A school bus bound for Burley Middle School was involved in an accident yesterday morning, the Progress reports. Driver Rebecca Merchant was turning onto Preston from Ridge-McIntire when she rear-ended a Ford Focus. Ten kids reported injuries, and were taken to the hospital, though all were released within a few hours. In the meantime, the road was shut down for hours, full of ambulances, police cars, and fire trucks. Merchant has been charged with reckless driving, and has been placed on leave by the Albemarle school system.
News and meta-news about Charlottesville, VA, since 2001.
Author Archive for Waldo Jaquith
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Albemarle County police say that their data show that the number of crashes at the intersection of Rio and 29 decreased after the installation of red light cameras last year, Dave McNair reports for The Hook. Initial data demonstrated that crashes had increased at the intersection—and they have—but police say that those numbers include lanes that are not monitored by red light cameras. The decline that their more specific data demonstrate is from fourteen to nine during the same periods in two consecutive years, the former without cameras, the latter with. Between December and July, a stunning 7,638 tickets were generated by the cameras, though an equally stunning 42% of those were found to be invalid.
Raise your hand if you knew that not all directions of that intersection are on camera. That’s news to me.
The county is facing a million-dollar shortfall at the end of the fiscal year, Samantha Koon writes for the Daily Progress. The $1.07M shortfall results from less income from real estate taxes than expected. Relative to Albemarle’s $304M budget, it’s not an enormous amount of money, but it’s still got to come out of somewhere. They’ve has faced larger shortfalls in recent years, especially back in 2008, as the economy was collapsing. The Board of Supervisors will figure out how to deal with the problem in work sessions next month.
Thirty-five years after it was closed down, a quarry just off 29N is back in business, Aaron Richardson writes in the Daily Progress, and the neighbors aren’t thrilled. Imagine you’re driving north on 29, past Walmart and over the Rivanna. There’s a traffic light there, for Polo Grounds Road, on the right. You can turn left, but virtually nobody does. That’s Rio Mills Road. I drove down there for the first time maybe five years ago. It’s a little-maintained road that runs right past a quarry. (Here’s a map of its location.) That quarry has been abandoned since 1975, but a Roanoke-based company has bought it, and they’ve got it back in business. Rockydale Quarries informed folks who live right around there that they were going to resume blasting and quarrying, but not everybody’s happy about it. The county has checked to see if the sound of their work exceeds the noise ordinance, but it falls within it. The property has a permit for the work going back to 1965, and the land is zoned for heavy industry. Still, some of the neighbors have asked the Board of Supervisors to shut down the business, asking that they review the permits and environmental impact, presumably hoping to find some irregularity.
I suspect that the moral of the story will be that if you want peace and quiet, you shouldn’t build or buy a house near a quarry on land that’s zoned for heavy industry.
I accidentally overhauled the technical infrastructure behind cvillenews.com over the past few hours. (It was meant to be a small fix, done late at night to avoid downtime, but one thing led to another…) I’ve upgraded from an ancient version of WordPress to the latest one, while trying to drag along many of the features that were dependent that rickety old version of WordPress. Parts of the site are going to look funny and broken-ish for a bit while I try to massage things back to how they were. Then they’ll start looking funny in new and interesting ways, as I start to make many of the improvements to the site that I’ve been unable to make for years now. Thanks for bearing with me!
9/25 Update: Oh, and it’s possible to post comments now. Because that seems like a useful feature.
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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