Podcast appearances and mentions of Bill Palmer

In Episode #64 of “Hear ye, hear ye, A TX-Style Renaissance Podcast”, I sit down with Bill Palmer, the Man behind Merlin the Magician. Merlin the Magician performed and worked at Texas Renaissance Festival for over 25 years. But that is not even half the story; Bill Palmer is a lifetime resident of Houston TX, and he graduated from Rice University, -and is a well-known magician in Houston and throughout the world. Bill learned accordion from his father, a well-known musician and writer of musical books. So, as a teenager, he started Banjo and quickly astounded his teachers. He then wrote his own music book, “How To Play Folk and Bluegrass Banjo,” that circulated worldwide. Did I mention, he also speaks German. Well, we shall cover that and more in episode sixty-four of “Hear ye, hear ye A TX-Style Renaissance Podcast.” Huzzah! The King

This episode features a conversation with Bill Palmer, Executive and Leadership coach, Pro Bono Coach for Global Clubfoot Initiative, and recent founder of The Clubfoot Fund. Bill talks about his personal experience living with clubfoot and about what led him to become involved with GCI and inevitably start The Clubfoot Fund. To check out the impactful work Bill is doing please visit https://www.clubfootfund.org/

In this special episode during Holy Week, Pastor Doug talks with Bill Palmer and reflects on Jesus' experience within the darkness of the crucifixion. Bill shares candidly about his experience living with a diagnosis of acute leukemia and how he is experiencing God's love and peace in the midst of it.

Written by Bill Palmer and presented by Kendrick Diaz. The apostle Paul wrote that he had “become all things to all men.” What did he mean, and what impact should this principle have on Christians today?Read Online: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/life/christian-living/become-all-things-to-all-men/

Written by Bill Palmer and presented by Clyde Kilough.Around the world civil unrest is tearing nations apart, once again proving that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. How should Christians respond?Read Online: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/prophecy/prophecy-in-the-news/a-kingdom-divided-against-itself-cannot-stand/

Today we have a special guest in the studio, Bill Palmer. Bill shares his expert advice as he currently works in a Nuclear Powerplant.

Today we have a special guest in the studio, Bill Palmer. Bill shares his expert advice as he currently works in a Nuclear Powerplant.

Written by Bill Palmer an presented by Kendrick Diaz.God is eternal and almighty, and also omniscient—He knows everything. He knows our every need, our every problem and our deepest desires. So, why pray?Read Online: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/god/prayer-fasting-and-meditation/how-to-pray/why-pray/

Throughout His ministry, Jesus spoke about the Kingdom of God. How should knowledge of God's Kingdom change our lives today?Written by Bill Palmer and Presented by Erik JonesRead Online: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/prophecy/kingdom-of-god/kingdom-should-change-our-lives/

Isaiah and Thornmary travel to Autumn University to get some information on the Glen of Merg.Join us on Discord!Follow us on Twitter at @maeltopiaWant to learn more about the world of Maeltopia? Check out our website!Want additional perks like extra lore, stories, art, and more? Check out our Patreon at: www.patreon.com/maeltopiaWant unique art and animations to go along with your Maeltopia episodes? Check out our Youtube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmmrdXEvkEPfQvCKT4pha4QBe sure to like, comment, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform! We appreciate your support!Credits:Written by Mark AnzaloneEdited by Walker Kornfeld--Thorn Mary voiced by Kelly BairIsaiah Voiced by Mark AnzaloneProfessor Oswald Kitch voiced by Steven Zivic--Music by Ramani, PB&J, Bill Palmer, and RusselMusic and Sound effects are licensed from third party providers including Envato, Epidemic Sound, Artlist, Soundstripe, Melody Loops, Pond 5, Soundcrate, Music Vine, Youtube, Melodie, Slipstream, Motionarray and StoryblocksDisclaimer:This show is written in a first-hand, first-person format from uncertain and inconsistent narrators. This show explores specific mental health conditions. Whilst there is consistent use of derogatory terms for those with specific conditions or neurodivergence including lunatic, maniac, crazy, psychosis etc., this show is written and produced by a team that live with some of the specific illnesses featured within, including Tourette's syndrome, schizoaffective disorder, insomnia, obsessive compulsive disorder, hallucinations, delusions, anxiety and depressive conditions, among others. Our team also features an academic background in neurology and psychology that has been drawn on to aim for sensitivity and accuracy. The intent of the language and experiences within the Sleep/Wake Cycle, and the extended works of Maeltopia, are designed to explore these conditions and their related isolation and degradation as experienced first hand. The world of Maeltopia is one where the mentally unwell are the majority. Yet there are still outliers who are hunted out. Content warnings: Murderers Audio Hallucinations Visual Hallucinations Fear of the Dark Menacing AgenciesDerogatory terms for Mental IllnessDiscussions of religionBody Horror Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Written by Bill Palmer and presented by Clyde Kilough.World debt reached a record-breaking $313 trillion in 2023. Should we be worried? And what does the Bible say about such debt?Read Online: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/prophecy/prophecy-in-the-news/growing-world-debt/

Written by Bill Palmer and presented by Clyde Kilough. Pentecost is most often associated with the beginning of the Church. Can we learn more about the significance of Pentecost in the book of Joel?Read Online: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/life/plan-of-salvation/pentecost/pentecost-book-of-joel/

Written by Bill Palmer and presented by Clyde Kilough. When Jesus was asked to prove Himself with a sign like the manna God gave ancient Israel, He declared, “I am the bread of life.” What does that mean for us?Read Online: https://lifehopeandtruth.com/god/who-is-jesus/i-am-the-bread-of-life/

Written by Bill Palmer and presented by Kendrick Diaz. Jesus spoke of “the mystery of the kingdom of God.” Paul also wrote about the mysteries of God. What are these mysteries, and what do they mean for us?Read Online. 

Pastor Doug is join by Bill Palmer in a spirited discussion about the breadth and depth of God's holy work.

Vance gets another bizarre phone call; Felix continues to be harrassed; and Mr. Mum talks to an old "friend."Join us on Discord!Follow us on Twitter at @maeltopiaWant additional perks like extra lore, stories, art, and more? Check out our Patreon at: www.patreon.com/maeltopiaWant unique art and animations to go along with your Maeltopia episodes? Check out our Youtube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmmrdXEvkEPfQvCKT4pha4QWant to learn more about the world of Maeltopia? Check out our website!Be sure to like, comment, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform! We appreciate your support!Credits:Written by Steven AnzaloneEdited by Walker KornfeldSound mastering by Steven J. Anzalone--Helena Vespertine played by Kelly BairMarvin Mum played by Steven AnzaloneGretchen Harlowe played by Steven Anzalone (modified)Vance Sallowynn played by Steven Anzalone (modified)Felix Yarrows played by Steven AnzaloneStrange Voice on the phone voiced by Steven ZivicVoice on Airport intercom voiced by Steven Anzalone--The Oscuary intro music was created by Steven J. AnzaloneMusic by Crypt-of-Insomnia, Bill Palmer, Kylie Couper, Pieter Kop, Steeve Body, Antracto, and AudiozenMusic and Sound effects are licensed from third party providers including Envato, Epidemic Sound, Artlist, Soundstripe, Music Vine, Soundcrate, Melodie, Storyblocks, Snapmuse, Slipstream and Pond 5 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

It has been over a decade since we last spoke in-depth to the author and kung fu movie expert, Ric Meyers - the man responsible for introducing much of America to the classics of martial arts cinema over a writing career spanning five decades. His books - including 1985's 'Martial Arts Movies: From Bruce Lee to the Ninjas', 1995's 'The Encyclopedia of Martial Arts Movies', 2001's 'Great Martial Arts Movies: From Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan and More', and 2011's 'Films of Fury' project, which involved both a book and a documentary - are essential resources for any serious fan of kung fu cinema.Now aged 70, Ric shows no signs of slowing down. He is still offering his honest, forthright opinion on modern action movies - particularly in his role as a regular reviewer on the 'That Phat Samurai Guy' YouTube channel - and as the long-standing compere of the annual Kung Fu Extravaganza event at San Diego Comic-Con, which just celebrated its 26th anniversary. On this episode, Ben catches up with Ric on the kung fu movies he has enjoyed in the last decade since they last spoke, the future of the genre, and how his own martial arts journey is progressing. As a kung fu practitioner, Ric has developed a keen eye on authenticity in kung fu cinema, something he feels is distinctly lacking from the genre today - although he does recognise and celebrate the filmmakers still trying to convey a more accurate portrayal of kung fu practice on-screen, acknowledging the works of Jackie Chan and the director, Xu Haofeng.LINKSRic Meyers on IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1838515/Ric Meyers on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ric_MeyersRic Meyers on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ricmeyersRic Meyers on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ricmeyersRic Meyers on 'That Phat Samurai Guy' YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=that+phat+samurai+guy+ric+meyersBuy 'From Bruce Lee to the Ninjas: Martial Arts Movies' by Bill Palmer, Karen Palmer, Amy Harlib and Ric Meyers on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Bruce-Lee-Ninjas-Martial-Movies/dp/0806510099/Buy 'The Encyclopedia of Martial Arts Movies' by Bill Palmer, Karen Palmer and Ric Meyers on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Encyclopedia-Martial-Arts-Movies-ebook/dp/B00CG16G2W/Buy 'Great Martial Arts Movies: From Bruce Lee to Jackie Chan and More' by Ric Meyers on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Martial-Arts-Movies-Citadel/dp/0806520264/Buy 'Films of Fury: The Kung Fu Movie Book' by Ric Meyers on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Films-Fury-Kung-Movie-Book/dp/0979998948/Buy 'They Shouldn't Have Killed His Dog: The Complete Uncensored Ass-Kicking Oral History of John Wick, Gun Fu, and the New Age of Action' by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/They-Shouldnt-Have-Killed-His/dp/1250278430/'Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks' review on Kung Fu Movie Guide: https://bit.ly/IronFistsAndKungFuKicks2019The calligraphy fight from 'The Magnificent Butcher' (1979): https://youtu.be/V7A0M5u_Pas?si=iGjI5BNoSxfzhw-IRic's eBay sellers account, Chimera Publishing: https://www.ebay.com/str/chimerapublishingKung Fu Movie Guide interview with Ric Meyers from 2011, updated 2013: http://kungfumovieguide.com/interview-ric-meyers/WHAT WERE YOUR FAVOURITE FIGHT FILMS OF 2023?Check out our not-very-comprehensive list on the Kung Fu Movie Guide website: https://bit.ly/KFMGPodEOYShow2023PartOneLet us know your favourite films - and why - and your comment could be read out on our End of Year Show 2023, featuring 'Life of Action Vol. 1 and 2' author Mike Fury. Email your response to hello@kungfumovieguide.com, or message us on social media. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Helena and Mum have another encounter; Vance receives some strange calls; the group runs into bureaucratic barriers.Join us on Discord!Follow us on Twitter at @maeltopiaWant additional perks like extra lore, stories, art, and more? Check out our Patreon at: www.patreon.com/maeltopiaWant unique art and animations to go along with your Maeltopia episodes? Check out our Youtube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmmrdXEvkEPfQvCKT4pha4QWant to learn more about the world of Maeltopia? Check out our website!Be sure to like, comment, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform! We appreciate your support!Credits:Written by Steven AnzaloneEdited by Walker KornfeldSound mastering by Steven J. Anzalone--Helena Vespertine played by Kelly BairMarvin Mum played by Steven AnzaloneGretchen Harlowe played by Steven Anzalone (modified)Vance Sallowynn played by Steven Anzalone (modified)Felix Yarrows played by Steven AnzaloneMayor Hampstead voiced by Steven Anzalone (modified)Office administrator voiced by Steven Anzalone (modified)--The Oscuary intro music was created by Steven J. AnzaloneMusic by Bill Palmer, Paulo Argento, Shahead Mostafafar, Ronlit, Cage Eye, and Jaime ArredondoMusic and Sound effects are licensed from third party providers including Envato, Epidemic Sound, Artlist, Soundstripe, Music Vine, Soundcrate, Melodie, Storyblocks, Snapmuse, Slipstream and Pond 5 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Written by Bill Palmer and Presented by Clyde Kilough. Every year, Christmas cards proclaim, “Peace on earth, goodwill to men.” This is attributed to the Bible, but does it truly reflect the biblical message?Read Online. 

Written by Bill Palmer and presented by Kendrick Diaz.  Worries about crime, disease and disasters are increasing. What can we do to avoid danger, and what does the Bible say about seeking divine protection?Read Online.  

On this day in 1967, Jimi Hendrix played his last show as the opening act for the Monkees. At least, that's one obscure fact about this day that serves as an ice-breaker for the July 17, 2023 edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement. But how do we know for sure? Is there a recording? Were any of you there? In any case, I'm skeptical but this is sadly not the focus of this installment of the program. In this particular edition: * A brief look at tonight's meeting of the Louisa County Board of Supervisors* Charlottesville opens up grant program for festivals and events* The search continues for a new fire chief* Some city departments will move into the S&P Building* Charlottesville City Council and the Planning Commission further discuss changes to draft zoning mapI like to write about this community. I really love when people read it. Sign up for free and I promise not to beg you for money. But I do appreciate paid subscriptions.First shout-out: Plant Northern Piedmont NativesSince the beginning of this newsletter, one Patreon supporter has dedicated their shout-out to an organization that seeks to draw awareness of the importance of native species to the ecosystem. As we approach summer, Plant Northern Piedmont Natives wants you to know they've printed over 9,280 copies of their guide Piedmont Native Plants: A Guide for Landscapes and Gardens. In this guide, Piedmont native plants are defined as those that evolved before the influence of European settlements shaped and changed the landscape. Plants included in the guide were selected from the Digital Atlas of the Virginia Flora and occur naturally within the region. You can download your copy today for free! Louisa County Supervisors do in fact meet tonightThere's a public hearing on a 5 megawatt solar facility We begin today with a correction. Or rather, an admission of an omission on this mission to inform and illuminate decisions. The Louisa County Board of Supervisors will meet this evening. I'd reported incorrectly that they took the day but that was my error. Rather than repeat all of that, head over to today's Fifth District Community Engagement for an explanation of what happened.Visit above for all of the details, but there are four public hearings worth placing here before we get on with getting through the week ahead.  * There is no staff report for a resolution that would change Louisa County code to allow for the Board of Supervisors to issue a five percent real property tax rebate to citizens. (resolution)* There's a public hearing on a siting agreement for a 5 megawatt solar facility known as OCHS solar or Louisa Solar. This would bring $50,000 to the county if the project is approved. (resolution) (siting agreement)* There's a related public hearing for a conditional use permit for the above project. Go back and look at the meeting overview for a link to more information. * There's a request for a conditional use permit for an equipment sales and rental business in a General Commercial District. The Planning Commission recommended approval with eight conditions. (resolution)A glimpse at the latest report from the City Manager RogersCharlottesville City Council meets tonight and one item I did not include in yesterday's Week Ahead is the report from interim City Manager Michael C. Rogers. Rogers will soon hand over the position to Deputy City Manager Sam Sanders, and Council will vote on Sanders' contract tonight.One of the aspects Rogers' brought to the job when he began in early 2022 was the creation of a written report about what's happening inside of city government. Here are some stories from the latest report.City awarding $560,000 in grants for arts, culture, and festivalsLast August, City Council set aside $580,000 from the American Rescue Plan Act to help spur community events in the wake of the pandemic. The window is open for groups who want to try something new or sustain something existing.“The program is intended to promote citywide special events that will activate public spaces, enrich the lives of residents, encourage partnerships between organizations, foster a vibrant and diverse community, and stimulate economic activity,” reads the report. Applications will be taken in four separate windows and up to $10,000 will be awarded for each event. Take a look at the city's website for information about how to apply.  Search continues for a new fire chief for CharlottesvilleCharlottesville is a city that has had much turnover and many high profile vacancies. That includes the position of fire chief. Michael Thomas has been serving on an interim basis since Hezedean Smith left to take a position in Florida. There were 30 applications to become the new chief. “The in-house review committee, which included representatives of the Fire Fighters union, narrowed the field to eight who were invited to do online interviews. And after that review, four candidates are invited for in-person interviews,” reads the interim city manager's report. An appointment is expected in the next several weeks. City departments moving into S&P BuildingThe City of Charlottesville owns the S&P Building at 700 East Jefferson Street and the Charlottesville Economic Development Authority leases it to S&P. City Council was briefed on the terms of this arrangement last June.Just over a year later, a few city departments will be moving into the building on the 1st and 2nd floors. These include the Office of Community Solutions and Public Works' Engineering Division. A regional group will also move into the space. “The Emergency Communications Center will occupy most of the first floor as training and space for back-office operations to lighten the current pressure at the main office on Ivy Road,” the report continues. Other items:* A new proposed pay scale for city employees will be presented to City Council on August 7 followed by a first reading on August 21. * Melinda Crawford is retiring from her position as the Chief Executive Officer of the Charlottesville Regional Airport. Internal candidates for her replacement will be interviewed by the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport Authority in August. * There were a total of five complaints made to the Police Civilian Oversight Board between October 2022 and April 2023. Three were forwarded to the Police Department's Office of Professional Standards. One was referred to the traffic engineering division as it was about a crosswalk. One more complaint is still pending. The one complaint received in May will be closed because it involved a UVA police officer. No complaints were received in June. * An update on the decarbonization study for municipal gas will be given to Council in October with a final report to be ready in February. Council was briefed on the launch of the study in March. Second shout-out: eBike Lending Library In today's second subscriber supported shout-out, one Patreon supporter wants you to know that Charlottesville now has an eBike Lending Library!  E-bikes are a great way to get around the community but there are many brands and styles to choose from. Because many e-bikes are sold online, it can be a challenge to try an e-bike before buying one.The Charlottesville E-bike Lending Library is a free, not-for-profit service working to expand access to e-bikes in the area. They have a small collection of e-bikes that we lend out to community members for up to a week, for free. You can experience your daily commute, go grocery shopping, or even bike your kids to school, and decide whether e-bikes are right for you. Check out this service at https://www.ebikelibrarycville.orgCharlottesville City Council and the Planning Commission further discuss changes to draft zoning mapSpoiler alert. I'm still quite behind on writing about the latest on the draft zoning code in Charlottesville. I also really want to write up the discussion on the Comprehensive Plan in last week. Later this week I'll write up the three hour discussion from July 13, 2023 between the City Council and the Planning Commission. Near the beginning of the Charlottesville Planning Commission meeting held on Tuesday, July 11,  there was this bit of information from Missy Creasy, the deputy director of the city's department of Neighborhood Development Services. “Because we're going to be talking about the zoning ordinance at length on Thursday, we won't have any additional zoning ordinance discussions for this evening,” Creasy said.The Planning Commission has held two joint work sessions with the City Council on the work session. The first was held on July 5 and was intended to be a continuation of a May 23 work session on potential changes to the zoning map. That one lasted four hours, and I have a summary of that discussion. You can either listen to it here on Charlottesville Community Engagement or read the text-only version on Information Charlottesville. The July 13 edition focused on residential neighborhoods and I plan to write that up in detail. But the July 5 noontime meeting began with an exchange captured between Charlottesville Mayor Lloyd Snook and Charlottesville Planning Commissioner Lyle Solla-Yates.“R-A, R-B, and R-C,” Solla-Yates can be heard before the meeting began. “I talked with staff about it just now, and that will be the next one that will be addressed at a work session…. Do you understand the issue?” “Well, I understand the issue, but I don't understand the resolution,” Snook said. “We will get there,” Solla-Yates said.“Okay,” Snook. “Which is a terrible answer, but that's my answer today,” Solla-Yates said. “Okay,” Snook. “Your concern is noted,” Solla-Yates said. What concern? What resolution? Maybe we'll find out. The July 5 meeting took two hours. The group went one by one through a series of specific requests recommended by members of the public. The following is some of what they discussed. Cedar Hills Road at District AvenueA two-block section of Hydraulic Road across from Stonefield in Albemarle County is currently listed as Corridor Mixed-Use 5 in the draft zoning code. One member of the public noted that currently some of those blocks are duplexes and other affordable places to live. Commissioner Philip d'Oronzio suggested switching those not fronting Hydraulic Road to Residential-A or Residential-B in order to preserve them. Councilor Brian Pinkston pointed out that the Commonwealth Transportation Board recently approved a roundabout at District Avenue at Hydraulic. That means some of those structures may be demolished to make way for that project. Snook, a member of the MPO Policy Board, said at least two buildings would have to go. (read that story)“Part of my concern is that I would hate to get to a situation where we are so determined to maximize housing that we don't allow for commercial uses in places where commercial uses make sense,” Snook said. d'Oronzio described the existing character of the land not fronting Hydraulic.“Once you get two steps back from Hydraulic you are in a quiet suburban neighborhood,” d'Oronzio said. The group reached consensus to make many of the changes to some of the properties. As this is a written and audio visual, I can't see precisely what was changed. Rugby / Grady and accommodating the student population Another request to the Future Land Use Map was for an area around Rugby Avenue and Grady Avenue designated for High-Intensity Residential. This is an area that's used for off-Grounds housing for students at the University of Virginia. “The current designation shows High-Intensity Residential for 3 owner-occupied homes, which seems to me like an encroachment of that student area into non-student land that won't be necessary if we densify within its current boundaries,” reads the request.  When the draft zoning map was drawn, these parcels were designated as Residential Mixed Use, or RX-3.At the work session, Commissioner Rory Stolzenberg suggested going in the other direction and increasing them by one grade to RX-5.“And the general philosophy of fitting as many students into existing student areas as we can so that they stop spreading out, Stolzenberg said. “That would leave a little more room to fit them in. I think 5 is also fairly consistent with some new development on Virginia Avenue that's four stories over there that is obviously higher than three.” However, Stolzenberg suggested some of the owner-occupied houses could be reduced to address the community member's concern. This topic comes up at a time when the University of Virginia is conducting a planning study for an initiative to house all second-year students on Grounds. Charlottesville Mayor Lloyd Snook expressed skepticism. “That's just me trying to read tea leaves and it's not any inside knowledge,” Snook said. “And if it happens it's going to happen probably at least five years from now anyway and maybe more like ten. Who knows? By that time we'll have a different Board of Visitors and we may have a different president. We don't know.” Planning Commissioner Carl Schwarz pointed out that after 14th Street was up-zoned in 2003, many houses came down to make way for the large apartment buildings that have been built ever since. Schwarz served two terms on the Board of Architectural Review (BAR) before being appointed to the Planning Commission last year and has seen many applications in this specific area. “This area has been kind of a battle ground for the BAR,” Schwarz said. “It is a bit of a struggle because there are a lot of single family houses that are no longer single family houses. And it's a little frustrating because there's an elementary school and the library and you've got parks. It's set up as a neighborhood but it's almost exclusively lived in by students.” Councilor Brian Pinkston raised a concern that the city may not have the ability to handle the additional density. The properties adjoining a nearby intersection are either Residential-C or RX-3. “We're assuming a lot of things about vehicles, we're assuming a lot of things about the road network, and so where Rugby (Road) comes into Preston (Avenue) just north of there essentially in an area that for better or worse has been residential for many years, that's going to be essentially like a hub as we're looking at it and I have some questions about whether that's really feasible.” Commissioner Rory Stolzenberg said that was not the area he was considering for upzoning. He meant closer to the University on properties that are currently zoned either in the UMD or UHD category. “That is zoned for 50 feet, five stories,” Stolzenberg said. “So really what we're proposing in this map is really a downzoning from what we allow there now. RX-5 would be what's allowed now.”Snook asked if anyone had ever quantified the number of UVA students who live in areas designated in student housing. Bill Palmer works in the office of the UVA Architect and said they've studied the issue.“Generally what we've found for undergraduates especially is that they want to be as close to UVA as possible,” Palmer said. “I will say that this area and [Jefferson Park Avenue] are both serve by our [University Transit Service] and very walkable.” However, Palmer said many students do bring their cars and if there are no parking minimums in the future, there would have to be some management. Upzoning church propertiesThere has been a trend in Charlottesville for church properties to go through rezonings to add residential density. This has happened at Hinton Avenue Baptist Church in Belmont, Park Street Christian Church, and Mount View Baptist Church in Locust Grove.In the comments on the Future Land Use Map made so far there were two further requests for church properties to be designated for future residential growth. These are at the Greek Orthodox Church on McIntire Road and Mount Zion Baptist Church. The Greek Orthodox Church property has a draft zoning designation of Residential-C. The Mount Zion Baptist Church property is Residential-A and is in the Sensitive Communities overlay. Commissioner Karim Habbab suggested it could be increased.“The South First Street development across the street is RX-3,” Habbab said. “Would it make sense to make [Mount Zion Baptist Church] RX-3? It's right on Elliot Avenue.” Freas said doing so as part of this process would require an alteration to the Future Land Use Map, which may slow down the rezoning process. Upzoning north of the BypassCharlottesville Mayor Lloyd Snook responded to community members suggestions that the area north of the U.S. 250 Bypass might not be suitable for medium-intensity residential. I'll point out that as I write this, I don't have access to the spreadsheet to which Planning Commissioners and Councilors made reference. For instance, the current draft zoning map designates properties along Meadowbrook Heights Road, Grove Road and Kenwood Lane as Residential-B matching the Medium-Intensity designation called for in the Future Land Use Map.  “One of the primary reasons why I really don't want to increase density right there unless we are going to solve the traffic problem,” Snook said. “That gets back to the question that I've been asking for a year now which is what responsibility do we have if we create a greater degree of intensity of use there?” Snook said the city has limited resources to put into infrastructure and the city might have to use eminent domain to buy right of way for more sidewalks. More on this topic in future editions of the program. Reading material:* Albemarle County plans study to address overcrowding, undercrowding in schools, Faith Redd, Charlottesville Daily Progress (paywall), July 15, 2023* Around $20K collected in Charlottesville from plastic bag tax, NBC29, Jacob Phillips, July 16, 2023Here's what's at the end of #557:I write this edition in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. I'll be here a lot more. How much more? Doesn't really matter, but what does matter is that torrential rain hit here the other day and a family of seven died when their vehicle washed away in a flash flood. Pennsylvania is contemplating joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative while Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin is doing what he can to pull out. What should happen? I don't know. But the point of this newsletter is to make you pay attention to what's happening and I am disappointed I've not been able to cover this specific issue. Why do any of us do any of the things we do? What is this life? Is it mere trivia that Jimi Hendrix did in fact open for the Monkees? Who gets to decide what is interesting and what's worth knowing? What's really worth paying attention to? All of us. I thank you for choosing to read what I put together. Advertising returns next time. Please pay attention and learn everything you can about this very complex world that needs constant vigilance to survive. Charlottesville Community Engagement is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit communityengagement.substack.com/subscribe

