By Will Goldsmith, Cathy Harding and Meg McEvoy
Oh-six was a year of contradictions and confounded assumptions. The Republican incumbent who was supposed to be unbeatable for the Senate enacted his own Chernobyl-like meltdown; “affordable housing,” the presumed cause du jour, turned into a dictionary game (what defines “affordable,” anyway?); the University that’s on a crack-like construction binge sat by while developers and government fought over how to shelter its students; a trash can arsonist faced 10 years in jail while a drunken killer walked after less than three. These developments and more were enough to make the seasoned news junkie wonder if she’d lost her grip on reality. Nope, it really was that nutty! Here’s a look at those and other stories from C-VILLE’s four weekly newsbeats—Government, UVA, Development, and Courts & Crime—the kind of stories that will make us happy to see 2006 ride off into the sunset.
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GOVERNMENT
Between Macacawitz, government-endorsed gay bashing and nuclear power that environmentalists love, in 2006, politics were like something ripped out of the pages of The Onion
And the horse he rode in on
Nationwide, Republicans seemed to be engaged in an internal race to see who could fall the hardest fastest. While Randy “Duke” Cunningham and Mark Foley got help from dirty lobbyists and fellow politicians who kept their sex secrets, the junior Senator from Virginia mangled his career all on his own.
At the start of the year, George Allen was untouchable. Not only did pundits foresee an easy re-election to the Senate for the former governor, they volleyed his name around as a possible presidential candidate in 2008. And why not? Like Dubya before him, Allen’s career has benefited from other people’s low expectations. He might have seemed, on camera, like he was sacked one too many times during his QB days at UVA, but he was said to have, in person, the kind of vapid charisma that plays well in the primaries.
Aah, if only he hadn’t opened his mouth to speak. An ill-judged comment made at a campaign rally on August 11 marked the beginning of the end for Allen. “Let’s give a welcome to macaca here,” Allen urged the crowd, referring to NoVa native S.R. Sidarth, who was videotaping the event for Allen’s Democratic challenger Jim Webb. “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia,” he continued to the UVA student, a man of Indian descent.
If the force of the insult was temporarily obscured by Allen’s nativist assumptions that a dark-skinned person might be in need of a welcome to “the real world of Virginia,” Allen’s political foes clarified the matter quickly. Macaca, it turned out, is not a “made-up word” as Allen insisted on “Meet the Press” following the incident (for which he eventually apologized). It is a French term commonly used in French-speaking North African countries. It refers to a genus of monkey and as people of color know when they hear it, it is not meant to flatter. How did Allen chance across this obscure racial epithet? His mother Etty was raised in Tunisia. She spoke French regularly around the house, and is presumably the source of Allen’s polyglot training.
It’s conceivable that Allen could have wrenched his way out of that gaffe—if he could have convinced people that it was just a one-off slip of the tongue. But faster than you can say Swift Boat Veterans, Webb’s forces (and loads of other people who just didn’t want a racist in the Senate, for some strange reason) helped accounts of Allen’s longstanding racial insensitivity to resurface. The noose hanging from the ficus tree in his Charlottesville law office; the Confederate flag displayed on the wall in a cabin near his place in Earlysville; his alleged spouting of the “N” word while playing football at UVA. Then there was his legislative record: He was the only delegate to oppose a holiday honoring Martin Luther King, and as governor he declared April to be Confederate History and Heritage Month. No number of “ethnic rallies” (a rainbow event staged by his camp in the post-macaca weeks to reconfirm Allen’s commitment to all races) could obscure Allen’s checkered past.
By the time he lost his cool over revelations that his mother is Jewish and fumbled his response (…”she was, as far as I know, raised as a Christian”), the race that had been Allen’s to lose was, in fact, lost.
Suddenly Webb was in the money and Virginia, once assuredly red, was in play.
On November 7, the voters sent Allen packing. In the past few weeks, he’s hinted that he might saddle up and run for office again. Good luck. The tarnish on Allen’s spurs is not, we hope, the kind that just washes clean.
Indeed, politics make strange bedfellows
It seems Dominion Virginia Power has found a way to be friends with everybody. On the one hand, there’s the Bush Administration, which in August 2005 enacted an energy bill that would kick millions of dollars to the nuclear energy industry with an aim of adding to the nation’s 103 nuclear power plants (two of which are operated by Dominion on Lake Anna, 30 miles from Charlottesville). The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, meanwhile, has made it easier to get permits for new nuclear plants—and Dominion is out front, hoping to double its pleasure in Louisa. On the other hand, there’s Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace. He’s a member of the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition, which, funded by a pro-nukes lobbying group, was launched in April of this year to promote nuclear power. Nuclear supporters and proto-environmentalists lining up behind the same cause? Even Bono couldn’t pull that one off.
