With three stages, over 50 artists, and friends everywhere you turn, the Tom Tom Festival’s Downtown Mall Block Party is the gateway to the annual event’s creative side. From the wild focus of Bad Hat Fire and fluid moves of Capoeira Resistência C’ville, to the blasts of the No BS! Brass Band and expansive jams of Kendall Street Company, the weekend’s roaming bash gives way to the laid-back picking at Porchella along the streets of Belmont on Sunday.
Price and times vary. tomtomfoundation.org
As the pandemic took hold in mid-March, Charlottesville and Albemarle’s criminal justice decision-makers started letting people out of jail. Two months in, it looks like the emergency measures have paid off: The Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail has not reported a single coronavirus case among inmates, and those transferred to house arrest have not posed any notable threat to public safety.
When the pandemic began, jails and prisons were quickly identified as potential coronavirus hotbeds, given the crowded living conditions and low quality of medical care. The area’s commonwealth’s attorneys, judges, and jail administration responded accordingly: They ended pretrial detentions, meaning people awaiting trial no longer had to sit in jail simply because they could not afford bail. And they transferred non-violent prisoners with short remaining sentences to home electronic incarceration (house arrest). That’s resulted in the lowest number of inmates inside the ACRJ in decades.
Local advocates have long hoped to see these decarceration policies put into practice. The pandemic offered a chance to speed that process along. Speaking to C-VILLE in March, Albemarle County’s reform-minded Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Hingeley framed the pandemic as a sort of experiment: “We are going to be accumulating information about the effects of liberalized policies with respect to sentences and bail decisions,” Hingeley said. “We’re going to see how instituting these different practices works out…My hope is that it’s going to work out well.”
Two months later, early returns show that the liberalized sentencing policies have had just the effect that Hingeley and other advocates envisioned.
The ACRJ has transferred around 15 percent of its pre-COVID population to house arrest, and the jail has recorded zero cases of COVID among inmates. By contrast, the state prison system has transferred just 217 of its 30,000 prisoners (less than 1 percent) out of the prisons, and the system has seen more than 1,100 cases of the virus in facilities around the state.
Meanwhile, in Charlottesville, allowing ACRJ prisoners to serve their time on house arrest has not endangered the public. In the last 70 or so days, more than 90 people have been released on house arrest, and “no new criminal offenses were committed,” says jail superintendent Martin Kumer. Eight people, out of 90, have been transferred back into the jail, all for technical violations such as drug use or unauthorized travel.
Last week, the Tom Tom Foundation convened a panel of local criminal justice leaders to discuss reforming the justice system during and after the pandemic. For some, the conclusions from the past two months support arguments they’ve been making for years.
“The data has already been there,” pointed out panelist Cherry Henley, who runs Lending Hands, an ex-offender aid service. “Most people like myself already recognize that if you can release people into the community, they are not that high risk. At the jail, at the work release department, most of these people go out anyway, every day.”
Even so, the pandemic has given these reformers new momentum, and keeping that going is important to them. “People forget stuff really quick,” said Harold Folley, a community organizer at the Legal Aid Justice Center. Folley thinks that moving forward, advocates for decarceration must “constantly remind [people] that releasing folks is safe. Those folks that were released didn’t go and do something criminal here in Charlottesville.”
It’s also important to remember that the house arrest system is far from perfect. “We’ve been dealing with a lot of inmates being released, and they’re on HEI, and they don’t have identification,” says Whitmore Merrick, who works for the city’s Home to Hope offender aid program. “So they’re not able to be employed. They’re stuck in the house with nothing to do. That’s been a major struggle.”
Martize Tolbert, an ex-offender who now works for the Fountain Fund, a re-entry support program, said that this moment feels like an opportunity to make change. “Let’s talk about things that we can radically do now,” Tolbert said. “Programs over prisons. Now is the time to [be] thought-provoking, to try to figure out institutions that we can use here in Charlottesville.”
Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania, who supports these alternatives to incarceration, outlined the challenges ahead. Not everyone in the system is on board. “You have victims, you might have detectives or police officers that have worked on the investigation, you have judges that are going to have to buy in…maybe probation officers that are involved in a violation hearing,” Platania said. “They feel a responsibility that might be at odds with some of what Jim [Hingeley] and I are trying to do. There’s a lot of different interests that you have to factor in as a prosecutor.”
“It’s a shame that it took this crisis to motivate the community to get behind decarceration,” Hingeley said, “but it’s happened now, and when the crisis has passed, we’re going to work to continue doing this.”
Stay tuned for the next edition of the Tom Tom Foundation’s Com Com Live! series, which will feature some of the leaders mentioned in the article and will be free and open to the public. Date to be announced.
What a difference a year makes. Charlottesville underwent a seismic shift shortly after we published last summer’s list of local power brokers, which is always an exercise in subjectivity anyway. Some of them have undergone dramatic reversals, new faces have appeared—and yet, much stays the same. But who wants to read about Coran Capshaw and UVA every year? To change it up, we divided this year’s list into four categories that most impact our day-to-day lives: business and development, culture, government and activism after August 12.
Risa Goluboff
UVA’s first female dean of its School of Law already was a legal rock star before President Teresa Sullivan asked her to head the Deans Working Group after a bunch of torch-carrying neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched through Virginia’s flagship university August 11. Goluboff led the mission to assess the university’s response to hate’s romp through Grounds and to maintain academic freedom, inclusion and tolerance—while keeping a safe space for a rattled community.
And in her own law school, Goluboff had to deal with unwelcome visitor Jason Kessler, an arrested Kessler protester and closing the library to outsiders during the end-of-school exam period. C-VILLE put her in the activism category, but in reality, Goluboff is just doing her job.
Jalane Schmidt
The UVA associate professor’s religious studies background gives her the tenure and balance to call out Charlottesville’s self-satisfied image of itself as a liberal, world-class city. Charlottesville has lots of activists, but unlike many, Schmidt brings knowledge and research to her efforts.
A regular at City Council, the Black Lives Matter organizer proposed that March 3—the day the Union Army arrived—should be recognized as Liberation Day in acknowledgment that 52 percent of the population here was enslaved at the time of the Civil War. She’s pushed council to recontextualize the controversial Confederate monuments and challenge the Lost Cause narrative. She brought the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society’s Ku Klux Klan robes out of the closet. And along with Andrea Douglas, she’s organized a pilgrimage to the Equal Justice Initiative’s lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, so that ignorance of the past will no longer be an excuse.
Zyahna Bryant
We can think of few local teens who’ve evoked so much change over the past couple of years—and she’s still got her senior year at Charlottesville High to go. Bryant is the young woman who questioned the city’s honoring of Confederate generals who fought to keep her ancestors enslaved, and started a petition for the removal of the Confederate statues in March 2016—when she was a 15-year-old freshman.
She’s been interviewed by Katie Couric, Vice, and she occasionally turns up on CNN. Did we mention she’s still in high school?
Jeff Fogel
Charlottesville’s civil rights legal gadfly has no problem filing a lawsuit when he sees injustice. He’s sued Charlottesville police to release stop-and-frisk narratives (he lost), an Albemarle cop who’s stopped an inordinate number of black motorists (on appeal) and has represented activists Veronica Fitzhugh in her confrontations with Jason Kessler, Morgan Hopkins for pulling off her shirt August 12 and Mayor Nikuyah Walker for a speeding ticket appeal.
Fogel frequently interjects himself into City Council meetings and even the hiring announcement for new city police Chief RaShall Brackney. And if his interactions with city officials aren’t always the most congenial, well, maybe it’s because he’s always suing the city.
Rising action
It’s not like there’s ever been a lack of activism here, but since the 2016 election, demonstrations have SURJed, to pardon our pun on Showing Up for Racial Justice. Local activists include antifascists, Black Lives Matter, Indivisible Charlottesville and the Public Housing Association of Residents, to name a few of the many groups that have sprung up. And then there’s the umbrella Cville Solidarity, aka Solidarity Cville. While there’s overlap, the more anarchist elements have disrupted and/or shut down City Council, and when Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler is spotted, they can mobilize on a dime.
