Edwards Declares Council Candidacy

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 12, 2007 in Politics. 12 Comments

Community activist Holly Edwards announced her candidacy for City Council today, Seth Rosen wrote in yesterday’s Progress. Edwards is a a volunteer parish nurse at Westhaven Nursing Clinic and PHAR‘s program coordinator, and is advocating affordable housing, reduction of taxes for the middle class and expanded public transportation. She pointedly announced her campaign while standing in front of Crescent Hall. More information about Holly Edwards is available on her website.

04/13 Update: Charlottesville Tomorrow was there, and provides this video:

Huja Declares Council Candidacy

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 12, 2007 in Politics. 3 Comments

Former Charlottesville city planner Satyendra Huja announced his candidacy for City Council today, Seth Rosen writes in today’s Progress. Huja is seeking the Democratic nomination, touting his 31 years charting the city’s development path. He oversaw or spearheaded some significant city improvements in his career, including the Downtown Mall, CTS, revitalizing West Main, several parks, JAUNT, McGuffey, and Meals on Wheels. Like most of the candidates thus far, he’s advocating for expanding the availability of affordable housing, also supporting more sidewalks and bike paths, protection of our natural resources, significantly expanding the frequency of bus service, and slowing the rate of tax increases.

Courtesy of Charlottesville Tomorrow, here’s the video of Huja’s announcement:

For more about Satyendra Huja, see his website.

$100M Gift Creates UVa Public Policy Dept.

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 12, 2007 in Business and UVa. 10 Comments

Frank Batten Sr. has given the university $100M to start a School of Leadership and Public Policy, UVa reports in a press release. It was just a few months ago that they announced their five-year masters of public policy program, making this a big step forward in very little time. I was surprised to learn a few years ago that UVa had no public policy department, something remarkable for its absence. They intend to hire a dean to start in the fall, and accept their first incoming class in the fall of 2009.

Call me slow to take a hint, but I’ll be applying to this program. I’d love to get a masters in public policy from the university.

Steephill Street: Accidental Public/Private Partnership

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 12, 2007 in General News. 8 Comments

In this week’s Hook, Lisa Provence writes about the apparent taking of private property by the city without ever actually taking it. They’ve taken over Steephill Street, despite that one of the owners of the private road, Louis Schultz, would like them to knock it off. From Schultz’s perspective, the city is treating it alternately as public property and private property, depending on what’s most convenient for them. It’s a strange problem.

Schultz raised this with Council last month, and sent me the full text of his comments, which I’ve included below. Disclaimer: Louis and I are old friends.

Continue reading ‘Steephill Street: Accidental Public/Private Partnership’

Nader on Local News

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 12, 2007 in Meta News. 2 Comments

Given the ongoing discussion about local TV news, it seems appropriate to reproduce a bit of Lindsay Barnes’ interview with Ralph Nader in The Hook, on the topic of public advocacy:

It’s going on all the time on the local level, but you don’t hear about it because of the deterioration of the local news. It’s a caricature now. There are probably only four minutes of actual news out of 30 minutes. Weather isn’t news unless you have got a hurricane. News is what’s going on the community: improving neighborhoods, what local businesses are doing. But they actually advertise the weather segment like you can’t get it anywhere else. They promote these weather correspondents as seers. There’s nothing funnier than watching the weather forecast when there’s six days of sunshine. They take the temperature in two towns that are two miles apart and say, “It was 59 in this town, but it was 60 over here!” It’d be tragic if it wasn’t funny.

Because I’m contractually obligated to do so at least once a year, I must mention here the really great analysis that Coy Barefoot provided of NBC-29’s coverage in C-Ville Weekly back in the late 90s. He watched something like a year of their evening news broadcasts and calculated precisely how much of each broadcast is dedicated to particular topics — weather, sports, and particular categories of news. It painted a pretty bleak picture. The article is, sadly, unavailable online. Maybe C-Ville will dig it up and put it online some day.

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