Author Archive for Waldo Jaquith

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Independence Day Organizers Calling It Quits

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 3, 2009 in General News. 30 Comments
The Crowd Watches the Fireworks
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.

RSWA Sues Local Recycler

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 2, 2009 in Business and Government. 11 Comments

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.

City Republicans Can’t Find a Council Candidate

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 2, 2009 in Politics. 10 Comments

It’s official: Charlottesville Republicans will, for the second election in a row, not field a candidate for the election, Henry Graff reports for NBC-29, leaving the two Democratic nominees challenged only by a pair of independent candidates. Charlottesville consistently delivers the second-highest percentage of Democratic votes of any locality in the state (Petersburg always trumps us), usually around the 75% mark. This fact of demography understandably leaves Republicans uninterested in running anybody.

The trouble here is that Democrats and Republicans are given a special privilege in Charlottesville (as in most—all?—localities in Virginia) which is that they can field candidates who they select. Independent candidates Bob Fenwick and Andrew Williams have to get the signatures of 125 registered Charlottesville voters and submit that paperwork to the State Board of Elections to get on the ballot, simply because they are not affiliated with a party. So with Republicans opting out of elections, I think it’s time to seriously consider whether a third party—whether to the left or the right of Charlottesville Democrats—need to be given the right to nominate candidates, taking over that duty from the unwilling Republicans. I don’t know how that process works, but if Democrats are to be seriously challenged in an ongoing fashion, exchanging Republicans for a third party seems like a route worth exploring.

Red Light Cameras Under Consideration Again

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 2, 2009 in Crime, Government and Transportation. 11 Comments

Albemarle County is considering installing red light cameras at three intersections around town, Jenn McDaniel reports for NBC-29. Two spots on 29—Rio and Hydraulic—and the intersection of 20N and 250 are where they’ve got in mind. County police have studied the intersections, and had police officers run down the light-runners and ticket them, but say that it’s not safe to have officers chasing them, and would rather just ticket them automatically.

We first discussed this in 2001, but the legislature outlawed red light cameras pending further study, until they legalized them in 2007. Two years ago it came up again in the form of Dave McNair’s Hook article, which explained all of the reasons why red light cameras are not the cure-all as promoted by their manufacturers. (VDOT’s own study found that they increase injury rates.) And, most recently, city and county staff recommended the installation of red light cameras in July of 2007.

Hook Acquires cvillemovies.com

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 1, 2009 in Business and Entertainment. 3 Comments

Long-time Charlottesville website—one of the earliest local sites—cvillemovies.com has been acquired by The Hook. It’s long been a really great site. It does one thing, it does it well, and it’s been run as a labor of love since I was a kid. Unless I’m mistaken, it was the first truly local Charlottesville website; back in 1996, the idea of a local website was laughable, since the web was seen as a way to connect with people far away, not people in your own back yard. (No doubt it inspired me to start cvillenews.com and Charlottesville Blogs.) I e-mailed former site owner Doug Ross to ask him how it all went down. He writes:

Cvillemovies.com was the invention of a UVA grad-student in Philosophy and went online in April 1996 (originally as CineVille.com). Control of the site changed hands a few years later, and in September 2003 the site went down and was almost lost. Serendipitously, I was trying to track down the site’s owner at the same time.

There was a bug on the page and when I viewed the source I found an amusing comment in the JavaScript; something to the effect of “if anyone knows how the hell to fix this, please email soandso@suchandsuch.com”.

Well, I knew what was wrong (it was a Netscape 4 / IE proprietary tag issue, the “button” tag), but the email address went nowhere, so I started asking around and making phone calls, until I found the “owner”. An employee of his had been tasked with the site’s maintenance. He’d been hand editing the HTML for the movie times, and uploading via an FTP client with a stored password that he himself did not know; on a laptop that suffered a crash. The poor guy didn’t even know who’d been hosting the site and hadn’t renewed the domain name, which expired at almost the same time I was setting up a meeting with his boss. Further, he hadn’t yet told his boss anything about the disaster that was unfolding and my desire to do a good deed ended up exposing him.

I offered to “save” the site and after a bit of digging through Google Cache and the Wayback Machine for recoverable markup, and tracking down the Philosophy major (moved to the West Coast) I grabbed the neglected domain name and began resurrecting the site.

I scrapped the original markup (Tag Soup) and replaced it with valid HTML 4.01 Strict + CSS, but I carefully kept much of the original look and feel. I built a backend for the site with PHP and MySQL and got it back online by that October. That was five and a half years ago.

I had fun tweaking the site here and there, added space for local and Google ads; put in a rating system and experimented with some (modified) off-the-shelf forum systems. I felt that a forum could keep the site “relevant” in a world wide web where one could just as easily look up times on Google or Fandango, but I just didn’t have the time or energy to put into the project anymore. I felt very responsible for the site and wanted to see it continue in good hands.

After some interviews with different parties, the Hook seemed like the most responsible; the most likely to understand the significance of, and appreciate the history of the site in it’s local context, and they have a proficient technical staff.

Curious about The Hook’s perspective on this, I e-mailed editor Hawes Spencer. He writes:

One of the things that’s so great about the site is that it started in 1996, in the earliest days of the public’s awareness of the internet, so it has a ton of bookmarks and hundreds of incoming links. And according to Google Analytics, it gets well over 5,000 weekly visits. One other thing that’s really great about it is that it’s not bogged down with a million bells and whistles, so it works equally well on computers and mobile phones—even old-school phones and simple computers with dial-up connections. We’ve been operating it since late April, and our changes have been extremely delicate. We respect the 13 years of history that Doug and his predecessors put into this site, and we’re not about to undo such great work.

One other thing cvillemovies.com has always had and always will have, and which the national movie sites can’t match, is info on special indie screenings and things outside the mainstream cinemas. In the past month, for instance, we’ve given times for special screenings at Newcomb Hall, PVCC, and the Paramount. Local, local, local is what we’re all about. And, hey, I’m a former movie theater owner/operator. I love this stuff!

I’m glad to see the site carried on in the spirit with which it’s existed for so long.

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