Tag: adam healey

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In brief: Happy hour, Master Charles, prof charged and more

Being able to advertise $1-off drinks for happy hour is a “great business opportunity” to bring more people out and to compete with bars on the Corner, says Kelly Creighton, bartender at Jack Brown’s. Eze Amos

Dead or alive

Virginia’s General Assembly has been hard at it for three weeks now, tackling the 2,000 or so bills legislators filed. While most bills will die quietly in subcommittee, here are a few survivors—and committee casualties.

Alive

A judge has already ruled Virginia’s law that suspends driver’s licenses for unpaid court fines is likely unconstitutional. The Senate got with the program January 25, and passed a bill that repeals the state “debtor’s prison” law 36-4.

Finding out about the best happy hour could get easier, thanks to legislation allowing the advertising of drink specials that has passed both the House and Senate. This, too, was preceded by a lawsuit in which a northern Virginia restaurant owner claimed ABC regs violated free speech.

A bill that would exempt menstrual products from sales tax cleared a Senate committee 14-1 January 25, but the “Dignity Act” still needs to make it out of a House subcommittee.

While all the gun safety bills championed by Governor Ralph Northam died in subcommittee, Republican Senator Dick Black’s packing heat in church bill cleared the Senate January 24 in a 21-19 vote on party lines.

Dead

A bill that would allow localities to set their own minimum wage was killed in a House subcommittee 5-1 January 22.

Undocumented immigrants are not allowed to have driver’s licenses in Virginia, and that won’t change with the January 23 demise on party lines of a Senate bill that would have allowed temporary driver privilege cards.

Delegate David Toscano’s measure to limit campaign contributions by utilities like Dominion to $500 died in a House subcommittee January 24.

Quote of the week

“It doesn’t help us as a community for our mayor to be out there in the public criticizing the people who live here.”—Adam Healey, Charlottesville Albemarle Convention & Visitors Bureau interim executive director, on marketing guru Jerry Miller’s Facebook live, to which Mayor Nikuyah Walker replied, “[Y]ou are the type of citizen who allows the soul of Charlottesville to remain ugly.”

In brief

Experiment gone wrong

The mother of a Greer Elementary student said her 6-year-old was traumatized by a social experiment teacher Vicky Chen conducted. Chen, who has been placed on administrative leave, separated her students by eye color, and gave candy to only the ones with blue eyes for her MLK Day-themed lesson on equal opportunity and inclusiveness. Activists say Chen further marginalized students of color, who typically have brown eyes.

Another creative writing prof

UVA Professor Jeffery Allen has been placed on administrative leave with pay after being charged with felony strangulation and misdemeanor domestic battery in November. He follows English Department colleague John Casey, who was on leave for a year and then retired in December after a disciplinary panel found he violated policies on inappropriate sexual contact with a student.

Synchronicity swami

Master Charles developed high-tech meditation at Synchronicity. Photo courtesy Synchronicity

Master Charles Cannon, founder of the Faber spiritual community, died January 24 at age 73. In 2008, Cannon was in Mumbai at the Oberoi Hotel when it was attacked by terrorists and 162 people were killed, including father and daughter Alan and Naomi Scherr, who were with a group from Synchronicity. After the attack, Cannon and Kia Scherr, wife and mother of the two slain Nelson County residents, called for compassion and forgiveness of the murderers.

Juneteenth organizer

California-born Tamyra Turner, 73, a former Charlottesville School Board member who started the city’s Juneteenth celebration in 2000, died January 16. A professor of English literature who taught most recently at PVCC, she met her husband, former Charlottesville NAACP president Rick Turner, at Stanford. She served on a number of boards, including the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, the Jefferson Madison Regional Library, and the Virginia Festival of the Book steering committee.

Bye, Buyaki

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The man who wore a Confederate flag-patterned tie to a county school board discussion of  banning Confederate imagery will not seek another term. Jason Buyaki, who’s been on the board since 2011, also caught the ears of community parents and activists in October when he questioned climate change and the nature of fossil fuels.

National spotlight

Charlottesville native Natalie Hoffman was convicted January 18 after leaving water and food for migrants crossing the desert into Arizona. Hoffman, who was working with the group No More Deaths, was charged with entering and driving in Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge without a permit.

