will start, it will be representative of the things that we think Downtown should be: a state-of-the-art transit facility, an amphitheater that is really going to appeal to national acts and a physical extension of the pedestrian realm in that entire area. I think that’s going to be a cornerstone project for 2003.

Also, housing is going to be one of the stories. With transportation, you’re going to see the kind of commitment that the public needs to make early on to a state-of-the-art transit system that builds on moving people rapidly. And I think you’re going to see an unprecedented level of cooperation between the University interests and the City, and that will converge on West Main Street.

Finally, what has been the most surprising thing so far about being Mayor?

I have a new respect for how tough the job is. It’s a challenge but it’s a challenge that you feel compelled to meet.

“It gets a little crazy around this time,” says Alex Hawkins, a registered nurse, as he calmly uncradles the receiver. At 5pm on Monday, December 29, the clinic is about to open for the night. Hawkins fields calls from Charlottesville’s sick and uninsured, telling them that, unfortunately, tonight’s appointment schedule is booked solid. He adds names to the waiting list, informing callers their only hope of seeing a doctor is another patient’s cancellation.

Riiinnng—someone cancels an appointment, so Hawkins calls one of the 16 patients on Monday’s waiting list with some good news. A flu-stricken woman can see a doctor tonight. “The poor woman sounded terrible,” Hawkins says after hanging up the phone.

As the clock ticks closer to 5:15, the clinic’s official opening time, executive director Erika Viccellio is also scrambling for the phones. Only two of the night’s six scheduled doctors have shown up, and some of the 23 volunteers are also missing. It’s the holidays, Viccellio says, so volunteers are hard to come by. “What am I going to do, scold them?” Viccellio asks. “I’m just thankful they’re here.”

A female patient shows up at the front desk and tells volunteer Tony LeVere, “No hablo Ingles.” Now another volunteer is needed—a Spanish translator.

“We’ve had a significant increase in the number of our Spanish-speaking patients,” says Viccellio. “But finding Spanish speakers to help us translate is really tough.”

Volunteer coordinator Laura Young calls her husband, Ken, who learned Spanish as a child from his Mexican nanny, to come to the clinic and translate. “He’s married to the volunteer coordinator, so he’s always on call,” Young jokes.

This all-hands-on-deck mentality is business as usual at the Charlottesville Free Clinic, which shares offices with the local Virginia Health Department on Rose Hill Drive. On Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights from 5:15 to 8:30pm, the clinic offers no-cost doctor appointments and free prescriptions for people who’ve fallen through the health care system’s widening gaps.

To qualify for a free clinic visit, patients (or a member of their household) must have a job, but no health insurance. Either their jobs don’t provide medical benefits, or they earn too much to qualify for Medicaid and other indigent care programs, but too little to pay for their own coverage.

Founded in 1992, the Charlottesville Free Clinic was started to save people with minor illnesses and no insurance a trip to the emergency room. In time it has evolved to become the only option for the working poor with chronic illnesses.

“Our motto was ‘Health care for people outside the system,’” says Dr. Mohan Nadkarni, who co-founded the clinic. “What’s happened since then, for better or worse, is that we’ve become part of the system.”

 

In the early 1990s, Nadkarni and Paul Demarco, both medical residents at UVA at the time, decided they were seeing too many patients ravaged by the later stages of diseases like cancer or diabetes. These people could have been spared a lot of suffering, Nadkarni thought, if they had been able to see a doctor earlier.

The problem was health insurance. Without it, Nadkarni says, people got by without care until they became extremely sick. Then they checked themselves into the emergency room, which by law cannot turn patients away for financial reasons.

The two doctors decided to start a free clinic, and the idea almost immediately became something of a local cause celebre. Nadkarni and Demarco (who now practices in rural South Carolina) met with local lawyer Leigh Middleditch, who helped the doctors assemble an all-star community advisory board with well-connected leaders like minister Rev. Alvin Edwards, Gordon Walker, head of the Jefferson Area Board for Aging, Albemarle County Supervisor David Bowerman and City Sheriff Cornelia Johnson.

When the clinic opened in 1992, it had $75,000. Today, the free clinic’s donor list takes up nine pages in its 2003 annual report and reads like a Who’s Who of Central Virginia. Last year, 42 percent of the clinic’s $483,453 budget came from donations by private individuals. Now, it has about 150 volunteer doctors, nurses, dentists and pharmacists and about 300 lay volunteers. Ten years ago, however, Nadkarni thought the clinic would soon be obsolete.