Nikuyah Walker
Walker became the city’s first independent councilor since 1948. Running on a platform of “unmasking the illusion,” Walker has broken a number of barriers as the city’s first black female mayor—who also is a city parks & rec employee. She doesn’t think it’s necessary to make nice with her fellow councilors, particularly Mike Signer, whom she frequently denounced when she was on the other side of the dais, or to talk to the press or follow council tradition, such as choosing the mayor behind closed doors. She’s taken to Facebook Live to call out city employees, like now retired Deputy Chief Gary “The Gasman Unpleasants.”
Since Walker has been mayor, there have been fewer shutdowns of council, but she’s had to balance giving voice to her supporters, who tend to disregard Robert’s Rules of Order, and run a public meeting and conduct city business. And she’s found herself on the losing end of 4-1 votes, such as West2nd’s special use permit.
Walker says she’s comfortable making people uncomfortable, and at least for many citizens attending City Council meetings, that’s something she’s accomplished.
Judges Bob Downer and Rick Moore
City court dockets have seemed even busier in the past year, and pretty much every charge stemming from the KKK rally July 8 and Unite the Right rally August 12 has gone through Judge Bob Downer’s Charlottesville General District Court, while every lawsuit filed about statues and every August 12 felony certified by the grand jury ends up in Judge Rick Moore’s Charlottesville Circuit Court.
Downer has presided over general district court since around 2001, and everyone from speeders to murderers appear before him. Assorted activists have shown up outside his courtroom since August 12, but he tolerates no protest inside. And it’s not like the latest batch is his first rodeo. Remember Code Pink? Downer convicts lawbreakers whether they’re white nationalists or anti-racists with a courtroom demeanor that’s both concerned and stern.
Moore is the guy who will decide whether City Council overstepped its authority with its vote to remove Confederate statues, as well as the lawsuits filed to keep violent interlopers from returning to a Unite the Right anniversary. He’s also presided over two jury trials of out-of-state men who were convicted of beating DeAndre Harris. In the courtroom, Moore is genial and thorough, typically pondering his decisions post-hearing rather than ruling from the bench.
Delegate David Toscano
Toscano briefly retired as House minority leader in 2015, only to be wooed back within 24 hours by his caucus, in time to see 2017’s blue wave that nearly made him House speaker. Toscano has represented Charlottesville and parts of Albemarle since the venerated Mitch van Yahres did not seek re-election to his 57th District seat in 2005. Most of the time, Toscano has been in a crushing 66-34 minority, but now that the Dems are 49-51, he’s using the title House Democratic leader and 2019 will determine whether he becomes the most powerful man in the House of Delegates.
Rick Randolph
The Albemarle Board of Supervisors usually is a more staid group than Charlottesville City Council, aside from the occasional sexual batterer like Chris Dumler. Following his election in 2015 as the Scottsville District’s supervisor, Randolph led the charge to study moving the county’s courts from the city to the county, and dared try to leverage the county’s worst deal ever—the 1982 revenue sharing agreement—to keep the courts downtown. For his trouble, Delegate Rob Bell got a bill passed that forbids moving courts without a referendum.
Coran Capshaw
It wouldn’t be the Power Issue without mention of the man who built it all—or at least a whole lot of it. As co-owner of Riverbend Development, Capshaw’s also behind several recently proposed projects, including building the Belmont Apartments and the new Apex Clean Energy headquarters on Garrett Street. He also recently built 5th Street Station, the massive shopping center anchored by Wegmans. A frequenter of Billboard’s Power 100, the founder of Musictoday and Red Light Management moved up two spots this year, from 11th place in 2017 to number nine. Since he made our list last summer, we’ve seen several of his acts in town, including Dave Matthews Band, Chris Stapleton, Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes, Luke Bryan and Odesza, the first three of which performed at the Concert for Charlottesville, a free unity show Capshaw helped organize in the wake of August 12.