The reasons for the mutual support are not so baffling. Simply, they start with “e” and end with “missions.” (Or, they start with “m” and end with “oney.”) The U.S. derives 50 percent of its energy from coal; as Moore, the former Greenpeacer points out, the nation’s 600 coal-fired plants produce 10 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Nuclear power does not produce air pollution, ergo nuclear energy “is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power.”
But the People’s Alliance for Clean Energy is not buying it. At public meetings in Louisa during the summer, they questioned why other options, besides more nukes, were getting no attention—things like increased efficiency and renewable energy sources. Going into 2007, we suggest you keep your third eye focused on this issue.
When citizens persist
Sure, we’re all for government access—but is it necessary for citizens to be so…irritating? (JK, folks, JK!!)
Seriously, one benefit of small-town life is that every voice can be heard. This year, like others before it, citizens groups stepped up to the mic.
Concerned that Region Ten, a nonprofit agency that gives support services to the mentally impaired, would erect a de facto group home without going through necessary zoning and planning channels, the Little High Area Neighborhood Association got vocal. Their complaints (to planning commissioners at City Council meetings) ultimately exposed some administrative disarray at Region Ten. Outspokenness aside, at the end of the day Region Ten was found to be in compliance with planning regulations, leaving the agency free to finish the project that will ultimately house 40 adults in low-income apartments. Though things didn’t go t
he way the neighbors might have hoped, they were gracious in defeat. In a statement following the ruling by the City Board of Zoning Appeals LHANA President Mark Haskins wrote, “Our dispute has been with Region Ten’s administration and planning of [the project]…not with the clients the project is intended to serve. Our neighborhood remains committed to welcoming all residents regardless of disability.”
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city, the Woolen Mills neighbors went all multimedia on government’s ass when, in September, aggravated by the truck traffic on Franklin Street, resident Bill Emory played a tape of truck noise during a City Council meeting. Mayor David Brown was not amused. Feeling riled by the effect of trucks accessing E. Market Street from Franklin, the neighbors had appealed to Council to pass an ordinance that would have prohibited truck traffic on Franklin. (Some residents living in the area of the Carlton Mobile Home Park weren’t crazy about the proposed truck ban, saying it would simply transfer traffic to their part of the neighborhood.) Eventually, the E. Market crowd and H.T. Ferron Concrete Co., the source of the trucks, arrived at a compromise involving increased signage along the route, saving Council the trouble of voting on an ordinance.
That’s not the only accomplishment of the outspoken Woolen Mills crowd. Under pressure from neighbors who are sick of the poopy stench, in November the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority announced that effective February 1 it will cease treating what are euphemistically known as biosolids in its Moores Creek wastewater plant, which abuts the neighborhood. Phew! That was close—we were starting to get worried about what neighborhood activists would next bring to City Council in order to make a point.
People don’t discriminate against people, governments do
Of course, there are times we really don’t want to hear from the citizenry. Such as when they’re loco enough to alter the founding documents of state government so as to reinforce bias against others. We speak of the Marshall-Newman Amendment, a referendum that passed in November with an astonishing 57 percent of the vote. The good news locally is that Charlottesville voted against the so-called marriage amendment by 77 percent; the comparable figure in Albemarle was 59 percent.
The Code of Virginia already makes gay people second-class citizens, and that same document outlaws civil unions or anything that rings matrimonial between same-sex couples. But supporters felt an amendment was needed to the State Constitution restricting the definition of marriage to “one man and one woman.” Constitutional scholars—and people of common sense—criticized the move to graft onto a governing document as important as the Constitution something as temporary as social policy. Moreover, as the amendment speaks of “unmarried individuals,” legal scholars, such as A.E. Dick Howard (the UVA law prof known as the father of Virginia’s modern Constitution) worried that such language would limit the existing legal rights of all unmarried couples to own a house together, make life decisions for each other or find protection under domestic violence laws.
“Today’s views about marriage and same-sex marriage may not be tomorrow’s views,” Howard told C-VILLE in advance of the vote. “This is a Jeffersonian principle, that each generation should decide for itself what public policy should be. ‘The earth belongs to the living generation’ was his language. And this amendment tries to freeze policy of the moment into the Constitution so that the next generation would have its hands tied.”
Bound? Gagged? Is this the course of civil rights in Virginia? If so, load up the wagon, kids! Next stop: Massachusetts!
People don’t ignore the pressing issues of their time, governments do
Recently addressing a crowd of young Democrats, freshman Delegate David Toscano summed up the 2006 legislative session in Richmond this way: “House Republican discipline.” We tend to think of discipline as a positive trait—like pushing away from the table before the third round of apple pie gets passed around at Christmas dinner. But the kind of obstinacy the House Republicans evidenced this year is a breed apart.
