New owner Dan Goff says Starlight Express has newer buses, better wi-fi, and more leg room.
PHOTO BY WILL WALKER

For six years, the Starlight Express, brainchild of entrepreneurs Oliver Kuttner and David New, has ferried passengers to New York City and back. The two have sold their locally grown bus service to Ruckersville-based A. Goff Limo, and the new owner stands ready to get in Amtrak’s face for Charlottesville-to-NYC travelers.

Dan Goff is so confident that passengers will choose the bus over train that after the holidays, he plans to put the Starlight’s pick-up/drop-off point, which has been on East Market Street, literally in Amtrak’s face at its station on West Main Street.

“That’s the center of the city,” says Goff. “We don’t have a physical location on Market Street.”

And although the unpaved parking lot at the Amtrak station has been a source of controversy for years now, it does offer more parking, says Goff, in a location where passengers can wait for their departure in restaurants and find multiple transportation options when the bus returns at midnight.

Since purchasing the bus company in a deal consummated in August, Goff (whose wife, Ana, founded A. Goff in 2000) has added (more)

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The smash trimmed the canvas— but not the enthusiasm— of the Virginia Dance Company, whose members gathered before 8am Thursday to tout their Sunday night “iDance.”
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

A University Transit Service bus driver who reportedly failed to secure the brakes on the vehicle while attending to some sort of cleaning operation resulted in extensive damage to a sidewall of historic Beta Bridge on Wednesday, October 21. The Bridge, which carries Rugby Road over the CSX railroad tracks, has long served as a canvas for student messages uttered in paint.

Moments after this photo was taken the following morning, a two-bulldozer crew from the Charlottesville Public Works Department arrived to stop traffic and— with industrial-strength chains— pull down the damaged section.

A photo and video captured by the Newsplex shows that the bus missed the adjacent fire hydrant (currently wearing a silver coat of paint) by what appears to be just an inch or two. The Newsplex is also the source for the cause of the crash.

Too many layers to count.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

According to the unofficial UVA historian Coy Barefoot, Beta Bridge got its first documented freelance paint job in 1926, three years after the steel-reinforced concrete structure was built. The current paint layers— as revealed in the massive bus-caused crack— appear at least two inches thick.

Most poignantly, the bridge served as a months-long condolence to Virginia Tech after the 2007 massacre on the Blackburg university’s campus.

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William Moses and his wife Paticia Kluge, who donated $1.2 million to the project, cut the ribbon in the building that bears their names.
PHOTO BY DAVE MCNAIR

Students already taking classes at Piedmont Virginia Community College’s new Kluge-Moses Science Building, which opened in the spring, had to pass through a throng of more than hundred people who’d gathered in the building’s atrium for the official opening ceremony on September 16, attended by Patricia Kluge and her husband William Moses, the couple whose $1.2 million gift for the project was the largest in school history.

As PVCC president Frank Friedman pointed out, the Kluge-Moses gift, while only a small part of the $11.5 million price tag, made up of mostly state funds, allowed the college to add cutting-edge technology that it might have had to eliminate, such as classroom whiteboards that copy anything written on them as PDF computer files, and two-way video systems that (more)

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Just four days after winning America’s top experimental car competition, Oliver Kuttner urged Council to dredge.
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

After an appeal from the victor in a car-of-the-future contest and about two score of other dredge fans, the long-running water debate reached a cascade in City Hall on Monday, September 20 with a cobbled-together compromise that focuses on dredging the silt-choked Rivanna Reservoir but first fixes the broken Ragged Mountain dam with a 13-foot rise.

The unanimous decision came at 11:45pm, nearly five hours after the City Council hearing began.

Automobile inventor Oliver Kuttner was one of the first speakers during the marathon event. “Building things to peak use is wasteful,” said Kuttner. “Maintenance is a really good idea.”