New clerk

City Council hired Lynchburg deputy council clerk Kyna Thomas to become its clerk and chief of staff for $105,000. City spokesman Brian Wheeler, who makes $116K, has filled in since former council clerk Paige Rice took the chief of staff job in July for $98,000 and left in September.

Child porn charges

Forrest Butler, ACPD

Albemarle police charged Avocado Capital co-founder Forrest Butler, 58, with two counts of child pornography distribution January 22. He was released from jail on bond and will appear in court April 8.

Wawa on the way?

The county’s Architectural Review Board has approved plans for a Wawa convenience store and gas station off Route 29 and Proffit Road. It could be built by the end of the year, as long as the Board of Supervisors gives it a thumbs up.

Free tax help

The local branch of the United Way is offering free tax preparation for most taxpayers with household incomes of $55,000 or less. Through its program called Cville Tax Aid, partners such as the UVA Community Credit Union have prepared nearly 20,000 returns since 2007, and organizers expect to help more than 2,700 community members this year. To schedule an appointment, call United Way at 434-972-1703 or visit www.CvilleTaxAid.org.

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C’villeization: Proposed ad campaign draws complaints

The latest iteration of a rebranding campaign to draw visitors to the area was better received than an earlier one, but its use of “C’villeization” still makes some local officials squeamish. Charlottesville Albemarle Convention & Visitors Bureau

The word “civility” has become a bad word among some Charlottesvillians. Now a proposed tourism ad campaign touting “C’villeization” as a play on the C’ville nickname is also drawing fire.

Chapel Hill-based ad company Clean presented mock-ups of its “Welcome to C’villeization” rebranding campaign at a December 20 tourism board meeting. The ads feature images of attractive people eating local food, having a good time, and, in one, clinking wine glasses with the text, “C’villeization welcomes spitting. In the right context.”

Mayor Nikuyah Walker, who is not on the tourism board, is not a fan. She posted on Facebook, “This makes me so sad. This logo is unacceptable. Be Better! Do Better!” Walker did not respond to a request from C-VILLE for comment.

Supervisor Ann Mallek, a county representative on the board, says, “I’m not a tourism expert. I do know what stuck up and arrogant look like.”

And by “stuck up” and “arrogant,” she means “anybody who claims to be the center of civilization.”

At an October meeting, Clean learned that civility was not going to fly. At the December meeting, Interim City Manager Mike Murphy was wary of “C’villeization” and “C’villeized,” as well. “It’s still too close for me,” he said.

Councilor Kathy Galvin said, “C’villeization is a problem.”

And Councilor Mike Signer, the city’s alternate member, liked going with “C’ville” sans the play on civilization.

Despite those reactions, Adam Healey, the visitors bureau interim director, said the C’villeization campaign had gotten “highly positive” feedback. He proposed it for an ad campaign targeting 25- to 44-year-olds, dubbed “refined roamers,” in the Washington, D.C., and Research Triangle Park area in North Carolina. “The goal is to increase short getaways,” he said.

After Walker’s Facebook post, which Healey says he hasn’t seen, he says, “We have to understand our objective. We’re trying to draw visitors. We’re not on a social mission. We’re on an economic mission.”

Albemarle Economic Development Director Roger Johnson, who was elected chair of the reconfigured tourism executive board, says the C’villeization presentation “was definitely better received than the initial one.”

The visitors bureau board has gone through major turnover the past year, and will now include two elected officials from the city and county on its executive board.

That change was spearheaded by Mallek, who says, “For 11 years I was concerned the county was not getting the service it deserved for its million dollars.” Before, the county sent a staff member, who was one of 11 board members and was consistently in the minority when the county’s wish list was voted on, according to Mallek.

Those at the December 21 meeting approved a 14-member board, with two elected officials each from Albemarle and Charlottesville, four city and county administrators, a UVA vice president, reps from the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which owns Monticello, and the Chamber of Commerce, two tourism industry members, and one representative from the arts community.

The size of the board drew some concerns. Signer favored a “nimble” decision-making group like the seven-member Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority Board. And Johnson said, “The larger we make this group, the harder it is to make decisions.”

Both the government officials and tourism representatives wanted more people with expertise from the tourism industry on the board.

The Board of Supervisors and City Council will vote on the changes to the board in January. As for the ad campaign, that will come back to the tourism board. Says Healey, “We’re going to incorporate feedback.”