“The Clinton health care reform plan was being debated. We were hoping there would soon be some form of national health insurance. One of our goals was to be out of business,” Nadkarni says.

Since then, however, the political pendulum has swung away from health care reform. Now the ranks of the uninsured are growing—in more ways than one.

First, the number of people without health insurance is rising. In 2002, the percentage of uninsured Americans rose to 15.2 percent of the population—about 43.6 million people—from 14.6 percent in 2001. The U.S. Census Bureau attributes the decline in coverage to the erosion in private insurance coverage, driven by a weak economy, rising unemployment and increasing health care costs.

The Charlottesville Free Clinic reports that about 1.5 million Virginians—25 percent of the Commonwealth—went without health insurance during all or part of 2002. Virginia attempts to serve its uninsured population through the Federal Medicaid program, which covers about 700,000 low-income people who are elderly, disabled, pregnant or minors, at an annual cost of to the State of $3.75 billion. A program called Family Access to Medical Insurance Security (FAMIS) gives benefits to an additional 50,000 Virginia children.

These programs don’t cover everyone, especially not in Virginia, which spends about $1.5 billion a year less on Medicaid than other states its size. The Commonwealth ranks 43rd among all states in percentage of budget devoted to Medicaid programs.

Given these trends, the Charlottesville Free Clinic has seen the need for its services expand. The clinic booked 3,244 appointments in 2003, up from 2,570 in 2000. Using statistics from the Chamber of Commerce, Viccellio estimates there are between 8,500 and 10,000 people in Charlottesville who qualify for treatment at the free clinic—that is, people who have jobs but do not have health insurance.

“Most of our advertising is word of mouth,” Viccellio says. She says the clinic is working on a plan to recruit more doctors, to be followed by a plan to recruit more patients. “Right now, we’re able to get people an appointment within the week they call, and there’s never a night when we haven’t filled every single appointment,” Viccellio says. “If we get a lot more patients without more doctors, we’d be in a bind.”

When she took the job as executive director in May 2003, Viccellio was a veteran of the nonprofit world but lacked medical experience. She said she was shocked by how many people don’t have access to basic health care.

“It’s great we can be here, but we shouldn’t need to be. It’s sad we’re such a vital part of our health care system,” Viccellio says.

 

America’s uninsured population is growing in another way—girth. About one in five adults in Virginia is obese—twice as many as 10 years ago, according to the Centers for Disease Control. That number is likely to swell in the near future. Last year, the Virginia Health Department’s Childhood Obesity Task Force estimated that nearly 42 percent of public school third-graders in Charlottesville were either obese or significantly overweight.

The national obesity epidemic has changed the clinic’s mission in recent years, as doctors diagnose more patients with fat-related problems such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. These conditions require long-term care and expensive medication that can tax any clinic’s resources. Charlottesville’s clinic is in better shape—in terms of both volunteers and donations—than many of the other 48 free clinics in the State.

“We have two great community hospitals here,” Viccellio says. “That gives us access to doctors that other communities don’t have, and we have a community that is willing to support us.”

Yet the increase in patients with chronic disease is forcing the clinic to make a trade-off, Nadkarni says: “One of our ongoing concerns is how we balance between acute visits and chronic illness.”

Viccellio estimates that between 60 percent and 70 percent of the clinic’s patients require long-term care, mostly for chronic diseases related to obesity. Indeed, on this Monday, 10 of the 31 patients on the schedule need treatment for one of these conditions, and the waiting room looks like a Weight Watchers meeting.

“It’s not even diabetes night,” says Hawkins. Once a month, he says, doctors from UVA’s endocrinology department visit the clinic to meet the growing diabetes demand.

The obesity epidemic also weighs heavily on the clinic’s pharmacy—one of only 17 licensed pharmacies among Virginia free clinics. Pat Tiedeman, a pharmacist who started working at the clinic shortly after its founding, says drugs and equipment like syringes that monitor and treat diabetes can cost thousands of dollars a year, and one diabetes patient can require eight to 10 prescriptions at a time.

While the number of patients at the clinic remains about the same from year to year, the number of appointments has gone up recently, and the number of prescriptions filled has skyrocketed [see chart]. Last year, the pharmacy accounted for about $166,941, or about 38 percent, of the clinic’s expenses.

