Charlottesville real estate assessments are up 18.8% this year, John Yellig writes in today’s Daily Progress. Some areas increased by as much as 39%, while some were as low as 7%. Note that this is only a calculation of the market value of the house — the rate reflects the realities of soaring real estate prices in the area, and not any taxation decision on the part of the city.
I need a little piece of software that just posts this story February 1 each year. There seems to no longer be any need to write anything different each time around.
Two separate sources have told me that NBC 29 anchor Beth Duffy has submitted her resignation, effective March 1. I’ve heard two different stories of her plans — either she’s getting out of the business but staying in town or she’s been wooed by CBS 19, though I’m more inclined to trust the latter. Of course, I’m in no position at all to authenticate this, so it’s best to regard this as rumor.
Losing a reporter is one thing, but Duffy is the face of NBC 29, as she has been for a few years now. And, more than any other individual factor, it’s a familiar face that gets people to remain loyal to a station. If she were to leave, that would be another minor blow to the station that has lost veterans Robert Van Winkle and Dave Cupp in the past few years, making it all the easier for viewers to flirt with one of the new stations. And if she were going to CBS 19… Well, that would be a major coup for them.
Three teenagers have been arrested for planning a violent attack on a pair of area high schools, NBC 29 reports. Three students from WAHS, AHS, and Jack Jouett are being held at Blue Ridge Juvenile Detention Center, a result of a tip.
The question will be whether these kids were both serious and capable of such an attack, or if they were just venting. If such cases around the country in the past few years are any indicator, the latter is certainly more likely.
Bryan McKenzie has a great piece in today’s Daily Progress about geocaching:
Go online to a game site such as www.geocaching.com and look up your Zip code. Choose a cache to find, download the coordinates into your GPS or print out the topographic map and go hunting. Some are hard to find, some are easy. But they are everywhere.
[…]
Within a 10-mile radius of downtown Charlottesville there are 36 caches. Within 25 miles there are 88. Draw a 100-mile circle around town and you can hunt for 1,957 bits of hidden treasure. Caches come in all sizes. There are small caches the size of a Starbuck’s vanilla mint tin. There are some as small as your fingertip and some the size of a 5-gallon bucket.
Having gotten a GPS for Christmas, I’m totally geeked at the prospect of so many caches in the area.
City Councilor Blake Caravati, who recently announced that he’s retiring from Council, is sounding mighty feisty on the topic of the budget. In today’s Daily Progress, John Yellig writes that Caravati said: “What I’m saying is, don’t be bellyaching about ‘we’ve got all this new money and we want to cut rates to reduce the amount of money,’ and then not talk about services. We all do it, and I’m saying I don’t have to worry about it this year, so I’m going to raise hell about it.”
Caravati is particularly peeved with lone Republican Councilor Rob Schilling, who has not participated in the budget process in the past, and has also voted against every budget in his single term on Council. “Rob doesn’t want to argue about it because he’s an ideologue…. I’m not a lame duck. I’m a wounded duck. And you know what happens when animals are wounded.”
I have to admit that I’m a bit puzzled by Caravati’s comments. Given that assessments are up 18.8% this year, a properly-crafted rate cut wouldn’t need to result in a decrease in funding of city services, as has been done in past years. I, too, deplore passing tax cuts without spending cuts, but it seems to me that, in this case, we can have our cake and eat it, too, at least rhetorically.
For years now The Hook’s consumer columnist, Barbara Nordin, has been on Lethal Wrecker like white on rice. Time and time again she’s caught the company violating the state and local laws that regulate consumer affairs and towing practices. Anybody following the years-long Lethal saga will smile at Liesel Nowak’s story in today’s Progress that reports that Lethal has lost a lawsuit brought by one of their victims, and they now a total of $1,120 to twenty one people. It’s not enough to bring down the company, but I’d like to think of it as another nail in their coffin.
NBC 29’s Paul Merrill broke the story last night that Caroline County Assistant Superintendent Rosa Atkins has been offered the position of Charlottesville School Superintendent. She has reportedly submitted her resignation to her current employer, which seems to indicate that it’s a deal.
The city will hold a press conference this afternoon to make the announcement.
6:30pm Update: It’s official.
