Jim Hingeley promises a more “progressive, humane approach” to criminal justice in his campaign for Albemarle commonwealth's attorney. Staff photo
Dozens of people, many from the legal community, braved the chill January 23 to stand in front of Albemarle Circuit Court, where Jim Hingeley, founder of the Charlottesville Albemarle Public Defender Office, announced his campaign for Albemarle commonwealth’s attorney.
“It’s time for criminal justice reform in Albemarle County,” said Hingeley, 71. He said he wants to take a more “progressive, humane approach” to prosecution, because lengthy prison sentences come at a cost to society.
Hingeley will seek the Democratic nomination, and he took aim at the Republican incumbent. Commonwealth’s Attorney Robert Tracci, said Hingeley, was putting nonviolent offenders in jail and had increased by 29 percent the number of cases tried last year in circuit court, where felonies are heard.
“Many times Mr. Tracci has asked for jail time for driving with suspended licenses,” says Hingeley. “I won’t do that.”
The state’s policy of automatically suspending driver’s licenses for unpaid court costs and fines is murky since a judge ruled December 21 the practice is likely unconstitutional.
Hingeley stressed his 43 years of experience as an attorney handling thousands of cases. “We’ve seen examples of how inexperience can affect justice,” he said. And he drew applause when he said he would not pursue the death penalty.
So far, Hingeley has raised over $10,000, most of that from a committee for Andrew Sneathern, who ran for the 5th District congressional seat last year and who was encouraged by some to run for commonwealth’s attorney. Sneathern introduced Hingeley
He lauded Hingeley’s “recognition of the dignity of every member of the community,” while excoriating the war on drugs and Virginia’s punitive misdemeanor marijuana possession laws, which “take driver’s licenses away for something that has nothing to do with driving.”
Hingeley, currently a city resident, says the law allows him to run in the county, and notes that former commonwealth’s attorneys Denise Lunsford and Jim Camblos lived in the city when they were elected and subsequently moved to the county. He says he’s planning to move to the county before the election “because I’m very committed to this.”
Among those gathered at Hingeley’s announcement were Albemarle Clerk of Court John Zug, Charlottesville Clerk Llezelle Dugger, who used to work for Hingeley in the public defender’s office, Albemarle sheriff candidate Chan Bryant, and City Councilor Wes Bellamy.
“I’m entering this race because we need to turn Albemarle County’s criminal justice system in a different direction,” he said. “I’m entering this race because our community can and should end the politics of mass incarceration.”
A judge found the arrest of local mom Lara Harrison at an August school board meeting unconstitutional. Others arrested that day weren’t as lucky. Photo by Eze Amos
Five anti-racist activists were in court October 30, following their arrests at an August 30 special meeting of the Albemarle County School Board. But many community members feel like only one was handed down the verdict she deserved.
While Lara Harrison’s trespassing charge was dropped, four others were convicted of trespassing or obstruction of justice.
“There’s a little history to this,” said defense attorney Janice Redinger, who represented Harrison and Andrea Massey. Both moms were charged with trespassing after allegedly disrupting and refusing to leave the Albemarle County Office Building where the school board meeting was taking place.
At an August 23 meeting, the activists—many with the Hate-Free Schools Coalition of Albemarle County—showed up to speak during the public comment session to ask the school board to ban Confederate imagery and other hate symbols from the division’s dress code. Most didn’t get the chance.
Redinger said in court that Harrison was the only person allowed to speak before the school board shut the meeting down for alleged disruption. Activists were snapping their fingers in agreement with Harrison’s comments, “the least disruptive thing that one can do in order to share your support,” Redinger pointed out. But the school board alleges other disruptive activity such as cheering.
The aborted meeting was continued August 30, but the school board did not allow for any public comment. So some activists decided to hold their own “community meeting” in the lobby outside of Lane Auditorium, she said.
These activists, including Harrison, began chanting, singing, and clapping for their cause. Alleging that they were still disrupting the meeting happening inside of the auditorium behind closed doors, County Executive Jeff Richardson testified that he approached Harrison and another woman and asked multiple times, “Please quiet down or you will have to leave.” He said he never specifically directed any officer to begin making arrests. “My goal was for the group to just quiet down.”
Richardson said he turned to Lieutenant Terry Walls and expressed concern that the activists weren’t quieting down or leaving, and Walls testified that he then began making arrests, starting with Harrison.
Redinger argued that the arrest was unconstitutional because Richardson never explicitly directed Walls to break out the handcuffs, and only Richardson had the authority to make that call.
Judge William Barkley agreed, and dropped Harrison’s charge. Harrison then took a seat in the gallery of the courtroom—among dozens of supporters from the local activist community—to learn the fate of the other three defendants.
“It was vindicating for that moment to hear that the judge agreed that it was an unjust arrest,” says Harrison. “At the same time, I felt very anxious for my co-defendants.”
Massey, Redinger’s second client, wasn’t as lucky. She was inside Lane Auditorium peacefully protesting with tape over her mouth, holding a large banner that said, “RACISTS DON’T GET RE-ELECTED.”
Witnesses agreed that the board meeting remained uninterrupted until an unnamed woman burst into the room to call for help, yelling that activists outside were being “brutalized” by police. Board Chair Kate Acuff ordered her out, and Massey, speaking for the first time, said, “You’re being ridiculous.”
