Tag: socialistdogmom

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Opinion

The virtues of incivility: Looking closer at the City Council candidates

Despite the refrain from all quarters that the defining issue of this year’s City Council election is housing, this election is a referendum on the status quo.

In what feels like hundreds of candidate forums, the five candidates in the Democratic primary for City Council have spent more energy agreeing with one another than setting themselves apart from the field. Their answers to many of the questions posed to them by community groups and neighborhood associations have started to blend together, a nearly indistinguishable blur of progressive generalizations.

All five candidates agree that we have a housing problem. They’ve all voiced support for funding local schools and closing the achievement gap. They all agree that the Lee and Jackson statues are lightning rods for hate that don’t belong in downtown Charlottesville. They all agree that improvements should be made to public transit, even down to the details of establishing a regional transit authority, making stops more frequent and regular, and erecting more bus shelters. They’re all committed to the noble, if nebulous, idea of equity.

In our small blue city, the Democratic primary is the de facto election. There are no Republican candidates. As a state with open primaries, that means our Democratic candidates can coyly court Republican voters. So it’s worth examining the candidates’ messages more closely.

Lloyd Snook is running on a platform of a return to civility. Snook says he decided to run because of the “chaos and disorder” of City Council and what he sees as “decisions not being made intelligently.” He later clarified that he was not referring solely to “what goes on on Monday nights” at City Council meetings, but when asked at a Belmont-Carlton Neighborhood Association-hosted forum, he was unwilling to articulate specifically what sort of bureaucratic and departmental reforms he envisions pursuing to “get the government to work right again.”

There is a general belief, particularly among people who do not attend them, that City Council meetings are chaotic. While there have been several meetings I would certainly characterize that way, those have been traumatic exceptions.

Outside of the meetings in the immediate wake of a terrorist attack that killed a member of our community, the only time in the past two years that a recess has been called because business could not be conducted was due to armed members of a neo-Confederate group threatening other members of the audience. The idea that City Council cannot conduct its business because of ongoing disorder is a myth that could easily be put to bed by regularly attending what are, in fact, very mundane meetings.

This myth persists because it feels true. It has a kernel of truth, and believing it facilitates the larger narrative that we need to return to how things were before, before people who traditionally did not engage with politics started showing up, before advocating for racial and economic justice became mainstream talking points, before anyone started talking about making the wealthiest among us pay their fair share to make this city livable for all its residents.

Shrouding regressive politics in the language of order and gentility is not new. And in an off-year primary for a local election, much of the electorate is not engaged enough to listen beyond what feels true. It’s easy to say, as every candidate has said throughout this campaign season, that you support finding solutions for our affordable housing crisis. But listen carefully to the solutions on offer.

Sena Magill has campaigned on reforming the regulations on and incentivizing construction of accessory dwelling units. Michael Payne is pushing for fully funding resident-led public housing redevelopment and investing in new affordable units. Bob Fenwick has focused on what he views as the misuse of special use permits, and Brian Pinkston has committed to few specifics.

Snook, while in favor of making it easier to add accessory apartments, also said, “We don’t have room for 4,000 new units in Charlottesville.” Despite being corrected during that April 30 forum by Payne, who clarified that the housing study indicates a need for 4,000 “interventions,” rather than newly constructed units (a fundamental difference), he repeated the claim at a May 13 forum, stating “We’re not going to build our way out of this problem.”

Snook’s plan for affordable housing is regional, which is another statement that, on its surface, sounds reasonable enough. What he’s shared of that plan is the belief that affordable housing should be built on less valuable land, land in the county. His commitment to better regional transit, then, seems to be for the primary purpose of busing people his housing plan would displace into the county back to the city for their low-wage jobs.

At a May 24 student-led climate strike, Payne had this message for the youth organizers: “There will be people who push back, people who tell you you don’t know how politics really works, that you’re being uncivil. I’m telling you, don’t listen to them!”

