C-VILLE Weekly

When he returned home to Charlottesville after earning a bachelor’s degree in landscape architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, Joshua Galloway wanted to keep up with his drawing, so he enrolled in an advanced drawing course in the evenings at Piedmont Virginia Community College for three years in a row. With the help of Elizabeth "Chica" Tenney, his drawing teacher and mentor at PVCC, Galloway went on to exhibit his work at places such as the McGuffey Art Center. Today he is pursuing a master’s degree in architecture at UVA. Galloway is not alone in utilizing the resources within PVCC’s art program as a stepping-stone for his career; his is but one example of how PVCC’s artsSure, PVCC is well regarded for its nursing program and as a stalwart source for workplace skills, but its standing as an arts source may not be as readily appreciated. That, however, has been changing, especially since the dedication of the V. Earl Dickinson Building in 1999–complete with music labs, composition studios, two galleries, five practice rooms, a ceramics studio equipped with three kilns, art studios, a black box, a 500-seat theater and a lakeside outdoor amphitheater. The structure has been nothing less than pivotal in allowing the arts to blossom at PVCC.

PVCC has gone "from nothing to a basket of riches," says S. Kathryn Bethea, a professor in theater and music. Indeed, promotional posters around town attest to the 2002/2003 bounty: artist workshops, master classes, faculty music recitals, ballet performances and children’s theater.

Carrington Ewell, the administrator for the PVCC Fine and Performing Arts Series, says the eclecticism is deliberate. "I try to find something for everyone," he says.

"PVCC is a crossroads in the community, one of the few places in the community where everyone comes together from six counties. There’s no one else in town doing music and dance and theater and films and visual arts and lectures and master classes. I consciously book and represent the widest possible mix of cultures," Ewell says, "the whole gamut of disciplines and artistic traditions." The combination of the Dickinson’s stellar facilities and Ewell’s programming has enabled PVCC to essentially quadruple performances, now up to nearly 150 per year.

As well as being a regional arts venue, the Dickinson building is a performing arts studio for a growing student body–more than 500 this year. Enrollment is up about 80 percent during the past five years. The college offers certificates in painting and drawing. The visual arts, theater, drama and music degrees are two-year programs for students planning to transfer to a university or seeking professional development in the arts. Those students who transfer do so most often to UVA, James Madison University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Maryland Institute College of Art or Mary Baldwin College.

The arts faculty, which too has grown during the past several years, is a richly diverse and well-plugged-in group. Tenney, for instance, has worked with the arts at PVCC since 1976, and she identifies PVCC’s "main mission" as "community connection." Tenney herself was among the founders of McGuffey Art Center. She serves on the board of Second Street Gallery and is involved with Art Reach, a non-profit organization affiliated with FOCUS that targets children who could benefit from having more art in their lives.

Tenney is one of 22 on the arts faculty, a number that has literally tripled since1997.

At $339,000 annually, total arts education funding, including salaries, supplies and personnel costs, accounts for about 3 percent of PVCC’s $11 million budget. Yet, measured by intangibles such as community outreach, rising public profile and growing popularity of class offerings, the small investment yields a large return. Still, PVCC, like other state educational institutions, faces the threat of severe budget cuts. Dr. Frank Friedman, PVCC president,

cannot go into details about possible pending budget cuts except to say that the impact would be felt "across the board."

Evidence of Tenney’s goal to get her art students immediately "connected with the Charlottesville arts community" is everywhere. She’s trying to create partnership events with local arts institutions such as the UVA Art Museum and Fayerweather Gallery, as well as Dot-2-Dot, a new gallery on Water Street. In November, PVCC’s Art Gallery will have a joint exhibition with Les Yeux du Monde gallery, featuring the paintings of John Borden Evans. There is a lot of "cross pollinating," Tenney says. "Carrington and I are working hard on that."

PVCC’s past few seasons are testament to such work. New Lyric Theater, Live Arts and Shenandoah Shakespeare have brought their productions to the Dickinson building. The arrangement worked out well for Live Arts when it brought its March production of The Wiz to PVCC, says Live Arts General Manager Ronda Hewitt. "We played to near capacity crowds the entire week," she says. "The facility was really state of the art." Indeed, PVCC has been a full-ranking member of what Tenney terms the "explosion of arts in Charlottesville" following the renovation of the Downtown Mall. Almost in concert, there were the births of the McGuffey Art Center, the PVCC art program, the UVA Art Museum, Second Street Gallery and Fayerweather Gallery, each supporting the other yet filling different niches within the community.