“Immediately, without resolution, without delay, Kate Acuff ordered her to leave and directed the police toward [Massey],” said Redinger. Though Acuff read a statement at the beginning of the meeting, which said any disruption would result ejection, Redinger argued that Massey couldn’t have disrupted the meeting, because it had already been disrupted when the woman barged in and called for help. For that reason, Redinger said there were no grounds to arrest Massey.
But the judge said Massey’s failure to leave after being asked to by Acuff and an officer was enough to find her guilty of trespassing.
Defense attorney Andrew Sneathern adopted Redinger’s argument for his client, Sabr Lyon, who was inside the meeting with Massey, and was also found guilty of trespassing.
With tape over her mouth, and holding her own sign, Lyon stepped away from her seat and moved closer to the podium at the front of the auditorium. But Sneathern said she never said word until she was being arrested.
According to prosecutor Juan Vega, Acuff gave Lyon a warning and asked her to leave. Her arresting officer testified he wasn’t specifically asked to arrest her and said he attempted to get her to leave without being arrested. Lyon allegedly said, “It’s up to you,” and left peacefully when he cuffed her and escorted her out. The judge found her guilty of trespassing.
Last up was Francis Richards, who got caught in the commotion outside of the auditorium. He said he saw a man grab a friend of his and he inserted himself between them to protect her.
The man turned out to be Deputy Police Chief Greg Jenkins, who was in plainclothes and who testified that he announced he was an officer. But several others testified that they didn’t hear him and had no idea who he was.
Defense attorney Bruce Williamson examined video of the chaos, and said if Jenkins ever truly announced his position, no one reacted. And while Jenkins testified that he had a badge, handcuffs, and a gun, Williamson said they weren’t visible.
Richards, who was charged with trespassing and obstruction of justice, was found guilty of the latter.
The prosecutor asked for a 60-day jail sentence for Richards because his encounter was physical, and 30-day sentences for Massey and Lyon. He wanted all of the activists to be banned from the county office building and school board meetings for two years.
The judge suspended the sentences on the condition of good behavior for two years, but chose to convict them to send a message.
Samantha Peacoe, who was also arrested for obstruction of justice, entered a plea deal before the trials and was sentenced to 30-days with all time suspended.
“We’re disappointed but not surprised by the judge’s upholding of white supremacy by targeting and finding guilty peaceful protesters that should have never been arrested in the first place,” says Harrison. “Every time we’re faced with the state trying to silence us and intimidate us into stopping what we’re doing, we just show up stronger.”
Walt Heinecke, an associate professor at UVA who observed the trials, says he found them “troubling and problematic.”
“[It] was just a spectacle orchestrated by the school division, the county government, and the commonwealth’s attorney to signal a message to citizens who want to actively participate in dissent in government processes that they will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law,” he says.
It’s as if public dissent has become illegal, he adds.
“I’d like to remind everybody that when I was a teenager during the ‘60s and early ‘70s, there were dissenters in American blowing up banks, blowing up government installations,” he says, “and now we’ve gotten to a point where if someone snaps their fingers, it’s a national security threat.”
Leslie Cockburn will be nominated the Democratic challenger to Congressman Tom Garrett in Farmville May 5. Photo by Natalie Jacobsen
She frequently wears a green quilted vest—and her campaign has high production values, perhaps fitting for a former “60 Minutes” producer. Two weeks before the 5th District Democratic convention May 5 in Farmville, and after 23 caucuses, Leslie Cockburn amassed the most delegates in a field of four candidates to be the presumptive nominee.
The question remains: Can she surf the blue wave, relate to rural voters and upset incumbent U.S. Congressman Tom Garrett in a district that was made for Republicans?
And can she unite fellow Democrats who were left feeling bruised from the caucuses?
Cockburn—pronounced “Coe-burn”—is nothing if not self-assured, and she says this year is very different from 2016, when former Albemarle supervisor Jane Dittmar tried to win the district that’s been in GOP hands since Tom Perriello fell in the 2010 midterm elections.
“We have a freshman Republican with a record,” she says. Garrett’s membership in the congressional Freedom Caucus has “alienated a lot of Republicans in the district.” And she says she has more committed Democrats in the district than Republicans do.
“If the switch is going to happen, this is the year it will,” she predicts.
Cockburn describes herself as part of the blue wave of women who woke up to find Donald Trump president. “I was really offended by him,” she says. “And I was alarmed as a journalist,” both at Trump singling out a disabled reporter and taking potshots at the Fourth Estate.
The Rappahannock resident says she was energized by the first Women’s March, and calls it “an amazing day.” A few months later at a Dem breakfast, two local party chairs asked her to run. She spent three months going around the district asking questions, “not as a candidate, but as a journalist,” and learned that health care was “by far the biggest issue for constituents.”
Many people at age 65 are considering slowing down rather than launching a yearlong, seven-day-a-week congressional race. Cockburn pooh-poohs the notion that age will be a factor and notes she was an investigative reporter for 35 years, has covered six wars—including three in Afghanistan—and won 10 awards. “I’m used to a fast pace,” she says.
She swims an hour a day, sails and is a “big hiker,” she says. “I’m a pretty spry 65.”
And she’ll need that energy to woo a congressional district that encompasses more than 10,000 square miles and is larger than New Jersey.