No tax increases, they vowed. Period. No matter that Virginians are spending ever more time in their cars sacrificing the quality of their lives to stalled traffic on crappy roads that were obsolete almost the minute they were built. Though Senate Republicans (and Democrats from both chambers of the Assembly) were willing to raise taxes to address transportation issues, the discipline of House Republicans led to gridlock—oops—deadlock. Democratic Governor Tim Kaine could do little to break the impasse, which led to the second-longest Assembly session in history. In September, the session officially came to a close with—you guessed it—no resolution on transportation.
The General Assembly reconvenes on January 10 for what should be a 46-day session. Considering that all 140 seats are up for election come November, and considering that commuters have had enough, it’s possible that no-tax Republicans will have to learn to blend discipline with another great virtue—flexibility.
UVA
With chartered restructuring taking effect, the year saw unprecedented confusion over whether one of the nation’s top public universities is even, like, public anymore. Whatever. It’s getting bigger, richer and even more unbeatable at lacrosse, not to mention brickier.
 Show me the money, Mr. Postman: UVA needs $1 million a day to keep up with their goals for the $3 billion capital campaign. |
Size matters
If higher ed were a Big Mac value meal, this year UVA said, “Supersize me” in more ways than one. First of all, the John—or the Jack, or the JPJ, whatever you want to call it—the John Paul Jones Arena, which opened August 1, is big. The 15,000+-seat, 366,000-square- foot arena includes 20 luxury suites, 175 TV monitors, 350 restrooms and an adjacent hall of fame and sports museum, making the $130 million arena one of the largest in the ACC and certainly the biggest music venue in Virginia.
The fact that you can practically see the John from space hasn’t escaped the notice of booking agents, either. The arena brought such crowd-pleasing acts as Dave Matthews Band (to whom the contrast in Charlottesville venues must have been quite apparent), James Taylor, Eric Clapton, WWE “Monday Night Raw” and Larry the Cable Guy. Despite the construction of only 1,500 new parking spaces, getting butts in seats hasn’t been a problem so far.
Even bigger, metaphorically, at least, was the launch of UVA’s $3 billion (that’s beeeellion) capital campaign, dubbed The Campaign for the University. Officially kicked off by the Board of Visitors on September 29, the launch weekend included lots of pomp and ceremony at the JPJ and the dashing smiles of the football Barber brothers, whose donations of a million dollars apiece seemed almost…quaint.
President John T. Casteen III has pledged to remain at the University at least until the campaign is completed in 2011, and has left no doubt about the campaign’s goals. “We’ve committed ourselves to the task of securing for the long-term future a permanent position in the top universities of the world.” To reach its goals, UVA must raise about a million a day.
UVA’s $3 billion goal was unprecedented in higher ed for about three minutes, before other top (private) schools trumped it with more astronomical goals and their own rhetoric about educational world domination.
The story that keeps on giving
The Living Wage Campaign didn’t start when a group of self-identified altruistic students got uppity at President John Casteen’s office this spring. People here have been clamoring about the idea of a “living wage” for years. (In 1998 the Labor Action Group kicked things off, with demands that UVA raise base pay to $8 per hour from $6.37.)
In March of this year, Casteen raised the base pay of UVA employees to $9.37, exactly 1 cent more than the City’s base pay. But it wasn’t enough for student protesters. In April, the living wage battle came to a head. Seventeen students staged a sit-in at Madison Hall targeting Casteen as the figurehead who could raise the wages of UVA employees to meet their demands of $10.72 an hour. Casteen has maintained he can do nothing to raise wages at the University.
The protesters’ charged tactics alienated some students and community members. It has been reported that “living wage” protesters called Casteen’s home on Carr’s Hill to harass his wife, Betsy, while he could be seen clearly in the window of his office.
During their sit-in, the students complained that they were hungry and that University officials had cut off their WiFi. The students stayed for four days, refusing to negotiate or appeal to other officials, before Casteen ordered them arrested. They were charged with trespassing.
But, Charlottesville General District Court Judge Robert H. Downer dismissed the charges in May, saying police did not allow the students enough time to leave voluntarily after their last warning. After the court ruling, students shouted dramatically that they would continue to pursue a living wage for UVA employees. That is, at least until they graduate.
Sitting this one out
Not sure about what to do about the ever-encroaching Wahoo population, City councilors struggled this year to figure out how to take advantage of the tax boon that are UVA undergraduates without destroying historic neighborhoods or excessively pissing off developers. City councilors voted in January to make the Rugby Road-University Circle-14th Street area, known as the Rugby-Venable neighborhood, an historic district, to the chagrin of developers who had enjoyed high-density zoning and were planning new high-rise student apartments there.