Over the past quarter-century, this network of arts institutions has only expanded. Downtown Charlottesville is seeing the opening of new galleries, such as Dot-2-Dot; Live Arts, Second Street Gallery and video documentary studio Light House are constructing a new building on Water Street; and the 1,000-seat Paramount Theater is in the midst of a City-supported restoration. It’s not just the love of the footlights or watercolors that’s driving this renaissance, either. As City Councilor Kevin Lynch notes, the local arts institutions are "economic engines," which help to support local restaurants and businesses and are integral to the livelihood of the community. Indeed, John Gibson, Live Arts Artistic Director, maintains, "Downtown Char-lottesville is becoming the arts destination for the region."

And while PVCC, located south of town on Route 20, is not exactly Downtown, "every theater is part of this network," Gibson says. "We have a common goal, which is bringing people together."

The community came together in turn to support PVCC when its art department (still the largest among its arts programs) was housed in the college’s main building, where inadequate space hindered its growth. Clifford Haury, the dean of humanities at the college, says that when the community saw PVCC’s need for a more functional space, given the quality of its teachers and the work being produced there, the response was simple: "How can we support you?"

The answer was the $7 million Dickinson building, which allowed Haury to instantly double course offerings. The demand was there; Haury discovered that, with a "loyal contingent of people," PVCC was able to quickly fill those courses.

Unlike Live Arts, which is entirely privately funded, or a venue like Starr Hill Music Hall, which runs off door receipts, PVCC is at the mercy of State funding. In fact, most of the money for the Dickinson building came from Richmond. These days, that relationship means potential trouble for the school–and its arts programming. Recently, Governor Warner required State-funded schools to submit proposals outlining 5 percent, 7 percent and 11 percent budget cuts. "We’re looking at having to live through severe cuts," says Robert Chapel, who chairs UVA’s drama department. "It will definitely affect our programs, especially during the academic year, and it will trickle down to affect production."

Over at PVCC, the irony isn’t lost on anyone involved in the arts. Just when PVCC’s class offerings and arts programming is catching on in the region, outside forces may hinder their growth. "If we have to cut at the highest level," Ewell says, "the college will be dramatically changed. It’s pretty frightening and, right now, it’s the not knowing that’s scary."

Regarding potential cuts, Haury says, "If our money were restricted, we might have to cut the number of course offerings in order to keep the program up. We’d see what’s essential and what’s not.

"Much of our money is in personnel," he continues. "Ninety-five to 96 percent of our money is in people, not in things." This could jeopardize the arts programs, as the "name identification is phenomenal" and this reputation for quality instruction is a big part of what draws students and community members to PVCC. However, there is a bright side: Haury says, "The community college system has one advantage." Just adopt an "entrepreneurial perspective"–make sure that classes have a sufficient number of students to pay the instructor. Such an attitude "may be a cushion for us in a budget cut," he says.

Councilor Lynch views potential budget cuts through the prism of all that PVCC has offered to the community in the past, namely its "role as a grassroots economic development." In terms of community colleges, PVCC "is certainly one of the most aggressive in the area.

"When you look at their relationship as an educational institution with the City," Lynch says, "it has really been nothing but a positive relationship. If their past performance is any indication, they have a consistent track record of delivering goods."

In fact, Lynch is sharply critical of cuts in educational budgets. "To cut investment in the work force in order for a short-term balance sheet gain is incredibly short-sighted," he says, "and I have faith that our legislature will be able to see that. It will be difficult for a respectable legislature to justify cutting it. These are the future tax payers of the Commonwealth."

Live Arts’ Gibson comes to a related conclusion: If budget cuts were to hinder PVCC’s capacity to deliver quality arts programming to the public, he says, "the community will be poorer. Charlottesville is hungry for theater and welcomes it in every possible venue."

