A hundred and twenty five people showed up to lobby City Council to deal with the shortage of affordable housing, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Progress. They were asking the city to set aside $1.7M annually for affordable housing. As WCAV reports, council didn’t go for it, instead simply passing a resolution that they intend to increase spending on affordable housing next year. Three fifths of council wasn’t willing to support locking in an annual rate of funding. The hope is that, instead, the General Assembly will pass legislation that would allow the city to allow developers to build more densely than zoning would otherwise permit in exchange for making contributions to an affordable housing fund.
Archive for February, 2008
The two remaining contenders for the Democratic nomination for president will be coming to town, NBC 29 reports. Both Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama have campaigned here already, but after last Tuesday’s primaries left the pair tied, next Tuesday’s primary here is suddenly mighty interesting to them. Obama’s campaign says that he’ll be in town on Sunday or Monday — no specific’s yet — while Clinton’s campaign confirms that she’ll be speak to Larry Sabato’s political science Introduction to American Politics class at UVa.
There’s been a lot of attention on bridge safety since the bridge collapse in Minnesota last year, and two of our bridges find ourselves in the news for safety reasons today. Belmont Bridge will be replaced soon, Seth Rosen writes in the Progress. Chunks keep falling off of the bridge, which dates from the early 60s, leading to the structure being rated at 49 out of 100, which is a pretty lousy sufficiency rating. The city’s looking for bids, and figure it’ll cost them around $9.2M, with the work starting late this year. Nearly all of that money will come from state and federal funding. Some folks weren’t happy that it was installed in the first place — it’s a pretty significant barrier between Belmont and downtown — so here’s hoping that some pedestrian improvements are made with Belmont Bridge 2.0.
The other bridge news is that delays will continue in replacing the Advance Mills bridge, which was shut down last year because it’s just not safe. Locals have been stuck taking a pretty goofy detour down a dirt road to get across the river. The BoS planned on installing a temporary bridge, which VDOT supports, but the Federal Highway Administration says that’s a waste, and that the next step is a new permanent bridge. And that leaves Advance Mills residents without a bridge until 2010 or 2011.
It’s been a long time since we’ve heard about a manufacturer opening in the area, but today it happened. The Virginia Distillery Company intends to start their business with a plant in Lovingston, Erin McGrath and Aaron Lee write in the Nelson County Times. The company is already in business as an importer, but is raising the $5M necessary to start manufacturing. They’ll employ nineteen people. The CEO, in explaining why they chose Nelson, says that “it looks like a piece of the Scottish Highlands has been lifted up and gently dropped down into Virginia.” (Close: try Germany and West Virginia.)
There are ten distilleries, 157 wineries and 37 breweries in the state, with Starr Hill rapidly becoming the area’s 800lb gorilla. Incidentally, they run tours of their Crozet plant (the old ConAgra facility) every Saturday, which I mention only because I’ve been planning to visit tomorrow.
Former Delegate Mitchell Van Yahres of Charlottesville died tonight. He was 81. Mitch served in the House of Delegates from 1981 to 2005.
Mitch had been diagnosed with lung cancer about three months ago. He had undergone surgery on Tuesday, February 5, and had come through the surgery without incident. However, this evening at about 6 PM, he developed a blood clot and died rather suddenly.
This is going to be the biggest funeral that the town has seen since Emily Couric’s death in 2001. I’m sorry I don’t have anything more useful to write at the moment. I’m a bit stunned. Hopefully some folks will provide some remembrances of Mitch here.
02/11 Update: The funeral will be held at 2pm on Friday the 15th at the Church of the Incarnation. Friends are asked “to make a healthy and significant contribution to the presidential campaign of Barack Obama.”
Every few years, some downtown restaurant or bar plays music way too loudly way too late at night. Citizens get angry, a result of the ineffective noise ordinance, and City Council finally agrees to do something about it. The restaurant gets upset and says it’s not fair that they’re being targeted. Then the restaurant capitulates — or goes out of business — and the ordinance never passes. Repeat.
The cycle has begun anew. This time, as Dave McNair writes for The Hook, four businesses’ noisy nights have led the city to consider tightening up its noise ordinance. The Buddhist Biker Bar, Outback Lodge, LaTaza and Saxx have all annoyed enough of their neighbors with late-night music that the city figures they should just enact a blanket nighttime decibel restriction on restaurants and bars. The plan is to stick with the existing 75db limit, but make it run from 10pm-6m, seven days a week, rather than the narrower window that varies by day of week that’s the existing standard.
Legislation before the General Assembly would force us taxpayers to pay for new developments, Scott Weaver explains in C-Ville Weekly. SB768, proposed by Sen. John Watkins (R-Midlothian), would eliminate proffers entirely, replacing them with straight-up impact fees. Under this system, the $41M in proffers for Biscuit Run would have been just $25M, leaving Albemarle citizens holding even more of the bag than we are now. (If I may mangle a metaphor.) Incidentally, Sen. Watkins has received more contributions from developers than any other business sector, $155k and counting. The bill has passed committee, and is likely to pass the Senate shortly, from which it will pass over to the House for approval.
