Category: Charlottesville

Our Town

4 of 5 Council members
City Council came to our neighborhood Thursday night. They brought a delicious dinner, a good audio system, and a complement of City staff. Staff and Council engaged in an extended (1:29:00) exchange of substantive information with neighbors. Many people-hours go into holding such an event. People out on the town at night investing their time, the elected and the citizens, striving to make their City a place worth caring about Audio is available on the Woolen Mills Neighborhood Association website.

Pipebot

pipe robot
Yuk: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the intrepid pipebot. Its five-year mission: to explore dark, reeking, bacteria laden, nasty-nasty wastewater pipe, to seek out inflow and infiltration, to boldly go where no man has gone before.
Pathfinder Model PE3500 has a pan and tilt camera with zoom.
City of Charlottesville inspects about 20 miles of wastewater lines per year, the City relined 5 miles of sewer line in 2014.

Jim Tolbert

Mr. Tolbert at work
Neighborhood Development Services director Jim Tolbert is headed south to a new job in Georgia.
Jim has been in charge of the department that oversees the fate of neighborhoods so we’ve had much contact over the years.
His is a critically important, tough position which he has handled with grace and good humor. I will miss him.

Jim’s last official words to me were encouraging, about getting long standing zoning issues rectified. That work now falls to his successor.

Following Mr. Tolbert’s departure I hope we can find an owner’s manual for the City.


30 x1028 px box

The city, sixth-largest in the state with a 2010 population of 93,853, wanted to separate itself from what it saw
as wasteful government spending in surrounding communities. The city benefits greatly, though, from the number of Fortune 500
companies headquartered there, boasting an extremely high per capita income, with the median family household income,
according to a 2008 census estimate, approximated at $129,810, and the average family income $169,815.–Huffington Post

Sandy Springs, Mr.Tolbert’s new town, has a considerably different socio-economic profile and governmental services structure than Charlottesville.

canopy street

willow street NOLA
In 1975, under the leadership of Charlottesville Parks and Recreation director, Gene German,
George Briggs and Clare Byrd developed “Guidelines For A Street Tree Planting Master Program For Charlottesville Virginia”.

“Our peace of mind, our emotions, our spirit-
even our souls– are conditioned by what our eyes see.
There is a feeling abroad in this land today that ugliness
has been allowed too long, that it is time to say
‘Enough,’ and to act.”- Mrs. Lyndon Johnson
Opening remarks to a conference on Natural
Beauty called by President Johnson in the White House

(from the preamble to the plan,page vii)