Theater still on schedule
There’s a roof on top of the new Zeus Digital Theater, and workers were in the theater on Friday installing drywall in Theater 1.
“It’s going to come down to the wire. But we’re on schedule for Oct., 1. I know some people have questions about that, but we’re on schedule for Oct. 1,” said developer and theater owner Brett Hayes, whose eight-screen digital and 3D movieplex will bring movies back to Waynesboro for the first time since the Wayne Theatre closed downtown in 1999.
Construction is slated to wrap on Sept. 1, giving crews a month to finish inside work on the lobby, screen, projectors and other indoors amenities.
Hayes expects to begin hiring in early September. The theater will open with a staff of 60 all told.
And yes, we’re close enough to begin thinking of tickets for Opening Night and the opening weekend.
“People have already started asking when they can prebuy their tickets,” said Hayes, who plans to make tickets for the opening night and the opening weekend on the Zeus website in late September.
Photo Slideshow
Story and Photo Slideshow by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Poll: Virginians split on McDonnell
A new VCU poll has Virginians split on the job performance of the new governor, Bob McDonnell.
The Commonwealth Poll conducted July 15-19 has 48 percent of Virginians rating the Republican’s performance as excellent or good, and 52 percent saying that McDonnell is doing a fair or poor job.
Inside the numbers, the views on McDonnell’s performance appear to track largely along partisan lines, with the deciding factor pushing the overall numbers slightly negative being independents, who split 46 percent positive and 54 percent negative on the job-performance question.
“The job performance ratings are lower than what we saw for past governors at similar points in their terms. But politics is more polarized along partisan lines these days and the economic climate is decidedly more sour than it was several years ago. Governor McDonnell has strong support from Republicans but less support from Democrats than did Governors Kaine or Warner with Republicans early in their terms” said Cary Funk, Ph.D., director of the Commonwealth Poll and an associate professor in the L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs.
Performance numbers for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli fell along the same lines – with 47 percent saying Cuccinelli is doing an excellent or good job, and 53 percent saying he is doing a fair or poor job.
One other interesting tidbit from the poll concerns the Tea Party movement. Six in 10 Virginians said they have no opinion on the Tea Party because they are undecided or they haven’t heard enough about the movement to form an opinion. Of those who do hold an opinion, the number holding a favorable opinion was at 19 percent of the overall population, with 21 percent of the overall population holding a negative opinion.
Edited by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Sweet Dreams made in Draft
This year marks the seventh annual Sweet Dreams Festival in Stuarts Draft. Saturday, July 24, thousands of people will show up to buy from local businesses, artisans and crafters and enjoy the stage with musical entertainment by S.A.L.T and Steve Losh.
The Festival begins at 9 a.m. and goes until 5 p.m.
Venders lined up Friday morning at an early 7:30 a.m. to get a prime location for their tent. These early birds included Kathryn McMillan of Cutter Conversions. McMillan has been doing this event for four years.
“This is the best place to get business. People come here ready to buy,” McMillan said.
Also among the venders was Melissa Howell of Barefoot Books and MDH Events, a new business. This is Howell’s second year in the festival, and she says the event is a good place to get the word out about the Barefoot Books, which are for people of all ages, because most of the books are not sold in local stores.
Kristen Printy, one of the coordinators for this event, was out there ready to go checking people in this morning as cars flooded the park.
“With McKee and Hershey both right here in Stuarts Draft, we have dubbed ourselves the sweetest place in Virginia,” Printy said about how this whole event came about.
Although the festival does not begin until 9 a.m., Printy, along with other workers, will be at Stuarts Draft Park at 5 a.m. in order to let vendors come in and set up their merchandise.
Events will be going on all day starting with a pancake breakfast at Stump Elementary School going from 6:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. At 7 a.m. there will be a 5K run, followed by tournaments including horseshoe and cornhole as well as softball. Numerous contests will be taking place throughout the day, ranging from a baking contest to a Little Debbie look-a-like contest.
Story by Jenny Hypes. Jenny can be reached at jenny.hypes@emu.edu.
Local optometrist elected to state association leadership post
Dr. Shannon Franklin, owner of Crozet Eye Care, Optometrists, in Western Albemarle, was elected to serve as vice president of the Virginia Optometric Association at its 108th annual convention in Norfolk last month.
As vice president, Dr. Franklin will lead the operations division of VOA, which includes managing the organization’s budget, personnel, legislative activities, and constitution and by-laws.
“The Virginia Optometric Association is an exemplary resource for our profession,” Franklin said. “I’m honored to be going into my fifth year as a member of the Board of Trustees and look forward to my new role and responsibilities as vice president.”