There are a pair of interesting articles that provide further insight into the attack alleged planned on local schools by three teenagers. The first is Carlos Santos’ interview with the 15-year-old’s father, which appeared in yesterday’s Times-Dispatch. The man expresses complete bafflement at his son’s arrest, saying that he can’t imagine what evidence that there could be against him. The second is Liesel Nowak and Kate Andrews’ discovery of the same kid’s MySpace page, in which he describes himself as “obsessed with guns” and lists his hobbies as “playing with fire and “SHOOTING!!!!” His fellow students have posted positive comments to the site in the past few days, offering their support and assurances that he did nothing wrong.
In this week’s Hook, Lisa Provence confirms that Beth Duffy will be leaving NBC 29 on March 2, as rumored. But she won’t be going to the competition: Duffy says she’s done with the crazy hours of broadcast journalism.
Now you can join the ranks of Charlottesvillians who have been in classic works of cinema like “Major Payne,” “Toy Soldiers,” “Hush” and…uh…”Heart’s Lonely Hunter” — head out to the casting call for “Evan Almighty”, which will be filmed in Crozet and Charlottesville. On February 25 & 26, from 10am-1pm/2pm-6pm they’ll be looking for adults who can play the simple townsfolk of Crozet better than the actual simple townsfolk of Crozet. If you play your cards right, you might be “discovered,” leading to riches, fame, dissatisfaction, depression, and, ultimately, an early death fueled by a mixture of drugs and alcohol.
Have fun!
The Daily Progress has a blog.
These are words that I never thought I would write.
Laura Bland, their Online Content Coordinator, appears to have dragged Bryan McKenzie into the 90s kicking and screaming. It’s got an RSS feed, an Atom feed, categories, monthly archives, comments, trackbacks, and reasonable URLs. Unfortunately, it also has smiley-face graphics, there’s no blogroll, and only Bryan McKenzie is contributing thus far. But, my Lord, what a start.
And just four years and ten months after cvillenews.com started! Seriously, I thought it would take a lot longer.
I’m happy to have added the Daily Progress blog to Charlottesville Blogs. Welcome to the Charlottesville blogosphere!
Anybody who has ever taken a left from the Food Lion in Lovingston is familiar with the terror that accompanies the maneuver. While certainly not a dangerous intersection, that’s only because people approach it with such trepidation. So VDOT is now installing Nelson County’s first-ever traffic light, Megan Rowe reports in today’s Daily Progress. It is the only planned traffic light in Nelson and, in fact, one of only two VDOT projects in the whole of the county.
Ron writes: “For the second time in less than a year, Dr. Laura Purnell has been advised that her job is being eliminated. Unlike last time, she has decided not to fight the decision. In a letter issued today by the acting superintendent, Bobby Thompson,sent to all central office staff and principals, Dr. Purnell stated that she will be placing her home on the market and looking for opportunities elsewhere.”
I can’t find anything about this in the way of news coverage. Can anybody confirm this?
02/15 Update: Sarah Barry confirms this in today’s Progress.
Melanie Mayhew has a great piece in today’s Progress about the importance of not overreacting to threats of violence in high schools, as in the case of the alleged planning of attacks on local high schools by three students. It’s tempting for news outlets to hype such stories, because it gets readers and viewers, but the fact is that idle declarations of violent intent are common among unhappy middle- and high-school students, while actual incidents are very rare. Lisa Provence has an article that touches on some of the same themes in this week’s Hook. It’s nice to see some rationality emerging from the discussion of this incident.
I’ve decided to broaden the range of source material that I use for stories on cvillenews.com, and that means highlighting material from local blogs that addresses local matters. I can’t think of anything better to start with than Bill Emory’s great blog entry from yesterday.
He’s provided a comprehensive piece about automobile traffic in the Woolen Mills, where he lives, looking at the history of the neighborhood, the cause of the problem, its immediate symptoms, a suggestion of how the city might address it, and even some photos (naturally — this is Bill Emory, after all) and a hand-drawn map.
So old houses are closer to the road because they were built before the ubiquity of the internal combustion engine. I had no idea.