Jaffray Woodriff
The man with the plan, Woodriff bought the .99-acre space that used to house the Main Street Arena, Escafé, the Ante Room and Carytown Tobacco, with plans to transform it into a tech incubator—aptly named CODE, aka the Center of Developing Entrepreneurs—for people who are a lot smarter than we are. Woodriff, the co-founder of financial planning firm Quantitative Investment Management and an angel investor, has also doled out dollars for at least 40 local startups over the past decade. He’s scheduled to begin construction on CODE this summer.
Apex Clean Energy
They’re in the business of renewable energy, and business is booming. What started as a company with fewer than 10 employees has grown to employ 220 in nine years, with 170 local staffers currently spread out among three offices in town. The company, headed by CEO and founder Sandy Reisky, has created $4 billion in clean energy opportunities and is now building a new seven-story, 130,000-square-foot headquarters on Garrett Street so its Charlottesville staff can all be under the same roof as they continue to clock hours replacing old, dirty energy practices with new wind and solar ones across the continent. And that office they’re building? It’ll be powered by the sun, of course.
UVA Health System/UVA
At the hospital that saw about 975,000 patients last fiscal year, beds won’t line the halls of the emergency department for much longer. In the biggest facelift the health system has ever undergone, the $400 million, 520,000-square-foot expansion and renovation of the emergency department and operating rooms on West Main Street, among other projects, is underway and scheduled for completion in 2020. Since our last Power Issue, we’ve said hello to President Jim Ryan as incoming president at the university, and we’re looking forward to seeing how he fares after the tumultuous tenure of Teresa Sullivan. If one thing’s for sure, without the university and its hospital, Charlottesville wouldn’t be nearly as smart, healthy, employed or populated.
Martin Horn
“We build stuff” is its motto—a modest take on what the $40 million construction company has been up to for nearly 40 years. With President Jack Horn at the helm since 2001, Martin Horn has had a hand in projects pretty much everywhere you look, and the ones we’re most interested in right now include the long-awaited skate park at McIntire Park, the C&O Row brownstones on Water Street that look more at home in a big city and Prime 109, the new steakhouse where the guys who brought us Lampo will be flipping filets in the old Bank of America building a couple doors down from C-VILLE’s Downtown Mall office. Another sweet spot? Horn works closely with the Building Goodness Foundation, a local nonprofit that connects people from the design and construction industries with vulnerable communities.
Andrea Douglas
Douglas spends long hours at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, where the mission—“to honor and preserve the rich heritage and legacy of the African American community of Charlottesville-Albemarle, Virginia, and to promote a greater appreciation for, and understand of, the contributions of African Americans and peoples of the diaspora locally, nationally and globally”—is never far from her mind. As executive director of the center, she fulfills these goals in many ways: opening the school’s auditorium to high school rap competitions and talks on race in America, reviving the Charlottesville Players Guild black theater troupe, curating gallery shows that feature the work of contemporary African American artists, and much more. And by doing this, Douglas, one of the city’s most socially conscious arts advocates, makes certain the center—and its mission—remain an integral part of the community.
Jody Kielbasa
There’s more to Kielbasa than being the director of the Virginia Film Festival, although he gets top billing for that for good reason. The festival’s 2017 lineup brought the already prestigious event to new heights with special guests Spike Lee, William H. Macy and Margot Lee Shetterly, plus the ever-relevant film series “Race in America.” Kielbasa is also UVA’s vice provost for the arts, a year-round job that entails planning and fundraising. Not only was he instrumental in bringing Tina Fey and Bryan Cranston to town, he and his staff put together the historic interactive stage celebration that launched UVA’s bicentennial with appearances by Hamilton star Leslie Odom Jr. and R&B powerhouse Andra Day.
