A green dream: City Council passes ambitious goal for carbon neutrality

The City of Charlottesville has set a plan in motion to reduce its carbon footprint—and it’s not messing around. On June 24, City Council unanimously approved a proposal to curtail carbon emissions by 45 percent over the next 11 years and achieve an end goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. It’s an aggressive plan, one […]

Plea denied: James Fields gets life behind bars for car attack

James Alex Fields Jr. sat before the judge, his thick, black hair grown just long enough to touch the collar of his black-and-white striped jumpsuit. The 22-year-old wore glasses, and spent most of Friday morning and early afternoon staring at the wall in front of him as the victims who were harmed when he plowed […]

New wave: Two women, two generations head into the 57th primary stretch

The reliably Democratic 57th District rarely makes for an exciting horse race. Once a delegate, always a delegate, as David Toscano and Mitch Van Yahres before him proved, each easily holding on to the seat representing Charlottesville and the Albemarle urban ring as long as he chose. Not this year. Newcomer Sally Hudson upended the […]

Tripped up: Mixed reviews for Charlottesville’s scooter experiment

They appeared overnight the first Monday in December of 2018, long-necked robots on wheels, lurking in neat rows of three or four on street corners all over town. Within a few days, the motorized scooters, which don’t have designated docking stations, were everywhere, and wherever. Now, about five months in to the City of Charlottesville’s […]

Worth the wait: We need the Police Civilian Review Board

After nearly nine months of work, the Police Civilian Review Board is finalizing its initial bylaws. The proposed model would require the city to hire up to two full-time professional staff members to assist the board in processing and independently investigating complaints against Charlottesville police officers. There has been an understandably high degree of public […]

Water works

By Bonnie Price Lofton If rainwater doesn’t seep, sponge-like, into the soil around us, it runs away somewhere. In Charlottesville, where much of the ground is covered with impermeable asphalt, it runs into stormwater drainage systems, ditches, and streams that eventually lead into the Rivanna River. That creates two problems: first, without earth to filter […]

New city manager wants open-door policy

City Council introduced its pick to be the city’s top executive April 15, and Mayor Nikuyah Walker urged citizens to be open to moving past “the way things have been done.” Tarron Richardson, currently city manager of DeSoto, Texas, a Dallas suburb, was chosen out of 37 candidates in a process that’s taken almost a […]

Downtown warehouse has a colorful history

Sandwiched between South Street and some train tracks, the Pink Warehouse has stored various things throughout its 105 years: wholesale food for the Albemarle Grocery Co.; tools for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway; imagination. In 1983, Roulhac and Ben Toledano—an author of architectural history books and a Southern literature-loving lawyer—bought the abandoned building. They renovated […]