We are a small city facing big problems. General platitudes that amount to ‘Make Charlottesville Great Again’ won’t solve our housing crisis or mitigate the coming climate disaster. It’s time to face the reality that Charlottesville hasn’t been great for many of its residents throughout its history and move forward, however uncomfortable that might be.

Conger is co-chair of the Charlottesville chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, which voted May 13 to endorse Michael Payne for City Council.

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Opinion

Worth the wait: We need the Police Civilian Review Board

Last June, police arrested several community activists who were protesting the conviction of Corey Long. Photo: Eze Amos

After nearly nine months of work, the Police Civilian Review Board is finalizing its initial bylaws. The proposed model would require the city to hire up to two full-time professional staff members to assist the board in processing and independently investigating complaints against Charlottesville police officers.

There has been an understandably high degree of public interest and public scrutiny on the board throughout its brief existence so far. This is a good thing. Hard questions asked at this stage will shape this body into a genuine reflection of what the community needs it to be. Because, make no mistake, this community needs civilian oversight of our police department.

As a municipal meeting enthusiast, I’ve enjoyed watching the body take shape. I worry, though, that those unfamiliar with the nature of the city’s boards and commissions will see stumbling blocks where I see building blocks.

The Civilian Review Board is just one of over three dozen boards and commissions operating in the city, some more functional than others (with a few appearing to be entirely defunct). The Planning Commission is a well-oiled machine, packed with policy knowledge. The Human Rights Commission is pulling itself back together after a few years lost in the wilderness. The Emergency Communications Board is struggling with staffing and training issues, not least of which has been its own inability to retain a director.

I’ve still never attended a meeting of the Towing Advisory Board—it is quite elusive, with meetings not properly noticed or canceled due to lack of quorum. What I mean is, unless it’s a call for a top to bottom audit of all city boards and commissions, I’m skeptical that the criticism of the CRB, much of which takes the form of attacking the personal credibility and professionalism of the volunteer members of the board, is in good faith.

Critics have questioned the cost and the need for a civilian review board. But there is one concept that is universal across every single government body: public engagement. It is, if you take them at their word, the heart and soul of any government endeavor. Why should policing be any different?

You can redress a grievance about an unattractive awning on Avon Street with the Entrance Corridor Review Board. You can tell the Tree Commission how you feel about the saplings put in by the John Warner Parkway. You can address the Library Board on anything from 3D printers to story hour programming. You can not only make your comment and be heard, but you can meaningfully engage with the process of resolving the issue you brought to the table.

But if you have a complaint about policing, that complaint goes into a black box. There is no community involvement. There is no dialogue. You will never find out what, if any, consequences an officer faced. You have no recourse. There is no relationship, no trust. That is a failure of government.

So many conversations about the current political climate in Charlottesville divide the course of our existence into Before and After the summer of 2017. For a not-insignificant number of people, that was their first significant encounter with policing in any capacity other than a traffic stop. But the problem with policing didn’t start the day in July when now-retired Major Gary Pleasants overrode an order from then-Chief Al Thomas, saying of his decision to brutalize antiracist activists protesting the Ku Klux Klan, “you’re damn right I gassed them!” The problem with policing in Charlottesville did not start when Thomas allegedly said, of the rioting in the streets on August 12, “let them fight.”

The events of the summer of 2017 did not cause a breakdown in an otherwise operational system—they just applied enough pressure that the cracks in the façade were finally visible to those of us not already living with the realities of racially biased policing. The battle for accurate, consistent, transparent stop-and-frisk data has been raging for years, and the numbers we have are deeply troubling. The problems aren’t new. We need a new approach if this police department hopes to begin to repair its relationship with the community.

What the CRB proposes isn’t radical. While the model it’s drawn up is its own, it’s similar to boards already in operation in cities around the country. The board would be able to process and investigate complaints, with a budget pegged at 1 percent of the annual police department budget. It is an investment in the department’s own stated goal of improving the relationship between the community and its police force, creating transparency in the process, and giving residents a voice.