On this particular evening, the pharmacy opened at 7pm. The demand for free medicine is evidenced by the line stretching from the pharmacy’s counter, through the waiting room and past the front desk. One young woman, who began visiting the clinic last year after she was laid off, is irritated to hear that she would have to wait another 30 minutes for her prescription. She takes the news without argument, unlike another client, who registers her complaint with Young. She manages her discontent.

“When a patient is angry, I can’t say ‘Wait, let me go get someone else,’” says Young. “I’ve been yelled at, almost physically assaulted. I had to get some attitude.”

Even though treating diabetes puts a strain on the clinic, Tiedeman and other volunteers argue that such care is a vital service.

“These people are all around us,” Tiedeman says. “And as a community, we want to help them. If you are a diabetic and you come to us, you get extremely good care. We keep a lot of people out of the hospital.”

 

As far as David Brinton is concerned, the Charlottesville Free Clinic didn’t keep him out of a hospital, they kept him out of a coffin. “The Free Clinic saved my life,” he says.

The 49-year-old moved to Charlottesville in 2000 after getting laid off from his job in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “Downsizing,” he says, with no small trace of bitterness.

On this Monday night, he sits in one of the clinic’s six examination rooms, on a brown patient bed with a yellowed pillow, covered by a strip of tissue paper. The smiling visages of Julia Roberts and Uma Thurman gleam from the magazine covers stacked on a nearby file cabinet. Besides a picture of Monticello, the dominant decor in the room consists of posters warning against sexually transmitted diseases. “First love? Not quite,” cautions one poster depicting a human pyramid that suggests your partner may not be so virginal.

Now Brinton works nights repairing audio-visual equipment for UVA. While his job is a full-time position, it does not include health insurance. If not for the free clinic, he says he probably wouldn’t have seen a doctor for the foot problem that prompted him to visit the clinic three years ago. He’s glad he came.

During the routine screening, a clinic nurse noticed that something was wrong with Brinton’s blood pressure. A doctor sent Brinton to a cardiologist who works for the clinic gratis, and the cardiologist confirmed that one of the valves on his heart had a very bad leak. A year and a half ago, a surgeon replaced Brinton’s faulty valve with a plastic one.

“I remember I was huffing and puffing just climbing a flight of stairs. I figured I was out of shape. I smoked. I was overweight. I never thought there would be something wrong with my heart,” he says.

Without the Charlottesville Free Clinic, Brinton says he could not have afforded the medical treatment. Even now, he is making monthly payments on $5,000 for other doctor bills.

Now Brinton is one of the clinic’s chronic patients, making appointments about every two months so the doctors can monitor his blood. On Monday, he tells Dr. Bob Kayser that when he eats pancakes for breakfast, he feels weak and shaky a few hours later. Kayser recommends Brinton try eating the pancakes without syrup, to see if that makes a difference.

“My first 49 years haven’t been too bad,” Brinton says. “I’d like to be around for another 40 or 50, now that I’ve got me a good woman.”

By about 8pm on Monday night, the clinic is winding down. Melissa Weimer, stethoscope slung around her neck, slumps in a plastic chair near a table of fried chicken, green beans and potato salad donated by Wayside Takeout & Catering, which, like other local restaurants, provides free food for clinic volunteers. Many volunteers leave day jobs to start work when the clinic opens at 5pm and don’t leave until 9pm.

Dr. Nadkarni still extends his workday by volunteering. After a day at UVA’s Medical Center navigating the bureaucratic byways of insurance companies, he says working at the clinic can actually be relaxing.

“It’s very refreshing. There’s much less paperwork, we’re not dealing with billing and insurance,” Nadkarni says. “The patients are very grateful. It feels like you’re providing a valuable service without all the red tape. It gets back to the reason we all got into medicine in the first place.”

This sense of purpose drives the 24-year-old Weimer, who now studies osteopathic medicine in Blacksburg, to return to the clinic as a volunteer when she’s home from school on Christmas break. She graduated from UVA in 2001 and for two years worked as the clinic’s patient-care coordinator, as well as in the pharmacy.

“I volunteer to feel like I have a purpose. In medical school you tend to lose that,” she says. “At the clinic you get to develop the relationship part of medicine, which is mostly what being a doctor is all about.”

Not all volunteers have a career in medicine, however.

“It’s interesting to meet the people,” says Dan Devereux, a philosophy professor at UVA. One of his favorite jobs, he says, is conducting the exit interviews to get feedback from patients after their clinic appointment.

