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 continued to receive his $134,513 annual salary, and will […]
“You can jail revolutionaries, but you can’t jail the revolution,” were the words scrawled on a giant white sign held by a man in sunglasses. It was the first meeting of the Albemarle County School Board since the August 30 one where six anti-racist activists were arrested and hauled off in handcuffs for allegedly being […]
With a wing named for him since 1936, the UVA hospital honors a man who was fundamental in the university’s eugenics movement, and perhaps best known for his popular address titled “The American Negro: His Past and Future,” in which he argued that African Americans benefited from slavery. A group of local activists wants his […]
After months of thousands of community members urging the authority board at the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail to stop voluntarily reporting the release dates of undocumented immigrants to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the board held a special meeting September 13 to take a revote on that policy. At the local jail, and every jail in […]
Grocery store shelves in Charlottesville and Albemarle County were picked clean last week by people preparing for Hurricane Florence’s worst. But come this week, those cases of water, boxes of batteries, and jars of peanut butter had gone largely unneeded. While a tornado left one person dead in Richmond, and significant flooding threatened folks in […]
At a meeting in late August, members of the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority’s board of directors voted to add $7 million to its budget to install part of a controversial water pipeline in Albemarle, even though just a month before, they said they had no plans to start building it. Critics say the $7 […]
A Forest Lakes woman who pleaded guilty to child cruelty in May for neglecting more than a dozen kids at an unlicensed daycare will serve two years in jail. “I would like to publicly apologize to all the parents,” said a tearful Kathy Yowell-Rohm, before a judge pronounced her sentence September 7 in Albemarle Circuit […]
In an August 30 motions hearing in Charlottesville Circuit Court, a judge heard arguments for why a three-week first-degree murder trial for the man charged with driving a Dodge Challenger into a crowd on Fourth Street last summer should be moved out of the city. Defendant James Fields, who wore a black-and-white-striped jail jumpsuit and […]
Public meetings held by elected officials in Charlottesville no longer go uninterrupted. But last night’s Albemarle County School Board meeting in which six people were arrested and one was hospitalized was a meeting of a different breed. For about a year, the Hate-Free Schools Coalition of Albemarle County has pressured the school board to reexamine […]
Developer Keith Woodard has abandoned his plan to build a $50 million castle of downtown luxury condos and retail space on a city-owned Water Street parking lot. “The project was a tremendous undertaking, and over time, the process of obtaining the necessary approvals became very difficult and at times adversarial, causing continual delays and uncertainty,” […]