Jeff Werner, the Land-Use field officer for a group called the Piedmont Environmental Council, says that the Rivanna Water & Sewer Authority’s $143 million water supply plan is the “least expensive” alternative, and he cites alleged ulterior motives of those who would oppose the controversial plan.

“Dredging is more expensive,” says Werner in a 33-minute discussion on the May 9 talk-show hosted by former City Councilor Rob Schilling on WINA-AM radio. During the program, Werner accuses the Hook of “misrepresenting,” of offering “misinformation,” “no analysis,” and also of being “offensive” and “inappropriate.”

The Hook has reported that a firm called Gannett Fleming won a $3.1 million dam design deal after alleging that dredging the Rivanna Reservoir could cost $145 million and later claimed it might cost as much as $225 million, a sum that exceeds a recent contract to dredge over 50 million cubic yards from the Panama Canal— a contrast which Werner branded “theater.”

Another firm, Gahagan & Bryant, has offered a ballpark dredging estimate of $25-30 million including dewatering— everything but land purchase or, alternatively, tipping fees, which the firm confirms (more)

 

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With so much attention paid to the race for the White House, former governor Mark Warner (D) came to Charlottesville today to remind voters that there is another office on the ballot in November, and that he’s running for it. With Sen. John Warner (R, no relation) opting for retirement instead of a re-election campaign, Mark Warner laid out the reasons why he should fill the vacancy– namely that he seeks to end the partisan tone in Washington. “You’ve got to recognize that good ideas don’t come with a ‘D’ or an ‘R’ attached to them,” he told the crowd of about 300 people. “I’ll work with anyone to make sure all Virginians get the same shot that I got.”

Warner summarized his platform on the range of issues facing the next Congress, including his formula for stimulating the struggling national economy. “India and China are not playing for second place in the 21st century,” he said. “We need a national competitiveness plan in this country,” which Warner said should include having “the most educated innovative workforce in the world,” “grappl[ing] with health care,” and “re-invest[ing] our crumbling national infrastructure.”

Warner also devoted some of his stump speech to the war in Iraq. “The Iraqi government is sitting on $70 billion in oil revenues right now,” he said. “The only way we ratchet up the pressure on them is to begin to bring our troops home.”

Asked after the speech if that means tying war funding to a timetable for withdrawal, Warner said, “I don’t believe you can set a date,” he said, “but I do think we have to make sure it’s not an open-ended, 100-year engagement.”

In a possible preview of (more)

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Today, at the University of Virginia, Governor Tim Kaine (D) put to rest any speculation that he would forgo his last year as governor in order to serve in Barack Obama’s White House, should the Illinois senator be successful in his presidential bid.

“You’re not going to see me leave,” he told reporters, “I’ll be Governor of Virginia through January of 2010. Maybe after I’m governor I’ll be able to help him.”

Since being the first governor outside of Illinois to endorse Obama in February 2007, pundits have bandied about Kaine’s name as a possible vice presidential candidate to share the ticket with Obama, or the possibility that Obama would appoint the governor to his cabinet.

Kaine’s longtime support of Obama was very much on the minds of Larry Sabato’s Introduction to American Politics class when engaging him in a Q&A following his brief 15-minute lecture. Students pressed the governor on the issues where he differs from his presidential contender of choice such as partial birth abortion (Kaine supports outlawing it, Obama voted against such a ban), and the death penalty (Kaine opposes it, Obama supports it).

While acknowledging their differences of opinion, Kaine emphasized that their disagreement is exemplary of why he supports Obama’s candidacy in the first place. “The strategy of Obama is finding common ground, and finding creative ways to make advances,” he said. “On just about every major initiative of his in the Illinois state senate and in the U.S. Senate, he’s had a Republican co-patron. He’s a uniter by nature.”