“You find out how diverse the population is around here. I’ve interviewed patients from Tibet, Russia, Afghanistan and from countries in Africa. We get a lot of waiters and waitresses, and people who do artistic things,” says Devereux.

The interviews mean the free clinic has comprehensive statistics on its patients. More than 40 percent of the patients are between ages 41 and 64. Most are white, and 60 percent are women. About 80 percent live in Charlottesville and Albemarle. More than 70 percent have only a high school diploma, 66 percent are employed full time and about 25 percent say that without the free clinic, they wouldn’t have seen a doctor at all.

Like many of the other volunteers, Weimer speaks with conviction that quality health care is a right, not a luxury. She says the volunteering gave her the chance to see behind the science of medicine to the social impact of health care policy. Weimer says she has seen how cycles of poverty contribute to chronic health problems, ensuring that, despite its goal of going out of business, the Charlottesville Free Clinic will remain a key part of local medicine.

“It’s not just that people don’t have health insurance,” Weimer says. “They don’t have transportation to get to the clinic, they don’t have child care, they don’t have a safe place to come home to. They may not even know what it’s like to lead a healthy lifestyle.”

Q: Ace, driving down the 250 Bypass the other night I was blinded by the parking lot lights of our new neighbor, Best Buy. Isn’t there a City code that prevents light pollution? Who approved them or were they missed in the process? Put your investigative skills to work and let us know!—Dazed & Confused

A: It’s indeed tough to miss the brightly lit new movie/music/electronics retailer, Dazed. To answer your questions, yes, the City has an ordinance to stop light pollution and no, Best Buy was not overlooked. It’s perfectly legit as it stands, even if it forces Ace to do his very best Corey Hart/”I Wear My Sunglasses at Night” impression when driving the Acemobile on the bypass. But here’s a bit of good news for all our peepers: Expect some of the Best Buy bulbs to get dimmer in a few weeks. More on that in a minute.

First, some history on Best Buy. The store officially opened on November 7 on the site of the former Aunt Sarah’s Pancake House and Mt. Vernon Hotel on Emmet Street. Construction took just a few months (the Mt. Vernon went down in late April), but planning on the building was finished well before September 15. That’s the date the City’s new zoning ordinance went into effect. The new rules are more stringent on issues like outdoor lighting and parking. But since Best Buy was ready to roll before the beefed-up guidelines came around, it’s exempt from the increased regulation.

According to City of Charlottesville Neighborhood Planner Missy Creasy, the old ordinance under which Best Buy was O.K.’d “was basically just a statement that property [owners] cannot reflect light off of their properties.” Creasy adds that the zoning ordinance changed because it was first created in 1976 and the nature of local development has since changed. Straight up, yo.

Creasy says that the new ordinance’s outdoor lighting section incorporates what are colloquially known as “dark skies” regulations, which aim to reduce light pollution. “It’s about trying to not reflect light up into the skies, trying to make things more natural,” she says.

It’s a good thing for Best Buy that its construction was approved before those rules came into effect, because those blinding parking lot beams wouldn’t pass new standards. Creasy says her office has received complaints from neighbors and drivers to that effect and approached the company. And while technically Best Buy doesn’t have to do anything, believe it or not, it is.

Jay Musolf, a public relations officer for Best Buy, says that the store has ordered four-sided shields to be put on all the light towers shining down on the parking lot. The new guards, which Musolf says will be up “as soon as possible” (they’re just waiting an apparently indeterminate time for shipping and installation), will direct illumination more squarely on the Best Buy property. And away from bypass drivers’ eyes. When that finally happens, the only sunglasses you’ll need at night can be found in the $7.99 CD bin.

With the holidays approaching, William was short on cash. This was not a seasonal problem for the 45-year-old Scottsville resident, who moved to the area from another state about one year ago. Though William has a job, he says it pays less than the one he previously held. The smaller paychecks have been rough for him, but he deliberately avoids credit cards to help him ride out budget crunches.

“Credit cards get you in trouble,” he explains.

So instead, as he’s done several times during the past year, William walked into the Checks Cashed in the Cherry Avenue Shopping Center, one of six payday loan stores in the Charlottesville area. After a simple process in which William signed and left behind a check for money he didn’t have, he walked out with $250 in cash.

On a cold Thursday night some time later, William walked back into the bright, neon-adorned office of Checks Cashed. This time, he was holding $287 in cash, the required amount to cover his check. The extra $37 was the fee for his $250 loan.

