BoS Takes a Turn to the Right

Published by Waldo Jaquith on January 11, 2010 in Business. 14 Comments

The Board of Supervisors is already taking a sharp turn to the right under its new conservative majority, Brandon Shulleeta wrote in yesterday’s Daily Progress. Saying that the county is insufficiently friendly to businesses, they passed a resolution in support of a six-point action plan, apparently based on the recent campaign promises of Duane Snow and Rodney Thomas, that includes making economic development “the top fiscal priority” for the county, directing county staff to work with the Chamber of Commerce, a private pro-business organization, “to develop a plan…to significantly increase non-personal tax revenues…[without] increased taxes to our business community.” (Charlottesville Tomorrow provides an account of the meeting, complete with audio.) The resolution passed along ideological lines, with Ann Mallek and Dennis Rooker dissenting.

As evidence of the county’s anti-business attitude, local developer Wendell Wood complains that the county wouldn’t approve the development of a new Walmart directly next to the existing Walmart, a project that would have required spending $25M to build a bridge across the Rivanna River just to be able to get to it, and it would have meant rezoning Wood’s functionally worthless rural Hollymead land into super-valuable commercial land, basically handing him millions of dollars in land value. Wood laments the loss of the $9M that Walmart was prepared to put up to defray the cost, but no word on where the other $16M was supposed to come from. Supervisor Ken Boyd says that he wants to reconsider providing that giveaway to Wood. Which would appear to be exactly the opposite of the stated goal of reducing taxes. Elections have consequences, and a more conservative BoS is perfectly sensible, but this is the kind of stuff that gives politicians a bad name.

Terry Sullivan Named as UVA President

Published by Waldo Jaquith on January 11, 2010 in UVa. 22 Comments

The UVA Board of Visitors has named Teresa A. Sullivan the new president of the university. The sixty-year-old woman is currently the Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where she’s been since 2006. From 1975-2006, she taught sociology in various capacities at the University of Texas at Austin, with four years in there spent teaching the same thing at the University of Chicago. Her particular expertise is on labor demography, a topic on which she’s published many papers. She has no prior connection to the university, making her the first such president of the school since the very first president, Edwin A. Alderman, who took office in 1904. 10:45 PM Update: Also, Bob O’Neill also had no prior connection.

There were a great many candidates whose names were bandied around in the past couple of days, some reasonable (e.g., Gene Block, Ed Ayers), some just bizarre (e.g., Condoleeza Rice). But “Terry Sullivan” was not a name that anybody uttered—nobody saw this coming. One note about today’s announcement: It came during the winter break, a time when students and teaching faculty are away from the university, on a day when even President Casteen is out of town. It’s an odd bit of timing, which may be coincidental, or it may have been deliberate.

President John Casteen will end his twenty-year run as president on July 31; Sullivan starts the next day.

Disclaimer: I work in the president’s office, but obviously I’m not writing here in that capacity.

Biscuit Run Questions

Published by Waldo Jaquith on January 10, 2010 in Business. 6 Comments

Edgar, a local investor, e-mailed me three questions that local media outlets ought to be asking about Biscuit Run:

  1. Did the original Biscuit Run owners get paid in full?
  2. Did Hunter ever really sign a deal with Ryan Homes, or was that just talk to sell shares?
  3. Does the bank involved—at least the one bank that has been identified—have a lien on the property for the loan, and if so, how can someone “donate” land to the state if a lien is on it, unless the state or Hunter or someone has made some collateral guarantee to the bank?

I’m not smart enough to know how to get answers to these questions, but here’s hoping that somebody does. There might be a story here.

The Future of Charlottesville Print Media

Published by Waldo Jaquith on January 5, 2010 in Business, Meta News and Site News. 10 Comments

I’m trying something new here—taking a cvillenews.com discussion into a real, physical forum. In an event held jointly with Left of Center in one week’s time at Rapture. Here’s the promotional blurb:

News media across the country are collapsing. After recent staff cuts, furloughs and the shutdown of local printing for The Daily Progress, will Media General be doing more downsizing? Can we support four TV stations? Two weeklies? Will blogs replace all of them? What about the partnership between the non-profit Charlottesville Tomorrow and the Daily Progress, being watched nationally as a possible future model for local news?

University of Virginia media studies professor Bruce Williams will give a historical overview of how changing “media regimes” in the U.S. have impacted political communication and civil society, and how the recent “broadcast era” may have been an anomaly in the larger sweep of American history. Then we’ll talk about what the future holds with Charlottesville Tomorrow’s Sean Tubbs, Daily Progress assistant city editor Josh Barney, and Hook editor Hawes Spencer.

Free appetizers and socializing (with a cash bar) from 7 to 7:30 p.m precedes a panel discussion and introduction to the issue. Then we open the floor to audience questions. Come join the discussion.

RSVP on Facebook so we’ll know you’re coming (or, if you’re not down with Facebook, you can RSVP here or, hey, just show up). Though it was tempting to include broadcast media, we’ve deliberately focused primarily on print media, in order to prevent the discussion from being too broad and shallow—sorry, broadcast folks. Next time.

Tuesday, January 12, 7:00 PM, Rapture. I hope you’ll come.

Biscuit Run State Park

Published by Waldo Jaquith on December 30, 2009 in Development and Government. 80 Comments

It’s official: Biscuit Run is now a state park. That’s 1,200 acres, just south of Charlottesville, to be preserved as a state park indefinitely. If I had a bottle of champagne, I’d pop the cork right now. The paperwork has been filed, the deed has been filed at the courthouse, and Governor Tim Kaine will be here to make the official announcement in a couple of weeks, during the last days of his administration. The conversion to parkland will save county and state government $222M, making this a sort of a financial windfall, insofar as it prevents us from spending a whole lot of money that we would have needed to spend had the planned housing development gone in.

But don’t start tramping around in the woods just yet. The state still needs to figure out what to do with it, build out whatever facilities need to be created, get it staffed, etc. There’s no word on how long that will take, but presumably Governor Kaine will address that in his remarks here on January 8.

12:50 AM Update: Brian Wheeler provides lots of great details over at Charlottesville Tomorrow. The important bit is that the state is paying $9.8M for this land, using money from a 2002 voter-approved bond to buy more park land and from federal funding for land acquisition, and (former) owner Hunter Craig will work out tax credits with the Virginia Department of Taxation.

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