Rosemary, or Mary, continues her conversation with Sugar, revealing various truths; Isaiah looks for Rosemary but finds something else.Join us on Discord!Follow us on Twitter at @maeltopiaWant to learn more about the world of Maeltopia? Check out our website!Want additional perks like extra lore, stories, art, and more? Check out our Patreon at: www.patreon.com/maeltopiaWant unique art and animations to go along with your Maeltopia episodes? Check out our Youtube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmmrdXEvkEPfQvCKT4pha4QBe sure to like, comment, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform! We appreciate your support!Credits:Written by Mark AnzaloneEdited by Walker KornfeldSound mastering by Steven J. Anzalone--Isaiah Stroud voiced by Mark AnzaloneRosemary Stroud voiced by Kelly BairSpider Black Voiced by Mark AnzaloneSugar voiced by Mark AnzaloneHonuma solder voiced by Mark AnzaloneAstarian voiced by Mark Anzalone--The Sleep Wake Cycle Theme by Steven J. AnzaloneIntro and Outro music by Steven AnzaloneMusic by Bill Palmer, Flying Aces, Kyle Preston, and Frank SchlimbachMusic and Sound effects are licensed from third party providers including Envato, Epidemic Sound, Artlist, Soundstripe, Melody Loops, Pond 5, Soundcrate, Music Vine, Youtube, Melodie, and StoryblocksDisclaimer:This show is written in a first-hand, first-person format from uncertain and inconsistent narrators. This show explores specific mental health conditions. Whilst there is consistent use of derogatory terms for those with specific conditions or neurodivergence including lunatic, maniac, crazy, psychosis etc., this show is written and produced by a team that live with some of the specific illnesses featured within, including Tourette's syndrome, schizoaffective disorder, insomnia, obsessive compulsive disorder, hallucinations, delusions, anxiety and depressive conditions, among others. Our team also features an academic background in neurology and psychology that has been drawn on to aim for sensitivity and accuracy. The intent of the language and experiences within the Sleep/Wake Cycle, and the extended works of Maeltopia, are designed to explore these conditions and their related isolation and degradation as experienced first hand. The world of Maeltopia is one where the mentally unwell are the majority. Yet there are still outliers who are hunted out. Content warnings: Murderers Audio Hallucinations Visual Hallucinations Fear of the Dark Menacing AgenciesDerogatory terms for Mental IllnessDiscussions of religionBody Horror Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Written by Bill Palmer and presented by Jeremy Lallier. Proverbs 31 describes a “virtuous wife,” but when we closely examine it, we see more. We see an ideal marriage relationship—a Proverbs 31 wife and husband.Read Online

Rosemary emerges from her revelation filled venture; Isaiah plays damage control, and Mesmer defends himself against accusations.Join us on Discord!Follow us on Twitter at @maeltopiaWant to learn more about the world of Maeltopia? Check out our website!Want additional perks like extra lore, stories, art, and more? Check out our Patreon at: www.patreon.com/maeltopiaWant unique art and animations to go along with your Maeltopia episodes? Check out our Youtube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmmrdXEvkEPfQvCKT4pha4QBe sure to like, comment, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform! We appreciate your support!Credits:Written by Mark AnzaloneEdited by Walker KornfeldSound mastering by Steven J. Anzalone--Isaiah Stroud voiced by Mark AnzaloneRosemary Stroud voiced by Kelly BairShane voiced by Mark AnzaloneDr. Mesmer voiced by Mark AnzaloneHounuma voiced by Mark AnzaloneDevelin voiced by Mark Anzalone (modified)Batna voiced by Kelly Bair--The Sleep Wake Cycle Theme by Steven J. AnzaloneIntro and Outro music by Steven AnzaloneMusic by Joel Woolf, Juha Pekka, Jaime Arredondo, Stefani Vita, Bill Palmer, and Shahead MostafafarMusic and Sound effects are licensed from third party providers including Envato, Epidemic Sound, Artlist, Soundstripe, Melody Loops, Pond 5, Soundcrate, Music Vine, Youtube, Melodie, and StoryblocksDisclaimer:This show is written in a first-hand, first-person format from uncertain and inconsistent narrators. This show explores specific mental health conditions. Whilst there is consistent use of derogatory terms for those with specific conditions or neurodivergence including lunatic, maniac, crazy, psychosis etc., this show is written and produced by a team that live with some of the specific illnesses featured within, including Tourette's syndrome, schizoaffective disorder, insomnia, obsessive compulsive disorder, hallucinations, delusions, anxiety and depressive conditions, among others. Our team also features an academic background in neurology and psychology that has been drawn on to aim for sensitivity and accuracy. The intent of the language and experiences within the Sleep/Wake Cycle, and the extended works of Maeltopia, are designed to explore these conditions and their related isolation and degradation as experienced first hand. The world of Maeltopia is one where the mentally unwell are the majority. Yet there are still outliers who are hunted out. Content warnings: Murderers Audio Hallucinations Visual Hallucinations Fear of the Dark Menacing AgenciesDerogatory terms for Mental IllnessDiscussions of religionBody Horror Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Looking for some great Texas music . Listen to my next interview with Wayne Sutton and Bill Palmer and their newly released Terlingua. It's a perfect matched duo of voice, guitars and creative magic inspired by our beautiful state . Originally aired 06/11/2023 on 95.3 FM KYHI the Range in Dallas, TX.

In this episode, Bill Palmer, founder of vital.ly shares an interesting back story as to how vital.ly was born, the challenges encountered in setting up a small business, what helped him through this period and much more....tune in here to listen.

Written by Bill Palmer and Presented by Kendrick DiazGod's faithful have often waited—for healing, relief and deliverance—while asking, “How long?” What can we learn while waiting for God?Read Online

The group wanders further into the massive cave, finding some unlikely and intriguing things.Join us on Discord!Follow us on Twitter at @maeltopiaWant unique art and animations to go along with your Maeltopia episodes? Check out our Youtube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmmrdXEvkEPfQvCKT4pha4QWant to learn more about the world of Maeltopia? Check out our website!Be sure to like, comment, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform! We appreciate your support!Credits:Written by Steven AnzaloneEdited by Walker KornfeldSound mastering by Steven J. Anzalone--Wesley Morrigan voiced by Steven AnzaloneVoran voiced by Steven AnzaloneMoffet voiced By Steven AnzaloneSalvatore voiced by Steven AnzaloneRiva voiced by Steven AnzaloneCreature voiced by Steven Anzalone (modified)The Grimland intro music was created by Steven J. AnzaloneMusic by Kylie Couper, Bill Palmer, and Steeve BodyMusic and Sound effects are licensed from third party providers including Envato, Epidemic Sound, Artlist, Soundstripe, Music Vine, Soundcrate, Melodie, Storyblocks and Pond 5 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Written by Bill Palmer and Presented by Clyde KiloughThe apostle Paul instructed members of the church at Rome to “present your bodies a living sacrifice.” How is that possible, and what did Paul mean?Read Online

Written by Bill Palmer and Presented by Erik JonesThe Old Testament is filled with stories of faith, but the word is scarcely found. Instead, faithfulness is stressed. Can we learn anything from this nuance?Read Online

About GeneGene Kim is a multiple award-winning CTO, researcher and author, and has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He has written six books, including The Unicorn Project (2019), The Phoenix Project (2013), The DevOps Handbook (2016), the Shingo Publication Award winning Accelerate (2018), and The Visible Ops Handbook (2004-2006) series. Since 2014, he has been the founder and organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.Links: The Phoenix Project: https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Business/dp/1942788290/ The Unicorn Project: https://www.amazon.com/Unicorn-Project-Developers-Disruption-Thriving/dp/B0812C82T9 The DevOps Enterprise Summit: https://events.itrevolution.com/ @RealGeneKim TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Cloud Economist Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: If you asked me to rank which cloud provider has the best developer experience, I'd be hard-pressed to choose a platform that isn't Google Cloud. Their developer experience is unparalleled and, in the early stages of building something great, that translates directly into velocity. Try it yourself with the Google for Startups Cloud Program over at cloud.google.com/startup. It'll give you up to $100k a year for each of the first two years in Google Cloud credits for companies that range from bootstrapped all the way on up to Series A. Go build something, and then tell me about it. My thanks to Google Cloud for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: This episode is brought to us by our friends at Pinecone. They believe that all anyone really wants is to be understood, and that includes your users. AI models combined with the Pinecone vector database let your applications understand and act on what your users want… without making them spell it out. Make your search application find results by meaning instead of just keywords, your personalization system make picks based on relevance instead of just tags, and your security applications match threats by resemblance instead of just regular expressions. Pinecone provides the cloud infrastructure that makes this easy, fast, and scalable. Thanks to my friends at Pinecone for sponsoring this episode. Visit Pinecone.io to understand more.Corey Quinn: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I'm joined this week by a man who needs no introduction but gets one anyway. Gene Kim, most famously known for writing The Phoenix Project, but now the Wall Street Journal best-selling author of The Unicorn Project, six years later. Gene, welcome to the show.Gene Kim: Corey so great to be on. I was just mentioning before how delightful it is to be on the other side of the podcast. And it's so much smaller in here than I had thought it would be.Corey Quinn: Excellent. It's always nice to wind up finally meeting people whose work was seminal and foundational. Once upon a time, when I was a young, angry Unix systems administrator—because it's not like there's a second type of Unix administrator—[laughing] The Phoenix Project was one of those texts that was transformational, as far as changing the way I tended to view a lot of what I was working on and gave a glimpse into what could have been a realistic outcome for the world, or the company I was at, but somehow was simultaneously uplifting and incredibly depressing all at the same time. Now, The Unicorn Project does that exact same thing only aimed at developers instead of traditional crusty ops folks.Gene Kim: [laughing] Yeah, yeah. Very much so. Yeah, The Phoenix Project was very much aimed at ops leadership. So, Bill Palmer, the protagonist of that book was the VP of Operations at Parts Unlimited, and the protagonist in The Unicorn Project is Maxine Chambers, Senior Architect, and Developer, and I love the fact that it's told in the same timeline as The Phoenix Project, and in the first scene, she is unfairly blamed for causing the payroll outage and is exiled to The Phoenix Project, where she recoils in existential horror and then finds that she can't do anything herself. She can't do a build, she can't run her own tests. She can't, God forbid, do her own deploys. And I just love the opening third of the book where it really does paint that tundra that many developers find themselves in where they're just caught in decades of built-up technical debt, unable to do even the simplest things independently, let alone be able to independently develop tests or create value for customers. So, it was fun, very much fun, to revisit the Parts Unlimited universe.Corey Quinn: What I found that was fun about—there are few things in there I want to unpack. The first is that it really was the, shall we say, retelling of the same story in, quote/unquote, “the same timeframe”, but these books were written six years apart.Gene Kim: Yeah, and by the way, I want to first acknowledge all the help that you gave me during the editing process. Some of your comments are just so spot on with exactly the feedback I needed at the time and led to the most significant lift to jam a whole bunch of changes in it right before it got turned over to production. Yeah, so The Phoenix Project is told, quote, “in the present day,” and in the same way, The Unicorn Project is also told—takes place in the present day. In fact, they even start, plus or minus, on the same day. And there is a little bit of suspension of disbelief needed, just because there are certain things that are in the common vernacular, very much in zeitgeist now, that weren't six years ago, like “digital disruption”, even things like Uber and Lyft that feature prominently in the book that were just never mentioned in The Phoenix Project, but yeah, I think it was the story very much told in the same vein as like Ender's Shadow, where it takes place in the same timeline, but from a different perspective.Corey Quinn: So, something else that—again, I understand it's an allegory, and trying to tell an allegorical story while also working it into the form of a fictional work is incredibly complicated. That's something that I don't think people can really appreciate until they've tried to do something like it. But I still found myself, at various times, reading through the book and wondering, asking myself questions that, I guess, say more about me than they do about anyone else. But it's, “Wow, she's at a company that is pretty much scapegoating her and blaming her for all of us. Why isn't she quitting? Why isn't she screaming at people? Why isn't she punching the boss right in their stupid, condescending face and storming out of the office?” And I'm wondering how much of that is my own challenges as far as how life goes, as well as how much of it is just there for, I guess, narrative devices. It needed to wind up being someone who would not storm out when push came to shove.Gene Kim: But yeah, I think she actually does the last of the third thing that you mentioned where she does slam the sheet of paper down and say, “Man, you said the outage is caused by a technical failure and a human error, and now you're telling me I'm the human error?” And just cannot believe that she's been put in that position. Yeah, so thanks to your feedback and the others, she actually does shop her resume around. And starts putting out feelers, because this is no longer feeling like the great place to work that attracted her, eight years prior. The reality is for most people, is that it's sometimes difficult to get a new job overnight, even if you want to. But I think that Maxine stays because she believes in the mission. She takes a great deal of pride of what she's created over the years, and I think like most great brands, they do create a sense of mission and there's a deep sense of the customers they serve. And, there's something very satisfying about the work to her. And yeah, I think she is very much, for a couple of weeks, very much always thinking about, she won't be here for long, one way or another, but by the time she stumbles into the rebellion, the crazy group of misfits, the ragtag bunch of misfits, who are trying to find better ways of working and willing to break whatever rules it takes to take over the very ancient powerful order, she falls in love with a group. She found a group of kindred spirits who very much, like her, believe that developer productivity is one of the most important things that we can do as an organization. So, by the time that she looks up with that group, I mean, I think she's all thoughts of leaving are gone.Corey Quinn: Right. And the idea of, if you stick around, you can theoretically change things for the better is extraordinarily compelling. The challenge I've seen is that as I navigate the world, I've met a number of very gifted employees who, frankly wind up demonstrating that same level of loyalty and same kind of loyalty to companies that are absolutely not worthy of them. So my question has always been, when do I stick around versus when do I leave? I'm very far on the bailout as early as humanly possible side of that spectrum. It's why I'm a great consultant but an absolutely terrible employee.Gene Kim: [laughing] Well, so we were honored to have you at the DevOps Enterprise Summit. And you've probably seen that The Unicorn Project book is really dedicated to the achievements of the DevOps Enterprise community. It's certainly inspired by and dedicated to their efforts. And I think what was so inspirational to me were all these courageous leaders who are—they know what the mission is. I mean, they viscerally understand what the mission is and understand that the ways of working aren't working so well and are doing whatever they can to create better ways of working that are safer, faster, and happier. And I think what is so magnificent about so many of their journeys is that their organization in response says, “Thank you. That's amazing. Can we put you in a position of even more authority that will allow you to even make a more material, more impactful contribution to the organization?” And so it's been my observation, having run the conference for, now, six years, going on seven years is that this is a population that is being out promoted—has been promoted at a rate far higher than the population at large. And so for me, that's just an incredible story of grit and determination. And so yeah, where does grit and determination becomes sort of blind loyalty? That's ultimately self-punishing? That's a deep question that I've never really studied. But I certainly do understand that there is a time when no amount of perseverance and grit will get from here to there, and that's a fact.Corey Quinn: I think that it's a really interesting narrative, just to see it, how it tends to evolve, but also, I guess, for lack of a better term, and please don't hold this against me, it seems in many ways to speak to a very academic perspective, and I don't mean that as an insult. Now, the real interesting question is why I would think, well—why would accusing someone of being academic ever be considered as an insult, but my academic career was fascinating. It feels like it aligns very well with The Five Ideals, which is something that you have been talking about significantly for a long time. And in an academic setting that seems to make sense, but I don't see it thought of or spoken of in the same way on the ground. So first, can you start off by giving us an intro to what The Five Ideals are, and I guess maybe disambiguate the theory from the practice?Gene Kim: Oh for sure, yeah. So The Five Ideals are— oh, let's go back one step. So The Phoenix Project had The Three Ways, which were the principles for which you can derive all the observed DevOps practices from and The Four Types of Work. And so in The Five Ideals I used the concept of The Five Ideals and they are—the first—Corey Quinn: And the next version of The Nine whatever you call them at that point, I'm sure. It's a geometric progression.Gene Kim: Right or actually, isn't it the pri—oh, no. four isn't, four isn't prime. Yeah, yeah, I don't know. So, The Five Ideals is a nice small number and it was just really meant to verbalize things that I thought were very important, things I just gravitate towards. One is Locality and Simplicity. And briefly, that's just, to what degree can teams do what they need to do independently without having to coordinate, communicate, prioritize, sequence, marshal, deconflict, with scores of other teams. The Second Ideal is what I think the outcomes are when you have that, which is Focus, Flow and Joy. And so, Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, he describes flow as a state when we are so engrossed in the work we love that we lose track of time and even sense of self. And that's been very much my experience, coding ever since I learned Clojure, this functional programming language. Third Ideal is Improvement of Daily Work, which shows up in The Phoenix Project to say that improvement daily work is even more important than daily work itself. Fourth Ideal is Psychological Safety, which shows up in the State of DevOps Report, but showed up prominently in Google's Project Oxygen, and even in the Toyota production process where clearly it has to be—in order for someone to pull the andon cord that potentially stops the assembly line, you have to have an environment where it's psychologically safe to do so. And then Fifth Ideal is Customer Focus, really focus on core competencies that create enduring, durable business value that customers are willing to pay for, versus context, which is everything else. And yeah, to answer your question, Where did it come from? Why do I think it is important? Why do I focus on that? For me, it's really coming from the State of DevOps Report, that I did with Dr. Nicole Forsgren and Jez Humble. And so, beyond all the numbers and the metrics and the technical practices and the architectural practices and the cultural norms, for me, what that really tells the story of is of The Five Ideals, as to what one of them is very much a need for architecture that allows teams to work independently, having a higher predictor of even, continuous delivery. I love that. And that from the individual perspective, the ideal being, that allows us to focus on the work we want to do to help achieve the mission with a sense of flow and joy. And then really elevating the notion that greatness isn't free, we need to improve daily work, we have to make it psychologically safe to talk about problems. And then the last one really being, can we really unflinchingly look at the work we do on an everyday basis and ask, what the customers care about it? And if customers don't care about it, can we question whether that work really should be done or not. So that's where for me, it's really meant to speak to some more visceral emotions that were concretized and validated through the State of DevOps Report. But these notions I am just very attracted to.Corey Quinn: I like the idea of it. The question, of course, is always how to put these into daily practice. How do you take these from an idealized—well, let's not call it a textbook, but something very similar to that—and apply it to the I guess, uncontrolled chaos that is the day-to-day life of an awful lot of people in their daily jobs.Gene Kim: Yeah. Right. So, the protagonist is Maxine and her role in the story, in the beginning, is just to recognize what not great looks like. She's lived and created greatness for all of her career. And then she gets exiled to this terrible Phoenix project that chews up developers and spits them out and they leave these husks of people they used to be. And so, she's not doing a lot of problem-solving. Instead, it's this recoiling from the inability for people to do builds or do their own tests or be able to do work without having to open up 20 different tickets or not being able to do their own deploys. She just recoil from this spending five days watching people do code merges, and for me, I'm hoping that what this will do, and after people read the book, will see this all around them, hopefully, will have a similar kind of recoiling reaction where they say, “Oh my gosh, this is terrible. I should feel as bad about this as Maxine does, and then maybe even find my fellow rebels and see if we can create a pocket of greatness that can become like the sublimation event in Dr. Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” Create that kernel of greatness, of which then greatness then finds itself surrounded by even more greatness.Corey Quinn: What I always found to be fascinating about your work is how you wind up tying so many different concepts together in ways you wouldn't necessarily expect. For example, when I was reviewing one of your manuscripts before this went to print, you did reject one of my suggestions, which was just, retitle the entire thing. Instead of calling it The Unicorn Project. Instead, call it Gene Kim's Love Letter to Functional Programming. So what is up with that?Gene Kim: Yeah, to put that into context, for 25 years or more, I've self-identified as an ops person. The Phoenix Project was really an ops book. And that was despite getting my graduate degree in compiler design and high-speed networking in 1995. And the reason why I gravitated towards ops, because that was my observation, that that's where the saves were made. It was ops who saved the customer from horrendous, terrible developers who just kept on putting things into production that would then blow up and take everyone with it. It was ops protecting us from the bad adversaries who were trying to steal data because security people were so ineffective. But four years ago, I learned a functional programming language called Clojure and, without a doubt, it reintroduced the joy of coding back into my life and now, in a good month, I spend half the time—in the ideal—writing, half the time hanging out with the best in the game, of which I would consider this to be a part of, and then 20% of time coding. And I find for the first time in my career, in over 30 years of coding, I can write something for years on end, without it collapsing in on itself, like a house of cards. And that is an amazing feeling, to say that maybe it wasn't my inability, or my lack of experience, or my lack of sensibilities, but maybe it was just that I was sort of using the wrong tool to think with. That comes from the French philosopher Claude Lévi-Strauss. He said of certain things, “Is it a good tool to think with?” And I just find functional programming is such a better tool to think with, that notions like composability, like immutability, what I find so exciting is that these things aren't just for programming languages. And some other programming languages that follow the same vein are, OCaml, Lisp, ML, Elixir, Haskell. These all languages that are sort of popularizing functional programming, but what I find so exciting is that we see it in infrastructure and operations, too. So Docker is fundamentally immutable. So if you want to change a container, we have to make a new one. Kubernetes composes these containers together at the level of system of systems. Kafka is amazing because it usually reveals the desire to have this immutable data model where you can't change the past. Version control is immutable. So, I think it's no surprise that as our systems get more and more complex and distributed, we're relying on things like immutability, just to make it so that we can reason about them. So, it is something I love addressing in the book, and it's something I decided to double down on after you mentioned it. I'm just saying, all kidding aside is this a book for—Corey Quinn: Oh good, I got to make it worse. Always excited when that happens.Gene Kim: Yeah, I mean, your suggestion really brought to the forefront a very critical decision, which was, is this a book for technology leaders, or even business leaders, or is this a book developers? And, after a lot of soul searching, I decided no, this is a book for developers, because I think the sensibilities that we need to instill and the awareness we need to create these things around are the developers and then you just hope and pray that the book will be good enough that if enough engineers like it, then engineering leaders will like it. And if enough engineering leaders like it, then maybe some business leaders will read it as well. So that's something I'm eagerly seeing what will happen as the weeks, months, and years go by. Corey Quinn: This episode is sponsored in part by DataStax. The NoSQL event of the year is DataStax Accelerate in San Diego this May from the 11th through the 13th. I've given a talk previously called the myth of multi-cloud, and it's time for me to revisit that with... A sequel! Which is funny given that it's a NoSQL conference, but there you have it. To learn more, visit datastax.com that's D-A-T-A-S-T-A-X.com and I hope to see you in San Diego. This May.Corey Quinn: One thing that I always admired about your writing is that you can start off trying to make a point about one particular aspect of things. And along the way you tie in so many different things, and the functional programming is just one aspect of this. At some point, by the end of it, I half expected you to just pick a fight over vi versus Emacs, just for the sheer joy you get in effectively drawing interesting and, I guess, shall we say, the right level of conflict into it, where it seems very clear that what you're talking about is something thing that has the potential to be transformative and by throwing things like that in you're, on some level, roping people in who otherwise wouldn't weigh in at all. But it's really neat to watch once you have people's attention, just almost in spite of what they want, you teach them something. I don't know if that's a fair accusation or not, but it's very much I'm left with the sense that what you're doing has definite impact and reverberations throughout larger industries.Gene Kim: Yeah, I hope so. In fact, just to reveal this kind of insecurity is, there's an author I've read a lot of and she actually read this blog post that she wrote about the worst novel to write, and she called it The Yeomans Tour of the Starship Enterprise. And she says, “The book begins like this: it's a Yeoman on the Starship Enterprise, and all he does is admire the dilithium crystals, and the phaser, and talk about the specifications of the engine room.” And I sometimes worry that that's what I've done in The Unicorn Project, but hopefully—I did want to have that technical detail there and share some things that I love about technology and the things I hate about technology, like YAML files, and integrate that into the narrative because I think it is important. And I would like to think that people reading it appreciate things like our mutual distaste of YAML files, that we've all struggled trying to escape spaces and file names inside of make files. I mean, these are the things that are puzzles we have to solve, but they're so far removed from the business problem we're trying to solve that really, the purpose of that was trying to show the mistake of solving puzzles in our daily work instead of solving real problems.Corey Quinn: One thing that I found was really a one-two punch, for me at least, was first I read and give feedback on the book and then relatively quickly thereafter, I found myself at my first DevOps Enterprise Summit, and I feel like on some level, I may have been misinterpreted when I was doing my live-tweeting/shitposting-with-style during a lot of the opening keynotes, and the rest, where I was focusing on how different of a conference it was. Unlike a typical DevOps Days or big cloud event, it wasn't a whole bunch of relatively recent software startups. There were serious institutions coming out to have conversations. We're talking USAA, we're talking to US Air Force, we're talking large banks, we're talking companies that have a 200-year history, where you don't get to just throw everything away and start over. These are companies that by and large, have, in many ways, felt excluded to some extent, from the modern discussions of, well, we're going to write some stuff late at night, and by the following morning, it's in production. You don't get to do that when you're a 200-year-old insurance company. And I feel like that was on some level interpreted as me making fun of startups for quote/unquote, “not being serious,” which was never my intention. It's just this was a different conversation series for a different audience who has vastly different constraints. And I found it incredibly compelling and I intend to go back.Gene Kim: Well, that's wonderful. And, in fact, we have plans for you, Mr. Quinn.Corey Quinn: Uh-oh.Gene Kim: Yeah. I think when I say I admire the DevOps Enterprise community. I mean that I'm just so many different dimensions. The fact that these, leaders and—it's not leaders just in terms of seniority on the organization chart—these are people who are leading technology efforts to survive and win in the marketplace. In organizations that have been around sometimes for centuries, Barclays Bank was founded in the year 1634. That predates the invention of paper cash. HMRC, the UK version of the IRS was founded in the year 1200. And, so there's probably no code that goes that far back, but there's certainly values and—Corey Quinn: Well, you'd like to hope not. Gene Kim: Yeah, right. You never know. But there are certainly values and traditions and maybe even processes that go back centuries. And so that's what's helped these organizations be successful. And here are a next generation of leaders, trying to make sure that these organizations see another century of greatness. So I think that's, in my mind, deeply admirable.Corey Quinn: Very much so. And my only concern was, I was just hoping that people didn't misinterpret my snark and sarcasm as aimed at, “Oh, look at these crappy—these companies are real companies and all those crappy SAS companies are just flashes in the pan.” No, I don't believe that members of the Fortune 500 are flash in the pan companies, with a couple notable exceptions who I will not name now, because I might want some of them on this podcast someday. The concern that I have is that everyone's work is valuable. Everyone's work is important. And what I'm seeing historically, and something that you've nailed, is a certain lack of stories that apply to some of those organizations that are, for lack of a better term, ossified into their current process model, where they there's no clear path for them to break into, quote/unquote, “doing the DevOps.”Gene Kim: Yeah. And the business frame and the imperative for it is incredible. Tesla is now offering auto insurance bundled into the car. Banks are now having to compete with Apple. I mean, it is just breathtaking to see how competitive the marketplaces and the need to understand the customer and deliver value to them quickly and to be able to experiment and innovate and out-innovate the competition. I don't think there's any business leader on the planet who doesn't understand that software is eating the world and they have to that any level of investment they do involves software at some level. And so the question is, for them, is how do they get educated enough to invest and manage and lead competently? So, to me it really is like the sleeping giant awakening. And it's my genuine belief is that the next 50 years, as much value as the tech giants have created: Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, they've generated trillions of dollars of economic value. When we can get eighteen million developers, as productive as an engineer at a tech giant is, that will generate tens of trillions of dollars of economic value per year. And so, when you generate that much economic activity, all problems become solvable, you look at climate change, you take a look at the disparity between rich and poor. All things can be fixed when you significantly change the economic economy in this way. So, I'm extremely hopeful and I know that the need for things like DevOps are urgent and important.Corey Quinn: I guess that that's probably the best way of framing this. So you wrote one version that was aimed at operators back in 2013, this one was aimed at developers, and effectively retails and clarifies an awful lot of the same points. As a historical ops person, I didn't feel left behind by The Unicorn Project, despite not being its target market. So I guess the question on everyone's mind, are you planning on doing a third iteration, and if so, for what demographic?Gene Kim: Yeah, nothing at this point, but there is one thing that I'm interested in which is the role of business leaders. And Sarah is an interesting villain. One of my favorite pieces of feedback during the review process was, “I didn't think I could ever hate Sarah more. And yet, I did find her even to be more loathsome than before.” She's actually based on a real person, someone that I worked with.Corey Quinn: That's the best part, is these characters are relatable enough that everyone can map people they know onto various aspects of them, but can't ever disclose the entire list in public because that apparently has career consequences.Gene Kim: That's right. Yes, I will not say who the character is based on but there's, in the last scene of the book that went to print, Sarah has an interesting interaction with Maxine, where they meet for lunch. And, I think the line was, “And it wasn't what Maxine had thought, and she's actually looking forward to the next meeting.” I think that leaves room for it. So one of the things I want to do with some friends and colleagues is just understand, why does Sarah act the way she does? I think we've all worked with someone like her. And there are some that are genuinely bad actors, but I think a lot of them are doing something, based on genuine, real motives. And it would be fun, I thought, to do something with Elizabeth Henderson, who we decided to start having a conversation like, what does she read? What is her background? What is she good at? What does her resume look like? And what caused her to—who in technology treated her so badly that she treats technology so badly? And why does she behave the way she does? And so I think she reads a lot of strategy books. I think she is not a great people manager, I think she maybe has come from the mergers and acquisition route that viewed people as fungible. And yeah, I think she is definitely a creature of economics, was lured by an external investor, about how good it can be if you can extract value out of the company, squeeze every bit of—sweat every asset and sell the company for parts. So I would just love to have a better understanding of, when people say they work with someone like a Sarah, is there a commonality to that? And can we better understand Sarah so that we can both work with her and also, compete better against her, in our own organizations?Corey Quinn: I think that's probably a question best left for people to figure out on their own, in a circumstance where I can't possibly be blamed for it.Gene Kim: [laughing].That can be arranged, Mr. Quinn.Corey Quinn: All right. Well, if people want to learn more about your thoughts, ideas, feelings around these things, or of course to buy the book, where can they find you?Gene Kim: If you're interested in the ideas that are in The Unicorn Project, I would point you to all of the freely available videos on YouTube. Just Google DevOps Enterprise Summit and anything that's on the plenary stage are specifically chosen stories that very much informed The Unicorn Project. And the best way to reach me is probably on Twitter. I'm @RealGeneKim on Twitter, and feel free to just @ mention me, or DM me. Happy to be reached out in whatever way you can find me. Corey Quinn: You know where the hate mail goes then. Gene, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me, I appreciate it.Gene Kim: And Corey, likewise, and again, thank you so much for your unflinching feedback on the book and I hope you see your fingerprints all over it and I'm just so delighted with the way it came out. So thanks to you, Corey. Corey Quinn: As soon as my signed copy shows up, you'll be the first to know.Gene Kim: Consider it done. Corey Quinn: Excellent, excellent. That's the trick, is to ask people for something in a scenario in which they cannot possibly say no. Gene Kim, multiple award-winning CTO, researcher, and author. Pick up his new book, The Wall Street Journal best-selling The Unicorn Project. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. If you hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and leave a compelling comment.Announcer: This has been this week's episode of Screaming in the Cloud. You can also find more Corey at ScreamingintheCloud.com or wherever fine snark is sold.This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

