Tag: charlottesville area transit

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State of the union

Charlottesville bus drivers, firefighters, and other city employees will be allowed to form unions. Staff photo.

Despite support from city firefighters and bus drivers, on Monday Charlottesville City Council unanimously voted not to approve the collective bargaining ordinance proposed in March by Greg Wright of the Charlottesville Professional Firefighters Association. Instead, councilors adopted a resolution allowing City Manager Chip Boyles to draft a new collective bargaining ordinance, as Boyles recommended. 

“I do not believe that council has sufficient information to make an informed decision about a particular collective bargaining ordinance,” said Boyles at the meeting. “[We] have a number of decisions to make as to what procedures might best fit the city administration and workforce, how many bargaining units may be authorized, and what departments should and could be included.”

Boyles suggested the city follow the lead of the City of Alexandria and Loudoun County, which hired consultants and gathered input from labor unions for over half a year before adopting collective bargaining ordinances. 

Since new state labor laws went into effect in May, Charlottesville Area Transit drivers have been pushing the city to allow them to unionize, primarily to negotiate higher wages. Firefighters have also asked the city to formally recognize the CPFA as a union.

City bus driver Mary Pettis spoke in favor of the unionization efforts during public comment.

“I have driven the bus for 35 years in the City of Charlottesville. I’m here to ask that y’all allow us to have a union, because I feel that it’ll help us get more things that we need,” Pettis said. “I personally had to move from Charlottesville to Waynesboro because I couldn’t afford to live in Charlottesville. I have three jobs because I don’t  make enough money just driving the bus.” 

“I’m a single parent. I’m not the only driver who has had to do these things,” Pettis continued. “I love driving, I love my passengers. I just need more from it financially.”

“We just want a seat at the table as the professionals that we are,” said Wright during public comment. “We want to…ensure that there’s always a chance for all city employees to be recognized. Wages and benefits is a huge part of this, but it’s really to have that opportunity to have an open and honest dialogue with city management.”

“It shouldn’t take collective bargaining,” said Mayor Nikuyah Walker after hearing Pettis’ comments. “We should figure out as a city how to take care of people. I fully support it, but it shouldn’t come down to who can organize and who can’t.”

Councilor Michael Payne agreed with Boyles’ assessment that the city needed to take enough time to make the ordinance “as powerful as possible,” but emphasized that the city should not take too long to draft it and should look to other unions around the state for a starting point. 

“Our goal is to have [an ordinance] finalized during this year’s budget cycle and not delay our employees’ right to collective bargaining,” Payne tweeted after the meeting. “Hopefully this will be one small step towards winning even bigger fights: expanding unionization and repealing ‘right-to-work’ in Virginia.”

Boyles said he planned to present a timeline to council next month, and get the ordinance drafted in time for the FY23 budget year.

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Driving it home

Better wages is the primary reason Charlottesville Area Transit drivers are considering unionizing. Staff photo.

For decades, Virginia has had controversial right-to-work laws, which ban employers from requiring union membership. Though supporters of the laws claim they protect the rights of workers and attract businesses, others say they weaken unions, keep wages low, and benefit corporations—Virginia has one of the lowest unionization rates in the country. But under the Democratic majority in the General Assembly, labor laws have slowly begun to change. And Charlottesville Area Transit drivers are hoping to take advantage of that.

Thanks to new laws, municipalities now have the authority to enact ordinances allowing city and county employees to form unions and engage in collective bargaining. Previously, state law prohibited municipalities from recognizing any union as a bargaining agent for public employees.

“We’ve been active as far as trying to get [a union] together for a while now, but just haven’t been really successful,” says Matthew Ray, who has driven for CAT for seven and a half years. “Having representation—a go-between between us and the city—is definitely needed now.”

The primary reason for the union push is wages. Full-time CAT drivers start at $16.97 an hour. Only a few currently earn over $20 an hour—the longest-serving driver makes $23.28 an hour. (Over a year, $20 per hour of full-time work comes to about $41,000.) 

