Not in attendance at a civil case hearing February 2 in U.S. District Court were the four plaintiffs who are suing Virginia’s Department of Motor Vehicles. One reason for their absences, according to their attorney, is because their driver’s licenses are suspended. The case, filed by Legal Aid Justice Center against DMV Commissioner Richard Holcomb, […]
Last month’s City Council vote on a motion to remove the statue of General Robert E. Lee deadlocked 2-2 and left the chamber in disarray for 30 minutes. The issue was back on the agenda February 6 after Councilor Bob Fenwick announced he was changing his abstention to a vote to remove the statue, and […]
Attorney Jeff Fogel has been in the thick of almost every civil rights action in the city during the past decade. He sued the city for its restrictions on panhandling. He’s sued Albemarle police on behalf of plaintiffs who say they were targeted by an officer because they were black. And he’s sued Charlottesville police […]
Albemarle hates it and Charlottesville loves it. But neither jurisdiction saw Delegate Steve Landes’ budget amendment coming that could scrub a 1982 agreement in which Albemarle pays millions every year to Charlottesville for the privilege of not being annexed—even though the General Assembly put a moratorium on annexation in 1987. “The county was only recently […]
Mayor Mike Signer had a quorum of councilors today outside City Hall, but it wasn’t for a City Council meeting. A band played Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” as hundreds of Charlottesvillians assembled at noon below the statues of three presidents, along with a handful of vocal protesters, and Signer declared Charlottesville the “capital of […]
The Great Recession is officially over. The evidence? Building permits in 2016 were the highest since 2007 housing-bubble levels. Construction is going on all over the area, from 5th Street Station to West Main to U.S. 29 north. And a recent Weldon Cooper Center population study pegs the Charlottesville area as booming.
In his second press conference of the week, Councilor Bob Fenwick, who abstained during the heated City Council 2-2 vote to remove Confederate statues last week, said today he’ll vote to move the statue of General Robert E. Lee at the next meeting February 6. “Immediately upon the vote being recorded, I will make a separate motion […]
Charlottesville’s confrontation with its slave-owning past has resulted in difficult discussions since Vice-Mayor Wes Bellamy and Councilor Kristin Szakos called for the removal last March of statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson and the renaming of the parks where they reside. At City Council’s January 17 meeting, the debate spiraled out […]
More than a million people showed up at Women’s March demonstrations Saturday in all 50 states, according to the New York Times, and that’s not counting the rallies in London, Paris, Berlin—and even Antarctica—in what was the largest public rebuff of a newly elected president ever. More than 500,000 flooded into Washington, the AP reports, […]
Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as the United States’ 45th president today, and hundreds of Charlottesvillians are heading to D.C., not to celebrate his inauguration but to protest it on Saturday at the Women’s March on Washington. Cynthia Neff is organizing eight buses, and she estimates there are at least 25 buses leaving Charlottesville […]