The strategy
In the 11 months that she’s been on the campaign trail, Cockburn has put 45,000 miles on her car. She has 700 volunteers and they’re in every county of the district. “We’ve created an army,” she says, comparing her strategy to that of Barack Obama in 2008.
And in the latest campaign filings, she’d raised more than $700,000, second in the field of four candidates. Roger Dean Huffstetler raised more than $1 million, Andrew Sneathern reports $260,000, and Ben Cullop, the only candidate who has officially withdrawn from the race, raised $288,000, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.
The remaining 5th District Democratic candidates: Leslie Cockburn, Roger Dean Huffstetler and Andrew Sneathern
Around 575 women are running for Congress or state legislatures this year, most of them first-timers. In an April 10 Vanity Fair article, Cockburn details her run for office in “Thank you, Mr. Trump: How the president drove me to run for office.”
When she met with Lisa Hystad, the former 5th District Democratic chair, Cockburn says Hystad told her she had to run as a progressive. The day before, a “seasoned political consultant” told her she had to stick to the middle, she writes in Vanity Fair.
When she introduces herself at the April 21 caucus in Charlottesville, she makes a nod to the conservative rural district: “I’m a farmer, I’m a conservationist, and I’m a woman with a past,” she says before segueing into her work at “60 Minutes,” “Frontline” and Vanity Fair.
She’s learned about the need for Medicaid, for school funding, for nursing homes, for transportation for those who “live in the hollows.” She’s learned about the “plague of opioids—I see it every day on the campaign trail.” And she points out that there are 2,500 open jobs in economically hard-hit Southside, but “people can’t pass a drug test.”
Every candidate will cite the need for jobs in the district, but Cockburn says she’s asked people what specifically can be done—and she will have a plan. For example, in the brewery-rich district, hops do well in certain areas like Madison County.
If elected, Cockburn says the first bill she’d support would be an expansion of Medicare for all. And the second would be an assault weapons ban. “I have a hunting background,” she says. “I have seen weapons of war. They should not be in the hands of an 18-year-old in Florida.”
Cockburn stresses her differences from Garrett, starting with her conservation background. “I’ve thought a lot about the environment,” she says. “He’s right there voting to dismantle the EPA brick by brick.” She cites a stream protection act Garrett helped repeal, and says coal ash in streams is a “big issue in Danville.”
The tax reform bill Garrett voted for will add $1.5 trillion to the deficit, she says. And he wants to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. And then there’s that March 2017 photo of Garrett with “white supremacist leader” Jason Kessler.
In talking to people throughout the district, Cockburn has made videos of the encounters and the issues they bring up.
Republican Congressman Tom Garrett wants a second term, and he has the advantage of a rural, GOP-leaning district. Photo by Eze Amos
She’s talked to veterans in Franklin County who suffer from PTSD.
She’s talked to African-American community members in Buckingham County, where Garrett lives, who are going to have a giant compressor station that “sounds like a locomotive” in a historic district. “Forty-five families are in the blast zone,” she says. “Those are people who desperately need representation.”
Says Cockburn of her opponent, “It’s as if he has no concern for the people in the 5th District.”
The controversies
Cockburn comes from a privileged background, and some wonder if her coastal elite creds will work with the rural voters in the 5th District.
She was born in high-end Hillsborough, California, the daughter of a shipping magnate. And her daughter, actress Olivia Wilde, and her fiance, Jason Sudeikis, bring a Hollywood connection that’s featured in a holiday photo on her website.
“I don’t live in Hollywood,” says Cockburn. “I do have a daughter who is a movie star. That doesn’t make me a movie star.” She points out that she also has a daughter who’s an attorney who focuses on criminal justice—a Harvard-educated attorney, according to her campaign website.
As for her wealth, Cockburn concedes, “I’m a little older than my rivals, so I have a little more assets.” In Congress, that would translate to the low-end of political wealth, she says.
“If anything, I’m land poor,” she continues. “I come from a well-to-do family, but that doesn’t mean they pay for everything.” She recounts that at age 24, she married a “poor Irish writer. My family was Republican and my father said, ‘You’re on your own.’ To call me rich is ridiculous. I have been the breadwinner in my family and I care about equal pay.”
Her husband, Andrew Cockburn, is Washington editor for Harper’s, and the couple have a Washington address, which had some questioning whether she even lives in the district.
The D.C. residence is her husband’s office, she says. They bought their Rappahannock farm 19 years ago, and 12 years ago made it their full-time home.
Andrew Cockburn raised some eyebrows when he tweeted after the first caucuses, “Leslie was defending the environment while others were defending rapists,” a remark that seemed directed at one of her opponents, criminal defense attorney Sneathern.
“I was saddened and disappointed by that,” says Sneathern. “He has apologized and I accepted his apology.”
“Attacking defense attorneys for doing their jobs isn’t something Democrats do—period,” wrote attorney Lloyd Snook on Facebook. He noted that the tweet came down more than 17 hours later.
The Democratic caucus in Charlottesville April 21 packed Burley Middle School. Photo by Natalie Jacobsen
And then there’s the public resignation of Greene County Democratic chair Elizabeth Alcorn, who, in a lengthy public letter, wrote she was resigning because “I have suffered harassment and intimidation from the Leslie Cockburn campaign for months over my insistence to keep the nomination fair and balanced for my voters.”
