While Albemarle County officials have insisted that the new red light cameras are safety tools, not money generators, the first 26 days of active enforcement seem to show a tidy profit.

Between December 12 and January 7, according to figures released earlier this week, 412 tickets were mailed to offenders. At $50 a ticket, that represents potential revenue of $20,600.

In a release, County Police Captain John Parrent said he was pleased by “what appears to be a positive impact” on the intersection of Rio Road and Seminole Trail; and that, he said, “translated into improved traffic safety.”

However, the County offered no data on the number of intersection accidents, if any, since the cameras went live, how any new accident rate might compare to a pre-camera time period, or any data on how many tickets were for “rolling stops,” a relatively benign infraction when answered by posting time.

Under the County’s agreement with Australia-based camera vendor Redflex, the company gets to keep the first $10,000 of monthly ticket revenue while the County keeps any overage for its general fund, an arrangement that’s received fire from the Rutherford Institute. In a report, the civil rights organization slams such systems as “revenue-raising devices” that create an improper financial incentive.

Specifically, the Institute contends that the arrangement violates a Virginia law prohibiting municipalities from making corporate deals in which compensation rises with the penalties. During a County budget meeting in April 2009, County Supervisor Dennis Rooker appeared to confirm such suspicions when he lauded the system not only for safety but also as a “revenue enhancer.”

County data indicate that the system itself has some problems. It seems that 998 drivers triggered (more)

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As recently reported, while weather and utility work delayed the installation of red-light cameras at the intersection of Rio Road and 29 North, Albemarle County’s high-tech attempt to curb red-light running will finally commence on Friday, November 12. There will be a 30-day grace period, during which violations will only be observed, but after that County police will start mailing out $50 tickets based on photographic and video evidence the cameras capture.

However, there’s one important detail (mentioned previously on Coy Barefoot’s radio program) that hasn’t been widely reported: the cameras won’t be monitoring the entire intersection. Say what?

According to a joint County/VDOT engineering safety analysis on the intersection, three cameras will monitor only two approaches: the through lanes of 29 Southbound and the two left-hand turn lanes, and the through lanes of Rio Road Eastbound and the left and right turned turn lanes.

“We are obviously hoping for a ‘halo effect’ that will impact driver behavior at all approaches to the intersection,” says county spokesperson Lee Catlin.

According to County police Lt. Ernie Allen, the camera systems can only be installed (more)

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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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Oliver Kuttner, the Charlottesville real estate developer turned automotive developer, has won the $5 million top prize in the Progressive Automotive X Prize, it was announced Thursday morning, September 16. His Edison2 team’s winning vehicle, a four-seater called the Very Light Car, reportedly gets 102 miles per gallon of fuel and could, Kuttner hopes, reshape the automotive industry.

Kuttner’s quest was the subject of the Hook’s June 17 cover story.

Accolades have begun streaming in. There was a celebratory party hosted by Arianna Huffington, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke at the September 16 victory ceremony held outside the Historical Society of Washington D.C., and Fifth District Congressman Tom Perriello quickly issued a congratulatory statement pointing out that he’s made numerous visits to Kuttner’s Lynchburg laboratory.

Two years ago, Kuttner helped embarrass local water officials— who were busily portraying dredging their main reservoir as impossibly expensive— by offering to dredge for $30 million, a fraction of the quarter-billion one consultant claimed it might cost. “It would be a dream job,” Kuttner said. “I’ll make so much money.”

His brazen form of entrepreneurship ran him afoul of Charlottesville officials years earlier. He’s the guy who embedded two stone arches salvaged from an old gothic church into the side of the former Woolworth’s building. The City made him remove the arches.

In a 2005 Hook cover story, Kuttner— after sifting through a stack of stop-work orders and other official rebukes— explained that Charlottesville red-tape had pushed him to Lynchburg, where an allegedly more business-friendly environment would smile upon his visions for developing property and, as it turned out, cars.

If officials once fled any association with Kuttner, now they clamor to be associated with the conquering visionary.

“Every time I visited their lab,” Congressman Perriello says in a statement, “I felt like a witness to history and to a re-imagining of the automobile for a new century. From the scientists to the machinists, they are blazing a path towards the efficient, affordable, American-made technology of tomorrow.”

Meanwhile, U.S. Senator Mark Warner also showed up for the award ceremony and made some gushing statements of his own:

“Edison2’s innovations really represent a home run— not just for Virginia, but for the whole country,” said Senator Warner.

