Loud and Clear Nikuyah Walker begins a second two-year term as mayor of Charlottesville, after being re-elected at the January 6 City Council meeting. Councilors Michael Payne and Sena Magill voted for Walker, while Lloyd Snook and Heather Hill (who made her own bid for mayor) abstained. Hill opened the meeting with an impassioned speech […]
Priorities Weeks after self-appointed Confederate monument defenders began monitoring downtown parks, city police arrested two Charlottesville residents for allegedly vandalizing the Stonewall Jackson statue in Court Square in the wee hours of the morning of December 19. Nic McCarthy-Rivera and former C-VILLE writer Jesse Tobias Beard have been charged with misdemeanor trespassing and felony vandalism. […]
On Monday night, City Council took another step in its plan to tear down Guadalajara and Lucky 7 and build an $8.5 million, 300-car parking garage on Market Street, just a few blocks from an existing parking garage . The move is part of a larger project to keep the county courts downtown, in which […]
Rain check Planning Commission delays form-based code proposal After much debate, the City Planning Commission has decided to table its plans to introduce an alternative kind of zoning, called form-based code, to the city’s Strategic Investment Area south of downtown. Unlike conventional [...]
By Spencer Philps Spend enough time on the Downtown Mall late at night and you’re bound to see it happen: someone hunched over against a wall “relieving” himself. Downtown business operators are acutely aware of this issue: One says he’s seen people urinating late at night, by the bus station [...]
Who’s suing whom In advance of the two-year statute of limitations, a flurry of lawsuits have been filed stemming from the events of August 12, 2017, adding to several that are ongoing. Having a hard time keeping up with who’s a defendant and who’s a plaintiff? Here’s a primer: Sines v. [...]
Tour de force For the past couple of years, Jalane Schmidt, UVA professor and activist, and Andrea Douglas, Jefferson School African American Heritage Center director, have been conducting tours of our downtown monuments, providing new context for the Confederate statues that have long [...]
In the end, the 57th District race pitting a millennial and a baby boomer for the open House of Delegates seat wasn’t even close. Thirty-year-old Sally Hudson crushed two-term City Councilor Kathy Galvin with 66 percent of the vote in the June 11 primary. The same dynamic played out in the [...]
Former Charlottesville mayor Maurice Cox, now Detroit’s director of planning and development, talks about managing growth, recovering from a crisis, and the power of telling the right story. There was a time when Maurice Cox couldn’t escape being recognized in Charlottesville. In August 2012, [...]
Over graduation weekend, Fry’s Spring resident Chris Meyer rented his house for a “ridiculous amount of money to someone from California,” he said at City Council May 20. He appeared before council to complain about the difficulty he encountered in getting the proper city permits and in trying [...]
Truth in scheduling: Progress joins City v. Civilian Review Board fray A Daily Progress reporter was a topic of discussion during public comment at the May 6 City Council meeting, following Nolan Stout’s story earlier that day that police Chief RaShall Brackney’s calendar seemed to contradict [...]
For some, it came as a shock when City Councilor Wes Bellamy announced yesterday that he would not run for re-election, especially considering his public remarks the week before that made it sound otherwise. At his March 20 Virginia Festival of the Book event with former New Orleans mayor Mitch [...]
It’s budget season. For four months every year, council and staff hold public meetings about the coming year’s priorities. For four months, I sit through what I am absolutely certain is the exact same PowerPoint at least a dozen times. Much of it remains inscrutable to me. I am growing [...]
Affordable housing is a priority for Charlottesville, and to pay for that in its $188 million budget, the city proposes raising the meals tax, an idea restaurant owners traditionally hate. The 1 percent increase on the current 5 percent meals tax adds 10 cents to a $10 meal and would raise $2.4 [...]
I had lived in Charlottesville for 10 years almost to the day before I saw the inside of City Council chambers. I’d paid my gas bill in person once or twice. I think I bought a trash sticker in 2012. But I’d never even been upstairs at City Hall before. If you’d asked me at […]
A few years ago, Molly Conger was just your average Charlottesville resident who, to be honest, didn’t pay much attention to politics. Now she’s got more than 20,000 Twitter followers hanging on her moment-by-moment reports on local government meetings, which she’s been live-tweeting since [...]
John Hall has run for City Council before. He’s also been banned from City Hall back in the early aughts because of behavior that caused then-city manager Gary O’Connell concern, such as showing up at City Council wrapped in foil, according to former councilor Rob Schilling. Hall [...]
Around 100 of Charlottesville’s Democratic establishment packed Bashir’s January 15 for defense attorney Lloyd Snook’s launch into the race for City Council. Snook cited “dysfunction at the top” of city government as the impetus for joining the race. “There are things that are going on in the [...]
It wasn’t your typical launch party. Supporters of local activists Don Gathers and Michael Payne gathered at Kardinal Hall January 8 for the official tossing of the hats into this year’s City Council races. But Gathers made a different kind of announcement: A doctor’s visit three hours earlier [...]
Perriello’s Sierra Leone rescue A desperate mother needed to get her 5-year-old daughter out of Sierra Leone in 2003, and asked a stranger at the airport to take her child to her grandmother in the U.S. Fifteen years later, Zee Sesay learned that the man who brought her daughter to safety was [...]
In the wake of recent U.N. and U.S. government reports on the catastrophic environmental damage already attributable to climate change, the City of Charlottesville has been challenged to divest from investments in the fossil fuels industry. Local activist Michael Payne proposed several steps [...]
Former Charlottesville police chief Al Thomas may have left last year, but it hasn’t stopped him from collecting a paycheck. Although the city said in December that Thomas’ retirement would be “effective immediately,” it turns out, as first reported by WINA’s Rob Schilling, that Thomas has [...]
County boots Trump chicken Albemarle County said the state of emergency declared for the August 11-12 weekend was still in effect after Indivisible Charlottesville brought an inflatable chicken with a Trump-like coif to its August 28 Flip the 5th demonstration in front of the County Office [...]