We find ourselves now at the August 19 mark, which seems like it is close to the end of 2022. Yet, inputting certain figures into the Year-O-Meter would indicate the passage of time has not passed the threshold of two-thirds. If numbers aren’t your metric, consider the sun will rise and fall 34 more times before the Fall Equinox. Either way, this is another Friday edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement intended to bring you information you may need between now and then. I’m Sean Tubbs.
In the next several hundred words:
The Albemarle County Economic Development Authority has endorsed a $600,000 pay-out for Habitat for Humanity’s redevelopment at Southwood
There’s a new principal at Charlottesville High School and two elementary schools
The Charlottesville Alliance for Black Male Achievement is holding an event this Sunday to get students ready for the beginning of the school year next Wednesday
The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources took steps this week to restore an endangered species to the James River
First shout-out: Livable Cville event on zoning rewrite
In today’s first Patreon-fueled shout-out, Livable Cville wants you to mark your calendar for August 31 for an educational talk about the next steps in the Cville Plans Together initiative. They’ve invited James Freas, the city’s Director of Neighborhood Development Services, to talk about the rewrite of the city’s zoning ordinance in an online webinar. The talk will include a presentation on the Draft Zoning Diagnostic & Approach Report and the soon to be released Market Analysis/Inclusionary Zoning Study. The talk begins at 5:30 p.m. and will include a question and answer period. Sign up to get your place at the virtual table for Livable Cville’s Update and Next Steps for the Cville Plans Together initiative.
Redevelopment work continues at Southwood
Work continues to redevelop the Southwood Mobile Home Park as a mixed-use community that will offer new homes to those who have lived there. The chief executive officer of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville gave an update to the Albemarle County Economic Development Authority on Tuesday.
“So when Southwood is done it will be somewhere between 1,000 and 1,100 homes and up to 700 of them will be affordable depending on subsidies that we get and how things develop,” said Dan Rosensweig, Habitat’s chief executive officer.
Habitat entered into a performance agreement with Albemarle and the EDA to provide a certain amount of affordable housing in exchange for financial payments and tax breaks.
“Our work at Southwood is part and parcel of our larger scale work to create mixed income neighborhoods and affordable home ownership in the region,” said Dan Rosensweig, the chief executive officer of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville. “We were a pioneer in this. We were the first Habitat nationally to do it and the first in the country to do mixed-income neighborhoods. We’ve now done ten mixed-income neighborhoods and built almost 300 homes in those neighborhoods.”
Rosensweig said in 2004, Habitat stepped in to save the Sunrise trailer park in Charlottesville from development and the result is a mixed-income community.
“Sunrise today is a neighborhood of front porches and back porches and open space for the community to use,” Rosensweig said. “To our knowledge it is the first mobile home transformation without displacement and that sort of set us up for Southwood.”
Habitat purchased the land in 2007 and the agency has operated it ever since.
“It was a mess,” Rosensweig said. “There were fires, trailers catching on fire, sewage bubbling into people’s trailer through their commodes. And it’s large. It’s on an enormous scale.”
Rosensweig said Habitat invested in infrastructure and entered into an agreement with Albemarle County for how redevelopment as a collaborative relationship as well as the performance agreement worth $3.2 million in both cash and tax rebates.
“Our deliverables in the first phase… are 75 affordable homes and our milestones are multiple,” Rosensweig said. “We’ve had to meet milestones in terms of submitting building permits, getting Low Income Housing Tax Credits apartments under contract.”
The latest milestone was to raise at least 95 percent of the funds necessary to purchase the building materials for the Habitat units. That released an appropriation of $600,000.
“We’re overperforming that performance agreement by quite a bit in that first phase,” Rosensweig said. “Per the performance agreement we’ve promised 75 affordable homes in the first phase alone. We’re building 207 affordable homes.”
As part of the first phase, the Piedmont Housing Alliance is constructing an apartment building financed through Low Income Housing Tax Credits.
Rosensweig said construction of two Habitat homes is almost complete and site work is underway for the rest. The second phase of the project still needs a rezoning and this will go before the Board of Supervisors on September 21.
Full build-out of the project will take another dozen or so years.
“As part of phase 2 we’re planning a business incubation center and a little bit of a neighborhood downtown,” Rosensweig said. “Some of the uses we’re trying to attract are shared commercial kitchen, a business incubation center, a cafe, early childhood education center and potentially some other non residential uses such as a credit union.”
Habitat has offered to reserve seven acres for a school that Rosensweig hoped would be more urban in scale with at least two and a half stories. However, they can’t give the land over for free.
“In the $500 million cost of Southwood, by far the largest contribution to filling up the bucket is market-rate lot sales and so if we were to give that away we would lose tens of millions of dollars of lot sales which cross-subsidize the affordability,” Rosensweig said. “What we have done is proportionally offered a discount if the school would like to purchase it.”
The final determination of what will happen remains to be seen especially with a rezoning vote pending. Deputy County Executive Doug Walker weighed in.