Meanwhile, back at the Dickinson building, there’s no hint of budget-cut anxiety as the new season gets underway. Students of all ages, economic backgrounds and experience levels settle into their classes and the show goes on.

"We are letting people know what art can do in your life," Tenney says. "It is a positive force, a hopeful activity. In difficult times, people need art more than ever. It is such a key factor in the quality of your life, in the quality of a civilization. It bring richness to your life."

Kevin Lynch arrived in Charlottesville from his hometown of Alexandria in 1980 to study at UVA. Twenty years later, he won a seat on City Council as a “Democrat for Change” advocating an alternative-transportation platform. Midway through his first Council term, Lynch is a Council representative to the Metropolitan Planning Organization and a member of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission. An avid biker—cycles and motorcycles—Lynch, who is 40, is self-employed by day as an electrical engineer and software contractor. With the Western Bypass all but extinct now and as Council resumes its consideration of Route 29 interchanges and the construction of the Meadowcreek Parkway, C-VILLE Editor Cathryn Harding met with Lynch to discuss his ideas for transit and growth in the region. An edited transcript of that discussion follows.

C.H. – How did you become interested in transportation issues?

K.L. – It started when I was in the Federation of Neighborhoods. In 1994, the Metropolitan Planning Organization did a southern transportation study and it recommended four-laning a lot of southern neighborhood streets, taking parking off of Avon Street, Monticello Road, Fifth Street and Ridge Street to put more cars through for the development of the southern area of the County. I live on Locust Avenue, and it was right about that time when Locust Avenue was connected with Water Street. We saw a real increase of traffic when that happened. The traffic went from being daily commuter traffic to 24/7 traffic. It really got worse at night. Even though the traffic wasn’t as heavy, it was a lot faster because people were using it as an alternative to Park Street.

    I was starting to get involved with other neighborhoods, particularly the neighborhoods around the Mall and realizing how we have this common interest in making sure the central City neighborhoods stay healthy. All of a sudden, the Belmont and Ridge Street neighborhoods were under this threat from the traffic generated by the southern growth of the County. My experience on Locust Avenue told me that if it was bad for the south side of the town, it was going to be bad for the north side of the town. I started to see regional traffic as a real threat to the City neighborhoods.

The discussion about the Meadowcreek Parkway started to kick into gear again right around that time. You were identified pretty early on as somebody who was against the Parkway.

When I saw the Parkway, my first reaction was that I was in favor of it. It would be a straight shot to Route 29 and I thought that it would be nice to jump around the 29 congestion. But, what I realized after going through this with the southern neighborhoods is, it wasn’t going to solve a congestion problem; it was going to create a congestion problem. It wasn’t being built in isolation, it was being built along with a program to intensively develop the northeastern quarter of the County.

    It has become clear to me over time that the way the transportation model has developed in this region is something of a hub-and-spoke model. Any neighborhood street that goes out of the City, like Avon Street Extended, Park Street, Monticello Road, Ivy Road, Barracks Road and Old Lynchburg Road, is developed by the County with a bunch of one-way-in, one-way-out subdivisions, all using the City street as their point of access and the City as the intersection. That’s not something that was clear to me until I started working with other neighborhoods on common transportation issues. Then I saw the Meadowcreek Parkway as just another spoke that would create problems for all of us in the hub.

So Charlottesville goes from being a “world-class city” to a world-class intersection. If you are critical of certain kinds of growth patterns, what are you in favor of?

A lot of things. There was a quote that sticks in my mind: Roads aren’t built to relieve congestion; they’re built to create opportunity. That’s very much true. So you have to decide where you want the opportunities to be. To me, that means you focus on 29, focus on making the 250 Bypass East and West more efficient, focus on the corridors that we have in the City that we’ve designated as areas where we want to see more development, like Cherry Avenue, Preston Avenue, Main Street. If you don’t want to see sprawl development, then you don’t want to build a bypass because a bypass generally encourages and subsidizes sprawl development.

    On the other hand, I’m as much against building a bypass to the east as I am building one to the west. Part of my issue with the County has been that I think they’ve been hypocritical in how they treat the 29 Bypass, which would go through wealthy neighborhoods. Yet, they are pushing for Phase 2 of the Meadowcreek Parkway, which is essentially the same as the Eastern bypass that VDOT studied and rejected back in the ’80s. Why would we want to create development opportunities in the watershed of the Rivanna and dump all of the traffic in the City?

