Tuition goes up while Feds eye endowments

As Virginia universities’ tuitions continue to climb, they do so amid calls from Republican U.S. Senator Charles Grassley, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, for universities to spend more of their endowments to make college more affordable. The total price of education for in-state students at UVA will increase next year by 7.3 percent. […]

Who lives on the Lawn, anyway?

Despite the big hoo-ha from students when President John Casteen gave fundraiser extraordinaire Bob Sweeney a spot on the Lawn, the pavilions still serve as an all-star gallery for UVA professors. But just who are these powerful few? The list includes a well-known talking head, an endowment head and a handful of deans. All pavilion […]

Women’s basketball struggles academically

Debbie Ryan had better make sure her team is on its game this exam season: All UVA sports teams made the academic cut this year, though women’s basketball didn’t have much room to spare—it beat the buzzer, so to speak, to avoid scholarship reductions or other penalties by the NCAA, college sports’ governing body. Debbie […]

What’s in your backpack?

Chris Belyea Age: 23 Hometown: Montpelier, VAYear: Senior Major: Commerce What’s in your backpack? Laptop, iPod, earphones, notebook, mints, gum, sticky notes, three pens, two pencils, TI-83 calculator, Chapstick, granola bar, fruit snacks, flash drive

Two projects bank on Preston’s promise

For the most part, Preston Avenue is a place in between places, an auto-oriented strip you pass through to get from Barracks Road to Downtown. But the city Planning Commission, along with a couple of pioneering developers, are hoping that Preston can become more than just a cut through. Alex Dotson and other investors have […]

Council decides not to decide on big house

When Charlottesville City Council declined to step into the middle of a dispute over the construction of an ambitious, environmentally friendly house that north Downtown neighbors argue is too large, it may have just delayed the inevitable. On May 5, councilors voted 4-1 to (ready for this?) not vote on an appeal brought by residents […]

Students imagine MaJeff in 2018

Ten years from now, the corner of Locust and High streets will undergo a dramatic facelift. In place of the Martha Jefferson Hospital will spring hundreds of housing units, a grocery store, an assisted-living facility, a linear park, and office space, served by an underground parking lot.

City gets nudge on stormwater laws

On the morning of May 9, the streets of Charlottesville were still carrying the torrents of the night before, the stormwater runoff forming an unfortunate conveyer belt moving oil and detritus into local rivers and eroding stream banks in the process. As a way of doing something about it, local groups have launched a concerted […]

Red dirt alert!

Amid the great swatch of red dirt, five houses are springing up in Belvedere. The 675-unit development, which has billed itself as a green project, is beginning a five- to six-year build-out. Cass Kawecki of Stonehaus, Belvedere’s developer, says the initial five houses will be move-in ready by June. The village green will be opening […]

What happened to a cherished water supply plan?

Flashback to 2005: After the worst drought on record and a whole lot of talk (and some misguided action) going back 30 years, it looked like there was a plan to expand the water supply that actually would work and satisfy a host of interests—developers who wanted water for the future, advocates who wanted better streamflows for aquatic critters, regulators who needed laws upheld, and ethicists and environmentalists who thought it best to use water from our watershed instead of drinking from the James River.