In this episode of The Journal Party Podcast, we're going to be focusing our journals on frugality. If you're looking to save money and be a more frugal McDougal, journaling can be a great way to help you track your progress and stay on track. Journaling can help you save money in a few different ways. First, it can help you become more aware of your spending habits. By taking the time to write down what you spend, you'll start to see patterns emerge and areas where you can cut back. Second, it can help you stay focused on your long-term financial goals. It can be easy to get sidetracked, but if you have your goals written down somewhere that you can refer back to, it'll be easier to stay on track. Finally, journaling can help you celebrate your victories, big and small. Saving money can be hard work, so it's important to celebrate your successes along the way!To keep journaling around your money habits, definitely check out the programs we have up on JournalParty.com.  If you like this guided journaling format, I think you'll like what I've put together for you.  There are timed journal prompts with soundscapes to keep you focused, and you can track your progress as you work toward your goals. Music by: Greg Carrozza, Mauricio Candussi, Bill Palmer, Neil Sutherland, and NookyHit us up on Instagram @journalpartyomgResourcesFree Journal Prompt App Try Journal Party Premium FREE for 7 Days Join our Facebook Group! Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel To Join Us For Journal Party LIVE

Written by Bill Palmer and Presented by Clyde KiloughPeter encouraged persecuted Christians to “be ready always to give an answer” for “the hope that is in you.” What does this mean for Christians today?Read Online

If you're looking for a way to get into the spooky holiday spirit, you're in for a treat. It just wouldn't be right to drop an episode of your favorite journaling podcast on Halloween and have it NOT be about Halloween! So grab your favorite notebook and pen, curl up with a cup of pumpkin spice coffee, and get ready to channel your inner goth kid.  Today's episode features 5 journal prompts for Halloween!Music by Bill Palmer, Joel Woolf, Marty Hailey, Kylie Couper, Jaime Arredondo, Cookie Cartel, Sebastian Avila, Russell Thornton, Steeve BodyResourcesFree Journal Prompt AppFor more journal prompts and guided journaling programs, visit https://journalparty.com Try Journal Party Premium FREE for 7 Days Join our Facebook Group! Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel To Join Us For Journal Party LIVE

Written by Bill Palmer and Presented by Kevin ScarbroughFaced with trials—from poor health to financial worries—many Christians find their faith can falter. Are there ways you can build your faith?Read Online

Does Wednesday the 13th make you tremble in fear? What about the fact that we’re now 110 days away from Halloween? Or perhaps the fast-paced motion of a rapidly revolving world has you dizzy? Either way, we are still supposed to be in the middle of the days of haziness and laziness, but somehow craziness abides each and every day. Charlottesville Community Engagement intends to bring some focus on an ever-changing landscape. I’m your host, Sean Tubbs. In today’s edition:A new health partnership is sponsoring an event this Saturday to promote better health outcomes in vulnerable communitiesSeveral area organizations receive funding from Sentara Healthcare Inflation is up as measured in the latest update of the Consumer Price IndexAn update on the Cville Plans Together initiative as well as a status report on the development of the University of Virginia’s next master plan Time is running out to fill out the latest survey in Albemarle County’s Comprehensive Plan review First shout-out is for LEAP’s new Thermalize Virginia program In today’s second Patreon-fueled shout-out: Have you been thinking of converting your fossil-fuel appliances and furnaces into something that will help the community reduce its greenhouse gas emissions? Your local energy nonprofit, LEAP,  has launched a new program to guide you through the steps toward electrifying your home. Thermalize Virginia will help you understand electrification and connect you with vetted contractors to get the work done and help you find any rebates or discounts. Visit thermalizeva.org to learn more and to sign up!  UVA continues to develop next master planThe University of Virginia is in the midst of updating its master plan, which is to be known as the 2030 Grounds Plan. These meetings are not open to the public, but the documents and presentations are available for your review. According to a presentation at the June 15, 2022 meeting of the Master Planning Council, the next plan will integrate several recent plans such as the 2030 Great and Good Strategic Plan as well as sustainability goals. The first phase of the plan’s update began last summer and the second phase took a look at Big Ideas, System Plans, and Redevelopment Zones. One identified opportunity is to:“Improve the Grounds-City interface through ongoing collaboration and cooperation on sustainability, equity, and community well-being,” reads a bullet point on slide 11 of the presentation. Big ideas include the goal of requiring second year students to live on Grounds, creation of mixed-use nodes including one at Fontaine Research Park, and creation of transit priority corridors. The presentation also includes maps for where future parking structures might be. In June, the Buildings and Grounds Committee recommended approval of an update to the UVA capital plan to include a $54 million 1,000 space garage. Potential locations could include Fontaine Research Park and North Grounds, as well as two other locations. (slide 28 for details). The third phase will begin to draft the actual plan. Both the Master Planning Council and the Land Use and Environmental Planning Committee (LUEPC) were asked what they thought of the Big Ideas and what was missing. The LUEPC committee is a closed-door body of Albemarle, Charlottesville and UVA staff that replaced what has been a public body in late 2019. Development of the 2030 Grounds Plan will continue throughout the rest of the year. The Charlottesville Planning Commission got an update on what’s happening at one of those nodes from Bill Palmer, their non-voting representative from the University of Virginia’s Office of the Architect. “At the Ivy corridor, the big construction site down there continues,” Palmer said. “The School of Data Science is the building you see coming out of the ground. A lot of steel in that one that, as well as the landscaping and the stormwater pond, which I heard held up well in the rain last weekend.” How does this compare with how the University markets the Charlottesville area to its students? Take a look at a video from May 2018. A series of speakers extol the virtues of this place. “The University feels like a major part of this community and town,” one unidentified voice can be heard. “There is this separation but also togetherness.” “You want to be part of a community that is constantly evolving, not in a rush, but gradually so you can make the place work for you,” says another unidentified speaker whose voice may sound familiar. You’ll have to hear the podcast to make your guess. Deadline for Comprehensive Plan survey in Albemarle fast approaching Albemarle County is in the first phase of a review of its Comprehensive Plan with an eye on a growth management policy. A second questionnaire on the policy closes on July 17, and Albemarle’s Communications and Public Engagement office produced an explanatory video. “The growth management policy is one of the tools that we use to implement the county’s vision by helping us to make intentional decisions about how and where we grow and what areas are protected,” states the narrator of the video.The video states that one purpose of a growth management policy is to ensure that there are services for a growing population, including the provision of water and sewer services. “The majority of new residential, commercial, retail, office, industrial, and mixed-use development is intended to be within the county’s development areas,” the video continues. “The rural area is intended to have limited residential development.” Different community groups are also encouraging community members to fill out the survey.The Forest Lakes Community Association reminded its members of the basic gist of the growth management policy. “Designated Development Areas currently comprise only five percent of Albemarle County while Rural Areas currently comprise 95 percent of the County,” reads the newsletter. “Yet we in Forest Lakes are seeing the developmental impacts more directly, since the limited Development Area includes the 29-Corridor to the west of Forest Lakes.” The Forest Lakes Community Association had argued against the nearby Brookhill and RST Residents developments, and points out there’s currently no public transportation in the area. “Roads are planned that will eventually connect both developments directly to Ashwood Boulevard, with estimates of up to a 50 percent increase in daily traffic utilizing the Forest Lakes South exit,” the newsletter continues. Former members of the Village of Rivanna Community Advisory Committee also want people to fill out the survey. The group quit en masse in April which you can read about on Information Charlottesville or on their Substack newsletter.This spring, the Planning Commission and the Board of Supervisors were presented with a build-out analysis to determine if there’s enough room in the existing development area to meet the needs of a growing population. Albemarle Planning Commission briefed on build-out analysis, Information Charlottesville, May 25, 2022New report shows potential for Albemarle's growth if the county wants it, Daily Progress, May 24, 2022Supervisors got an update on June 1, 2022 that I’ve yet to write about, but will before the end of the summer. You can watch the video of that meeting here, and let us know what happened!NDS Director gives an update on Charlottesville’s Comprehensive PlanIt’s a hot summer for big land use plans. Charlottesville is in the third phase of its Cville Plans Together initiative which has already seen adoption of an Affordable Housing Plan as well as an updated Comprehensive Plan that gives more development rights to mostly every residential lot in the City.How those development rights will turn into future buildings will depend on the update of the city’s zoning code that is now underway. In June, the city released a Zoning Diagnostics and Approach report.“Basically, a slate of ideas for how we can modify our zoning to implement the Comprehensive Plan that you all and Council adopted last November,” said Neighborhood Development Services Director James Freas to the Charlottesville Planning Commission last night. The next step will be the development of a new Frequently Asked Questions list based on input taken at a public forum in June. “Our public feedback period lasts until all the way through until the end of August,” Freas said.In early August, Freas said the city will release the inclusionary zoning and market analysis report.“The market analysis piece of that is the piece looking at how might our real estate development marketplace here in Charlottesville react to this new zoning?” Freas said. “What we can expect in terms of the timing for new development, the types of new development that might happen, and where it might happen based on our existing market conditions and what we can not to that.” If you’re interested in what’s happening with the property market in Charlottesville, I track that and will have a piece that paid Substack subscribers will get a first look at tomorrow. In the meantime, visit Information Charlottesville to catch up on monthly anecdotal reviews. Sign up for a paid subscription to get the June report tomorrow!Happy 2nd birthday to Charlottesville Community EngagementToday is the second anniversary of Charlottesville Community Engagement. I posted the first episode to what’s now become Information Charlottesville. This first version is about five minutes long, but I decided to commit to putting together something on a regular basis. I had produced the Charlottesville Quarantine Report since March 2020, and was quickly wanting to branch out.I’ve been able to do this work thanks to a great number of people who have been supporting the work through Patreon. I’m grateful to those who thought my return to local journalism would be worth funding, and so I got to work as soon as I could. A few days after July 13, 2020, I launched this Substack because the delivery platform is so easy to use. This has also brought in more revenue, with many generous supporters who want me to produce as much information as I can about the items I’ve been covering for many years. This shout-out is a thank you, but it’s also a hope that if you’ve not opted to support the work yet, you might consider doing so at some point in the near future. I depend on subscriptions and Patreon contributions, as well as a couple of sponsorships. I’m looking to sustain the information and to continue serving the community. And with that, it’s back to the work! Inflation increases by largest amount since November 1981Real quick segment here. You’ll hear about inflation from lots of sources today, but I wanted to direct you to the original press release. The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics today released the latest Consumer Price Index (CPI), which indicates that the average cost of all tracked items has increased by 9.2 percent from June 2021 to June 2022. For the month, the CPI increased 1.3 percent over May. Energy costs increased 7.5 percent since May with gasoline increasing 11.2 percent. When you exclude food and energy, the index rose 0.7 percent in June. Several organizations get funding from Sentara HealthcareEarlier this month, Sentara Healthcare announced nearly $5 million in funds for organizations across North Carolina in Virginia. Distributions from the Sentara Healthier Communities Fund include several in the greater Charlottesville area. “These investments will directly support programs and initiatives that address social determinants of health and promote health equity by eliminating traditional barriers to health and human services,” reads a release that went out on July 6. The local groups that received funds are:Brave Souls on FireCharlottesville Redevelopment & Housing Authority Common Ground Healing ArtsHabitat for Humanity of Greater CharlottesvilleLoaves & Fishes Food Pantry, Inc.Meals on Wheels of Charlottesville/AlbemarleThe Women’s InitiativeThomas Jefferson EMS Council Tour of Faith Mobile Community event to be held to promote health benefits of walkabilityA relatively new public health program to improve health for vulnerable community members will hold an event this Saturday morning to spread awareness of their work Betsy Peyton is the director of WellAWARE, a partnership program between UVA Health, the Charlottesville Free Clinic, and Central Virginia Health Services that seeks to serve medically underserved communities. “We are an innovative, new community health program that sends community health workers into people’s homes to help connect them to better health care,” Peyton said. Peyton said this includes neighborhoods such as Rose Hill and the 10th and Page neighborhood as well as the Esmont area in southern Albemarle. “We chose these neighborhoods related to health data,” Peyton said. “Highest rates of obesity, stroke, highest rates of low acuity emergency room visits, so people going to the emergency room for things like a headache.” WellAWARE is intended to connect people to primary care physicians. “We’ve signed a lot of people up for Medicaid who are scared to go the doctor because they weren’t sure how they would pay,” Peyton said. “We drive people to the doctor or provide free cabs to the doctor.” Peyton said the organization also holds events to promote awareness of healthy lifestyles, and this Saturday there’s one coming up in central Charlottesville.“So this event, we’re partnering with Move 2 Health Equity and it’s going to be a big event in Washington Park called Healthy Streets and Healthy People,” Peyton said. Peyton said the event will draw importance to the need for environmentally healthy streets. “If you’ve looked at maps of Charlottesville and the region, the areas that have the least shade also have the worst health outcomes, are also the poorest, and traditionally African-American neighborhoods,” Peyton said. “And so part of the mission of this event is to talk about more bikeability, more tree canopy, usable parks.” The event will take place between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. There will be a “gentle” walk/run with prizes, a field day event for kids, and gardening sessions where people can take home containers of potted herbs and vegetables. There will also be some general medical training. Learn more in this link to a press release.Housekeeping notes for the conclusion of this installment:Now that this newsletter is two, I am going to begin to add this end section with wrap-ups and acknowledgements. This is in part to curb on the rambling that occurs at the end of the podcast. Beginning today, I will acknowledge that most of the music in the podcast is composed by an entity currently going by the name Wraki. You can purchase the latest tracks on Bandcamp in an album called regret everything. If you’re interested in a shout-out, consider becoming a Patreon Subscriber, or drop me a line and we can find another way. The shout-outs may be changing soon in the near future. I am certain that does not mean they will be translated into Esperanto. Sed ili povus esti.Charlottesville Community Engagement is free to receive, but supported by paid subscriptions. If you subscribe, Ting will match your initial contribution! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit communityengagement.substack.com/subscribe

How should we get around in the future? What should our transportation network look like? Those are some of the questions that feature heavily in today’s installment of Charlottesville Community Engagement, and this will be a focus in future versions as well. I’m your host, Sean Tubbs, and I’ve been writing about transportation planning for nearly thirty years. Even if you don’t think you’re interested, you probably might be if you have access to stories about these issues. That’s the point of Charlottesville Community Engagement, and I’m grateful to the hundreds of supporters who are helping me track all the pieces in motion. Help this newsletter grow by signing up for a paid subscription. Ting will match your initial payment! Sign-up is free, but I need a roof over my head to keep paying attention to all of the things! On today’s program:Charlottesville officials weigh in on potential plans to address safety concerns on Fifth Street The nation’s top court paves the way for the federal government to calculate the “social costs” of greenhouse gas emissions An American Elm has been honored by a local non profit that does such things faceFirst shout-out: The Plant Northern Piedmont Natives Campaign It’s springtime, and one Patreon subscriber wants you to know the Plant Northern Piedmont Natives Campaign is a grassroots initiative of motivated citizens, volunteers, partner organizations, and local governments who want to promote the use of native plants. This spring the group is working with retailers across the region to encourage purchase of plants that belong here and are part of an ecosystem that depends on pollination. There are plenty of resources on the Plant Northern Piedmont Natives Facebook page, so sign up to be notified of lectures, plant sales, and more!U.S. Supreme Court clears way for federal study of greenhouse gas emissionsIn a one-sentence order issued last night, the United States Supreme Court has cleared the way for the federal government to study the “social cost” of greenhouse gas emissions. “It is essential that agencies capture the full costs of greenhouse gas emissions as accurately as possible, including by taking global damages into account,” reads Section 5 of an executive order issued by President Joe Biden on January 20, 2021.That order set up an interagency working group to resume the work of calculating those costs, work that had been stopped by the previous administration. Ten states led by Republicans sued to stop the Biden administration from moving forward, and Judge James Cain  of the Western District of Louisiana agreed with them in a February ruling granting an injunction. (read that ruling)In March, the Fifth Circuit allowed the study to proceed and the matter was appealed to the high court. According to Courthouse News, the one-sentence concurrence allows the study to proceed pending further executive action. Locally, work continues on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and also to prepare for the effects of climate change. The city of Charlottesville will hold a community workshop on June 9 on the Climate Vulnerability Assessment. More info on the city’s website.Charlottesville Area Tree Stewards honor their 15th landmark treeAt the corner of Elliot Avenue and Monticello Avenue stands an American Elm that a nonprofit group honored in late April as part of Arbor Day. Now, a plaque has been installed marking the Elm as the 15th Landmark tree. The Charlottesville Tree Stewards were on hand at Sojourner’s Church on Arbor Day this past April 29 to mark the occasion.City transportation planners present ideas on Fifth Street ExtendedIn the next few installments of this program, there’s going to be a heavy focus on transportation. Today we look at one specific project in the heart of Charlottesville. On Tuesday, Charlottesville’s elected officials met with the appointed Charlottesville Planning Commission to give feedback on a set of proposals to slow down traffic on Fifth Street Extended. Several groups have called upon to Council to take action to increase safety conditions on the roadway following a string of fatal crashes in 2020. “Our consultant team and staff have been working for the last couple of months to expedite a design plan to improve transportation safety,” said James Freas, the city’s director of Neighborhood Development Services. The city is working toward an August 1 deadline to submit the projects to the Virginia Department of Transportation for funding through something called the Smart Scale program. Candidate projects from all across Virginia are scored according to how well they will achieve certain outcomes, such as increasing safety and reducing congestion.For many years, Amanda Poncy was the city’s bike and pedestrian coordinator. She left that position last year to work for EPR PC.  “EPR was hired by the city in February to help with the development of that grant application which is due on August 1,” Poncy said. “The segment that we’re looking at is between old Ridge Street and Harris Road. Our scope of work really involved looking at the crash data, conducting a speed study, developing concepts for public review and ultimately arriving at a final feedback that we can really flesh out with cost estimates and better understanding of some of the engineering issues and things like that for the Smart Scale submittal.” The roadway has been studied before, including a 2018 study conducted by EPR that resulted in two successful Smart Scale applications. These are for a turn lane on Cherry Avenue as well as multimodal improvements on Ridge Street. (read the 2018 study)“A third project that involved pedestrian improvements at the Cherry / Ridge intersection was also funded by VDOT outside of that project study but is being lumped into these other two because there is some overlap there,” Poncy said. Since that study, there have been a series of fatal crashes and EPR’s work concludes that many of those are related to intersections. All of the fatalities were related to speeding. Poncy said a survey was conducted this spring which yielded over 700 responses. “Really the top thing we heard was concern about people’s driving behavior whether it is reckless driving or redlight running,” Poncy said. There are several potential solutions, such as a roundabout, a restricted crossing U-turn, and guardrails to prevent people from hitting trees. Another option would be to remove the trees, which Poncy said would go against the spirit of the Streets that Work plan. Restricted crossing U-turns have been used in Virginia. Poncy explains how one would work on Fifth Street. “People coming from the side streets, so for example Bailey Road or Old Ridge, they would first make a right turn,” Poncy said. “The median openings that are currently there would be closed for through traffic and people coming out of the side streets would have to make a right hand turn and then go up to the next median opening to go in the direction they wanted to travel.”Another potential solution is a roundabout at Bailey Road which is the entrance to the Orangedale section of the Fifeville neighborhood. That would likely mean the taking of some property to accommodate the geographic scope.Another overarching concept is to put Fifth Street on a road diet, which would mean reducing travel lanee and giving that space over to wider sidewalks or shared-use paths. Bike lanes could be protected with a physical barrier, but those details have not yet been worked out. In one of the scenarios, the road diet would include a dedicated bus-lane in each direction. Second Shout-out: RCA working on restoration of Riverview ParkThe first Patreon-fueled shout-out today is for the Rivanna Conservation Alliance and their work with the City of Charlottesville on the restoration of Riverview Park. The RCA aims to restore a 600-foot section of the Rivanna riverbank in an area that’s designated for public access to the waterway as well as a 200-foot section of a dangerously eroding stormwater channel nearby. Another community meeting will be held in the near future to get your feedback on the work should be prioritized. Visit rivannariver.org to learn more about the project, which seeks to help Riverview Park continue to be a welcoming place to exercise, cool off, paddle, fish, play, explore, observe nature, and escape from the day-to-day stresses of life.  Skepticism of bus lanes, support for roundabout, more data needed on road diet detailsAfter the overview, Commissioners and Councilors had the chance to provide feedback. During their discussion, they appeared to want more detail about what a road diet would entail, expressed support for the single-lane roundabout, and stated concerns about dedicated bus lanes. Let’s begin with the Planning Commission’s non-voting representative from the University of Virginia wanted to know if the needs of the emergency health system had been taken into account.“From the UVA perspective, this is a pretty major corridor for emergency vehicles coming to the hospital,” said Bill Palmer with the Office of the Architect. Bill Wuensch of EPR said if the bus lanes were dedicated, they would be available for use by emergency vehicles. “Whether it’s an ambulance, fire truck, police, whatever, they would still be able to use and access that bus lane in that single lane option,” Wuencsch said. Palmer asked what the Future Land Use map designations were for the roadway and said whatever alternative is selected should anticipate future development. Much of the corridor is designated now as Medium Intensity Residential with other portions as Higher Intensity Residential. During the conversation, at least three Councilors were skeptical about reducing capacity by eliminating travel lanes. “In plumbing, you’ve got to be careful of going from big to little,” said City Councilor Sena Magill said. Magill added she would support some form of a dedicated bus lane, but said she would be concerned it might be difficult for those vehicles to merge back into traffic on either end. “Refining some of those details about the transitions is kind of the next step,” said Jeannie Alexander, another EPR employee who used to work for the city. “Getting into those design details. Yes, you’re right, it’s very important and will be the make or break for many things.”Charlottesville Mayor Lloyd Snook said he was skeptical about the bus lane concept. The Route 2, Route 3, and Route 6 operated by Charlottesville Area Transit regularly use the corridor. “And we’re devoting the largest share of asphalt to something that only takes… 30 vehicles a day,” Snook said. “That strikes me as being a very difficult thing to justify.”  Snook said he was concerned that constricting Fifth Street would route more vehicles through Bailey Road up to Prospect Avenue, or onto Harris Street through the Fry’s Spring neighborhood. Vice Mayor Juandiego Wade used to work as a transportation planner for Albemarle County. He echoed Snook’s concern.“I know what’s going to happen,” Wade said. “They’re going to filter through the neighborhoods and then we’re going to get calls about complaints of cars speeding in front of Jackson-Via [Elementary School] and in front of Buford [Middle] School because that’s where they’re going to go if they get off of I-64 and see the traffic.” Planning Commissioner Jody Lahendro said he was skeptical of many of the options.“The conclusion I’m coming to is that this is very difficult to come up with one static solution for a road that has various issues,” said Commissioner Jody Lahendro. Commissioner Hosea Mitchell was also concerned about the road diet and the potential for congestion. “I’m not too geeked out about the two-lane roundabout either,” Mitchell said. “I’ve worked and lived in lots of big cities and those two-lane roundabouts can be confusing. Mitchell said he could support a single-lane roundabout but wanted to know more information. He also said he supported the pursuit of low-cost measures such as guardrails and photo enforcement. Planning Commissioner Karim Habbab said he would support some form of a road diet but only if it didn’t lead to too much congestion. He also said he could support a roundabout.“I know those are great at reducing crashes or the severity of crashes at those intersections and I’m for a roundabout,” Habbab said.  Commissioner Rory Stolzenberg supported the road diet because he said a change in design would stop the conditions that lead to the three fatal crashes in 2020. “In off-hours, Fifth Street becomes a drag strip and it’s just a wide open road, a total straightaway, and people can speed recklessly,” Stolzenberg said. “Yes it’s a small minority of people but road design is how we stop that.” Stolzenberg said the road concept needed to be fleshed out further. City Councilor Brian Pinkston said he supported studying the road diet and doing a study. That would likely mean a delay in applying for the Smart Scale funds. The next round will be in 2024. Magill said she wanted to know more about a road diet would work, and that she could support a single-lane roundabout but not a double one. She also said people need to understand Charlottesville’s geographic role. “We cannot get away from the fact that we are the urban center for a large rural community and that’s something we have to plan with,” Magill said. Councilor Michael Payne said he supported the roundabout at Bailey Road to break up the speed. “You know I think I would lean toward the road diet but I do have concern of us doing with the level of information that we have now,” Payne said. “It does seem that more study and information is needed.” Planning Commission Chair Lyle Solla-Yates said he wanted the city to pursue all of the options.“In general we need to be thinking bigger and more systematically so we can get at these connections about these issues,” Solla-Yates said. City traffic engineer Brennan Duncan said he heard the concern about a two-lane roundabout but said unless the number of lanes was reduced through a road diet, that would have to be the case.“Just for a roundabout, in order to build one for the road we have today, it would have to be a two-lane roundabout,” Duncan said. Council will return to this matter at their meeting on June 21.There are other projects nearby. Albemarle County and the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission are working on a Smart Scale application for an area south of Harris Road (read those application details)A TJPDC application for something called the Fifth Street Trail hub was successful in the last Smart Scale round and received nearly $10 million in funds (read the application)The city was awarded $8.74 million in Smart Scale Round 4 for Ridge Street improvements (read the application)The city was awarded $6.1 million for the Cherry Avenue turn lane improvements in Smart Scale Round 3 (read the application)More transportation-related items in the next Charlottesville Community Engagement. Always in motion, we are! Sign up for Ting - Support Town Crier productions!For over a year one year now, Town Crier Productions has had a promotional offering through Ting!Are you interested in fast internet? Visit this site and enter your address to see if you can get service through Ting. If you decide to proceed to make the switch, you’ll get:Free installationSecond month of Ting service for freeA $75 gift card to the Downtown MallAdditionally, Ting will match your Substack subscription to support Town Crier Productions, the company that produces this newsletter and other community offerings. So, your $5 a month subscription yields $5 for TCP. Your $50 a year subscription yields $50 for TCP! The same goes for a $200 a year subscription! All goes to cover the costs of getting this newsletter out as often as possible. Learn more here! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit communityengagement.substack.com/subscribe