    They say they don’t want a bypass, but really they don’t want a western bypass through their houses. I don’t blame them; I don’t want a bypass that goes through my house, either. But I think if you’re going to use the environment as an argument, then you have to be consistent. You have to acknowledge that Meadowcreek Parkway Phase 2 is as damaging if not more so to the Rivanna watershed. Even though no one in this area drinks that water, we swim in that water, there are three City parks that are downstream of that, we fish there, we eat the fish out of there and people downstream drink it. It’s environmentally irresponsible to say we can’t touch the western side because we drink that water, but to hell with the eastern side because somebody else drinks that water.

    I think it makes a lot of sense to look at the 29 corridor and make that work more efficiently.

What would that look like?

There are a lot of forms that it could take and we’re about to do a study of the corridor to get a better understanding of our options. One model that I’ve always thought would be an attractive solution is Highway 101 in Santa Barbara, California. It is probably the most attractive urban expressway that I know of. Twenty years ago, it was just like 29. It was a series of lights and it was a congested mess. Then, the California Transportation Department started the process of eliminating lights there. It carries a large volume of traffic, and it’s not just an expressway. It also has a secondary network that parallels it. And, in Santa Barbara, the business interests along the highway have prospered because they still have good access and much more volume. Highway 101 moves a significant volume of traffic, yet it feels like a parkway running right through the City. Perhaps your readers will know of some other good examples that might work here.

    It’s been since 1988 that Charlottesville has done an origin-destination study. So I’d like to see a new origin-destination study. We’ve grown quite a bit in 14 years in patterns that weren’t necessarily expected.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the sentiment that Council expends a great deal of effort on studying stuff.

I feel that way, too. I agree absolutely that we spend too much time studying things. Part of that is because whenever there’s a study and the conclusion is something that some group of people doesn’t like, there will be another study to prove that the first group had some hidden agenda. Sometimes that is the case, but I think the Metropolitan Planning Organization can hold out a neutral position and make it clear that we’re not asking for a study to prove something we already support. The MPO is the most objective group around when it comes to transportation matters. It doesn’t necessarily have an agenda other than that people should move around the region as efficiently as possible and that we want to reduce reliance on the automobile and support sustainable development.

At a recent meeting of the MPO, Meredith Richards had hoped to nail the coffin shut on the 29 Bypass. It was reported that you were not comfortable representing that as City Council’s point of view. You wanted to take it back to Council and not let the MPO take that vote right at that moment. Some people were hinting that there are politics at work there.

Well, certainly individual members have agendas. And no group is free from politics. As I see the function of the MPO, it needs to represent what the regional consensus is. If this doesn’t include the consensus of City Council and the County Board of Supervisors, the MPO will become dysfunctional. Meredith and I weren’t elected to the MPO; we serve as Council representatives. If we’re going to advocate the City position or the County position or our own position or the environmental position or the Western Albemarle County position, we can do that, but we still have to have a buy-in from both jurisdictions.

As you became involved in the neighborhood politics that you mentioned earlier, how did you decide that Council was the best setting for the kind of destination-directed transportation policy you’ve been talking about?

I felt there was this move among the development community to super-size Char-lottesville. That didn’t necessarily fit in with what I wanted to see Charlottesville become and what I think my neighbors want to see Charlottesville becoming.

It was your sense that Council was the place where neglected voices could be best represented?

Yes. Although “politely ignored” is probably a better phrase than “neglected”

And do you find, more than two years into it, that you’re giving voice to these concerns? Is that voice is being heard?

Sometimes. One of the first things that happened that I feel very good about after I joined Council was that I was able to get the trolley going.

    That idea had been out there for a while, but it wasn’t happening. So I campaigned on it. It didn’t take too long to make it happen. So I view that as a very positive thing. I think it’s been hugely successful. When I see it jam-packed on a Friday afternoon and people coming Downtown, I feel like we’re making progress. When you ask what am I in favor of, I really do think that trends in alternative transportation are the way to go.

