Monthly Archive for April, 2007

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Steephill Street: Accidental Public/Private Partnership

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 12, 2007 in General News. 8 Comments

In this week’s Hook, Lisa Provence writes about the apparent taking of private property by the city without ever actually taking it. They’ve taken over Steephill Street, despite that one of the owners of the private road, Louis Schultz, would like them to knock it off. From Schultz’s perspective, the city is treating it alternately as public property and private property, depending on what’s most convenient for them. It’s a strange problem.

Schultz raised this with Council last month, and sent me the full text of his comments, which I’ve included below. Disclaimer: Louis and I are old friends.

Continue reading ‘Steephill Street: Accidental Public/Private Partnership’

Nader on Local News

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 12, 2007 in Meta News. 2 Comments

Given the ongoing discussion about local TV news, it seems appropriate to reproduce a bit of Lindsay Barnes’ interview with Ralph Nader in The Hook, on the topic of public advocacy:

It’s going on all the time on the local level, but you don’t hear about it because of the deterioration of the local news. It’s a caricature now. There are probably only four minutes of actual news out of 30 minutes. Weather isn’t news unless you have got a hurricane. News is what’s going on the community: improving neighborhoods, what local businesses are doing. But they actually advertise the weather segment like you can’t get it anywhere else. They promote these weather correspondents as seers. There’s nothing funnier than watching the weather forecast when there’s six days of sunshine. They take the temperature in two towns that are two miles apart and say, “It was 59 in this town, but it was 60 over here!” It’d be tragic if it wasn’t funny.

Because I’m contractually obligated to do so at least once a year, I must mention here the really great analysis that Coy Barefoot provided of NBC-29’s coverage in C-Ville Weekly back in the late 90s. He watched something like a year of their evening news broadcasts and calculated precisely how much of each broadcast is dedicated to particular topics — weather, sports, and particular categories of news. It painted a pretty bleak picture. The article is, sadly, unavailable online. Maybe C-Ville will dig it up and put it online some day.

BoS Sets Property Tax Rate

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 11, 2007 in Politics and Taxes. 12 Comments

Though budget discussion are ongoing, the Albemarle Board of Supervisors voted unanimously this afternoon to set a property tax rate of $0.68 per $100 of assessed value, the county announced in a press release. After county assessments climbed by 15%, county staff proposed a 5.6% spending increase. Supervisors initially had widely divergent views on what the tax rate should be, with a plurality supporting $0.68, and one member each supporting $0.71, $0.72, and $0.74. (Lowering it to $0.58 would have left the average tax bill unchanged.) The board took a stab at a $0.65 rate, but that didn’t pass.

04/12 Update: Jeremy Borden has an engaging look at how $0.68 was arrived at in today’s Progress. Supervisor Dennis Rooker points out that rate is the minimum required, just enough to fund schools at last year’s levels and provide raises to keep teacher salaries competitive.

Council Passes the 2007 Budget

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 10, 2007 in Politics and Taxes. 21 Comments

By a 4-1 vote this evening, City Council passed the 2007-8 budget, Henry Graff reports for NBC-29. It came in at a record $122M, requiring a property tax rate of $0.95 per $100 of assessed value. Given assessment increases, that amounts to an average tax increase of 14%. City staff had proposed a $136.5M budget. Councilor Kevin Lynch was the lone dissenter, saying that he simply couldn’t support a $0.95 tax rate.

For more, see the City Budget Office webpage or the city’s press release.

Local Students Win Peabody Award

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 10, 2007 in Entertainment. 4 Comments

Sahar Adish and her family fled Afghanistan in 1998, to escape the Taliban, after the fundamentalists seized control of Kabul. They made their way to a refugee camp in Pakistan where they lived until 2002, when they were granted asylum in the United States. The International Rescue Committee resettled them in Charlottesville, getting her geologist father work as a hotel janitor and her teacher mother a job at a day care center. Three years ago, as a student at Light House, Adish made a film about her family’s escape to America, entitled “Sahar: Before the Sun.” Fellow students Joe Babarsky, Sanja Jovanovic, Luke Tilghman all worked on the film, which went on to be widely broadcast on the Independent Film Channel, among others.

Family

Now comes the news that Sahar and her three collaborators have won a Peabody award, Katherine Ludwig reports in the current C-Ville Weekly. The Peabody is the highest award in journalism — to have one’s first film win a Peabody is akin to walking into a baseball park for the first time and hitting the grand slam that wins the World Series. The award is for “Beyond Borders: Personal Stories from a Small Planet,” broadcast on CNN International in 2006, which included the Light House film along with eight others.

I can only find an excerpt of the movie online. While down with the flu last year I was thrilled to stumble across the film on TV, and doubly thrilled when I realized that it was local. There’s no caveat here; it’s not good despite having been made by a group of teenagers. It’s just flat-out a stunning work.

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