Details are still emerging, but an eleven year old boy was shot and killed in a home near Tonsler Park last night. A man in the home was wounded, too. The number of murders in Charlottesville is in the low single digits each year — we’ve even had zero — and when there are murders, it’s almost always drug or gang related. An eleven year old boy being (apparently) murdered is extraordinary.
3:30pm Update: 27-year-old Waverly “Eddie” Whitlock has turned himself into police in the murder of Walker Upper Elementary student Aziz Damar Booth. Police Chief Timothy Longo describes it as “a very complex crime scene investigation,” implying that this was not merely a robbery gone wrong, as it appears.
City Council endorsed the local water supply plan last night, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Daily Progress, but they want more studying of the dredging option. They’re proceeding as planned, but apparently open to doing otherwise. And that means months (years?) of further uncertainty.
The Albemarle Board of Supervisors has OKd a $500 fine for excessive dog barkage, Brian McNeill writes in today’s Progress. The process is pretty laborious — a neighbor has to swear out a warrant, a court date is set, and the neighbor has to prove that the dog barked for more than a half an hour. If there are three violations in a year, the dog can be taken away. The concept behind this appear to be for the benefit of both the neighbors (anybody who has tried to sleep with a dog barking all night can relate) and also for the dogs (a dog that’s barking all the time is not a happy dog). There’s an exception for dog owners in the rural area with more than five acres. The city’s had a similar regulation since 1951.
Whole Foods is providing specifics on their planned move to Hydraulic Road, Seth Rosen writes for the Daily Progress, and it sounds like it’ll really shake up that corridor. Their new location, next to Kmart, is slated to include a three story parking garage, and will necessitate moving the traffic light on Hydraulic back from 29, closer to the bypass. Whole Foods says that the 66,000 square foot building “could be the chain’s most environmentally friendly grocery on the Eastern Seaboard and would feature a large community space for meetings and farmers markets.” Whole Foods has historically been terrible about selling local produce, and they may be taking this opportunity to improve their image.
Anybody who has cause to drive on Hydraulic during rush hour knows what a mess that spot can be — along with Emmett south of Barracks, it’s one of the most backed-up spots in town every day. So while change to that area sounds good, it sure would be unpleasant if it made things worse. The Hillsdale Connector is planned to run along the edge of Whole Foods’ property, which could make things better, but there’s no reason to expect that to exist for a decade.
With gas above $4 a gallon, and with no reason to expect a substantial drop any time soon, suddenly it’s not just a handful of pedestrian-advocate whackos like me arguing that we’ve got to make our city usable to folks who aren’t in cars. “Daily Progress Correspondent” (?) Sharon Fitzgerald writes about how dangerous it is to move around town on foot, especially in a dozen key locations around town. VDOT, the county, and ACCT have come up with that list of spots badly in need of improvements, and that includes areas along Rio and Hydraulic, Commonwealth Drive, South Pantops Drive, and the entirety of route 29, among others. There have been 57 car/pedestrian accidents in Albemarle in the past couple of years, with two deaths.
If you doubt that the city (especially the urban ring) is badly planned for pedestrians, recall what’s gone through your mind when you see somebody walking along 29N or, worse yet, trying to cross it: Is her car broken down? Is she OK? Is it safe for him to be pushing that stroller here? Between dangerously curved intersections and shopping centers surrounded by a moat of blacktop, we’ve got an enormous amount of infrastructure that’s just not compatible with the increasing cost of fuel.
VDOT has provided a listing of local transportation projects that they just won’t have the money to fund–a whopping 44% reduction in funds–and Sean Tubbs lists them for Charlottesville Tomorrow:
Project cuts on primary roads include:
- Corridor improvements on Route 29 north of Charlottesville city limits (widening and safety improvements on Route 29 between the South Fork Rivanna River and Hollymead Town Center)
- Corridor improvements on Route 250 east of Charlottesville City limits
- A project to replace the bridge over the CSX Railway ΒΌ mile west of McIntire Road
- A project to replace the bridge over the CSX Railway at Shadwell
- A project to replace the bridge carrying Route 601 over the Route 29/250 Bypass
Project cuts on secondary roads include:
- Reconstruction and add lanes for Route 649 (Proffit Road) from Route 29 to Baker-Butler Elementary
- Widening of Route 601 (Old Ivy Road) from Route 250 to the 29 Bypass to four lanes
Also, the Hillsdale Drive Extension will receive no more funding until 2014. The list for all of Virginia is available on VDOT’s website.
