News

Few in the criminal justice system who first encountered Frank E. Brown Jr. thought he was going to make it through the Charlottesville/Albemarle Drug Court Program.

New news: We’re always hot on its trail. But when we stop to cool off, we start to wonder what old news is still burning.

As outrage mellows to acceptance during the development review process, only the dedicated opponents continue to pipe up at public meetings. On July 24, the Albemarle County Planning Commission considered rezoning 87 acres just north of I-64 for a big-box shopping center. While in the past citizens for and against the project have shown up, […]

Surrounded by boutique shops and restaurants to the north, condos to the south, and the new Downtown ACAC just across the street to its west, Friendship Court anchors a rapidly changing neighborhood. Charles Martin is the executive director of Urban Vision, which provides residential services at low-income housing complexes. He knows Friendship Court sits on […]

Hollymead Town Center might well get its, well, town center. Of the five areas of Hollymead, two areas are almost all commercial and two are almost all residential. Only Area A-2, as it’s known in the planning process, is truly designed to be mixed-use, with 1,222 residential units and 364,000 square feet of commercial space. […]

The item on the consent agenda for City Council’s July 30 meeting doesn’t seem to warrant much notice: "Appropriation: $439,000—Transfer from Housing Initiatives Fund to Piedmont Housing Alliance/Habitat for Humanity." At every meeting, money, much of it in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, gets shuffled into and out of city coffers, and Council this […]

Charlottesville City Councilor Kevin Lynch admits that building a road is, in his words, "like getting your teeth drilled." As the Meadowcreek Parkway (MCP) moves nearer to a construction date, he’s wondering why the city is the only one with dentist appointments. When deciding whether to grant easements for the Meadowcreek Parkway, City Council has […]

It’s getting drier around here. After the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority (RWSA) declared a drought watch last week, area streams ran at only 18 percent of their normal level, down from 25 percent in mid-July (C-VILLE used poor wording last week that suggested levels were at 75 percent of normal—kudos to keen-eyed readers who […]

Dear Ace: What with all the history around here, is there anyone in Charlottesville who does historical re-enactments?—Lee N. Grant Lee: Well, there are those folks over at Ash Lawn-Highland, including a slave re-enactor that is certainly one of the stranger blurrings of the whole re-enactment thing that Ace has ever come across, but Ace […]