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A little help: Tourism bureau seeks PR firm to turn around its image

It’s going to take more than an ad campaign to rehab Charlottesville’s image after the white supremacist violence of 2017. SUSAN PAYNE

Before the summer of 2017, a Google image search of the word “Charlottesville” might have turned up some photos of our picturesque purple mountains, or the stately columns of Monticello and the University of Virginia. These days, as demonstrated in the recent Charlottesville documentary, it turns up images of flag-waving neo-Nazis and white supremacists.

Now, with the city back in the national news for the trial of accused murderer-by-car James Fields, the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention & Visitors Bureau is looking for a little help. Specifically, the bureau released a request for proposal seeking a public relations firm to turn around the area’s negative image, which stems, it says, from “the takeover of our town by a white nationalist rally organized by Jason Kessler.”

“There’s been a lot of negative press,” says the bureau’s interim director Adam Healey. “There’s no doubt it’s impacted tourism.”

The number one metric of the tourism industry is revenue per available hotel room, says Healey. “For Charlottesville and Albemarle, that number is down 4 percent while every other major market in the state is up.”

He attributes the decrease to the “public relations challenge” since the Unite the Right rally, as well as underfunding of the visitors bureau—it gets 20 percent of the transient occupancy tax while top tourist destinations in other states get 100 percent of that tax. Marketing and branding efforts have so far failed to establish this area as “the crown jewel of Virginia,” he says.

Tourism is about jobs and quality of life, he says. “It’s a driver of economic development.”

The PR firm will work with Healey and Clean, the bureau’s Chapel Hill-based ad agency, which it hired in 2017. “We need both of those,” says Healey. A typical retainer for this type of PR work is around $8,000 a month.

Healey wants a public relations firm experienced in crisis communications to be proactive in changing the narrative about Charlottesville.

While the events of August 12 were a crisis, Batten Fellow and global communications expert Barie Carmichael says at this point, Charlottesville has “an issue,” which requires a long lead time to mitigate. “It’s not a flip-the-switch situation.”

Carmichael, who worked for Dow Corning during its silicone breast-implant crisis, says it’s important not to assume everyone associates Charlottesville with white supremacists without doing the research to find out exactly what the target market—tourists—thinks. Without research first, it’s a “fire, ready, aim” strategy that’s pretty much a useless exercise.

“Smart companies are going out and looking at social media” and using analytics to find out what people are already talking about, she says. In doing so, a firm may find “unexpected allies” that can help change the narrative.

“Communications issues management doesn’t begin with what you say,” she says. “It begins with what’s received.”

Healey notes that 1,500 hotel rooms are currently being developed that will increase the area’s capacity 35 percent in the next three years. The PR firm will get a one-year contract that can be renewed for an additional four years, hopefully long enough to fill all those hotel rooms.

“We’ve got to be proactive about public relations,” he says. “There’s been a lack of accountability.”

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In brief: America’s Dad, Virginia’s tampons, A12’s price tag and more

U.S. Senator Tim Kaine stopped by York Place for a pizza party with UVA students. Eze Amos

New contender for America’s Dad?

Senator Tim Kaine stopped by his campaign office in York Place September 21 for a pizza party with nearly three dozen University of Virginia Democrats.

Supporters passed around campaign signs that said “America’s Dad,” although Kaine may have some competition for the title—a spokesman for Bill Cosby told reporters recently that Cosby is still America’s Dad, despite his conviction for sexual assault.

In an exclusive interview on the vital topic of “dad jokes,” Kaine confessed that he groaned when his staff introduced the signs during his 2016 vice presidential campaign. “I kind of found myself in the center of all these dad jokes. And I mean, this is a very dad thing to say, but until I was in the center of them, I didn’t know there was such a thing as a dad joke.”

Urban Dictionary defines a dad joke as an “indescribably cheesy” or dumb joke made by a father to his kids. “We’re in a business where people get called a lot of names, and being made fun of because of my dad quality? I’ll take that,” says Kaine.

Smells of pepperoni and cheese wafted through the air as Hillary Clinton’s former running mate also fielded questions about his favorite type of ’za.

“I will always have Canadian bacon, mushroom, and black olive if I can,” he said. “Not everybody has Canadian bacon. It was more popular back in the day, and with Trump in a trade war against Canada, I’m sure there’s no more Canadian bacon.”