Commonwealth’s attorney Denise Lunsford has decided not to charge anybody with a crime in the shooting of a man during a police raid on his home, reports the Daily Progress. Police conducted an early morning raid on the home of one of the two kids who shot up cars on Route 64 twenty four hours previously, and they were met by the boy’s father, Edgar Dawson, who was wielding a revolver. Police told the man to drop a gun, but he refused, and he and officer M.J. Easton exchanged fire. The man was shot twice, and hospitalized for a time as a result. The state police investigated, and turned the matter over to Lunsford. In an interview with WINA, Lunsford said that both men believed that they were in danger of harm at the time that they exchanged fire, and figured that it would be neither useful nor necessary to charge either man with a crime.
The latest meeting of the Metropolitan Planning Organization sounds like a bummer: the MPO is realizing that, with the state approaching bankruptcy in the transportation realm, they can’t do a thing. A special session of the General Assembly is scheduled for next week, and Ben Doernberg covered Del. David Toscano’s transportation town hall meeting for Charlottesville Tomorrow, held earlier this week. Unless something significant gets accomplished during this special session — and I’d bet good money that it won’t — expect a lot more thumb-twiddling MPO meetings.
Incidentally, this Daily Progress story is by Rachana Dixit, a newcomer to the paper from the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star and, before that, JMU’s Breeze, plus the odd contribution to the Nepali Times.
There’s gold in these here hills. Steven Kurutz has a travel piece in today’s New York Times about prospecting for gold in Central Virginia, looking specifically at at meeting of the Central Virginia Gold Prospectors club in Dillwyn. Its members, who come from all around the northeast, get together every few weeks to pan for gold in what used to be gold belt running clear down to Alabama. Their members get access to the group’s claims, where they find gold dust, flakes, and the odd tiny nugget. Interest is sufficient to sustain a prospecting supplies shop in Dillwyn.
Albemarle County Police are going to start ticketing people for running red lights on 29 North, CBS 19 reports. All of next week, the cops will be going after folks along the corridor. A paltry 284 tickets were issued for running reds in the entirety of the country during the whole of 2007. It was two and a half years ago that the Progress‘ Jessica Kitchin sat and watched a half hour of rush hour traffic at the intersection of Rio and 29 and found that somebody ran the red every single time. At $161 a throw, I’d think that intersection would be a license for the county police to print money. And if that’s a money-losing proposition for the department, then the county needs to increase the fine.
In case it’s not obvious, red light runners make me furious. (Note to self: You must now never, ever get caught running a red.)
The Meadowcreek Parkway and the YMCA will significantly reduce the size of McIntire Park, including lopping at least two holes off the golf course. Though only golfers can say whether a seven-hole course is of much good to anybody, one local group is proposing replacing the golf course with a botanical garden, Seth Rosen writes in the Progress. City leaders are supportive of the idea, but the catch is that it’d cost upwards of $50M (!) to pull it off. That could be done with city dollars, or the city could give a nonprofit a lease on the land, and that group would do it as a barn-raising (in the style of The Paramount). It had been suggested that a recreational pond be installed there, which was a bang-up idea, but the Army Corps of Engineers said it wasn’t feasible. A botanical garden would certainly reduce the sting of losing a chunk of parkland.
President George Bush will be the speaker at this year’s Independence Day naturalization ceremony at Monticello. Such events take place around the country, and the annual event at Monticello is for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia. Charlottesville’s is always a big deal, not just because of the always-excellent speakers (Sam Waterston, actor and Unity08 founder, spoke last year), but because of its great location. The event is free, though probably tough to get into this year. It’s always stunningly hot, even at its 10am start time, so prepare accordingly if you intend to go.
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