There is a month and a week left until the summer solstice, and the time when the days begin growing shorter. Until then, there are now over 14 hours of sunlight in the section of the Earth on the day when the May 16 edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement is produced. That’s enough time to ensure that this newsletter and podcast at least tries to bring as much information as possible. I’m your host, Sean Tubbs. On today’s program:Charlottesville Planning Commission recommends a seven-story building on Jefferson Park AvenueA fatal crash on U.S. 29 near Greenbrier Road has claimed the life of a Charlottesville manAn Augusta County elections official is the latest appointee to the State Board of ElectionsA quick update on COVID-19 from the UnivToday’s first shout-out goes to LEAPWe’re now well into spring, and many of us may have already turned on our air conditioning units for the first in months. To see what you can do to get the most out of your home, contact LEAP, your local energy nonprofit, to schedule a home energy assessment this month - just $45 for City and County residents. LEAP also offers FREE home weatherization to income- and age-qualifying residents. If someone in your household is age 60 or older, or you have an annual household income of less than $74,950, you may qualify for a free energy assessment and home energy improvements such as insulation and air sealing. Sign up today to lower your energy bills, increase comfort, and reduce energy waste at home!COVID cases still increasing; UVA Health urges renewed maskingAs the week begins, the Virginia Department of Health this morning reports a seven-day average for new COVID-19 cases at 2,750 a day and the seven-day percent positivity has increased to 14.6 percent. The actual amount of spread is likely higher due to the number of home tests that have become common as a first diagnosis for many people. “There are many people calling saying they’re COVID positive and importantly and interestingly, a fair number of those people have been vaccinated,” said Dr. Costi Sifri, the director of hospital epidemiology for the University of Virginia Health System. With more cases in the community, UVA officials say its time to take precautions again.“Personally I’m masking back up and I think a lot of people are making the decision,” said Wendy Horton, the CEO of the UVA Health System. “It’s people that have been really careful, been vaccinated, and I think we’re just in this interesting time where we’re really tired of masking but I think it’s alive and well. We know it. We see it in our workforce. We see it in our patients.” The latest COVID model from the UVA Biocomplexity Institute was released on Friday. “Models forecast a significant surge of cases in the coming weeks,” reads the model. “Case rates are not expected to reach levels seen during the January wave. But they will likely exceed those seen in pre-Omicron waves.” Dr. Sifri said ebbs and flows are likely to continue as COVID-19 continues to transition from pandemic to endemic. He said the same public health advice exists. “In a period of time like now where we’re starting to see a surge in cases, this is the time to say okay, in this time and place right now, wearing a mask is helpful to prevent transmission,” Dr. Sifri said. “It’s also important because with COVID it still remains the case that probably half or more than half of cases are in people who are asymptomatic or have such mild symptoms that they don’t recognize that they’re sick.” This week the Virginia Department of Health is retiring several dashboards and ways of reporting COVID. People who seek to know cases by vaccination status will need to go to the Centers for Disease Control website. Cases and Deaths by Date Reported will also be phased out. The changes will take place on May 19. The VDH already has stopped reporting cases by locality on its website. Learn more about the changes on their website.Fatal crash on Seminole TrailAlbemarle County police are investigating the cause of a fatal crash last night in the 1200 block of U.S. 29 near Greenbrier Drive. Thirty-six-year old Justin Michael Tilghman of Charlottesville died at the scene of the crash which happened at 9:21 p.m. last night. The driver of a second vehicle was taken to the University of Virginia hospital. The Albemarle County Police Department’s Fatal Crash Reconstruction Team is leading the investigation. This is the fourth fatality on Albemarle County roads so far in 2022. Augusta County official named to State Board of ElectionsGovernor Glenn Youngkin has named a member of the Augusta County Board of Elections to serve on the Virginia State Board of Elections. Youngkin named Georgia K. Alvis-Long to the position. A press release identifies her occupation as a registered nurse instructor. Under Virginia law, the State Board of Elections is a five-member body that will have three members from the political party that won the Governor’s mansion in the last election. “Each political party entitled to an appointment may make and file recommendations with the Governor for the appointment,” reads Section 24.2-102 of Virginia Code.Alvis-Long fills a position left by the resignation of Jamilah D. LeCruise. For more recent appointments, take a look at the full release. Second shout-out: Charlottesville Jazz Society spotlighting benefit show for UkraineIn today’s second subscriber supported shout-out. The Charlottesville Jazz Society is spotlighting a benefit event to support the people of Ukraine at the Whiskey Jar this Wednesday from 6:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Young jazz students near the besieged city of Mariupol sent guitarist Royce Campbell a plea to help, and several area musicians have jumped into help. Vocalist Monica Worth has organized the event, and Campbell will play for Ukraine with bassist Andre La Vell and drummer Jim Howe. Many of Charlottesville’s best jazz musicians will sit in. Donations will be collected and sent to Global Giving’s Ukraine Crisis Relief Fund, and you can also go ahead and support this effort with a payment online. That’s We Play for Ukraine at the Whiskey Jar this Wednesday from 6:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Divided Planning Commission approves seven-story building on Jefferson Park Avenue A divided Charlottesville Planning Commission voted 4-3 on May 10 to recommend that City Council approve a special use permit for additional height and density for a seven-story U-shaped building at 2005 Jefferson Park Avenue.  They’ve also recommended reducing parking requirements by 22 percent over what would otherwise be required.“The [special use permit] is required to accommodate a development being proposed for 119-units of multifamily dwellings within one building with underground parking,” said city planner Matt Alfele. This project was filed after the city adopted a new Comprehensive Plan and Future Land Use Map created as part of the Charlottesville Plans Together initiative, which is still underway. There are currently 17 units across multiple structures across the property. “The Future Plan Use Map, the Comprehensive Plan that we went through, is increasing density and increasing density in certain areas of the city, and this area of the city is one that is looking to increase density and to increase density at especially this scale is going to create a big building,” Alfele said. The developer would pay $500,000 into the city’s affordable housing fund rather than provide required affordable units on-site or at another location nearby. They’ll build 125 parking spaces in an underground garage with access on Washington Avenue. Residents would not be eligible to park on that street or Observatory due to restricted parking. The building would be seven stories taller from JPA and would be five stories tall at the back. “The biggest concern I think staff had was the rear elevation, the five story building going down into the mainly single-family, two-family neighborhood,” Allele said. This request comes after City Council adopted a new Comprehensive Plan with a Future Land Use Map that encourages more residential density, but before the new zoning rules have been written. “Do you happen to know and can you remind me what in our Future Land Use map, what this area is designated as, and what the by-right height would be in that corridor?” asked City Councilor Michael Payne. “This is Urban Mixed Use Corridor and the height is five stories or up to eight at key intersections,” Alfele said. “This is one of the areas where our Comprehensive Plan land use conflicts with our current zoning because our Comprehensive land use map is anticipating our zoning changing. The Future Land Use Map measures in stories and not feet.” Under the existing zoning, the structure could be 35 feet tall without a permit. This is one of the areas that will be clarified in the zoning rewrite. The term “key intersection” is also currently not defined. Payne pointed out the Comprehensive Plan seeks to encourage more units that would be rented to people below market. “The framework that we’ve adopted for that is that if we’re going above the by-right height, the reason we’re doing that is to have an inclusionary zoning program that’s going to required affordable housing as part of that,” Payne said. Payne also suggested $500,000 as an affordable housing contribution would not go far. “I know it’s their choice and we don’t have any control over it but I would just note for the record that we got an affordable housing report that included data on the total subsidy needed to construct a new affordable unit, and I can’t remember the exact number but I know in Virginia that total subsidy to build one new unit could be around $300,000,” Payne said. Charlottesville Mayor Lloyd Snook noted that there had been a lot of concerns during the Future Land Use Map from other neighborhoods such as North Downtown, but he had not heard much from the JPA neighborhood at that time.“The one area where it seemed clear that everyone was willing to agree we should have increased density was along JPA yet there was no basically no public discussion of that fact,” Snook said. Until the rezoning is finalized, individual applications like this are the forum for how the city will look in the future. The project will need a certificate of appropriateness from the Entrance Corridor Review Board, which is also the Planning Commission. They’ll get to influence the design. The developer said the area was already predominantly occupied by renters, and that this level of density is served by transit. “We are one block away in each direction from the trolley stops,” said Erin Hannegan with Mitchell + Matthews Architects and Planners. Hannegan acknowledged the Future Land Use Map designation of Urban Mixed Use Corridor and said this project meets the goals of the Comprehensive Plan.“The further definition is ‘higher intensity mixed-use development’ for this area and that’s exactly what we’re trying to do,” Hannegan said. “A higher intensity development. Mixed use is not allowed under the R-3 mixed-use currently designated.” Hannegan acknowledged that the new building would be out of scale with what is currently there, but anticipated the future conditions of JPA.“This building might be taller than its current neighbors but it won’t be out of character with the future implementation of the Comprehensive Plan and the implementation of the vision that’s been in the works for over 20 years for this particular neighborhood,” Hannegan said. At the public hearing, Nina Barnes of the Jefferson Park Avenue Neighborhood Association said the Comprehensive Plan compels Council and the Planning Commission to take adverse effects into account when considering a special use permit. “Adverse impacts may include traffic or parking congestion, undue density and population, and massing and scale,” Barnes said. “This project has adverse effects in all of these ways.”Barnes said the seven-story building would block the sun from existing one and two story buildings.Ellen Contini-Morava said the staff reports seemed to be in favor of the developer, and noted the gap between an adopted Comprehensive Plan and older zoning. She said this undermines the spirit of the Cville Plans Together Initiative. “This application treats the rezoning that’s proposed in the Future Land Use Map as if it were already in place,” Contini-Morava said. “This application not only aims to short-circuit the rezoning process but even requests a height that is two stories higher than the five stories suggested in the Future Land Use Map for the JPA corridor.” Fifeville resident Matthew Gillikin spoke for the group Livable Cville, which is not a registered entity with the State Corporation Commission but is active in promoting higher density in the community. Gillikin said the answer to affordability in Charlottesville is more housing. “And the developer is planning to contribute nearly $500,000 to the Charlottesville affordable housing fund as a condition to build,” Gillikin said. “This will fund groups like [Charlottesvile Redevelopment and Housing Authority], LEAP, [Albemarle Housing Improvement Program], [Piedmont Housing Alliance], and Habitat for Humanity in the work to address local housing issues.” Gillikin said approval of this project would prevent students from moving into local neighborhoods such as Tenth and Page and Fifeville. These units would have no affordability provisions. For comparisons let’s look at the Standard, another building designed by Mitchell + Matthews Architects. According to their website, the lowest rent for a room in a four-bedroom unit goes for $1,029 a month. Double occupancy in a single bedroom in a three bedroom unit can go for $845 a month. One and two bedroom units in the Standard are sold out. Pricing is not available online for the Flats at West Village. The Lark on Main has a one bedroom unit with a study for $1,879 a month. A room in a four bedroom, four bathroom costs $955 a month. Garage parking is an extra $100. Commission discussionAfter the public hearing, Commissioner Hosea Mitchell said he supported the project, but did want the massing to be a little more consistent with the rest of the neighborhoods. “We do need more housing in Charlottesville and we do a bit of relief valve,” Mitchell said. “We need housing in Charlottesville that is closer to UVA so that the housing that is further away from UVA can be used by the rest of our citizenry,” Mitchell said. Commissioner Taneia Dowell said if the developer is going to additional density based on the future zoning for the property, the spirit of the Affordable Housing Plan must also be honored. “That’s where I’m really having some heartburn,” Dowell said. “If we’re going to go off future endeavors for this project and this special use permit, then we need to go off future endeavors for everything related to this.” Commissioner Jody Lahendro said he could not support this level of density in the area and especially with a building with that much massing. He said the Comprehensive Plan also calls for development on Entrance Corridors to be compatible with existing neighborhoods. “I am not in favor of sacrificing a long term neighborhood for providing student housing for the University,” Lahendro said. “I think the people who have lived here and the single-family homes in this neighborhood deserve… we can’t just pretend that they’re not there.” Commissioner Rory Stolzenberg said he was reviewing the permit request under existing rules and not looking ahead to the new zoning. Quoting the standards of review, he noted that the Commission must review whether a proposal would be “harmonious with existing patterns of use and development in the neighborhood.”“But it will shock you guys to learn that harmonious is not actually defined in the code so the question I think before us is whether a five-story building can co-exist near or next to even smaller buildings including detached houses,” Stolzenberg said. “I’d note there’s already a four and a half story building at the head of the street.” Bill Palmer is with the Office of the Architect at the University of Virginia and sits as a non-voting member of the Planning Commission. He said UVA is not in an era where they are being required by the Commonwealth of Virginia to increase enrollment. According to the UVA office of Institutional Research and Analytics, there was an on-Grounds enrollment in Fall 2021 of 16,793 undergraduates and 6,928 graduate students. (enrollment data)“If you look at our official projects, they are flat,” Palmer said. Palmer said UVA is building additional housing on Grounds, including a second new structure in the Brandon Avenue Corridor. He also said the UVA initiative to build up to 1,500 new affordable units in the community includes a site further down from 2005 JPA in Albemarle County at the Piedmont housing site. “In terms of having affordable housing close in the future, that will be a place where the University is trying to provide something,” Palmer said. Council thoughtsCouncil will have the final decision, but did not vote during what is their first reading.Councilor Payne said he was frustrated that the affordability rules of the future are not yet in place. “This happened with another [special use permit] a few weeks ago where we’re in this strange situation where we’re sort of evaluating the Future Land Use Map and zoning map rewrite in mind, but if we’re using that in our evaluation, that will include our framework of inclusionary zoning and affordable housing overlays which are critical to the success of that plan for affordable housing,” Payne said. Councilor Brian Pinkston said he is learning toward support because it did provide more housing close to the University of Virginia. “I’m not able to fully articulate how we square that with point number one which is whether it is harmonious,” Pinkston said. “To some degree I think harmoniousness might be in the eye of the beholder. I will say that in terms of how the design was laid out and that you have seven stories in the front and five stories in the back, I thought there was some care and attention to trying to integrate into the neighborhood.” Snook also said he had issues with the word “harmonious” and said the traditional form of land use control known as “Euclidean zoning” is not good at dealing with change. “It doesn’t allow for us to grow gradually from a little bit of density to a little bit more density,” Snook said. “It allows us to say okay, we’re going to rezone the entire block of the entire neighborhood but it doesn’t let us go bit by bit.” As the Entrance Corridor Review Board, the Planning Commission voted unanimously on a motion to acknowledge there would be an adverse impact, but those impacts can be mitigated through the design process. As the Planning Commission, they consider a motion made by Stolzenberg to recommend approval. The was 4-3 with Stolzenberg, Mitchell, Habbab, and Commission Chair Lyle Solla-Yates voting in favor. Lahendro joined Dowell and Commissioner Liz Russell in voting no.  Help Ting help support Town Crier productions!For one year now, Town Crier Productions has had a promotional offering through Ting!Are you interested in fast internet? Visit this site and enter your address to see if you can get service through Ting. If you decide to proceed to make the switch, you’ll get:Free installationSecond month of Ting service for freeA $75 gift card to the Downtown MallAdditionally, Ting will match your Substack subscription to support Town Crier Productions, the company that produces this newsletter and other community offerings. So, your $5 a month subscription yields $5 for TCP. Your $50 a year subscription yields $50 for TCP! The same goes for a $200 a year subscription! All goes to cover the costs of getting this newsletter out as often as possible. Learn more here! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit communityengagement.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to the only Friday the 13th of all of 2022! Many consider the day to be unlucky, a tradition that goes back many centuries. Rather than go through all of that, I’m more curious to know what you think of this day. Do you take precautions? Did you even notice? Do other days in a Friday the 13th’d month also have powers? In any case, those questions aren’t the purpose of Charlottesville Community Engagement, a podcast and newsletter whose host still wonders why. Charlottesville Community Engagement is mostly free but your financial support will help it growing! On today’s program:Governor Youngkin orders flags at half-mast to commemorate one million Americans who have died from COVIDThere are five vacancies on the Charlottesville Planning Commission, and the city is seeking applicantsAn update on the city’s zoning process as well as an update a lawsuit claiming the Comprehensive Plan is invalid under state lawAnd a quick preview of a conversation between the Reverend Alex Joyner and the author of a book on Virginia’s eugenics movement Shout-out to Charlottesville Area Tree Stewards In today’s subscriber-supported Public Service Announcement, the Charlottesville Area Tree Stewards continues to offer classes this spring and summer to increase your awareness of our wooden neighbors and to prepare for the future. Coming up on June 7 is a tree identification course taught on Zoom by tree steward Elizabeth Ferguson followed by a separate hike on June 11 at the Department of Forestry’s headquarters near the Fontaine Research Park. That’s followed by a tree identification walk at the University of Virginia on June 12 for the public. On June 14, Rachel Keen will give a lecture on Zoom on the Social Life of Trees. Do trees really communicate with one another? What is a 'mother tree'? Can a tree do anything to repel a pest? Learn more at charlottesvilleareatreestewards.org.One million Americans have died of COVID since pandemic beganGovernor Glenn Youngkin has followed the direction of President Joe Biden and has ordered that the United States and Virginia flags be flown at half-mast until Monday to commemorate the milestone of a million Americans who have now died of COVID in the past 26 months. I’ll have more on the pandemic tomorrow.On Thursday, the Virginia Department of Health reported another 3,144 new cases, and the seven-day average for new cases is 2,441. The seven-day percentage for PCR tests is 13.7 percent, up from 11 percent on May 6 and 9.1 percent on April 29. None of those numbers include tests taken at home. This morning the Virginia Healthcare and Hospital Association reports 325 people in hospitals are currently COVID positive, but many of those patients may have been admitted for other reasons. Forty-five COVID patients are currently hospitalized in intensive care units and 20 of those are on ventilators. Nationwide, the trend is toward more cases with 84,778 new cases reported through PCR tests according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control. Hospitalizations are also trending upward across the country with a seven-day average of 2,603 new admissions a day. It’s important to remember that the number of COVID fatalities continues to trend downward with a current seven-day average of 272 deaths. The highest seven-day average during the pandemic was 3,420 in mid January of 2021 and 2,709 in early February of this year. Charlottesville hires two department headsThe City of Charlottesville has promoted two employees to take over their departments, and has also filled the position of Human Resources Director. Mary Ann Hardie will move to Charlottesville from Washington state to take the human resources position, which has been vacant since November 2020 when Michelle Vineyard left after just over a year of service. Hardie has served for the past three years as human resources director in Lacey, Washington. That’s a suburb of state capital Olympia that grew from 42,393 people to 53,526 from 2010 to 2020 according to the U.S. Census.Hardie starts work on May 16.Misty Graves has been with the city of Charlottesville’s Human Services Department for 16 years and has been the interim director since Kaki Dimock left the city to work for Albemarle County. “I am humbled by the opportunity to build on the existing work of the Department," is quoted in a press release. "Our Department is comprised of dedicated staff that are committed to creating a more equitable and just community so all of our residents may thrive, and it’s my honor to work alongside them.”David Dillehunt has been the interim deputy director of the Office of Communications and Public Engagement since soon after former director Brian Wheeler stepped down late last year. Deputy Director Joe Rice left soon afterwards. Dillehunt began working for Charlottesville in 2005 as a consultant has won two Regional Emmy Awards for work he’s produced for the city. In 2004, Dillehunt also produced a documentary on the children’s program You Can’t Do That On Television. (play the trailer) The city is still looking to fill the director’s position for the Office of Communications and Public Engagement. The position closes May 18 if you want to throw your hat in the ring. (see the vacancy)Vacancies opening up on Charlottesville Planning CommissionIf you have an interest in advising Charlottesville City Council on land use decisions, and have time to devote to the effort, you may get your chance. “There are spots on the Planning Commission that are coming open this summer,” said Missy Creasy, the Deputy Director of the city’s Department of Neighborhood Development Services. “And right now we are in the window for applications.” There are five terms ending this summer, and at least two current members cannot reapply. They are Jody Lahendro and Taneia Dowell. Commissioner Karim Habbab is filling an unexpired term which runs out on August 31. The terms of Hosea Mitchell and Rory Stolzenberg are both running out on that day. Stolzenberg is also filling out the unexpired term vacated when Hunter Smith resigned in 2018 after a handful of months in the position. Apply for the position here.Charlottesville zoning info slightly delayed Work on the next phase of the rewriting of Charlottesville’s zoning ordinance continues, but it’s slightly delayed. Neighborhood Development Services Director James Freas told the Planning Commission Tuesday that a “diagnostic and approach” report was not ready in time for their May meeting, but he hopes it will be out by the end of this month. (previous coverage)“As this point we are anticipating that the joint meeting between the Council and the Planning Commission to eventually make a decision on moving forward with that report, we’re projecting that happening in September at this point in time,” Freas said. Freas is now referring to this report as a conceptual plan for the new zoning ordinance. “It’s going to lay out what the approach is towards bringing our zoning into consistency with our Comprehensive Plan and its meant to include within it both modeling of potential building outcomes, so what type of buildings might be buildable under the policies articulated in the Comprehensive Plan, and how the market might respond to this new zoning,” Freas said. Freas said a public meeting will be held two weeks after the report with other community engagement events happening over the summer. The new Comprehensive Plan was adopted in November 2021. Consult Information Charlottesville for a series of property transactions in city limits since then. That joint City Council and Planning Commission meeting in September will be after a pair of judicial proceedings related to a lawsuit filed by anonymous Charlottesville property owners challenging the validity of the Comprehensive Plan. A hearing on the initial motion will be held in Charlottesville Circuit Court on July 15 with Judge Richard E. Moore presiding. A hearing on a city-filed demurrer to require the plaintiffs to identify themselves will be held on August 26. Alderman Library construction reaches milestoneThe tallest portions of the new Alderman Library have been installed, and the University of Virginia marked the occasion with a “topping out” ceremony. UVA Today reports that over a hundred workers were on hand to witness the placement of two steel beams that had been signed by UVA officials and more. “The two beams are part of the steel-framed clerestory roof structure, an architectural feature that will allow natural light to reach the study and reading rooms inside the library,” writes Matt Kelly in an article posted yesterday. The library itself is only two thirds of the way to being completed. When it’s done, there will be a new entrance that faces University Avenue. Bill Palmer is with the UVA Office of the Architect and he gave an update to the Charlottesville Planning Commission on Tuesday. “That’s a big milestone of a transformative project over there that will really open up the library towards University Avenue as you’re going up and down that thoroughfare,” Palmer said. The original library opened in 1937, but was closed off to University Avenue in 1967 when the “stacks” were built. I’ll have more from the Planning Commission in a future edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement. In today’s other three shout-outsCode 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 codeforcville.org to learn about those projects. In the middle, I’d like to take the opportunity to wish my brother, Steve Tubbs, a happy birthday for tomorrow. The final comes from another Patreon supporter who wants you to go out and read a local news story written by a local journalist. Whether it be the Daily Progress, Charlottesville Tomorrow, C-Ville Weekly, NBC29, CBS19, WINA, or some other place I’ve not mentioned - the community depends on a network of people writing about the community. Go learn about this place today!Eugenics and the Making of Modern VirginiaThe newsletter and podcast you’re experiencing stems from a website I created in 2005 to bring lectures, interviews, and audio segments to the public as an experiment. The Charlottesville Podcasting Network has been in the hands of my friend Dan Gould for several years, but he recently retired and passed the baton back to me. From time to time, I’ll end this newsletter with a small taste of what you might hear there. The Reverend Alex Joyner is the pastor of Charlottesville First United Methodist Church, and he wants to ask questions about what it takes to make a place more whole. One thread in his questioning is the future of Market Street Park in downtown Charlottesville. In February, he interviewed Elizabeth Catte, the author of Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia. Catte said she wrote the book after learning about some of the history of Western State Hospital. After the original structure closed in 2005, the site was turned over to the Staunton Industrial Authority for redevelopment as apartments. At one point, the facility was known bluntly as the Western State Lunatic Asylum. “Its history became part of its branding identity and that was a really interesting transformation to me,” Catte said.“Yeah, that’s a long stretch to pull those two things together,” Joyner said. “So 200 years of history had to get condensed into something that could be about two paragraphs on a website and could also be anchored to branding material for tourism, for community development, so it developed this really cozy kind of positive story about early physicians who committed themselves to the humane treatment of mental illnesses,” Catte said. “That was certainly one of the chapters of that sites’ history but the larger chapter that I knew as a historian was the history of the institution during the eugenics era.”Eugenics was the legal practice of sterilizing those thought to be inferior so they would not reproduce. The 1927 United States Supreme Court ruling of Buck v. Bell cleared the way for the practice, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes delivering the line “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” The practice was legal until the 1970’s.“At least 1,700 people were sterilized against their will at Western State Hospital,” Catte said. “The longest serving superintendent was a vocal leader of the Virginia eugenics movement and it has a very harrowing history.”To hear more from Alex Joyner’s interview with Elizabeth Catte, visit the Charlottesville Podcasting Network.Or view the interview on YouTube. Help Ting help support Town Crier productions!For one year now, Town Crier Productions has had a promotional offering through Ting!Are you interested in fast internet? Visit this site and enter your address to see if you can get service through Ting. If you decide to proceed to make the switch, you’ll get:Free installationSecond month of Ting service for freeA $75 gift card to the Downtown MallAdditionally, Ting will match your Substack subscription to support Town Crier Productions, the company that produces this newsletter and other community offerings. So, your $5 a month subscription yields $5 for TCP. Your $50 a year subscription yields $50 for TCP! The same goes for a $200 a year subscription! All goes to cover the costs of getting this newsletter out as often as possible. Learn more here! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit communityengagement.substack.com/subscribe