Fellow dredge fan and HotCakes bistro co-owner Keith Rosenfeld tried to score guilt points on the probable swing vote, Councilor Satyendra Huja, by pointing out that Huja once offered to take him out for an Indian dinner while preventing him from cutting down a tree blocking the HotCakes sign.

“Now we’re talking 50,000 trees,” Rosenfeld said, “and I want to take you up on that dinner.”

Asked after the meeting if the compromise was a victory for the dredge-lovers, Rosenfeld was cautiously optimistic. “The devil’s in the details,” he said.

At issue was (more)

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Huja has warned that wars will someday be fought over water.
PHOTOS SKIP DEGAN, WILLIAM WALKER

After a career spent tinkering within the limits of his job as the Charlottesville planning director, freshman City Councilor Satyendra Huja suddenly finds himself the decider in a contentious cross-border debate that some critics fear could double local water bills. City Council has set a Monday, September 20 public hearing to determine whether to dredge the main existing reservoir, build a massive new dam, or both.

“I guess I’m the swing vote, and that’s not a bad place to be,” Huja says in an interview that comes just a day after a dredge equipment executive suggests that Charlottesville has become the laughingstock of the dredging industry for allowing consultants to talk the city out of saving its existing reservoir.

Four years ago, Charlottesville and Albemarle officially dismissed dredging as a viable option after a Pennsylvania-based engineering firm claimed the cost might top $223 million. However, following a recent boat tour, the regional sales manager for Ellicott Dredges walked away with a different opinion.

“The scale and scope of the project was so much smaller than I had imagined,” Steve Miller told reporters and officials during a September 15 meeting, one day after his tour of the silt-choked Rivanna Reservoir, the major drinking water lake for the Charlottesville-Albemarle urban areas.

Miller told the gathering in the main library that he often travels to municipalities to perform a “sanity check” when he hears numbers that don’t make sense to him, such as that $223 million, which came from a firm called Gannett Fleming. Even a thriftier prognosis from a Richmond-area firm called HDR struck Miller as needlessly overwrought with (more)

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Halsey Minor, left, has been sparring with developer Lee Danielson.
FILE PHOTOS BY HAWES SPENCER AND JAY KUHLMANN

The company owned by bi-coastal Internet millionaire Halsey Minor to develop the stalled Landmark hotel on the Downtown Mall declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy Wednesday, September 1, in the federal bankruptcy court in Lynchburg.

Court filings indicate that Minor has directed the Roanoke-based law firm of Woods Rogers to handle the situation.

Minor recently won a $6.6 million victory against developer Lee Danielson in the hotel fiasco, but the two sides are slated to spar again on November 1, court records say, with a three-week trial in Atlanta, where Minor had been sued by Danielson and the project’s Georgia-based lender.

The largest unsecured creditor in the bankruptcy of Minor Family Hotels LLC, which is headquartered at Minor’s sumptuous Fox Ridge farm in Free Union, appears to be Minor’s lawyer, Betty Shumener of the Los Angeles-based firm DLA Piper. A court document shows that Minor’s company owes Shumener $3,047,360.

Despite the seven-figure debt, Shumener— who bills her time at $790 per hour— appears to have recently begun representing Minor in another matter after his original legal team began bailing out. On July 30, (more)

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The Ghana delegation (Head of Warrior Group Joseph Baiden, Transport Minister Mike Hammah, and Municipal Chief Executive’s Representative Godfrey Kwame Nkrumah) meets with Worrell Water Technologies researcher Eric Lohan.
PHOTO COURTESTY WWT

When a delegation from Winneba, Ghana visited Charlottesville several weeks ago, one city official criticized those who might “poo-poo” the idea of a fourth sister city as a waste of tax payer money. An appropriate phrase, as it turned out, because the African delegation visited Worrell Water Technologies, a company known for turning sewage into fresh water.

In 2007, Worrell Water built one of its “Living Machine” waste-water treatment systems— featured in a 2009 Hook cover story entitled “The Tao of poo”— in Tema, Ghana, one of more than a dozen such systems the company has installed around the world.