Councilor Kevin Lynch and Mayor David Brown drew the hardest line on keeping historic houses in those neighborhoods, saying they didn’t want 14th Street to look like the high rise-ridden Jefferson Park Avenue. Council’s ultimate decision: Developers would have to go before the Board of Architectural Review (BAR) to approve any plans they had for the now-historically designated neighborhood.
The restrictions were seemingly in conflict with standing City efforts to keep student housing (and traffic and noise) from sprawling beyond the University area. The shiny new apartment complexes planned for the Corner could be scrapped by the BAR, and the growing student population could have nowhere to go but farther into the community. Meanwhile UVA seemed content to let the City and developers battle it out, adding little in the way of dorms to its massive construction plans.
At the root of the problem: UVA doesn’t provide enough student housing. While UVA’s dorms are 95 percent occupied, even at full capacity, they would only hold half of the undergraduate student body. And, the Board of Visitors has voted to raise the cost of a double-occupancy dorm room to $3,639 per year per student. Additionally, few dorms offer attractive options. Consider the alienating monstrosity that is Gooch-Dillard, and you’ll understand why UVA undergrads get out of dorms as soon as possible.
In a surprising move in May this year, City Council overruled a BAR decision and voted to let Rick Jones of Management Services Corporation build his 28-unit Sadler Court apartments on 14th Street. And where was UVA in this heated debate? Yeah, we’re wondering that, too.
Thanks, Duke!
Dude, everyone knows Virginia Lacrosse is like, totally awesome. This year, it didn’t hurt that a big rival in the ACC—Duke—had a little problem with some rowdy players, some booze and some strippers, forcing the team to suspend its entire season.
UVA, which had been scheduled to play the Blue Devils on April 15, sailed into the ACC tourney as the undefeated top seed.
We all know the story from there—in May, UVA rolled over Universit
y of Massachusetts 15-7, with standouts Matt Poskay and Matt Ward scoring five goals each.
UVA took the ACC title, finished the tournament with a flawless 17-0 record, and sealed its status as one of the top lacrosse programs in the NCAA. The team’s record also lined up Poskay, Ward, Kyle Dixon, Michael Culver and JJ Morrissey for the Major League Lacrosse draft.
The refrain when the time ran out on the 15-7 score against UMass? “We rock! …glad we didn’t have to play Duke.”
Vaccinate this!
Just as the UVA administration seemed to be flyin’ high on the opening of the JPJ arena and the kickoff to the capital campaign this fall, a crisis ensued to remind them that higher ed can be a messy business. The Centers for Disease Control declared an official mumps outbreak at UVA on October 17, when three students were confirmed to have the mumps.
Over the next two months, 43 mumps cases were confirmed and dozens more students reported mumps-like symptoms.
Students were ordered to convalesce at home. Those who lived too far away were quarantined in a secure, undisclosed location near the Student Health Center on Brandon Avenue. Tales of “mumps life” leaked from the mystery dorm like prison stories.
In the end, a few students had their Thanksgiving ruined and midterms likely sucked. But, UVA officials said publicity of the outbreak didn’t have an impact on their fundraising goals. It seems even a mumpy day at UVA can pull in a million.
The long shadow of The Teej
Part of being an ever-expanding empire is constructing new buildings—especially ones that gradually smother the community with your specific 18th-century aesthetic. UVA development continued apace this year, with the South Lawn Project breaking ground, and continued expansion at the research parks and hospital and new arts facilities in the works.
Granted, the Campbell Hall additions in the architecture school didn’t exactly adhere to strict Jeffersonian details. But, down on Central Grounds, they like their bricks red, their columns white and their architecture conservative, dammit.
The South Lawn Project, which broke ground in September, will add 110,000 square feet of space for Arts & Sciences and cost a projected $105 million. Plans show it will extend the original Lawn southward, across Jefferson Park Avenue, creating a new, grassy hub for student life.
So monumental is the South Lawn that Congress crafted a bill that includes $2 million for the South Lawn’s grass-covered pedestrian bridge over JPA. It’s one of only seven Commonwealth projects in the bill to get federal funding.
Construction will proceed despite the departure of the project’s fearless champion, Arts & Sciences Dean Ed Ayers, who announced in November he would resign to become the University of Richmond’s ninth president.
This year also saw discussions of adding about 500,000 square feet of space to the research parks. An additional 85,000-square-foot research building was under construction at Fontaine—though, the folks over there don’t really seem to care how it looks as long as it houses the beakers.
Also in the works are a new Clinical Cancer Center at UVA Hospital and parking garage on West Main (bumper sticker to come: “Where would Jefferson park?”).
