By Sean Tubbs
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Monday, September 6, 2010

 With the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority facing an uncertain future due to a dramatic drop in revenue, a majority of the City Council appears to favor keeping one of its key services in business.

“I’m strongly in support of not only maintaining the McIntire Recycling Center but figuring out how to enhance the services,” Mayor Dave Norris said.

As of Jan. 1, neither Albemarle County nor Charlottesville will be obligated to continue paying the RSWA to operate the Ivy Material Utilization Center or the McIntire Recycling Center.

Both localities recently amended an agreement that governs operations at Ivy and McIntire. The RSWA previously funded the services with profits made from tipping fees charged at Ivy and another transfer facility at Zion Crossroads.

Many trash haulers have chosen to stop using the Ivy facility, and the RSWA no longer collects a fee at Zion Crossroads. That was one of the conditions of a settlement between the authority and Van Der Linde Recycling, which operates a similar facility nearby.

In fiscal year 2005, 105,593 tons of municipal solid waste and other items passed through the Ivy facility. In FY2009, that number had dropped to 69,636 tons.

The authority’s executive director, Thomas L. Frederick Jr., told the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors last week that his employees need to know soon what their destiny will be.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty in their eyes right now about what are they going to be doing, how are they going to feed their families and pay their mortgages in the future because I can’t tell them beyond the end of December what our structure is going to look like,” Frederick said.

Frederick said the RSWA could play a role in helping Albemarle County continue to provide services at Ivy, as well as the recycling center, should the city opt out.

To save money, the RSWA also cut back hours at McIntire and stopped accepting certain materials that are expensive to dispose, such as compact fluorescent light bulbs, batteries and paint. Area residents are being directed to private companies or to wait until a special collection day the RSWA will sponsor next spring.

“In the last two months we have seen increasing numbers of complaints, and the vast majority of those complaints are about the services that we curtailed,” Frederick said. “There are some people that are feeling the effects of not having a regular place to take their CFLs and their fluorescent tubes anymore.”

Frederick also told supervisors he thought the city may exit the RSWA because it provides many of the same services to its residents.

However, Councilor David Brown, who sits on the RSWA Board of Directors, said at the authority’s August meeting that he still wants to find a way to have the city contribute to the McIntire Recycling Center.

City and county staffers are preparing solid waste plans for elected officials to consider.

County Executive Robert W. Tucker said supervisors will be presented with a series of options on how to proceed at their meeting in October. They might include curbside recycling through private haulers, a recycling center at the Ivy transfer station or finding a way to build multiple centers in populated areas throughout the county.

“At one time we had five recycling centers in the capital improvement program, and they were taken out because of funding issues,” Tucker said in an interview. Each one was estimated at $250,000, though Tucker added that that figure may have dropped due to the recession.

Norris said he hopes the city can make its decision in October as well. He said one option might be contributing to the McIntire center outside of the auspices of the RSWA.

In an e-mail, Councilor Holly Edwards called the center “part of the fabric of the community.”

Councilor Satyendra Huja said he had not yet made up his mind, but observed that the county has more of a use for the McIntire center than the city does. Councilor Kristin Szakos could not be reached for comment.

Regardless of the RSWA’s destiny, the city must continue to participate in an agreement to pay for the continued remediation of the Ivy landfill, which closed in 2001 after being the primary landfill for the city, county and the University of Virginia.

Katie Baines, “tightrope.”

“These shouldn’t work” was my first thought while standing in Ruffin Gallery looking at Katie Baines’s recent paintings. A visiting faculty member in UVA’s art department, Baines creates shape-strewn abstracts, combining numerous techniques from airbrushing to stenciling to brushwork, in colors that would normally clash but somehow mesh. And work, they do.

The best approach, I discovered, is simply to yield, allowing each of the 10 acrylic-on-panel paintings to unfold. After a few minutes, Baines’ visual vocabulary begins to make sense. From piece to piece, she deploys a similar set of elements— thin parallel lines fluid in their irregularity, waving polyps, scalloped borders, stenciled shapes and their echoes, etc.— that unite her complex compositions and move the viewer smoothly from one small event to the next.

