Western Bypass Bids a Rorschach Test

Published by Waldo Jaquith on May 11, 2012 in Government, Taxes and Transportation. 7 Comments Tags: .

The construction bids are in for the Western Bypass, Sean Tubbs writes for Charlottesville Tomorrow, but it’s not yet clear whether they’re good news, or bad. Seven bids were submitted, ranging from $136M to $214M, all of which exceed the $125.6M budget. A Virginia Department of Transportation spokesman says that they’re all within the entire $139M design-build budget, but Tubbs points out that pretends that none of that additional $13.4M engineering budget has been spent when, in fact, $9.3M of it had already been spent as of June 17 of last year. That seems to make it pretty clear that all of these bids are beyond the state’s financial means, unless VDOT chooses to allocate additional funding to the project.

The Commonwealth Transportation Board is scheduled to name the winning bidder of the design-build contract on June 20, which is also when the public will be able to see the design that was submitted.

Council Passes Pro-Marijuana Resolution

Published by Waldo Jaquith on May 8, 2012 in Government and Politics. 6 Comments Tags: , .

Last night, City Council passed a resolution memorializing the General Assembly to decriminalize marijuana, Lisa Provence writes in The Hook. The resolution was originally also to instruct the Charlottesville Police not to enforce the state law prohibiting possession, but that bit was stricken, leaving it only as a comparatively toothless request to the legislature. It passed on a 3–2 vote, with Mayor Satyendra Huja and Kathy Galvin opposing it.

Chain Store Selling at City Market

Published by Waldo Jaquith on May 5, 2012 in Agriculture. 182 Comments

The Great Harvest chain has set up shop at the City Market, Graham Moomaw writes in the Daily Progress, and that’s got some local farmers upset. The market, overseen by the city, is meant to connect customers with local food producers, and over 100 folks have their names on a waiting list to get a spot at the popular weekly event. The Great Harvest Bread Company is a Montana-based chain, with hundreds of locations across the United States, established on a philosophy of providing more local control to franchisees than most chains. The city says that they were not aware that Great Harvest was a chain, although it’s not clear what difference that would have made in the application process. The owner of the local franchise says that there’s nothing wrong with allowing chains into the farmers’ market, while a couple of critics argue that, by that logic, Subway or Panera could set up shop there.

This debate has unfolded at farmers’ markets across the country, with some markets remaining dedicated to selling local produce, and others turning into something closer to weekly open-air markets for chains. Which approach is better depends on what each community thinks that the purpose of a farmers’ market is. We may be about to find out what the purpose of our farmers’ market is.

Progress Editor Leaving for UVA

Published by Waldo Jaquith on May 4, 2012 in Business and Meta News. 7 Comments Tags: .

McGregor McCance, managing editor of the Daily Progress for seven years, is becoming the latest employee of the paper to depart for UVA. McCance is going to work for university spokeswoman Carol Wood.(Note that the position of managing editor is the top editorial position at the Progress—there is nobody with the title of, simply, “editor.”) Today was McCance’s last day. The Progress doesn’t yet have a replacement for McCance.

City Recommitting to Bypass’s 35 MPH Limit

Published by Waldo Jaquith on April 22, 2012 in Transportation. 36 Comments

With a study supporting the 35 MPH speed limit on parts of the 250 Bypass, City Council intends to keep it there, Megan Davis writes for the Waynesboro News Virginian. (No, I don’t understand, either. Let’s chalk that up to a production error.) The study found that while most people are going faster, it also found that the lack of sufficient space for acceleration and slowing down necessitates the seemingly unreasonably slow speed limit. The westbound stretch after McIntire, in particular, is what strikes a lot of people as unreasonably slow until it hits 45 MPH just before the firehouse. (Councilor Dave Norris is one of those people.) Council intends to pass an ordinance restating that speed limit. All of this came about after a half dozen people appealed tickets for speeding, who argued that the limit is unreasonably low and was set in 1967 without a necessary study to demonstrate cause for it to be set so low.

Sideblog