A little back ground…

Back 2013, State Farm Insurance began an aggressive sale-leaseback of its operations centers across the country to lower expenses and raise capital. Dallas-based private equity firm Lone Star Funds bought 23 of them for $720 million, then turned around and sold 14 of them a few month later to JDM Partners, an Arizona-based real estate firm run by Jerry Colangelo, the former owner of the NBA’s Phoenix Suns, for $550 million. That included the State Farm operations center on Pantops, which Lone Star bought for $69.3 million and sold to JDM Partners for $72.9 million, making $3.6 million on the flip.

It would turn out to be a costly decision for JDM Partners.

In 2020, as a response to the COVID pandemic, State Farm removed employees from its operations centers across the country and then later made those changes more permanent, outsourcing jobs and subleasing office space. While State Farm continued to honor its lease agreements with JDM Partners, and JDM was able to find tenants like Bonumose, the eventual loss of State Farm as a tenant drove down property values. Indeed, the County tax assessment on the Pantops State Farm property went from $56 million in 2020 to $37 million in 2026.

As a result, JDM Partners was unable to pay off the loan they took out to purchase the properties in time to avoid “a near doubling of its interest rate,” according to reporting from CoStar. In addition, because of the declining value of the property, refinancing was not a possibility. So they have been selling off the operations centers at significant discounts.

Now UVA has announced that it has purchased the State Farm Property from JDM Partners for $37.7 million, which is $35.2 million less than they paid for it.

UVA Health plans to use the property to expand inpatient care and free up space at University Hospital. The sale also means that Albemarle County will no longer be collecting the approximately $330K in annual tax property tax, due to the University’s tax-exempt status.

Free Bridge on Route 250 was in the news a lot this year for what happened under it, but what’s been happening across it has concerned regional planners for years. In 2013, the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission (TJPDC) and the Charlottesville-Albemarle Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) launched the so-called Free Bridge Congestion Relief project, created to find solutions for what had become “a key regional choke point” for traffic at an important eastern gateway into the city and exit gate to the county. According to study results from the project, there were currently 53,000 vehicles per day on Free Bridge, which was designed to accomodate only 45,600 a day, resulting in an overall failing level of service. “Modeling has shown that by 2040, approximately 70,000 vehicles a day will be using the bridge,” the study concluded, “ making the already failing level of service 25% worse.”

Indeed, anyone who travels regularly across the bridge can tell you how increasingly congested it has become, with traffic often backed up along Pantops Mountain on one side and Long Street on the other.

Back in 2013, regional planners decided that “nothing would be off the table” in presenting solutions and so some ambitious ideas were proposed, including a $140 million bridge over the existing bridge and a separate bridge project at a different location along the river. Other less ambitious alternatives included adding additional lanes to Free Bridge and reconfiguring intersections and approaches to those intersections on either side of the bridge. A long-desired bicycle and pedestrian bridge between Pantops and the Woolen Mills was also part of the mix.

In 2016, an application for SMART SCALE funds as part of the Free Bridge Congestion Relief project was submitted for two additional lanes to the bridge, a bicycle and pedestrian bridge, and reconfiguration of the High Street and Route 20 intersections at an estimated cost of $45.7 million.

However, the project did not score high enough to be selected for funding.

Since then, there hasn’t been a directly comparable regional planning effort to develop alternatives, concepts, and forecasts specifically for Free Bridge.

“But the need for an additional crossing of the Rivanna River has been discussed in multiple planning efforts since,” says Taylor Jenkins Lowery, Director of Transportation for the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission (TJPDC). “And additional work has been completed on assessing the feasibility and siting of a potential bicycle and pedestrian crossing.”

Both the 2019 Pantops Master Plan (2019) and the 2022 Urban Rivanna River Corridor Plan have also addressed traffic and design issues concerning the area, says Lowery, including congestion relief at Free Bridge and a bicycle and pedestrian connection over the Rivanna.

Today, data would suggest that the 2014 study was wrong about the increase in traffic volumes across Free Bridge. According to VDOT, traffic on Free Bridge has averaged approximately 50,000 vehicles per day over the last 15 years.