For instance, in “glowing cell,” overlapping vertical rectangles of brown, orange, ochre, and olive drip down like stylized stalactites in the top left corner and have their colors repeated in boxes of lines, reminiscent of topographical maps, at the bottom of the painting. The earthy colors occur again as curving ochre shapes with diffuse olive edges that enliven the interior of a purplish cell— its hues as varied as a bruise— at the heart of the painting. Meanwhile, two small tiger-striped cylinders of red and chartreuse occur in an egg shape placed inside the “line boxes” but also have twins afloat in the purplish cell stenciled with overlapping ovals.

Nothing in Baines’s paintings happens in isolation— there is always a call and response between the elements. Although abstract, her compositions are rife with animated drama arising from the cartoon-like interplay of shapes and colors. In “tightrope,” forms of pale blue, yellow, grey, rust, brown, and orange seem to hang from a slack aqua line, while below, their “shadows” appear to rest beneath a frosted dome. In the background, a white line suggests a horizon above what seems to be a dark body of pooling water edged by stylized swamp grass.

Baines’s paintings are like poetry; each work contains a number of stanzas that resonate with each other and circle back to variations on a chorus. Although her techniques are distinct, the dizzying complexity of her compositions and playful “everything including the kitchen sink” approach to palette recall Wassily Kandinsky’s abstracts. The longer one looks, the more “aha” moments emerge and entertain. And what at first may have caused head-scratching suddenly makes brilliant sense.

Katie Baines’s recent paintings are on view through September 17 at Ruffin Gallery. Ruffin Hall, 179 Culbreth Road. Katie Baines will give an artist’s talk at 5:30pm, September 15 in Campbell 160. 924-6123.

That’s the Jefferson Theater at right behind the tallest twirl.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

Ever wonder what happens outside the Jefferson Theater at 10:02pm on a Friday night? Well, at that time on September 3, this is what happens— whatever the heck it is.

Just up Route 231 from the Somerset Store.
PHOTO BY SKIP DEGAN

The patriotic cornfield recently photographed by Gordonsville Airport-based flight instructor Skip Degan and appearing on this blog on July 12, now appears headed for public enjoyment. The Orange County Review reports that on September 11 the field will be a pay-to-hike maze for the sum of $10 per person. It’s located in the community of Somerset at a place called Liberty Mills Farm.

L-R: The Mentor building, Brown’s Lock & Safe, and the Omni hotel, as seen from the McGuffey Art Center during First Fridays.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

This is how downtown looked from the McGuffey Art Center at 7:40pm on Friday, September 3.

Over at The Hook, editor Hawes Spencer has been writing about the latest in the slow-motion collapse of the whole Landmark Hotel / Halsey Minor / Lee Danielson thing, with the news of the moment being the Chapter 11 filing by Minor Family Hotels LLC. Within that piece, Spencer mentions that Minor started threatening The Hook with a lawsuit, and links to two e-mails [1, 2] that Minor sent to the newspaper in early July. The first one, sent July 2, reads:

Hawes you are the $7.5 mm man — so far. If it was not for you printing the outrageous comments from Lee and SFG I would not have done so well in court. You have clearly destroyed the value of the hotel with your series of inaccurate and in inflammatory stories based on completely false facts. SFG was horrible, and Lee was just as bad but with the hook accepting falsehood after falsehood as gospel you have made obvious the damages the bad actors can have in undermining a project and an important economic driver to a city like Charlottelsville.

As I said. Christies down $12.5.mm for fraud. Lee bankrupt. SFG bankrupt. You write one more story that is libelous and I have no choice but to go after the third leg of the stool, the Hook. Tell your people to quite inventing facts. Say you are sorry. Haas, I am suing you plain and simple to clear my name with one more nasty false story. Christies can afford to underestimate me. You cannot.