Believe it or not, he was also there to talk politics. As was 5th District congressional candidate Leslie Cockburn, who was preaching to the choir when she said one of her top priorities is debt relief for folks with student loans.

Like his young constituents, Kaine said he believes in climate science, marriage equality, and reasonable rules to “stop the carnage of gun violence.”

“I feel like politics is a lot like a train that’s run away and we need to pull the emergency brake,” Kaine told the crowd of students. And when recruiting young supporters, he said he no longer just talks about the differences between Republicans and Democrats.

“It’s not just that there’s a difference between the two sides,” he says. “It’s that you make a difference.”

As for defeating opponent Corey Stewart? “I feel good about what I see, but we take nothing for granted.”

Quote of the week

“If someone chooses to visit a Virginia Department of Corrections inmate, he or she cannot have anything hidden inside a body cavity.”—Spokeswoman Lisa Kinney tells the AP why women can’t wear tampons or menstrual cups when visiting state prisons.

In brief

Tourism bureau slam

Adam Healey, interim executive director for the Charlottesville-Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau, called the agency a “weak marketer,” its messaging “confusing,” and its positioning “dusty” rather than modern, according to Allison Wrabel’s story in the Daily Progress. And he wants to bump the bureau’s advertising budget from around $400,000 to $6 million.

Weekend traffic fatalities

UVA engineering grad student Rouzbeh Rastgarkafshgarkolaei, 27, died on U.S. 29 in Culpeper around 4:50am September 23, when his 2006 Audi sideswiped a Dodge Caravan, ran off the road, and caught fire. Virginia State Police said speed was a factor. That same day, Mary Elizabeth Carter, 19, died when her Mazda crossed the center line in Louisa and struck a Ford F150. Police said she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.

Jowell Travis Legendre faces multiple charges. Charlottesville Police

Student assaulted, robbed

A UVA student was robbed and sexually assaulted around 9:30pm September 19 on the 500 block of 14th Street NW, city police said. Louisa resident Jowell Travis Legendre, 29, was arrested the next day and charged with object sexual penetration, forcible sodomy, robbery, grand larceny, and credit card larceny.

Well endowed

UVA’s endowment jumped almost $1 billion in the last fiscal year, from $8.6 billion to $9.5 billion. Even more impressive, the endowment has seen a 10.9 percent annual return over the past 20 years, according to COO Kristina Alimard.

Nuts wanted

The Virginia Department of Forestry is seeking acorns and nuts from 12 different species, mostly oaks, from state landowners. The department wants to plant them at its Augusta Forestry Center for tree seedlings.

 

 

Pricey preparations

While Jason Kessler was in D.C., Virginia State Police sent 700 officers to Charlottesville during the
August 12 anniversary weekend that brought out hundreds of anti-racist activists, students, and
mourners, but little to no opposition. The cost?

$3.1 million, according to VSP spokesperson Corinne Geller, who says the department has submitted the bill to the Virginia Department of Emergency Management for reimbursement. That number includes: $953,000 for equipment and vehicles,
and $885,000 in salaries (for officers who would have been working anyway). It does not include costs for Charlottesville, Albemarle, and UVA.

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In brief: Interim imbroglio, Miller Center imbroglio, gunman imbroglio and more

Mayor Nikuyah Walker takes it to social media.

Infighting implodes council

The hiring of an interim city manager, an event that usually takes place behind closed doors, has become heated and public, with reports of shouting at a July 20 closed City Council session. Mayor Nikuyah Walker has gone on Facebook Live twice to express her concerns that the process is part of the old boys’ network because someone suggested a candidate for the position to Vice Mayor Heather Hill, which she calls a “white supremist practice.”

On July 23, councilors Hill, Mike Signer and Kathy Galvin issued a five-page response to Walker’s Facebook Live video. “We regret that our rules requiring confidentiality about closed session discussions for personnel choices—which are in place under Virginia law, to protect local elected officials’ ability to discuss and negotiate employment agreements—were broken by the mayor.”

The search for an interim city manager became more urgent when Maurice Jones took a town manager job in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, leaving the city without a chief executive as the anniversary of August 12 looms.

Chris Suarez at the Daily Progress reports that three sources have confirmed U.S. Army Human Resources Command Chief of Staff Sidney C. Zemp has been offered the job.

