Builder fined in elevator shaft fatality

Early July 25, Albemarle police responded to an industrial accident at Yancey Lumber in Crozet, where employee Floriberta Macedo-Diaz, 46, of Waynesboro, died of her injuries. Macedo-Diaz isn’t the only workplace fatality in the region. In June, the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry finished its investigation into a job-related death last fall, and fined […]

Philanthropic windfall: Library gets $1 million bequest 

By Jonathan Haynes The Jefferson-Madison Regional Library was the unexpected beneficiary of a nearly $1 million bequest from one of its Friends of the Library Endowment Fund patrons earlier this year. The donation came from the estate of Nancy Swygert. Despite the large sum, Swygert and her husband lived a frugal life, never having children […]

Fenced out: Neighbors complain about closed shortcut

In the North Downtown neighborhood, a new fence is causing a fuss. Where some Second Street NE residents have long walked down their dead-end lane to an unlocked gate that led to the backyard of the Park Street First Baptist Church, they’ve recently been faced with an obstruction to the beaten path. It’s a fence—a […]

Mike Murphy named interim city manager

After more than a week of heated exchanges between city councilors and Mayor Nikuyah Walker over the hiring of an interim city manager,  there was 10 minutes of public notice before a 3-0 vote in closed session at 1:15pm resulted in Assistant City Manager Mike Murphy taking the job effective 5pm today, just hours before […]

Leaky-gate, part 2: RWSA responds to cover-up accusations

It was late June when a whistleblower, who recently resigned from the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority to protest an $80-million water pipeline it wants to build between two reservoirs, went before its board of directors to denounce it. Rich Gullick, the authority’s former director of operations, handed over several pages of in-depth analysis on […]

Brookhill base: Ice park planned at new subdivision

When an angel investor bought the Main Street Arena for nearly $6 million in March 2017 with the intent to turn it into a technology incubator, folks who frequented the 23-year-old ice park—the only one within an hour’s drive from Charlottesville—began to panic. But now it looks like hockey players, figure skaters and curlers could […]

Truce: City and Mark Brown settle parking garage dispute

Two years ago, before Nazis came to Charlottesville in 2017, the big story was the contretemps between Mark Brown, co-owner of the Water Street Parking Garage, and then-mayor Mike Signer and the city. The escalating parking wars led to suits and countersuits, panicked meetings of downtown business owners, threats of closing the garage and of […]

Bugs on the bus go ’round and ’round

Former Albemarle School Board member Gary Grant had an appointment at UVA WorkMed Clinic last month and he struck up a conversation with a Charlottesville Area Transit bus driver. As a former school bus driver himself, Grant asked the driver if he was in for a random drug test. It was even worse. The driver […]

Charlottesville shares its name with a small town in the Midwest

Photos by Doug McSchooler August 2017 may have made Charlottesville, Virginia, a hashtag, but it barely caused a ripple in the day-to-day fabric of the other C’ville. Judie Wells, a lifelong resident of the state of Indiana, said she’s heard of Charlottesville, Virginia, but like most of her neighbors in Charlottesville, Indiana, she’s never been […]