And the second one, sent July 3:

Hawes, trust me. When your down people start to pile on. You are just such an individual which is why you are generally disliked around town.

You need to publicly apologize to me. Divorce and a libel suit are not going to be a good plan for you.You apologize publicly or I am coming after you for lying about me when I was fighting my battles, which were for the sake of the city, not to sell sleazy papers.

The difference between you and I is you bug the fuck out of me, but I on the other hand can and will crush you if you don’t make amends for being such a lying asshole for the last 18 months — you, Lee and the FDIC. Your world is getting small fast and if you choose to take me on too you are not going to believe how far down the bottom really is. I crushed the jerks in my way. Good luck to you.

Wow. Those are scorchers. Minor never specifies what he believes to be falsehoods in The Hook’s coverage, so it’s tough to know what the merits are of his claims.

It’s safe to travel to Weyers Cave again: the serial mooner has been caught (in the act).

Planned Parenthood opted to meet more stringent standards when it built this facility on Hydraulic Road. PHOTO BY LISA PROVENCE

It was a busy week for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, losing his quest for climate change documents, asking Craigslist to yank adult ads, and issuing an equally controversial legal opinion on abortion.

“It was obviously a political maneuver,” says Tarina Keene, director of the state chapter of an abortion rights group. Keene estimates that 17 out of the state’s 21 abortion providers could not meet the stricter standards that Cuccinelli’s opinion says the state could mandate. Currently, facilities for first-trimester abortions are classified as physician offices— along with oral surgeons, eye doctors, and urgent care centers.

Keene, who runs NARAL Pro Choice Virginia, protests that other surgeries riskier than abortion, like cosmetic surgery, breast augmentation, and eye surgery, also fall under the “physician offices” category, which is regulated by the Board of Medicine. Outpatient hospitals are under the jurisdiction of the Board of Health.

“Abortion is very well regulated,” she says. “This is sort of a slap in the face to the Board of Medicine.”

When he was in the General Assembly, Cuccinelli tried— unsuccessfully— to pass legislation regulating abortion providers. But in his capacity as AG, when pro-life Delegate Bob Marshall asked for an official opinion on that matter, Cuccinelli determined that yes, the Commonwealth can regulate the facilities that provide first-trimester abortions, as well as the medical personnel who perform them.

“The Attorney General is trying to attempt to generate a regulatory fix to something the legislature has refused to do by law or by statute,” says Planned Parenthood’s David Nova.

Cuccinelli spokesman Brian Gottstein, however, disagrees and says issuing official opinions is part of the attorney general’s job when a state agency or legislator requests it. “Official opinions are not the attorney general’s personal opinions, but rather legal opinions,” says Gottstein. “Issuing this legal opinion is not an ‘end run’ around anyone, because the law already says the state can regulate clinics.”

Indeed, Planned Parenthood’s Nova has long prepared for this moment. When Planned Parenthood constructed new clinics in Roanoke in 2000 and Charlottesville in 2004, they were built to the outpatient hospital specifications “out of concern that one day the legislature would require us to operate as hospitals,” explains Nova.

That’s not the case for Charlottesville Medical Center for Women, a Commonwealth Drive abortion provider, which declined to comment when contacted by the Hook.

“The Attorney General’s opinion states the Commonwealth of Virginia has the legal authority to regulate abortion providers,” says Nova. “Planned Parenthood agrees with that. Virginia has the authority and obligation to assure every medical facility operates professionally and safely.”

Where he draws the line: If the Board of Health uses the Attorney General’s opinion to restrict access to first trimester abortions. “The ruling in and of itself doesn’t do anything,” says Nova. “It doesn’t say the state will do this. It says the state can do this.”

John Whitehead at the Rutherford Institute weighs in with support of tightened restrictions on clinics, even if it means first-trimester abortions are more costly and send women to other states. “Though it may seem undesirable to have Virginians crossing state lines to undergo less costly abortions, this concern must be secondary to the health risks associated with the Commonwealth maintaining a laissez-faire attitude toward abortion clinic safety” he writes in a letter to state Senator David Marsden.

