Seth Rosen at the Progress had some interesting news on Saturday that I don’t want to let slip by. The still-forming police advisory committee won’t have investigative powers, the city has decided. The panel, made up of Charlottesville citizens, will apparently have no power, other than (presumably) to raise a stink if they see something inappropriate going on. The last such group to exist in the city — active from 1990-97 — had the ability to interview witnesses and access internal misconduct complaints. Chief Timothy Longo points to the 17/45 rate of sustaining complaints of rule violations against officers last year as a sign that the police department is willing to discipline its officers.
Area officials are giving up on plans for a 64/Sunset Avenue interchange, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Daily Progress. The traffic flow south of the city is awkward (moving between 20 S, Avon, and 5th isn’t particularly easy), and the city, county, and UVa were angling for improving things by way of a new interchange. But at $50-100M it’s just too expensive. Instead, they’re looking to connect Sunset and Fontaine, but as with just about all road construction, even that’s unlikely to happen. (The state is hurtling towards 2018, the date at which the spiraling cost of maintaining our roads will eat up 100% of the state transportation budget. With each year that goes by, we can build less and less roads.) The need for this is going to come from the massive Biscuit Run development, just south of town. But with the developers offering a paltry $1.2M towards the road, there’s no reason to think that we’ll end up with anything but more traffic.
Just last week C-Ville Weekly wrote about Josh Bare’s efforts to keep open the Hope Community Center homeless shelter, set up to take the place of COMPASS’ efforts. (I think it was last week. Mysteriously, C-Ville Weekly provides no dates for stories on their website. Or authors, so I can’t tell you who wrote it.) Accused of violating zoning regulations, the city told the shelter that they’d need to shut down unless they got an amendment to zoning regulations to accommodate them. Today Jayson Whitehead writes on C-Ville Weekly’s new blog that the shelter is shutting down, unable to comply with the fire code, with no path forward in their relations with the city, and facing increasingly unhappy neighbors. This will leave 45-60 regular residents without a place to sleep.
Mac McDonald has quit his gig as the radio announcer for the Cavaliers, effective yesterday, NBC 29 reports. It seems like it was just yesterday that he came back from last time he quit — he left the job in 1985, returning in 1996. The football and basketball announcer says he wants to “pursue other opportunities.” He’s long been billed as “the voice of the Cavaliers,” a clever form of job insurance that presumably leaves CBS Collegiate Sports Properties in a tight spot. For more information, see the company’s press release.
Given the climbing price of food, I’m looking to expand the household vegetable garden this year beyond the seeds that we planted back in February. We’ve looked around, but the few places we’ve checked are devoid of organic labeling. Organic isn’t a particularly big deal to me in the food that I buy, but the stuff that grows in my own garden I like to keep away from the ol’ Miracle Grow. Can anybody suggest a nursery in the area where I could stock on up tomatoes, basil, cucumbers, etc?
Lori writes:
Last night, we were up at Christian’s on Pantops. The signs were all gone and they had little hand written signs announcing that the individual slice prices were going up by a quarter and $1.00 for a pie. I know that there was an article in Sunday’s Progress about Bodo’s raising their prices slightly (and still losing money on it). One of my friends thinks that the farmers are going to be making money, money, money but they don’t seem to remember (or know) how much gasoline is used.(I’m suddenly remembering reading about the days of the Weimar Republic where people walked around with wheelbarrows full of money so they could buy a loaf of bread.)
It’s not just Christian’s, of course — prices are going up everywhere. Seth Rosen wrote about this in a pair of articles [1, 2] in the Progress this weekend. Bodo’s is taking the cost their bagels up $0.10/apiece, since the price of flour has tripled — it’s not enough to even things out for them, but it’s an improvement. Local schools are having a tough time providing food for the kids. The food bank has seen demand climb, and food stamp cases are up 10%. My wife and I went to buy a bag of grain for our horse at Southern States last week, and the price had doubled (and the quality reduced).
Remember that your standard factory-farm fertilizer is petroleum-based — your food is literally bathed in oil, and at $118/barrel, that fertilizer is getting expensive. The price of diesel has doubled, so our food economy — premised on the notion of cheap, fast transportation from California, Mexico, Chile, or New Zealand — is getting pricy along with it.
It’s been a rough week for the Meadowcreek Parkway. First the school board deferred a decision on giving up some of their land to build the road, Barney Breen-Portnoy wrote in the Progress on Saturday. And now city council has declined to endorse any of the interchange options, Seth Rosen writes today. Now, the school board signing off is really just a formality — and they’re quite likely to do so, anyhow — but the interchange is a bigger problem. Sen. John Warner secured $25M in federal funding for the road almost three years ago, but then the interchange committee went and recommended a design $5M+ over budget.
Councilor Julian Taliaferro thinks that interchange, at seven acres, is just too big. And Mayor Dave Norris just doesn’t see how the city is going to pay for it. Council will hold a work session in a month or two to figure out what to do.
The school board is willing to give up the required 8.5 acres, but they’ve got some conditions. They want a 25mph speed limit near school property (thus reducing the benefit of this dedicated route), a pedestrian bridge, a prohibition on trucks, a guarantee that the fifty replacement acres of parkland would forever be parkland*, and for CHS teams to get first dibs on the promised replacement sports field in McIntire Park.
* The same promise that the city made in order to accept the money from Paul Goodeloe McIntire to establish the park in the first place. Clearly, promises are no obstacle for the city.
In the current (soon-to-be prior) issue of C-Ville Weekly, Jayson Whitehead writes about a pretty cool idea: turning Morven into a farm to grow food for UVa. John Kluge donated the 7,400 acres to UVa in 2001, and the university has been trying to figure out what to do with the land that they haven’t sold off. Urban & Environmental Planning graduate student Anne Bedarf has pitched her idea to the UVA Foundation (which owns all of UVa’s land), and they’ve been receptive.
I considered attending Asheville college Warren Wilson after high school and was pleased to find, when I visited, that they had their own farm for just this purpose. Yale does the same thing.
Plan 9 and the Satellite Ballroom will close at the end of May, David Moltz writes in today’s Cavalier Daily. Plan 9 is going to allow their lease to expire, seeing their possible forced closing as a sign that perhaps it’s best that they consolidate their two C’ville locations. Their subtenants — Higher Grounds, Just Curry, and Satellite Ballroom — will likewise be out come midnight, May 31. Plan 9 owner Jim Bland intends to make a formal announcement today.
1:20pm Update: C-Ville Weekly provides more details. CVS sounds like all but a sure thing, and Satellite Ballroom is looking hard for a new location, rather than simply giving up.
©2008 Bill Detmer. All rights reserved.
OK, I’m calling it — winter is over, spring is here. Monday’s threat of sleet was winter’s last gasp. I was convinced of that when I saw this photo by Bill Detmer appear in the Charlottesville Flickr group this morning. The daffodils have come and gone, the flowering trees behind my office have lost their flowers, and The Dogwood Festival is underway.
A barely related memory. A decade ago, when Robert Van Winkle was still at NBC 29. It’s early December. The weather has turned cold because, hey, winter’s coming. Robert has just finished providing the forecast. A bubbly anchor without a brain in her head turns to him and asks earnestly: “oh, Robert, when will this cold snap end?”
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