Council Requests Dredging Study

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 3, 2008 in Development and Politics. 18 Comments

City Council endorsed the local water supply plan last night, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Daily Progress, but they want more studying of the dredging option. They’re proceeding as planned, but apparently open to doing otherwise. And that means months (years?) of further uncertainty.

11-Year Old Killed in Fifeville

Published by Waldo Jaquith on June 3, 2008 in Crime. 2 Comments

Details are still emerging, but an eleven year old boy was shot and killed in a home near Tonsler Park last night. A man in the home was wounded, too. The number of murders in Charlottesville is in the low single digits each year — we’ve even had zero — and when there are murders, it’s almost always drug or gang related. An eleven year old boy being (apparently) murdered is extraordinary.

3:30pm Update: 27-year-old Waverly “Eddie” Whitlock has turned himself into police in the murder of Walker Upper Elementary student Aziz Damar Booth. Police Chief Timothy Longo describes it as “a very complex crime scene investigation,” implying that this was not merely a robbery gone wrong, as it appears.

Water, Sewer Fees Skyrocket

Published by Waldo Jaquith on May 31, 2008 in Development and Taxes. 25 Comments

The Albemarle County Service Authority is jacking up rates for sewer and water connections, Jeremy Borden wrote in yesterday’s Daily Progress, in an effort to pay for the enormous costs associated with upgrading the system to deal with growth. The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority has taken the price of connecting to the water network up 62%, to $2,095, and the price of connecting to the sewer network up 82%, to $2,425. The total cost in Albemarle was $11,790 to hook a house up to the network, and now that’s $14,079. Homeowners’ alternative, installing a septic tank and drilling a well, isn’t a whole lot cheaper, and may well be substantially more expensive. And, of course, the alternative to the rate increase is to simply raise everybody’s property taxes, but that would hardly be fair.

First 64 Shooter Sentenced

Published by Waldo Jaquith on May 29, 2008 in Law and Justice. 9 Comments

The younger of the two Interstate 64 shooters has been sentenced to “an indeterminate amount of time at a state juvenile facility,” Tasha Kates writes in today’s Daily Progress. The 16-year-old Brandon Dawson could be in prison until he’s 21, but it’s up to the Department of Juvenile Justice when he gets out, and something closer to a year or a year and a half is more likely. Dawson pleaded guilty to five counts of shooting at unoccupied vehicles. The other shooter, Slade Woodson, has not yet been tried.

Media General to Lay Off 11% of Staff

Published by Waldo Jaquith on May 22, 2008 in Business and Meta News. 37 Comments

Bad news from Media General: they’re laying off 11% of their employees. In advance of this, the Media General-owned Richmond Times Dispatch announced that they’re increasing their subscription rates, publishing 16-20 fewer pages each week, and shrinking their distribution region. The logic is that, somehow, the way to improve your business is to make your product worse, charge more, and sell it to less people.

As always with media outlets, cost-cutting doesn’t mean firing the folks on the business side — since they’re the ones who bring in the money — it means the elimination of reporters, photographers, and their support staff. Which means their newspapers — like the Daily Progress — will get worse. Stockholders are demanding profit margins on the order of 15-30%, which is 3-6 times better than most of the S&P 500 is doing.

The relentless focus on big profit margins is demonstrably terrible for publications and their readers. With Seth Rosen and Jeremy Borden leaving the Progress soon, and Bob Gibson having recently left, the paper shouldn’t have to fire people — they’ll probably just fail to fill some or all of those positions. And that will leave us with more wire stories and less coverage of the things that matter in our community.

It’s a good thing we’ve got C-Ville Weekly, The Hook, the Charlottesville Podcasting Network and Charlottesville Tomorrow. If Media General thinks that their real competition is coming from the web, they should figure out that the competition isn’t the web itself — it’s more relevant, more in-depth information that happens to come in the form of websites. Making their coverage suck by shafting their reporters isn’t going to make them more competitive. It’s going to sink them.

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