Warrant for Dumler’s Arrest in Orange

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 20, 2013 in Crime. 4 Comments

There’s a warrant out for Chris Dumler’s arrest in Orange County, Chris Stover reports for CBS-19. He’s charged with a failure to appear in court but, unusually, he failed to show up as the attorney. In June—on the day that he resigned from the Board of Supervisors—he asked a judge to let him withdraw from a case that he’d thought was done. But the case wasn’t done, and when Dumler failed to show up at the next hearing, the judge ordered him to come to court to explain himself. He never showed, and the court has been unable to find him. In the Progress, Liana Bayne quotes Supervisor Dennis Rooker as saying that he thought Dumler planned to move away (a sensible decision), and all the supervisors say that they haven’t heard from him since prior to his resignation. Bayne went to Dumler’s home and found it maintained and apparently occupied, but Stover reports that Dumler’s phone number has been disconnected.

The 28-year-old Democrat was elected to represent the Scottsville district on the Board of Supervisors in 2011, but then he was arrested on charges of forcible sodomy, pleaded guilty to sexual battery, and eventually resigned his seat in June.

BOS Approves a Costco for Stonefield

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 14, 2013 in Development. 19 Comments

The Board of Supervisors has given the Stonefield shopping center permission to add a Costco, Sean Tubbs wrote for Charlottesville Tomorrow on Thursday. Ken Boyd and Petie Craddock were the dissenters in the vote. Permission was required because the developer, South Carolina-based Edens, needed to change the already approved layout of the roads to accommodate the 155,000 square foot building, and because they’d need to relocate a plaza and eliminate a café in favor of an “enhanced pedestrian corridor,” which I assume is a euphemism for a sidewalk. With these two waivers, that’s a total of seventeen waivers that the county has granted Edens for Stonefield.

As Dave McNair writes in The Hook, all of this is precisely the opposite of what Edens promoted Stonefield as. Back when they were calling this “Albemarle Place,” Edens pitched the development as a mixed-use, new urbanist, anti-shopping-center, complete with renderings that showed something like the Downtown Mall, transplanted to 29 North. (They even labelled one road in the development as “New Main Street,” stomach-turningly.) They’re still touting it as “neighborhood style [sic] development” on their website, despite the addition of Costco.

Those puzzled by Ken Boyd’s dissenting vote might look at this bit of McNair’s article:

“There is somewhat of a campaign of misinformation against the Stonefield application for minor plan variations and it appears to me to be being waged by other developers,” claims Rooker, whose district Stonefield occupies.

“In my opinion,” he adds, “this developer is being singled out for much harsher treatment because of a campaign of opposition from other developers and at least one board member who is carrying their water.”

Say what?

Rooker’s is not the only allegation of a board member carrying water for a developer, but none of his fellow supervisors had responded to such claims by press time.

9/16 Update: I originally wrote that Edens is based in North Carolina. They’re actually based in South Carolina.

Snow-Falling the Western Bypass

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 6, 2013 in Development and Meta News. 2 Comments

C-Ville Weekly has a long, lovely feature about the Western Bypass, by Graelyn Brashear. The article itself is a history of efforts to build a bypass around the 29 Bypass, presented through the lens of a driving tour of the proposed route with Supervisor Ken Boyd and Piedmont Environmental Coalition’s Jeff Werner riding in the back seat. It incorporates video, maps, per-section public comments, and audio throughout, presented not in a standard C-Ville Weekly page template, but instead as a wholly designed page. Brashear’s article doesn’t provide any new information, nor is that the goal, but instead is taking a long view on the project, sort of a “how we got here.”

This type of integrative story is known in the industry as a “Snow Fall” piece, named for the New York Times story of that title published last year, which resulted in a lot of analysis and endless discussion at conferences. (As an attendee of those conference, I’ll allow that perhaps the discussions only feel endless.) The work was done by Vibethink, the local website design shop who created C-Ville Weekly’s website. This sort of work adds a great deal of production cost to an article, not just in terms of website development, but also producing all of the supplementary multimedia materials. Some argue that snow-falling an article is a crutch, while others argue that it’s simply using the web as something more than a place to shovel material that also appeared in print. I know that when I’ll want to direct somebody to a place to learn more about the Western Bypass, I’ll send ’em to Brashear’s article.

The Hook to Fold

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 6, 2013 in Business and Meta News. 28 Comments

The Hook is being shut down by its parent company, in a decision that is disappointing, although surely not shocking. That leaves C-Ville Weekly, owned by the same company, as the city’s sole weekly. The final issue will be published on September 26.

The Hook debuted thirteen years ago, only three weeks after an acrimonious split between the three owners of C-Ville Weekly drove owner Hawes Spencer to start his own paper. Nine years later, the two publications’ owners decided to join up again, with time and experience having mellowed the former competitors. At the time of the merger, owner Bill Chapman denied plans to eliminate staffing redundancies. Finally, last December, Hook editor Hawes Spencer sold his shares and stepped down, with Courteney Stuart taking his place. (The first comment after that story was prescient: “Cue the Cville gutting the Hook in 2013 by summer if not sooner.”)

Both of the papers have maintained distinctly different identities. Post-split, The Hook quickly took on the role of news publication, while C-Ville Weekly focused more on the arts and soft news. In this way, they managed to enlarge the overall news market, so that both could have room to exist. When the two papers came under the same umbrella again two years ago, it was logical to keep both publications, since—anecdotally—each had their own fans and detractors, and presumably likewise differing bases of advertisers. If today’s news is any indicator, that simply proved not to be true. Or, at least, the benefits of maintaining two competing brands were outweighed by the cost and redundancies of maintaining two publications.

Questions remain. What will become of Hook staff: reporters, back-office staff, and ad sales? Will C-Ville Weekly expand its coverage to include the hard news that The Hook provided, or as a community will we simply lose that? When will C-Ville Weekly become a twice-weekly publication? And what of The Hook’s website? There are 12 years of vital, historically significant news coverage there, available to anybody using Google. The loss of that archive—like the once-deep web-based archives of The Cavalier Daily, WINA, and The Observer—would be terrible. What’s the plan to maintain that?

5:45 PM Update: In a statement, the company says that “several key members of The Hook’s team will remain,” that they’ll be moving publication from Monday to Wednesday, and touts that the combined circulation of 25,000 will give them the largest circulation in Charlottesville.

Council Plans City Manager Performance Bonus

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 5, 2013 in Government. 3 Comments

City Council has OKed offering a performance bonus to City Manager Maurice Jones, NBC-29 reports, contingent on him fixing the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority. Council has accepted that as a “stretch goal” for Jones, a result of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s strong criticisms of the authority last year. If Jones takes care of those problems, he’ll get a bonus of $17k, on top of his $173k salary. Jones will present a plan to Council next month.

Sideblog