“There is ongoing dialogue between the planning staff and the school staff about the viability of this site for their plans so that we can be in a position to share with the Board of Supervisors whether this is a viable site or not,” Walker said. “I do know that those conversations are ongoing.”
Rosensweig said the way the proffer is worded gives the county until 2027 to make a decision.
The EDA unanimously approved a resolution to acknowledge the latest milestone and release the $600,000.
New faces at Charlottesville City Schools
We are now five days away from when school will go back into session in Albemarle County and Charlottesville. There will be some new faces at some schools.
Rashaad Pitt took over as the principal of Charlottesville High School earlier this week after serving most recently as assistant principal of George Wythe High School in Richmond. Pitt began his educational career teaching history in Petersburg City Public Schools and has also worked in Chesterfield County, Hampton City Schools, and the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice. According to a release, his area of expertise includes community outreach, restorative justice, instructional leadership and professional development.
Pitt succeeds Eric Irizarry, who stepped down after six years at CHS to become Director of Equity, Family, and Community Relations for Albemarle County Public Schools.
“I am excited to begin this next chapter,” Pitt is quoted in the news release. “I want to build on the strong success and good work of Dr. Irizarry, and I look forward to working with the excellent leadership team and staff at CHS.”
Two other principals in Charlottesville have been promoted from within the school division.
Chantel Beverly is the new principal at Venable Elementary School. Beverly has been assistant principal at Greenbrier Elementary since 2019 after teaching in Petersburg and Richmond.
Carmella Johnson took over as principal at Clark Elementary School in July. Since 2017, she has been an assistant principal and instructional coach at Johnson Elementary School and before that Johnson taught at Greenbrier for ten years.
Free haircuts to be offered this Sunday
With school fast approaching, it’s time for many to get their appearance ready. This Sunday, several groups will gather at the Boys and Girls Club at Buford Middle School for back-to-school bash from 2 p.m. to 7 p.m. There will be free hair cuts, among other things.
The Charlottesville Alliance for Black Male Achievement is organizing the event with 100 Black Men of Central Virginia, House of Cuts Barber Shop, the Uhuru Foundation, Peace in the Streets, as well as the Boys and Girls Club of Charlottesville.
“Free haircuts, braids, and raffle prizes will be available and Prolyfyck Running Creww will be giving out free shoes to high school students,” reads a press release on the city’s website.”De-La-Roll will provide free skate lessons to those interested as well.”
The event is open to all.
Second shout-out goes to Camp Albemarle
Today’s second subscriber-supported public service announcement goes out to Camp Albemarle, which has for sixty years been a “wholesome rural, rustic and restful site for youth activities, church groups, civic events and occasional private programs.”
Located on 14 acres on the banks of the Moorman’s River near Free Union, Camp Albemarle continues as a legacy of being a Civilian Conservation Corps project that sought to promote the importance of rural activities. Camp Albemarle seeks support for a plan to winterize the Hamner Lodge, a structure built in 1941 by the CCC and used by every 4th and 5th grade student in Charlottesville and Albemarle for the study of ecology for over 20 years. If this campaign is successful, Camp Albemarle could operate year-round. Consider your support by visiting campalbemarleva.org/donate.
Spinymussel returns to James River
A small invertebrate that scientifically goes by the name James River Spineymussel has not been seen alive in the waterway its named for since the late 1960s.
“We’re pretty confident that they’re extirpated from the main stem river and even if they’re still out there, they’re probably at such low levels that they’re not really biologically like they should,” said Brian Watson, a top biologist for freshwater mussels at the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.
On Wednesday morning, Watson and his crews were at five locations on the James River to reintroduce about 1,300 individuals back into the waterway. These were all raised at a mussel hatchery in Charles City.
The goal is to repopulate a species that is one of dozens of freshwater mussels that used to be commonplace in what is now North Carolina, Virginia, and West Virginia.
For many years, biologists in Virginia have taken this seriously.
“We have about 80 species which ranks us about sixth in the United States in terms of diversity,” Watson said.
Watson said there are roughly 900 species of freshwater mussels across the globe and around 300 are in the United States. One of those species is the James River Spineymussel, which is on the federal endangered species list as critically endangered.
Watson said the small creatures play an important role in the ecosystem as they feed from their position on the beds of rivers and lakes filtering water for food and nutrients.
“We often talk about freshwater mussels as the livers of the river,” Watson said. “When you’re heard historically about how oysters could clear the Chesapeake Bay, the entire water volume, within about a month when oysters were at their heyday, freshwater mussels used to do a similar thing for our freshwater creeks and streams and rivers.”
For decades, aquatic biologists have sought to restore creatures back to habitats that became uninhabitable due to all sorts of pollution. An interesting adjective to describe mussels is “benthic” which means anything that lives on the bed of a waterbody.
“And since these are benthic organisms that live in the stream bottoms and they don’t move around like freshwater fishes do, they are relatively good indicators of water quality so if something is going wrong at a site or there’s a change for the negative for water quality, mussels are usually going to give you an indication that something’s going on.”