Virginia, cautions Whitehead, “must see that its clinics don’t become the dreaded ‘back alleys.’”

Actual examples of botched or risky abortions in Virginia were not produced and were not a factor in Cuccinelli’s opinion. “It does not look at— nor is it intended to look at— specific instances of harm caused by a lack of regulation,” says Cuccinelli spokesman Gottstein.

The next move is up to Governor Bob McDonnell, who appoints members of the Board of Health, the regulatory body overseeing outpatient hospitals. McDonnell also opposes abortion, but he’s bucked Cuccinelli before when the attorney general opined that colleges didn’t have the authority to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation.

“The Governor and members of the administration are currently evaluating and reviewing this opinion,” says McDonnell press secretary Stacey Johnson.

Over at the Board of Health, local appointee Willis Logan says at the moment, the opinion doesn’t change anything, but he acknowledges that questions about the ruling are going to the governor’s office, and that McDonnell has the final say on who makes up the Board of Health. Notes Logan, “I serve at the pleasure of the governor.”

Updated 10:40am with John Whitehead’s observations.

By Brian Wheeler
Charlottesville Tomorrow
Friday, September 3, 2010

Charlottesville’s City Council met in a two-hour work session Thursday to review recent studies about a 50-year water plan that has been in the works for nearly eight years, since the drought of 2002 underscored the need for a long-term solution.

After seven separate presentations, the council found it had run out of time for a substantive discussion about specific plan alternatives. Mayor Dave Norris said the council would find time at the next two regular City Council meetings being held in September, including a public hearing on the water plan scheduled for Sept. 20.


“Our purpose today was not for council to come to any decisions, but rather to give us a chance to review a lot of the studies that have been done,” Norris said.

“The data presented was very useful,” Councilor Satyendra Huja said after the meeting. “We have more data and opinions now than when I first started on City Council. I think we will have a better plan.”

Organizations advocating both for and against the 2006 water plan, which still has the backing of Albemarle County officials, were given the opportunity to make presentations.

The Nature Conservancy’s Bill Kittrell provided the council with background on his organization’s early work contributing to the water plan. He described the goal of balancing human and environmental needs by finding a plan that provided a big enough “bath tub” to provide drinking water in a severe drought and at the same time provide for improved stream flows in the Moormans and Rivanna rivers.

“Stream flows are important because water and wildlife that depend on rivers depend not just on the quality of the water, but also the quantity of the water,” Kittrell said. “Unfortunately, aquatic animals are the most imperiled animals in the world … and impacts locally are due primarily to excess sedimentation and altered hydrology.”

Dede Smith, Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan

Dede Smith, representing Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan, a group that favors dredging at the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, presented data about water conservation that she has said demonstrates why the new dam in the water plan will be unnecessary.

“Given what we’ve seen and what we know about conservation trends, we can anticipate a conservation rate that is much closer to 30 percent,” Smith said. “I consider this quite a conservative estimate.”

Smith said water conservation would increase as more efficient water fixtures and appliances were utilized in the community and that the 50-year water plan was oversized. Smith said overall water usage in the city would continue to drop, and that while the University of Virginia was a significant city customer, she said Albemarle was a different matter.

“UVa will be put before you as a big threat, but I’ll tell you, UVa can’t even begin to compete with county growth,” Smith said.

The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority has scheduled a tentative meeting of the “four boards” for Sept. 21, the day after the council’s public hearing. The signatories of the four-party agreement that governs local water and sewer matters are the RWSA, the Albemarle County Service Authority, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors and the City Council.

Huja said he was “leery” that the council would have reached a decision by the time of that meeting.

“It could happen Sept. 20, but if history is any guide, I’m not so sure,” Huja said. “I hope I will be able to make a decision by then.”