“VDOT does not anticipate that average will change significantly during the next 40 years,” says Alexis Mehretab, a spokesperson for VDOT, adding that motorists using alternate routes when Free Bridge is congested during peak travel times could be a reason for this.

However, as both Mehretab and Lowery pointed out, that doesn’t mean there isn’t a congestion problem.

“On a roadway, relatively stable daily traffic counts can coexist with significant peak-period congestion and backups,” says Mehretab.

“Once a facility reaches capacity, additional demand does not necessarily always translate into ever-increasing traffic volumes crossing the bridge,” Lowery explains. “Excess demand could show up as additional delays, travelers changing when they take their trip, or choosing different modes to reach their destinations in response. For the historical and present traffic volumes, it makes sense that only minor fluctuations are being observed over time, as the bridge is operating at capacity and can’t accommodate significantly more volume.”

Lowery thinks a new study of Free Bridge is in order.

“Because the US 250 corridor functions as a connected system, including the bridge, intersections, and road segments on either side, a current traffic operations analysis would be needed to make additional conclusions about how the bridge operates today,” says Lowery.

According to Mehretab, the Free Bridge area was actually considered for a new study this year, “but was not selected because of competing priorities and limited funding.”

“We anticipate that the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County may explore the area again during the next funding round,” Mehretab added. “Free Bridge remains a local priority for VDOT and both localities.”

Of course, one of the challenges of dealing with Free Bridge is that the Rivanna River serves as a boundary line on the eastern edge of the city, meaning the bridge itself is in both localities. Agreeing on what to do about the bridge, and providing plans and funds, requires cooperation.

Meanwhile, the area around Free Bridge appears to be developing organically, despite no formal plan in place, in an area largely dominated by traffic. In addition to a homeless encampment that sprung up beneath the bridge, stirring passions and debate for months before it was finally cleared, the area around the has become home to an unlikely hodgepodge of community amenities and businesses — a popular outdoor concert venue, paddlesports outfitter, and brewery, an ice cream shop, a pizza restaurant, a county road that has become a pedestrian promenade, two river trails, a corner lot where food trucks have set down roots, an autobody shop, a wrecker yard, billboards, and two used car lots. There’s also a nearby elementary school and new apartment buildings not far down River Road, along with a cannabis market that has become popular.

As a recent video about Free Bridge attempted to explore, the crossing has a long and interesting history that is still playing itself out.

“We find a continuing battle between the river and the people trying to navigate across,” says narrator and producer Sid Revels. “We also find the governments of Charlottesville and Albemarle County trying to decide what this crossing should become. So, Free Bridge isn’t simply a structure over water, it’s a record about how this community traveled, traded, expanded, and frequently argued about it's future.”

Years ago, the current bridge designers, then UVA architecture professors Ellen Dunham-Jones and Jude LeBlanc, told me they “tried to design the bridge to serve as a unique gateway into Charlottesville, not just a standard-issue widened stretch of highway happening to cross a waterway.” Indeed, the arched sides seen from below and the bridge supports are beautiful, and the “Free Bridge and the Rivanna River Waterfront Plan” received an award for excellence in design from the Virginia Society of the AIA shortly after it was built in 1993. In addition to designing sidewalks that would connect to the planned trails on either side of the river, Dunham-Jones told me they had also designed fishing platforms and banner poles, but they were never built. They also hoped to accommodate possible zoning changes that would allow a mix of sustainable residential uses along the riverside. Years later, when developers sought to build a 245-apartment complex on 24 acres near Free Bridge along the banks of the Rivanna River, Charlottesville City Council responded to public concerns about the environmental impact of such a large project by buying the land from developers. What’s to become of it is still an open question.

But there have been visions…

In 2013, about 400 UVA architecture students were tasked with creating design plans for the Rivanna River waterfront from Pen Park to the Woolen Mills as part of what was called the Rivanna River Vortex competition. The winning design imagined small “sound craters” on either side of the river that would serve as outdoor amphitheaters and live event spaces. Other winning designs imagined the area along the river as a kind of circus grounds with arcades, a promenade, and various spectacles to enjoy. Another sought to immerse the public in the ecology of the area with walking paths through constructed wetlands and a series of art studio buildings.

