Napoleon v. Bellamy at City Council

Kerfuffles certainly aren’t new at City Council meetings anymore, but the one June 18 between Pat Napoleon and Wes Bellamy jolted awake anyone who may have been dozing during public comments. Napoleon is the founder of Rise Charlottesville, and has been collecting signatures to remove those on council last year who voted to remove Confederate […]

Blast zone: Belmont residents perturbed about subdivision rock clearing

Quarry Road runs along Belmont’s southern border by Quarry Park, across from where Belmont Point will be built. Monikers of nearby Rockland and Stonehenge avenues also suggest there’s a lot of rocky ground in the vicinity. And when some of the neighbors got notices from a survey company that blasting would take place to excavate […]

State budget benefits Robert Davis

The General Assembly’s passage May 30 of a budget that expands Medicaid makes nearly 400,000 Virginians now eligible for health insurance. The previously stalled budget also helps a local man who spent almost 13 years in prison. Robert Davis turned 34 years old May 22, and one thing he didn’t get for his birthday was […]

Free swim—pool scholarships get kids in water 

Darnell Lamont Walker was surprised when he went to Washington Park Pool in 2013 and it cost $6 to get in. “I remember when it was 50 cents,” he says. Since then, Walker, who now lives in New York and is a writer for “Sesame Street,” has been raising money to send kids to Charlottesville’s […]

Pipeline parallels? Eminent domain: the movie

One of the least popular Supreme Court decisions this century would have to be Kelo v. New London, a case that resulted in 45 states, including Virginia, passing laws or, in the Old Dominion’s case, constitutional amendments to prevent the seizing of private property to benefit other private owners under the guise of economic development. […]

The taxman cometh—and wants list of stored vehicles

Personal property taxes are due June 5, and the city has stepped up its efforts to locate vehicles that reside in Charlottesville, even if their owners don’t. Woolen Mills Storage received a request from Commissioner of the Revenue Todd Divers to provide a list of vehicles stored there. “If a vehicle is parked here on […]

Confronting a shameful past: Search for 1898 lynching site narrows

As big a role as history plays in Charlottesville’s identity, some events, like an 1898 lynching, were pretty much buried or forgotten until Jane Smith was doing historical research and going through old issues of the Daily Progress in 2013. She happened upon this July 12, 1898, headline: “He paid the awful penalty: John Henry […]