“The disparity in pay between myself and someone who has been here twice as long as I have is something like an 89-cent difference,” says Ray. 

Meanwhile, unionized bus drivers make much higher wages across the state, according to John Ertl of the Amalgamated Transit Union. The ATU’s drivers in other cities earn as much as $33 an hour, Ertl says. 

“A lot of these folks here, they can’t afford to live in the community that they serve,” says Ertl of CAT drivers. “A lot have to work multiple jobs. These folks have given it their all through the pandemic, Nazi rally, snowstorms…even though they have to drive in from distant counties to make it here.”

“You have to go through regular drug screenings, wake up at 3 or 4am, drive a bus for long days, hold your urine for hours at a time, get spit on by angry customers who don’t want to wear their masks,” he adds. “It’s a very hard, tough job.”

In addition to negotiating higher wages and better terms of employment, a union will help reform CAT’s grievance and disciplinary processes, which are currently handled by City Hall. Ray says the policies can be unclear, and are not always followed. 

“As an employee, I really can’t trust the people above me, because they’re not going through the process,” Ray says.

Ertl points to the racist origins of right-to-work laws—which were adapted mostly in the 1940s and 1950s by segregationist politicians to prevent organizing among workers of all races—as another reason to allow collective bargaining. The phrase right-to-work was popularized by white supremacist and anti-Semite businessman Vance Muse, who lobbied for anti-union laws across the South, so that “white women and white men [will not] be forced into organizations with black African apes.”

“We’ve taken down the statues here, but we still have the legacy of Jim Crow here [with] the anti-union laws,” says Ertl. “If you look at [CAT], it’s predominantly people of color, and a good amount of immigrants.”

This year, Charlottesville firefighters have also urged City Council to pass a collective bargaining ordinance for city employees. Though the Charlottesville Professional Firefighters Association helps firefighters advocate for themselves, it is not recognized by the city and has no contracts with it.

Once City Council comes back from its recess in September, Ertl expects the councilors to begin discussing a collective bargaining ordinance. So far, Councilor Michael Payne has been the biggest supporter of the union effort. 

“Now that it’s allowed under state law, I think it’s time for the city to allow public employees to collectively bargain,” Payne says. 

“Furthermore, I hope that CAT employees unionizing can be part of a broader effort to expand unionization throughout Charlottesville and central Virginia—including big fights to expand unionization into the private sector and repeal right-to-work in Virginia,” he adds.

In the meantime, Ertl is working to get more CAT drivers to join the ATU and sign union cards. Most long-time drivers are on board with unionizing, but it’s been more of a challenge with the newer drivers who are not familiar with unions, says Ray.

Once a majority of CAT drivers have shown an interest in unionizing, they will go through the process of getting the city to recognize them. The city will then have 120 days to respond. Ertl hopes council will pass an ordinance before an appeal is necessary.

“[CAT drivers] just want to have a seat at the table and the same rights that transit workers elsewhere have,” he says. “They need the right to be able to advocate for themselves and boost their standard of living.”

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In brief: Worst state to vote, bug-free buses, facial hair for charity and more

Mississippi ekes by Virginia as the state that makes it the most difficult for its citizens to vote, while Oregon is ranked best state for voters in a recent study.

We’re No. 49

Virginia ranks as one of the worst states in the country when it comes to ease of voting, according to a recent study from Northern Illinois University. Our state has slipped in the “cost of voting index” since 1996, when we ranked No. 42, to the “second most difficult” place to vote in 2016—just ahead of Mississippi, says co-author Michael Pomante.

Voter fraud is often cited as the reason for the restrictions, but Pomante says, “We don’t see voter fraud in other states that make it easier to vote.”

And what does No. 1 look like? That would be Oregon, home to automatic voter registration and where every voter on the rolls is mailed a ballot, which can be mailed or dropped off, says Pomante. “It makes voter turnout much higher.”