Alcorn, who served as a Madison County caucus official, took issue with Cockburn staff campaigning at the April 15 caucus, a big no-no, she says, and one of them was sent back to the observer section twice. The next day, she says Cockburn sent an email to the chair of the 5th District committee, Suzanne Long, accusing caucus officials of a “racist incident.”
“I cannot support such a person let alone encourage others in my community to support someone who exhibits behavior no different than politicians we wish to replace,” says Alcorn.
Alcorn says other committee chairs have been harassed by the Cockburn campaign. “I think it’s going to be hard to energize the base when you’ve done a scorched earth with committees,” says Alcorn.
Cockburn says her campaign staff has received praise for its professionalism from a majority of caucus chairs.
Caucus criticism
Many energized 5th District Democrats attended their first caucus in April to elect delegates to attend the May 5 convention in Farmville to choose a congressional candidate, and 23 caucuses were held across the district. A staggering 1,328 registered at Monticello High for Albemarle’s April 16 caucus, and that does not include those who gave up after not being able to find parking.
It turns out that a convention is pretty standard fare for the 5th District, but the ones in the past have not attracted the interest and number of participants as the post-2016 landscape (it’s up to the parties in each district to choose between a caucus and primary). That’s why the 5th District Democratic Committee upped the number of delegates from 2016 to 250 so local caucuses could send more people, says chair Suzanne Long.
The delegates are committed to their candidates for the first ballot, which means that with Leslie Cockburn holding more delegates than her two remaining rivals combined, Long doesn’t see any chance of an upset.
“With the energy in the country, it’s the worst possible way to choose a candidate,” says former Greene County Democratic chair Elizabeth Alcorn. “You don’t get millennials, you don’t get blue collar workers, you don’t get young families. They can’t take three hours off to do a caucus.”
Alcorn calls the process that of the “old guard,” and says Cockburn was nominated by “a very energized old Democratic base,” with most of her supporters “70 and above.”
Republicans will choose their candidates at a June 12 primary.
And a primary would have benefited Roger Dean Huffstetler, who raised over $1 million, says UVA’s Center for Politics Geoffrey Skelley.
For other candidates like Andrew Sneathern and Ben Cullop, who raised significantly less, a convention “levels the playing field,” observes Skelley.
Long believes the Democratic Party of Virginia is going to limit local jurisdictions like the 5th from using a convention in the future because of the time it takes and the potential to disenfranchise voters. “We want to let voters have as much opportunity as possible to participate in the democratic process.”
The Center for Politics agrees. With a 13-hour window to cast a vote, says Skelley, “We think a primary is the best for involving the most people.”
Official 5th District delegate results
Leslie Cockburn 140
Roger Dean Huffstetler 55
Andrew Sneathern 54
Earlysville resident Ben Cullop withdrew from the race after receiving zero delegates at the Albemarle caucus, One delegate is uncommitted.
Fifth District chair Long says she’s sorry to lose Alcorn, but adds, “I don’t think she had experience with the campaigns and caucuses. I’m not making excuses for Cockburn,” but all the candidates were campaigning at the caucuses, she says.
As for whether the inter-party contretemps will affect Cockburn’s challenge of Garrett, says Long, “That’s an excellent question and I wish I was a genie who could answer that.”
Geoffrey Skelley at UVA’s Center for Politics doesn’t think the infighting will be a problem in the general election—unless it continues. “If you’re going to have a kerfuffle, it’s better to have it now.”
And while Skelley and other political junkies were disappointed the convention won’t be contested, Long sees it as an opportunity to have “a unity convention to defeat Tom Garrett.”
The punditocracy
On April 18, the Cook Political Report moved the 5th District from “likely Republican” to “leans Republican.” Sabato’s Crystal Ball still rates the 5th District winner as likely Republican.
Skelley, who is a Crystal Ball associate editor, points out that although Hillary Clinton won Virginia by 5 points in 2016, Donald Trump won the district by 11 points. And in 2017, Democrat Ralph Northam won the governor’s race by 9 points statewide, but GOPer Ed Gillespie took the 5th by 9 points.
“That’s 18 points to the right” of the rest of the state, says Skelley, who adds that Gillespie was a stronger candidate than the current Republican Senate offerings of Corey Stewart and Delegate Nick Freitas.
“It’s not safe for Garrett by any means,” he says, but Cockburn needs several things to win: an environment that brings out an energized base, the top of the ticket—U.S. Senator Tim Kaine—to “totally dismantle the Republican candidate” and a lot of luck.
Garrett outperformed Trump in Albemarle in 2016, and “as an incumbent, could potentially outperform Republicans in the Senate race,” says Skelley.
“From her perspective, she’s got to talk to every Democrat in the district,” says Skelley. “For Cockburn to win, she needs it to be a disproportionate turnout.”
Overall, the environment for Democrats seems good, he says, “but how good is unclear.”
Cockburn seems up for the challenge. “To take on the 5th District is incredibly rewarding,” she says. “It’s in my backyard. I have done the work.”
The strange candidacy of Roger Dean Huffstetler
C-VILLE Weekly has covered a number of elections, and if there’s one thing we hold true, it’s that a candidate running for office always wants publicity.
That was not the case for Roger Dean “RD” Huffstetler, and we’re not just saying that because we were snubbed when he announced his campaign a year ago after barely living in Charlottesville a year, moving here in 2016 when his OB-GYN wife took a position at Sentara Martha Jefferson.
