The guy who shot that puppy in Earlysville has been sentenced to 30 months in prison. #
An impressively strong earthquake shook up the central east coast just a few minutes ago, a 5.8 magnitude quake centered on Mineral, which is midway between Charlottesville and Richmond. Though we’ve had a few quakes of this size in the past few hundred years, it’s been a while since we’ve had one this big. We had one in 2001, a 4.5 in 2003, and a 2.7 in Nelson in late 2009, but a 5.8 is a lot stronger than any of those. The shaking was felt from North Carolina clear to New York. What was it like where you are?
5pm Update: Note that it was just in March when Dominion Power’s Lake Anna nuclear plant was named the 7th most at-risk nuclear plant, in the event of an earthquake. So what was the facility designed to withstand? “A magnitude 5.9–6.1 earthquake.” The plant’s reactors shut down automatically, but after the Fukushima nuclear plants reduced the surrounding area to a radioactive wasteland following their March earthquake, that’s not as reassuring as Dominion might think it is.
The YMCA is on hold while the VA Supreme Court considers an appeal in the ACAC/Gold’s lawsuit. That won’t be until spring. #
Democrats nominated incumbent Satyendra Huja and newcomers Kathleen Galvin and Dede Smith for City Council yesterday, Charlottesville Tomorrow reports, and ousted three-term clerk of court incumbent Paul Garrett in favor of challenger Llezelle Dugger. A record 2,524 Democrats voted in the all-day firehouse primary. Huja and Galvin were both clear preferences of a majority of voters—winning on the first ballot—but it took five rounds of counting via instant-runoff voting before Smith finally emerged as the third-most-popular candidate, narrowly beating Paul Beyer by 31 votes.
The three Democrats nominated for Council will now run against the five independent candidates (Republicans have yet again failed to put forth challengers) for the November election. Nobody else is running for clerk, making Dugger the presumptive winner.
6:30 PM Update: The unofficial tallies have been released. These are the numbers for council, and these are the numbers for clerk. What stands out here is that Dugger trounced Garrett and fellow challenger Pam Melampy, with 1,534 votes to Garrett’s 656 and Melampy’s 294. The numbers from the council race show that all three nominees were also the top three vote-getters in the first round of voting, indicating that the results may not have been different with a traditional balloting system.
Here’s your annual warning: Move-in weekend starts Friday, August 19th—a day early—and runs through Sunday. If you want to retain your sanity, avoid the entire 29 corridor, Barracks Road, The Corner, the Downtown Mall, and anything between Preston and University Ave. #
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