When the executive director of the city, county, and university’s troubled Emergency Communications Center abruptly resigned last week, questions and concerns started circulating among the center’s employees. “Barry [Neulen] was doing so many good things for us, and we were singing his praises to anybody and everybody,” says one employee. “I wholeheartedly believe Barry did […]
It was the same old, same old in Charlottesville Circuit Court on March 13, when attorneys involved in a lawsuit to keep the town’s Confederate monuments in place hashed out all-too-familiar arguments. It’s been two years since the Monument Fund and a dozen other plaintiffs filed suit in response to City Council’s vote to remove […]
Controversy erupted recently over including a local politician and activist in a Black History Month display at Walton Middle School—and we bet you can guess who it is. City Councilor Wes Bellamy had some community members clutching their metaphorical pearls when his photo appeared alongside those of historical black figures such as Harriet Tubman, Langston […]
When Charlottesville Police Chief RaShall Brackney took her oath in June, she was sworn in to a position already highly scrutinized by citizens of a town where many are wary of the cops. Perhaps the thing locals wanted most in a new chief was transparency, and Brackney says she has spent the past nine months […]
Anti-racist activists have spent more than a year advocating for a ban of hate symbols in Albemarle county schools, and after months of the school board deferring an official vote, the superintendent took matters into his own hands last week to prohibit such imagery in the dress code. Now, a constitutional attorney says he better […]
Garbage truck driver Dana Naylor was found not guilty for his involvement in a crash that made headlines last year, when an Amtrak train carrying GOP congressmen smashed into his truck in Crozet. The crash killed Naylor’s friend and coworker, Christopher Foley, who was one of two passengers. The other, Dennis Eddy, was severely injured. […]
An Albemarle County physician facing 11 charges related to sexually assaulting 10 female patients was in court February 19 for a motions hearing. Mark Hormuz Dean will be tried on multiple counts of rape, object sexual penetration, aggravated sexual battery, sexual battery, forcible sodomy, and abduction, all from his time as a doctor of osteopathic […]
In the early morning hours of February 10, Julie Bargmann woke up to the sound of gunshots. She laid still. “Unfortunately, I’ve gotten kind of used to it,” says the Fifeville resident who’s lived on Sixth Street Southwest for four years. Over the last two, there have been multiple shootings and other incidents that drew […]
It’s long been clear that the folks of the small, predominately black Union Hill community in bucolic Buckingham County don’t want the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and its compressor station on their soil. And now two well-known voices who condemn environmental racism are joining the fight against it. Former vice president Al Gore and Reverend William […]
As he prepares to step down, the founder of the Southern Environmental Law Center looks back on three decades of defending the region’s natural treasures Ambitious and naive. That’s how Rick Middleton describes himself 33 years ago, when he founded the Southern Environmental Law Center, a small nonprofit that would protect the air, the […]