The former Marine and North Carolina native touts his rural roots and parents who struggled with addiction, a background that would resonate in the heavily rural, heavily addicted 5th District. His website notes that he was the first in his family to go to college and that he went to graduate school on the G.I. Bill—but omits that his two graduate degrees are from Harvard.
Huffstetler worked in Silicon Valley for five years, and it was a video from a 2013 Zillabyte launch that had WINA radio host Rob Schilling noticing Huffstetler then did not have the accent as an entrepreneur that he sports in a campaign video.
And then there was the borrow-a-farm blunder for that same campaign video, called “Best I Can.”
The campaign made cold calls to locals with farms to ask if they could use them for the ad shoot, according to the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news website, which quotes landowner Richard Foxx as saying, “My initial thought was, ‘You’re running for Congress in the 5th District of Virginia and nobody on your staff or that you know is a person with a farm?’ If you get out of Charlottesville, the whole district is rural.”
For that same ad, Huffstetler’s campaign manager, Kevin Zeithaml, put out a call on Facebook to borrow an old Ford pickup for a few hours.
Maybe that’s why rival Andrew Sneathern told C-VILLE, “My F-150 truck is one of the heroes of this campaign.”
Not surprisingly, Huffstetler had not responded to multiple requests for comment from C-VILLE at press time.
The winners of a contest to memorialize Vinegar Hill proposed an 80-foot wall made of layers of metal maps of the lost neighborhood on the west side of the Downtown Mall.
Vinegar Hill reimagined
The winners of a Bushman Dreyfus Architects and Tom Tom Founders Festival competition to use public spaces to create constructive dialogue and to reimagine Vinegar Hill, the city’s historic and predominantly African-American neighborhood, proposed an 80-foot wall made of layers of metal maps of the lost neighborhood on the west side of the Downtown Mall.
The wall, similar in size to the Freedom of Speech Wall on the opposite side of the mall, would be surrounded by rolling benches. Winning team members Lauren McQuistion, a UVA School of Architecture grad now based in Detroit, A.J. Artemel, director of communications at Yale School of Architecture, and Tyler Whitney, a former junior designer at local VMDO Architects who is also now in Detroit, received a grand prize of $5,000. All three are 2011 UVA graduates.
Thanks to urban renewal, Vinegar Hill was razed in 1964, and the city is currently considering how to memorialize it, independently from the competition, which garnered submissions from 80 applicants across 20 countries.
Quote of the Week: “One of the saddest outcomes of Ryan Kelly’s Pulitzer-winning Charlottesville #photo is he’s leaving #journalism altogether & not returning. He now works for a brewery.” —K. Matthew Dames, an associate librarian for scholarly resources and services at Georgetown University, on Twitter. Kelly had already planned to leave the Daily Progress, and August 12 was his last day.
Crozet triangle
A twin-engine Cessna crashed off Saddle Hollow Road April 15, killing the pilot, not far from where Piedmont Airlines Flight 349 slammed into Bucks Elbow Mountain in 1959 with one of the 27 people onboard surviving. Crozet also was the scene of a GOP congressional delegation-carrying Amtrak crash into a Time Disposal truck that killed one person January 31.
Rain tax quenched
Photo by Richard Fox
Albemarle Board of Supervisors decided April 11 to use its general fund to pay for the stormwater utility fee because of massive farmer outrage. Next issue to get riled about: property taxes going up.
Park entry fees upped again
It’s going to cost five bucks more to visit Shenandoah National Park this summer. Starting June 1, vehicle entrance fees will be $30, motorcycles $25, per person is $15 and an annual pass is $55. Good news for seniors and frequent parkers: The annual pass to all parks and the senior lifetime pass remains $80.
Call to condemn
Activist groups Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice want City Council and the Albemarle supes to approve a resolution written by Frank Dukes that condemns the Confederate battle flag that’s been erected in Louisa near I-64.
Cullop walloped
Things are not looking good for 5th District Democratic candidate Ben Cullop, who scored zero delegates at the April 16 overflow Albemarle Democratic caucus in his home county. Leslie Cockburn received 18 delegates, Andrew Sneathern 13 and R.D. Huffstetler will take eight to the Dem convention May 5 to choose a challenger to U.S. Congressman Tom Garrett.
A capacity crowd packed the Monticello High School gymnasium April 16 to participate in the 5th District Democratic caucus.
Court referendum
The General Assembly passed a law that means if Albemarle wants to move its courts from downtown, voters will have a say.
Power of the press
During the 2017 Virginia Press Association awards ceremony on April 14, C-VILLE nabbedaccolades in 10 categories in the specialty publication division, along with two best in showawards for design and presentation (Bill LeSueur and Max March) and artwork (Barry Bruner).
First place
Design and presentation: Bill LeSueur, Max March
Food writing: Caite White, Samantha Baars, Tami Keaveny, Erin O’Hare, Lisa Provence, Jessica Luck, Erin Scala, Eric Wallace
Illustrations: Barry Bruner
Front page or cover design: Bill LeSueur, Max March, Eze Amos, Jeff Drew
Combination picture and story: Eze Amos, Natalie Krovetz, Lisa Provence, Samantha Baars, Erin O’Hare, Susan Sorensen, Jessica Luck, Jackson Landers, Bill LeSueur
Pictorial photo: Jackson Smith
Second place
In-depth or investigative reporting: Samantha Baars
Earlier this month Governor Terry McAuliffe signed an executive action that will significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions from state fossil fuel power plants. Executive Directive 11 instructs the Department of Environmental Quality to establish regulations to cap carbon emissions. Only a handful of states have attempted this—it’s kind of a big deal.
