The Charlottesville Transit Service is being rebranded as “CAT,” Sean Tubbs reports for Charlottesville Tomorrow, complete with a wretched new logo and slogan: “Catch the Cat.” Because when you think about public transit in Charlottesville, the city apparently wants you to remind you of the generally unpleasant experience of attempting to capture a fleeing feline. (Last time I tried that, I wound up with a half dozen kitten claws embedded deep in my arm.) But, hey, maybe they’re highlighting the positive side of cat-chasing.
Oh, and Chatham, Bismarck, Mackinac Island, Raleigh, Watchung, and Clemson called—they want their slogan back.
In today’s Daily Progress, Sean Tubbs writes that Scottsville Board of Supervisors member Lindsay Dorrier says that Jefferson Madison Regional Library can’t close the Scottsville branch. The county attorney says that their contract with JMRL indicates that funding is proportional, so if they shut down Scottsville, they lose all of the funding for that branch and still have to take a 5% cut for the remaining locations. The library’s Board of Trustees disagrees, saying that the contract indicates that the money is for all of Albemarle’s branches, and that JMRL isn’t obliged to use that money for a Scottsville location.
It looks to me like section 4 of the agreement governs this. The only applicable bit that I can find is part b, which says that the “costs shall be allocated…in direct proportion to their respective shares of the total circulation,” which doesn’t seem to imply any obligation to maintain a particular branch. And Section 6 specifies that “[t]he Regional Library Board shall determine hours and places of library service.” But surely the county attorney is finding this someplace in this agreement—can anybody find it?
A study conducted for the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority supports dredging the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, Brandon Shulleeta writes for the Progress. The plan has been to build up the Ragged Mountain Reservoir dam and run a pipeline from South Fork to Ragged Mountain, but that’s going to be awfully expensive. Critics have argued that it’d be cheaper to just dredge the South Fork, and that would provide enough increased capacity for the area’s future needs. The study found that the sediment in the bottom of the reservoir is perfectly safe—that is, not harmful to human health if disturbed. The reservoir originally held 1.6 billion gallons, but it loses ~1% of that capacity annually due to sediment buildup. Dredging it should get it back up to 1.2 billion gallons, which would obviate the need to increase the height of the Ragged Mountain dam or build a pipeline.
Conservative Republicans Rob Schilling and Keith Drake say that if you want to support local government, you should donate to their PAC. They’ll pass along to your local government no more than 94% of what you give them, what with transaction fees, the cost of running their PAC, etc. These anti-government crusaders are no doubt looking forward to nobody giving them money, so that they can use that to support their thesis that people are opposed to government. On a related note, if you want to support the Albemarle Truth in Taxation Alliance, write me a check and I’ll give them somewhat less than 94% of it. If I don’t get any money, then we can conclude that nobody wants to support ATTA. As I understand the logic.
If you do want to make a contribution to a government service, you certainly can, and giving directly to government is significantly more efficient than funneling it through the private sector in the form of this PAC. (In this way these two have unwittingly illustrated precisely the opposite of what they intended to.) You can give to a particular program or service —the police K9 program, your child’s school, the library, a park, whatever—and it’s tax deductible. Alternately, you can give to the General Fund, and the county will allocate it to where it’s most needed. Send it to 401 McIntire Road, Charlottesville.
Here’s some news that will give hope to opponents of the city’s snow removal ordinance: a judge has ruled that they lack the authority to ticket property owners for failing to shovel, The Daily Progress reports. The city can remove unshoveled snow, and then bill the property owner—which makes it a civil matter—but they can’t simply ticket citizens, says the judge. The city is already in the process of rewriting the ordinance, and police chief Timothy Longo says that he thinks it shouldn’t be a criminal matter, anyhow.
The plan for a regional transit authority is apparently dead, Brian Wheeler writes for Charlottesville Tomorrow. The city and the county have been looking at consolidating their efforts by creating a single entity to oversee mass transit, and while they’ve got permission from the General Assembly to do so, there’s no funding to make it happen, nor is there likely to be any time soon. The result is that the city is reluctant to expand the bus lines to include more of the county (such as out to MHS and Mill Creek), since the county isn’t funding those lines.
In the Daily Progress, Rachana Dixit has written a two-part series [1, 2] about Charlottesville’s proposed budget. While basically every municipality is cutting services pretty deeply, Charlottesville is cutting a bit more than 1% from spending while avoiding eliminating any services or laying anybody off. Outgoing City Manager Gary O’Connell says that the reason for this is simple: the city started preparing for the effects of an economic downturn three years ago. Mayor Dave Norris points out that the city has one of the lowest tax rates of any city in Virginia, at $0.95 per $100 of assessed value. But, city officials warn, things start to get bad with the 2012 budget. With the state continuing its decade-long trend of reducing local funding, and federal economic stimulus funds due to expire in a year and a half, the current arrangement may just be masking the underlying financial trouble.
The city is looking at eliminating funding for the McIntire Recycling Center, Rachana Dixit writes in today’s Daily Progress. Many of the materials that people can drop off there are collected curbside by the city, making the facility largely redundant. It’s jointly funded by the county, via the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority, since folks in the county need to drive their recyclables to McIntire. The catch is that it’s not clear that the facility could continue to exist without city funding, which would eliminate recycling for many Albemarle residents.
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