Tag: CVEC

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In brief: Rice reactions, RBG ruling, TJ’s party over, and more

Paige Rice at a City Council meeting following the KKK rally in July 2017. eze amos

‘Odd’ indictment

The felony embezzlement charge against former City Council clerk Paige Rice, 37, for an iPhone and Apple Watch valued at more than $500 has many scratching their heads.

“It seems very unusual it got to this point without a resolution,” says attorney Scott Goodman. “It seems like something that could have easily been resolved without a felony indictment.”

A former city employee who spoke only on the condition of anonymity says, “It seems kind of odd to me someone didn’t call her and say, you need to return the phone, rather than sneak around and charge her with a felony. Particularly with her husband working there. It’s very odd.”

Rice is married to Joe Rice, deputy director of communications for the city. Neither responded to C-VILLE’s phone calls.

Rice was a fixture at council meetings for eight years. Last July she was named chief of staff to manage two new employees at the disposal of councilors. The job came with a salary bump from almost $73,000 to $98,000. The larger council staff had been touted by then-mayor Mike Signer, but was criticized by Mayor Nikuyah Walker, who call for a guest audit of the position and its pay.

Rice’s resignation letter came barely two months later on September 12. She took a job at the Focused Ultrasound Foundation as chief of staff.

Attorney Dave Heilberg says embezzlement is a crime of taking property with which one has been entrusted, but Rice’s case “is not as clear cut” as that of an accountant who writes herself a check. What Rice was told about the equipment could be a factor in her defense, and he points out that “technology goes out of date really fast” when assessing its value.

A grand jury from both Albemarle County and Charlottesville—which is also unusual, says Heilberg—indicted Rice June 7. And court records show the date of the offense as October 5, Rice’s official last day.

Goodman says the indictment could have consequences that “could be ugly,” particularly if Rice has information about other people in the city in similar circumstances who didn’t get indicted.

A city release announcing Rice’s resignation said, “The City Council appreciates the service of Ms. Rice over the last eight years and wishes her the best as she moves on to the next exciting phase in her professional life.”

Her next court appearance is August 19.

Quote of the week

“The House [of Delegates] has no prerogative to select its own members.”—Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a U.S. Supreme Court decision that upholds a lower court ruling that Virginia’s legislative districts were racially gerrymandered

In brief

B’day non grata

At its June 17 meeting, City Council took steps to remove the birthday of local icon Thomas Jefferson, April 13, as a paid city holiday and to replace it with Liberation and Freedom Day, March 3, which commemorates the arrival of Union forces and the emancipation of the area’s 14,0000 enslaved people. Albemarle will discuss ditching Jefferson’s birthday at its June 19 meeting.

Are luxury condos in the Dewberry’s future? Skyclad Aerial

Dewberry condos?

Not much activity has been seen on the ground at the site of the alleged Dewberry Hotel, now celebrating its 10th anniversary as a wraith towering over the Downtown Mall. But the Progress reports some movement on the Dewberry Group website, and renderings of the hotel have migrated from its hospitality to its living section, with a new name: the Laramore.

Deadbeat guv pays up

West Virginia Governor Jim Justice finally paid the  $311,000 in back taxes his company owed to Albemarle County, plus the current tax bill, reports the DP’s Allison Wrabel. The county had started the process to sell 52 of Justice’s 55 parcels because of the large arrearage.

AG okays THC

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring spoke out in favor of legalizing recreational marijuana in an op-ed published in both the Daily Press and The Virginian-Pilot on Sunday. The General Assembly has yet to pass any measures on the issue, but decriminalization has been an issue generally shot down by Republicans in past sessions.

Rural broadband access

Central Virginia Electric Cooperative’s subsidiary, doing business as Firefly Fiber Broadband, will receive $28.6 million of FCC funds to provide 1 gigabit internet speeds for over 11,000 homes and businesses in central Virginia over the next 10 years.

Election turnout: Not great

Off-year elections traditionally have lower turnout, and this year’s June 11 primary was no exception. With no presidential or gubernatorial candidates at the top of the ballot, many voters chose to sit out the primary, despite several local General Assembly races.

  • The 57th District, which includes Charlottesville and the Albemarle urban ring, had the highest turnout—15.7 percent—in state General Assembly elections, according to Virginia Public Access Project.
  • The 17th Senate District, which had both a Democratic and Republican primary, brought in a much lower 5 percent of the electorate in each race.
  • Total Charlottesville turnout (including City Council primaries) was 19 percent, compared to 27 percent in 2017.
  • Total Albemarle County turnout (including races for sheriff and Rivanna supervisor) was 10 percent.
  • In 2017, county turnout was 19 percent for the Democratic primary for governor and .05 percent for the Republican primary.
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Better access: Supes mull broadband deal

Albemarle wants to survey what internet service is available in the county before accepting a fiber broadband proposal from Central Virginia Electric Cooperative, which wants a $550,000 tax break from the county.

By Jonathan Haynes

Lack of high-speed internet access has been a big issue for rural areas of Albemarle County in recent years. In January, the Central Virginia Electric Cooperative submitted a proposal to incorporate fiber optic broadband cables along its existing infrastructure in Albemarle, which could benefit about 3,600 county customers. CVEC says it can do the project for $555,000 in county tax incentives, a big drop from its previous request for $2.2 million.