Mike Tidwell, the executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, says the directive “is precisely what environmental advocates have been asking the governor to do for more than two years now. With President Trump dismantling climate policies nationally, it’s reassuring that Governor McAuliffe has at last responded in a powerful way.”
Noting the governor’s “decidedly mixed environmental legacy” in a Washington Post op-ed May 21, Tidwell also said this new action will improve the failing report card grade that CCAN assigned to McAuliffe last year.
Here’s how the environmental cheerleaders say he’s doing so far:
D-lister
Keeping fossil fuels in the ground: D
Cleaning up a toxic legacy of coal ash: F
Moving Virginia to a new clean energy economy: C+
Fighting sea level rise and flooding impacts: B
Final grade: D+
From racetrack to subdivision?
Court documents in the neighbors’ suit against Foxfield Racing Association showed plans to split the primo Garth Road property into 17 lots called Hermit’s Thrush, and another plan that would develop some of the 184-acre property and keep the track, according to Charlottesville Tomorrow.
5th District candidate
Attorney/Charlottesvillian Andrew Sneathern got a jump on the 2018 congressional race and announced a run May 30 for the Democratic nomination, presumably to challenge Tom Garrett.
Yancey Elementary nevermore
The Albemarle School Board voted 5-2 May 25 to close the Esmont school, which has staved off closure for years, at the end of the current school year on June 9, citing dwindling enrollment—118 currently, 108 projected for next year—low test scores and a loss of $395,000 in federal grants. Students will attend Red Hill or Scottsville elementaries.
“White silence is racist violence.”—The anonymous Cville Solidarity in a May 24 press release on resisting violent white supremacism in Charlottesville
HR downsizing
UVA plans to merge its academic and medical human resources departments, which could slice 40 jobs. Employees claim they’ve been kept in the dark; UVA says they’ll be offered jobs, the Daily Progress reports.
Wenners and losers
Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine, a biography about the mag’s founder, will hit bookstore shelves this October. Author and journalist Joe Hagan says it will address the now debunked UVA sexual assault story, “A Rape on Campus,” which resulted in a major lawsuit and retraction.
Attorney Andrew Sneathern says he's "strangely fitted" for the 5th District.
Photo Eze Amos
Touting his background growing up on a farm and as an attorney, Andrew Sneathern threw his cap into the 2018 5th District congressional race today before dozens of supporters at Champion Brewery.
Sneathern, 46, plans to tap into the “unbelievable wealth of power coming from the Democratic party now, something I’ve never seen before,” he says.
A former assistant prosecutor for Albemarle County who now has a private practice, the Missouri-raised attorney says he understands the problems of rural residents in the 5th District from his own family’s experience farming 2,700 acres, which took eight people to run when he was a kid and now three people work it.
“Those jobs are not coming back,” he says, “and anyone who tells you they are, either doesn’t understand or is flat-out lying.”
A Dem has not won the 5th since Tom Perriello snagged one term in 2008 and it was “gerrymandered to keep a Democrat from winning again,” says Sneathern. “I’m strangely fitted for the 5th.”
Sneathern noted the “fear and mistrust” coming from the election of Donald Trump, and says he has the endorsement of Trump antagonist Khizr Khan. “We are a better country, a better commonwealth when we recognize we are more alike than different,” he says.
Referring to local patriots from the Revolutionary War era and casting 2018 as an epic election year, Sneathern says when his future grandchildren ask, “When it was your time, what did you do?” he wants to look back and say, “We all stood up together.”
Charlottesvillians Roger Dean Huffstetler and Adam Slate say they’re running in 2018 as well. Republican Congressman Tom Garrett, who just took office in January, has not announced whether he’ll seek another term.
Updated 6/2/17 to add candidate Roger Dean Huffstetler.
Hunter Smith, founder of Champion Brewing Company, says the new city brewery regulation could “disincentivize someone from locating in Charlottesville in the first place if they are going to be hamstrung down the road.” Photo by Eze Amos
Breweries have been popping up around Charlottesville like mushrooms after a rain. About a dozen beer producers are now located within an easy drive from town. But curiously, only four breweries are actually located within the city’s limits: Champion, South Street, Three Notch’d and—the newest addition in September—Random Row.
In the middle of a regional beer boom, a new city regulation on breweries was slipped into a zoning regulation change last winter. Nobody seems to know whose idea it was, but it was would-be brewer Julie Harlan who first noticed that new microbreweries within Charlottesville will have to derive at least 25 percent of their revenue from on-site retail sales.
In August 2012, Harlan bought an almost 1,500-square-foot foreclosedhome on Forest Street for the shockingly low sum of $17,700, which allowed her to purchase the property with cash. Located a few blocks from Bodo’s Bagels on Preston Avenue, it is zoned B-3, which is a flexible zoning status that allows for use as either residential or commercial purposes.