Just six days after the Daily Progress launched a blog, The Hook has launched a blog of their own. In a note from editor Hawes Spencer in this week’s issue, the paper announces their plan to “provide both a digest of local news and a mix of fresh observations as well as that thing we were put on this earth to do: fresh reporting.”
So far I’m impressed. The paper has been maintaining the blog in secret for some time now, as evidenced by the backlog of posts, and the mixture of types of stories covered and sources demonstrate a commitment to not just rehashing what’s in the paper, but providing new information and, when appropriate, crediting and linking stories to competing local media outlets. The site is run on WordPress, the software that powers this blog. The only gaffe is a failure to include an author on blog entries, which isn’t very bloggy, but if that’s my biggest complaint, that’s pretty good.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I eagerly await the day when local media websites are so good, and the local blogging community so strong, that cvillenews.com no longer serves a purpose. I will happily shut down this site on that day, and I encourage area bloggers and media outlets to do what they can to hasten its demise.
Republican City Councilor Rob Schilling will seek a second term, Rick Sincere writes. He intends to announce his campaign at Clark Elementary on Tuesday, at 11am. With no other candidates so much as rumored, the race will likely pit Democrats Dave Norris and Julian Taliaferro against Schilling.
02/21 Update: Rick covers the kick-off.
A second vehicular crossing on the Downtown Mall is likely to be approved by City Council on March 6, John Yellig writes in today’s Daily Progress. Business owners say that downtown businesses aren’t getting enough exposure to vehicular traffic; opponents point out that the Downtown Mall appears to be doing just fine, thankyouverymuch.
How many cross streets are necessary for a pedestrian mall to just become a “street”?
The sun will rise in the east. Winter will turn into spring. Whisper Ridge (nee The Brown Schools, nee The Millmont Center) will abuse their patients. Time after time the facility, which has frequently renamed itself to stay one step ahead of its reputation, has been charged with human rights abuses against its teenaged mental patients. Its employees have raped patients, beaten kids, threatened to kill kids, allowed patients to wander freely through the facility, and had half of their staff consist of utterly untrained temps.
In today’s Daily Progress, Megan Rowe reports that police locked down the place at 5pm on Thursday and searched it for evidence of sexual assault until after midnight. (Bad news, Megan: You’re stuck following this story now, like Claudia Pinto was before you.) It’s thought that a dozen people may be involved in the matter, including both perps and victims.
Kidde is moving their manufacturing operations from Albemarle to Mexico, WINA reports. That’s 94 people with specialized skills, skills that don’t particularly translate to any of the few manufacturing jobs left in the area, whose jobs will be in Mexico. News about manufacturing job losses used to be commonplace, with ConAgra, Technicolor, and Frank Ix & Sons being particularly major examples, but there are so few left that this is the first such manufacturing jobs loss in a while. Kidde will also be moving a still-larger number of jobs from their North Carolina plant down to Mexico.
A new study shows that 29 North has become a lot more efficient, Jessica Kitchin reports in today’s Progress. Since the traffic lights were synched up a few years ago, and since they’ve been tweaked since, it’s become steadily easier to cruise down the Albemarle portion of 29 without hitting a red light. All of that has been at the expense of those who need to cross over 29 or turn onto the road, but it’s hard to argue with an average speed of around 38mph from Hydraulic to Burley Station.
Man, I’ve wanted to use that headline for years.
The couple who ran that ill-fated Thomas Kinkade gallery on the Downtown Mall have won $860,000 in their lawsuit against Kinkade, with the court having agreed that they, along with many other gallery owners, were defrauded, Kate Andrews reports in today’s Progress. That sum may well rise to $3.5M. There are 21 other dealers that have filed similar suits across the nation, all charging that Kinkade forced dealers to buy prints (”paintings”) at vastly inflated rates, undercut them at area discount stores, and then refused to let the dealers lower their prices.
These things run nearly a grand apiece, but Tuesday Morning might sell them for under a hundred bucks, leaving nobody to buy the stuff at the downtown gallery. The couple have now realized that the “I’m just a humble Christian businessman” schtick of Kinkade’s is B.S. Here’s hoping they’ve realized that his work is garbage, too.
03/05 Update: The L.A. Times has a big-big story about this. Turns out Kinkade is a drunk, fondles women, and engages in public urination as “ritual territory marking,” as he calls it.
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