Incidentally, a pair of those links are to Richmond Sunlight, a site that I run about the General Assembly. Since the legislature is in session right now, as they will be for the next month, every bit of my spare time is spent on Richmond Sunlight. If y’all are feeling ignored here lately, that’s why.
Jeremy Borden wrote about objections folks are raising to the planned reservoir enlargement last week, and the organization that’s opposing it. Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan are against the $142M plan to embiggen the Ragged Mountain Reservoir by 180 acres and fill it with a pipeline from the Rivanna Reservoir. Their proposal is to, instead, dredge the South Fork of the Rivanna Reservoir. But dredging was considered and rejected as an option by the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority, who didn’t like its unpredictable cost ($127M-$145M) and questionable results.
All of this is a result of the nasty 2002 drought, which everybody would like to avoid. An undercurrent of the reservoir discussions is growth — population growth puts significantly more pressure on our limited water resources, and some folks figure that we if we just don’t expand the reservoir, that’ll prevent the population from expanding much more. On the other side there are people whose livelihoods depend on uninterrupted growth, who want to see the reservoirs expanded to make it possible for new construction to continue. I don’t mean to say that many people fall into these camps, only that this is an unspoken part of this debate that color the views of some opinion makers.
The Sexshuns clothing store on the Downtown Mall was raided by federal agents this afternoon, Rob Seal writes in the Progress. Proprietor Reynold George Samuels Jr. is accused of running a crime ring, distributing marijuana, crack, cocaine, and pirated DVDs. Samuels is already a convicted felon, so his ownership of firearms isn’t going to help him, either.
You can get away with selling crack these days, but get caught pirating DVDs and you’re screwed.
An investor is in talks with the Red Sox and Waynesboro about establishing a minor league team there, Jimmy LaRoue reports for the News Virginian. Jim Morris is looking to plunk down $20M on a 4,000 seat stadium, but he’s looking for W’boro to chip in some money to make it happen. Though this island of Red Sox nation would certainly love it if the Sox did establish a team here, there’s more than enough cause to think that it ain’t gonna happen. But that doesn’t mean that an independent franchise couldn’t be persuaded to open up a location in our area.
The proposed city/county bus rapid transit system would cost over $100M, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Daily Progress. Both municipalities have agreed to petition the General Assembly for permission to create a joint transit authority, but there’s not much agreement how that will manifest itself. The most expensive option is to create bus-only lanes along 29 N, allowing mass transit to become a faster means of commuting than driving.
This seems to be a lot like the “need” for an larger, $19M sewer line running up 29 N. If we intend to continue our rate of growth then, yes, these things do qualify as needs. But if we look at the costs of a new lane, new buses, a new sewer pipe, a new fire station, new schools, etc., and decide that it’s too much, then we’re obligated to limit our growth accordingly and live within our means.
In an effort to worsen traffic on Pantops (one assumes), a Pennsylvania businessman has proposed building an indoor sports complex there. Jeremy Borden writes in the Progress about the $9M, 125k ft.2 soccer, tennis and basketball facility, which would be built on land that the guy already owns. He’s looking to work with the guy who owns the land adjacent, too, for an even larger project.
Pantops is probably an appropriate place for this sort of a thing, but without doing something radically different with the transportation network there, things are only going to get worse.
Mark Tenia at WCAV called up a Craigslist hooker, who offered him a “Greek” or a “French” for $150/hour. He called back and said he was a reporter, and she did a phone interview, saying the usual things prostitutes say when they’re interviewed. Tenia even called up the Albemarle Police, who said they they’d never even heard of Craigslist.
French? Greek? Am I so unhip I don’t even know the slang anymore?
In today’s Daily Progress Brian McNeill writes that the area is weathering the foreclosure crisis better than most, but it still looks like a bad situation. 0.5% of area homeowners are facing foreclosure, compared to 0.8% for the whole of Virginia and 1.3% for the whole country. Piedmont Housing Alliance reports a 174% increase in people asking for help between ‘05-’07. But the most clever figure comes from the Progress itself:
Meanwhile, the number of notices of foreclosure published in the Daily Progress’ classifieds section also jumped significantly. Last year saw a 30 percent increase in the notices over 2006. Moreover, there were 47 percent more foreclosure notices in January than in the previous year.
Why the comparatively low numbers here?
A key reason Charlottesville has fewer foreclosures is because the region has far fewer subprime mortgage loans than elsewhere in the state and region. Roughly 2.43 percent of the Charlottesville area’s owner-occupied homes were financed by a subprime loan, while that figure was 5.66 percent in Richmond, 4.14 across Virginia and 5.62 percent for the nation.
I assume we’ll know if the numbers spike, because foreclosure scam signs will spring up in the median strips like mushrooms after a spring rain.
Nathan Antonio Washington was sentenced to four life terms this afternoon, Rob Seal writes in the Daily Progress. Just before his sentence was read, the notorious serial rapist said to the judge: “I didn’t mean for these things to happen they way they did. I had no self-control. I always thought I was good, until I was tempted.” Oddly, he only pleaded guilty to five rapes, with Seal writing that “a sixth attack will not be pursued.” Lab results will show whether he should also be charged with a 1997 rape in Waynesboro.