“I was looking down the list of zoning options and microbrewing was on the list,” says Harlan. “My niece had gone to Piedmont and studied viticulture and she suggested brewing. …I would take care of the business and we could have a small, woman-owned nanobrewery. …It seemed like a good idea because everything I read about the Virginia laws seemed like they were going in the direction of less regulation.”
Three Notch’d Brewing Company President Scott Roth says the brewery is expanding its operations into a larger space at IX Art Park next year that will include an outdoor beer garden and an event space. The company will keep its Grady Avenue facility for production and storage. Photo by Eze Amos
The 25 percent requirement was tacked on to a change in law that Three Notch’d Brewing Company requested. Previously, breweries within Charlottesville were limitedto a 15,000-barrel annual cap for production. As Three Notch’d has won fans both locally and around the region for its inventive range of beers, demand has increased beyond the 15,000-barrel limit and the company was concerned about possibly having to relocate outside of the city. Its owners asked that the limit be raised to 30,000 barrels, and the city agreed.
Three Notch’d’s management team realized they would need the increase as they prepared to move into a new, larger space at the IX Art Park that will include an outdoor beer garden and an event area (they will maintain their existing space in the old Monticello Dairy on Grady Avenue for storage and production).
“When we were contemplating the move it was necessary to ensure that we wouldn’t be regulated in terms of the amount of barrels we can produce,” says Scott Roth, president of Three Notch’d Brewing Company. “The city was very understanding and took a good look at the code and understood the need for a few changes.”
“We have been busting at the seams in our current location and wanted to find a more permanent home where we could focus on maximizing our production facility without being so hindered by space constraints,” Roth says. Three Notch’d’s new presence at IX will include “food and beer in a relaxing atmosphere that is comfortable for everyone, including families.”
But the changes aren’t settling well with everyone seeking to become part of the beer industry. The new 25 percent requirement has given Harlan pause and may scuttle her plans to open Charlottesville’s fifth brewery (C’ville-ian Brewery closed in October after two years in business). To start, she doesn’t understand how it would be enforced.
“Are the sales net or gross?” she asks. “I’m also worried, would we be pushing beer to make the 25 percent? Like, we’d be looking at the clock thinking we would like to close now but we haven’t made our 25 percent. …There’s no clear guidelines. How do you report it? What if you don’t make your 25 percent quota? Is there a penalty? Is it a zoning violation? Do they shut you down? …I couldn’t find anyone who could give me any reason behind the 25 percent, which would help me understand where they were going with it.”
Julie Harlan had planned to open a microbrewery on her Rose Hill property, until she learned a city code added last winter requires 25 percent of her revenue to come from on-site retail sales. Photo by Eze Amos
Brian Haluska, principal planner for the City of Charlottesville, has a few answers.
“The rationale for the 25 percent requirement is that if we are permitting these facilities in our commercial and mixed-use districts, they need to incorporate a ‘front door’ that contributes to the activity on the street,” says Haluska. “Our commercial and mixed-use districts are intended to have activity at the street level. The fear was that without some sort of on-site sale requirement, a microproducer could locate in the commercial or mixed-use zone, have no on-site sales, and have all of their beverages leaving on trucks out of the back. That is a bottling facility—which we allow, just not in the commercial and mixed-use zones.”
Andrew Sneathern, former assistant commonwealth’s attorney in Albemarle County who is now in private practice specializing in alcohol-related law, says the likelihood of a company being a bottling-only facility is small.
“The costs of being in the city of Charlottesville versus, say, Waynesboro, for example, would be completely disparate,” he says. “I think you could probably pick up for about $3 a square foot in Waynesboro for a bottling facility. In Charlottesville you couldn’t come anywhere near that, so the chance of that happening is extremely small.”
Nor does Haluska’s concern make a lot of sense to Hunter Smith, owner of Charlottesville’s Champion Brewery and co-chair of the Government Affairs Committee for the Virginia Craft Brewers Guild.
“Any brewer would tell you that you would be nuts not to have the retail component,” says Smith. “If you’re going to have some retail component, chances are it will be a large portion of your sales early on. It’s as you grow that it becomes of concern.”
Real estate and rent in Charlottesville are so expensive that it would not typically make economic sense for someone to open a facility that only brews and bottles without selling retail. Such a facility could easily be opened in another county with cheaper land and closer access to a highway, like Devils Backbone’s outpost in Rockbridge County.
Breweries have a special legal status under Virginia state law. Most businesses that serve alcohol are required to sell a certain amount of food as well. You can’t legally open a business that is only a bar in Virginia—it also has to be a restaurant. But breweries can sell their own beer at the same site where they brew without being required to offer food.
And those on-site sales are something that small to mid-sized breweries value. A beer sold directly from the brewery keeps all of the profit in-house. All beer sold to other restaurants or retailers is required under state law to pass through a third-party distributor and then to the point of sale. Each business needs to make a profit and marks up the beer along the way. Normally, a small Virginia brewery will sell as much beer as possible through its own pub and distribute the rest for a lower profit per pint. According to Smith, a pint of beer sold to a thirsty brewpub patron typically provides about five times more profit to the brewer than the same pint sold through a distributor.
“The reason to have a business in Charlottesville is the great retail potential,” says Smith. “So this is solving a problem that doesn’t exist.”