Prior to becoming an officer, Franklin served three years on the Board of Trustees and four years as president of the local chapter of the VOA. In 2002, she won the Vanguard Award recognizing the best and most outstanding VOA active member practicing less than eight years. In addition, Franklin currently is the Virginia coordinator for the InfantSEE program, a no-cost public health program developed by the American Optometric Association and The Vision Care Institute of Johnson & Johnson Vision Care Inc. to provide professional eye care for infants nationwide.
In 2006, she started Crozet Eye Care, Optometrists, a family practice in Western Albemarle that offers comprehensive eye exams, medical diagnosis and treatment, and a wide variety of optical solutions to patients ranging in age from infants to senior adults.
Edited by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Generals suffer Braves beatdown
The Staunton Braves might still be on the outside looking in as far as the 2010 Valley League playoff picture is concerned, but they also still own the Waynesboro Generals.
The Braves blasted Waynesboro 12-1 Thursday night in front of 1,111 at John Moxie Memorial Stadium to post their 10th win in the last 12 games in the rivalry series.
It was done largely with small ball. Only one of Staunton’s nine hits went for extra bases, but the Braves stole 11 bases on 12 attempts.
Jarryd Summers (1-1) took the loss for Waynesboro, giving up four runs on two hits and six walks in six innings pitched.
Ben Alsup (4-0) picked up the win for Staunton with five and a third innings of shutout baseball.
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Hurt pledges to defund health-care reform: Good politics, but is it good policy?
Robert Hurt’s move to sign the DeFundIt.org pledge to pull funding from the health-care reform measure passed by Congress and signed into law by President Obama in March is good politics. It’s probably also bad policy, but you could say that policy is the province of those who are good at politics first.
“By signing our pledge, Hurt has taken a leadership position in calling for the defunding of ObamaCare as the first necessary step to fully repealing and replacing this unconstitutional, job-killing, fiscal train wreck. Americans and Virginians would have a friend in Congress with Robert,” said Alex Cortes, a one-time Bob McDonnell campaign staffer-turned-chairman of DeFundIt.org.
Attempts made by AugustaFreePress.com to reach the Hurt campaign for comment on the move by the Fifth District Republican congressional nominee to sign the pledge were unsuccessful. Lise Clavel, the campaign manager for Democratic incumbent Tom Perriello, did issue a statement to the AFP on the Hurt pledge.
“Robert Hurt’s dangerous plan to defund the health-care reform law would put health insurance companies back in charge of your care, raise prescription drug costs for seniors, increase costs on small businesses, allow insurance companies to drop people’s coverage when they get sick and allow them to discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions. Virginia’s hard-working families won’t stand for it, and Tom will fight to make sure they don’t have to,” Clavel said in the statement.
Whether or not Republicans could be successful in squelching the reform effort by defunding it is immaterial as far as the November elections are concerned. The move isn’t aimed at initiating a policy discussion, but rather at pushing what the GOP thinks will be a hot button with voters in the fall.
“Opposing the health-care bill and the process that led to it here in the Fifth District is pretty good politics,” University of Virginia Center for Politics analyst Isaac Wood said. “You have people here upset not only with the final bill, but with the way that it was conducted. For the most part, a lot of people felt that you didn’t have a great degree of transparency in the process, that Obama in particular had promised transparency when he ran in 2008. As a result you have a lot of people who are upset and basically want to go back to square one. That’s where this idea of either repealing it or defunding it originates from.”
The effect of this early move by Hurt is Advantage: Hurt, to Wood’s reasoning.
“One of your main goals at the outset is to decide the turf on which the battle will be fought. That’s what you’re seeing the Hurt campaign starting to do here,” Wood said. “They know the issues that they want to talk about, and one of them clearly is health-care reform. it may not be the most salient issue anymore. People’s passions may have cooled somewhat since the March vote, but still, for the most part, the politics is on the Hurt campaign’s side of this issue. Some of the public opinion has turned more positive about health-care reform in general, but in this district, I’d expect that you’d find a great many voters still upset, and the degree to which that becomes a key issue in this race could really benefit Robert Hurt.”
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
Vanke fights Capitol Hill convention
A question for Jeff Vanke. You’re an independent candidate for Congress. Let’s say you’re elected. Who do you caucus with?
The answer will surprise you.
“I wouldn’t caucus with either party. I would have a vote on the House floor,” said Vanke, a self-described “independent centrist” from Roanoke who is challenging Republican incumbent Bob Goodlatte for the Sixth Distict seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.
