In today’s Substack-fueled shout-out, Code for Charlottesville is seeking volunteers with tech, data, design, and research skills to work on community service projects. Founded in September 2019, Code for Charlottesville has worked on projects with the Legal Aid Justice Center, the Charlottesville Fire Department, and the Charlottesville Office of Human Rights. Visit the Code for Charlottesville website to learn more, including details on projects that are underway.
In today’s installment:
Albemarle Supervisors are briefed on status on economic development planning exercise for the area around the Woolen Mills
A conversation about policing and security at public housing sites
A new creative director at Live Arts
Martinsville and Henry County agree on reversion
This show is nearly a year old now, having launched to the public the second week of July during the pandemic. Sometimes the various segments come together as a theme. Sometimes, there are just things I want to get on the record, somewhere. In today’s show and for much of this first week of June, there will be a lot of catching up.
There’s a new artistic director at Live Arts. Susan E. Evans will take over effective today, arriving from the San Francisco Bay area where she most recently ran the 187-seat Old Town Theatre in Lafayette, California. Before that, she was artistic director at the Douglas Morrison Theatre in Hayward, California and before that she was with the Eastenders Repertory Company, also in the Bay area.
“I am drawn to the active verb in Live Arts’ mission: forging—theater and community striving toward bringing folx together, vigorously exchanging perspectives through art,” Evans is quoted in a press release.
There were over 140 applications for the position. Live Arts was founded in 1990.
The city of Martinsville and Henry County in southside Virginia have reached an agreement in which Martinsville will revert to a town. In late April, the two governing bodies met in a mediated closed session according to the minutes of the May meeting of the Virginia Commission on Local Government. That body must approve the agreement when it is finalized. According to the Martinsville Bulletin, the seven-member Martinsville City Council and the six-member Henry County Board of Supervisors met at a joint meeting on May 26 and agreed on a rough sketch of a memorandum of agreement for the reversion. The agreement doesn’t specify when the reversion will take place, but the two parties have agreed to let the Commission on Local Government pick the date.
In 2019, the Albemarle County Economic Development Department began a planning study of the roadway that leads to the Woolen Mills factory, a historic property that has renovated in recent years by developer Brian Roy. The main entrance is along Broadway Avenue, which extends from Carlton Avenue at the border between the city of Charlottesville and Albemarle County. In all, there are about 45 acres of land that were the subject of an interim study presented to the Board of Supervisors in November of 2019.
“The goal at that time was to leverage the public and private investment that had taken place and projected to take place at the Woolen Mills redevelopment and the Willow Tree relocation at that site,” said J.T. Newberry in the economic development department.
Much of the land is zoned for light industrial use, and several businesses are operating in the area. Construction of the new Woolen Mills Industrial Park is underway. The Board of Supervisors was to have seen the results of an implementation study in April 2020, but the pandemic put a pause on the work.
“Nevertheless we have tried to stay engaged with stakeholders on the corridor,” Newberry said. “There have been a number of projects that have continued on the private side.”
After the interim study, Albemarle staff met with city staff at least twice, and the blueprint has been run by the Planning Commission, the Economic Development Authority, and the Office of Equity and Inclusion. The latter suggested a new approach to the project following the signing of a memorandum of understanding on the topic by Charlottesville, Albemarle County and the University of Virginia. Roger Johnson is the director of economic development for Albemarle.
“We are going to pause our project and go back and review the Broadway corridor through an equity lens,” Johnson said. “We don’t know if that will change anything substantively or not but we expect that it will.”
That will include a meeting with the city’s new Deputy City Manager of Racial Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, Ashley Marshall.
Next steps could include creation of a business association for the area, similar to the Downtown Crozet Association. Another would be to create an arts and cultural district for the location.
“Some other types of activities we are contemplating are to complete pedestrian and bike connectivity, multimodal streetscape, enhanced public transportation,” Johnson said.
Those activities are now considered to be long-term goals.
The Piedmont Master Gardeners and Virginia Cooperative Extension will host an online presentation by author Douglas Tallamy on “The Nature of Oaks” at 7 p.m. Thursday, June 3. Admission is $15. Register by 5 p.m. Wednesday, June 2, at piedmontmastergardeners.org/events to reserve a spot in the program.
A longtime professor at the University of Delaware and author of widely acclaimed books such as Bringing Nature Home and Nature’s Best Hope, Tallamy has shown how we can help save nature’s ecological riches in our own backyards. In his latest book, The Nature of Oaks, he explains how adding native oak trees to our home landscapes is one of the best ways to help heal the planet.