Paul Beyer
The Tom Tom Founders Festival gets larger every year, and Beyer, its creator, is the one to thank for it. Since TTFF’s first run in spring 2012, he has cultivated and transformed the event into a twice-a-year occasion, adding the Tomtoberfest music festival in the fall while still assembling an impressive collection of diverse events and keynote speakers in the spring (and the numbers keep climbing: 43,165 people attended this year’s spring event). Beyer has also gained a reputation for taking Tom Tom in unexpected directions—for example, special guest John Cleese of Monty Python fame recently infused his dry wit into a serious panel titled “Is There Life After Death?”—and with a new Art Ecosystem track added for 2019, Beyer doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
Three Notch’d Brewing Company
Charlottesville loves its craft beer, and Three Notch’d Brewing Company is a local favorite. Boasting locations in Harrisonburg, Richmond and, most recently, opening the largest restaurant in the city, this brewing facility hasn’t forgotten its humble Grady Avenue roots (a spot now focused on sour beers) or its original mission statement—to respect the “inalienable rights of man,” presumably referring to humankind’s right to kick back after a long day with a pint of locally crafted beer. And thanks to its new 15,000-square-foot, 30,000-barrel-per-year flagship location at IX Art Park, the Three Notch’d team is giving Charlottesville brew-lovers the perfect place to do it.
Kirby Hutto
With Coran Capshaw’s Red Light Management and Starr Hill Presents responsible for so many locally unifying gatherings—from Fridays After Five to A Concert for Charlottesville—it’s natural to wonder who makes the gears turn behind the scenes. Hutto, general manager of the Sprint Pavilion, is a vital member of the RLM/Starr Hill Presents team. Since the Pavilion opened in 2005, he has been involved with nearly every aspect of the venue, from improving the sound quality and updating security to ensuring the happiness of audience members and performers alike. Hutto received the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention & Visitors Bureau’s 2018 Tourism Achievement Award this May, in recognition of his effort to shape the Pavilion into a premier performance space.
2014
Corbin Hargraves
Jason Vandever
Christine Mahoney
Margeret Gould
Stephen Davis
Matt Joslyn
Mark Brown
Frank Ballif, Charlie Armstrong
Zach Buckner
Dean Maupin
Joel Slezak, Erica Hellen
Collean Laney
Brennan Gould
Pam Moran
Dave Chapman
David Heilberg
Jeyon Falsini
Kristen Szakos
Dan Rosenweig
UVA
Teresa Sullivan
William Goodwin
Patrick Hogan
Developers
Coran Capshaw
Gabe Silverman
UVA
Dan Rosenweig
Wendell Wood
Politicians
Ken Boyd
David Toscano
Kristin Szakos
Rob Bell
City Republicans
Arts
Jody Kielbasa
Jon Parrish Peede
Matt Joslyn
Erica Arvold
Maureen Lovett
Entrepreneurs
Baron Schwartz and Kyle Redinger, Vivid Cortex
Dr. Crystal Icenhour, Phthisis Diagnostics
ChartIQ, Dan Schleifer
InSpark technologies, Erik and Karl Otto
LoveThatFit, Gina Mancuso
Pete Myers, Environmental Health Sciences
Toam Nguyen, C’ville Central
Kristen Suokko, Local Food Hub
Neal Kassell, Focused Ultrasound Foundation
Brian Wheeler, Charlottesville Tomorrow
UVA
Teresa Sullivan
Helen Dragas
George Cohen
Edward Howell
Carl Zeithaml
Politicians
David Toscano
Richard Baxter Gilliam
Ken Boyd
Sonjia Smith
Chris Dumier
Landlords
Coran Capshaw
Michael Strine
Gabe Silverman and Allan Cadgens
Jim Justice
John Dewberry
Investors
Ted Weschler
Hunter Craig
Jaffray Woodriff and Michael Geismar
Robert Hardie
Mark Giles
Entrepreneurs
Tom Skalak
Martin Chapman
Michael Prichard and Tobias Dengel
Dr. Neal Kassell
Zach Buckner
Arts
Maggie Guggenheimer
Jody Kielbasa
Matt Joslyn
Steve and Russell Willis Taylor
Andrew Owen
Youth Movement
Tony Bennett
Collean Laney
Michael Allenby
Wes Bellamy
Hebah Fisher