A third candidate in the race is Libertarian Stuart Bain. The Democratic Party is not fielding a candidate in the Sixth after Sam Rasoul ran head-to-head against Goodlatte in 2008 and received just 36 percent of the vote in the two-way contest.
Vanke’s move to say that he wouldn’t caucus with either party if elected is, by his own admission, “a unique situation.”
“But the party system isn’t in the Constitution,” Vanke said. “I’m sure an independent in Congress can work out a fair set of committee assignments appropriate for a freshman. They can’t run a duopoly to the point where somebody comes in and says, I don’t want to be in your clubs, they can just shut you out.”
Vanke has made fixing the federal budget the centerpiece of his campaign. Goodlatte, at first glance, would seem to have as a conservative Republican some political insulation on budget issues, but Vanke points out the congressman’s support for big-business and agribusiness subsidies and his votes for deficit budgets under President George W. Bush that added trillions of dollars to the national debt.
The disenchantment with Washington reflected in recent polling numbers from Public Policy Polling that have both parties facing voter-disapproval ratings approaching 60 percent is something that Vanke is hoping to be able to capitalize on in the 2010 election in the Sixth.
“The system is broken,” Vanke said. “What can we do about it? That’s what we’re trying to do with this movement. We understand that we’re in it for the long haul.”
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
City looks for help in collecting unpaid taxes
Governments are running on ever-tight budgets. Keep that in mind when you consider this number: $1.8 million.
Delinquent motor-vehicle taxes in Waynesboro in a four-year period prior to fiscal-year 2011 totaled more than $1.8 million. The roughly $450,000 a year that has gone uncollected is equivalent to about 1 percent of what the city spends on local-government operations in a given year.
City Treasurer Stephanie Beverage has made collecting unpaid taxes a priority since taking office in January.
“People are asking us, Why are you doing it now? The answer is simple. It’s the law,” said Beverage, who has worked out a tentative agreement to engage the Suffolk-based Virginia Auction & Collection Company to assist her office in collecting delinquent taxes.
Under state law, the city can seize the Virginia state tags on vehicles on which taxes are delinquent, seize the vehicles themselves for impoundment until the taxes are paid, or sell seized vehicles at auction in the event that payment arrangements can’t be worked out with the delinquent taxpayer, with proceeds from the auction going against the unpaid tax bill.
The process spelled out in the tentative agreement between Virginia Auction & Collection and the treasurer’s office for collecting on delinquencies of $500 or less would have the company removing the Virginia state tags from the vehicle on which taxes are owed and placing a distress/seizure warrant on the driver’s side door that notifies the taxpayer that they have three days to respond to the city treasurer with a satisfactory plan for paying delinquent taxes.
On delinquencies of more than $500, vehicles will be towed to a VAC storage lot and kept there until the taxpayer has worked out a payment plan with the treasurer.
The tentative agreement between Beverage and the collections company will be up for discussion at the Waynesboro City Council meeting on July 26. Beverage needs a resolution from City Council to finalize the agreement.
City Manager Mike Hamp is recommending that the city move forward with the agreement.
According to the company, there is no cost to the city for the collections. The method employed by Virginia Auction and Collection assesses the recovery costs on the delinquent taxpayer. For delinquencies at $500 or less, residents would be charged a license-plate removal fee of $30 plus an amount equivalent to 20 percent of the overdue tax bill, and on delinquencies above $500, residents would be charged a tow fee starting at $200 for passenger cars and pickup trucks up to one ton plus an amount equivalent to 20 percent of the taxes paid.
Another number to keep in mind in relation to this topic: 1 million. Even with Beverage’s renewed efforts thus far this year, the total delinquent taxes still outstanding is just shy of a million dollars all told.
“The city runs on these taxes. Taxes are what fund what the city does in terms of providing services. This has to be a priority. We need to make sure that people follow through,” Beverage said.
Story by Chris Graham. Chris can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
David Toscano: Inside the surplus
It is always better to have a surplus than have a deficit. Consequently, Governor McDonnell and many Virginians recently celebrated the fact that the Commonwealth will have a surplus at the end of the fiscal year. After all, who would not want a surplus? If we balance our family checkbook at the end of the month, we feel better when we have a positive balance. But, as they say, it is always good to know how we got there. If you balanced your checkbook by cutting medical care for your child or going cold in winter by not paying for enough fuel, you would not feel as good. If you borrowed from your savings, you might feel even worse about your surplus and how it was generated.