Like many boards, the CRB is taking some time to get off the ground. But that’s in part because its charge is so important. The people of Charlottesville should have an avenue for redressing grievances about policing that is at least as robust as the appeals process for requests to paint historic brick buildings.

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Opinion

Working the system: Galvin has a history of supporting the status quo

City Councilor Kathy Galvin is running for David Toscano’s seat in the House of Delegates this fall. Photo: Eze Amos

Councilor Kathy Galvin won’t be sitting on the dais in City Hall much longer. Instead of running for re-election to council this year, she’s currently campaigning as a progressive candidate for the House of Delegates. The planks of her platform are “a sustainable future,” “an equitable future,” and a “just and safe world.”

At face value, it is a good and progressive platform. But looking at her history as a local politician tells a different story—Councilor Galvin is almost cartoonishly sawing through the planks of Candidate Galvin’s platform.

Galvin’s understanding of the government’s role in righting the wrongs of its past is perhaps best summarized in her own words. Before she sat on City Council, she served as a member of the Charlottesville City School Board. In 2004, the district commissioned a report by the International Curriculum Management Audit Center. The audit found a stark racial divide in our city’s schools, concluding, “No city can survive by only serving one-half its constituents well. The future of such a legacy is dire.”

In a 2005 memo to the rest of the school board, Galvin criticized the report, accusing the outside auditor of being “bent on finding evidence of institutional racism.” Instead, she blamed parents for Charlottesville’s shocking racial inequities:

“The educational system is in and of itself neutral, even passive. White parents make it work for them through persistence and volunteer involvement. Black parents on the other hand expect the schools to look after their needs and tell them what needs to be done. […] As a result white kids learn how to prepare for college life due to their parents’ advocacy and black kids are left in the lurch due to their parents’ lack of knowledge or experience with a good education […].”

She urged the rest of the board to reject the results of the audit and “unequivocally state that the racial bias [in the audit] was unnecessary and in fact harmful” and warned of “unintended consequences” of closing the racial achievement gap, particularly that the district will lose more rich white students to private school “because they perceive that academics have taken a back seat to politics.”

She asks what the implications are “if the needs and interests of one ethnic group are emphasized over all others,” but clearly fails to realize that’s the situation the report tells them they already have.

When asked about the memo by The New York Times in October of last year, she stood by her position, calling the report’s advice on correcting the city schools’ racial achievement gap “too narrow and racially biased.”

I reread this memo recently. Several times. A recent AP Style Guide update has advised journalists to do away with euphemisms like “racially charged,” but as an opinion columnist I was already free to call this what it is. It is so racist it knocked the wind out of me. Any white progressive who truly believes the system to be neutral doesn’t stand a chance of making any meaningful change. And based on what I’ve seen in council chambers, that memo was and remains representative of her views as a whole: We can address issues of equity if and when we’ve thoroughly considered how it might affect upper-middle-class white families.

Galvin’s votes as a councilor often seem motivated by a rigid adherence to existing paradigms, even when she acknowledges that the plan she’s clinging to is flawed or downright wrong. For instance, in her rationale for voting against a zoning change that would have allowed the Hogwaller Farms project to move forward, Galvin was anxious about rezoning out of sync with the comprehensive plan, saying “that’s not a holistic vision; that’s not a healthy way” to plan. In her job as an architect, this is an asset. An entire building is carefully planned on paper before ground is broken. Cities are planned, too, but life doesn’t stop while you take the plan back to the drafting table. We can’t sit on our hands for years waiting for an overhaul of zoning ordinances the head of Neighborhood Development Services has called “a wastebasket of errors.”

