A fourteen-year-old was shot while asleep in bed on Sunday morning, the Daily Progress reports. At 4:09 AM, the home, two apartments, and a vehicle on Prospect Avenue were all hit by gunfire. The unidentified child was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries. There haven’t been any arrests.
News and meta-news about Charlottesville, VA, since 2001.
Monthly Archive for June, 2009
Page 4 of 5
Tom Slonaker, the owner of the Arby’s at Forest Lakes, says he’s suing Albemarle County for “discriminatory” enforcement of sign ordinances, Tasha Kates writes in today’s Daily Progress. Slonaker has sought for years to evade the county’s zoning restrictions on how garish the signage for a business can be, and is continually caught and cited for violating the sign ordinance. (In 2003 he had an advertisement fashioned into a flag, and when caught for that, he claimed that the county was anti-flag, hoping to win popular opinion by impugning their patriotism.) Slonaker doesn’t intend to sue over the appropriateness or constitutionality of the laws, but rather because he believes that his business is being targeted while others are allowed to violate the same standards.
Karl Ackerman writes:
November 2009 marks the third election for the Charlottesville City School Board. Three members were elected in the first cycle in 2005 (Ned Michie, Juan Wade, and Leah Puryear), with six candidates running. Four members were elected in the second cycle in 2007 (Kathleen Galvin, Colette Blount, Llezelle Dugger, and Alvin Edwards), with seven candidates running. This year three slots are open and, to date (June 9th is the closing date for nominating petitions), there are only three candidates running for the three open positions—the three incumbents: Michie, Wade, and Puryear.
When they declared their candidacies earlier in the spring they announced that they were running as a team.
Our School Board elections are non-partisan. When candidates (especially incumbents) run as a team, they effectively skirt this provision by making it nearly impossible for a single candidate to win.
I don’t think Michie, Wade, and Puryear teamed up with the goal of limiting their opposition. But this is what they have effectively done.
The School Board is a tough job. It needs to be an elected job so that voters have a measure of accountability that was missing with an appointed School Board, and led to a number of terrible decisions in Charlottesville (the “pairing” of Walker and Buford, the hiring of Scottie Griffin as superintendent). How to get good people to run for this job? I think School Board members themselves need to take an active role recruiting their successors. Michie, Wade, and Puryear haven’t done that. By running as a team they have effectively shut out the competition.
I think their move will weaken the authority of Superintendent Rosa Atkins just at the moment when she needs a great deal of community input and, ultimately, support to bring about the many changes, including possibly closing a school, called for by the recent efficiency review.
If anybody wants to run for Charlottesville City School Board—or better yet, three people who might consider running as a team—please give me a call. I’ m sure many folks in Charlottesville would love to see us avoid a Soviet-style election come November.
I haven’t followed this race at all, but if these three candidates wind up running unopposed, that certainly doesn’t wouldn’t support the notion that elected school boards would lead to vigorous competition and thus a better school board. Candidates should never go unopposed in a general election, I don’t care who they are.
- Charlottevillians watch a red firework explode overhead in McIntire Park on July 4, 2007.
Seven years ago the organization who had long run the annual Independence Day celebration abruptly threw in the towel. Ray Cadell rounded up a bunch of local business owners and put together the big annual celebration with only a few weeks’ notice. The then-aptly-named Save the Fireworks Committee has been running the show every year since, despite their hope that they’d only have to do it that one year. Committee chairman Dave Phillips says that this July’s scaled-back event will be their last, Bryan McKenzie writes in the Daily Progress this afternoon. They cite a lousy economy, which makes it tough to raise money, but it also makes it tough to justify spending that money on frivolity when there are so many more needs that are more urgent.
A lot of people think of a July 4 celebration as something that “they” do—the state, the city, the county, somebody. But “they” is actually us. It’s a thankless, difficult, money-losing task. Here’s hoping a combination of local grant-making organizations and a local community organization can start planning now to put together a 2010 event and lay the groundwork for a sustainable event that will take place annually for decades to come.
06/04 Update: In an updated article today, McKenzie points out that the Charlottesville Downtown Foundation ran the event in 2003, and that it was the Jaycees that had run the event for so many years.
There’s a strange ongoing saga between the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority and local recycling facility operator Peter van der Linde that I haven’t written about here simply because it’s too confusing to be summed up in a couple of paragraphs. But I’ll take a stab at it here.
Back in April, Dave McNair wrote a long feature about the local man’s Zion Crossroads facility, which is a state-of-the-art, single-stream, mechanical sorting recycling operation. It’s a natural addition to the 800 dumpsters that the home builder rents out throughout the region. He’s long hauled waste to Allied’s Zion Crossroads waste transfer station, where he pays to deposit the contents of those dumpsters, so it’s logical that he’d want to recover some of that money by recycling the waste and turning it into valuable scrap. Somewhere along the way, the RSWA started charging a $16/ton service fee to everybody other than Allied to dump their Albemarle-originating waste at Allied’s facility, which haulers aren’t happy about, because they can’t see what the RSWA has to do with it, and also because they figure it gives Allied an upper hand. (Waste from outside Albemarle is $34/ton.)
Now the RSWA has filed a lawsuit against Van der Linde, alleging that he’s had his haulers lie routinely, claiming to be hauling trash from outside Albemarle, thus depriving them of an unknown quantity of money. Van der Linde counters that it wouldn’t make any sense to lie, because then he’d have to pay more, and he also claims to have surveillance video showing that his guys routinely weren’t even asked where their load originated. He says that this is really about the RSWA trying to shut him down because he’s getting all of the waste business at his facility, which charges less, thus ending their monopoly. In a statement, the RSWA denies it, saying that they’re simply trying to claim money that he owes them.
If you’re confused, Tasha Kates sums all of this up in today’s Daily Progress. I know I’m puzzled. It just doesn’t make any sense for the RSWA to sue over getting too much money. I must be missing something.
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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