Monthly Archive for December, 2006

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Albemarle VDOT Facility Spared

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 15, 2006 in Politics and Transportation. 3 Comments

VDOT has announced that they’ll be shutting down 87 maintenance facilities across the state, as proposed, except for four locations. One of those four is Free Union, which serves the bulk of western Albemarle. It appears that they spared any location with citizens who were paying enough attention and had the resources to fight back. Jeremy Borden explains in today’s Progress.

The final nail in the coffin for the proposed shut down of the Albemarle location was probably when Ann Mallek, of Earlysville, pointed out to Secretary of Transportation Pierce Homer that the only viable route for snow plows to get from the Stanardsville maintenance facility to Earlysville required driving across the Advance Mills bridge — you know, the one that was shut down for many months this year because it’s crumbling, the one that has a three ton weight limit. This was news to VDOT, who was not aware of their own weight restriction, and apparently hadn’t even thought through how they were going to get their equipment from point A to point B.

There’s no reason to think that they thought through their plans any better for the doomed 87 locations across the state. Those facilities will be shut down gradually over the next year and a half in order to save money, saved money that VDOT will then give to private contractors to do the same work.

Camblos Apparently Disqualified for Judgeship

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 14, 2006 in Law and Justice and Politics. 22 Comments

Canon 2, Section C of the Canons of Judicial Conduct for the Commonwealth of Virginia says:

A judge shall not hold membership in any organization that practices invidious discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion or national origin.

And in last week’s C-Ville Weekly, Meg McEvoy had an article about Debbie Wyatt that said:

In 1986, Wyatt was working on a rape case with co-counselors Dan Atkins and the bow-tied Jim Camblos, now the Albemarle Commonwealth’s Attorney and one-time president of the Red-Land Club.

The Red-Land Club, as is the theme of the article, is a professional organization for attorneys near Court Square that arbitrarily and invidiously excludes women. Thus Camblos, as a past president and presumed current member, is disqualified to hold the judgeship that he’s seeking.

Three snaps in Z formation.

UVa Accidentally Releases SSNs

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 14, 2006 in UVa. 8 Comments

A UVa TA accidentally sent a spreadsheet with 62 social security numbers to an entire class last week, and the provost is now telling faculty to erase any SSNs from their computers, Aaron Kessler reports for the Progress.

UVa has a terrible, terrible system by which they track students and staff — they use social security numbers as unique identifiers. So SSNs appear on all sorts of paperwork and grading information and student records, none of which are treated with anything approaching the level of security necessary for one’s SSN. Most schools long ago phased out that practice. As a Virginia Tech student, I was assigned a random nine digit number, because the school recognized that they had nothing to do with the U.S. Social Security Administration. In order to get a UVa computing ID for my job (I work for Virginia Quarterly Review) I had to give ITC my SSN, to my horror. But I also want to keep my job, so I forked it over.

The university says they’re working on phasing this out, but it’ll take until 2010. My advice to students? Lie. Don’t worry, Jefferson would have done the same.

Camblos: No Charges in Shifflett Shooting

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 13, 2006 in Law and Justice. 2 Comments

Elvis Shifflett's MugshotAlbemarle Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Camblos has decided not to file charges against police in the Elvis Shifflett shooting, CBS 19 reports. Camblos’ decision was based in part on the investigation conducted by the Virginia State Police, which wrapped up just a few days ago.

Shifflett was captured in mid-October after a manhunt was launched for his apparent attempted murder of his ex-girlfriend a week previous. Shifflett was left in critical condition after being shot repeatedly by police when he refused to comply with police orders to show his hands.

Housing Costs Increasingly Out of Reach

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 13, 2006 in Business. 53 Comments

Dave Norris writes:

Every year around this time, the National Low Income Housing Coalition releases a report called Out of Reach, which analyzes housing costs vs. wage levels in communities all across the U.S. The report focuses on a statistic they call the “Housing Wage,” which is the amount of money that a worker has to earn in order to afford an average two-bedroom rental unit in his/her community.

Well, Out of Reach 2006 was released today. And the 2006 Housing Wage for the Charlottesville area has been calculated at…(drum roll please)…$15.23. Know many retail or service jobs around here that are paying that much?

The good news is that somebody can pay their rent here with a minimum wage job. They just need to work five days a week, 52 weeks a year, for 23.6 hours per day in order to make the necessary $31,680/year. And they’d be wise to get a job for the remaining 24 minutes each day, so they can start saving for their next rent increase.

Presumably the Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce will drop their opposition to a living wage now. I kid, of course: they have their head so far up their collective ass that, last month, they shot down a program envisioned by members of their own leadership program that would have acknowledged those local businesses that choose to pay their employees a living wage. The Chamber, you’ll recall, is opposed to any minimum wage; they think our existing minimum wage is just too darned high. Let’s put their staff on minimum wage and see how long that lasts.

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