Author Archive for Waldo Jaquith

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Chain Store Selling at City Market

Published by Waldo Jaquith on May 5, 2012 in Agriculture. 182 Comments

The Great Harvest chain has set up shop at the City Market, Graham Moomaw writes in the Daily Progress, and that’s got some local farmers upset. The market, overseen by the city, is meant to connect customers with local food producers, and over 100 folks have their names on a waiting list to get a spot at the popular weekly event. The Great Harvest Bread Company is a Montana-based chain, with hundreds of locations across the United States, established on a philosophy of providing more local control to franchisees than most chains. The city says that they were not aware that Great Harvest was a chain, although it’s not clear what difference that would have made in the application process. The owner of the local franchise says that there’s nothing wrong with allowing chains into the farmers’ market, while a couple of critics argue that, by that logic, Subway or Panera could set up shop there.

This debate has unfolded at farmers’ markets across the country, with some markets remaining dedicated to selling local produce, and others turning into something closer to weekly open-air markets for chains. Which approach is better depends on what each community thinks that the purpose of a farmers’ market is. We may be about to find out what the purpose of our farmers’ market is.

Progress Editor Leaving for UVA

Published by Waldo Jaquith on May 4, 2012 in Business and Meta News. 7 Comments Tags: .

McGregor McCance, managing editor of the Daily Progress for seven years, is becoming the latest employee of the paper to depart for UVA. McCance is going to work for university spokeswoman Carol Wood.(Note that the position of managing editor is the top editorial position at the Progress—there is nobody with the title of, simply, “editor.”) Today was McCance’s last day. The Progress doesn’t yet have a replacement for McCance.

City Recommitting to Bypass’s 35 MPH Limit

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 22, 2012 in Transportation. 36 Comments

With a study supporting the 35 MPH speed limit on parts of the 250 Bypass, City Council intends to keep it there, Megan Davis writes for the Waynesboro News Virginian. (No, I don’t understand, either. Let’s chalk that up to a production error.) The study found that while most people are going faster, it also found that the lack of sufficient space for acceleration and slowing down necessitates the seemingly unreasonably slow speed limit. The westbound stretch after McIntire, in particular, is what strikes a lot of people as unreasonably slow until it hits 45 MPH just before the firehouse. (Councilor Dave Norris is one of those people.) Council intends to pass an ordinance restating that speed limit. All of this came about after a half dozen people appealed tickets for speeding, who argued that the limit is unreasonably low and was set in 1967 without a necessary study to demonstrate cause for it to be set so low.

Rabid Bear Killed in Western Albemarle

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 19, 2012 in General News. 16 Comments Tags: , .

A couple of guys fended off a rabid black bear at Royal Orchard Farm on Tuesday, NBC-29 reports. (The Progress has a somewhat longer story.) The men were in a Gator—a small, open utility vehicle—when the bear attacked the vehicle, and then came after then. Armed with a shotgun loaded with birdshot, reasonably enough during spring turkey season, one of them shot the bear point-blank in the head. Said noggin was sent off to a state lab, where it was confirmed that the bear had rabies.

Royal Orchard is the farm of the Scott family (as in Scott Stadium), located just off 64 on the way up to Afton. When driving up the long, slow grade to Rockfish Gap, at one point a bridge goes over the interstate at a crazy angle. That’s Royal Orchard Drive, a road that exists solely to connect their farm to Route 250. The house is an honest-to-God castle. The Shenandoah National Park was built around the estate, because the family had the money and the political power to keep the federal government from seizing their land and from building Skyline Drive within their viewshed.

City Launches Mapping Website

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 19, 2012 in General News. 2 Comments Tags: , , .

Charlottesville has put their mapping system online for everybody to use, Courtney Beale writes for Charlottesville Tomorrow. The Charlottesville GIS Viewer is functionally much like Albemarle County’s web-based GIS system, providing property data, assessments, transfer histories, photos, and relatively sophisticated map display options. It’s pretty straightforward to create a custom map of floodplains, historic districts, police districts, voting precincts, or any of a few dozen other data layers.

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