Author Archive for Waldo Jaquith

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Plan 9, Satellite Ballroom Closing Next Month

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 21, 2008 in Business. Closed

Plan 9 and the Satellite Ballroom will close at the end of May, David Moltz writes in today’s Cavalier Daily. Plan 9 is going to allow their lease to expire, seeing their possible forced closing as a sign that perhaps it’s best that they consolidate their two C’ville locations. Their subtenants — Higher Grounds, Just Curry, and Satellite Ballroom — will likewise be out come midnight, May 31. Plan 9 owner Jim Bland intends to make a formal announcement today.

1:20pm Update: C-Ville Weekly provides more details. CVS sounds like all but a sure thing, and Satellite Ballroom is looking hard for a new location, rather than simply giving up.

It’s Spring

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 17, 2008 in Weather. 5 Comments
barnscape

©2008 Bill Detmer. All rights reserved.

OK, I’m calling it — winter is over, spring is here. Monday’s threat of sleet was winter’s last gasp. I was convinced of that when I saw this photo by Bill Detmer appear in the Charlottesville Flickr group this morning. The daffodils have come and gone, the flowering trees behind my office have lost their flowers, and The Dogwood Festival is underway.

A barely related memory. A decade ago, when Robert Van Winkle was still at NBC 29. It’s early December. The weather has turned cold because, hey, winter’s coming. Robert has just finished providing the forecast. A bubbly anchor without a brain in her head turns to him and asks earnestly: “oh, Robert, when will this cold snap end?”

City Adopts Budget with a Flat Tax Rate

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 16, 2008 in Government and Taxes. 16 Comments

Charlottesville has adopted a $140M budget, Sean Tubbs writes for Charlottesville Tomorrow, keeping the real estate property tax at $0.95, as it was last year. The budget (99k PDF) includes some last-minute additions of funding for things like JABA, Streamwatch, and Children, Youth & Family Services.

For a sense of perspective, note that we had a $100M budget in 2005, a $94M budget in 2004, and a ~$80M budget in 2003.

UVa Laptop Goes Missing with SSNs

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 16, 2008 in Crime and UVa. 12 Comments

Bad news for my fellow UVa employees: an employee’s laptop was stolen, and it contained names and Social Security numbers for 7,000 students and staff. Brian McNeill explains in the Progress that the university has contacted everybody whose data has gone missing, saying that they suspect the intended theft was of of the computer, not its data. The university uses SSNs as a primary identification number for many UVa employees, so it’s used whenever there’s cause to provide a unique identifier for a given employee, but they’re thankfully phasing that out.

Rob Bell Won’t Run for AG

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 14, 2008 in Politics. 18 Comments

Del. Rob Bell has often been cited as a likely contender for attorney general in the 2009 election, largely on the basis of his sizeable war chest, an artifact of going without a serious challenger in his tailor-made Republican district (in which I live). Now Bell tells Bob Gibson that he won’t be running for AG, citing his impending second child as a higher priority. Of course, there’s nothing keeping him from changing his mind: Paul Harris, who used to hold Bell’s seat, declared on March 10 that he wasn’t running for AG, only to announce precisely the opposite fifteen days later.

Democrats had hoped that a distracted Bell would either retire from his seat in order to run for AG (unlikely) or simply be unable to defend his own seat, and lose it to a centrist challenger. Straight-up running against him isn’t likely to get Dems real far. As Will Goldsmith explained in C-Ville Weekly last month, Bell works hard and gets a lot done. Though a lot of folks might not like what he gets done, neither corruption nor laziness exist to provide a purchase for prying him out of his seat.

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