This is the 78th day of the year, otherwise known as March 19, 2022. We are days away from the spring equinox, and there’s no turning back the clock in our future for some time. Sunlight and warmth fuel an explosion of vegetation, as well as the production of every installment of Charlottesville Community Engagement, a newsletter and podcast that seeks to keep you up to date on things trivial and things substantial. I’m your host, Sean Tubbs.Sign up to not miss an installment in your inbox! Payment is optional but very much appreciated and makes future installments much more likely! On today’s program:A plan to build four seven-plexes on 0.62 acres in Fifeville gets the Planning Commission’s approval for a second timeA lawsuit seeking the voidance of the city’s new Comprehensive Plan moves forwardAnd the City Tree Commission presents ideas to the Planning Commission. First shout-out goes for a Charlottesville United for Public Education eventToday’s first Patreon-fueled shout-out goes to Charlottesville United for Public Education who want listeners and readers to know about an event happening Sunday at 1 p.m. at the Ix Park in collaboration with the Black Parents Association. They’re looking for people who want to show support for local public schools and speakers will provide updates on school reconfiguration and the city’s budget cycle. There will be art activities, bubbles, poster making, Kona ice, and an appearance of the Free Book Bus. Visit charlottesvilleunited.org to learn more.Charlottesville served with suit against the Comprehensive Plan The city of Charlottesville has been formally served with a lawsuit that seeks to overturn the Comprehensive Plan adopted by City Council last year. Seven anonymous parties filed the suit in Charlottesville Circuit Court in mid-December arguing that the city did not follow state law when adopting the plan. (visit the code) However, the city had not yet been formally served with the suit, which requires a response from the city. Interim Deputy Communications Director David Dillehunt confirmed receipt of the suit on Friday, meaning the city has until April 8 to make a response to the court.The suit argues four points of failure, one of which is an alleged lack of “designation of new and expanded transportation facilities… that support the planned development of the territory covered by the plan.” The anonymous property owners include people who own land on Rugby Road, Altavista Avenue, Davis Avenue, Locust Avenue, and Rugby Avenue. They claim the Future Land Use Map is too specific in nature and argues the additional density called for in the plan is affecting property values. “For example, a house located at 507 10th Street NW, which is currently assessed at $315,000, is being marketed at $485,000 due to its development potential based on the higher density prescribed in the plan,” reads paragraph 16 of the suit. There are actually two houses at that address, and both and the 0.19 acre property sold for $475,000 to Bloom Hill LLC, which has an address in Somerset, Virginia. The transportation argument claims that rather than writing a new transportation plan, the plan adopted in November 2021 recycles previous plans such as the 2015 Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plan and the 2016 Streets That Work Plan. “Despite radically upzoning all of the real estate in the City, which will result in significant population increases, the Plan fails to include transportation infrastructure improvements to support the increased density,” reads paragraph 22.The suit also alleges that the city failed to provide public notice that a vote would be held after the November 15, 2021 public hearing. The Comprehensive Plan was the second achievement of the Cville Plans Together initiative, following on the heels of an affordable housing plan that Council adopted in March 2021. While the lawsuit makes its way through the legal process, staff in both the city’s Neighborhood Development Services Department and consultant Rhodeside and Harwell are working on the zoning code. The next step in the process is release of an assessment of whether the approach they are taking will yield the desired results. Tree and Planning Commissions discuss loss of Charlottesville treesVirginia State Code assigns the task of overseeing the Comprehensive Plan to the Planning Commission. Earlier this month, members of the Tree Commission urged Planning Commissioners to consider the importance of woody perennial plants. “Our tree canopy is declining at an increasing rate,” said Jeffrey Aten, the vice chair of the Tree Commission. “We have good intentions and are planning for a robust urban canopy in our Comprehensive Plan. But we believe more needs to be done to ensure this is the case as we build for more affordable housing and adjust streets to be more friendly for pedestrians and cyclists.” The city is finalizing a tree canopy study that appears to indicate the total tree canopy is at 40 percent of Charlottesville’s 10.2 square miles, down from 47 percent in 2008. The most recent report is based on data from an aerial survey conducted in 2018. Aten said that there are improvements that could be made to the city code to protect trees. “We believe that there are code issues that we can work with the Planning Commission on revising and updating,” Aten said. “Development in the city has been happening per code and staff is enforcing code but we believe the code does need to change to help preserve some existing high value trees and to really incentivize developers to work with the city to keep those trees and or plant new ones when existing ones must be removed.” Tree Commission Peggy Van Yahres said her group also wants to make sure there is better protection for trees during construction and greater costs to disturbing a public tree such as oaks on Garrett Street that were recently removed to make way for the redevelopment of Friendship Court. “In Richmond, they have an ordinance when a developer is allowed to take down a public tree they have to pay into a fund for more planting around the city and this can result in hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Van Yahres said. “Those oaks would be conservatively estimated at $25,000 a piece so eight times 25 would be $200,000!”Van Yahres said the Tree Commission wants the zoning ordinance to be updated to make sure trees are considered a vital asset. That means maintaining requirements that buildings be set back from the property line. The Standard on West Main Street is an example of a building constructed right to the sidewalk and public realm. “Some people think that means you’re going to lost a lot of land,” Van Yahres said. “We’re not talking about huge set backs. Ten feet, fifteen feet.”The Tree Commission also wants to be able to look at site plans for large projects like Friendship Court. Commissioner Rory Stolzenberg said during the code review, he wants consideration of ways to plant more trees in the right of way of streets by reducing space for cars.“And I wonder if we can look at our rules to make it make more sense to be able to fit trees in front of buildings even without increasing set backs by using that right of way,” Stolzenberg said. Commissioner Jody Lahendro said the city could learn a lot from the University of Virginia regarding the treatment of trees. “They’ve been treating their ash trees for many, many years now to save them,” Lahendro said. “They’re adding trees all the time. They have an arboretum committee that reviews any proposal to remove a tree. Has to be approved. They have two arborists on staff.” Bill Palmer works in the Office of the UVA Architect and sits on the Planning Commission as a non-voting member. He acknowledged that there has been canopy loss associated with at least one major construction project at the Emmet-Ivy corridor.“There was a landscape of trees there that is no longer there,” Palmer said. “We’ll be putting them back but trees take a long to grow. But the end result thirty years from now will be much better than what was there before and also meet UVA’s mission.” If you want more on this topic, go watch the Tree Commission’s Codes and Practices Subcommittee on Charlottesville’s streaming media portal. (watch)Second Shout-out goes to Mulch Madness! In today’s second subscriber-supported shout-out, are you ready for Mulch Madness? The Rivanna Solid Waste Authority has a free mulch giveaway through April 16. In between all the big games, the RSWA wants you to get your yard ready for spring. If you have a way to transport mulch, head on over to the Ivy Material Utilization Center between 7:30am and 4:00pm, Monday through Saturday, where you can pick up up to two tons free. Rivanna staff are available to help load, but ask that you bring a covering. Mulch is double ground and derived from vegetative materials brought to Ivy for disposal. That’s Mulch Madness at the Ivy Material Utilization Center. Visit rivanna.org to learn more. Divided Planning Commission recommends Grove Street rezoning There was a slightly different vote this month when the Charlottesville Planning Commission once again recommended approval of a rezoning that would allow 28 units to be built on just under two thirds of an acre on a cul-de-sac in the Fry’s Spring neighborhood. In October, the Charlottesville Planning Commission voted 4-2 for the rezoning, a vote at which Commissioner Taneia Dowell was not present. However, Dowell joined Commissioners Hosea Mitchell and Liz Russell in voting against the proposal, which also required a special use permit for additional density and a critical slopes waiver. The public hearing for all three had to be held a second time, as city planner Matt Alfele explained at the March 9 Planning Commission meeting.“In preparing to move the application forward to City Council it was discovered one of the tax map parcel numbers was mistyped in the public ad,” Alfele said. “To ensure accuracy, all three applications have been readvertised and returned to the Planning Commission for action. No information has been changed or been updated in the application materials.”As was the case in October, the developer will contribute $48,000 to construct pedestrian improvements in the Fifeville neighborhood and 28 percent of the units will have some affordability provision for at least ten years. Civil Engineer Justin Shimp is working on behalf of property owner Lorven Investments. “Twenty-eight percent in total affordable, which is eight units,” Shimp said. “Of those, four of the them, the rent including the utilities is capped at the [U.S. Department of Health] fair market rate.” (learn more from HUD about fair market rent)The other four would be called at 125 percent of the fair market rate, which is the upper limit for a unit to be eligible to receive housing vouchers. The Comprehensive Plan designation has changed since the October 2021 review.“The Comprehensive land use map for this area calls for General Residential which recommends up to 2.5 stories in height, up to three units per lot, or four units if an existing structure remains,” Alfele said. This application would have four seven-unit buildings with some three-story and some four-story buildings for what Shimp called a sevenplex that provides bonus density in exchange for providing housing at a below-market price. That’s a basic tenet of the Affordable Housing Plan Council adopted in March 2021. “We ended up with buildings that are basically three stories in the front and then kind of three stories but with units in the attic that backfill and have units in the roof system,” said civil engineer Justin Shimp. “So, trying to keep it at that 30 to 35 unit building height.” Alfele had recommended denial of the rezoning in part because of the conditions on Valley Road Extended. “Valley Road Extended on the east side you have Rock Creek and on the western side you have a fully developed neighborhood with limited sidewalks and with parking,” Alfele said. “Any improvements to Valley Road for pedestrians and foot traffic would be a major undertaking and would remove parking from existing homeowners.” Only one community member spoke during the public hearing. Paul Benneche was concerned about the potential for Valley Street Road to handle additional vehicles.“By my count, I counted the houses on that road currently and this would seem to increase the total number of people on that road by 30 to 40 percent potentially,” Benneche said. “It just seems like that road is already not wide enough. It’s only about one and a half lanes wide.” Vice Mayor Juandiego Wade was not on Council when the matter was last before a joint  meeting. In the late 2000’s, Wade worked for Albemarle County as a transportation planner. “I’m trying to figure out from my planning days, even back then, $48,000 doesn’t get you much sidewalk,” Wade said, “Or is there a new way to build them cheaper now? What are we getting for $48,000? Why not $40,000 or $50,000? What’s magic about $48,000? Is it a formula or something?”Shimp said $48,000 did come from the formula that the city uses to calculate what a developer would pay if they got a waiver from having to build a sidewalk in front of their development. In this case, they are also building a sidewalk in front of the new units. “The site plan ordinance requires us to build our own sidewalks and then we would offer the money up for some improvement down the road,” Shimp said. “We talked last time about maybe something at the entrance of Valley Road Extended. That would be up to the city. We tried to make the proffer sufficiently vague so it could be used where in that neighborhood it made sense.” Commissioner Rory Stolzenberg said he supported the plan because it is an example of what should be built under the General Residential designation across the city. “There’s no buildings to demolish on this site so that’s a fourplex by right, and then we have provisions for bonuses at affordable housing,” Stolzeberg said. Stolzenberg said there are other thin roads that lead to cul-de-sacs such as Altamont Street in North Downtown. “People kind of manage and people walk in the street and then people slow down when they see them,” Stolzenberg said. Commissioner Liz Russell had a different interpretation of General Residential. “My take on the General Residential category is three units per lot with an additional bonus and we haven’t defined what that bonus is, but presumably it would be another unit,” Russell said. “So we have three parcels here and the max would be four units per parcel, twelve units max. And this is a proposal that proposes  no more than 28.”After some discussion, the vote was taken again and resulted in a 4 to 3 vote on both the rezoning and the special use permit, but Commissioner Hosea Mitchell did vote for the critical slopes waiver. The matter will next go to before City Council at a later date. The original plan pointed to a concept in the city’s 2016 Bike and Pedestrian Master Plan which showed a tunnel underneath the railroad track to what is now the University of Virginia’s Brandon Avenue precinct. The end of Valley Road Extended is only 250 feet away from an access road behind Bond House, one of UVA’s newest residence halls. Valley Circle is a few more steps away. However, there are no actual plans for such an underpass. Support the program!Special announcement of a continuing promo with Ting! Are you interested in fast internet? Visit this site and enter your address to see if you can get service through Ting. If you decide to proceed to make the switch, you’ll get:Free installationSecond month of Ting service for freeA $75 gift card to the Downtown MallAdditionally, Ting will match your Substack subscription to support Town Crier Productions, the company that produces this newsletter and other community offerings. So, your $5 a month subscription yields $5 for TCP. Your $50 a year subscription yields $50 for TCP! The same goes for a $200 a year subscription! All goes to cover the costs of getting this newsletter out as often as possible. Learn more here! This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit communityengagement.substack.com/subscribe

This week Stephanie K and Jay welcome Bill Palmer, Shannon Garrett and Beth to the studio.  Bill is the Director of Genesee County Veteran Services.  Bill, Shannon and Beth are dedicated to helping veterans get the services they need and deserve.  Formed in 1975, the Genesee County Department of Veterans Services was created to help local veterans and their families obtain veterans' benefits from federal, state and local agencies. The office was also set up to help indigent veterans and veterans in emergency situations who need help with the necessities of life.  For more information please call (810) 257-3068 or visit Department of Veterans Services (gc4me.com)

In today’s subscriber-supported public service announcement, the Charlottesville Area Tree Stewards continues to offer classes and events this fall and winter to increase your awareness of our wooden neighbors and to prepare for the future. On October 19, there’s a free class on the Selection, Planting, and Care of Trees from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. (register) In early November, there is a three part class on Winter Invasive Plant Identification and Treatment. Information on all the classes and the group can be found at www.charlottesvilleareatreestewards.org. On today’s show:The Charlottesville Planning Commission recommends approval of the update of the Charlottesville Comprehensive PlanA start-up seeking sugar substitutes secures funding for expansion at the State Farm BuildingThe Charlottesville Tree Commission looks forward to the future and a little ReLeafWe begin today with an economic development announcement in Albemarle County. Specifically at the former regional headquarters for State Farm on Pantops. Governor Ralph Northam was on hand to announce that the firm Bonumose will partner with the Hershey Company to research and develop reduced or zero sugar chocolate.“This is a $28 million investment that Bonumose is putting forth in the Commonwealth of Virginia,” Northam said. Ed Rogers is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Bonumose, which was formed in 2016 and currently operates out of the University of Virginia’s North Fork research park. Using a $256,000 grant from the Commonwealth’s Opportunity Fund and $300,000 from the Virginia Investment Performance Grant program, Bonumose will move to a portion of the State Farm site.“It’s an important milestone, 36,000 square foot building,” Rogers said. Bonumose is betting that its technology can provide a healthy sugar substitute that can be produced at a price that can be affordable. Rogers said there’s a lot of hard work to do to prove that the tech will pay off. “We are not so full of hubris that we think that’s going to be easy,” Rogers said. “I mean, sugar is great. Who doesn’t love sugar? I mean even if you hate sugar, you probably love sugar also. It’s the gold standard of sweeteners. It’s natural. It tastes great. It is functional. It provides structure to foods. It helps depress the freezing point so you have creamy ice cream. It caramelizes. It does all of these things in food so when you’re talking about replacing sugar, it’s just not a matter of replacing the sweetness.” Current sugar substitutes do not work as well in cooking, and can be much more expensive than the real thing. Rogers said the product Bonumose will make s based on tagatose, a naturally occurring sweetener. The Pantops facility will serve as a demonstration project and will provide at least 64 new jobs. Rogers said this only came about because the county’s Economic Development office approached the company with options on how to expand. Soon after the pandemic, State Farm said they would shift entirely to a teleworking model and would not return to the 365,000 square foot building. Economic Development Director Roger Johnson is fond of using code names for various projects that they are working on before the deals can be announced. “Albemarle County had begun working with Bonumose well before the state die and we named this project internally Project Leopard, after Def Leppard’s hit song Pour Some Sugar On Me,” Johnson said. This is a story I’ll continue to monitor in the weeks, months, and years to come.New grant programThe City of Charlottesville has launched a new grant program intended to encourage job creation. The GO Hire program run by the Office of Economic Development will be adapted as part of the city’s pandemic recovery efforts. The position must pay $15 an hour. (learn more)“Grant funds can be used for City based businesses hiring a new employee that is a City resident,” reads the application for the program. “[The Office of Economic Development] will reimburse 50 percent of the wages for the initial eight week hiring period.”Grants are capped at $5,000, but the positions are eligible for the Virginia Return to Earn Initiative operated by Virginia Career Works. Comprehensive Plan milestone achieved After four years and ten months of review, the seven member Charlottesville Planning Commission has voted unanimously to recommend approval of an updated Comprehensive Plan as well as the Future Land Use Map. They did so after a long public hearing in which dozens of community members spoke about the plan, which has been drafted by the firm Rhodeside & Harwell as part of the Cville Plans Together initiative. James Freas has only been Charlottesville’s director of Neighborhood Development Services for one month, but had the honor of introducing the public hearing. “The result of this process to date is the draft plan that you have before you tonight which is itself only a first step as we move on to the implementation actions and rulemaking through the zoning ordinance project,” Freas said. That’s the third step in the Cville Plans Together project, but Freas said the Planning Commission had to take into consideration all of the chapters of the Comprehensive Plan. “As we move into implementation, we will be considering this entire plan,” Freas said. “While there has been discussion of the land use map, the strategies in this plan call for environmental protection, historic preservation, recognition of neighborhood context, addressing climate change, and providing affordable housing among many other issues and all of these will go into crafting a new zoning ordinance.”Freas said that densities called for in the future map may be adjusted in places where it is not suitable. He said he is excited to join the team just as this next phase gets underway. Update on Climate Action PlanAfter a presentation on the plan, Commissioners got the chance to ask questions before the public hearing began. One yielded an update on the Climate Action Plan from Kristel Riddervold, the city’s environmental sustainability and facilities development manager. “There’s been sort of some competing priorities that the city has worked on and so we have in some ways given some deference to the comp plan process,” Riddervold said. “There’s been a lot of ground work and climate protection related supporting work that’s been going on for the past year. There is still fully a commitment to develop a climate action plan because that is consistent with Council’s commitment with the Compact of Mayors.”Bill Palmer works in the Office of the Architect at the University of Virginia. He said he supported goals in the draft Comprehensive Plan that refer to the role UVA plays in the community. “And the acknowledgement of UVA’s influence on many aspect of Charlottesville both positive and negative,” Palmer said. “I think continuing the collaboration and cooperation between the city and University is very important and [Albemarle] County as well.”Public hearingThe public hearing lasted nearly two hours and featured competing visions. Some are concerned that additional density in the map could worsen the phenomenon of gentrification.“The process that got us to this point has been incredibly flawed and is now barreling toward a forced premature conclusion,” said Julia Whiting. One former Planning Commissioner agreed with that sentiment. “It feels like we’re driving drunk at night,” said Bill Emory. “Kind-hearted developers will not address our shortage of affordable housing.Third-year UVA student Chloe Estrada said she supports a plan which will hold landlords accountable. “Earlier this year, we conducted a survey of students who have lived off-Grounds to learn more about their housing experiences with specific regard to treatment they have received from landlords,” Estrada said. “Broadly, only 43 percent of student renters were satisfied with their off Grounds housing experience.” One supporter of the plan wanted the implementation phase to begin quickly.“I recommend that you not slow down the process and that you go ahead and adopt this map as a guide for creating new zoning,” said Kathryn Laughon. “We know that changes in status quo are going to create a lot of backlash.”On Monday, Council and the Planning Commission held a two-hour question and answer period on the plan. Kevin Hildebrand had listened and it cleared up one aspect of the plan. “I was encouraged listening to yesterday’s meeting that the up to 12 units is not a by-right development in medium density,” Hildebrand said. “Heretofore that has not been made clear and perhaps the allowable density will be based on lot size.”Commission review and adoptionDozens more people spoke over the next hour or so before the Commission got to their deliberation. There were many discussions of tweaks, and quite a few amendments. Some of this came down to what language should be used. Here’s an interchange about bonus density for providing affordable housing in “sensitive” areas.“I got a new wording,” said Commissioner Rory Stolzenberg. “Consider allowing additional units and height under a bonus program or other zoning mechanism with greater and deeper affordability than non-sensitive areas.” “Is it ‘consider’ or just ‘allowing’ because ‘consider’ means that maybe you can, maybe you cannot,” said Commisioner Taneia Dowell. “‘Allowing sounds like something can happen.”“I don’t think we know yet whether that it should be considered,” said Commissioner Liz Russell. “That’s I think the point.”“In my opinion we can change it to allow and then we can figure out the number in that bonus program,” said Commissioner Karim Habbab. Going forward, NDS Director James Freas will be leading the discussions. If this were a role-playing game, he’s sort of like the dungeon master. “When we say consider, what we mean is that the planning board and the City Council would be the ones doing the considering at the time when you’re moving forward with the adoption of the zoning,”Council will have to take a vote and some of the amendments suggested by the Planning Commission need to be fleshed out by the consultants with more information and specifics. Shortly before the vote, NDS Deputy Director Missy Creasy listed four changes that would be made. One of them was the language we just heard. Here is another:“Require that zoning changes preserve and enhance historic and cultural resources,” Creasy said. Another is to further outline what is meant by a “sensitive” area.“And number four, recommend that sensitive area delineation should continue to be defined and additional means and metrics beyond Census block data need to be considered,” Creasy said. The next step will be the first reading by City Council, scheduled for November 15. In today’s second 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 codeforcville.org to learn about those projects. While Charlottesville does not yet have a specific Climate Adaptation Plan, the draft Comprehensive Plan has several references to the importance of trees to the city’s overall goals. In 2015, a measurement found that the city’s tree canopy was at 45 percent of the land cover. The 2021 draft Comprehensive Plan features more calls for preservation requirements including Goal 6 of the Environment, Climate, and Food Equity chapter which includes many strategies for increasing tree canopy, especially in areas that experience the urban heat island effect due to a lack of shade. “The Comprehensive Plan when it is finally done is going to have significant statements about supporting trees, adding trees, and the environmental health of the city,”  said Planning Commissioner Jody Lahendro at the October 5 meeting of the Tree Commission. The Tree Commission was created in 2010 to advocate for those types of policies, and to recognize specific trees. At the beginning of their meeting on October 5, Chair Brian Menard noted that a landmark tree in Maplewood Cemetery crashed to the ground the weekend before.“There is significant damage to the fabric of the cemetery,” Menard said. “There are a lot of stones damaged, some surely beyond repair.” Menard said the sudden death of the tree has caused an impact and points to the importance of celebrating trees. “Just watching people through the neighborhood react to this, it reminds me that for the last year or so we have especially stressed the functional benefits of trees, the health benefits, the environmental benefits,” Menard said. To help with education about those benefits, a group called Charlottesville ReLeaf has formed to lead efforts to help spread the word and to plant trees in strategic areas. Peggy Van Yahres is one of its members. (learn more)“What we want to do is get kids and families excited about trees and the green industry, so we’re really starting with some educational events,” Van Yahres said. Van Yahres said the group is working on developing a website. One idea is to develop materials that can demonstrate the heat differences between different playgrounds. The one at Venable Elementary features a bit of shade, whereas most others do not. Menard said the Tree Commission should be playing a role in making sure that new public projects will include new trees.“We need to know who and where and when plans are being made to make changes to city property so that we’re in early enough on the conversation,” Menard said. “So whether that is with Public Works or with the school division or whoever.” The Tree Commission also got an update on municipal tree planting on public property. The current capital improvement program has set aside $75,000 for that purpose. Mike Ronaybe is the city’s arborist and he said staff needs to be in place to do the planting and to make sure planted trees are regularly watered. “We usually hire 17 seasonals that work at parks in the summertime,” Ronayne said. “I think we are able to fill three of those positions so that’s just seasonal staff. Our full-time staff we’re down about a third from where we need to be for full-time positions.”In the 2020 State of the Forest report, Ronayne stated there is a city planting goal of 200 trees a year, but that has not been met for four years. The Tree Commission discussed ways to encourage other ways to help meet the goal.Special announcement! Today’s the third day of a new promo with Ting! Are you interested in fast internet? Visit this site and enter your address to see if you can get service through Ting. If you decide to proceed to make the switch, you’ll get:Free installationSecond month of Ting service for freeA $75 gift card to the Downtown Mall This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at communityengagement.substack.com/subscribe

