Unemployment Up; Still Relatively Low

Published by Waldo Jaquith on October 1, 2008 in Business. 2 Comments

Unemployment in the region is at a six-year high, Brian McNeill writes in the Progress, but it’s still not bad. We’re at 4.1%, compared to 4.6% statewide and 6.1% nationally. That’s a 55% increase over August of last year. (And it was just January of last year that the city had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation.) It’s well worth noting that unemployment numbers are based on the number of people still seeking employment; anybody who gives up to wait for the job market to improve is dropped from the rolls. Broadly speaking, a rate of 5% unemployment is considered normal and healthy, since there is always going to be a certain number of people between jobs.

We had a nasty drop off of employment, both in raw unemployment numbers but also in underemployment, back when Ix, Comdial, and Technicolor folded, laid off their local workforce, and moved operations to Mexico, respectively. That put a lot of career blue collar workers out of work or left them delivering pizza (making them technically employed). That 1998-2002 period was followed by the unsurprising discovery that area income was dropping.

If the global economic woes are a hurricane, and Charlottesville is a beach town, the good news is that we’ve got the coastal wetlands of the university to buffet the waves. (Admit it—that metaphor was awesome.) Though UVa is making it tough to hire new employees now, and a hiring freeze is rumored, there’s just no reason to expect layoffs now, as there virtually never has been there.

Coiners’ Sold

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 30, 2008 in Business. 30 Comments

Coiners Scrap Iron and Metal has been sold, Christina Mora reports for NBC 29. The Meade Avenue business, in its 101st year, is now owned by the Roanoke-based Cycle Systems, which is nearly as old. Cycle Systems has been on an acquisition binge in the past decade, snapping up scrap metal companies in Harrisonburg, Waynesboro, Staunton, Martinsville, Pulaski, and South Boston. Because the sale is private, it’s not known how much walking around money Preston Coiner has suddenly found himself with.

UVA Adds a New Dorm

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 29, 2008 in Development and UVa. 3 Comments

UVa has finally built a new dorm, the first of seven long-promised new ones, Katie Bo writes in today’s Cavalier Daily. The university has had a housing shortage for the last half decade, pushing students out to rent houses, which drives up the cost of housing in Charlottesville. The Kellogg dorm has such new-fangled technology as air conditioning, elevators, and the internets. It’s a start, but it’s not like others are following close on its heels: the plans for the next one won’t even be finished until next year.

Dam Prices Doubles

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 23, 2008 in Development, Government and Taxes. 47 Comments

Well, this seems bad:

An engineering firm has nearly doubled the estimated cost of a dam at Ragged Mountain Reservoir, prompting officials to halt design work on a project intended to supply drinking water to the region for the next 50 years.

Gannett Fleming — the firm tasked with the project’s design, engineering and construction — hiked the original $37 million cost estimate to $70 million largely because of fractured and weathered rock at the site of the future dam. Local officials then sought a second study from Schnabel Engineering, which concluded that the project could be done for $56.5 million or less.

Brandon Shulleeta explains in the Progress that the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority is putting together a panel to review the two studies and figure out what to do. Citizens for a Sustainable Water Supply Plan are thrilled, saying that this is makes clearer than ever that it would be cheaper to just dredge the South Fork. The trick is that we’re not trying to provide water for everybody who lives here, but also everybody who might move here between now and 2058. Growth is expensive, and it’s the taxpayers who get stuck with the bill.

Contribute to Wikipedia

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 21, 2008 in General News. 6 Comments

Online encyclopedia Wikipedia has become the central repository for human knowledge, but Charlottesville isn’t very well represented. Many of the basic historical figures and central geographic locations of our area are only given a cursory description, if they’re listed at all. There are predictably informative and lengthy entries for Thomas Jefferson, UVa, DMB, etc. But there’s nothing at all about the Jefferson School, the Charlottesville Pavilion, Barracks Road, or our own mayor (for instance). And the entries for the Downtown Mall, WINA, the Daily Progress, CHO, Lane High School, The Corner, and the Southwest Mountains are pretty anemic. And given their profile, Ash Lawn-Highland and Montpelier should have way better entries.

I’ve made a list of a bunch of entries that I’d like to create or improve, though no doubt folks can think of plenty more. It took two of us just a couple of days to create a decent entry for Paul Goodloe McIntire. I hope that y’all in the habit of contributing to Wikipedia will take a few minutes to add some information to local entries. And those of you who are new at this, I encourage you to give it a try: just click on the “edit this page” link at the top of any one of those entries, add any information that you think should be there, and save your changes. (See Wikipedia’s guide to editing a page.) Collectively, I’m sure that we all know enough about the area’s history to make a considerable contribution to its chronicling.

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