Councilor Holly Edwards said she was weighing the benefits of improved stream flows and a sense of obligation to maintain the existing South Fork Reservoir with dredging. She said she still needs to look at all the information that has been collected before making her decision.

“On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being [at a decision] and 1 being not even close, we are still at a 5,” Edwards concluded.

Edison2’s Chief of Design Ron Mathis (right) and CEO Oliver Kuttner.
PHOTO BY BRAD JAEGER/EDISON2

For Oliver Kuttner,  Thursday, September 16 could be called the moment of truth. That’s the day that the Charlottesville real estate developer turned automotive innovator finds out if the past two years of designing and building the car of the future will win $5 million in the Progressive Automotive X Prize.

At this point, it’s them or no one.

While most of the 136 vehicles entered into the X Prize back in 2009 were electric or hybrid, Kuttner’s team— dubbed Edison2  and the subject of the Hook’s June 17 cover story— took what might have seemed a retro approach. They stuck with a combustion engine, but they focused on making the car as streamlined and lightweight as possible. It seemed to work.

During the three phases of the contest, the Very Light Car achieved eye-popping fuel thrift with highway efficiency topping 100mpg, a contest requirement. Team Kuttner also met the strict emission and safety standards required for X Prize victory. But it hasn’t been a road without bumps.

Each of Edison2’s two-seater versions were knocked out of competition— and therefore, the chance at an additional $5 million— by technical problems. And the two four-seaters very nearly met a similar fate during one of the last tests of the Finals in July. For instance, during a fuel efficiency test called a “coast down,” Contest-assigned drivers (not Edison2’s own drivers) allegedly shifted incorrectly, damaging the engines to the point that the vehicles couldn’t complete the very last competition stage, laboratory validation.

All was not lost for Edison2, however. Throughout the course of the car’s development and competition, Kuttner’s team had been testing the cars at the Roush laboratory, which like the X Prize’s official lab, Argonne, is certified by the Environmental Protection Agency, so X Prize officials agreed to let Edison2 submit the Roush results, although judges retain the right to discard them.

Citing contest rules, Kuttner declines comment on the lab results, other than to say he “feels good about our chances.” Perhaps that has something to do with what he told the Hook back in June, when he reported that in a laboratory test, the Very Light Car had gotten more than 106 miles to the gallon in the highway cycle with the emissions meeting the far more stringent standards currently set for 2014. If numbers like those are used and accepted by judges, it’s not hard to understand why he’d be feeling very good indeed.

Whether or not Edison2 ends up taking the Prize, Kuttner says he’s not finished with the Very Light Car. He’s already scoping out additional manufacturing spaces in various locations across the country, including sites in Pittsylvania County and in Lynchburg, where Edison2 is headquartered.

“We’re just getting started,” he says. “We’ve come way too far to stop.”

Frank Islam, author of Renewing the American Dream, joins Coy to discuss his book.

The “takeoff roll” on the paved runway.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

The Gordonsville Municipal Airport has been getting some extra attention recently. Known to aviators at KGVE and owned by the town that shares its name, it’s actually privately run and recently assisted by a relatively new group of volunteers called GAPS, or Gordonsville Airport Preservation Society. Last Saturday, August 28, a reporter took a little ride with one of the volunteers, Skip Degan, who also occasionally shoots aerial photos for the Hook.

The top story on today’s UVA Today is about a children’s bilingual astronomy picture book produced as an outgrowth of the “Dark Skies, Bright Kids” outreach program being run by U.Va. astronomy professor Kelsey Johnson and many student volunteers.

I’d like to highlight something from deep down in Fariss Samarrai’s story: the group is trying to win $25,000 in funding from Pepsi to get more copies of the book printed, with the goal of increasing its distribution around the local schools and possibly around the state. (Click on the link above; you can vote up to 10 times a day.)

Alumnus Phil Plaitt, whom we wrote about last Friday, used his “Bad Astronomy” blog on the Discover website to lobby for votes for the book. And Johnson herself penned a piece on the club for the current edition of Albemarle Family magazine,