The next step for researchers is to look at voter disenfranchisement, says Pomante. “We do know there’s a correlation with minority population and voting. States with higher minority populations make it more difficult to vote.”

And on the cost of voting index, most Southern states wallow in the bottom half of the scale.

Reasons why the Old Dominion is so voter unfriendly:

  • Voter registration deadline: It’s three weeks before Election Day, while some states have same-day registration, automatic registration, or even pre-registration for those about to turn 18.
  • Photo ID: without it, voters have to cast provisional ballots.
  • No early voting.
  • Absentee voting: You’d better have a
    darn good excuse to do so.
  • Felon disenfranchisement: While not quite as bad as Florida, where 10 percent of
    the citizens can’t vote because they’ve spent time in jail, Virginians who have served their time have to petition the governor to get back their voting rights.

Quote of the week

“We’ve got to do a better job of teaching critical thinking to young people so they won’t be suckered by hate mongering.”—Martin Luther King III at the Virginia Film Festival

In brief

Rebel flags banned

The Charlottesville City School Board voted unanimously November 1 to prohibit wearing hate symbols such as Confederate, Nazi, and KKK imagery across the division. Albemarle, which has been sued in the past for restricting images on students’ clothes, is still wrestling with the issue.

Another UVA frat racial incident

UVA’s Student Hip-Hop Organization and I.M.P. Society denounced “blatant discrimination and violence” at an October 27 party they hosted at Beta Theta Pi, the Cav Daily reports. After deciding not to allow additional guests, white guys guarding the doors let their friends in, and fraternity members set up a separate, exclusive space from other partygoers, creating an unwelcome environment for minority students. The fraternity apologized November 2.

‘Graduation rapist’ in news again

Jeffrey Miller, formerly known as Jeffrey Kitze. Photo: Virginia Department of Corrections

Jeffrey Kitze was convicted of raping his sister’s UVA law school roommate in 1989. And he was back in jail for probation violations for stalking a local woman in 2013, when he changed his name to Jeffrey Ted Miller. In May, he moved to New York, where a woman recently requested a protective order against him, CBS19 reports.

Books are back

Another used bookstore will take the place of the Downtown Mall’s now-closed Read It Again, Sam, according to landlord Joan Fenton. She says new tenant Daphne Spain will open the doors of Second Act in February.

Cost of grooming?

Some Charlottesville police are fighting childhood cancer by not shaving their facial hair until February. “Officers will be allowed to grow beards and donate the money they typically spend on shaving and grooming to benefit the UVA Children’s Hospital Cancer Clinic,” according to a CPD press release on the Winter Wool campaign. Here’s hoping some CPD members are used to expensive shaves.

Transit boss declares CAT buses bug-free

During the summer, C-VILLE Weekly learned of Charlottesville Area Transit drivers being plagued by irritations that they attributed to bug bites. The city confirmed it was aware of “two or three cases,” but said the drivers had not seen the bugs they believed responsible for the bites.

“They have never found a thing,” says transit director John Jones. “There aren’t any bugs on the buses. There are bugs on people.”

When passengers visibly sporting bugs catch the CAT, says Jones, “We call Foster’s Pest Control immediately.”

City buses are vacuumed every night, cleaned every week, and bug-bombed regularly, he says. In fact, one driver’s rash came from the cleaning products. “They’re harsh,” says Jones.

A new trolley will have hard plastic seats to further thwart insect infestations, he says.

He also notes that a sofa in the drivers lounge that employees wouldn’t touch was replaced by a leather one that turned up in the city warehouse. “One of the judges downtown was getting rid of some nice furniture.”

Jones reassures CAT riders: “We never found an infestation of bed bugs or anything.”

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Bugs on the bus go ’round and ’round

You could catch more than the CAT when you ride city buses. File photo

Former Albemarle School Board member Gary Grant had an appointment at UVA WorkMed Clinic last month and he struck up a conversation with a Charlottesville Area Transit bus driver. As a former school bus driver himself, Grant asked the driver if he was in for a random drug test.