Politicians aren’t the only ones now clamoring for Kuttner. The day after the announcement, he appeared live on the NBC Today show as well as on National Public Radio. But it’s not all champagne and interviews. On Monday, September 20, Kuttner appeared in City Hall, urging City Council to give dredging a try.

“I’ve been thinking about it all weekend,” says Kuttner. “It’s liable to save the citizens over $100 million.”

So how does he deal with his sudden popularity and the fact that he’s been proposing visionary ideas in Charlottesville for several years without much appreciation.

“Some people understand things sooner,” says Kuttner, “and some people understand things later.”

One of the “sooner” folks is Sierra Club Chairman Carl Pope, who posted a video of Kuttner’s X Prize victory speech on his personal blog and called him “2010’s inspiration.”

While Kuttner says Pope’s endorsement has been the “coolest thing” coming out of the X Prize, he’s not slowing down to bask in praise no matter how glowing. By Monday morning, September 20, he was back in the Edison2 workshop in Lynchburg, where the team is now hard at work on a next generation edition of the Very Light Car, this time with an electric engine and assistance from fellow X Prize competitors Li-ion Motors (winner of one of the two-seater X Prize categories) and a firm called TW4XP.

“They have a lot of experience,” says Kuttner.

Also in the cards: raising an additional $3 million to take the company forward. Kuttner declines to reveal the exact amount already invested in Edison2, which he says is now valued at $15 million. But after the next round of fundraising, he says he believes that value will double and continue to rise.

“In a couple of years, this is a couple hundred million-dollar company,” says Kuttner, who is “strongly considering” expanding the company into Campbell County, just outside Lynchburg, or to Michigan.

The economic downturn has been bad for most businesses, but for a start-up car company like Edison2, Kuttner says, there are heretofore unseen opportunities.

“Right now, you can buy machines for $300,000 which, if new, would cost millions and millions of dollars,” he says. “During this crazy time you can do things which you’ll never be able to do again in our lifetime.”

Kuttner’s victory has also spurred environmental groups to action. The L.A. Times reports that in the wake of the X Prize, 19 such groups have joined together to push the government to adopt a 60-mpg standard by 2025. Currently, the 2016 standard is 34.1 mpg.

As for when Very Light Cars might hit the street, Kuttner is cautious about making promises to future buyers and even his own investors.

“We still don’t know our path forward,” he says. But he is certain the car he believes is the best solution for this country’s energy woes won’t hit a dead end.

“We’re not wrong about this,” he says. “We’ve got this tiger by the tail.”

—with additional, on-the-scene reporting by Courteney Stuart

#

–updated 11:19am Friday (60 mpg standard)

—updated 2:35pm  Thursday (corrects car weight)

–updated 10:46am Friday (with Today show photo and Mark Warner quote)

–updated 2:12pm, Monday (with a little more about Kuttner’s backstory)

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The way that a pilot named Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger saved all 155 onboard his disabled commercial jetliner was the feel-good story of 2009. Locally, however, the “Miracle on the Hudson” helped launch some bad feelings in the Forest Lakes neighborhood.

Since the incident and following a series of Congressional hearings and the release of previously confidential FAA data on bird strikes, thousands of the geese across the country have been rounded up and slaughtered as part of the airline industry’s efforts to make flying safer.

But the mass killing has outraged bird lovers and ruffled feathers at Forest Lakes where 90 Canada Geese were rounded up and killed in early July. Some Forest Lakes residents have come forward to say that despite their neighborhood’s proximity to the airport, Forest Lakes geese actually pose little risk to planes.

“It’s hypocrisy, and it’s all about money,” says resident Arthur Epp, who lives in a house overlooking a lake where the geese once swam and raised their young.

While federal officials say the geese killing will bolster the safety of the flying public, Epp says there’s plenty of data to back up the claim that the airline industry is most concerned with making people think they’re safer.

Who is right?

(more)

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Eight months after beloved musician Johnny Gilmore perished in a house fire, the official investigation is complete: the blaze was accidental and likely ignited by a dropped or improperly discarded cigarette. Gilmore died of smoke inhalation, and authorities now cite a high blood alcohol content as a contributing factor in his death. But the answer to one question remains elusive: Could a different type of smoke detector have saved him?

The 45-year-old drummer was home alone in the Green Leaf Townhouses in midtown on Fifth Street, SW on Thursday, October 22, when a smoldering fire ignited in his bedroom. His then 75-year-old father, Curtis Gilmore, with whom the musician lived, arrived home right after 9pm to find smoke emerging from his son’s locked bedroom and called 911. By the time firefighters arrived five minutes later, however, the room had “flashed over”— as the temperature reached 1,200 degrees Fahrenheit and materials spontaneously combusted— and the elder Gilmore, whom the Hook was unable to interview, was injured attempting to break down the door to reach his son. He was treated for smoke inhalation and burns and released from the hospital that night.

