Author Archive for Waldo Jaquith

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Slutzky Suggest Land Use Tax Reform

Published by Waldo Jaquith on October 13, 2009 in Development, Politics and Taxes. 59 Comments

Albemarle BoS chair David Slutzky is toying with a significant overhaul to county taxation policy, Brandon Shulleeta writes in today’s Daily Progress, although he says it’s nothing more than idea, one that he’s not even sure that he’d vote for. The county provides a significant real estate tax cut to landowners in rural areas who agree to keep their land rural. The majority of the county’s land is enrolled in the program, $18M worth of tax breaks in all. A lot of folks are using the program as it’s designed. But some folks aren’t. Land speculators that aren’t planning on developing their land just yet can enroll their land, get tax breaks for as long as they want, and when they decide to develop it, they just pay the last few years of rollback taxes. Slutzky proposes requiring that, in order to get the tax break, rural landowners commit to permanently keeping their land rural by placing it in a conservation easement, so that neither they nor any future owners would be permitted to develop it. He figures it could bring in an extra $10M-$20M year in real estate taxes, revenue that would come in handy right about now.

Rodney Thomas, the Republican opposing Democrat Slutzky in this year’s election, doesn’t support Slutzky’s idea, and told the Progress:

I think it’s just taking the rights away from the individuals that own the land. I don’t think they [should] have to put their land into conservation easement just to prove that they aren’t going to develop some property. It’s their property. It belongs to them.

Slutzky doesn’t intend to do anything with this idea before the election, but says that he wants to learn more about it to see if it’s worth pursuing.

A New Dam Cheaper than Fixing the Old One?

Published by Waldo Jaquith on October 8, 2009 in Government. 32 Comments

It may be cheaper to build a new dam than repair the existing one, Rachana Dixit wrote in yesterday’s Progress. The Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority‘s executive director says that the engineers studying what to do with the dam figure that the cost of repairs would exceed the cost of tearing it down and starting again, though that’s just a preliminary conclusion. That’s the opposite of what the prior consultants said…though they were fired. In the case of such wildly varying information, it’s tough to know what to believe.

The Hook Looks Back at the Piedmont Airlines Crash

Published by Waldo Jaquith on October 8, 2009 in General News. 5 Comments

This month is the fiftieth anniversary of the crash of Piedmont Airlines Flight 349, which went down on Bucks Elbow, near Sealeville north of Crozet, on October 30 1959. The Buckeye Pacemaker, a DC-3, travelled low over AHS, where fans at the football game that evening heard it buzz by, hidden in the cloud cover. Minutes later the plane, with 27 on board, crashed into the side of Bucks Elbow. Remarkably, one man survived, tossed from the plane, still strapped into his seat, where he was found a day and a half later. (Listen to Rey Barry’s remarkable story of how he found the man, from Coy Barefoot’s show in 2006.) The crash, and the survivor’s ordeal, were national news. It’s remained a mystery why and how the pilot made the series of errors necessary to fly directly into the side of the mountain.

In this week’s Hook, editor Hawes Spencer tells the story of what happened in those couple of days, in far greater detail that I’ve ever seen it. It turns out that the government crash report doesn’t make a lot of sense, and what might be the real explanation of what happened that night is a whole lot more interesting, and makes a great deal more sense. Don’t miss the comments, where family of the deceased are telling their own stories.

Annual Raises for County Teachers Unlikely

Published by Waldo Jaquith on October 8, 2009 in Education, Government and Taxes. 2 Comments

County teachers aren’t likely to get their annual pay raise next year, Brandon Shulleeta reports in the Progress today. That’s already the case for state employees, who aren’t getting any raises for performance or cost of living increases, and with Albemarle facing the same economic conditions, it looks like there’s no way around limiting teacher pay likewise. No official decision has been made, but with a $4.7M shortfall in the county budget, it may as well have been.

Council Apologizes for Closing Schools in 1959

Published by Waldo Jaquith on October 6, 2009 in Government, History and Politics. 19 Comments

City Council has passed a resolution apologizing for its role in Massive Resistance, Rachana Dixit writes in today’s Progress. The vote was unanimous. Copies of the resolution will be sent to the dozen men and women who were the first students to cross the color barrier fifty years ago.

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