Though the UVA look is seemingly crucial to most new construction (at least if it’s to earn approval from the Board of Visitors), critics of Rotunda-esque architecture have one thing right—sometimes the aesthetic just doesn’t translate. The ridiculously blown-up scale of the JPJ columns make them look like they could house T.J. himself, if he ever made it onto the Cartoon Network.
DEVELOPMENT
Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: In 2006 the big development stories were Biscuit Run, Coran Capshaw, affordable housing and the mystery known as the Charlottesville real estate market
 It kept coming up Coran in 2006: The Dave Matthew Band manager had his hand in development of virtually every stripe. |
It’s good to be king
There is no name in the development game that gets bandied about town like “Coran Capshaw,” the Dave Matthews Band manager, multi-restaurant owner, music merch mogul, and developer. It hardly matters what’s up for discussion. The second after a restaurant gets sold, Capshaw is rumored to be the buyer. Attorneys won’t identify investors in a new development? Must be Capshaw, at it again.
Sometimes those rumors are just that—but often enough they’re on target. This year, as before, Capshaw backed developments that, if completed, would allow one to live, work, shop, rock and eat, all without leaving the cozy confines of Capshawville.
Many Capshaw properties in the news include sites he’s been working on for years, but this summer, he added a new jewel to his crown: the Jefferson Theater on the Downtown Mall, which stopped showing second-run movies following his purchase. (Showing just how highfalutin the Mall has become, Capshaw paid $2.2 million for a theater that went for $310,000 in 1992). Renovations, which have displaced tenants like Better Than Television, are expected to continue through 2007.
This spring, he unveiled plans for four buildings and 60 townhouses at the coal tower site, lining the railroad tracks just east of Downtown.
And sifting through the rumor grist, we found one that we can’t confirm on the record, but that seems likely: Capshaw, along with another big-timer Hunter Craig, is a principal in several developments on the southern side of Charlottesville. A combined 167 acres just over the city limits, the projects include an almost-500,000-square-foot shopping center between Ridge and Avon streets as well as the Granger property near the Fontaine Research Park, which will include 500,000 square feet of office space. Both remain in the early phases of the planning process.
Not everything comes up Coran
Not all new developments are in fact built with the DMB manager’s money. So far as we know, Capshaw has no connection to the project on the horizon of every developer, government official and civic activist in town: Biscuit Run.
Last year, developer Hunter Craig bought most of the 1,500-acre farm Biscuit Run, just south of Charlottesville, from Elizabeth Breeden and her late husband, David, for $46.2 million—and the proposed development of those acres has been invoked at nearly every planning meeting this year. Originally discussed as a site for 5,000 housing units, Biscuit Run has sparked an outcry against the sheer number of people it represents—and particularly against their cars.
When a traffic study was previewed in June, locals packed into a County planning commission meeting. When developers changed design firms and unveiled preliminary plans, citizen anxieties over Biscuit Run dominated a November planning meeting despite the fact that the proposed development had dropped to between 2,500 and 3,500 new housing units (the figure now stands at 3,100).
Of course, Biscuit Run didn’t have to be on the agenda to merit discussion: Whether the topic at hand was a 300-unit college condo complex or Capshaw’s shopping center, traffic-obsessed locals showed up with the name Biscuit Run on their lips.
Going up?
Where do you turn if you don’t want car-dependent living at places like Biscuit Run? Why not pedestrian-friendly, high-rise-ready Downtown?
Local players Keith Woodard and Bill Atwood had their nine-storey dreams surface this year. Atwood’s Waterhouse, located on Water Street (where Eloise and Sidetracks currently stand), sailed through the City approval processes. Woodard hasn’t had it so easy: His designs for a nine-storey building between the Mall and Market Street are still grinding through the preliminary City stages. Despite the tumult, Woodard has kept his plan to build Charlottesville’s coolest-ever parking garage: Condo residents returning home will drive into a bay, swipe a key card, and their vehicle will be magically (well, mechanically) transported to a parking spot.
Another local developer, Oliver Kuttner, came into the nine-storey mix when, in May, he spent $3.7 million for the former Boxer Learning center. He recently discussed a nine-storey design concept with the Board of Architectural Review (BAR).
Local developers weren’t the only ones to submit nine-storey plans: A Washington, D.C.-based group, Ideal Ventures LLC, is working on a nine-storey condo project on Avon Street near Belmont Bridge that promises luxury for both residents and Mother Nature. Architect Randolph Croxton says the building aims for platinum Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification. Though it’s currently bogged down in the BAR, it has preliminary approval from the planning commission.