It was even worse.

The driver was there for bugs irritating his skin, and he said it happens to a lot of CAT drivers, says Grant. “The CAT buses are full of bugs,” he recounts from his conversation with the driver, who said some who are sensitive to the bugs end up with rashes and nasty itching.

CAT has received two to three complaints from its drivers saying they believe they have received bug bites on buses this year, according to city spokesperson Brian Wheeler.

“At this time, drivers have been unable to see the bugs or know how they were bitten,” says Wheeler in an email. “Some drivers have been seen in a medical facility, but they report that medical personnel cannot identify the nature of the bite or the cause of the rash or irritation.”

And in case we were wondering, “Charlottesville Area Transit cleans its buses every day,” says Wheeler.

The Virginia Department of Health has nothing on the mysterious itch-causing insects. “I do not have any information to provide you about the bugs at this time,” says Kathryn Goodman, spokesperson for the Thomas Jefferson Health District.

Grant says it was his perception that it was more than two or three drivers getting bitten. “It was serious enough,” he says. “He wasn’t being funny.”

And he wonders about all the passengers who suffer from hitchhiking bugs from other passengers, and then going home and not being able to figure out why they have skin problems.

“A lot of people ride buses,” observes Grant.

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Bus logistics among top concerns in city

Andrea Wieder, who uses the bus as her primary source of transportation, says it should be more of a priority for city officials. Eze Amos

Andrea Wieder relies on the bus.

Bus No. 4, which stops at the bottom of Highland Avenue, is the one the Fry’s Spring resident takes to Food Lion and CVS. For Harris Teeter’s Senior Discount Day every Thursday, she takes the same route, transfers to the No. 7 bus and checks out the offerings at Barracks Road Shopping Center. The free trolley shuttles her downtown, and she’ll also take that to the doctor at UVA if she doesn’t walk or ride the No. 10 bus line.

“Timing can be tricky, but that’s life,” Wieder says, and adds it doesn’t take long to memorize a route. Some concerns with the bus, however, are out of her control. “There are frequent delays on the buses. It seems not a problem of the buses or the bus drivers, but the fact that around this town, there is so much construction going on, you can hardly turn a corner without running into cranes and extra congestion.”

On a recent morning, Wieder invited Democratic City Council candidate Heather Hill to ride the No. 7 bus with her.

“I wanted her to sit on the bus with me, see who was on the bus with me and see where the buses go,” she says. “I wanted her to hear that the system seems to have very low priority within the city. I don’t understand that, since it’s a tremendous link and a resource for many, many people.”

On that day, the bus was so late Wieder called the Downtown Transit Station to inquire about the holdup. The person who answered the phone told her that construction equipment at the site across from C&O Restaurant—a slew of detached brownstones known as C&O Row—was causing a traffic jam.

“Why don’t they coordinate things like this?” Weider asks. “Why is it that every single bus in the city of Charlottesville—with the exception of [buses] 5 and 9—passes through the transit center on the same street at the same time?”

Wieder met Hill when the candidate was canvassing the city for her campaign. By the end of May, Hill will have knocked on about 2,300 doors and spoken with at least 1,600 individuals.

“While I am grateful for our public transportation infrastructure, there are clearly ways it can be improved, and I strongly feel evaluating the future state of this system needs to be done in partnership with the county and the university,” Hill says, adding that riding the bus with Weider reinforced some of the transit system’s hurdles that she had heard about from other residents. She notes that CAT has recently installed data collecting fareboxes, which will produce ridership and bus timeliness numbers.

The City Council hopeful likes data, and by surveying neighborhoods door-to-door, she has deduced the top five concerns of the residents with whom she interacted.