In reality, a similar dynamic has occurred in Virginia. Over the past several years, the lack of an expanding revenue base has forced the Commonwealth to make a number of serious cuts totaling over $7 billion. In the last General Assembly session, the budget was balanced through a combination of even more cuts and forgoing over $600 million in payments into the Virginia Retirement System, in effect giving state employees, public safety officers, and public education staff an IOU. Cuts were made in K-12 education, higher education, support for mental health, and public safety. Make no mistake about it – we are enjoying a budget surplus now on the back of painful cuts to key programs in Virginia and putting off financial commitments into the future.
Another financial consequence of our budgetary action has also recently become apparent. The Unemployment Trust Fund, the account out of which we pay unemployment benefits to Virginians who are out of work, has essentially run out of money, and now we will have to borrow from the federal government to fund our obligations. You may remember that the House of Delegates unfortunately rejected a change in Virginia’s unemployment compensation program two years ago that would have brought additional monies to the state in exchange for small changes in the program. Now, because those changes were not made, we are forced to borrow money from the federal government, and small businesses will need to pay more in unemployment insurance.
The surplus will be spent on one-time expenditures. About $82M of the $200M surplus will fund a 3% bonus for state employees, who have not received a raise in many years. $26M will go to the Water Quality Improvement Fund to help clean up the Chesapeake Bay. This is a statutory provision of our budget process. $19M will go to K-12 education; some will likely arrive in Albemarle and Charlottesville. Most of the balance of the surplus will go to fund transportation.
Since the surplus reflects more monies coming into the state treasury than were projected, it is an indication that the economy has improved somewhat. Hopefully, the economy will continue to improve and revenues will continue to increase so we will have an opportunity to replace some of the losses that have occurred over the last several years because of our cuts.
David Toscano represents Charlottesville and Albemarle County in the Virginia House of Delegates.
Brian Miller: Restoring a vibrant middle class
Imagine joining friends for a late-night game of Monopoly, but in this game, there’s a twist: At the start of the game, one player gets an entire side of the game board, from Pacific Avenue to Boardwalk, including the Short Line railroad. Instead of pondering easy questions like whether to be the shoe or the thimble, you’re now grappling with a more important question: Do you even stand a chance in such a lopsided game?
As you ponder the fairness of this board game, Congress is debating the very real future of our federal estate tax, a tax on inherited wealth designed in part to prevent one player from owning most of the board before the game even begins.
Recently, a new proposal was introduced in an effort to break through the stalemate that has led to the current tax holiday for the super wealthy. Because of the inability of Congress to reach agreement back in December, the year 2010 is slowly passing as the first since 1916 with no estate tax. Billions of dollars are now being transferred tax-free, while our national deficit grows. The heirs of the late Texas billionaire Dan Duncan stand to inherit, free of any estate tax, more than the average American earns in 4,000 lifetimes. No one questions the right of parents to pass on a legacy to their children, but how much is enough?
Despite its kitchen table status today, the Monopoly board game can trace its roots to Lizzie Magie, who created the game in 1903 as an educational tool to help people understand that free market economies, absent rules to ensure otherwise, naturally move toward monopoly control as wealth is increasingly concentrated into the hands of the few. It takes public policies, from anti-monopoly rules to progressive tax systems, to protect free markets from this self-destructive tendency. The fact is: any economic system is effective only to the extent that its more extreme aspects are reined in.
Our progressive tax system, including the estate tax, helped guide our economy and fuel the broadly shared prosperity our nation experienced during the post-war period. However, that progressive tax system came under a 30-year assault which began in the early 1980s. We’ve seen the consequences of this backsliding and the misguided tax cuts for the wealthy. Instead of the promised trickle-down, we got stagnant wages for most Americans and the widest disparity of income our nation has seen since 1928, just before the Great Depression. It’s time to recapture the core values that made our economy work, beginning with the preservation of a strong estate tax.
The importance of this proposal cannot be overstated. Transfers of wealth from generation to generation impact every aspect of our economic landscape, even the persistent racial wealth divide. While we’ve made significant strides at closing the income gap in the half-century since the great Civil Rights victories, the gap in actual wealth is much harder to shake because wealth transfers forward. Even today, African-Americans have only 10 cents of net wealth for every $1 of net wealth that whites have. Latinos have 12 cents. Without a strong estate tax, the inequalities of the past will forever haunt our nation, leaving the Monopoly board permanently tilted.
Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., and other estate tax opponents are wrong in trying to weaken the estate tax. Congress should instead work to preserve a strong estate tax for the benefit of all Americans. This estate tax proposal represents the kind of commonsense solution that balances the desire to protect small businesses and farms with generous deductions, while ensuring that the super-wealthy give back to support the country that made their prosperity possible.