In the days following the fire, (more)

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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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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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If Oliver Kuttner’s Very Light Car doesn’t win the Progressive Automotive X Prize, nobody will.

That’s not boasting— it’s now a fact in the mainstream category of the international contest after every other four-seater vehicle in that class– more than 60 of them originally— was eliminated, leaving only two of the Very Light Cars built by Kuttner’s company, Edison2, in competition for the $5 million prize given to the maker of a vehicle that can get 100 mpg while meeting steep emissions and safety standards.

“Things are looking good,” says David Brown, the Charlottesville city councilor who became spokesperson for Kuttner’s Lynchburg-based company earlier this year. As detailed in the Hook’s June 17 cover story, “Can this car save the world? Oliver Kuttner’s counting on it,” Kuttner’s cars were rare in the contest in that they run on a combustion engine fueled by E85— a mixture of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline as opposed to most of the other vehicles which were electric or hybrids. The impressive efficiency is achieved by using extremely lightweight materials– hence the Very Light Car’s name. The bullet shaped vehicle weighs less than 725 pounds, but thanks to high tech engineering, it offer handling and safety that cars many times its weight can’t offer. (more)

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The hulking white warehouse looks like any other industrial building in any other industrial town– there’s no sign or marking, nothing to hint that a solution to America’s oil dependency might lie just a few steps inside, where rough, weatherstained concrete suddenly gives way to a modern 22,000 square foot workshop with gleaming hardwood floors and a variety of high tech machines. Here, tucked away on Kemper Street in Lynchburg, nearly a dozen men– some of the world’s top auto mechanics and engineers– are working furiously on an automobile prototype that they believe could avert the country’s energy crisis and might even prevent another environmental catastrophe like the BP spill.

Sleek and narrow with a bullet-shaped nose and tail and four wheels set apart from the chassis, the prototype they’re building by hand is named the Very Light Car, and appropriately so. At less than 725 pounds, it’s about one fourth the weight of a Mini Cooper. If these men achieve what they’ve set out to do, the Very Light Car will be the first of its kind: a car that gets 100 miles per gallon while meeting all federal and state safety and emission standards, and which can be mass produced and sold for less than $20,000.

They’ll also have won $10 million in an international contest known as the Progressive Automotive X Prize that pits dozens of teams from around the world against each other in a race to build the car of the future.

And they will have made one Charlottesville man very, very happy. (more)

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Last year, local business owner Jeff Gunther allowed his 22 employees to do something that most employees can only dream about: set their own work schedules. The creator of OpenSpace, a 6,000 square-foot space next door to the Downtown ACAC that rents tech-friendly workspace by the hour, Gunther also runs two high-tech startups that were looking for a better way to deal with employees.

“Some people thought I was crazy,” Gunther told author Daniel H. Pink, whose new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us features a section on Gunther’s experiment. “They wondered, ‘How can you know what your employees are doing if they’re not here?’”

But Gunther, founder of Charlottesville-based Meddius and Intalgent, portrays the experiment as a success. He says his employees have been more productive and less stressed, free to focus on work instead of office dynamics.

“Management isn’t about walking around and seeing if people are in their offices,” Instead, Gunther says, it’s about “creating conditions for people to do their best work.”

However, the experiment isn’t completely novel. Tech companies including IBM, Sun Microsystems, and Google have been experimenting with this for a while. In fact, certain Google employees are allowed to take a day off each week to pursue their own interests, and close to half of Sun Microsystems employees telecommute.

Gunther, however, has adopted what’s become known as a ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment), a concept founded by former human resources officials Cali Ressler, 33, and Jody Thompson, 53, who implemented the idea at Best Buy in 2005. Since then, (more)

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No one can accuse Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli of shying from controversy. In his first four months in office, Cuccinelli  directed public universities to remove sexual orientation from their anti-discrimination policies, attacked the Environmental Protection Agency, and filed a lawsuit challenging federal health care reform. Now, it appears, he may be preparing a legal assault on an embattled proponent of global warming theory who used to teach at the University of Virginia, Michael Mann.

In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli’s office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann’s receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann— now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State— was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.

If Cuccinelli succeeds in finding a smoking gun like the purloined (more)

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It seems like just last year that CenturyTel acquired Embarq and started repainting those utility trucks with a CenturyLink logo. Wait, it wasn’t even a year ago, and now, the Monroe, Louisiana-based company has added another telco to its belt, this one Qwest Communications with its beefy fiber-optics network.