Overall, she says affordable housing is the No. 1 worry. Development, zoning and planning come next, with the viewpoint that current projects don’t address the community’s needs, erase green spaces and lack a long-term vision. The third concern was schools and education, followed by infrastructure and supporting multi-modal transportation. Voters are also worried about the allocation of the city’s resources.

“My time speaking with neighbors throughout the city has highlighted the extent to which we are united on many priorities,” Hill says. “It has also made me aware that the issues we hear about in public settings are not always reflective of the things that matter most to the broader community.”

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29 Express: New bus service draws average of three riders, lawsuit

Wendell Wood, pictured here in 2009, doesn’t think it’s fair he should have to pay $500,000 for JAUNT commuter service and has filed suit against Albemarle County. File photo

To much fanfare, JAUNT unveiled a commuter express service May 2 from the Food Lion on U.S. 29 north of town to UVA and downtown. Free for the first two months, the service seemed a boon for commuters traveling through major construction this summer as they headed into town.

To the man being called upon to pony up $50,000 a year for 10 years to pay for the service, Albemarle County’s interpretation of a proffer is “unreasonable” and far exceeds what any other developer has been asked to contribute to public transportation, according to Wendell Wood’s lawsuit against the county filed June 21.

Founder and president of United Land Corporation, Wood is a major property owner in the northern part of the county, and is the developer of Hollymead Town Center, the National Ground Intelligence Center and Walmart, among many other projects. He also built the gigantic house visible on top of Carter Mountain.

Hollymead Town Center is made up of several separately owned sections, and during the heyday of the real estate boom in 2007, the developer of the Kohl’s portion, HM Acquisitions Group, agreed to pay the county $500,000 over 10 years for public transportation to get that property rezoned.

Two years later, before ever developing anything on the property, according to the suit, HM Acquisitions defaulted, and Wood took back the land. In 2010, the Planning Commission agreed to reduce the proffer to $25,000 with a sunset date of 2012.

When Wood went before the Board of Supervisors in 2011, the county attorney told the board it couldn’t amend the proffer because it wasn’t part of the original application, but Wood could come back to amend it at a later date, according to the suit.

Instead, in November 2015, the board voted 4-1 to use the original proffer to help pay for the commuter route. Supervisor Brad Sheffield, who is director of JAUNT, recused himself from that vote, and former supervisor Ken Boyd cast the nay vote.

“There has to be some moral reason for what we do as members of the board,” says Boyd. “That proffer was brought by a different owner.” Boyd says he was surprised the former owner agreed to it in the first place. “It was a huge expense,” he says.

Another thing that bothered Boyd about the board decision to hold Wood to the pre-real-estate-crash proffer: “It seems to be quite often in politics to want to punish people who are successful,” he says. “Some of the conversations I heard from other board members left me believing they felt it was an obligation he had even though he had inherited it. We should put some ethics into our decisions.”

Wood’s suit contends the proffer was intended for Charlottesville Area Transit service, not a JAUNT commuter service that takes people to jobs in town, and doesn’t bring shoppers to Kohl’s. The suit also notes that JAUNT met with residents of Forest Lakes, who have nothing to do with the Kohl’s property and were looking for public transportation to work.

Other developments have been required to pay much less in transit proffers, the suit claims, and in the portion of Hollymead Town Center where Harris Teeter and Target are located, no transit proffers were required.

For CAT service to Wegmans, 5th Street Station will pay $100,000, says assistant county exec Lee Catlin. Stonefield has a transit proffer to pay $20,000 a year for five years, Martha Jefferson Hospital proffered $50,000, and before turning it into a state park, Biscuit Run developers had a $1 million transit proffer. Riverbend Development, which is working on the 800- to 1,500-unit Brookhill, has proposed a $500,000 transit proffer, says Catlin.

Since JAUNT purchased two buses for $81,622 each to run the express route twice a day, the service has averaged three riders a day, and has ranged from a high of 11 riders to zero riders, Catlin says. “The county is not surprised to see somewhat low numbers at this early point in the service,” she says, particularly as it is summer and UVA is out of regular session.