Kaine just returned from Pennsylvania, where he campaigned door to door for Obama in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre area. Asked about how Obama’s recent comment about how small town Americans are “bitter” and “cling to guns and religion,” Kaine said it seemed the issue was getting more plan in the media than on the ground. “Not one person brought it up,” Kaine said. “Whether they support him or not, they know that this is a guy who knows what it’s like to face tough straits.”

Still, Kaine does not forecast an Obama victory in Pennsylvania tomorrow. “[Sen. Hillary Clinton] will probably win,” he said, “but if we can finish within a single digit margin, that would be a positive outcome.

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With last night’s conclusion of the HBO miniseries John Adams, so ended the latest on-screen portrayal of Thomas Jefferson. This time around, British actor Stephen Dillane (best known to American audiences for portraying Virginia Woolf’s husband in 2002’s The Hours) donned the red wig to play the aloof, enigmatic Jefferson, to Paul Giamatti’s driven, blunt Adams.

That got the Hook thinking, which other actors have attempted to play Shadwell’s favorite son? Of course, there was Nick Nolte’s much-panned turn in 1995’s Jefferson in Paris which focused on his extra-marital affair with slave Sally Hemings. The Chicago Sun-Times‘ Roger Ebert was puzzled by the performance, of which he wrote, “The Jefferson in this movie is such a remote figure that you wonder, by the movie’s end, if he actually knew he was having sex at the time.”

While Nolte’s portrait is the most well-known in recent history, an IMDB search reveals (more)

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Local activists Jeff Winder and Sue Frankel-Streit are preparing to cross the U.S. border from Mexico sans checkpoints and walk 40 miles of migrant trails through the Sonoran Desert to protest US anti-immigration policy.

The two, pictured just before their arrest in Rep. Virgil Goode’s office in a 2007 Code Pink protest, this time have on their People United hats to protest resolutions such as one passed in Prince William County that limits county services to citizens and has police verifying citizenship pretty much when they stop people for speeding.

“We want to overturn Prince William County,” says fellow protester Virginia Leavell from Tucson, the city where the border crossers– who have been dubbed “insanity without borders” by one of their coalition members by Greg Latieq, founder of Help Save Manassas– will begin their hike to Mexico over the weekend. (more)

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UPDATE 4:15pm– At his 2:30 press conference, U.S. Attorney John Brownlee says he’s “seriously considering” a run for attorney general, according to the Roanoke Times.

POSTED 11:26am– U.S. Attorney John L. Brownlee, top federal prosecutor for western Virginia who was on a list of attorneys considered for firing under Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, announces his resignation today.

Brownlee, 43, was appointed by President George Bush in 2001 and was not among the nine U.S. attorneys purportedly canned by Gonzalez for political reasons.

Brownlee testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee last fall that he was contacted at home by a high-level Gonzalez staffer October 24, 2006, the deadline for Oxycontin manufacturer Purdue Pharma to accept the government’s offer to settle or face other charges for falsely marketing the highly addictive drug. A week after that phone call, Brownlee was placed on a list of prosecutors being considered for dismissal. Pharma Purdue settled for $635 million last May.

Brownlee was in Charlottesville March 20 to announce the indictment of a man in the 2006 murder of Katherine Danielle Howard. Other local prosecutions during his administration include 17 members of the notorious Westside Crew, swindler Terry Dowdell, and Shenandoah Park murders (more)

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Thirty-seven years after he last stood in front of a UVA Law School class as a professor, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia returned to the school to deliver a lecture on the topic of Thomas Jefferson’s concept of a “wall of separation” between church and state.

In relating his legal philosophy on the matter– well known to the 400 students and faculty in attendance and the 100 or so outside Caplin Auditorium who couldn’t get in– Scalia said he didn’t believe Jefferson intended government to “favor or disfavor religion, nor banish it from the public forum.” Nor does Scalia believe his view is as far from Jefferson’s as some scholars have argued. “I have been a centrist jurist,” he said, before adding with a smirk, “at least, by my standards.”

