Author Archive for Waldo Jaquith

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Blake Caravati Arrested for Domestic Assault

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 12, 2011 in Crime and Politics. 7 Comments

Blake CaravatiFormer Mayor Blake Caravati was arrested last Friday night, charged with assault in a domestic dispute, CBS-19 reports. Police aren’t saying who the victim is; Caravati lives with his wife, Paula. The 60-year-old Democrat was elected to council in 1998, and was mayor from 2000–2002. Neither he nor the police have commented on the matter.

9/13 Update: The Progress has more detail on this story—which was first broken by NBC-29, incidentally—specifying that he’s charged with assaulting his wife, and that she did not need medical attention. Neither Caravati nor his attorney are commenting. There’s an initial court hearing on Friday.

Rick Turner: A Secret Pact Bars Blacks from Downtown

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 11, 2011 in Business. 18 Comments

Remember Rick Turner? The former UVA Dean of African-American Affairs retired in 2006 after lying to federal investigators in a drug case. (The details of that sordid affair never became public.) That humiliation appeared to be the end of his public life, one that had become increasingly noisy in the prior couple of years. In 2005 alone he defended the stunningly incompetent school superintendent Scottie Griffin as a victim of race hatred, declared that teachers and the school bard are racist, that firing Griffin would be a “lynching”, that black people have a “slave-like mentality”, and that UVA students were guilty of “racial terrorism”. Again, that’s just in 2005.

Well, Turner’s emerged in public to again light a fire and throw some gasoline it, this time informing City Council that downtown has way too many white people, Graham Moomaw wrote in the Progress last week, and accusing downtown business owners of having a secret pact to refuse to hire African-Americans. Turner, the head of the Albemarle-Charlottesville branch of the NAACP, provided no evidence to support his claims. Councilors Holly Edwards, David Brown, and Dave Norris thanked Turner for his comments. (Turner once called for then-mayor Brown to resign for meeting with school principals.) His remarks can be watched, starting at the 43:14 mark. Downtown business owners aren’t thrilled with the accusations. Chamber president Tim Hulbert complained that “[i]It’s just not helpful…when anyone calls out a whole group of people and paints them with a brush that’s inaccurate.” Downtown Business Association co-chair Bob Stroh was reduced to stating the obvious, that “the part about the secret code and that kind of stuff is…not true.”

Earthquake Exceeded North Anna’s Designed Tolerances

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 9, 2011 in Business and Weather. 2 Comments

Last month’s earthquake exceeded the design standards of the North Anna nuclear plant, the Associated Press reports. That came out after a Nuclear Regulatory Commission inspection of the plant, using USGS data. That’s based not on the magnitude of the quake, but based on the peak ground acceleration (PGA)—the measurement of how hard and fast the ground was shaking at the plant. You can see that on the USGS’ “shakemap” of the earthquake. PGA varies enormously, based on distance from the quake, soil makeup, and other factors. It’s measured in G-force, a term that you’ll have heard in the descriptions of the forces on fighter pilots when pulling sharp turns, or on astronauts upon launch. Lake Anna was constructed to withstand 0.12–0.18g, but the 5.8 earthquake caused peak ground movement of 0.26g, substantially more than the designed limits of the reactor.

The plant remains closed, as it has been since the August 23 earthquake. The NRC says that it suffered “minor” damage, but no specifics have been provided.

Fluvanna Blogger Wins Free Speech Case Against County

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 2, 2011 in Government and Law and Justice. 3 Comments

Blogger Brian Rothamel has won his lawsuit against Fluvanna County over his use of the county seal, Sharon Fitzgerald writes for the Daily Progress. He brought a suit against the county back in January, courtesy of the Rutherford Institute, after they adopted a law prohibiting anybody from using their seal for any reason. The ordinance appeared to have been passed specifically to prevent Rothamel from illustrating stories about county business with the seal on FlucoBlog. (In the first few years of this site, I displayed the Charlottesville seal as the icon for news related to city government, just as Rothamel was doing for Fluvanna government news.) Federal Judge Norman K. Moon issued an injuction against the county to prevent them from continuing to enforce the law, writing that “the deprivation of Rothamel’s First Amendment freedoms easily outweighs whatever burden the injunction imposes on the county.”

The Progress article doesn’t include any quotes from members of the Fluvanna Board of Supervisors. I certainly hope that somebody gets their respond on the record. The law was unconstitutional on its face, and now that they’ve been smacked down by a federal judge, they’ve got some explaining to do.

City School Board OKs Laptops for Students

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 1, 2011 in Education. 23 Comments

The Charlottesville School Board has OK’d a $2.4M expenditure to buy two thousand tablet computers for students, Graham Moomaw writes in the Progress. These Fujitsu Stylistics aren’t tablets in the iPad sense, assuming the Progress’ photo is representative, but really just laptops with the screen permanently affixed to the back of the computers, with a tethered pen-like stylus in lieu of a mouse, and a wireless keyboard. The operating system is simply a modified version of Windows 7, and not a real tablet operating system. Reviews of what I think are the right model aren’t glowing [1, 2], but presumably the school system’s requirements are rather different than most reviewers’. The laptops will cost $768 apiece, and will show up in a few weeks. CHS students will get them in mid-October, with kids at Buford and Walker getting them in November.

Note that this was originally pitched as a $500,000–$1,000,000 project back in February, a number that the school system was presenting as “below $1 million” in May.

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