“The nice thing I can say is we’re the acquirer and won’t have to change our name,” says Rondi Furgason, CenturyLink VP and general manager for Virginia, who is headquartered in the old Centel/Sprint/Embarq building on West Main.

In the $10.6 billion stock-swap deal, CenturyLink takes a 50.5 percent majority ownership. The combined landline companies will operate in 37 states with 17 million access lines, 5 million broadband customers, 1.4 million video subscribers and 850,000 wireless consumers.

The latter will come from Qwest, because Embarq/CenturyLink ditched its wireless customers last year. (more)

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Now that iPhone’s can jump from Tweeting to eateing, as Eppie’s co-owner Dan Epstein and his customer and local techie Brian Williford have launched orderTopia, which allows customers to create an order, choose a pick up time, and pay for their order using their internet-equipped phone or computer. OrderTopia holds the order until it’s time to begin preparing it, then prints it just like orders at the restaurant.

“We built this system to run directly through the restaurants’ existing point of sale system,” says Epstein in a release. “This frees up front of house staff to focus on in-store customers and doesn’t require any changes to kitchen procedures already in place.”

So far, Elevation Burger (a Northern Virginia-based franchise), Eppie’s, and Revolutionary Soup are on board, with Rise Pizzaworks, Mellow Mushroom, and Boylan Heights in discussions.

Check it out!

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After a nearly 120-year run, there’ll be no University of Virginia yearbook for sale this year, say UVA officials.

“The Corks & Curls yearbook is traditionally published by UVA students, but the group is currently not active,” says Karen Shaffer, UVA’s director of student services. “While they may choose to regroup and publish a yearbook in the future, there is no plan to do so in the 2009-10 academic year.”

The news came as a shocker for historian Coy Barefoot, who says he drew heavily on archival copies of Corks & Curls in compiling his own book, The Corner: A History of Student Life at the University of Virginia.

“It’s a prime historical resource,” says Barefoot, who is teaching a local history course this semester. “This is just awful from a historian’s standpoint.”

However, according to Cavalier Daily editor Andrew T. Baker, the yearbook hasn’t been making much of an impression on current UVA students.

“I haven’t seen much publicity or presence from the yearbook around Grounds in the four years I’ve been here,” he says.

“I’ve tried testing the waters with some of my friends, casually mentioning that the yearbook isn’t going to be published,” says UVA student and Hook music writer Stephanie Garcia, “and no one seemed to really care.”

An even bigger shocker, according to Aaron Josephson, who serves on the executive committee of the Class of 2009, was that the historic treasure wasn’t (more)

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It appeared to be a trash match made in heaven…

In December 2008, as the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority, formed in 1990 to manage the disposal of Charlottesville and Albemarle trash, began seriously struggling financially to fulfill its duties and promote recycling in our area, dumpster king Peter Van der Linde opened an $11 million state-of-the-art Materials Recovery Facility [MRF] now capable of recycling both construction/demolition debris and household trash.

Problem solved, right? With the RSWA’s expertise, and Van der Linde’s new facility, surely we could create one of the greenest waste disposal and recycling models in the State.

If only that were so.

Instead of working together, the two trash titans have been locked in a legal battle that has cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and brought the community no closer to solving its waste disposal and recycling woes. As the two sides careen toward a jury trial this summer,  the Hook felt it was time to distill some of what we’ve learned about the complicated lawsuit over the last year. Consider this latest offering a busy citizen’s guide to better understanding the lawsuit. It might also give (more)

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At the Downtown Mall’s Free Speech Monument today, former City Council candidate Bob Fenwick led a small rally in support of recycler Peter Van der Linde, calling the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority’s $20 million RICO lawsuit against him an “atrocity.”

About a dozen people holding signs that said “Free Peter” and “Stop the Waste” stood behind Fenwick as he addressed about a half-dozen members of the local media and few spectators curious about all the fuss over Van der Linde.

“They have branded this man a federal criminal in front of the entire community by using a legal device tailored to combat organized crime,” said Fenwick. “This is a mean-spirited attempt by two governments, who are spending our money to do this, to ruin a man and his business.”

“It seems pretty wrong to me,” said Charlottesville resident Richard Stanley of the RSWA lawsuit. “We should be jumping on the Van der Linde bandwagon.”

Van der Linde opened an $11 million Materials Recovery Facility in Zion Crossroads last year, which (more)

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