These big boys are just what the City asked for in changing the zoning laws in 2003 to allow for nine storeys by-right, but some officials with the BAR, Planning Commission and City Council this year seemed uncomfortable with the “massive” quality of the structures. Others were queasy about an entirely different aspect rarely present in these mammoths: affordable housing.
Let’s play Balderdash
The Charlottesville area continued a swell job churning out swanky $400,000 homes and upscale condos—but where can the other 87 percent of us live? The issue of affordable housing has justifiably been much in discussion—Dave Norris won election to City Council largely on promises to tackle the issue. But what the hell do we mean when we say “affordable”?
Definitions of affordable housing proliferated this year like so many Coran Capshaw rumors, and local planners held several sessions to help define it—or to muddle it.
Most definitions revolve around “area median income.” But that figure spreads from $35,000 to $67,000, depending on whom you ask, and even the experts get it wrong some times.
“Area median income for a family of two is around $35,000, isn’t it?” said developer Vito Cetta while presenting to the County Planning Commission the developers’ point-of-view on affordable housing.
“It’s about $50,000,” answered Ron White, County chief of housing.
And even when you pin that down, there’s the question of who you’re targeting with affordable housing. Nonprofits, like Habitat for Humanity, tended to talk about the “working poor” who earn as little as 25 percent of area median income—janitors, store clerks, hous
ekeepers. Others spoke of affordable “workforce housing,” meaning the middle class of teachers, police officers, government employees and the like earning between 80 and 120 percent of median income.
Write your definition out clear as day, local politicians were still at a collective loss as to what to do about affordable housing in a region where the median home sale price was $274,250 in the first three quarters of this year.
Maybe talk is not the solution, but the marketplace itself is. With housing prices cooling a bit in 2006, the market might, after all, be the ultimate affordable housing fix.
Realty and reality
The real estate market came in like a lion—roaring with higher City assessments and big-money homes—but it’s slinking out like a lamb.
“I don’t see any softening in the market” for million-dollar homes, real estate agent Loring Woodriff told us in January, and City assessments on average rose by 16 percent.
But Charlottesville was to gradually learn that it’s not completely insulated from the cycles of the market. At first, we were told the slowdown was a “return to normalcy,” in the words of Dave Phillips, CEO of Charlottesville Area Association of Realtors (CAAR), when first quarter numbers showed a 17 percent drop in housing prices compared to the same quarter in 2005. After the second quarter, Charlottesville became an official buyers’ market. And when the third quarter showed a 20 percent decline over last year, we heard even developers acknowledge a decline in the market—ironically at a meeting about affordable housing.
Meanwhile, those hunting for affordable rental property still had a tough time, as 2006 was the year to digest last year’s condo conversion craze—turning hum-drum rental property into lots of money for real estate agents and developers. We were told in March that conversions were still “really hot.” And even after the “healthy” third quarter slowdown, in Phillips’ word, realtor Carrie Slaughter told us that sales in the city, as opposed to the county, were still strong because of condos. Who was buying them? Retirees, students’ parents, and UVA alums with season tickets to ball games. Go ‘hoos!
COURTS & CRIME
The serial rapist continued to haunt legal news, even though he didn’t strike this year, and police incidents from previous years eked into local courts. Meanwhile overzealous prosecutors and press tripped over each other in the so-called teen bomber case, leaving us wondering if somebody has watched just one too many episodes of “Law & Order.”
 Kids, parents, cops, lawyers, reporters: Everybody deserved to stand in the corner for their behavior in the Albemarle schools teen wanna-bomber affair. |
Pass me the dunce cap
There are cases that are cut-and-dry: Justice is served, the criminal goes to jail and everyone else goes home. Then there are cases that leave all involved—the prosecutors, the defense, the accused, the police, the public and the media—with egg on their faces. This year, the teen wanna-bomber case was just such an exhibit.
In late January and February, four teens, ages 16, 15, 13 and 13, in the Albemarle County school system were arrested on various charges stemming from an alleged plot to blow up Western Albemarle and Albemarle high schools.
The teens were communicating about potential attacks via MySpace and AOL Instant Messenger. In February, Albemarle police confiscated two shotguns and the teens’ computers. All were charged on multiple counts, including conspiracy to commit murder.
In late March, after three days of trial in juvenile court, supposedly reached a verdict, but placed a gag order that barred attorneys from Judge Susan Whitlock talking about the outcome. County Prosecutor Jim Camblos later confirmed that the 15-year-old, viewed as an accomplice to the 16-year-old ringleader who had pleaded guilty from the outset, had also been found guilty. In April, the two 13-year-olds were also found guilty.
Meanwhile, people couldn’t stop talking about the teen bomber case. The Daily Progress and The Hook filed separate lawsuits seeking to lift the gag order. Parents in the community mostly supported this move, seemingly willing to sacrifice the four kids’ privacy for a little inside information to protect their own school kids.