The payday loan business is a numbers game. And when the math is done, it’s clear that the house always wins. The scheme is called a “payday loan” because a borrower is supposedly getting a cash advance on his next paycheck. The practice is also referred to as a cash advance or check advance.

To get a payday loan, the borrower first must prove he has a job and an active bank account. Then, he writes the lender a check for the amount of the desired loan, which is given to him in cash. No credit check is run during the process—a huge enticement for many people. The payday lender agrees not to cash the check, but keeps it as collateral until the loan and a fee are repaid.

The fee on William’s loan was based on the standard $15 per $100 loan in Virginia, which is the maximum fee payday lenders can charge in the State. The minimum time period for repaying the loans is seven days. If William repaid his loan in a week, the annual interest rate would amount to a whopping 782 percent. If he waited 30 days, it would be 183 percent. Should he not repay the loan in time, he could be sued.

Despite the steep cost of his loan, William isn’t complaining. He’s embarrassed that he has had to resort to payday loans, refusing to give his full name to this reporter, but he defends the service.

“It’s come in handy,” William says.

He says his cash flow problems are temporary. “Eventually, I won’t need it,” William says of payday loans.

But his optimism seems unfounded. William admits to getting a payday loan at least every two months. He’s obviously cash strapped, and the mounting fees must worsen his financial headaches. Yet William claims he’ll be able to escape the grasp of payday loans and fees. “I will. That’s no problem,” he asserts.

 

According to Jay Speer, a Richmond- based staff attorney for the Legal Aid Justice Center, payday loan fees force many customers like William into such a deep financial hole that they end up taking loans from one payday lender to repay the loans and fees from another. Getting a loan rolled-over or extended is illegal in Virginia, but Speer says some people bring in cash to settle an old loan, and immediately write a check to take out a new one from the same payday loan store.

“I think most people think it’s a one-time thing. They have no idea that they’re getting sucked into a long-term relationship,” Speer says. “Once they get you, it’s very hard to get out.”

A report from the Virginia Bureau of Financial Institutions supports Speer’s claim. In the first six months after payday loans became legal in the State, the typical borrower took out almost five payday loans—an average of a loan every five to six weeks.

“There’s no real way to address that at this point,” says Susan Hancock, the deputy commissioner of the Virginia Bureau of Financial Institutions, of repeat payday loan customers and the “vicious cycle” of going to one payday loan office to pay off a previous loan.

Consumer advocates say the payday lending industry relies on this repeat business, and preys on lower-income and minority families, as well as on military personnel.

“Visits to payday lending stores—which open their doors in low-income neighborhoods at a rate equal to Starbucks opening in affluent ones—are threatening the livelihoods of hardworking families and stripping equity from entire communities,” said Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP and UVA history professor, in a recent news release.

The six payday loan centers in the Charlottesville area are located on: Cherry Avenue, which is in a lower-income, predominately black neighborhood; in the Rio Hill Center—the County’s bargain shopping district; on Carlton Road in blue-collar Belmont; in the shopping development that serves as a margin between the City and University and sits across Emmet street from the Barracks Road Shopping Center; on Seminole Trail across from Lowe’s; and near the ABC store and Burger King in Ruckersville.

According to a recent report by the North Carolina-based Center for Responsible Lending, which has long been a thorn in the side of the payday-lending industry, 91 percent of payday loans are made to people who take out five or more payday loans per year. The report estimates that these people, whom the consumer group labels as being caught in a “debt trap,” shell out $3.4 billion in fees each year.

But while critics deride payday loan centers as “legal loan sharks” who drag lower-income families into a nightmarish pyramid of growing loans and fees, the payday industry paints a far different picture, claiming the service helps people avert a cash emergency. Proponents also argue that payday loans help working families rather than prey on the poor, and cite a Georgetown University study that found roughly half the industry’s customers have a household income of more than $35,000 per year. Payday lending representatives claim their loans help a working family make ends meet when the car’s transmission goes or when junior needs that saxophone.

“I really think that this industry is a classic example of the marketplace making a need that somebody or someone fills,” says Vicki Woodward, a vice-president for Advance America, a leading national chain of payday lenders, which has a store in the Rio Hill Center.

Woodward, who also serves as the spokesperson for the Community Financial Services Association of America, the trade group that represents most of the payday loan industry, says her industry has “concern for customers who have become overreliant” on payday loans. She says payday lenders must provide explicit descriptions of the costs and responsibilities of their loans, and that the process is designed to “give pause” to borrowers.