In today’s first Patreon-fueled shout-out is for the Plant Northern Piedmont Natives Campaign, an initiative that wants you to grow native plants in yards, farms, public spaces and gardens in the northern Piedmont. Native plants provide habitat, food sources for wildlife, ecosystem resiliency in the face of climate change, and clean water.  Start at the Plant Northern Piedmont Natives Facebook page and tell them Lonnie Murray sent you! In today’s show: Several odds and ends from the Charlottesville Planning Commission meeting The Virginia Film Festival will return to movie screens in Charlottesville this OctoberYour input is requested on thoughts and concerns about future natural disastersWe begin today again with today’s COVID numbers. Today the Virginia Department of Health reports another 4,066 cases today. The number of COVID deaths since the beginning of the pandemic in Virginia is now at 12,170. Since September 1, there have been 309 reported, with 52 reported today. That does not mean all of those fatalities happened within a 24-hour period, as that number is tallied as death certificates are reported to the VDH. When natural disasters strike, governments across the region often cooperate with each other to lend a hand in the emergency response and recovery efforts. Before they strike, there is a federally-mandated document intended to provide direction on how to prepare to lessen their impacts.“The purpose of the Regional Natural Hazard Mitigation Plan is to prepare for natural disasters before they occur, thus reducing loss of life, property damage, and disruption of commerce,” reads the current plan, which was put together by the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission.The last plan was adopted in 2018 and it is time to put together the next one as required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Virginia Department of Emergency Management. The TJPDC wants your input in the form of a survey which is now open. Participants are asked if they’ve ever experienced a natural disaster and if so, what the specific impact was. You’ll also be asked what hazards you are concerned about, ranging from dam failure to winter weather. (take the survey) The Virginia Film Festival will return to in-person events this October when the long-running series returns for action. Last year the event pivoted to drive-in and virtual screenings, but will return to the Violet Crown, the Culbreth Theatre, and the Paramount Theater. “The Festival will also continue its very popular Drive-In Movies series at the beautiful Morven Farm in Eastern Albemarle County.” said festival director Jody Kielbasa in a release. “As always, the Festival will work to create the safest environment possible for its audiences, requiring masks at all indoor venues.”The festival will run from October 27 to October 31, and the full program will be announced on September 28. Tickets will go on sale on September 30. A major highlight this year will be the screening of an episode of Dopesick, an upcoming series on Hulu about the nation’s opioid epidemic. The series is based on the work of former Roanoke Times journalist Beth Macy and the event at the Paramount will be presented in partnership with the Virginia Festival of the Book. For more information, visit virginiafilmfestival.org.Albemarle Supervisor Ann Mallek is one of 16 elected officials from around the United States to be appointed to an advisory panel of the Environmental Protection Agency. EPA Administrator Michael S. Regan made appointments to the Local Government Advisory Committee and its Small Community Advisory Subcommittee, and Mallek will serve on the latter. “From tackling climate change to advancing environmental justice, we need local partners at the table to address our most pressing environmental challenges,” Regan said in an August 25 press release. Kwasi Fraser, the Mayor of Purcellville in Loudoun County, is the only other Virginian appointed to either of the two groups. Speaking of appointments, last week Governor Ralph Northam appointed several Charlottesville residents to the Virginia Board of Workforce Development. They are:Rich Allevi, Vice President of Development, Sun Tribe SolarJohn Bahouth Jr., Executive Vice President, Apex Clean EnergyTierney T. Fairchild, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Resilience EducationAntonio Rice, President and Chief Executive Officer, Jobs for Virginia GraduatesThe Virginia Board of Workforce Development will meet next week for a special briefing. The board’s executive is Jane Dittmar, a former member of the Albemarle Board of Supervisors. You’re reading Charlottesville Community Engagement. Time for two quick Patreon-shout-outs. One person wants you to know "We keep each other safe. Get vaccinated, wear a mask, wash your hands, and keep your distance."And in another one, one brand new Patreon supporter wants you to go out and read a local news story written by a local journalist. Whether it be the Daily Progress, Charlottesville Tomorrow, C-Ville Weekly, NBC29, CBS19, the community depends on a network of people writing about the community. Go learn about this place today!For the rest of the show today, highlights from last night’s City Planning Commission meeting. I want to state up front that this newsletter does not feature the meeting’s main event, which was a public hearing for 240 Stribling in the Fry’s Spring neighborhood. That conversation that focused on a novel method of funding infrastructure improvements to support additional vehicular and human-powered traffic. I’m going to focus on that in an upcoming newsletter, but I want to get one concept on your mind. Let’s get some legal guidance from City Attorney Lisa Robertson about that mythical beast known as a “proffer.” For large developments that require a rezoning or a special use permit, you may also see the applicant offer cash or specific improvements as a required condition if their desired land use change is accepted. “Proffers are really to deal with impacts generated by the development itself and to provide cash for infrastructure that’s more directly sort of connected to or necessitated by the development,” Robertson said during the Commission’s pre-meeting. “In this situation as evidenced by the fact that the Stribling Avenue need for sidewalks has already been documented for a number of years in the city’s master plans and [Capital Improvement Program].”Southern Development is the applicant behind 240 Stribling had wanted to make its willingness to fund some of the infrastructure improvements in a proffer, but Robertson asked to pursue the matter in a different way because proffers are not two-way agreements. What happened with that? We’ll come back to that tomorrow. Highlights from the meetingAt the top of the actual meeting, the Commission elected Lyle Solla-Yates to serve as the body’s Chair. Solla-Yates was appointed to the seven-person body in March 2018 and succeeds Hosea Mitchell, who will remain on the commission. “Thank you very much Chair Mitchell for your two years of excellent service and for this honor and attempting to follow you,” Solla-Yates said. “Remarkable opportunity.”Next, Commissioners gave various reports on the various committees they are on. This is a good way to find out quickly a lot of things that are going on. Commissioner Mitchell said he and Commissioner Jody Lahendro with city Parks and Recreation officials reviewing a major problem in McIntire Park.“The drainage in McIntire Park is also creating a violation of the Department of Environmental Quality, their standards,” Mitchell said. “That is going to be a top priority and that’s going to be about $350,000 that we will be asking Council to approve but this is a must-do. We are in violation if we don’t fix that.” Mitchell said repairs to bring the outdoor Onesty Pool back next summer will cost about $400,000. There’s a lot of erosion and standing water at Oakwood Cemetery that will cost about $52,000.“And the last must-do thing is a comprehensive master plan,” Mitchell said. “We haven’t had anything like that in a number of years and our future is going to be relentless for Parks and Rec if we don’t do that and that’s going to be about $150,000.”Mitchell said the Smith Aquatic and Fitness Center is not expected to open now until late fall. Smith has been plagued with air quality problems since it opened in 2010. The facility shut down for several weeks in 2015 to install new exhaust pipes and has been closed since the spring of 2020 for at least $2.25 million in repairs. At least, that’s what Council approved as a capital improvement program budget line item in the Fiscal Year 2021 budget. In any case, Mitchell also announced that Todd Brown will be leaving his position as director of the city parks and recreation department to take a position in Fredericksburg. Bill Palmer, the University of Virginia’s liaison on the Charlottesville Planning Commission, reminded the Commission that UVA is working on an update of its Grounds Framework Plan. Palmer did not have much specific information but the closed-door Land Use and Environmental Planning Committee got a briefing at their meeting on July 23. “The Plan will be underway from Summer 2021 to Fall 2022 and includes a robust engagement process with the University and regional community,” reads a presentation made to LUEPC. The Grounds Framework Plan is intended to guide planning and development over the next 20 years with an emphasis on sustainability, resiliency, and equity. Some guidance in the presentation is to “capitalize on the potential of existing and new facilities” and “holistically consider Grounds as an integrated campus of mixed-use buildings and green spaces.”The firm Urban Strategies has been hired to conduct the work, which will build on smaller plans developed in the past several years ranging from the 2015 Brandon Avenue Master Plan to the 2019 Emmet Ivy Task Force report. UVa is also undertaking an affordable housing initiative to build up to 1,500 units on land that either UVA or its real estate foundation controls. The community also got a first look at Jim Freas, the new director of the City’s Department of Neighborhood Development Services. “Today is my second day so still finding my feet and learning my way around the building,” Freas said on Tuesday. Freas comes to the position from a similar one in Natick, Massachusetts. Natick consists of over 16 square miles in Middlesex County and has a population of 37,000 according to the U.S. Census. Thank you again for reading today. Want one of those shout-outs? Consider becoming a Patreon supporter. For $25 a month, you get four shout-outs spread across the various programs. That price will increase in the near future. Questions? Drop me a line! This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at communityengagement.substack.com/subscribe

In today’s Patreon-fueled shout-out: What’s your perfect holiday weekend in Charlottesville? Hanging with friends outside... Great live music... Maybe breaking a Guinness world record? Then mark your calendar for WTJU 91.1 FM's Freefall Music Festival -- Saturday, September 4 starting at 3 p.m. at IX Art Park. Live performances by Zuzu's Hot Five, Susie and the Pistols, and Good Dog Nigel. We'll attempt to form the world's largest human music note at 7:30 p.m. Plus, a hot dog and veggie dog cookout for our whole community. Find out more at wtju.net.On today’s show: Albemarle County is looking for a consultant for to help update their zoning codeU.S. Census Bureau releases population figures for 2020Charlottesville Planning Commission gets an update on the Cville Plans Together initiativeThe University of Virginia plans to increase the number of opportunities for people to get vaccinatedThe Virginia Department of Health reports 2,270 new cases of COVID-19 today, the third straight day with one-day totals in excess of two thousand. The percent positivity has increased to 7.7 percent. In the Blue Ridge Health District, there are 37 new cases today and the percent positivity is at 4.6 percent. There have been 244,944 cases of COVID since mid-January, and of that amount, 98.34 percent of cases were in people not fully vaccinated. Of 2,838 deaths, that figure is 98.17 percent. (The above paragraph was corrected to fix a typographical error)In Albemarle County, 73.2 percent of adults are fully vaccinated, or 63.6 percent of the total population. In Charlottesville, 61.8 percent of adults are fully vaccinated, or 54.7 percent of population. The numbers in outlying counties are lower. For instance, in Louisa the figures are 54.4 percent of adults and 45.5 percent of the total population. In Fluvanna those numbers are 64 percent and 54.5 percent. In Greene, those numbers are 63.3 percent and 56.8 percent, and in Nelson 65.3 percent of adults are vaccinated and 55.6 percent of the total is fully vaccinated.The University of Virginia Health System has announced they will make vaccines available in their outpatient pharmacies by appointment, weekdays between 11 a.m. and six p.m. Justin Vesser has helped lead the health system’s vaccination efforts. “So we’re at this time when we sincerely hope everyone makes the decision to become vaccinated and there’s a lot changing on the vaccine front and a lot changing on the COVID front with the Delta variant and the current surge that we’re in,” Vesser said. These are in addition to the vaccinations at the COVID clinic.“We have community pharmacies that are UVA pharmacies in Zion Crossroads, we have them in Fishersville, we have them at UVA Cancer Center at Pantops, one in the UVA Bookstore, and one at student health clinic on the UVA campus,” Vesser said. Masks are now required indoors at all public schools in Virginia, per a public health emergency order issued yesterday by Governor Ralph Northam. Even though the state of emergency has elapsed, the public health emergency is still in place. One whereas clause in the order point out that children under the age of 12 are not eligible for a vaccine yet. (read the resolution)Among the others: Only 40.3% of 12-15 year-olds and 51.7 % of 16-17 year olds in Virginia are fully vaccinated as of August 10, 2021Universal and correct mask use is an important COVID-19 prevention strategy in schools as part of a multicomponent approach and has been shown to be associated with lower incidence of COVID-19 in schoolsThe Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advises universal indoor masking for all teachers, staff, students, and visitors in K-12 schools, regardless of vaccination statusExceptions are made for anyone eating or drinking, exercising, for participation in religious rituals, and for those with health conditions that prevent wearing a mask. The U.S. Census Bureau has released population and demographic data from the tally in 2020. According to the count, Charlottesville officially has 46,553 people, a 7.08 percent increase from 2010. Albemarle’s population is 112,395, a 13.56 percent increase since 2010. Louisa County’s population increased by 13.4 percent to 37,596, Greene increased 11.68 percent to 20,552, and Fluvanna grew 6.06 percent to 27,249. Nelson County’s population shrank by 1.63 percent to 14,775. Overall, the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission increased by 10.4 percent to 259,120.Virginia as a whole has an official population of 8,631,393, a 7.9 percent increase since 2010. There are 218.6 people per square mile. Charlottesville has a density of 4,544 people per square mile, and that figure is 156 people per square mile in Albemarle County. (population and housing data viewer)A major purpose of the Census is to allocate seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. Virginia will continue to have 11 members. Albemarle County is looking for a consultant to help update its zoning order. On Tuesday, Planning Director Charles Rapp hosted a briefing for representatives of firms interested in doing the work. “The zoning ordinance exceeds probably 30, 40 years of life and its in need of an update,” Rapp said. The chosen firm will enter into a multi-year contract to do the work in phases.  “We have an initial phase outlined in this [request for proposals] that focuses on zoning district land use clarifications and setbacks as kind of the first two sections,” Rapp said. Subsequent phases will be undertaken as Albemarle begins to update its Comprehensive Plan. “As we finish sections of the Comprehensive Plan, we will identify sections of the zoning ordinance that correspond with that topic,” Rapp said. “So an easy one to talk about is natural resource planning. So a zoning ordinance that might relate to natural resources would be landscaping, lighting, stream buffers, all of that kind of stuff.”Back to that first phase. Rapp said this would be an update to transition toward a more modern zoning code that is easier to use and better organized. “We would like to get a consultant on board by October,” Rapp said. A second request for proposals will be released soon for a consultant to work on the Comprehensive Plan. After this brief break, catching up with the Charlottesville Planning Commission. You’re reading to Charlottesville Community Engagement. In this subscriber supported public service announcement, over the course of the pandemic, the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society has provided hours and hours of interviews, presentations, and discussions about interpretations and recollections of the past. All of this is available for you to watch, for free, on the Historical Society’s YouTube Channel. Some examples:June 7, 2021 event on a report on how to improve cvillepediaJanuary 28, 2021 event on the Jefferson Madison Regional Library’s historyDecember 17, 2021 Speaker Series with Jordy Yager of Mapping CvilleLater on Tuesday, the Charlottesville Planning Commission met for their regular meeting in August. They’ll have two work sessions coming up, and the agenda for this one was relatively light. As always, the meeting began with updates from Commissioners, including the nonvoting representative from the University of Virginia, Bill Palmer. “I don’t have a whole lot to report other than just the reminder that fall semester starts on August 24 and we’ll be in pretty full swing around Grounds with first years coming back for orientation and all that,” Palmer said. Commissioner Rory Stolzenberg noted the finalization earlier this month of a key global update of how the entire world’s climate is changing. “The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has released the first part of its sixth assessment report and most of the stuff in there is bad news and some of it is tentatively good news if we act on it and I would encourage all of you to read it,” Stolzenberg said. Stolzenberg said the report shows the global temperature will likely continue to rise above the 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming considered to be an important threshold. Efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are intended to keep that number lower.“And we’re most likely looking at three degrees or more unless we can get very significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions,” Stolzenberg said. Stolzenberg said the good news is that if the world can get to net zero, temperatures could eventually begin to go down. (view the various reports on the IPCC website)James Groves, an associate professor in the Department of Engineering and Society at the University of Virginia, spoke about the report during matters from the public. He said it is the first update from the IPCC since 2013.“Without surprise, the report states that our lifestyles are dangerously eroding the natural world around us, setting the stage for increasingly difficult living conditions for everyone and everything,” Groves said. Groves said he hopes the Comprehensive Plan needs to have specific recommendations related to climate change such as recommending specific financing mechanisms to replace heating and cooling systems. “Investments in sustainability solutions like [Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy] financing, a green bank, and micromobility could put critical dollars in the pockets of our most needy neighbors, year after year, while stabilizing the climate for all of us,” Groves said.Speaking of the Charlottesville Comprehensive Plan, the firm Rhodeside & Harwell updated the city Planning Commission on the next steps for the Cville Plans Together Initiative. In February 2019, a previous Council opted to spend nearly a million dollars on a firm to complete the Comprehensive Plan, rewrite the zoning code, and adopt an affordable housing plan. That last step was completed in March. Jennifer Koch is with Rhodeside and Harwell.“What we’ve heard from you all is that you’d like to see us have a Comprehensive Plan to Council this year,” Koch said.The consultant team continues to review the feedback submitted this spring in six-week public input window on the Future Land Use Map and some of the draft chapters of the Comprehensive Plan. There’s an upcoming work session on August 31. “We’ll come to you with what we’re proposing as some adjustments to the Future Land Use Map and the Land Use, Urban Form, and Historical, Cultural Preservation chapter to respond to what we heard,” Koch said. Planning Commission Chair Hosea Mitchell said he thinks it is crucial to get a Plan for the current City Council to vote on before the end of the year.“Slippage is not an option,” Mitchell said. “We do not want to have to educate a new Council. If it slips, we could be looking at another couple of years.”More to come in the near future. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at communityengagement.substack.com/subscribe

In today’s Patreon-fueled shout-out: Help support black-owned business in the Charlottesville area. Check out the Charlottesville Black Business Directory at cvilleblackbiz.com and choose between a variety of goods and services, ranging from beauty supplies, professional services, and e-commerce. Visit cvilleblackbiz.com as soon as you can to get started.On today’s show:Work to begin on roundabout at intersection of Stony Point and Proffit roads in northern AlbemarleThe latest campaign finance is in for candidates in Albemarle and CharlottesvilleThe Charlottesville Planning Commission recommends approval of a rezoning in Belmont that was previously denied in November 2018And discussion of a street closure in the Little High neighborhood could pave the way for a new trail connection We’re in the middle of summer, and it’s been quiet on the local elections front. Not only has there been a lull in campaign events, there was not much campaign finance activity in Albemarle or Charlottesville. Reports for activity between May 28 and June 30 were due yesterday to the Virginia Department of Elections. They have been made available through the Virginia Public Access Project. Democrat Juandiego Wade began the period with a balance of $32,626 and raised an additional $1,015 in cash over that time. He spent $28,381 during the reporting period with $18,000 spent on Liveview Marketing and $2,350 in advertising with the Daily Progress. Wade finished the money with a balance of $5,259. Democrat Brian Pinkston began the month with a balance of $14,152 on hand, and raised an additional $850 in additional funds including $500 in a loan from himself. He spent $12,701 during the period, including the repayment of $9,922 in loans to himself. Pinkston concluded the period with a balance of $2,301. The two independents in the race did not report any fundraising. Incumbent Nikuyah Walker filed a report that stated a campaign balance of $90 with no expenditures or receipts. There is no report yet in the Virginia Department of Elections database from challenger . None of the races for Albemarle County Supervisor are contested this year, but new reports are available all the same from the three candidate. Incumbent Jack Jouett District Supervisor Diantha McKeel raised an additional $500 and reported no spending, bringing her balance to $32,556. Incumbent Rio District Supervisor Ned Gallaway reported no fundraising or spending, and has a balance of $15,809. In the open Samuel Miller seat, Newcomer Jim Andrews raised $2,001 in cash and spent $3,190 in the period, leaving a balance of $29,317. No write-in candidates filed a report.  There are four General Assembly races of note in the area. The 25th House District includes part of western Albemarle County. Incumbent Republican Chris Runion began the period with $44,960, raised $13,235, and spent $2,566, leaving a balance of $55,628. Democratic challenger Jennifer Kitchen began the period with $78,249. She raised $29,834, with cash contributions from nearly 600 individuals or entities. Kitchen spent $24,524 and had a end-of-period balance of $83,558.The 57th House District case is contested. Incumbent Democrat Sally Hudson began the period with a balance of $52,254, raised $1,348, and spent $10,742. Her opponent is Republican Philip Hamilton, who began the period with a balance of $1,179 on May 28. Hamilton raised $150 in cash, spent $990, and had a balance of $338 on June 30.In the 58th House District, Incumbent Republican Rob Bell began the period with $264,965 and raised an additional $20,565, spent $3,935, and had a balance of $281,594 on June 30. Challenger Sara Ratcliffe began the period with $2,804, raised $5,532 including $3,002 in loans, and and spent $1,108. The 59th House District includes a portion of southwestern Albemarle and the Republican incumbent is Matt Fariss. Fariss began this reporting period with $12,846 on May 28 and raised $24,120 from 60 individuals or entities. He spent $5,628 in the period and had a balance of $31,338. His Democratic challenger, Ben Moses, began the period with a balance of $130,216 and raised $56,985 in the period with cash coming from 141 individuals or entities. He spent $29,627 and ended the period with a balance of $157,248. Independent Louis Scicli reported no money during the period. Races in the Virginia Senate are not until 2023. *Another roundabout is coming to another corner of Albemarle County. Construction will get underway next week at the intersection of Stony Point Road and Proffit Road for the project, which was funded in the second round of the Virginia Department of Transportation’s Smart Scale process in 2017. In order to save money and attract efficiencies, VDOT opted to bundle that project with several others into a single $28.5 million design-build contract that was eventually awarded to Curtis Contracting. Completed projects include a traffic light on U.S. 29 at Interstate 64’s Exit 118 and the Rio Mills Connector Road that opened in June. A conversion of the junction of I-64 and U.S. 250 at Exit 124 is underway, and a roundabout at Route 151 and U.S. 250 southwest of Crozet will begin construction later this summer. (more information)Construction phasing documents for the project (Credit: Virginia Department of Transportation)Today, two segments that make up half of a recap of the Charlottesville Planning Commission meeting from earlier this week. There was a lot of activity and it is all worth documenting. First, the meeting began with announcements. First up was Bill Palmer, the non-voting representative from the University of Virginia’s Office of the Architect. Another office building from the 20th century is coming down. “The demolition of the Dynamics building over at the Emmet/Ivy corridor is underway and a lot of the utility enabling seems to have started over there so that project to enable the Data Science institute as well as the conference center and hotel that we’re building over there so that’s finally getting underway after lots and lots of planning,” Palmer said. The Dynamics building will be demolished. Where will the materials go? (Credit: Charlottesville GIS) Planning Commission Chair Hosea Mitchell serves on the city’s Parks and Recreation Advisory Board. He told his colleagues and the public that the Onesty Family Aquatic Center will not open this summer.“The reason is we just can’t get enough lifeguards to support all of the parks we’ve got,” Mitchell said. “This is not unique to Charlottesville. This seems to be a nationwide problem that we just can’t get the lifeguards.” In the first item of business, the Commission considered a rezoning and special use permit for a vacant lot currently zoned R-2, which would allow two units on the property.“The requested rezoning would be to R-3, residential multifamily medium density,” Mitchell said. “And then the following special use permit would then allow the applicant to build eight units.”A similar application went before Commission and the Council in 2018 and was denied by Council in October that year. As part of this application, eight parking spaces would be provided on site. Here’s Matt Alfele, a city planner. “Residents are concerned that the code-required eight parking spaces will not be enough for this development and the overflow parking will impact the surrounding neighborhoods, especially the homes on Chestnut Street,” Alfele said. One change since 2018 involves how vehicles will get in and out of the site. Justin Shimp is the engineer on behalf of MSC. “We have worked with the traffic engineer and we have a one-way entrance off of Carlton because that is a narrow street and the one-way entrance is a safe entrance and we exit out the alley, so there’s no traffic concerns,” Shimp said. Shimp said the rezoning was consistent with the city’s desire to build more housing units.“The reality is that if you look at the goals that are stated for the city in terms of providing housing to folks who take alternate means of transportation, and how to deal with climate change and other issues we face, these sort of in-fill projects are an excellent way to achieve those goals,” Shimp said. Though not a representative of the rental company that would manage the units, Shimp said the one bedroom units would be rented between $1,100 and $1,200, and the two-bedroom unit would be around $1,500. None of the units are being subsidized and will not be proffered to keep them below market.  The situation may be different in the future when the Comprehensive Plan is adopted and the zoning ordinance is rewritten. Lisa Robertson is the city attorney.“What we’re all waiting for so anxiously is a zoning ordinance that can have regulations that say if we’re going to require a certain amount of affordable housing for every development of a specific size, we want to be right upfront about what that means and what the paperwork that’s going to be required over the course of the affordability period will be,” Robertson said. Several residents of the immediate neighborhood asked for the rezoning to be denied or for more parking to be required. Another Belmont resident said there should not be more parking.“I have to say I’m a little dismayed by the number of my neighbors who want more car storage here,” Gold said. “This is a really solid location for car-free living.”This time around, the Planning Commission unanimously recommended approval of both the special use permit for more density and the rezoning. It goes next to City Council at a future meeting. The cover of the applicant’s concept plan (download the full PC packet)In today’s second Patreon-fueled shout-out is for the Plant Northern Piedmont Natives Campaign, an initiative that wants you to grow native plants in yards, farms, public spaces and gardens in the northern Piedmont. Native plants provide habitat, food sources for wildlife, ecosystem resiliency in the face of climate change, and clean water.  Start at the Plant Northern Piedmont Natives Facebook page and tell them Lonnie Murray sent you! Next, the Commission was asked to weigh in on whether Charlottesville should give up public right-of-way between East High Street and Meriwether Street in the Little High Street area. This is what is known as a “paper street” because most of the land dedicated to the city for a road was built upon. Tony Edwards is the Development Services Manager in the city’s Department of Public works. “This subject street was created in 1940 with a subdivision plat that established the Little High neighborhood,” Edwards said. “The 1940 subdivision created a new Lewis Street.”The original play for the Little High Street neighborhoodAn adjacent landowner has asked for the city to give up the right of way in order to avoid a cut-through street from ever being built to the Little High neighborhood. Another nearby landowner asked that an existing gravel path be turned into a formal city trail for bikes and pedestrians.“It was determined that the existing gravel path actually veers outside of the platted right of way of 13th Northeast over the yard of a private residence and a busy parking lot,” Edwards said. “Staff at that time was also of the opinion that establishing a bike and pedestrian connection within the platted right of way would be difficult and expensive.”Nonetheless, city staff recommended not vacating and closing the right of way in part to preserve the possibility of meeting future transportation needs. The applicant for the street closure said one reason for the request is because the amount of developable property on the parcel he manages is less than it should be because of differing building setback rules when there’s an adjacent street - real or paper. In this case, twenty feet versus fifteen. “If you take 20 feet away from the property line, basically, it removes all of that property from utility,” said Roy Van Doorn, the manager of the LLC that owns 1140 East High Street. Van Doorn said a connector road would overwhelm the Little High neighborhood. Under his proposal, there would be more parking for uses on East High Street and he would fix drainage issues. He made this offer on behalf of himself and neighboring properties. “I made a proposal and its on the table that we as property owners around this section would put in a 12-foot wide gravel connector so that bikes and pedestrians could walk in that area,” Van Doorn said. If the city were to work out an arrangement for that land to be dedicated to public use, that connector would need to be built to standards according to traffic engineer Brennen Duncan.“It wouldn’t necessarily have to be built to the full roadway standards but it would have to be built to [Americans with  Disabilities Act] or bicycle-trail standards,” Duncan said. The specific question before the Commission was whether vacating the street conformed with the Comprehensive Plan. Commissioner Jody Lahendro said no.“I don’t like the idea of forfeiting the city from the future possibility of doing something,” Lahendro said. Commission Lyle Solla-Yates said he support thinking about the issue more while an arrangement is worked out to use the right of way for non-motorized modes of travel. Van Doorn had sent over his compromise proposal on Monday, which was not enough time for the Planning Commission to get a staff report on the idea. Van Doorn requested a deferral to work through the details of how to make the connector trail work.“Owning the land for us is not that important,” Van Doorn said. “What is important is that the Little High Street neighborhood has a way to utilize connectivity but not automobile,” Van Doorn said. Will this come to pass? Stay tuned in future installments of Charlottesville Community Engagement. This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at communityengagement.substack.com/subscribe