Would you elaborate on that vision?

There are two parts of that vision. First, rather than an eastern or western bypass, I see a network of roads in the urban ring, which allow people to move around the urban ring without having to drive into Charlottesville.

    I think that it’s high time that the County acknowledges that it’s becoming an urban area. You’ve got this urban area, which is essentially a city the size of Charlottesville surrounding Charlottesville and using Charlottesville neighborhood streets to get from one part of the County to the other. I think that is wrong. We need some connectivity within the urban ring.

    Second, within Charlottesville, I think we can do a lot more to make our own transportation choices more efficient. Very few people are going to ride the bus because it’s the right thing to do. There has to be a reason to do it, and it has to work for them. For different people, alternative transportation means different things. For me, it means getting more bike lanes because there are roads that are dangerous to bike on. It means getting a more efficient bus system.

    I’d like to see at one point—and this would be far down the road—I’d really like to see a transit-on-demand model where, if you wanted to go somewhere, it would be like a share taxi. You’d get picked up right at your house and go to where you need to go. It’s like letting someone else do your driving for you.

    A lot of people love their cars, but most people would rather not drive if they have to go somewhere in the City. It’s more relaxing to be the passenger. You enjoy the City more as a passenger than you do a driver. So as far as the transit model goes, if it’s really going to be effective, people have to think of it just the same as letting someone else do the driving. In order for that to happen, it has to be competitive in terms of time, and that gets back to the ideas that I’ve been putting forward.

    How do we take a system that we have right now, which has really been designed for the captive rider, and move toward a system that makes it work for the discretionary rider?

Is there a model of this that you’ve seen work somewhere?

Yes, Portland is a good model. There’s a high-speed corridor and you can get transit to that corridor.

    Certainly, the faster and more reliable you can make this service, the better it’s going to work. If money weren’t an issue, I would say we’d have some sort of light rail system that would go from one end of the Downtown Mall along West Main Street and then go up through 29 maybe as far as the airport. Neighborhood buses would provide door-to-door service to the nearest rail stop. While you’re waiting for that ultimate configuration to take place, I see a series of increments that would ultimately get us to an efficiently functioning system. To start, I think it would be helpful to identify a corridor, and a number of a people are working on that. From the studies that I’ve seen, it makes sense that the corridor would look something like an L. It would start at the east end of the Downtown Mall, go down to the Corner and then head out 29, roughly the same route that the No. 7 bus takes.

    The second step would be to reconfigure our current bus system so that we have a backbone bus route, like the trolley, running in the corridor at 10-minute intervals with neighborhood feeder routes taking people to and from the backbone. I think we can provide much better service with our existing busses by going to a backbone/feeder model. Next, we give those buses that ride the backbone some priority in how they move through traffic. Right now a bus could hold a yellow light. I’d like the bus to be able to turn a red light green the same way that the emergency service vehicles can. Or we could synch the lights to the buses. That way, people would see the buses and they know that if you’re on the bus, you get to move and move fast. It’s all about giving transit the competitive advantage.

Would these buses be using the transfer station proposed for the east end of the Mall?

I see the east end transfer station as one of a series of stations. I see a fundamentally different approach to that eastern end. Rather than bringing all the buses there and doing all the transfers there, that would just be the eastern-most stop on the backbone. And there would be, maybe, four to six stations like that along the backbone, with neighborhood feeders going out to the adjacent neighborhoods.

You can coordinate these bus lines up to a point, but that urban ring you described is inhabited by a lot of people who come in and out of Charlottesville. How do you work that out with a County that you’ve characterized, in part, as being difficult to work with?

We do have a lot of similar values, although I’m concerned that many County people who look at an efficient transit system would say, “Well, that’s a really good idea as long as I don’t have to pay for it.” And that’s a fundamental problem I think the County has to grapple with. Suburban development has all of these external costs that aren’t properly accounted for in the tax rate so they show up in other ways, usually in a degradation of quality of life. The County hasn’t come to grips with the fact that it’s not a rural county anymore, although what it has is essentially is a rural tax rate. Seventy-six cents works fine if you’re a rural area, if you’re agricultural. There is this aesthetic that the County has that it wants to believe it’s a rural community, but the reality is that it’s in many ways as urban as Charlottesville is. The County is just a lot stingier about paying for services that improve the urban quality of life.