Steve Ashby writes:
The Forest Lakes Neighborhood Association has placed NO TRESPASSING signs at two extremes of the walking trails behind Baker-Butler Elementary School in Proffit. These trails provide access to the school from four subdivisions (Jefferson Village, Chesterfield, Langford Hills, Forest Lakes North) and Proffit Road. The signs prevent legal pedestrian access to Forest Lakes and force non Forest Lakes middle school students from healthy bicycle/foot access to Sutherland Middle School onto buses. The option to bike on Proffit Road and U.S. 29 is just too dangerous for our kids. The streets in Forest Lakes are state-maintained, public rights-of-way. All this seems down right unneighborly.
I have made a short and silly VodCast, “Noise in the Wood“, about this development-developement.
The lawsuit over the serial rapist DNA testing has been dismissed, CBS 19 reports. Larry Monroe filed a lawsuit against the city in 2004 after being compelled to submit to DNA testing on the basis of his race and sex, even seeking class action status a year later. CBS 19 does not, oddly, say why the suit was dismissed, but does point out that Monroe can still appeal.
It was just yesterday that Nathan Antonio Washington was sentenced after being arrested on the basis of DNA evidence, though that DNA evidence did not result from the widespread testing of black men. The woman who gave police the crucial tip received a $60,000 reward today.
In one of the stupidest moves I’ve seen a local business make in a long time, the X Lounge blanketed UVa with spam today, apparently sending thousands of e-mails to UVa employees. The 7.1kb message appeared to originate from The Event Company, who shares an address with the downtown restaurant. The e-mail didn’t even make a gesture at compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act, the federal law that makes precisely this sort of thing illegal. It appears that all e-mail addresses were harvested from UVa’s online staff phone book, which is maintained for the convenience of employees. I received the e-mail via a UVa address that I do not use for anything. I don’t give it out, I don’t send e-mail under it, and the only place it’s listed anywhere is in that UVa LDAP directory.
The X Lounge can expect a pretty stiff upbraiding from UVa’s network administrators tomorrow. If they’re lucky, they may get off with reimbursing the university for their bandwidth costs. But if they catch the UVa postmaster on a bad day — and with the number of complaints bound to roll in, it may be a bad day tomorrow, indeed — they may find themselves on the wrong end of a formal complaint to to the Federal Trade Commission.
Writing a script to dig through UVa’s staff directory and then sending e-mail to every one of them is both illegal and a really, really bad idea. It takes a special kind of stupid not to know that.
Speaking of recycling, Scott Weaver surveys the state of C’ville paper use and recycling in the current C-Ville Weekly. Despite being in the thick of the electronic age, the amount of paper being used continues to climb. Though, interestingly, the amount of newspaper being processed by the RSWA is actually dropping.
I chalk it up to old folks (as does Weaver). I bought a laser printer a year and a half ago and I haven’t even burned through the demo cartridge that came with it. It’s been out of paper for two months, but I haven’t bothered to buy paper.
Comedian Brian Regan has a bit in his routine that I particularly like:
You see weird things driving… I’ve never understood log trucks. Sometimes you’ll be out on the highway, you see two big giant trucks loaded up with logs, and they pass each other on the highway… I don’t understand that. I mean, if they need logs over there… and they need ‘em over there, you’d think a phone call would save ‘em a whole lot of trouble.
In this week’s Hook, Lisa Provence explores a similar scenario: dredging the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir and using the soil to extend the CHO runway. It’ll cost an enormous amount of money to have the dredged silt hauled away and put somewhere, and the airport is looking at spending $15M to buy the soil to extend their runway. Supporters of increasing our water supply by dredging the reservoir (as opposed to the planned Ragged Mountain/South Fork pipeline approach) figure this is something well worth looking at doing to save money all around. I’m not equipped to say whether or not this is a good idea, but I certainly love this kind of thinking.
I decided to start running Blogads on cvillenews.com over two years ago, and classified it as an “experiment.” That’s still how I think of it, but it’s probably time to revisit the decision so I can decide if they’re worthwhile or not. From my perspective, they’re useful. I turn down all of the ads that advertise things that I don’t think would be of interest to some cvillenews.com readers, which is 20-30% of those ads that are submitted. The prices are about as cheap as they can be made on Blogads, and all of the money that I make off of ‘em go to local charities. (Legal Aid got the last payout.)
What do you think? Are they a useless distraction? Or are they relevant enough to you that they’re worth keeping?
A study proposes that the best use of the Martha Jefferson Hospital, once vacated, would be a grocery store and a retirement home, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Progress. They’ve got thirteen acres they’re looking to sell once they move to their Pantops location in 2012. It had been thought that the building could be appropriate for a hotel or conference center, but the study shows that those things just don’t make sense. Martha Jefferson assures people that they’re not going to sell to the highest bidder, but find a buyer whose plans are right for the area. Martha Jefferson sponsored the study.
The hospital announced the move in 2001, but has taken pains to make sure that their departure doesn’t make the neighborhood hate them. The whole area grew up around the hospital since its 1903 founding, so this transition is going to be tricky.
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