Written by Bill Palmer and presented by Kevin Scarbrough Does faith mean we believe that God will answer our prayers exactly as we asked? Or does faith in God mean accepting His answer, whatever it is?Read online

Use this player to listen to the podcast: In the late 1860s, the hazard known as the Middle Ground Flats — opposite the City of Hudson, New York, in the Hudson River —made navigation in the busy shipping route treacherous. An appropriation of $35,000.00 was approved by Congress in 1872 to build the Hudson-Athens Lighthouse. The lighthouse went into service in late 1874. It was run by a resident keeper until it was automated in the 1950s. It still serves as an aid to navigation. Hudson-Athens Lighthouse, New York. Photo by Bob Taylor. In 1982 a group of local citizens formed the Hudson-Athens Lighthouse Preservation Society. Since then, with the help of private donations, public grants, and legislative initiatives, the Preservation Society has undertaken the analysis and mitigation of structural, aesthetic, interpretive and public access issues that face the property. Recent efforts have mostly focused on shoring up the foundation of the structure. Left to right: Joe Keneally, Van Calhoun, and Bill Palmer of the Hudson-Athens Lighthouse Preservation Society A grant from the Preservation League of New York State earlier this year is supporting an engineering study of the lighthouse. Another issue the organization has faced in recent years is the failure of the power cable that provided electricity for the lighthouse. Van Calhoun is chair of the Hudson-Athens Lighthouse Preservation Society's Foundation Renovation Committee. Bob Taylor is the historian for the Society, and Bill Palmer is a volunteer and boat captain. Bob Taylor Use this player to listen to the podcast:

Live from Santa Fe, NM in 2018

Guest: Bill PalmerShow Live-with: “You cannot climb a ladder with both hands clasped to your ass.”Topics Covered in this Episode:Advanced Sales MethodologiesHow NOT to use LinkedinChallenger SalesWhat does RNT mean? Creating an echo chamber for your customerCounter-tactics in SalesThe difference between change and transformationApplying the OODA loop to salesThe ONE thing all sales people are bad atBill's Websitehttps://queenswayfarers.uk/https://www.consentri.care/

Bill Palmer is our first guest pilot we will hear from on this episode.  Bills soaring journey started in 1991 when his wife gave him a glider flight for his Birthday . It was with the now famous Bob Wander in Minnesota. Bill had recently qualified as an A320 captain with Northwest Airlines at the time, but had not flown gliders before nor had any exposure. He started with The 2-33 northeast of the Twin Cities. With the private check ride approaching squashed by winter, he picked up the following May (as Minnesota melted) and decided to simply push for the commercial, which he then completed. He continued to fly with the Minnesota Soaring club until 1995 where he flew an ASK 21, ASK 7, K8, & an SGS 1-23. Some pilots would do cross country trips with their own gliders, mostly downwind dashes with a crew to follow in a trailer. Not having access to a crew, Bill put that out of his mind and enjoyed taking friends for rides and working through the A through Bronze badges, and completed the silver 5 hour duration and 1000 meter gain flights. Bill would have to wait 23 years to complete the silver distance. Bill moved to San Diego California in 1995 and didn’t seek out soaring there until 2012, after a couple of moves he realized that Sky Sailing was only about 40 minutes away. He checked out in their Grob 103, 102, and SGS1-26 and 1-36 and had a fun time being able to climb to 12,000 feet and play the how- long-can-I stay-up game, while stretching his goals all within gliding distance of the airport.  Bill is also the author of the book "Understanding Air France 447" Its About An A-330 that crashed into the Atlantic North of Brazil in 2012.      His Soaring goals are to Learn to use the water ballast in his ASG29, for longer and faster cross country flights and hopefully a 750K. Bill also wants to continue to share his enthusiasm to  current and future soaring pilots to fan their aviation flames and ambitions. (38:00) Soaring Tales with Dale. Dale brings us a story on this episode about bow wave. Have you ever experienced this? (41:30) We also have a very special Tips & Techniques segment for you on this episode! Eric Carden has an exciting journey ahead of him this coming summer as he attempts to cross the the entire United States in a glider! Eric started flying hang gliders in 1993 while a sophomore in college, he briefly flew paragliders, and started flying sailplanes in 2015.  He also owned and operated a powered ultralight business for several years, flying and teaching in weight-shift and three-axis aircraft. He has taught others how to fly hang gliders and powered ultralights. In 2011, he started giving beginner to advanced coaching of paraglider,  hang glider, and sailplane pilots in thermaling and cross-country (XC) flying. He has created a free online thermaling and XC course and He's passionate about soaring (especially cross-country)... and about helping others have more fun soaring!  To pay for his fun, he works as a mechanical/aerospace engineer.  For our Safety soaring Segment we go back to Oshkosh 2019 Where we interviewed Riley Speidel live on location under the wing of her aircraft for the 50th Anniversary Celebration. All this and more now on Soaring The Sky! http://soaramerica.wordpress.com/ https://sites.google.com/site/thermalxc

Yesterday marked the 6th month anniversary of this program, which I launched to help explain various things that happen in and around Charlottesville. That’s hours of podcasts and thousands and thousands of words about this community, and many of them belong to the various people in local government, and the citizens that participate. I thank you for reading and listening, and I want to acknowledge the many people who have provided financial support. At the end of this post, you can find out how you can join them. For now, though, it’s more important to get to the information.Planned for today’s show:Charlottesville hires regional administrator Chip Boyles to serve as City ManagerCharlottesville Planning Commission begins its work in 2021 Albemarle County Schools transitioning to all virtual learningAfter a tense start to 2021 that included over a dozen hours spent in closed emergency session, Charlottesville City Council has named a city manager. City Councilor Michael Payne read from a prepared statement. “We would like to announce that Mr. Chip Boyles has agreed to join the organization as City Manager,” Payne said. “After carefully balancing the needs of the city at this current time, we are offering Mr. Boyles the City Manager position with the goal of stabilizing the organization and rebuilding the leadership team within City Hall.”Chip Boyles has been executive director of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District since April 2014Boyles came to the area in the spring of 2014 when he was hired to be executive director of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District, a regional agency that provides government services to the city as well as five surrounding counties.“I look forward to working with all of the city staff and I especially look forward to working with all of the Charlottesville community,” Boyles said. “I know that there are a number of citizens that were looking for a different direction as a City Manager but I’m trusting the City Council and your commitment to the city to lead all of Charlottesville to a much brighter future. I hope that over time I will build the support of all the community for all of us to work together to work toward a more unified community and Charlottesville.” Boyles will not be known as an interim city manager, though Payne said Council will reopen a search for city manager sometime next year with the goal of getting public input. If successful, Boyles would be able to participate in that process. The joint statement also acknowledges recent dysfunction and said solutions won’t happen overnight. “Over the past several months, city government has experienced significant turnover, uncertainty, and instability,” Payne said. “This has occurred at a time when our community is facing historic challenges created by a global pandemic, economic instability, and the need to address long-standing inequities within our community.”During his tenure, Boyles has helped promote regional cooperation in public transit, affordable housing, and many of the various issues that face our overall community. The TJPDC has overseen the creation of the Cherry Avenue Small Area Plan, created the Ruckersville Area Plan in Greene County, and is currently planning on a similar study for Zion Crossroads. Boyles received a Master’s in Public Administration from Clemson University and a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of South Carolina. He served for five years as city manager in Taneytown, a small town in western Maryland. In 2000 he became assistant city administrator of the city of Clemson in South Carolina, a position that gave him eight years working in a community in a university town not unlike Charlottesville. Other positions include urban development director in the city parish of Baton Rouge, Louisiana and a vice president at the East Baton Rouge Redevelopment Administration.In April 2014, Boyles succeeded previous TJPDC executive director Stephen Williams. William’s contract was not renewed following fall-out from allegations of financial mismanagement related to a federal grant. Mayor Nikuyah Walker said she supported Boyles serving in the new position. She’s worked with him from her position as a board member of the Regional Transit Partnership and the TJPDC Board. “My thoughts here was that we had wanted someone who is neutral,” Walker said. “Chip has been here in the community for a number of years but he hasn’t been in the organization and it will provide us an opportunity to just look at any issues that were brought up through a neutral lens and I thought that was very important.”Interim City Manager John Blair will leave the city to take a job as city attorney in Staunton. Councilor Heather Hill thanked him for his service. “Mr. Blair’s departure is a great loss for the organization and the community that we serve,” Hill said. “I would be remiss to not acknowledge the sacrifices that he and his family have made for this organization during his tenure and most notable in his time as acting City Manager.”Blair took over as interim in September after Dr. Tarron Richardson resigned that month after a brief tenure that lasted little over a year. Councilor Lloyd Snook also thanked Blair for serving as interim manager. “As Charlottesville goes, so goes our region as well, so it will not be a complete change but just more of a difference in a way to focus on the the city of Charlottesville but keeping the region in mind as well,” Boyles said. A longer version of this story will be forthcoming in a special edition of this program for premium subscribers. They’ll get to see it first, and then it will be made public. *Albemarle County reports 48 new cases of COVID today and one of the two core indicators used by the Centers for Disease Control to gauge transmission risk is at the highest level. The total number of cases per 100,000 people over the past 14 days is at 557.4 and the percent positive rate over 14 days is at 8.5 percent. The higher case counts have led Superintendent Matthew Haas to order county schools to go back to all-virtual instruction beginning Tuesday, January 19. He sent this email to family and staff.“While schools remain among the safest places in our community in helping to prevent the spread of the virus, given what is occurring around us, now is not the time to be recommending that we continue with or increase the thousands of students now receiving their instruction face-to-face,” Haas wrote in an email addressed to families and staff. Haas writes that all-virtual will continue through at least February 1. That’s the date for which the school system had been planning to move more students into face-to-face instruction. The day is significant because it marks the beginning of a new grading period. Haas said he will change his planning targets. “The uncertain and highly volatile nature of this illness requires us to be instantly flexible and proactive in our decision-making,” Haas said. “I no longer will be making recommendations tied to marking periods. I will continue to rely upon the health data in our county, the advice of our health department, and the views of our parents and employees to determine when a change in our instructional plans should be recommended to our School Board. An announcement about whether they will return to the current tier of stage 3 will be made on January 27. That will occur on the school system’s Stages of Returning webpage. Source: Virginia Department of Health*Albemarle’s case count of 48 is included within the 5,294 new COVID cases reported by the Virginia Department of Health today. The seven-day average of positive PCR tests has declined slightly to 15.5 percent. There are another 74 deaths reported, bringing the total to 5,626 in the past ten months. Albemarle is within the Blue Ridge Health District, which reports 112 cases today. That also includes 20 cases in Charlottesville, 19 in Louisa, 11 in Nelson, nine in Fluvanna and five in Greene. Source: Virginia Department of Health*The tradition of long meetings that Charlottesville City Government is famous for has continued into the new year. The Planning Commission met for four hours Tuesday. Commissioner Gary Heaton said at the beginning of the meeting that he welcomed the work ahead.“I did want to say to everybody how encouraging it is to show up to a civic meeting at a time where there is a lot of conversation about what government is,” Heaton said. “And here it is right on the computer screen. Thank you everybody for your participation.”The commission also got an update on the status of a new format for another regional planning body that consists of Charlottesville, Albemarle and the University of Virginia. What was a public body called the Planning and Coordination Council is now something different. Bill Palmer is with the Office of the Architect at the University of Virginia, and sits on the city Planning Commission as a non-voting member. “What used to be the PACC-Tech or PACC and has now been reiterated as LUEPC,” Palmer said. “Don’t make me say what that acronym is because I don’t remember exactly.”I don’t blame Palmer, because the Land Use, Environmental and Planning Committee doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. Still, it will provide the same function as what it has replaced.“That’s kind of the coordination committee for the city, county and University of Virginia to talk about planning issues,” Palmer said. The group meets for the first time this year on Friday. That event is not subject to open meeting rules because it consists of staff. Currently there is no agenda available online. Another city committee charged with thinking about planning is the PLACE Design Task Force, upon which City Planning Commissioner Rory Stolzenberg sits. City Council voted last year to stop having PLACE report directly to Council. “At this point the general idea is to reform as a general sort of think tank or bodies of experts that the city can draw from in order to create ad hoc task forces for any problem it wants to solve,” Stolzenberg said. “Things like lighting plans, or whatever.”One idea would be for the group to address specific problems in the city. Stolzenberg had one suggestion. “Since Council is debating the future of the West Main Streetscape which is a very expensive budget item, and we don’t have lots of room in the budget, one thing that we’re trying to brainstorm is kind of tactical urbanist improvements that we could make to the street at very low cost in order to make it a safer better experience in the near term without spending $50 million dollars.” One possibility for community engagement may come in the form of informal walking tours to gather input, but of course, only when it’s safe to gather again. Commissioners also got a brief update on the Cville Plans Together initiative, which seeks to update the Comprehensive Plan, create an affordable housing strategy, and update the zoning code. Jennifer Koch is the project manager with the consultant, Rhodeside & Harwell. There will be a work session on January 26 to discuss something known as the Future Land Use map, which signals to developers and property owners desired levels of density and intensity. “We’re convening several times as a consultant team this week to determine that we have the right program… for that meeting so we can have a really productive and effective discussion,” Koch said. “We will let you know as soon as possible this week if we need to delay that a little bit but right now I am looking forward to speaking with you more about land use on the 26th.” *After that, the Commission got into the Cherry Avenue Small Area Plan, a document created by the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission.  I’ll have a story on that for paid subscribers first later on in the week. They also recommended approval of a special use permit to add additional density at 1000 Monticello Avenue, a project that drew opposition from many in the neighborhood as well as from housing advocates. For more on that, read Nolan Stout’s account in the Daily Progress.*Thanks for reading today. As I mentioned, I’ve passed the six month point of creating this newsletter for the community. If you would like to support its continued production, consider one of many ways. All proceeds go to my company Town Crier Productions. Support my research on local government by making a donation through PatreonSign for a subscription to Charlottesville Community Engagement, free or paidMake a contribution through VenmoContact me about a commercial sponsorship This is a public episode. Get access to private episodes at communityengagement.substack.com/subscribe

Written by Bill Palmer and presented by Erik Jones Daniel 9 contains one of the most passionate prayers in the Bible. What can we learn from Daniel’s prayer of confession and His appeal to God’s mercy? Read online

Written by Bill Palmer and David Johnson and presented by Clyde Kilough Here are reviews of some resources that give helpful background information about the time of Jesus Christ, the apostles and the early New Testament Church. Read online

Nunawading Basketball was established in 1969. In 1979, a Nunawading Spectres men's team entered the National Basketball League for its inaugural season. Barry Barnes would coach the team during every NBL season until the team decided to move into the CBD to facilitate more fans and in doing so were renamed the Eastside Melbourne Spectres. The Nunawading Spectres would narrowly miss out on an NBL Grand Final appearance due to countback in 1979 and then were runners-up in 1981 to Launceston City Casino. The Spectres' opening-night roster included Bill Palmer, Fox, Brendan Joyce, Alan Black, Dean Templeton and Barry Barnes as coach. Six men who were to play significant roles in shaping the NBL during it's for 20 seasons. Palmer became general manager of the league in the mid-90s and took the game to new heights. Fox, Joyce, Black and Templeton became NBL head coaches with a combined 565-499 win-loss record and four NBL Coach of the Year awards (two each for Black and Joyce). Among other players who wore the red, white and blue for Nunawading in the NBL were Damian Keogh, Dean Uthoff, Bruce Bolden, Ian Stacker, Steve Lunardon, Chuck Harmison, Vince Hinchen, Darren Lucas and Robert Scrigni. Barry Barnes would also coach the Geelong Supercats and Canberra Cannons before becoming the first full-time head coach of the Australian Men’s  National Team in 1993, leading the Boomers in two Olympics (1996 & 2000) and two FIBA World Championships (1994 & 1998). Topics include; The history of the Nunawading Spectres NBL program (2:00) The difference's between the Australian National program in the 1960s compared to the 1990s (10:30) The NBL begins in 1979, Barry's memories of that time and the first season of the Nunawading Spectres (18:00) The Spectres miss out on the 1979 Grand Final in unusual fashion (30:00) The Spectres ability to produce some of the greatest Australian coaching talent in the 1980s (36:00) Why Barry wasn't happy about the team moving to the CDB and becoming the Eastside Spectres (41:00) A three-year stint with the Geelong Supercats which includes Shane Heal, John Dorge, Daren Rowe and Bobby Locke (47:00 Does winning the coach of the year award mean you're doing your best coaching? (56:00) What things would he do differently as a coach knowing where the game is today (100:00) Who was the hardest opposition player to stop during his time as a coach (103:00) Memories of former Nunawading Spectre Robert Scrigni who sadly took his own life only a few years after playing for the Australian Boomers (106:00) Thoughts on his former Boomers assistant Brett Brown being fired by the Philadelphia 76ers (108:00) Visit dunk.com.au for your next set of basketball uniforms. Listen to our previous interviews with the biggest stars in Australian Basketball, head to Aussiehoopla.com. Check out previous podcasts featuring; Australian Basketball Legends - Luc Longley, Andrew Gaze, Shane Heal, Mark Bradtke, Leroy Loggins, David Andersen, Andrew Vlahov, CJ Bruton, Chris Anstey, Brett Maher, John Rillie, Tony Ronaldson, Brad Newley Current NBL Stars - Kevin Lisch, AJ Ogilvy, Damian Martin, Daniel Kickert, Thomas Abercrombie, Jason Cadee, Bryce Cotton, Chris Goulding, Mitch McCarron, Cam Gliddon, Anthony Drmic Our Finest Coaching Minds - Brian Goorjian, Barry Barnes, Joey Wright, Adrian Hurley, Aaron Fearne, Rob Beveridge, Phil Smyth, Ian Stacker, Shawn Dennis, Dean Vickerman, Trevor Gleeson, Lindsey Gaze, Ken Cole, Will Weaver NBA Stars Past & Present - Andrew Bogut, Matthew Dellavedova, Stephen Jackson, Randy Livingston, Torrey Craig, Acie Earl, Josh Childress, Reggie Smith, Todd Lichti, Ryan Broekhoff, Doug Overton The NBL's Greatest Imports - Darryl McDonald, Ricky Grace, Derek Rucker, Leon Trimmingham, Scott Fisher, Lanard Copeland, Mike Mitchell, Darnell Mee, Isaac Burton, Adonis Jordan, Shawn Redhage, Willie Farley, Al Green, Corey "Homicide" Williams, Andre Moore, Steve Woodberry, Mike Mitchell, Dusty Rychart, Ebi Ere, Doug Overton And the men who run things - Larry Kestelman, Paul Maley, Vince Crivelli, Jeremy Loeliger, Chuck Harmison, Jeff Van Groningen, Bob Turner All that and much more. Follow @AussieHoopla on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or email us at info@aussiehoopla.com

Written by Bill Palmer and presented by Erik Jones Just before Jesus died, He cried out in Aramaic, quoting Psalm 22:1, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” What do the events around His death mean for us? Read online

The grifters who ascended in the wake of the 2016 election and rode Russiagate to disgrace and — sadly — financial gain. Louise Mensch — queen of "putinbot" and russiagate accusations. Bill Palmer, chronicler of Donald Trump's breakfast farts. And Seth Abramson, fan of long tweet threads that only the dumbest would buy. Jake finally gets in touch with us, and it looks like he's in Quite The Pickle. Might even have something to do with Abramson and his basement room. Sign up at: patreon.com/qanonanonymous to get all our weekly premium episodes!

The grifters who ascended in the wake of the 2016 election and rode Russiagate to disgrace and — sadly — financial gain. Louise Mensch — queen of "putinbot" and russiagate accusations. Bill Palmer, chronicler of Donald Trump's breakfast farts. And Seth Abramson, fan of long tweet threads that only the dumbest would buy. Jake finally gets in touch with us, and it looks like he's in Quite The Pickle. Might even have something to do with Abramson and his basement room. Sign up at: patreon.com/qanonanonymous to get all our weekly premium episodes!

After the Boeing 737 MAX 8 crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia, the question is whether cockpit automation is working for pilots or pilots are working for the automation. We talk with the pilot of Qantas Flight 72, An Airbus A330 that pitched down without control input and without warning a decade ago. The pilot of that aircraft says of the MAX 8 accidents, “the road is different, but the destination is the same.” Our roundtable of pilots and aviation journalists looks at the growing complexity of flight deck automation, our increasing dependence on it and the lack of training available to pilots for cases in which the automation fails. Participants: Capt. Kevin Sullivan, Qantas Flight 72, October 8, 2008 Capt. Gary Rower, Airbus A330 international captain and cockpit resource management trainer Capt. Bill Palmer, Airbus A330 international captain and author Capt. Bert Botta, former international captain and flight crew trainer, now flying business aircraft Mark Phelps, executive editor, AIN Publications Matt Thurber, editor-in-chief, AIN Publications Rob Finfrock, aviation writer

Have you ever dreamed of taking a spring break hunting trip to quail country? Dr. Bill Palmer of Tall Timbers Research Station gives a few pointers on DIY public land quail hunts and describes the magic of a covey rise. The guys also discuss the creation of Quail Forever, the Mr. Mom bobwhite quail advantage, and the critical importance of prescribed fire to bobwhite quail habitat management.

What Story are You Writing with Your Team? Today's guest, Bill Palmer, principal at Palmer and Associates, helps us think about concrete techniques and strategies to write more positive stories with our staff teams and volunteers. For show notes visit: www.reclaimedleader.com/episode67

This week Matt & Andy give you their book recommendations and announce the winners of the latest completion to win a copy of Fly! by Richard De Crespigny. Here are their book recommendations, QF32 - Richard De Crespigny https://amzn.to/2BtpVZE  Fly! - Richard De Crespigny https://amzn.to/2ClkBsR  The Smell of Kerosene - NASA https://amzn.to/2BrLZ6Y  Understanding Air France 447 - Bill Palmer https://amzn.to/2Rbu9iJ  Flying Concorde: The Full Story - Brian Calvert https://amzn.to/2GvUbsD  Black Box Thinking - Matthew Syed https://amzn.to/2SXYtKz Riding Rockets - Mike Mullane https://amzn.to/2GBFPXY  If you were the winners this week then get in touch with your delivery details and we'll get them sent out straight away.  