Over the next 30 minutes, the 21-year veteran of the nation’s highest court explained that while the text of the Constitution is most important in deciding any case, second-most important is what Scalia called “accepted constitutional tradition,” such as allowing the mint to put “In God We Trust” on currency, or allowing a prayer to open a legislative session, rather than (more)

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What’s the best way to lure college students away from a former president’s talk? Three words: Dave Matthews Band.

That’s what happened in Bloomington, Indiana, when former President Bill Clinton came to the campus of Indiana University to drum up support for the presidential campaign of his wife, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY). Just as the two-term Oval Officer was preparing to take the stage in IU’s Assembly Hall, word began to spread that free tickets to Sunday’s DMB concert on campus were being given away across town at that very moment. Students frantically flocked away from the former Commander-in-Chief to get their mitts on the tickets at… the Bloomington campaign headquarters for rival candidate Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL).

“I was leaning toward Obama, but (more)

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Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson admits he was disappointed he didn’t get the nod for the U.S. Supreme Court when his name was bandied about as a nominee in 2005 and he was interviewed by President George Bush. “For a little while, I really felt very sorry for myself,” Wilkinson told the audience at the UVA Law School March 28, and in fact, he enjoyed a brief wallow in self pity.

Then one day, “I looked in the mirror and thought, ‘Jay, you make a hell of a poor victim,’” said the federal judge on the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. Wilkinson, a UVA law grad/prof and Charlottesville resident, gave the Henry J. Abraham Distinguished Lectureship on “A View from the Bench” as part of the 14th Virginia Festival of the Book.

Wilkinson, who was appointed to the federal bench in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan, said abortion or any other single issue should not be a litmus test for a federal judge. “I honestly don’t think we’re a partisan group,” he observed, while noting the skepticism that came from the Bush v. Gore decision, in which conservative justices ruled for Bush. “We just rule case by case.”

He said he’s never witnessed a judge swapping a ruling on one case in exchange for a vote on another. “There’s none of that horse trading one would see in the political process,” he said.

Although he’s a well-respected jurist, Wilkinson said, “My kids though it very boring that I wasn’t a firefighter.”

He acknowledged that being a judge is a “monastic” life, exemplified by his uniform. “Maryland has red robes,” he said. “They’re beautiful. Those of us with black robes envy them.” (more)

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Following an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate in 2006, Gail “For Rail” Parker is once again running to represent Virginia in the world’s most deliberative body. The 62-year-old retired Air Force officer will run under the banner of the Independent Green Party and will offer a platform of installing a light rail train system to solve the Commonwealth’s transportation woes. Parker announced today that she has the requisite 10,000 signatures to get on the ballot, which she will present to the State Board of Elections today.

Her ‘06 campaign gained national attention, and not only for the fact that she may have swayed the unprecedentedly close election to Jim Webb with her last minute endorsement. No, Parker’s legacy is greater than that; her radio ads featured (more)

 

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Ever strolled the Downtown Mall on a warm day looking for a place to throw your empty drink container, but awash in enviro-guilt as you discarded it in one of those black garbage cans? If only you look a little harder, walk a little further, you think, maybe you could recycle it.

Well, now you can tell that still, small voice in your head to pipe down. Just yesterday the City installed 12 new green recycling bins (like the one Parks & Rec employee Clifton Brown is installing at left) beside the black ones on and around the Mall.

Currently, plastic, glass, and aluminum are the only materials that can be deposited in the new receptacles. However, if you find yourself with a used paper cup or newspaper (more)

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The Daily Progress is losing its senior reporter, the man whose 31 years of experience may be more than the total of the combined metro news squad. According to stories in this morning’s Progress and Newport News Daily Press, senior reporter Bob Gibson, who writes the influential “Political Notebook” column among other duties, is leaving the newspaper to head the Sorensen Institute for Political Leadership, succeeding Sean O’Brien, who left to head a new Constitutional center at Montpelier.

Gibson’s track record covering an array of topics— including an award-winning early ’90s investigation of racial sentencing disparities— has made him the “dean” of the local journalism world.

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