Now Albemarle wants to do an online survey to pin down the number of people without broadband access.

Some county residents, like Phil Fassieux, who lives in the far northwestern part of Albemarle with no broadband or DSL options, are skeptical. “The county has identified this as a need for many years,” he says. “When it comes down to it, they find a reason not to fund the money.”

The cooperative would partner with the Albemarle Broadband Authority, which was established in 2017 to help provide internet service to underserved areas. If the Board of Supervisors approves the partnership with CVEC, the authority would apply for a grant to complete funding for the project from the Virginia Telecommunications Initiative, a state program conceived to erase the lingering broadband service disparities that remain between rural and urban communities.

Rural communities, which for the most part still rely on DSL, have lagged behind in the shift to broadband because most businesses have deemed installation in those areas cost prohibitive. “We have terrain that makes it very expensive to run fiber optic cables,” says Mike Culp, the county’s IT director and the Albemarle Broadband Authority vice chair. “We’re facing a high cost of building and in low-density communities, there’s less return on investment.”

Fiber optic cable is an ideal medium for broadband since it can transmit data without encountering limiting factors like electromagnetic interference or energy loss, enabling much faster speeds than services that employ copper wiring like DSL and traditional cable.

According to CVEC spokesperson Melissa Gay, the cooperative has run into problems when trying to partner with internet service providers. “We put out a request for pricing and agreed to waive the pole attachment fees if other [internet service providers] would use our poles,” she says. “Not one company could or would come forward because it’s so cost prohibitive. People can’t see a return on investment when there’s four or six people per mile.”

CVEC recently partnered with Appomattox County to offset the costs associated with its $110 million fiber broadband project. The cooperative estimates that its agreement with Appomattox and a nearly $1 million grant from the Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission will trim $10 million off its installation expenses.

Because of its unexpectedly successful rollout, during which it enrolled twice as many eligible members than originally projected and received large grants from the federal government, CVEC has been proposing more modest incentive packages to ease the burden on localities such as Albemarle.

Still, the cooperative is requesting what will be a $550,000 tax break over the next 10 years—about $55,000 a year—from Albemarle County, which has given pause to some board members.

The Board of Supervisors will meet again on October 24 to further discuss the proposal.

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Inspector gadget: CVEC deploys its first survey drones

The Central Virginia Electric Cooperative’s use of inspection drones presents opportunities for advancement as well as concerns about privacy. Photo courtesy PrecisionHawk

By Jonathan Haynes

This year’s transmission line inspection from the Central Virginia Electric Cooperative was decidedly more low-key than in previous efforts, when the company used a piloted helicopter to make the rounds. In fact, local residents likely have no idea the weeks-long process was taking place, as CVEC deployed an unmanned aerial system to conduct its annual survey.

Powered by battery, the drone is operated from a remote Virginia location by a Federal Aviation Administration-licensed pilot from PrecisionHawk, its North Carolina-based manufacturer. It then navigates its inspection route with a Lidar scanner, a light-energy laser that scans the surrounding area to configure an active 3-D map of the local topography, complete with the position and movements of nearby objects. Once the drone reaches the designated areas, it snaps photos of the infrastructure with its built-in camera.

CVEC switched technologies to maximize safety, reduce its carbon footprint and examine more area, according to Melissa Gay, communications and member services manager at CVEC. Because drones can fly at a slower pace, hover closer to transmission lines and better maneuver dangerous areas, they can capture higher resolution images of civil infrastructure than can helicopters, whose cumbersome aerodynamics had restricted inspections of high-voltage substations and wooded areas.

But the technology has its shortcomings. The drone costs roughly as much as a helicopter and takes a little longer to complete the same tasks. In fact, CVEC’s inspection ended up continuing several days after its target date.

Gay attributes this to CVEC’s own inexperience. “Navigating our terrain and learning the system took a little while,” she says.

But the stealthy nature of drones has raised issues of privacy concerns. There’s little chance someone on the ground will see a drone, and because it may inadvertently capture people’s faces or license plates in the background while recording their locations, privacy advocates worry the technology might compromise people’s identity or reveal their whereabouts without prior consent.

The way the data is processed does little to soothe these concerns: CVEC does not currently possess the inspection footage, which is being compiled in PrecisionHawk’s North Carolina headquarters. PrecisionHawk will return the footage to CVEC once it mines the relevant information.

Some data repositories have been a hot target for hackers over the past few years, as seen with banks, credit card companies and even dating sites.

Moreover, law enforcement personnel may subpoena data and images collected by private drone companies so long as they obtain a warrant. In the past, law enforcement has subpoenaed footage from drones that have inadvertently captured pot farms or other illicit activity while flying unrelated operations.

To preempt concerns, CVEC notified the 2,175 customers who reside near its route in advance of the inspection. Though it did not reach out to residents who are not patrons and had no way of reaching out to drivers and pedestrians passing through affected areas.

Gay says CVEC received no complaints. But the communities lying along CVEC’s path would have had little say in the matter if they did. Under Virginia’s Dillon Rule, municipalities are prohibited from enacting their own drone ordinances without permission from the General Assembly, and nearby communities were not notified until two weeks before the inspection.