Feds review county DSS's translation services
Albemarle County’s Department of Social Services (DSS) is at risk of losing funding if it cannot comply with federal requirements to provide adequate language translation to
Federal FOIA suit filed against Army
Jayson Whitehead v. the United States Department of the Army is now official. More than a year and a half after filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the appraisal of Wendell Wood’s land that was sold to the Army in 2006, I have now had to sue in federal court. In late [...]
Would rebricking wreck or enhance Halprin design?
I have walked the Downtown Mall several times a day for the past year in my job at C-VILLE, but I have seldom noticed the disrepair of its 32-year-old bricks.
Lit scholar takes on Cartman, Bart and Captain Kirk
“Maybe I’ll wear my shades,” says Paul Cantor. The UVA English professor flips a set of clip-on sunglasses down over his regular frames and leans back in a black metal chair on the Downtown Mall. “I lead a double life.” While Cantor teaches on elitist seeming subjects like Homer and Shakespeare in a university setting, [...]
War Powers Commission makes recommendations
Just days after our war-mongering president came to Monticello, a commission established to address over-reaching like his has released its recommendations today.
City, stores clash over carts
Ten years ago, Dave Taylor opened the Read It Again, Sam used bookstore, and as a way of pulling in customers, he placed waist-high racks of paperback fiction outside his front door on the bricks of the Downtown Mall. “Twenty-five percent of my business is from the carts,” he says. A decade later, however, Taylor [...]
Budget efficiency studies all the rage
Last summer, the Albemarle County School Board contracted with the Commonwealth Educational Institute at Virginia Commonwealth University to conduct a “Resource Utilization Study” to make sure that the school division practices an efficient use of its resources. “In hindsight, it was brilliant,” says at-large School Board member Brian Wheeler of that decision. Five months later, [...]
Legal Aid forces cable company to investigate immigrant pay
Under pressure from immigrants rights groups including the Charlottesville-based Legal Aid Justice Center, the Internet and cable provider Verizon Communications announced yesterday that it might bar certain of its contractors from work if it finds they withheld pay from immigrant laborers who dug trenches for the company’s fiber optic cables in the Washington, D.C. area.
UVA hires new play-by-play announcer
UVA sports blogs are alive with the news of a new hire for play-by-play announcer. His name is Dave Koehn and he comes from the University of Vermont
Assault on vehicles on West Main Street leads to two felonies against three teens
According to a resident of W. Main Street, he was awakened Tuesday morning around 3 or 4 am by a police officer knocking on his door who then told him that his car was lit on fire.
Prof studies jail program
“Just because it sounds and feels good doesn’t mean it’s effective,” says Ross Carew. He is assistant director of Offender Aid and Restoration (OAR), a corrections and rehabilitation program for the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail, which has commissioned a UVA study of a recently added re-entry program. Previous coverage: Inmates prepare for life after jailFive women [...]
Water, sewer, gas and electric bills to rise
As the temperatures rise, so do our utilities. City Council decided June 16 (after C-VILLE went to press) whether to raise water rates by 5 percent while county residents’ rates will for sure go up almost 13 percent.
Special effects creator Stan Winston dead at 62
We are sad to announce the death of UVA grad Stan Winston, a renowned makeup, creature- and visual-effects wizard whose work on Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Jurassic Park earned him four Academy Awards. He died at the age of 62 from multiple myeloma.
Corner brawl between Hoffmans and UVA wrestlers nets two misdemeanor pleas
This time yesterday Jason Hoffman was sitting behind a table in Charlottesville’s circuit court listening to two attorneys discuss what happened to him one night last summer.
Woolen Mills on path to local historic district
On June 2, North Carolina resident Janet Leitch stood before Charlottesville’s City Council to speak about the historic seven-acre estate on East Market Street in the Woolen Mills neighborhood where she grew up. “I was going to write a letter but then just decided to come up,” she says. During the public comment period, Leitch [...]
Council picks interchange for MCP
As growth extends throughout the city and county, the roads around and through Charlottesville have become ever more crowded. To alleviate some of the congestion, area officials have moved forward with two controversial projects, the Meadowcreek Parkway (MCP) and Eastern Connector. Both would pass through a city park—McIntire and Pen parks, respectively. City Council held [...]
Staunton hospital violates civil rights of Spanish speaking patient
According to a press release from Legal Aid, Western State Hospital in Staunton has violated the civil rights of a Spanish-speaking mentally ill patient.
June 08: A generation of changes
In 1975, Nellysford native Frederick Pershing Phillips began work on a tiny shopping center right off Rte. 151 where he once ran a fruit stand, selling bushels of apples for $3. “I dug the foundation with a roto-tiller,” he says. “My uncle and I built the cinder-block, I helped a neighbor do the plumbing.” Four [...]
Charlottesville Dreamers move on and up
Financial advisor Chris Poe was a college student when he first heard of the I Have a Dream Foundation while watching a “60 Minutes” segment on the program, which started 20 years ago to help poor inner city kids with school and life. “I thought that would really be cool to do someday,” he says. [...]
Inmates prepare for life after jail
A little after 10am on a sunny May 30, five women in orange prison garb filed into a closed room in the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail for their graduation from a re-entry program.
UVA student makes game of murdering religous figures
A new videogame being developed by a UVA grad student allows the player to go back in time and stop the spread of two of the world’s major religions by killing its mythical creators.
Homeless take to street while city looks for solutions
According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), a chronically homeless person is “an unaccompanied disabled individual who has been continuously homeless for over one year.” There are certainly some of those in our area, people who have bottomed out for one reason or another and cannot get back up on their [...]
Hope homeless shelter shuts down for good
By the time (a little before 8pm) that I got to the Hope Community Center for its last night as an evening homeless shelter, the place was packed.
Charlottesville Fire Chief to head Homeland Security committee
Charlottesville Fire Chief Charles Werner has been elected the new chair for the Executive Committee of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Emergency Communications and Office for Interoperability and Compatibility.
Local farmers defend tax breaks
A week after the county Board of Supervisors decided to consider changing the land use tax program, local farmers are still distraught. Since 1975, Albemarle has granted landowners a tax deferral for a minimum of five acres that meets prescribed standards of agricultural use. Basically, the land must be used for the sale of crops [...]
Regulation headaches for local ice cream maker
Two years ago, Colin Steele and his wife thought they had conceived of the ideal product: ice cream made from all local products. Most important would be the use of milk straight from the cow. The business would be called A Perfect Flavor and would be customized ordering. That settled, Steele began to look into [...]
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UVA tennis ace wins back-to-back singles championships
While most folks were getting drunk in front of a grill, UVA’s Somdev Devvarman was kicking tennis tail, becoming only the fourth player in the last 50 years to win back-to-back NCAA men’s singles championships yesterday.