Even in a game – like Monopoly – we can see the need for rules to ensure that opportunity continually circulates throughout our economy to create a broadly shared prosperity for all, not just a select few. Preserving a strong estate tax is essential to ensuring that each subsequent generation has a chance to achieve the American dream. Without it, we have to ask ourselves, is the game hopelessly stacked? Should we even bother playing?
Miller is executive director of United for a Fair Economy. Online at www.faireconomy.org.
Local derby team rolling into big-time
The Rocktown Rollers are now formally working their way into big-time roller derby.
On July 1, the Rollers, based in Harrisonburg, were accepted into the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association’s apprentice program.
The apprenticeship is a year-long program dedicated to helping new teams become full members of the WFTDA league.
“These are really good teams. We can play them now, but the win or loss will not count for anything in our stats, and besides, WFTDA teams generally only like to play other WFTDA teams,” said team member Christina Steele.
In order to become full members, the Rollers will have to complete community service, and everyone on the team must pass a litany of skills tests. During this process, the Rollers, which formed in 2008, will have help from a mentor team from the WFTDA league that will help guide them through the process to make sure they will become full members.
The application process to get into the apprentice program was lengthy. “Lots of paper work had to be filled out regarding each of us,” said team member Knasty Knitter. All of the women also had to pass a skills assessment test. Another part of the application process was setting up bylaws and making the WFTDA see them as a business. Along with all of those things they had a write a letter explaining what their intent and goals were.
One might wonder how you get into a sport like roller derby. Steele shared her experience. By day she is Christina Steele, hardworking Starbucks employee; by night she is Blue Steele, a hard-hitting roller derby chick.
Steele was first introduced to the Rocktown Rollers by a friend, known in the rink as Betty Crasher. Even though Steele had no idea how to skate, she thought she would go to a practice and see what happens. After the first practice, she gave up on the idea, then a couple weeks later she was back. The girls let Steele practice learning how to skate off to the side while they did their own practicing for their next bout.
Now, 13 months later, Steele is the team’s director of administration, and loving every minute of it.
“It’s the most powerful, enduring, strategic sport I’ve ever played,” Steele said. “At first I thought it was just skating around and hitting each other, but then I realized there’s actually a game to it. There is a lot of strategy that comes with it, and that’s what I love about it.”
Story by Jenny Hypes. Jenny can be reached at jenny.hypes@emu.edu.
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Chris Graham: They’re both gone
Posted on July 22, 2010 · 2 Comments
Then it got sadder. My grandfather passed this afternoon.
He had been in decline for some time – years, many years, really. He was just a shadow of his former self, particularly after the love of his life passed away in January 2009. They’d been married 67 years.
I was with him when the news was broken to him that she had passed. I’ll never forget the moment. Imagine seeing somebody having his heart ripped out right there in front of you. This was worse.
The family had gotten word from the doctors earlier this week that his days were numbered. My mom called me to tell me, then said she knew he’d hang on until today.
“He’s going to make it to mom’s birthday. It might be midnight that day, but he’s going to make it to mom’s birthday,” she said.
I could write a book on the topic of, Everything I Learned In Life, I Learned From My Granny and Granddaddy. How I’m a writer with interests in a wide variety of topics, because when my parents split up I spent the weekends with my grandparents, and Granny Decker, Margaret Decker to some, Peggy to others, had interests in a wide variety of topics, always had books and magazines and newspapers around, and loved to sit on the front porch on summer nights talking. Or how I work harder than anybody I know, because Granddaddy, Paul Decker to the world, worked harder than any 10 other people that you could pull together to try to do more than he could in a day. The man built houses until he was 75 years old; it was how he worked himself out of the orphanage, starting at age 14 building chicken coops to support his brothers and sisters after their mother abandoned them.
He took me out with him on work sites and later had me with him on volunteer jobs that we did for a number of local churches. Then we’d go home on Saturday night and shoot baskets in the driveway until we couldn’t move.
Funny things that you remember, but this is the one thing that will stick with me about my grandparents. Granddaddy fretted constantly over whether Granny was good with whatever she was drinking, tea or Pepsi or whatever it was.
Do you have enough to drink? Need any ice? Want a new cup? He was relentless.
What I wouldn’t give for one more summer night on the front porch with the two of them.
Good news, Granny. Granddaddy is back to pester you about your drinks again.
Column by Chris Graham. He can be reached at freepress2@ntelos.net.
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