I’ve long believed Galvin is simply terrified of change, that she lacks the courage and creativity to imagine solutions that don’t adhere to her rigid notions of how the system works, and is unwilling to examine how that system works and for whom. Time and time again she asks marginalized communities to wait for a more convenient season, to stop agitating for radical change, to stop inconveniencing the comfortable. I do think she believes what she is doing will bring about “an equitable future,” but she holds fast to a flawed belief that this can be done without the input of those currently suffering under inequity.

It doesn’t matter if there is no malice in your heart if you repeatedly support policies that consistently harm marginalized communities. At the end of the day, intentions don’t matter. Impact does.

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News Opinion

A moral map: The city budget is a chance to show what matters to us

The city has proposed a 1 percent increase in the meals tax in its 2020 budget. Photo: Robert Llewelyn

It’s budget season. For four months every year, council and staff hold public meetings about the coming year’s priorities. For four months, I sit through what I am absolutely certain is the exact same PowerPoint at least a dozen times. Much of it remains inscrutable to me. I am growing comfortable with the idea that I’ll never be entirely sure what it means in the real world to move money around on paper. What I do understand, though, is that the city, like most of us, can’t pay for everything it wants.

“The city has better ways of getting income,” Joan Fenton, president of the Downtown Business Association of Charlottesville, said at a March 4 council meeting of the possibility of raising tax rates. Better ways than taxation? Localities too afraid to raise taxes (because of the ire of business owners like Fenton) often rely on fees and fines to increase revenue. That means raising court costs and turning the city into a speed trap to fill the holes in our budget, which would disproportionately impact the poor. It is regressive and unreliable and relies on a weaponized justice system.

While a truly progressive tax is an avenue not available to the city under the Dillon Rule, there are revenue streams that don’t literally rely on criminalizing poverty. Raising tax rates provides a reliable, steady revenue stream to tackle the problems the alternative would only exacerbate.

While much about the budget process remains opaque to me, it is bewildering to see what feels like intentional misrepresentations about what it would mean to raise meals and lodging tax rates. Business owners have appeared at public comment to make the case that increased meals and lodging taxes would hurt their business. One restaurant owner said he would have to raise prices to account for the “loss,” but failed to explain how an additional one dollar in tax on a $100 meal at his pricey establishment would drive down business to the point that he would have to raise prices to make a profit.

The restaurant experiences no loss here. The tax is paid by the consumer and only passes through the business. The hysteria is puzzling to me.

When you make your personal budget, you have to make hard decisions about what’s important to you and what things you can do without. It’s the same when a city makes a budget, except we’re deciding what our neighbors should do without. The real hurdle in balancing the budget is not a column on a spreadsheet, but in the public understanding of what the budget is. A budget is more than just a balance of revenues and expenditures—it’s a moral document, an agreement about what is important to us.

Beyond the public protestations of business owners about the meals and lodging rates, there has been a lot of uncertainty about the real estate tax rate, whose increase would fund affordable housing. At a March 16 budget forum, Councilor Kathy Galvin was vocally in favor of a 1-1-1 increase. By Wednesday night, she was expressing relief that the real estate tax would remain steady for another year. While the higher rate was advertised, it seems we won’t know the fate of the tax until the March 27 work session.

At the first reading of the final 2019 budget in April of last year, the meeting went into an hour-long recess due to threats of violence from an armed neo-Confederate. A woman had just commented that the Downtown Mall was the jewel of Charlottesville. That jewel sits in a crown forged by centuries of racial inequity. The violence isn’t always as overt as an angry racist with a gun in council chambers. Sometimes, it creeps insidiously into our lives, in the form of a budget that doesn’t value the lives of our most vulnerable community members.

UVA professor Walt Heinecke offered us a positive reframing at a recent public comment period: When the national press returns to Charlottesville this summer to ask us what we’ve done to address the conditions underlying the violence of the summer of hate, let this budget be the jewel in our crown, he said. He urged council to move forward with the real estate tax increase to put money into affordable housing and to publicly frame the meals and lodging tax increases as a public good—even going as far as proposing a campaign to put signs in restaurant windows advertising the meals tax increase as a micro-investment in equity. I’m not sure this budget goes far enough to deserve to be called a crown jewel. But it has the potential to be a down payment on a crown this city never earned.