The Daily Progress printed the names and pictures of the two older boys repeatedly starting in April. Plumbing the depths of tastlessness, The Hook ran an article comparing the teen wanna-bombers to Columbine shooters Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris with a photo from the April 1999 incident showing the two infamous teens wielding machine guns .
Privacy became moot when three boys appealed their decisions to open circuit court. The 15-year-old’s parents spoke to the Progress in detail, and one 13-year-old’s parent detailed in court the events of his life during the time he was allegedly conspiring to bomb schools.
The case ended up making police look bad as well. The 15-year-old, his parents said, had been questioned alone without a lawyer. The case against him, they claimed, was based mostly on this bogus interrogation.
As the case unfolded, the plot didn’t look as bad as it originally seemed. Though cops claimed in February that attacks on the school were imminent, it turned out the teens didn’t have any bomb-making equipment, the shotguns belonged to the 15-year-old’s father and the threats, though scary, were mostly talk.
In the end, one 13-year-old (now 14) is back in school, one 13-year-old who did not appeal is serving his juvenile detention sentence, the 16-year-old (now 17) is in a residential mental health facility, and the 15-year-old (now 16) deferred his court ruling until he reaches age 21.
Much ado about nothing? Perhaps. A reason to keep your kids out of the rocky juvenile justice system that’s supposed to protect them from frenzies like this? Absolutely.
You call it a confession, I call it a “searching and fearless moral inventory”
In a story that broke in January and took all year to resolve, William Beebe contacted his victim in a disputed sexual encounter that occurred more than 20 years ago at a UVA frat party. In September 2005, Beebe, a Las Vegas real estate agent and massage therapist, sent a letter to the home of Liz Seccuro in Connecticut. He told her he was sorry for having harmed her in 1984 when the two had an encounter Seccuro described as rape at the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity house on Madison Lane. Beebe was making amends as part of the 12-step Alcoholics Anonymous program.
Seccuro didn’t take the apology too well. She contacted Charlottesville police, who issued a warrant for Beebe’s arrest in December 2005.
The story made national news and Seccuro, interviewed on “Dateline NBC” in May, described her attack, which occurred when she was 17, as painful and violent.
Originally charged with rape and object sexual penetration, in November, Beebe plea-bargained, pleading guilty to aggravated sexual battery. His plea agreement allows for not more than two years imprisonment. He vowed to help police find other frat brothers who may have been involved in a gang rape. Beebe appeared on several local news networks saying he always wanted to find closure for both himself and Seccuro.
Beebe will be sentenced in March.
Guns don’t shoot people, cops shoot people
This year saw a string of cop shootings—that is, shootings where cops pulled the trigger—as well as lawsuits and even a settlement on behalf of the people they’ve shot.
Most remarkably, civil rights attorney Debbie Wyatt won $4.5 million for the family of Frederick Gray, an unarmed man killed by an Albemarle County police officer in 1997. Such settlements are rare. It took a retrial and intense jury deliberation for Gray’s camp to win it—Wyatt is still not sure when the family will see the money.
The tough struggle doesn’t provide much hope for two cousins who have filed suit against Albemarle and Charlottesville police. Robert Lee Cooke was shot by Albemarle police officer Andy Gluba in October 2004, after Cooke shot Gluba’s K-9 officer, Ingo, while committing a burglary. Cooke was sentenced to 10 years in prison and remains paralyzed from the waist down. He has filed suit seeking $2.35 million in compensation.
Cooke’s cousin, Kerry von Reese Cook (spelled with no “e”), was injured in an incident in August 2004. Cook was shot in the abdomen in a scuffle with two police officers who were answering a domestic disturbance call at Friendship Court. Cook was in a coma for months and must now use a colostomy bag. He is seeking $10 million in damages from the officers involved in the incident and from Charlottesville Police Chief Timothy J. Longo.
And, another local family could very well have reason to sue for the shooting of their son, Elvis Shifflett. Wanted for attempting to shoot his longtime girlfriend October 13, Shifflett led police on a manhunt before police spotted him on October 20 on Brookhill Avenue in Albemarle. Police believed Shifflett was armed and shot him several times, sending him to the hospital for more than two weeks.
Commonwealth’s Attorney Jim Camblos announced on December 13 that he would not seek criminal charges against the Charlottesville police sargeant who shot Shifflett.
Police are routinely put on administrative leave after shootings occur. These cases alone could be enough to make the rest of the force consider keepin’ it in the holster.
Who’s the victim here?
