City to Go Seriously Green

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 16, 2007 in General News. 9 Comments

The county’s recent pledge to reduce greenhouse emissions is nice, but Seth Rosen writes in the Progress that the city will be taking some pretty impressive concrete steps along the same lines. Council will require the city to reduce carbon emissions, buy electricity produced sustainably, and even create a power co-op with other buyers to demand renewable energy from Dominion. The paucity of renewable energy prevents council from setting benchmarks, unfortunately. The commitment to buying power from local producers is especially awesome, though I wonder how it will work. If I stick a 3KW solar panel array on my roof, how will the city get the energy that I produce? Would they buy credits from me, while I just net meter that power back into Dominion’s grid? (I wrote a bunch about this very topic earlier this year.)

Council will vote on this Monday night, where it will almost certainly pass.

Double H Farmers Pleads Guilty

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 13, 2007 in Law and Justice. 6 Comments

Double H Farms have gotten about the friendliest possible court ruling, Rob Seal writes in today’s Daily Progress. Richard Bean and Jean Rinaldi had expected the worst after their bizarre SWAT-style arrest on a labeling offense back in September, but the judge who OKd dropping nearly all of the charges and the fine actually volunteered that farming laws just don’t make any sense, and that the legislature should fix them. They had to plead guilty to a single count of transporting uninspected meat for sale, and they’ve had to agree to comply with all state and federal farming regulations.

Incidentally, none of the 127 bills pre-filed for this January’s General Assembly session address farming. But there are thousands more bills to come, so it’s certainly not too late.

COMPASS Day Haven

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 13, 2007 in General News. 11 Comments

Jayson Whitehead has a really interesting story in the current C-Ville about COMPASS Day Haven’s difficulty in getting started. The organization has been working to provide a day shelter for the local homeless population, but trouble finding a location, the loss of a fiscal agent, internal conflicts, difficulty establishing a board and zoning trouble have all slowed them down.

Whisper Ridge Patient Sues

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 13, 2007 in Business and Law and Justice. 1 Comment

Rob Seal reported in the Progress a couple of days ago that a former Whisper Ridge resident is suing the mental health facility for $10.35M. The anonymous plaintiff just recently turned 18, and alleges that he was physically and sexually abused while there between 2003-5. Which, odds are, is true. It seems that Whisper Ridge (formerly The Brown Schools, before that The Millmont Center) has broken just about every law, regulation, and standard of decency that’s possible (see exhibits a, b, c, d and e), so if I were a betting man, I’d place my money on the kid winning the case. I guess what’s amazing is that it took this long for somebody to sue this place.

Washington Pleads Guilty to Serial Rapes

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 10, 2007 in Law and Justice. 62 Comments

Nathan Washington has pleaded guilty to four of the serial rapes, NBC 29 reports. Prosecutors have agreed to charge him in only four of the seven cases in exchange for his guilty plea. With the deal comes a recommendation for a life sentence on each charge. It was just four months ago that Washington was arrested. Washington is a husband and father of three, and lived in Woodbrook and worked as a Daily Progress deliverman and Harris Teeter meat cutter until his arrest. There’s no word on when sentencing will take place. Suffice it to say, he’s never getting out of prison.

9:15pm Update: Lisa Provence reports for The Hook on how Washington was caught, something that many of us have been wondering. It turns out that one of his victims spotted him in the parking lot of the UVa Aquatics and Fitness Center, the same place where he’d attacked her in 2002. She’d also seen him at Harris Teeter. So she wrote down the plate number and called the cops. They put him on surveillance, and a detective grabbed a disposable cup that he’d thrown away after drinking from. The DNA results came back quickly, showing it was a perfect match to every attack, and they arrested him three days later. That’s some clever, efficient work on the part of both police and the alert victim.

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