rain tax – C-VILLE Weekly

In brief: A lost neighborhood, a plane crash and C-VILLE wins big

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

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 nabbed accolades in 10 categories in the specialty publication division, along with two best in show awards 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

News portfolio writing: Lisa Provence

Third place

Feature story writing: Erin O’Hare

Public affairs writing: Lisa Provence

County controversy: Farmers say rain tax targets rural areas

A proposed stormwater utility fee in Albemarle that has widely become known as the “rain tax” has caused quite the ruckus. But a similar one in the city continues to go off without a hitch.

County farmers say rural areas are unfairly targeted by the potential fee, because it will be calculated based on the number of impermeable surfaces—such as outbuildings, travelways and barns—included on a property. The exact fee has not yet been determined.

“You don’t get rich farming,” says Richard Fox, an owner of Roslyn Farm and participant of a March 24 rally in White Hall in which farmers against the rain tax rode about 55 tractors to Supervisor Ann Mallek’s town hall meeting. “It will put some farms out of business because they won’t be able to afford the additional tax. They’re barely breaking even as it is.”

He says farmers do their work “for the love of the land,” and are naturally environmentalists. But they’d prefer if the stormwater fee was funded by the general fund, instead of by “taxing the backbone of this county.”

The initial impetus for the program was to comply with a state Department of Environmental Quality mandate to prevent runoff from reaching the Chesapeake Bay and improve local drainage systems, Mallek says.

County officials have been discussing the fee since 2014, when they agreed to put 7 cents of each dollar collected in real estate tax toward a water resources protection program. Mallek says that fund is at about $1.2 million now.

The supervisor originally supported the fee because properties with more impermeable substances would be charged more, which is not possible when drawing from the general fund, but says she’s having second thoughts after about 125 people, including Fox, showed up at the March meeting.

“If the process is so complicated that I can’t explain it to people and tell them how much it’s going to help, then I’m making a mistake by pursuing it,” Mallek says.

Jack Brown, a member of the Rivanna Conservation Alliance for 15 years and current chair of its public affairs committee, says a city stormwater utility fee has been collected twice annually since 2014.

“Albemarle has even a greater need than Charlottesville did,” he says, because, for a long time, the county has had less regulation and oversight of stormwater infrastructure.

The fee will pay for long-needed repairs, connections and improvements to the systems of culverts and pipes that carry stormwater off individual properties and into common resources, like the Rivanna River, he adds.

“Calling this a ‘rain tax’ appeals to anti-tax advocates and libertarians,” says Brown. “But policy should arise out of facts, not from appeals to fuzzy ideology.”

A new group with a website called No Rain Tax Albemarle has emerged, and its name is plastered on electronic flyers that claim the proposed fee will case a “HUGE, expensive government bureaucracy that will never go away.”

After repeated messages from C-VILLE, the group’s organizers remain unidentified—a fact that concerns some locals.

Says Dunlora resident Caroline Polk, “Unless the people running it are willing to come forward and put their names on the site and where the funding comes from, I would be very suspicious and treat this not as reasoned argument against the fee, but just knee-jerk anti-tax hysteria.”

The Board of Supervisors will meet April 11 for a work session on the proposed fee.

City fee explained

The city has collected $7.6 million in stormwater utility fees since it started billing in 2014. The fee is $1.20 per month, per billing unit, and a billing unit is equal to 500 square feet of impervious surface.