What’s a Living Machine? Well, imagine a man-made, turbo-charged tidal wetland. Basically, waste water is pumped and filtered, and monitored by microcomputers, through a series of cells that use plants in porous gravel to cultivate natural microorganisms that eat up the waste. The cells continuously fill and drain, mimicking the tidal action of estuaries.

Whereas the earth only has two tidal cycles a day— nature’s way of flushing the toilet— the Living Machine replicates that cycle 10 to 12 times a day.

“It was my second visit to Worrell Water this past year,” says Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris, who tagged along with the Ghana delegation, “and I am definitely (more)

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UVA powers down in the face of the sun.
PHOTOS BY JEN FARIELLO & IAN JAMES O’NEILL

A month ago, the University of Virginia conducted an “energy reduction” drill designed to reduce electric loads on its power grid in case of a declaration of an “energy emergency.” Today, the drill became reality.

“Yes, we’ve been informed that there is a real electric grid emergency in the Commonwealth of Virginia,” says Cheryl Gomez, UVA Facilities Management director of energy and utilities around 2pm Wednesday, July 7. “We’re initiating the load reduction plan as we speak.”

However, a spokesperson with Virginia Dominion Power disputes that, saying there is no grid emergency. More on that further down.

Gomez says that University officials received word earlier in the day from PJM Interconnection, an organization that monitors the flow of electricity in the Virginia Dominion Power region, that the current heat wave was causing an energy emergency on the state’s power grid, which could lead to rolling blackouts.

Gomez says it’s the first time the University had to implement the load reduction plan for real, but that during the two-hour drill on June 10, which tested the University’s ability to take loads off-line, they were able to reduce energy consumption by 2.96 megawatts. This time, however, Energy Connect has advised UVA to remain in an energy emergency for at least six hours.

Meanwhile, Gomez says a thermal energy storage tank has been brought on-line, which will offset the energy load by 1 to 2 megawatts, and that they’ve taken the main heating/cooling plant on Massie Road and another near a research facility off-line. The two plants will now run on diesel powered generators until the emergency is over.

Gomez also says that University faculty, students, and administrators have been asked to turn off all lights, computers, monitors, appliances, and any other devices not needed to do business.

If all goes as planned, Gomez expects UVA to take 6 megawatts off the power grid.

However, David Botkins, media relations director for Dominion, says the company wasn’t aware of any grid emergency. PJM, he said, could have made the call on its own.

“We haven’t broken any records yet,” he says, pointing out that the highest usage the company experienced was in August 2007. “There is high demand today, and we are encouraging conservation measures, but no emergency is in effect.” He suggested we call UVA Facilities Mangagement director Don Sundgren to confirm.

Sundgren, however, stood behind Gomez’s statements.

“We wouldn’t implement this on our own,” he says.

Updated 7.8.2010 9:24am

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Is the McIntire Recycling Center doomed?
PHOTO BY HAWES SPENCER

The McIntire Recycling Center would seem to have been dealt a blow by City Council’s recent decision to award a major city trash/recycling contract to the area leader in no-effort recycling, Van der Linde Recycling, which (in addition to the City’s curbside recycling program) gives residents yet another reason not to use the park-and-drop center. But (yet another) blow also came from the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority itself, which voted June 22 on a slimmer budget that would terminate daily acceptance of fluorescent lights and batteries at McIntire, which will now be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. In a related move, paint will no longer be accepted at the Ivy transfer station.

That’s some pile of bad news for do-it-yourself recyclers, who, according to the RSWA’s recycling manager, Bruce Edmonds, have continued to flock to the Center, which has been on McIntire Road since 1979.

“Man, this place has never been busier,” says Edmonds, who recently announced he will retire in September to launch his own consulting firm. “There’s always a flood of cars here. And when we’re closed they save it up and come the next day.”