In the councilors’ response, all three say they’ve never met the candidate, and that review panels are not used when filling interim positions.

In her July 20 video, Walker walked back a comment she made on Facebook and Twitter July 19: “We might have to protest a City Council decision. Are y’all with me?” She said she didn’t want supporters to shut down a council meeting, but did want them to pay attention to the process.

Walker was back on Facebook Live July 23, blasting her fellow councilors for their “very privileged” backgrounds and questioning their integrity.

She says she favors an internal candidate—the two assistant city managers and a department head have been floated—which councilors Wes Bellamy and Signer initially favored.

Bellamy issued his own statement: “Elected bodies agree and disagree all of the time” and that can lead to “healthy debate.”

Will council actually vote for an interim city manager at its August 6 meeting? Stay tuned.

Mayor Nikuyah Walker expressed concern in a July 20 Facebook Live video about the hiring process for an interim city manager.

In brief

Too much heritage

The Louisa County Board of Zoning Appeals said the giant Confederate battle flag on I-64 must come down because its 120-foot pole is double the county’s maximum allowable height. Virginia Flaggers erected the “Charlottesville I-64 Spirit of Defiance Battle Flag” in March and argued that after putting up 27 flags across the state, they wouldn’t have spent $14,000 on this one without confirming county code.

Controversial hire

A petition with more than 2,000 signatures of UVA faculty and students objects to the Miller Center’s hiring of Trump legislative affairs director Marc Short as a senior fellow. The petitioners are opposed to Trump administrators using “our university to clean up their tarnished reputations.”

Presidential paychecks

New UVA president Jim Ryan commands a higher salary than his predecessor, but can’t touch Brono Mendenhall’s paycheck. Photo UVA

Outgoing UVA prez Teresa Sullivan’s base pay of $580,000 and total compensation of $607,502 last year makes her one of the higher paid university chiefs, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Her successor, Jim Ryan, starts with a $750,000 base pay, but to put those numbers in perspective, remember that UVA football coach Bronco Mendenhall makes $3.4 million—with a possible $2 million-plus bonus. At this week’s ACC Kickoff event, media members predicted—for the fifth straight year—that UVA will finish last in the conference’s Coastal Division.

New tourism director

Adam Healy, the former CEO of online wedding marketplace Borrowed and Blue, which closed abruptly last October, will now serve as the interim executive director of the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Standoff on Lankford

A state police vehicle on the outskirts of the standoff.

About 50 city, county and state police and SWAT team members were on the scene of a four-hour standoff with 29-year-old Alexander Rodgers, who had barricaded himself inside a Lankford Avenue home on July 19. Someone called police around 8am and reported shots fired. Rodgers, who has a history of domestic violence and was wanted on six outstanding warrants, eventually surrendered and was charged with three felonies and a misdemeanor.

Quote of the week:

“The fish rots from the head.”—Senator Tim Kaine, after U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security and UVA alum Kirstjen Nielsen said about last summer’s violence in Charlottesville at a July 19 press briefing, “It’s not that one side was right and one side was wrong.”

County crime report

The Albemarle County Police Department released its annual crime report for 2017 last month. Here are a few things that caught our eye.

-Police misconduct has been reframed in a new “cheers and jeers” section, where police complaints are compared side-by-side with commendations.

  • Complaints: 57
  • Commendations: 69

-The award section may come as a surprise, because Detective Andrew Holmes, who faces five lawsuits for racial profiling, was granted a community service award.

-Albemarle County had the second-lowest crime rate in the state while Charlottesville had the highest. Crime rate is measured by tallying the number of crimes committed per 100,000 people.

  •   Fairfax: 1,273
  •   Albemarle: 1,286
  •   Prince George: 1,334
  •   Arlington: 1,355
  •   Prince William: 1,370
  •   Chesterfield: 1,450
  •   James City: 1,611
  •   Roanoke: 1,638
  •   Henrico: 2,548
  •   Charlottesville: 2,631

-County police officers made 2,296 arrests and used force “to overcome resistance or threat” on 14 occasions.

-Assaults on police officers have gone up and down.