To get mussels to be in a place takes a lot of factors, so Watson said putting them back in a former habitat from which they’ve disappeared means a lot of biological steps will need to be taken.
“They kind of have a unique life cycle for an invertebrate,” Watson said. “They are an obligate parasite, most of them are. They have a larva that typically has to attach to a particular fish species to complete their life cycle. So it’s a really small larvae that females hold inside of their gills.”
Watson said a small shell that looks like a Pac-Man will snap shut when in the presence of the fish to hitch a ride. They’ll use chub, minnow, or several other species.
“And if they’re successful and stay on the fish, they will transform into a juvenile, drop off, and if they happen to drop off in a suitable location and conditions are right then they will grow to be a sub-adult and then an adult.”
If the fish have moved on, then the life cycle is interrupted. Some species of mussels can live for decades, but they may die out if the waters are impaired.
For decades, biologists have been restoring fish to rivers made more habitable by the Clean Water Act. Now research into doing the same thing for invertebrates, including this release of the James River Spineymussel. To make that work, the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources has approached the local governments in Albemarle, Buckingham, and Fluvanna counties to ask for permission even if might not strictly have been necessary.
“The way the language reads in our current regulation is that if we’re going to introduce any new species to an area that is a game animal or a game bird or a fish that we need the authority and the cooperation of the local government of the locality it will be released into,” Watson said. “So when you look at that language it doesn’t necessarily say freshwater mussel or invertebrates.”
Watson said notifications have been made because of the regulated nature of the James River Spineymussel. In Albemarle, its presence in the 1980’s was enough to put regulatory approval of the Buck Mountain Reservoir in doubt and the project was abandoned.
In 2022, Albemarle’s consent for the release was on the consent agenda for their May 18 meeting. Watson had an audience with the Buckingham County Supervisors earlier this month but had not heard back from Fluvanna as of this past Tuesday when our interview was conducted.
The project definitely has the support of Matt Lawless, the administrator of the Town of Scottsville.
“Having a healthy and scenic river that’s accessible and safe for everybody to use is what Scottsville is all about,” Lawless said. “That’s been our history for hundreds of years and we feel really responsible for our little piece of the river and we take its quality and its health very seriously.”
The individual mussels released are all three years old and Watson said they should be ready to reproduce.
“Right now we would consider them adult mussels,” Watson said. “They should be reproductively mature so that when they are released into the river, assuming that every goes right, that they should start reproducing next year or within the first years that they’re out in the river so that they’re not young individuals that are just dropping off of the fish.”
The work to propagate mussels dates back to the late 90’s and Watson said teams used to send them out at an earlier stage in the life cycle. The results were not successful. This batch has been kept in the hatchery longer than usual due to various approval processes.
So, how will Watson and his team measure success? There are three metrics. First, they’ll check to see how many survive.
“The second is are they reproducing after you put them out,” Watson said. “So at the certain time of the year when the females would have those larvae inside of them, we will try to monitor those locations and check some of those animals to see if they are what we call ‘gravid’ or not and that’s when the females have the larvae inside their gills.”
The third step is to see if those larvae can get onto the fish as part of their role as obligate parasite. All of the individuals that went out this week are tagged so they can be monitored.
“So the hope will be that as we monitor these in the future, if we start to see younger individuals that do not have tags on them, then that tells us that they are new individuals that are recruiting into the population.”
Watson said it is inevitable that many of the introduced species will float downstream over time and that they won’t be detectable. Still, he predicts survival rates will be high. Monitoring efforts will continue and Watson said people should be patient for results.
“And it could take a decade or two to actually see something going on,” Watson said. “There have been some restoration and recovery work with rare mussels out in the Mississippi River where they put lots and lots of individuals out there. You’re talking like thousands to tens of thousands of animals out in spots and they are just now starting to see recruitment in some of these areas where they’ve placed large numbers and you’re like a decade later.”
Housekeeping for Episode #419
I had not expected to take two days to get to another installment, but somehow that’s what happens. I am the sole writer and producer of this newsletter, which also means I have to do all of the business activity. Yesterday there were things needed to be attended to, but I hope to get to all of the stories I want to write in the coming days and weeks.
I’m glad to have written about something a little different in the last segment. It’s amazing to think how everything we see in front of us came to be. In the case of the Spineymussel, I’m inspired by all of the steps necessary to make it all work out. I hope to be here well into the future.
To get there, I will need to navigate the waters of accounting and finance, which is a long way of saying I depend on reader and listeners support to keep this going. About a third of you paying, which is a pretty good showing. But, I need more to do so or I’ll have to consider a different path.
Perhaps the best way to support me is through a Substack subscription. If you do so, Ting will match your initial payment! And, if you sign up for their services through this link you’ll get a free standard install, your 2nd month free, and a $75 downtown mall gift card! Enter the promo code COMMUNITY for full effect.
Either way, I thank you for reading or listening. Today’s podcast outro is completely different from this, so go and listen to see what I said. I enjoy being mysterious.
August 19, 2022: Habitat for Humanity reaches financial milestone for Southwood redevelopment; Spineymussel returns to the James River