Since the serial rapist is still at-large, in the public mind, every rape could mean he’s striking again. And that means that every suspected rapist gets eyed, potentially, as the serial rapist. Last year, one man, Chris Matthew, was wrongfully accused of raping a UVA law student, landing him a five-day jail stay and speculation that he was the serial rapist.
Now, Matthew is suing, making him and his lawyer, Debbie Wyatt, perhaps among the most unpopular folks in town. They’re seeking $750,000 from the rape victim who mistakenly fingered Matthew as her attacker.
The incident occurred in September 2005. The UVA law student was walking home from a party when, she says, a black man dragged her into the woods near Jefferson Park and Sunset avenues and raped her.
Shortly after the incident, police collected Matthew, who was walking nearby. The victim identified Matthew, who is African American, by the sound of his voice, the plaintiffs have said.
DNA evidence found at the crime scene cleared Matthew days later. Police then pinned the crime on another man, John Henry Agee, whose DNA was already in the databank from a previous felony and matched evidence from the scene. Agee entered an Alford plea, acknowledging enough evidence to convict him, in October this year.
In Matthew’s lawsuit, Wyatt will try to prove that the woman was not raped, that she made her accusation of Matthew in bad faith, and that she should be held accountable for her actions.
Wyatt says the eagerness of police to find and convict a suspect commonly complicates rape cases. So, in a twisted way, the serial rapist did strike again this year.
Fun with numbers
Don’t get us wrong—after reading through court documents detailing every sicko aspect of dozens of crimes, few could be as victim-oriented as we are. Hard time for violent felons—yee-haw! But, when victimless crimes carry harsh penalties, we’re left a little confused. For example, 10 years in prison for burning a trash can and three months jail time for thinking about stealing books!
Such was the plight of Curtis J. Hill, who, over two days in March 2005, twice threw a match into a plastic trash receptacle that melted in a restroom at UVA Hospital. After he threw the second match, Hill was arrested by UVA police. Hill entered a guilty plea in federal court to two counts of “attempting to destroy by fire.” The charges fell under an interstate commerce statute because, prosecutors argued, UVA Hospital does business with 2,500 out-of-state companies. Saying Hill could have posed a greater threat to patients, Judge Norman K. Moon rejected Hill’s motions to withdraw his guilty plea, and slapped him with the mandatory minimum—10 years in prison. Ooh, that burns.
Another way-harsh case was the story of UVA football’s third-string wide receiver Theirrien “Bud” Davis, who almost stole books from the UVA Bookstore, but thought better of it. Davis was on the upper level of the bookstore and was looking over his shoulder suspiciously, picking up textbooks. Employees followed him to the lower level where, apparently aware he was being watched, he bought a coffee and one book and left the others in the café. When UVA police caught up with him, Davis said he had intended to steal the $500-worth of textbooks and re-sell them.
Those naughty thoughts (and perhaps Davis’ scrupulously honest confession) earned him a grand larceny charge. Davis’ attorneys plea-bargained to reduce the charge to larceny under $200, a Class 1 misdemeanor. Davis was found guilty and sentenced to a year in jail, with nine months suspended. He was also barred from UVA football, withdrew from the University, was ordered to pay $1,322.35 to the bookstore and will be under postrelease supervision for three years. Damn.
Too little, too late
The story of Earl Washington, Jr. begins in 1983 when he was picked up for the murder of Rebecca Lynn Williams in Culpeper. Williams was a young mother of two who was raped, stabbed and left to die on her front doorstep while her husband was out.
Washington, a mildly retarded man with an I.Q. of 69 who had once broken into the house of an elderly neighbor and assaulted her, was found by a jury to be Williams’ killer. In 1984, he was sentenced to death.
Washington spent 17 years in prison, nine-and-a-half of them on death row, before DNA evidence exonerated him in 2000. The crime was later linked through DNA evidence to Kenneth Tinsley, who was already serving prison time for another rape.
Washington sued the estate of Curtis Reese Wilmore, the State investigator who interrogated him and collected the evidence on which the prosecution’s case was based. An Expendable Man, a book about the Washington case written by the Virginian-Pilot journalist Margaret Edds, shows how easily Washington was swayed during his “confessions.”
Though Washington’s legal team did not seek a specific amount, a jury awarded him $2.25 million in May. But getting the money will likely be complicated.
Wilmore died in 1994, and his estate is claiming they can’t pay Washington’s settlement. In the past, the Virginia General Assembly has made awards for cases of wrongful conviction between $1 million and $2 million. This time they’re saying they’re not liable for a penny in the Washington case. An appeal to the State could take months.
Meanwhile, Edds, who interviewed Washington extensively for her book, says he is working in a Virginia Beach program for mentally disabled adults and is doing well. If the man who spent 17 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit can be at peace, Washington is a bigger person than we would be.