Categories
Opinion

For the record: How a ‘strange hobby’ became a public service

Tensions ran high at Charlottesville City Council meetings in the aftermath of August 12, 2017. Photo: Eze Amos

I had lived in Charlottesville for 10 years almost to the day before I saw the inside of City Council chambers. I’d paid my gas bill in person once or twice. I think I bought a trash sticker in 2012. But I’d never even been upstairs at City Hall before. If you’d asked me at any point between August 2007 and August 2017, I would not have been able to tell you the mayor’s name.

I’m not sure what I was looking for when I squeezed into the packed chambers that night in August. I didn’t understand how Unite the Right had been allowed to happen to us. I didn’t know how our local government worked, but I needed to know what had gone wrong because surely something had. Things were out of control—cops were dragging people from the room, white supremacists were showing up at public comment. Even without any understanding of municipal government, this was noteworthy content, and like any millennial, I took to social media to tell my friends. And, unexpectedly, people seemed to enjoy reading what amounted to meeting minutes. I have tweeted out a blow-by-blow, real-time account of every City Council meeting since December 2017.

I started attending city government meetings for myself, because I had questions I couldn’t answer. What I found was not a simple explanation. Slowly, the meetings became about the mundane business of governing a city again, and it was clear the violence of the summer of 2017 was a symptom of a disease we have had for a long time—a nasty flare-up of a chronic illness. There is white supremacy deeply entrenched in the most boring parts of our government. We think of that violence as the Nazis who marched in our streets, but that was just the ugly cold sore caused by the virus that reproduces quietly in decisions about school district boundaries and funding allocations and building permits.

As the meetings became less about the spectacle, I was fascinated by the process of government. Decisions made in council chambers are based on decisions made in still more meetings—boards and commissions and work sessions. I was between jobs with time to kill, so I went to another meeting, then another. I realized the real work of governing was happening in open meetings that were open in name only—they were sparsely attended and lightly reported on.

The reporter is, typically, not part of the story. The news should be dispassionate. But we have no dearth of sterile, detached coverage of the events affecting our daily lives. What I’ve found is that we need more than that. Entirely accidentally, I discovered there is a real desire for news with an audience surrogate. For as intimately as it affects our lives, government can be opaque and inaccessible. We want the facts, but the lack of any emotional context makes them hard to grasp. In my coverage of city meetings, I am not just accountable to this community, I am a part of it. I don’t hide my frustration, my sadness, or even my boredom during long hearings on easements or alleyways.

Charlottesville as a community is uniquely civically engaged, but civic engagement is time consuming. Some board meetings are held in the middle of the day, some are held inside the jail, and City Council meetings can last until one in the morning. I never intended for my strange hobby to become a public service, but the combination of having the time and tenacity to sit through dozens of hours of meetings per week and no editorial board asking me to tone down the emotional intensity of my coverage has created a unique public record that I am still shocked to find so many people rely on for their city government news. With this column, my hope is to bring you not just a bi-monthly update about what happened in some dry public meeting you missed, but to make the business of these meetings more relatable, more accessible to you, my neighbors.

My personal style of intensely emotional, tonally conversational coverage cannot and should not replace traditional reporting from our local mainstream press. Those reporters provide an invaluable service. While my coverage may be less comprehensive, I see these forms of media as complementary. Providing people with bite-sized, digestible, relatable coverage makes broader engagement possible. I’ll sit through a full day city budget work session, a six-hour City Council meeting, and days of motions on that statue lawsuit so you don’t have to–although I’d be happy to save you a seat.

Follow Molly Conger’s real-time coverage of city meetings on Twitter @socialistdogmom