At the beginning of May, a contract for a security firm to patrol public housing sites lapsed. At the same, a series of shootings has taken place, including an April 30 incident at Westhaven where bullets struck multiple vehicles and apartment buildings.
The Board of Commissioners of the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority discussed the matter at their meeting on Monday, May 24. Commissioner Laura Goldblatt is a member of the CRHA safety committee and had an update.
“There was a lot of discussion and has been a lot of discussion at the past few about the roles that residents want to see for police and what they want policing to look like in their neighborhoods but also the role that they want various community-based safety initiatives to play,” Goldblatt said. “And also a perceived lack of services or a desire for creativity around certain services so we spent a lot of time discussing mental health and trauma services.”
Goldblatt said there is a need for trauma counselors who understand the experience of living in public housing. She said some residents have anxiety about the lack of security services at the moment.
“I know we have been working towards a [request for proposals] about the various kinds of services we would sent out for,” Goldblatt said.
Charlottesville Mayor Nikuyah Walker said she’s been meeting Police Chief RaShall Brackney and CRHA Executive Director John Sales about the security issue.
“Chief Brackney’s position is that in response to the security firm no longer being present, that they are being asked to increase police presence and this is coming on the heels of a lot of change but a loud community to not having cameras, not having police presence and now there is a request for that increase,” Walker said. “From a community that is asking to defund, where there is being a significant amount of resources being spent on increased patrol on the Thursday, Friday, and Saturday time frame right now.”
Charlottesville Police have stepped up patrols in the past few weeks to prevent additional shootings. Chief Brackney is seeking a letter from CRHA about the rules of engagement for future patrols in order to ensure everyone in the community is on the same page with regards to why officers are there.
“So that we could be clear that as we were being asked to increase our presence in the community, as we were being asked to use whatever tools and technologies that we have to be able to respond to the increase in violence in the community, as well as the fact that as of May 2, there was no security team or security profile there in the community,” Brackney said.
Chief Brackney said she wants the letter to guard against comments from the community about over-policing.
“So when there is a lot of presence, I want the community to understand that this is something the residents are asking for of us as well,” Brackney said.
Brackney said as of May 20, there had been 121 shootings in the city, with many of them taking place on or near CRHA properties. She said that’s up 51 percent over this time last year.
Shelby Edwards, the executive director of the Public Housing Association of Residents, said she was not certain her organization was ready to sign such a letter.
“And I love and appreciate the idea of uniformity as far as approach but what I think we always wonder as we continue to serve the community, if we sign a letter that says we co-signed, and to be clear to the public, we have not co-signed anything, there is no letter quite yet, I just wonder if anyone goes down on CPD’s watch, how would that look for us?”
Walker said she supported an agreement because it could set up better relations between police and the community into the future as people in positions of power change.
“In the past, police have just come into the community and policed how they want,” Walker said. “I think creating this kind of partnership, having it in writing also gives an example of what future policing looks like if its needed and hopefully we can prevent some of the harm by organization like CRHA and PHAR being able to say ‘hey, this is what we did in 2021 and we want to follow a model similar to that.’”
Goldblatt said if there is to be an increase in police presence at public housing sites, she wanted additional mental health services. Chief Brackney said she understood and hoped that police presence would not be required in the future.
“I would also wish that we should understand and appreciate that police presence isn’t the only things that are triggering events in our communities,” Brackney said. “It would seem to me that the reasons we’re getting called there should be triggering events for our communities as well. And I’m sure they are. I come from those communities and grew up in those communities.”
For the past four weekend, four officers have been dedicated overnight to sites Westhaven, South First Street and Sixth Street and there have been no shootings.
“Police presence does make a difference,” Brackney said. “We also know that police presence, people will find a different place to go, and they will find another pathway so we have to be careful that we don’t push it into another community or another area, but that we get to the root causes of it to start.”
CRHA Executive Director John Sales said in an email to me today that so far there is no letter, but one is in the works. Stay tuned and more from this CRHA meeting in an upcoming episode of this program.
Thanks for reading! If you’re new to the program, I’m Sean Tubbs and I’ve been writing about public policy of and on since I was a student at Virginia Tech. I’m producing this work as a way of helping members of my community better understand what’s happening in local and regional government, as well as the economy that fuels the area. My goal is to bring you information in a way that directs you to new information you may not yet have considered. Let me know if you have any questions!
June 1, 2021: Charlottesville chief seeks letter to govern police presence at public housing sites; Broadway blueprint update