Monthly Archive for December, 2006

Page 5 of 7

CVS Tangles with BAR

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 6, 2006 in Development. 16 Comments

The BAR has told CVS to bugger off, Will Goldsmith reports in the current C-Ville Weekly. The pharmacy wants to move their location on the Downtown Mall to the corner of West Main and McIntire, where the equipment rental company is now. But the Board of Architectural Review is pretty annoyed with the developer, who is trying to put up your standard CVS with nothing more than a nod to BAR standards — a one-story box with a fake second story, with no residential or office-space components. The developer is no more happy with the BAR.

Those fake second stories look so stupid — just stand to the side or behind the building and it’s always obvious it’s one step above cardboard held up with a few 2x4s. The developer, apparently trying to sound threatening, says that CVS might bail on the new location entirely. Boo. Hoo.

Seven Candidates for Judgeship

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 6, 2006 in Law and Justice and Politics. 8 Comments

Seven people are seeking to be named the new Albemarle Circuit Court judge, NBC 29 reports:

Those people include Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Camblos, Charlottesville general district court judge Robert Downer, Assistant Albemarle County prosecutor Jon Zug, Cheryl Higgins, Lee Livingston, Patricia Brady and Claude Worrell.

Whoever ends up with the gig will replace Judge Paul Peatross, who recently announced his retirement.

VDOT’s Closure Data

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 6, 2006 in Politics and Transportation. 4 Comments

At last Friday’s meeting between Free Union residents and VDOT representatives, agency Chief of Technology Research and Innovation Gary Allen began his brief response to the questions with the following statement:

I’m happy to provide every bit of information I have. First thing Monday morning, if you’ll give me a person to send it to, I’ll give you every bit of data, every travel time we’ve run, every test of a topographic area, the fifty years worth of national weather service data on falling weather for every location in the state, all of the financial information about the Culpeper district, the rest of the state if you’re interested — I’m happy to give you all of that information.

He and the rest of the VDOT representatives there refused to answer any specific questions that could (ostensibly) be answered by reviewing the data, and apparently felt that providing this data would be a sufficiently response. Well, Mr. Allen sent that data on Monday night.

Remember: This is the data that proves that Free Union’s VDOT location can and should be shut down and replaced. This is the culmination of months (years?) of research, the very embodiment of the classic traveling salesman problem of mathematics, a puzzle that is NP-hard, with no known general solution. So the mathematics should be impressive, the logic unimpeachable.

Here’s what was sent:

  1. Area Headquarters Consolidation Review Methodology Summary (27k), a one-page document that contains no data or even a mention of Free Union.
  2. A pair of maps of Albemarle and a pair of tables (1.2MB) indicating how long it takes to drive from a few area towns to other area towns.
  3. Their stock Area Headquarters Consolidation Review slideshow (568k) that doesn’t mention Free Union.

There are only two useful bits of data that I managed to extract from these documents. (Though perhaps you’ll have more luck.) The first is that VDOT judges that it takes twice as long to travel a given distance in “winter weather” than it does in good weather, and that they judge 45 minutes to be the maximum allowable good weather travel time. The second is that it takes 39 minutes (in good weather) to drive from Stanardville to Free Union, which isn’t really news to me.

So here is the sum of the case to be made that the area currently served by Free Union (Crozet, White Hall, etc.) won’t be affected by closing down the existing maintenance facility: hey, it’s not that far of a drive. Thanks for that, guys.

In a Sunday editorial, written prior to the Friday meeting, the Daily Progress described the fight to keep the Free Union facility open as “Cold data vs. humanity,” explaining:

As of this writing, a planned public meeting by VDOT in the Free Union area has not been held. New, better data may emerge from that meeting.

The value of cold data and statistics is that they remove the human element and allow decisions to be made on a strictly practical basis.

Unfortunately, there is no data, at least nothing to speak of. No new data emerged, no better data emerged. And VDOT’s representatives confessed in the meeting that the quality of service in Albemarle will decline as a result of this change.

So that’s VDOT’s big case. How will the hospitals be affected if their employees can’t get to work? How will the schools in the area be affected? Do many key public safety employees (fire, rescue, doctors, etc.) live in the area, and what will the effect be on delaying their ability to dig out? Isn’t the travel time from Stanardsville or Boyd’s Tavern to Free Union a little extreme, given the need to drive clear across the county for every refill on salt and chemicals? Why don’t we have a map of all of the roads in Western Albemarle that indicates how long it takes for them to get salted and plowed now and another map of how long it’ll take with the proposed change?

Where is all of this data?

Turns out, it doesn’t exist.

The full text of Gary Allen’s e-mail is below the fold.
Continue reading ‘VDOT’s Closure Data’

Pagan Flier Sent Home from School

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 6, 2006 in Education and Politics. 41 Comments

Jocelyn writes to describe a developing kerfuffle. You’ll recall that two Hollymead Elementary students tried to distribute fliers to their class to promote their church’s vacation bible school by way of the schools’ “backpack mail” process, used to send information home to kids’ parents. They weren’t allowed to, because of the schools’ prohibition on sending home “partisan, sectarian, religious, or political” fliers. The kids’ father got Jerry Falwell to go after the county, and the school board agreed to let religious groups distribute materials through the system. (See Lisa Provence’s September 28 coverage of this in The Hook for a more detailed recap.) It was at this point that I thought “oh, damn, no they didn’t.” How long until Satanists exercise their right to send literature home with the kiddies?

Americans United for Separation of Church and State writes about the inevitable result:

Some local Pagans who attend Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church, a Unitarian-Universalist congregation in Charlottesville, decided to take advantage of the new forum as well. They created a one-page flier advertising a Dec. 9 event celebrating the December holidays with a Pagan twist and used the backpack system to invite the entire school community.

FlierOne local (Christian) blogger, Cathy, is upset — on the one hand, she says she wants the kids to learn more about Christmas in school, but on the other hand, she’s furious about the flier, believing that pagan rituals are inferior to her religion’s rituals and inappropriate for children. She vows that she “will not step aside.”

On the other hand, local blogger Jeff Riddle — the pastor of Jefferson Park Baptist Church — points out that this is simply what comes of breaking down the church and state wall…but then calls for Christians to leave public schools.

This is why we don’t mingle religion and government. It’s bad for government, yes, but it’s worse still for religion. Cathy doesn’t want her kids exposed to paganism, just as some parents don’t want their kids exposed to Christianity. Here’s hoping that the school board will rescind this policy. Or they could just wait for Falwell to demand that they rescind it, but why wait?

By the way, the event is at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church on Saturday from 1-3pm. It actually looks pretty interesting.

12/07: Lisa Provence writes about this in the current Hook.

UVa’s New Purchasing System Not Popular

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 6, 2006 in UVa. 5 Comments

UVa has launched a new purchasing system, Aaron Kessler reports in the Daily Progress, but it’s not going over very well. David Sewell writes in — speaking only for himself and not the university — explaining the difficulty:

It’s not just the double-whammy fee that’s a problem. The whole system, while facilitating simple orders like office supplies, makes it much harder for departments to order things like one or two copies of software produced by a small Eastern European company that’s not prepared to deal with the bureaucracy for registering as a UVa vendor. (Can you imagine if you were a tiny software shop and had to spend 15 minutes of your time figuring out Web registration forms from every public institution that wanted to place a $25 order? You’d be out of business fast.)

The folks I know in purchasing at UVa are trying to figure out how to circumvent the system entirely — it’s just too much trouble. And, as always, I’m not speaking for the university, either, even though I work for ’em, too, in a roundabout way.

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