Bill Palmer has dedicated much of his life to helping people get comfortable with death. Hear why he has hosted more than 75 Death Cafes and what he's learned from them and the people who attend. Note: A Life and Death Conversation is produced for the ear. The optimal experience will come from listening to it. We provide the transcript as a way to easily navigate to a particular section and for those who would like to follow along using the text. We strongly encourage you to listen to the audio which allows you to hear the full emotional impact of the show. A combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers generates transcripts which may contain errors. The corresponding audio should be checked before quoting in print. Contact Death Cafe website Transcript Dr. Bob: My guest on today's podcast has been on a really interesting journey over the past several years. Bill Palmer is a successful executive coach and management consultant who lives in Oakland, California. After a personal experience with a loved one who died while being supported by an excellent hospice organization, Bill was inspired to come home to Oakland and start volunteering with other people on hospice. And then he began hosting Death Cafes. To date, Bill's hosted over 75 Death Cafes for members of his community up in Oakland. If you're not familiar with Death Cafes, you will be after listening to this very informative podcast. Bill has had incredible insights through many, many hours spent with hundreds of people openly discussing death and dying. From the very practical aspects to the emotional and spiritual issues. On this podcast, he shares some of the insights that he's gained with us. I believe this can help you become more comfortable having those meaningful and really important conversations that you should be having with your loved ones and with yourself. I hope you're as grateful for these insights and reminders as I was, as I was speaking to them. Bill, thank you so much for being willing to spend some time with us and share a bit of your experience and knowledge with the listeners. Bill Palmer: Sure you're welcome. Dr. Bob: You have an interesting life, I'm assuming. For some reason, you have chosen to dedicate yourself to helping people get more comfortable talking about death. How did that come about? What was the ... My understanding is that you're a business coach and that you're coaching people through different aspects of business and leadership. How do you become a Death Cafe leader from that place? What was your journey? Bill Palmer: The journey really started actually, quite a few years ago when my mother was admitted as a hospice patient in Florida. She received incredibly good care at the Hospice of Palm Beach County where she lived at the time. As a business coach, and as an organizational development consultant, I was struck mostly by the wonderful care that she and my family received, but I was also struck by the incredible business alignment and sense of higher purpose in that hospice. At the time, I thought it was unique. And since then I volunteered in several different hospices. I found that to be more the rule than the exception. Somehow, rather, and I don't recall exactly how I came across a guy named John Underwood who lived in London, and who was the founder of Death Café. It just seemed like a great idea to me at the time. I became a hospice volunteer because I wanted to give something back. It didn't especially require any special skill to be a hospice volunteer. Sometimes just sitting with somebody, visiting, doing a respite visit something like that. But Death Cafe appealed to me because I could bring to bear some of the skills that I feel I have in terms of leading groups and speaking with individuals in an open and honest and kind of free, willing environment. So, I decided I would take John's advice and example and do a Death Café, which is actually pretty easy to do. Dr. Bob: You have the model, right? He shared the model with you and ... From my understanding ... Tell us what a Death Cafe for people who don't really understand it. Bill Palmer: Well, first of all, there's a website called www.deathcafe.com, and it gives a full explanation not only of what a Death Cafe is but how to start one if you want to in your own community. A Death Cafe is simply a free and open ... Free meaning there's no fee to attend, a group meeting of people, whoever wants to come, who want to talk about any aspect of death that interests them. That could be anything from where do I get a will to, deep philosophical and religious concerns to, what are the regulations about scattering ashes to, my companion died 40 years ago and I'm still grieving to, my spouse died last week and I feel nothing. There's an incredible richness of experience and this is going to sound really strange, but they're actually fun. There's a lot of laughter in a Death Cafe. Some of that laughter is just nervousness about speaking about a taboo subject, but some of it is just appreciation of life. If I could make one generalization about the Death Cafes, people leave feeling strongly that what they're doing in their lives right now, whether they're close to death or whether they feel like they're very far away, takes on an added significance if they can find a way to accept the fact that we're all going to die. One thing that surprised me about the 75 Death Cafes I've led is the number of people who apparently, intelligent, responsible, normal people who actually don't really think they're going to die. Dr. Bob: They certainly act like that, right? Bill Palmer: Yeah. Like I said, responsible, taxpaying, voting, civic-minded people who don't have a will, who don't have an advanced care directive, who've never discussed their wishes for their care towards the end of their lives. It is just an indication of the power of the taboo that people who in most every other aspect of their lives behave quite responsibly. But in this one area, even after they see and hear about the chaos that ensues if you die without a will, if you die without an advanced care directive, if you die or become disabled, even after they hear stories about that, it doesn't seem to get them. Dr. Bob: Do you think that people are denying that they're going to die or that they just think somehow things are going to work out? They just don't want to ... They don't feel like they need to do the preparation because things just have a way of working out? Bill Palmer: Well, I guess on an intellectual level, of course, they know they're going to die. But I think on some kind of emotional level, like a child, they don't really believe it. But I think it's probably a little bit of both, is just if you've never sat down and filled out an advance care directives, and you're using a good one, I'd ask some pretty tough questions. For example, if you don't really know what resuscitation is like, you might think sure, resuscitate me. And if you find out what resuscitation is actually really like in many cases, you might decide something very different. Dr. Bob: Right, in most cases. I think people, they watch TV shows, they watch ER or St. Elsewhere, these shows that depict somebody having a cardiac arrest. They do a couple of things and then a few seconds later they sit up and everyone's relieved, and it doesn't depict the absolute horror that ensues when somebody's doing chest compressions and ribs are breaking, and there's virtually no chance of survival in the vast majority of cases. So, yeah, are those kinds of things discussed even at that kind of graphic level? Are people open to hearing those kinds of things when they show up for the Death Cafes? Bill Palmer: Yeah, I think so. Anyone who leads a Death Cafe, including myself, leads it with a very light touch. There's no schedule of activities. There are no small groups. There are no icebreakers or anything like that. It's just open conversation. If somebody brings that up, people listen, and I think people are affected by it. There is a great deal of information that gets shared. A common statement is, my family won't discuss my death with me. I will or someone else in the group will say, "Well, here are some great resources." The conversation project, for example, can give you some tips and guidelines and do's and don'ts for, how do you have this conversation with people that don't want to talk about it? It's not an easy thing. So, I think there's that and there's a sense of comfort and community and that people find out well, gosh, I'm not alone in this. Other people feel this way too, or are afraid of the same thing, or have had a similar experience. I think it's comforting to people. Dr. Bob: Yeah. Oh, it's rich, and like you say, it's a safe space. Interestingly, I haven't been to one for a bit, but when I went to a few Death Cafes here in San Diego, and they did break up into small groups like four people and then there were some sample questions to stimulate conversation. There was a little bit of discussion as a group. I think as I remember, representatives from the small groups talked about some of the insights that came out. But I felt like there were so many people in the room, there were maybe 50 to 60 people in the room, and I felt like we missed getting the insight from more people in that space. So, I feel like maybe the open format like you're describing could be even more effective if everybody who wants to speak has a chance to. Bill Palmer: Well, anyone who's interested in starting a Death Cafe can read on the Death Cafe website, very specific and clear instructions for leading one. I think that if someone is fortunate enough to get 50 or 60 people at a Death Cafe, that's nice, but I think it's an unwieldy number. I know that I've always limited the attendance of Death Cafe to 20. Even at 20, it can be a bit unwieldy. So, I think the smaller group dynamic works. I know I was asked to help with a Death Cafe that was being sponsored in a retirement community here in the East Bay in California. 40, 50 people showed up. Yeah, we split up into small groups, but it just wasn't as satisfying. It is just really difficult to manage. If anybody's considering doing it, I would strongly recommend that you limit the attendance. You can use a website like Eventbrite which is a free ... It's like Evite, or Eventbrite, one, they're pretty much the same. You can invite people to purchase free tickets, or just sign up for registration. Then you can limit it to 15 or 20. Dr. Bob: How did you go about finding a location? Because if you're there's no fee, I'm assuming you've done 75 of these, I'm assuming that you're trying to avoid spending a lot of your own money on these. Is there money available from any organization to help defray costs of putting these on? Bill Palmer: Actually, to be specific, The Death Cafe, you can charge a fee if it's to reimburse the cost. For example, if you rent some space or if you provide some refreshments, you can recoup the cost with nominal fees. I was very fortunate. There's a funeral home here in Oakland called Chapel of the Chimes. They have a long, long history of community involvement and a beautiful setting. They have a lovely acreage and their buildings are fantastic. They have a high commitment to community service. So, I called him up and I said, "Would you sponsor a Death Cafe? I.e. give us free publicity, give us free space?" They said, "Yeah, we'll do that, and we'll also provide coffee and cookies and donuts for you. Because it's right in line with the way that we want to be involved with the community." Death Cafe Oakland gets free space and a little bit of free publicity. They get 20 people a month walking in there who maybe otherwise wouldn't know about Chapel of the Chimes. They've just been great to us. Churches are likely spots, community centers are likely spots. Synagogues are likely spots, and funeral homes I think. There's an obvious disincentive for certain people, well, I don't want to go to a funeral home ever for any reason, but it's worked for us very well. Dr. Bob: Right? Well, my sense ... So, a great alignment, it seems like a great partnership as long as everybody's approaching it with the right intention, and it's comfortable. You don't want to partner with somebody who's going to be pushy and pushing their services. It sounds like that's clearly not happening. But the people who are coming to Death Cafes are probably the same people who don't mind walking into a funeral home. Bill Palmer: That's probable. Dr. Bob: You've got a bit of a self-selected group. Well, that's helpful. I appreciate that. So, you've done 75 of the Death Cafes. When was your first one? Do remember- Bill Palmer: March, of 2013. We actually had our 76th last night. Dr. Bob: Fantastic. So, you've spent 76, and then they're probably what, an hour and a half to two hours each? Bill Palmer: Two hours, yeah. Dr. Bob: Okay. You've had a lot of time to hear people sharing. I'm sure that you are well aware of some of the gaps and the challenges and the struggles around living and dying. Can you share some of the top insights that you've gained from the experience, and offer some of those to the listeners? Bill Palmer: I've thought about this a lot. Something that jumps out at me is that how we die in America is largely a function of race and wealth. Death Cafe in Oakland or the part of Oakland that we're in is a very different thing than a Death Cafe might be in a very different part of Oakland. That jumps out at me constantly. Another thing that jumps out at me is, we live in a secular world, many of us do. Certainly, here in California, at least in the East Bay, in the Bay Area. I'm not sure that that's a bad thing but another thing that jumps out at me is that the loss of rituals, of customs, and community, most religions supply ... Things are taking their place but if you look at the Jewish religion, or you look at Islam, or you look at Catholicism, really any of the major world's religions, Hindu, there are very specific rituals and customs around death that are a comfort, and that allow people to navigate or at least help them to navigate through what is painful and difficult. So, I think that a lot of the interest in Death Cafe and in the conversation around death, it's much larger than Death Café, is around some of the loss of those rituals and the lack of replacements for them. Dr. Bob: I started to write down the statement because I'm sure it was going to be something really valuable. Could you finish the statement, the loss of rituals, customs and community around the time of death has- Bill Palmer: Left a vacuum where people are alone. They don't have a way to navigate through that first, terrible few days, weeks, months. I just think it makes it harder. Dr. Bob: It's a vacuum, I can see that. So, people were coming to the Death Cafes in part to help to fill that void, that vacuum, or because they're afraid that that will be there? Bill Palmer: Yeah, I think on two levels. One is simply, what are rituals that I could participate in that I no longer an observant and fill in the blank. Catholic or Jew or Muslim or whatever. There are rituals that people have created in this country or reinvented in this country about dying at home, and how to care for the body of someone who has just died, against the medicalization and hospitalization, and institutionalization of death. So, I think it's both those things. Some of it is just information. What am I supposed to do? Where can I go to find some community around it? Dr. Bob: The practical issues that can really lead to a lot of stress and anxiety if they're not addressed or planned for. Bill Palmer: Yeah, exactly. Dr. Bob: Any other big insights that are jumping out for you? Bill Palmer: Unfinished business. I can't tell you. I haven't done an exact count, but probably in the 75 Death Cafes, we've had, oh gosh, 500, 600 people come through there. What I constantly hear is five years, 10 years, 20 years after someone died, that the unfinished business that I had with that person haunts me. I never forgave them, or they never forgave me. I had a sister, brothers, spouse, father, mother, son, daughter, and I never resolved what it was that drove us apart. To me, unfinished business in our relationships is the gasoline that gets thrown on the fire of grief. It just makes it all that much worse because you can't fix it once they're gone, they're gone. So, that's something that I hear over and over again. Dr. Bob: Do you offer resources ... it seems to me like ... I think one of the things that felt a little bit dissatisfying for me about the Death Cafes, was that there were people who are clearly looking for support and needing additional help and resources, and there wasn't ... Because it's not promotional, you're not giving out pamphlets or directing people specifically to resources. It feels like there would be an opportunity to bring in some experts and to have people bring in their specific questions to get that kind of guidance. What's the thinking on that? Bill Palmer: Well, I think the thinking is, and it may be flawed is that, above all, John Underwood the founder of Death Cafe did not want to commercialize. I've had any number of invitations from perfectly respectable, fine people who have a book, they have a program they have this, that or the other thing, and they want to come in and in effect, make a sales pitch. Under normal circumstances, I'd say that'd be fine. But I think it leaves us open to having to vet them, having to know what they say. My solution has been to, I've created a Facebook page for Death Cafe Oakland. I post resources there. If somebody says, "Well, gee, how do I start this conversation with my spouse?" I can mention the conversation project. I can also tell people to look on that Facebook page, which is open to the public. You don't have to have attended Death Cafe Oakland to see it. You can find wills, you can find an Advance Care Directive. You can find lots and lots of research. So, I agree with you that the one thing I do specify is that, and I say this at the beginning of every Death Café, is this is not grief counseling. So, if you're grieving, what I say is, please talk about if you want to, we will support you, but it's not grief counseling in the sense that I personally cannot offer you continuing support. Dr. Bob: Yes, it's not a support group. It's a forum, right? With a lot of people coming for different reasons? Bill Palmer: Right. I can refer them ... They can do a Google search as easily as I can on bereavement groups. There's many of them. But I agree with you, my solution is a bit of a compromise, and hopefully, it's workable, but probably every single person who ever came to Death Cafe Oakland who wanted a specific resource for a specific need sometimes didn't get it. Dr. Bob: You're staying true to a mission and that's honorable and it makes sense because you could open it up for all kinds of challenges if you don't keep the boundaries clear, and you're providing ... Again, you're doing this all as a volunteer, right? You have a career and you have to divide your time between things that allow you to pursue that and to ... I really applaud you, commend you for your passion and commitment to this. It's really remarkable. Bill Palmer: The irony is I get more than I give. I appreciate you for saying that, thank you. Dr. Bob: Just to quickly follow up on that, what have you gotten? How has it changed you to have this experience and to be part of this movement? Bill Palmer: Well on a very practical level, to avoid any hint of hypocrisy, I have filled out every form known to humanity with regard to my death, and I'm closer in terms of age, I've got a lot more behind me than I do ahead of me. I think that what I've gotten, the most valuable thing I've gotten about that is, if not an acceptance of it, but a clear idea of, if I have my way, how I want it to go to know exactly what I think is right for me in terms of end of life care. If I'm not able to make decisions or to be mentally competent, a great deal of faith in the agreements that I have with my family, specifically my daughter and my son, who I 100% trust will carry out my wishes should I not be able to act on my own. So, that's a huge gift, that really is. Just the incredible richness and variety of the people who show up, I'm always interested in groups of people. I'm never bored in a group because I'm always watching to see and hear and feel what's going on, and they never disappoint me. It's always fascinating. Dr. Bob: Yeah, I couldn't agree more, especially when they're talking about issues that are so vital and important to them. Do you still have any fear or concerns about what lies ahead for you? Bill Palmer: Sure. I think the idea of gradually losing capabilities is what bothers me and bothers most people that I talk to. Not that I'll be dead, but that I won't be able to move, or I won't be able to speak, or I won't be able to hear, or see, and then that gradual loss of capability, of mobility. Of course, I'm afraid of that. I've also been a hospice volunteer and seen people who seem to live with a quality of life, whose lost a lot. So, I take a little comfort in that. But yeah, that scares me. Dr. Bob: That is such an interesting awareness, right? That some people when they lose certain capabilities, certain degrees of independence, when they're dealing with challenges, some people are ready to die because they've lost these things and it's intolerable for them and they're ready to check out as soon as possible. Then there are others who just handle it with such grace and acceptance and even joy. I don't know what the secret formula is, I'm looking for it. Because I want to be able to A, have it for myself, and B, be able to prescribe it for my patients. But it's such a unique individual, I guess, a way of being in the world. I try to figure it out, but I haven't been able to, and I'm still working on that. Bill Palmer: Let me know when you do. Dr. Bob: Yeah, I will. You'll be one of the first ones. As far as ... I think most of us share a little bit of the fear of the unknown of what's coming. I guess one of the things that I'm really passionate about now is helping to give people a greater sense of understanding, a greater sense of control over the circumstances that they may find themselves in. Part of that is by doing all the right preparation, filling out all the right paperwork, having the conversations with those who will be responsible for making those decisions if you can't. But also, I think ... Do you feel like you have a medical team, do you feel like you have a physician who if and when things become really challenging or intolerable for you, will engage at the level that you need to support you through that difficult challenging last journey? Bill Palmer: Yeah, I do. I am a Kaiser Permanente member. And one of the criteria for my primary care physician that I insisted on was somebody who would not only understand my wishes about that but who would act upon them. The interviews that I did, I found a physician who I'm reasonably certain will honor my wishes. My advanced care directive is scanned into my medical record there... it's a crapshoot a little bit- Dr. Bob: A little bit, it always is. Bill Palmer: You fall down on the street and nobody knows who you are, and they take you to whatever hospital, the ER people are bound by law and by custom to do everything that they can to resuscitate you. Is there a chance it could all go sideways? Yeah, but I feel like ... I've taken every precaution I could to try to make it go the way that I want, and my physician she seems like she's just fine with it. So that's important. Dr. Bob: Well, let's hope whenever it happens, many many years in the future, she'll probably be retired, and you'll have to have a new person who comes on ... I guess that's a good reason to try to find younger doctors so that you connect with. Well, this has been great. I feel like we've given people a great overview of what the Death Cafes are designed to do, and hopefully given some insight into where some of the challenges and struggles people face are, and how to try to mitigate those. I appreciate your time. If you have any burning thoughts that you want to share before we sign off, I am all ears. If you feel like you're complete with what we've discussed, that's totally cool too. Bill Palmer: No burning thoughts, but I want to thank you for the time, and for your thoughtful questions and statements. It was great to connect with you and someday, some way I hope our paths will cross. Thank you again. Dr. Bob: Thank you, Bill. Bill Palmer, founder and curator of Death Cafe Oakland, and I'm sure our paths will cross hopefully fairly soon.

VISIT OUR SPONSORS: LOUISIANA RENAISSANCE FESTIVAL RENAISSANCE MAGAZINE Faire (The American Rennie Love Rock Parody) by The Village Idiots from Chamber of Stupidity The Ship That Never Returned by Pandora Celtica from F'n Sharp Spell by Capt'n Black's Sea Dogs from Tales of the Black Dog Dark Lady by Pride Of Bedlam from Refit The Orange and the Green by The Belles of Bedlam from Folked Up! A Little Over One With The Other by Iris and Rose from Happy Endings Red Earth by Cast in Bronze from Best Day Ever Jump At The Sun by Sarah Marie Mullen from The Wild Woods Wild Rover, Bill Palmer version by Bedlam Bards from Take Out The Trash No Shade Never, by Rowan and the Rose from Travelling Minstrels What Do You Do With A Drunken Barmaid by Merry Wives of Windsor from Bottoms Up Cha Ching by Queen Ann's Lace from Faire To Stormy Weather Beginning of Patreon only Section: To hear the extended version with no commercial interruptions go to Patreon Old Time Religion by Craig of Farrington from Easy Being The Alphabet Song by The Other Woman from I Want You For Fun And Frivolity And Then I’ll Give You Back Lady Hath Bustle by Daniel Birt from Songs of My People Stairway by Galamor the Bard from Drive-By Barding End of Patreon only Section: To hear the extended version with no commercial interruptions go to Patreon Exclamations by Brobdinagian Bards from Brobdignagian Fairy Tales Where, Oh Where, Art Thou Tonight by Boogie Knights from Many A Sleepless Knight   CREDITS: A Moment in History by The Rude Tudors Background Music: Reflection by Cast in Bronze from Laird of the Rings Shakespeare Approves by Willie Shakespeare A Minute with Fugli by Fugli The Moat by Scoundrels Inn Joe on the Road by Joe Haydu Information Provided by therenlist.com Background Music: Scarborough Fair by Kindred Spirits The Secret Garden by Serena MINIONS: Honorary Minion - Jesse Linder Honorary Minion - Meister Realm Honorary Minion - Brad Boucher Honorary Minion - Marc Gunn Producer - The Tinker Host / Audio Editor - Thomas Host / Musicologist / Interviews - The Lookout Host / Festival News - Joe Interviews - Ken Host - Matt Host / Lyrics - Nathan Host / Show Assistant - Serena Show Facilitator - Captain Host / Audio Editor - Thomas Check out piratedirectory.com for an awesome listing of all things piratical. HOW TO CONTACT US Post it on Facebook Email us at renfestpodcast@gmail.com Call or text the castle at 478- castles that is (478) 227-8537

With violence escalating in recent weeks between Israelis and Palestinians, the conflict is once again high on the news agenda. Coverage of the story is always scrutinised strongly and this week we'll hear from listeners who allege biased reporting about both sides. But can such a long-running and complex conflict be fairly covered in a forty second news bulletin? Roger Bolton speaks to Kevin Connolly, the BBC's Middle East Correspondent. When The Daily Mail's cartoonist Stanley "Mac" McMurtry appeared on Midweek, he discussed the nature of modern satire with Libby Purvis. But during a discussion about political correctness, he used an outdated term to describe ethnic minorities that some consider offensive. Should Libby Purves have stepped in and corrected him on air? When Erica Jong was invited on to Woman's Hour, many listeners expected a steamy listen. And the author did not disappoint. Presenter Jane Garvey's attempt's to reel it in were in vain, so was it a little too much for a morning during half term? Listeners didn't seem to think so. Roger speaks to Jane Garvey about a truly memorable interview and how you know when you've stepped over the line. And last week Radio Solent broadcast an item about love in later life, and a lonely 95 year old local man, Bill Palmer, was one of those to call in. Within an hour of the call, Bill was in the studio, speaking directly to Solent's listeners. His story of elderly isolation touched many - it spread online and quickly went global. Roger speaks to Chris Harris, the executive producer on the day, and Chris Osborn, one of those who called in. Producer: Katherine Godfrey A Whistledown production for BBC Radio 4.

Another episode of the story-teller series, musician Eric George describes the meaning behind his tune "Water" off the Man No Sober EP released August 2012. The song features Mikey Chavez on drums/percussion with Eric on guitar/vocals and was recorded at Frogville Studios in Santa Fe, NM by Bill Palmer.

This one runs a bit long as in our longest show ever, but it's chock full of great! Some terrific Twitter feedback that leads into a discussion about microphones and Application deletion software. Some email talking about why Reb WON'T buy an iPad, and Bill Palmer checks in and even stays for the third segment to talk about the upcoming 100th issue of BeatWeek Magazine!Guy gets his battery changed and annoys everyone with the theme song from the place that did it and lastly, Apple's World Wide Developers Conference is coming but maybe no new hardware? Bummer.

Beatweek's Bill Palmer joins Tim today for a lively chat on where and how the music and tech industries collide. Even more entertaining, perhaps, is that Tim has been without his voice for over 48 hours, and records this episode just as it is kinda - sorta coming back. Ouch!

Interview with Bill Palmer, publisher of BeatWeek Magazine. We discuss the new iPhone, upgrading from older iPhones, the difference between new media and old, what it's like to interview Carlos Santana and Ozzy Osbourne, and so much more. You can't miss this one! Also, listener feedback and THE MAC TALKS TO US! Seriously!

Day three at Macworld Expo. Joining Tim on the main stage this year was Grant Dahlke of OWC, Paul Kent from IDG, Bill Palmer of BeatWeek, Peter Cohen from The Loop, Victor Cajiao of Typical Mac User, Chuck Joiner of MacVoicesTV, Dave Hamilton of Mac Geek Gab, Ken Ray of Mac OS Ken, and Neil Ticktin from MacTech Magazine.

OWC Radio spends another day on the Macworld Expo showroom floor, visiting Bill Palmer of BeatWeek, Guitar Toolkit, TuneUp, the OWC Booth, Sennheiser, TransTech Systems, Microvision, Wisair, Dr. Bott, Sam Levin, David Cohen, and Josh Long of MacTech Magazine.

Lee Givens and Bill Palmer join in the fun this week with Tim, David, and Guy. Topics include Michael Jackson dominating iTunes sales chart, third-party hardware for the iPhone, what's new from AOL, TomTom for iPhone, Macworld Expo, reader feedback, hot iPhones, and much more. A really great show!

This week, we look at the top Mac / Apple stories of 2008, starting with the big news of Apple pulling out of future Macworld Expo's after 2009. Joining Tim, David, and Guy this week are MyMac.com reviews editor John Nemo, new MyMac writer Mark Rudd, and iProng Magazine publisher Bill Palmer.

This week, we are joined by Mark Altekruse from Abaltat to chat about abaltat Muse 2.0, his history in computers, working for Apple, and much more. Sam Levin picks some great products for Cool Mac Picks. And on the last segment, Tim and David are joined by iProng Magazine publisher Bill Palmer and new MyMac staffer Mark Rudd to discuss everything else under the sun. A long show, but well worth the time to listen!

Mentioned in this Free Online Yoga Class Podcast : Dr. Martin Luther King program on KPFKMarianne Williamson Agape International Spiritual CenterAnusara Universal Principles of Alignment - Good to read!!! YOGACASTING with Hillary Rubin iProng Article A BIG - Thank you to Bill Palmer and E*star LA schedule for 2008 *****YOU ARE INVITED TO MY MEXICO YOGA RETREAT ***** GIVE YOURSELF THE GIFT OF YOGA IN PARADISE Anusara Yoga with Hillary April 6-12, 2008 Heat your body and cool your mind with two Anusara Yoga classes a day, and a SPECIAL BONUS!!! a 3 hr Thai Yoga Massage Class with one of LA's top therapists - Deon De Wet. Also included is a personal thai yoga massage with him to assist you to unwind and enjoy yourself fully. This retreat is designed for all levels - from those with no yoga experience including if you have physical injuries to more advanced practitioners. Everyboy is welcome to honor their process of unfolding to enjoy their own process of transformation. Between classes you'll have plenty of time to relax on the beach, shop in town, unwind in your beautiful villa or nuture yourself. You are free to make the best choices on your vacation to find the peace that resides within you. FOR MORE INFORMATION: Check this link or CALL 1-800-603-YOGA (9642) __________________________________________________________________ ADD your FACE to my facebook group Hillary's Yoga Practice Podcast Sequence for Beginners Free Online Yoga Podcast Class: All 4's Cat Cow Pose Variation of Cat Cow - Down Dog Plank Pose On your belly to Salambasana (hands clasped) Child's Pose Down Dog Uttansana - Standing Fwd Bend Down Hill Skiers Pose Urdvah Hastasana - Hands Extended Over Head Samasthiti - Mountain Pose/Pose of Alignment Uttanasana - Fwd Bend Straight Leg Lunge Lunge with Knee to Floor - Uttanasana - Fwd Bend Plank Pose - Top of a Pus-up Cobra Child's Pose All 4's to Down Dog Parsvakonasana - Extended Side Angle Down Dog Child's Pose Supta Padangustasana - Supine Leg Stretch Supine Stretch Knees to Chest Savasana - Corpse Pose Namaste!

Mentioned in this Free Anusara Online Yoga Class Podcast : iProng Article - Thank you Bill Palmer and E*star LA schedule for 2008 *****YOU ARE INVITED TO MY MEXICO YOGA RETREAT ***** GIVE YOURSELF THE GIFT OF YOGA IN PARADISE Anusara Yoga with Hillary April 6-12, 2008 Heat your body and cool your mind with two Anusara Yoga classes a day, and a SPECIAL BONUS!!! a 3 hr Thai Yoga Massage Class with one of LA's top therapists - Deon De Wet. Also included is a personal thai yoga massage with him to assist you to unwind and enjoy yourself fully. This retreat is designed for all levels - from those with no yoga experience including if you have physical injuries to more advanced practitioners. Everyboy is welcome to honor their process of unfolding to enjoy their own process of transformation. Between classes you'll have plenty of time to relax on the beach, shop in town, unwind in your beautiful villa or nuture yourself. You are free to make the best choices on your vacation to find the peace that resides within you. FOR MORE INFORMATION: Check this link or CALL 1-800-603-YOGA (9642) SIGN UP BEFORE JANUARY 6TH TO GET THE SPECIAL RATE! __________________________________________________________________ ADD your FACE to my facebook group Hillary's Yoga Practice Podcast TODD TESEN RETREAT in Turkey JUNE 3-9 BLOG LOVE - THANK YOU!!! YogademiaTahnee's Yoga SpaceShrink YourselfYoga DreamsMeggy's Journal (Japan)The Girl Who Cried Ephipany Siva Nataraja - Lord Shiva Dancing the Lila Tandava (playful dance) Level 2/3 Playful Yoga Sequence Geared to Open Your Shoulders and Heart: All 4's - Hands and Knees Down Dog Uttanasana - Standing Forward Bend Shoulder Opener at the Wall - All 4's to Down Dog Split - Uttanasana with Shoulder Stretch - Plank Pose to Cobra Pose On Belly Leg Lifted to Prone Posture (good for lower back) Prep for Cobra Hands on Waist Down Dog Crescent Pose Down to a Twist - Then into a Hip Opener - Down Dog to Plank to Cobra (Vinyasa) Down Dog to Uttanasana Vinyasa with Updog Ardha Chandrasana - Half Moon - Ardha Chandra Chapasana - Sugar Cane in the Half Moon Vinyasa to Pincha Prep (Forearm Balance) into Picha Plank with Forearm Arms - Childs Pose Tree Pose with Twist Standing Arch Back Uttanasana to Down Dog Anejaneasana Thigh Stretch- Down Dog to Uttanasana Baby Dancer - Uttasana to Down Dog Pigeon Prep with Up Dog Arms Vinyasa Jathara Parvitatsana Happy Baby - Knee To Chest Savasana - Corpse Pose Namaste