The $1.50 fare each way will contribute about $15,000 to the annual $113,000 cost to run the service, according to a JAUNT information sheet. It also noted $50,000 in matching federal funds from Wood’s proffer.

“We are working on a partnership with UVA to make it free to UVA employees,” says Sheffield, who anticipates that will begin in August.

He also reports that one of the passengers is concerned that Wood and his son are “surveilling” the buses and taking pictures of riders getting on and off. From the passenger’s own photos, “It’s clearly Mr. Wood,” says Sheffield, who says all he can do is advise the passenger to contact police.

Wood declined to comment for this article. His attorney, Pete Caramanis, says, “It’s basically just an overreach. This is not a developer trying to get out of a promise but, rather, whether the county’s demand is in line with what was actually promised and what is reasonable under the law.”

The General Assembly passed a law that went into effect July 1 that severely limits the proffers a local government can require for residential development, but it’s not clear that would affect commercial rezoning.

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Stopped light: Long wait at downtown signal triggers questions

Besides creating delays on Water Street, the Third Street SE stoplight is also known for once having a Southern-accented male voice instructing pedestrians when to cross. Staff photo

On Water Street, buses regularly back up at a traffic light at Third Street SE that has the Water Street Parking Garage on one side and a half street dead-ending on the Downtown Mall on the other. Water Street traffic can idle at this light for nearly a minute, by this reporter’s count. The Charlottesville Area Transit advisory board asked that it be changed, a request that was under way until City Manager Maurice Jones intervened and put the request on hold.

“Some business owners raised some concerns that they believe this crosswalk is the best one for folks with mobility issues or handicapped to get on the mall,” says city spokesperson Miriam Dickler. “They asked the city to reconsider. We put a pause on that to consider other options.”

That pause has raised concerns for Lena Seville, who sits on the CAT advisory board, which has been asking that the signal, which is right after a bus stop, be changed for months. “We were told Neighborhood Development Services couldn’t restripe until the weather was warm,” she says. “Everything I was told was that it was going to be removed.”

Seville also says she was told someone on City Council had intervened on someone else’s behalf who did not want the signal removed.

“A lot about this bothers me,” she says. “There’s a process in place. They’re elected to be fair, not to get special treatment for friends and donors. They’re supposed to work for the overall benefit of the public, not the special benefit of individuals.”

“Nobody I talked to had talked to anybody from City Council about this,” says Dickler. “People contact the city manager’s office all the time. It’s a totally appropriate way to contact the city.”

She says Neighborhood Development and CAT staff are working to evaluate the situation.

“It does delay the buses,” especially at the bottom of the hour when 11 buses leave the Transit Center and get stopped at the light, says CAT manager John Jones. “The last bus in line can lose four minutes of transit time. People riding the No. 10 bus are quite sensitive to delays.”

“It seemed ridiculous to back up traffic on that street,” says Seville. “Each bus has to wait for its own green light.”

From her own observation at the bus stop, she says it’s rare to see someone use that crosswalk. And she says the green light for dead-end Third Street stays green as long as it is on Water Street—with no traffic coming out of Third.

“The thing is, it’s not activated by actual use,” she says. Lights can have sensors or can be pedestrian activated. “I don’t think it should work the way it works. It could be modified.”

It’s not the first time there has been grousing about the city’s handling of traffic lights. The long-awaited McIntire Interchange opened in February 2015, and for months drivers languished through multiple cycles at a light that was green for only 18 seconds, despite heavy traffic volume, backups and complaints. Lights installed at Park Street also stalled commutes.

Citizens who have concerns about traffic issues can contact Neighborhood Development, for which Rashad Hanbali is the new traffic engineering manager, says Dickler. Or, apparently, they can also complain to the city manager’s office.

“It appears there’s sort of a lack of transparency and evenness to this process,” says Seville. “It feels like things are happening behind the scenes. I would have liked it transparent and public.”