Fluvanna Blogger Wins Free Speech Case Against County

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 2, 2011 in Government and Law and Justice. 3 Comments

Blogger Brian Rothamel has won his lawsuit against Fluvanna County over his use of the county seal, Sharon Fitzgerald writes for the Daily Progress. He brought a suit against the county back in January, courtesy of the Rutherford Institute, after they adopted a law prohibiting anybody from using their seal for any reason. The ordinance appeared to have been passed specifically to prevent Rothamel from illustrating stories about county business with the seal on FlucoBlog. (In the first few years of this site, I displayed the Charlottesville seal as the icon for news related to city government, just as Rothamel was doing for Fluvanna government news.) Federal Judge Norman K. Moon issued an injuction against the county to prevent them from continuing to enforce the law, writing that “the deprivation of Rothamel’s First Amendment freedoms easily outweighs whatever burden the injunction imposes on the county.”

The Progress article doesn’t include any quotes from members of the Fluvanna Board of Supervisors. I certainly hope that somebody gets their respond on the record. The law was unconstitutional on its face, and now that they’ve been smacked down by a federal judge, they’ve got some explaining to do.

City School Board OKs Laptops for Students

Published by Waldo Jaquith on September 1, 2011 in Education. 23 Comments

The Charlottesville School Board has OK’d a $2.4M expenditure to buy two thousand tablet computers for students, Graham Moomaw writes in the Progress. These Fujitsu Stylistics aren’t tablets in the iPad sense, assuming the Progress’ photo is representative, but really just laptops with the screen permanently affixed to the back of the computers, with a tethered pen-like stylus in lieu of a mouse, and a wireless keyboard. The operating system is simply a modified version of Windows 7, and not a real tablet operating system. Reviews of what I think are the right model aren’t glowing [1, 2], but presumably the school system’s requirements are rather different than most reviewers’. The laptops will cost $768 apiece, and will show up in a few weeks. CHS students will get them in mid-October, with kids at Buford and Walker getting them in November.

Note that this was originally pitched as a $500,000–$1,000,000 project back in February, a number that the school system was presenting as “below $1 million” in May.

Officer Texting Before Hitting Wheelchair-Bound Man

Published by Waldo Jaquith on August 29, 2011 in Crime, Government and Law and Justice. 8 Comments

Remember Gerry Mitchell—the wheelchair-bound AIDS survivor who was ticketed by Charlottesville Police after he was hit by an Albemarle Police cruiser in late 2007? (He was ticketed in the hospital, since he’d been hospitalized with his injuries.) Charges of jaywalking were dropped a couple of weeks later, and a few weeks after that, video of the incident was made public. Mitchell sued police for negligence, malicious prosecution, and intentional infliction of emotional distress in June of 2009, and that was the last news in the matter.

It turns out that the police officer behind the wheel was engaged in “excessive texting” immediately prior to hitting Mitchell, Courteney Stuart writes for The Hook. That information came out as a result of the civil suit. Officer Gregory C. Davis obfuscated this information back in August 2009, early in the lawsuit, disclosing only that “[o]n another occasion I was found to have used my cell phone excessively,” without calling up that occasion came immediately prior to his hitting Mitchell.

What hasn’t been established here is whether the officer was texting at the very moment that he hit Mitchell—that is, whether it’s actually the cause of the accident. Note, too, that § 46.2-1078.1 of the Virginia Code prohibits texting while driving, but it doesn’t apply here because a) wasn’t law until a year and a half after the incident and b) has an exemption for “the operator of any emergency vehicle.”

Did We Dodge a Bullet with Lake Anna?

Published by Waldo Jaquith on August 23, 2011 in General News. 19 Comments

The story of Dominion’s Lake Anna nuclear plant is now an international one, with media outlets around the world writing about the apparent narrow escape that we made from serious trouble as a result of today’s earthquake. (For example, here’s a Reuters piece.) The quake turns out to have been the biggest one in Virginia in at least a century, and the biggest one to hit the east coast in 67 years, since a 5.9 in New York during WWII. That apparently lulled regulators into figuring that big quakes are uncommon enough that they’re not worth worrying about when building a nuclear power plant, since Dominion spokesman Jim Norvelle said in March that the plant was designed to withstand a magnitude 5.9–6.1 earthquake. We had a 5.8. In today’s Reuters article, Dominion is already upping that number, with Norvelle now saying that “the plant was designed to withstand an earthquake of up to 6.2 in magnitude.” An MIT engineering professor is quoted as saying that “the size of the vibrations from this East Coast earthquake are probably less than you would feel in a loud nightclub”—obviously this man has either never been in a 5.8 earthquake or he’s never been in a nightclub—by way of defending the structural integrity of nuclear power plants, but it’s Dominion who’s saying that this earthquake was just barely within the design limits of their plant, and it’s hard to imagine why they’d make up a story like that.

For some perspective, here’s the location of the epicenter of the initial quake relative to the location of the nuclear power plant:

Complicating things, there are interest groups on both sides. The energy industry is sure to want to present this as no problem whatsoever. (Recall the Tokyo Electric Power Company insisting this spring that everything was A-OK with the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, even as it was clear to everybody that it had melted down fully and become extremely dangerous.) Some environmental groups are sure to want to present this as being a clear danger, a canary in the coal mine, and that an earthquake at any moment could send a cloud of deadly radiation across central Virginia. In the middle of this all of us who actually live here, caught between competing narratives. Keep some potassium iodide on hand—always a good idea when living near a nuclear power plant—and try to take all of this with a grain of salt.

Defeated Democrat Running for Clerk as Independent

Published by Waldo Jaquith on August 23, 2011 in Politics. 15 Comments

Pam Melampy, who came in third in Saturday’s three-way Democratic nomination race for Clerk of Court, is running in the general election anyway, Graham Moomaw reports for the Daily Progress. Melampy got 12% of the vote in the firehouse primary. In order to run for the Democratic nomination, Melampy had to promise that she wouldn’t support any opponent of the nominee—Llezelle Dugger, as it turned out—a promise that she’s clearly decided to ignore. (Such an agreement is in no way legally binding, and is simply intended to place people’s reputations on the line to prevent them from doing exactly this.) Dugger had been without a challenger in the general election, but Melampy’s last-minute filing with the State Board of Elections—today was the deadline—means that there will be a race after all.

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