Business owners on Garrett Street are sad that people have to walk a block to get to the parking garage, Rachana Dixit wrote in yesterday’s Daily Progress. Though there’s lots of on-street parking, it’s all-day, and is often filled up by commuters by 9:00 AM. The city plans to turn fifteen of those spaces into two-hour spaces in spring, but some business owners don’t want to wait that long. Of course, once those become two-hour spaces, expect commuters to be angry at their loss of parking.
News and meta-news about Charlottesville, VA, since 2001.
Monthly Archive for November, 2008
Page 3 of 4
UVa’s Hereford College has started a mini-farm, Tasha Kates reported in yesterday’s Daily Progress. The 800 square foot garden, maintained by members of the university community, fits in with a recent course on alternative food production. Now students are working on creating another garden, this one a half-acre in size, with some of the resulting food passed along to area soup kitchens.
BoS member David Slutzky is considering running against Del. Rob Bell, Brian McNeill writes in Sunday’s Daily Progress. Bell, a Republican, is up for reelection next November; he had no challenger last year. Slutzsky, a Democrat who represents the Rio district, says that he hasn’t made his mind up, but that what Bell does in January’s legislative session will affect his decision.
Slutzky is upset that the state isn’t funding transportation (hence no roads getting built anytime soon), and would like to have a Charlottesville/Albemarle referendum on raising taxes to fund a regional transportation authority. Bell is threatening to oppose that referendum—that is, to lobby against allowing Charlottesville to hold one at all—which led Slutzky to declare the following in an October 31 regional transit authority working group meeting: “We will pillory him in the press. Then we run against him and we kick his ass out. Not to be subtle.”
Bell hasn’t faced a significant challenge since his 2002 election, allowing him to build up one of the state’s largest campaign war chests. his campaign has $94k on hand, he also runs the Piedmont Leadership PAC, which exists solely for him to donate money to and to give money to him, and he’s got $312k squirreled away there. The common assumption is that he’s planning a run for a higher office, since otherwise there’s just no need to sit on that money, though earlier this year he announced that he wouldn’t be running for attorney general in the 2009 election.
Coincidentally, I crunched the numbers on the the 58th district earlier today and found that Democrat Tom Perriello beat Republican Virgil Goode in the 58th with 55% of the vote, a significant move leftward from past election results in this district. That’s the sort of demographic shift that’s got Del. Bell vulnerable at the polls. But with his fundraising advantage, anybody running against him will have to fundraise as few in Virginia ever have.
All over town, folks are pretty obsessed about the status of the Goode/Perriello canvass (or the recount, as it’s colloquially known.) You’ll notice a new item over on the sidebar of cvillenews—the latest status of the Perriello/Goode recount. That’s updated every five minutes, with a link to the SBE’s log of changes to the tally. I’ve also created a JavaScript widget that you can embed in your own website:
<script src="http://waldo.jaquith.org/recount/perriello.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
Here’s a screenshot of how it looks:
And for those of y’all looking for something rawer, there’s a plain text version with each candidate’s totals.
The bad news: Two laptops containing personal information about every voter in Charlottesville have been stolen, Henry Graff reports for NBC-29. The good news: The data was encrypted, so there has almost certainly been no breach of privacy. On election night, after things shut down for the evening, somebody tossed a cinderblock through the front door of Tonsler and made off with the two systems. Voters’ names, addresses, birth dates, and driver’s license numbers are stored on the computers. Laptops’ portability make them common targets of theft, and it’s inevitable that government systems containing confidential information will be stolen now and again. But if best practices are followed, and the data is encrypted, it’s not a disaster.
11/07 Update: The more I think about this, the more I figure that this story is fear-mongering on the part of NBC 29. (Compare to WINA or the DP’s coverage.) Wanting to know what else was in place, other than encryption, I checked with Charlottesville election official Rick Sincere, and he told me: “The laptops require multiple passwords to make them operable. The passwords are complex and difficult to remember.” They’re using Datacard’s Electronic Poll Book Solution, which you can read about in Rick’s October 2006 blog entry on the topic. Rick favors electronic voting, while I think it’s a security nightmare, but this is an example of everything apparently being done safely. If there’s reason to think that anybody’s confidential information has been breached here, Henry Graff hasn’t provided it—NBC 29 should stop making this claim if they can’t back it up.
Sideblog
Police announced this afternoon that their investigation into what was initially believed to be a fatal fire on Rugby Avenue is now a homicide investigation. #
The Virginia Supreme Court has denied George Huguely’s appeal. His second-degree murder conviction will stand, WRIC reports. #
In a carefully worded story, and not citing specific sources, WTVR reports that forensic evidence belonging to Jesse Matthew Jr., the main suspect in the disappearance of Hannah Graham, matches forensic evidence collected during the investigation of Morgan Harrington’s 2009 murder. #
In the wake of Hannah Graham’s disappearance, and the evidence that came from private security footage, city officials are revisiting the question of installing security cameras on the downtown mall. #
Both Charlottesville Registrar Sheri Iachetta and former Electoral Board member Stephanie Commander have turned themselves in to the police on
foursix and four felony counts of embezzlement, respectively. #Ten years ago, the National Institutes of Health budget doubled and schools like the University of Virginia built massive new research facilities. A decade later, those buildings remain largely underutilized. NPR visits UVA in this story on the effect of federal binge and spurge spending in the sciences. #
In 2012, Council approved a new student housing complex on West Main—now some council members are questioning whether what they were shown matches what was built. #
The Architectural Review Board has approved a bike-themed mural on West Market, below the McGuffey Art Center, although at least one member expressed concerns that it might look like the bicyclists were riding away from Charlottesville’s downtown. #
City Police Chief Tim Longo is meeting with city leaders to work on protocols regarding the use of military surplus police weapons in Charlottesville. #
A 100-year-old Colonnades resident received military honors for her service in the WWII Women’s Army Corps #
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