But this cautious atmosphere is nowhere to be seen in the ubiquitous advertisements for payday loans, which are peppered with pictures of gleeful customers holding fistfuls of cash and slogans like “quick, easy and hassle free!”

Woodward says payday lenders fill a void left by banks, which have mostly stopped offering small loans in recent years. She also cites growing charges for bounced checks, ATM machine usage and credit card late fees as reasons for growth in the payday loan industry.

“There’s not many places to turn for this,” Woodward says of people in need of a small loan. “The vast majority of customers use payday advance properly, and what we could call moderately.”

Woodward says payday borrowers appreciate the service, and the industry claims a low number of customer complaints. State authorities back up this assertion.

“Relative to the number of transactions, the complaints have not been bad,” says Deputy Commissioner Hancock.

 

While consumer advocates vigorously dispute the payday loan industry’s claim of providing a helpful service to its consumers, both sides agree that banks are responsible for the emergence of payday loans.

“[Banks] are not providing adequate, fairly priced loans to consumers, which means the predatory payday lenders can flourish,” says Ed Mierzwinski, the consumer program director at the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, in an e-mail.

A wave of bank consolidations and mergers followed the major banking deregulation of the ’80s and early ’90s. A profusion of new bank fees followed, and small loans became tougher to find. For instance, SunTrust doesn’t offer loans under $3,000. Virginia National Bank will give loans to certain customers, but not for any amount under $500. Both banks do, however, feature overdraft protection, which could take the place of a payday loan for cash-strapped consumers. With overdraft protection, a bank offers credit to cover an overdrawn account—for a fee and/or interest. For VNB, overdraft money includes a 15.5 percent annual interest rate. The SunTrust overdraft option tacks on a $10 fee for every $100 borrowed.

Though not cheap, overdraft and other conventional banking solutions—with the exception of bounced checks—are generally cheaper than payday loans. But with fees rising for ATM transfers and even balance inquiries, people are increasingly looking toward the bright lights of payday loan stores. Since payday lenders first hit the scene in the early ’90s, the industry has exploded. At the beginning of 2003, more than 15,000 payday loan stores were operating around the country—a 50 percent increase in only two years. Payday lenders make $25 billion in loans each year to roughly 12 million households, according to industry estimates.

Payday lending came quickly to Virginia, sometime in the early ’90s, when check-cashing stores in the Tidewater region began giving unlicensed small loans, according to Jean Ann Fox, Yorktown-based director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America. Though check cashing and payday loans often go together, and can sometimes be found under the same roof, they deal with a different clientele. Payday borrowers have jobs and checking accounts while checks cashed customers are often of the “unbanked” variety.

After a contentious debate, in 2002 the Virginia Legislature passed the rules for payday loans. Prior to this, a few payday loan stores had been operating in the State by partnering with national banks and thus avoiding Virginia regulation and the 36 percent cap on small loans.

State Senator Creigh Deeds, who represents the Charlottesville area, voted for the payday lending measure, though he says he thought long and hard about it.

“In an ideal world I would say payday lending would not be necessary,” Deeds says. But he says people need short-term loans, and that the market for payday lending was there.

“It wasn’t like we could make this industry go away,” Deeds says, adding that the final legislation was an attempt to “make some lemonade—even though it’s sour—out of lemons.”

The legislation went into effect on July 1, 2002, opening the door to payday lenders in the midst of a major economic downturn—the perfect market for payday lenders. Six months after the legislation went into effect, the state had 377 payday loan locations, and $165 million had been loaned out. Hancock says that since then the total number of locations in Virginia has grown to 623, with more licenses still pending.

While the payday loan industry’s trade group speaks of helping Americans get over a financial hump, the less sophisticated side of the business makes it clear that payday loans are indeed about wads of cash. “And the best part of all, most of your customers are repeat customers!” breathlessly exclaims the Web site cashnow.com. “Repeat Customers = Residual Income.” Another site also aimed at would-be lenders estimates that the average payday loan location clears $25,875 per month in loan fees.

But their loans are not usury, say industry representatives. Indeed, both the payday loan industry and its critics offer many statistics to compare its pricing to other forms of borrowing money [see sidebar].