Smith agrees with Harlan that the 25 percent requirement could scare new breweries away from Charlottesville, but he disagrees about the point in a brewery’s development that this would happen. Champion has grown from producing 500 barrels per year when it opened in December 2012 to 10,000 barrels per year in 2016. In fact, they opened the Missile Factory, a 7,000-square-foot facility with a 15,000-barrel capacity, in Woolen Mills in 2014 to keep up with distribution demand.
“Here we are in year four and [Champion is] opening multiple extra states for wholesale distribution. It’s going to be hard for my 1,500-square-foot taproom to keep up with my multimillion-dollar wholesale business,” Smith says. “The long-term situation is that it could disincentivize someone from locating in Charlottesville in the first place if they are going to be hamstrung down the road.”
While a quality product and good marketing can dramatically expand the distribution of a brewery’s products, the brewpub located at the brewery can’t make more people walk in to have a drink. In fact, it is illegal under state law for them to try.
“It is illegal to advertise specifically alcohol or prices on alcohol because of the ABC [Alcoholic Beverage Control],” says Smith. ABC regulations, some of which date back to the era immediately following Prohibition, prevent businesses that retail alcohol from promoting their prices or doing certain other things that could encourage people to drink beer.
“So if you find yourself in a pinch on that regulation, it is hard to go out and drum up more business,” says Smith. “I can’t just go make more people to drink beer here.”
A local business might actually have to turn down orders for its beer if it is unable to increase on-site sales to 25 percent of the new total in revenue. This is deliberate.
“One of the chief concerns from the Planning Commission was how much truck traffic would these uses generate, especially with some of our commercial zones being close to residential neighborhoods,” says Haluska. “So, in addition to the desire to see retail sales in the microproducers, the 25 percent on-site sales rule would limit the volume of shipments.”
Haluska does not know who initially requested that a 25 percent minimum retail sales requirement be added to the city’s zoning regulations along with the production increase to 30,000 barrels annually. Smith, heavily involved with the Craft Brewers Guild, says he had not been consulted on or made aware of the proposal. The craft brewing industry currently provides about 8,900 jobs in Virginia, according to the guild.
Sneathern thinks there might be some unintended consequences of the 25 percent requirement. “It may be that a real microbrewery might have to extend its hours in order to meet that requirement,” he says. “If they had to stay open later [in order to raise their on-site sales to 25 percent of sales] and they’re in a neighborhood like Belmont where there are residential neighbors, it would probably impact those neighbors. When I practiced law in Belmont I was on Douglas Avenue, and I remember distinctly a number of neighbors being bothered by what was going on after the zoning changes happened in Belmont. Noise issues and people being out intoxicated late at night and everything that goes along with that.”
Harlan wouldn’t want her imagined brewery to stay open late.
“I could foresee doing a tasting room as part of the brewery, but if we got busy we might just want to do contract brewing,” she says. “Our goal is not to get bigger and bigger. We were not looking for the requirement for the hours to be open to the public. Staying open at night is not something we want to do.”
Breweries that distribute their beer to local restaurants have to walk a fine line by selling beer through a tap room but not appearing to compete with their customers.
“You don’t want to be open till 2am like they are,” Smith says about bars, “trying to steal their alcohol business and competing with them. We are in the tourism and tasting business, not in the bar or restaurant business.”
But Smith is actually planning to make that leap. At the November 5 Top of the Hops beer festival, Smith announced plans to open the first-ever brewery on the Downtown Mall.
“We intend to sell all the beer produced there, right there,” says Smith. “The business model is to sell 100 percent of the beer retail. We’ll be opening the first brewery on the Downtown Mall. It will be a new category for us to get into.”
Smith’s new brewery will offer different varieties of beer that are currently unavailable at Champion and it will be combined with a restaurant, a joint venture with Wilson Richey. Under Charlottesville’s new 25 percent rule for microbreweries, Champion can get to the 25 percent by selling anything retail, including food. But the restaurant/brewery combination is a risk that most brewers aren’t comfortable taking.
“The inherent risk of the restaurant business is higher,” says Smith. “In a restaurant you are being judged on so many other criteria. You’re getting out of your wheelhouse so you can grow the business you are good at. It’s like you would have to get better at hockey so you can play basketball. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Three Notch’d’s Roth isn’t worried about the 25 percent minimum.
“They are focused on providing a healthy combination of retail and interactive space for the city of Charlottesville,” he says, “while also providing the breweries with what they need in terms of barrel limits to succeed. …If you really dive into the numbers, the 25 percent requirement should not prove to be overly daunting.”
Harlan plans to tear down the single-family house currently on her lot and replace it with a new building that she designed herself. Right now she’s considering erecting a duplex on the site, and says parking requirements for a brewery also factored into her decision to table that business venture.
“The rules are pretty clear for anyone looking to open a facility in the city,” says Haluska. “If the sales to distributors start to rise, then those businesses need to consider how to accommodate that expansion in production—if a second site is necessary in a zone that permits a standalone bottling plant or whether to relocate to a zone that permits small breweries.”
What neither Harlan, Sneathern nor Smith understand is exactly why the city would need to limit breweries in a situation where the price of real estate already seems to be doing that. Is there something undesirable about having a brewing industry in Charlottesville?
“You have the idea of some old Guinness building with rats and the spent grain and labor strikes and things like that,” says Smith, invoking the images of American breweries from the gilded age of the late 1800s. “In 2016 it’s an irrelevant concern.”