  • 2015: 3
  • 2016: 10
  • 2017: 7
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War on weddings: Looming legislation troubles local businesses

Keswick Vineyards owner Al Schornberg says a one-acre vineyard is only a $20,000 expenditure and compares it to the millions invested in growing grapes at Keswick. He hopes to see stricter restrictions. Photo by Martyn Kyle

Some professionals in the wedding business see Albemarle County’s attempts to further regulate events at farm wineries, cideries, breweries and distilleries as a blatant attack on a burgeoning industry—and they’re not sure why.

Amid crowd murmurs that the county is working toward finding “a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist,” senior planner Mandy Burbage presented a staff report to supervisors and planning commissioners at a joint work session June 14 that recommended limiting events at those venues to 24 per year.

Jen Fariello, a wedding photographer who spoke along with other industry professionals including event planners, limousine drivers, caterers and musicians, says capping weddings at these types of farm venues could imminently harm her business.

“We have an incredibly positive and thriving and profitable wedding industry,” she says. “We cannot talk about the huge success of the wedding industry without it being tied in to the farm winery, farm cidery and now brewery and distillery industry. They’re incredibly linked.”

While Charlottesville and surrounding counties are known as a hub for destination weddings, Fariello says brides and grooms-to-be aren’t attracted to the area for its mass of hotels or restaurants—it’s the “bucolic countryside” they’re attracted to.

Borrowed & Blue’s co-founder and CEO Adam Healey calculates the wedding industry as having an economic impact of $158 million in Albemarle County, and the local wedding market has been ranked as one of the top five for destination weddings on the East Coast, he says.

“Why are weddings being attacked?” Fariello asked. “Why would the county squash the golden goose?”

And she was happy to learn that most supervisors and planning commissioners felt the same way.

Diantha McKeel, vice chair of the Albemarle Board of Supervisors, said it best: “I’m not excited about caps.”

A current issue, staff reported, is the number of places acting as farm wineries, cideries, breweries and distilleries. The comprehensive plan dictates that those businesses should not be solely event venues and, according to the county’s senior planner, “that potential does exist.”

Al Schornberg, owner of Keswick Vineyards and one of 27 members of the public to speak at the meeting, says those types of venues, or “faux wineries,” as he calls them, are already here among 29 local wineries currently classified as farm wineries.

“There’s companies that want to take advantage of the farm winery ordinance to do events without really making the investment in vineyards and cellars,” Schornberg says. According to state regulations, 51 percent of a farm winery’s grapes used to make wine must be grown on the farm. Staff recommended going a step further in the county and requiring each winery to also have at least one acre of vines on-site. But, for Schornberg, who says he has invested millions of dollars in grape growing, a one-acre vineyard—or roughly a $20,000 investment—isn’t enough to inaugurate a legitimate winery.

“Any winery or any establishment that claims to be a winery and doesn’t have a cellar isn’t really a winery,” he says. Though he won’t point fingers, he says some new wineries seem to follow that trend. And “it’s not really fair to legitimate farm wineries who have made the investment in vineyards and cellars and things like that,” he says. “It’s not a level playing field.”

Officials agreed that the zoning amendment to ensure that farm wineries, cideries, breweries and distilleries are not just taking on that name in the guise of an event venue should move forward.

“Where does it end?” rural landowner Elizabeth Neff asked, encouraging the officials to look 50 or 100 years into the future if events at farm venues in question aren’t capped. “How do you want rural people to live?”

Complaints from neighbors mostly came from noise from events and the number of people visiting the county.

A 50-vehicle trip event cap (or 25 each way) exists in the current ordinance, triggering the need for a zoning clearance, which is a $50 permit.

“That’s an awful lot of people in a car if you’re going to have 200,” commissioner Mac Lafferty noted. Currently, a special use permit is required for events at farm venues with more than 200 people. A zoning ordinance allows venues to play amplified music at a cost of $50, but the new amendment proposes the need for a special use permit, which could cost about $2,000.

Ultimately, as new legislation that would limit their labor loomed, the faces of farm wineries, cideries, breweries and distilleries made it clear to county leaders that partnering with the event industry makes their work possible.

“We have not seen the issues that apparently are out there,” Charlotte Shelton, the owner of Albemarle Ciderworks, said. Generating revenue through holding events, she said, “can be the difference between breaking even or stumbling along.”

By the end of summer, county staff will have a draft of the text amendment.

Corrected June 24 with information to reflect that the 50-vehicle trip event cap already exists and a $2,000 special use permit to allow amplified sound at events would be a one-time cost.