Monthly Archive for March, 2008

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City to Spend $5.2M to Reduce Sewage Stink

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 25, 2008 in General News. 12 Comments

The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority has decided to spend $5.2M to reduce the sewage stink from the Woolen Mills processing plant, Seth Rosen and Jeremy Borden write in the Progress. Three million of that will go to building an enclosed receiving statement, with scrubbers to filter outgoing air, and $2.2M will go for equipment to regularly clean the whole joint. Folks living in the area have complained for years, and rightly so — nobody wants to live near that.

Gibson Leaving the Progress

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 25, 2008 in Business and Meta News. 7 Comments

Bob Gibson is leaving the Daily Progress to take a job with the Sorensen Institute, Progress editor McGregor McCance writes on their website.

Though good for Sorensen, it’s going to leave a hole at the Progress that quite likely won’t be filled. I don’t mean that in a nostalgic way. I mean that Bob Gibson’s decades of writing and editorial work for Progress arose from the paper being lucky enough to have a political reporter disinterested in living anywhere other than Charlottesville. Though he could surely have gotten a job with larger newspapers elsewhere in the country, with better pay and many more readers, he preferred to stay here. Media General isn’t about to spend a decade training a replacement, nor are they going to pony up the necessary money to convince a seasoned political reporter to move here and write for them. Instead, they’ll surely rely on the two political reporters for the Richmond Times Dispatch to provide coverage from Richmond, and let the rotating cast of beat reporters take care of local politics. The paper is losing their political institutional memory.

In a nutshell, expect the quality of the political reporting at the Progress to decline significantly over the next couple of years.

Students Stick Around?

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 24, 2008 in UVa. 3 Comments

NBC 29 reported something yesterday not likely to surprise many: a lot of UVa students stick around after they graduate. According to the UVa Alumni Association, 7-10% of each graduating class stays in Charlottesville. JMU, on the other hand, says that 15% of their graduates live within fifty miles of campus.

While interesting, that doesn’t necessarily tell us much. Perhaps 7-10% of UVa students are from Charlottesville. It strikes me as pretty likely that 15% of JMU’s graduates are from within fifty miles of Harrisonburg. (The media reporting bad or useless statistics are a pet peeve.) That said, we all know lots of people who stuck around after getting their degree, so whatever the percentage is, it’s got to add up to a significant chunk of the population.

CTS’s GPSes Installed

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 22, 2008 in Transportation. 69 Comments

The $500,000 Charlottesville Transit System GPS installation is done: now you can track CTS buses’ locations online or at dozens of bus stops. At least, it’s possible in the abstract that they can be tracked online. I wouldn’t know, because the site requires Internet Explorer and some Adobe plugin. (Install a plugin? Really? Didn’t we already do 1998?) Like one in four UVa students, I have a Mac–there is no IE to suffer through. Want to check your iPhone/Treo/Blackberry to see if you can make the next bus? You’re out of luck. Work in an office that doesn’t allow installing software? No schedule checking for you.

The significant upside, of course, is the remaining 95% of the system. Now CTS can track, coordinate, and adjust bus schedules in real-time to meet traffic demands. And the little screens at the bus stops sound pretty great. I’ll just have to abandon my hope of putting together per-line location-triggered RSS feeds and e-mail alerts. Cue the tiny violin.

Confusing News Over CARS Fee

Published by Waldo Jaquith on March 19, 2008 in Taxes. 9 Comments

It’s been tough keeping up with the news about whether Charlottesville and the Charlottesville Albemarle Rescue Squad have forged a deal to cooperate on charging for emergency service. First it was widely reported that there wasn’t a deal. Then that there was. Then that there wasn’t. What gives? Seth Rosen looks into the state of things for the Progress. There is clearly not a deal at this point; CARS’ Larry Claytor makes that clear. City manager Gary O’Connell has stopped talking to the media, presumably feeling cautious since he was the source of the false news in the first place. Apparently, CARS’ board hasn’t even talked to the city about a deal yet, leaving the rescue squad feeling puzzled about all of the news.

Maybe CARS will want to play ball with the city’s upstart rescue squad, maybe not. But this marks the second time that the city has put their foot in their mouth on this deal, which doesn’t put them in a great position to plead for cooperation.

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