Indeed, according to a recent RSWA survey, 2,585 cars visited the center between June 8–13, or 430 cars a day, with 65.2 percent coming from the County, 31.7 percent from the City, and 3.1 percent from outside the RSWA’s service area. But the struggling Authority’s $2 million budget— already representing a (more)

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Van der Linde’s recycling facility(surrounding the holding pond) is permitted to handle 1,000 tons of trash a day. The RSWA’s Ivy transfer station: 150 tons a day
PHOTO BY SKIP DEGAN

Last year, our local governments stood behind the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority as it spent nearly $400,000 trying to prove that recycling entrepreneur Peter Van der Linde had defrauded area tax payers. Now it appears that tax payer funds, including disposal fees that once went to the RSWA, will be headed Van der Linde’s way.

Last week, Charlottesville City Council said good-bye to its long-standing support agreement with the RSWA, which had required City trash be taken to an RSWA-sponsored transfer station for the purpose of collecting a “service contribution fee” to support the Authority’s services, awarding a new City contract for trash disposal services to Van der Linde Recycling.

Under the contract, all City curbside trash will be taken by Waste Management (whom city has a separate $759,430 hauling contract with) to Van der Linde’s Materials Recovery Facility in Zion Crossroads, which is permitted by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to process commingled recyclables, construction and demolition debris, and household waste for recycling.

With a low bid of $39 per ton, Van der Linde beat out his neighbor, former RSWA partner Republic Services Inc. (formerly BFI and Allied Waste), which has received City trash since (more)

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For over two years, The Box and other business on 2nd SE have endured constant construction.
PHOTO BY CHAS WEBSTER

Chas Webster figured that by now there’d be a lovely outdoor patio space and a luxury hotel in front of his restaurant The Box on Second Street SE. Instead, he’s looked out on what he describes as a “war zone” for over two years. And it’s taking a toll.

“Yesterday, I couldn’t even get into my own business,” he says, as the entrance to the building had been blocked off, allegedly without notice, by a construction crews under contract to the City.

“It’s ridiculous,” says Webster. “The City promised this would take four months. Now it’s taken almost twice as long as it did to renovate the entire Mall.”

Indeed, while many Downtown businesses suffered during last year’s multi-month re-bricking of the Mall, the Box and other businesses on Second Street SE have endured a special kind of torture.

Demolition of the old Boxer Learning/Central Fidelity bank building began over two years ago to allow construction of the 11-story tower. The subsequent renovation of Second Street SE means that businesses like The Box, Zabor Dance Studio, and Oyster House Antiques haven’t had (more)

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Louis Schultz is arrested for attempted assault by car.
PHOTO BY ROB SCHILLING

A citizen icon of the property rights and environmental movements spent the night behind bars, charged by Charlottesville Police with a felony, but according to a witness to the arrest, Louis Schultz was simply staging a peaceful defense of his own private property.

“It was kind of like a low-grade Tiannamen Square,” says Rob Schilling, host of WINA’s Schilling Show. “Louis had the nose of the car up to the bulldozer, blade-to-blade with the bulldozer. It was eerily reminiscent of 1989.”

That proximity, however, say police, is what cost Schultz his freedom.

According to Charlottesville Police Lieutenant Gary Pleasants, Charlottesville Public Works employees under orders to (more)

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No one told Maurie Sutton her street would be no parking when she bought a lot there in 2007.
PHOTO BY COURTENEY STUART

The neighborhood already reeling from getting declared a no plow zone in December just got another unhappy surprise when residents learned that they can no longer park at the end of their cul-de-sac. Now, some residents of this south-of-downtown neighborhood say they don’t know where they’ll park.

“I have a roommate, a 23-year-old nurse who works nights,” says resident Maurie Sutton. “She’s going to have to walk through a neighborhood that isn’t safe.”

And safety isn’t the only concern at Roy’s Place, (more)

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