City Council has voted unanimously to fund an $80,000 program to establish “Downtown Mall ambassadors,” Graham Moomaw writes for the Daily Progress. That’ll pay for four seasonal employees to provide directions to tourists, perform light maintenance, and other small tasks…but the real impetus is to try to deal with the ongoing problem of aggressive, apparently coordinated panhandlers. City police were trying to get the funding to increase police presence in response to panhandlers, but council balked at the price tag. Not being police, it’s not clear that these new folks will have the power to do anything at all. Council regards this as an experiment, one that they’ll evaluate the success of next summer.
cvillenews.com
News and meta-news about Charlottesville, VA, since 2001.
Twenty months after he took the job as Charlottesville City Manager, Maurice Jones has bought a house in town, Graham Moomaw writes for the Daily Progress. A requirement for the position of city manager is that, after accepting the position, the manager must move into the city limits. Recognizing the realities of what goes into moving and selling a home, that doesn’t have to be done instantly, but instead within one year. Jones, like many folks in the area, is underwater on his Earlysville home—he paid $393,000 for it in 2006, and now it’s worth just $315,000, making it impossible to sell without ponying up $78,000 to the bank. Jones said he had a tough time finding a buyer, so Council gave him an extension to allow him twenty months, rather than the previous twelve.
Jones has taken early possession—a week before the formal closing—of a house in Greenbrier, just as his time elapsed. The house requires renovation, though, and won’t be habitable for a few months, so while Jones does now own a house in the city, he won’t be sleeping in the city until later this year. Council members tell Moomaw that they’re satisfied with Jones’s progress, and consider him in compliance with his contractual requirements.
Four people were killed in a shooting in the sleepy hamlet of Stony Point last night, NBC-29 reports, under conditions that remain wholly unclear. A 911 call was received at 11:43 PM from a small rental house across the street from Stony Point Elementary School from a gunshot victim. That person died in the hospital a short time later. Police say that this is an isolated incident, and that there’s no threat to the community or the school, but aren’t identifying a suspect. Given the lack of manhunt or a story of an arrest, one must assume the suspect is among the dead.
5:00 PM Update: C-Ville Weekly editor Giles Morris reports that the dead include Elizabeth Walton and her three children, and that Walton was an employee of C-Ville Weekly. An e-mail from Albemarle High School identifies two of the victims as eighth-grader Andrew Romando and eleventh-grader Lily Romando, while Morris names the third as Noah Romando. According to Noah Romando’s Facebook profile, he’s an employee of Harris Teeter, a student at Piedmont Virginia Community College, and a 2011 graduate of AHS. Elizabeth Walton had just gotten married in June, and started working for C-Ville Weekly in April. There is not yet word on who was the shooter and who were the victims.
08/30 Update: Police believe that 19-year-old Noah Romando is responsible for the death of his family, Courteney Stuart reports for The Hook. Stuart documents a trail of online evidence that leads to him describing himself as a Satanist, which surely wouldn’t explain his actions, but it would start to paint a picture of what lead up to the death of this family.
Charlottesville Tomorrow isn’t the only local media outlet with a new website—C-Ville Weekly has also had a total overhaul, complete with a new CMS. The weekly long had a custom CMS that had become awfully restrictive, but they’ve replaced it with a WordPress-based site (that’s what cvillenews.com has run on for many years) with Disqus-based commenting. Using a standard platform will make it easy for them to add new features, stay current with emerging technologies, and ultimately integrate it into their document workflow. (The Bangor Daily News has a famously amazing document workflow, which is entirely open sourced, that makes it a snap for their articles to flow both into their print layout tool and their WordPress-based website.) WordPress is liable to serve them well for years to come.
The one catch of the new website—and it’s a big one—is that they’ve failed to redirect their old URLs to their new URLs. That is, all of their old stories are still on the website, but every link on the web to every one of those stories is now broken. Here’s hoping that they have a plan to deal with that. There are some other bugs and oddities still to be resolved, but that’s just how it goes with a new website.
Sideblog
Police announced this afternoon that their investigation into what was initially believed to be a fatal fire on Rugby Avenue is now a homicide investigation. #
The Virginia Supreme Court has denied George Huguely’s appeal. His second-degree murder conviction will stand, WRIC reports. #
In a carefully worded story, and not citing specific sources, WTVR reports that forensic evidence belonging to Jesse Matthew Jr., the main suspect in the disappearance of Hannah Graham, matches forensic evidence collected during the investigation of Morgan Harrington’s 2009 murder. #
In the wake of Hannah Graham’s disappearance, and the evidence that came from private security footage, city officials are revisiting the question of installing security cameras on the downtown mall. #
Both Charlottesville Registrar Sheri Iachetta and former Electoral Board member Stephanie Commander have turned themselves in to the police on
foursix and four felony counts of embezzlement, respectively. #Ten years ago, the National Institutes of Health budget doubled and schools like the University of Virginia built massive new research facilities. A decade later, those buildings remain largely underutilized. NPR visits UVA in this story on the effect of federal binge and spurge spending in the sciences. #
In 2012, Council approved a new student housing complex on West Main—now some council members are questioning whether what they were shown matches what was built. #
The Architectural Review Board has approved a bike-themed mural on West Market, below the McGuffey Art Center, although at least one member expressed concerns that it might look like the bicyclists were riding away from Charlottesville’s downtown. #
City Police Chief Tim Longo is meeting with city leaders to work on protocols regarding the use of military surplus police weapons in Charlottesville. #
A 100-year-old Colonnades resident received military honors for her service in the WWII Women’s Army Corps #
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