For example, industry critics PIRG and the Consumer Federation of America issued a report showing that payday loans are far more expensive than credit cards. Calculated with fairly standard interest rates and fees, the report claims that the finance charge on a $200 credit card cash advance that is repaid in one month would be $8.41—a yearly interest rate of 50.46 percent. At the rates available in Virginia, a $200 payday loan would include a fee of $30. The annual interest on the loan would be 183 percent.

“Credit cards are expensive, but they’re still cheaper than a payday loan,” says Jean Ann Fox of the Consumer Federation of America.

Not always, says Woodward of the industry group. Slinging her own math, Woodward argues that the credit card fees for a late minimum payment could be $27 for a $100 credit card balance, which could trump the payday loan fee. Woodward also cites overdraft protection fees, bounced check fees from banks and merchants, utility bill late fees and even ATM charges, all of which can charge more interest than the typical payday loan in Virginia.

Though Woodward concedes that payday advances are not always the best option, she says they are always cheaper than a bounced check, the average fee for which is $25 per check, and merchants often charge their own fees in addition to the bank.

“It’s just like any other product, you have to weigh it against other alternatives,” Woodward says.

 

William chose to drop $37 at the loan center on Cherry Avenue instead of putting the $250 on a credit card and slowly chipping away at the credit. Why?

William says he has experienced more than his share of credit card debt woes in the past. For him, a quick payday loan was a simpler option than dealing with credit cards.

Fox says this is a common sentiment among the payday loan set. Some people are in deep with credit cards or don’t even have a card. Others have a bad credit rating. Perhaps most importantly, the ads for “cash now!” make payday loans seem so easy. With no nagging bills and no credit check, it’s over and done in minutes.

“It’s quick and it’s easy and it’s fast, and they have neon signs,” Fox says. “Who wouldn’t want to be able to write checks when they don’t have money in the bank?”

In essence, payday loans have become the fast food of the banking industry—an analogy that is bolstered by the profusion of payday loan stores. “It’s worse than 7-Eleven,” Fox says of the hundreds of payday loan centers now sprinkled around Virginia.

And it’s an industry that’s likely here to stay.

“Once you get the industry established in the state, it’s much harder to repeal it,” Fox says. “This industry is very generous, and they are big campaign contributors.”

For example, a recent Toledo Blade investigation found that Advance America, the nation’s largest payday loan chain and the company Woodward works for, hosted a fundraiser for Ohio Congressman Mike Oxley, who chairs the committee that oversees the industry. Advance America’s troops, the masters of quick cash, made sure that Oxley walked away with $42,000 in campaign donations from that single event.

Critics of the industry have pushed to subject payday loans to the 36 percent annual interest rate banks are limited to for small loans. They have also championed state-run databases like the one in Florida that identifies people who are stuck in a payday-loan debt cycle. Fox and other consumer advocates also suggest legislating a “cooling-off” period between payday loans for borrowers.

Woodward says the industry would oppose these reforms, and that the true goal of payday lending critics isn’t to protect consumers but to abolish the business altogether. As evidence, she says a 36 percent interest rate cap imposed on banks would be unworkable for payday lenders. And the industry claims that overheads and financial risks taken by short-term loan centers justify the steep fees.

“Frankly, they know that a company cannot make a loan for 10 cents a day,” Woodward says, citing the amount a payday lender could charge for $100 loan at the 36 percent rate. Furthermore, Woodward stresses the need to protect the right to small loans for customers who are “overwhelmingly satisfied with this product.”

When Governor Mark Warner signed the payday lender bill into law, he indicated that it was an issue that might warrant revisiting. And Sen. Deeds says he “has an open mind” about possible legislative protections for payday borrowers.

But as payday loan centers keep sprouting up in the State, and the industry continues to gain clout, slapping new regulations on the practice will not be easy. Some states have banned payday lenders outright. North Carolina flip-flopped, legalizing and later outlawing payday lending.

“A state can change its mind. It’s tough, but you can do it,” Fox says.

Ultimately, any attempt Virginia might make to crack down on payday loans will be hamstrung by the appeal of fast cash and the slippery world of the Internet. A two-second Web search turns up a ridiculous number of Internet-based payday lenders, some of which promise approval in 30 seconds and a transfer of funds within 24 hours. But the fees for Internet payday loans are sometimes double the Virginia rate.

With such hefty fees, there are few scenarios in which a payday loan makes any financial sense. Yet it seems only strong national legislation could successfully stamp out the fringe banking industry of payday lending. With legislators like Rep. Mike Oxley at the helm in Washington, buyer beware will continue be the governing principle behind the fast cash of payday loans.