You sound pretty pessimistic about this.

Not in the long term. I doubt that the County is going to have that sort of shift in its self-perception any time soon, but I think it will happen over time as the County continues to urbanize and cosmopolitan voters assert their priorities. Sooner or later, I think they’ll realize that, compared to all the intangible quality-of-life costs of suburbanization, the real cost of running a decent transit system doesn’t look too bad. I have been encouraged by recent talk about the idea of creating a transportation district that would have auxiliary taxes that would be used to run transit. I would personally like to see us tack a few cents on to the gas tax, especially since Virginia has one of the lowest gas taxes in the Country. I think that fits better with the County model of fee-for-service. Put the tax on the automobile user rather than the property owner. It might sell, I don’t know. I’ll throw it out there and see how many cranky calls I get.

Where does UVA fit into this plan?

UVA is interesting because it causes a lot of transportation problems, but, at the same time, it shows us a solution. All the UVA kids have cars and they’re parking all over the place and they drive them all over the place—except when they go to one place, right? And that’s UVA itself.

You mean that to go to class they take the bus?

Right. The car just doesn’t work on the UVA grounds, and they’ve set it up that way on purpose. They have a bus system that works, and they’ve really discouraged students from parking their cars on Grounds. Even for their employees, UVA parks them all out at U-Hall and brings them in. When you’re on the Grounds, it’s really an attractive place to be because there are no cars.

    In some sense, it recreates the same feeling of having the Downtown Mall. The reason people love the Downtown Mall is because there are no cars on it. It’s just this very pedestrian thing. You know, cars have these hard edges all around.

    Look at how UVA students use the trolley. After hours, catch it around Second Street. It comes and drops 30 kids on Second Street. It works for them. So then the question is how do we grow on that? If it went to Barracks Road, would they also use it? Would City residents use it?

So, is there optimism about the diversity that can result from bringing different people into the City by different means underlying your ideas?

Yes, that’s probably true. Someone who wants to represent Charlottesville, which I do, has to appreciate that diversity. That’s one of the great things that I like about Charlottesville: It is a diverse place. One of the things that made me very optimistic is when we started our comprehensive process two years ago; we had a real big neighborhood focus and a real big emphasis on getting the community to turn out, which they did. One of the things about that that I was almost a little bit surprised by, but certainly very gratified to see, is that almost unanimously the people who turned out wanted to see more alternative transportation. They wanted to see public transit, they wanted to see transit that worked for them, they wanted to be able to interact with the rest of the community.

    I think there is something about Charlottesville that brings those sorts of people here. I consider myself to be an extrovert and, as you say, I have some optimism, a multi-cultural optimism. But I don’t think that is something unique to me as an individual. I think there is something about Charlottesville that projects that feeling. That is what drew me here in the first place, and I see a lot of other people like that expressing the same values.

    There is this large untapped willingness and desire to be more of a community and to have more interaction. That is what makes me optimistic about the idea that something like transit could work or that expanding the Mall in either direction could work. I don’t really consider myself a visionary person.

    I’m an engineer. What I think I’m good at is seeing what other people want to do and figuring out ways to implement that.

Ah, fair November. After months of pent-up frustration with the local government, an informed citizen who has done weeks of research and attended myriad local meetings, and who truly understands each important issue can go out to the polls and cast a ballot that has the equal value of an ignorant yahoo who only cares about making Smokey and the Bandit commercial-free on NBC29. Oh well. Here are some meetings to look out for in November.

Albemarle Board of Supervisors. County Office Building. November 1, 6pm.
Charlottesville School Board. Charlottesville High School. November 2 & 16, 7pm.
Charlottesville City Council. City Hall. November 6 & 20, 7pm.
Albemarle Board of Supervisors. County Office Building. November 8, 6pm.
Charlottesville City Planning Commission. 610 E. Market St. November 9, 5pm.
Albemarle School Board. County Office Building. November 9, 6:30pm.
Charlottesville City Planning Commission. City Hall. November 14, 6:30pm.
Board of Zoning Appeals. City Hall. November 16, 4pm.