Meanwhile, various pieces of that 2016 proposal are in the works. As mentioned, planning and discussions about a bicycle and pedestrian bridge have continued, and a SMART SCALE application submitted in 2020 by Albemarle County for improvements to the intersection of Route 20 and Route 250 was awarded funding. That project will provide additional turn lanes and crosswalks, add a raised median along US 250 from Route 20 to Hansen Road, and add a new sidewalk on the west side of Route 20. Construction is expected to begin in the Spring of 2027 and be completed in the Fall of 2028 for a total cost of $22.4 million.

Finally, in what could benefit what has grown up around Free Bridge, the City is about to launch an 18-month study of East High Street within the next few months, which is being funded by VDOT’s STARS program.

“The study will consider intersection alternatives, lane configuration changes and traffic signal modifications, along with improvements for people walking and bicycling,” says Mehretab. “ The primary focus is on identifying practical, near-term solutions that could be implemented without large-scale modifications to the bridge itself.”

Maybe, finally, Free Bridge and the area around it will begin to find its identity amidst the choke hold that traffic, history, delayed infrastructure planning, and a lack of funding has had on the area.

The City has announced a new effort to compel developer John Dewberry to either finish or sell the unfinished hotel project on the Downtown Mall he bought at auction in 2012, and that has sat unfinished for over 18 years. The effort follows a similar one by government officials in Atlanta to compel Dewberry to finish another long-abandoned building project, and they recently voted to use the city’s blight tax to significantly raise the amount of property tax Dewberry will have to pay. Charlottesville isn’t going that far…yet.

“The unfinished Dewberry project has been a scar on downtown for far too long,” said City Manager Sam Sanders. “The City continues to believe the best outcome would be for the owner to sell the property to someone ready, willing, and able either to finish the building or remove the existing shell and start over. What we are no longer willing to accept is an indefinite continuation of the status quo.”

Read more

As previously reported, a rare voter registration fraud case brought against local activist Tanesha Hudson was quickly dismissed on June 30, but not before costing Hudson her government job and raising questions about why a grand jury for Charlottesville Circuit Court sought to investigate her in the first place.

“I have thoughts as to various reasons or actors with motives to bring the indictments and prosecute, but they’re too speculative,” says Hudson’s attorney, Elliot Harding. “That being said, I do think it was someone with an agenda to harm Ms. Hudson due to her outspoken advocacy and nature for speaking boldly against the powers that be.”

Harding suspects at least one …

Read more

Yesterday, in Charlottesville Circuit Court, a felony indictment brought by a special grand jury charging local activist Tanesha Hudson with voter registration fraud was quickly thrown out. But not before it caused Hudson to lose her job with the federal government.

“The process was the punishment,” Hudson speculates. “This wasn’t about justice; this was about revenge.”

In March this year, Hudson was the subject of a “Hometown Heroes” profile in Vinegar Hill Magazine, “Trailblazing Tanesha: How This Woman’s Voice is Reshaping Charlottesville’s Fight for Justice.” Indeed, Hudson has always been an outspoken member of the Charlottesville community (and quoted often in the DTM), and may be best known for suing the City of Charlottesville for violating her free speech rights, a…

Read more

Payne’s comments:

“I think we should learn from Atlanta and pursue a blight tax. And if authority doesn’t currently exist to implement that within Virginia, we should request authority from the General Assembly,” he says. Likewise, Paynes says the city shouldn’t abandon the previous effort to declare the property blighted.

“There is a legitimate basis for considering the unmaintained property a threat to health and human safety,” says Payne, “ given the large rat population and that seemingly no monitoring is taking place to know who might enter the structure, or what damage could have been done to the skeleton of the b…

Read more

According to this Atlanta-Constitution Journal story, the city of Atlanta and Charlottesville appear to have the same John Dewberry problem.

Both cities have multi-story downtown buildings owned by Dewberry that have sat unfinished for years. Dewberry bought Atlanta’s Campanile office tower at Peachtree and 14th streets in 2010, and Charlottesville’s unfinished “Landmark Hotel” building in 2012, after CNET founder Halsey Minor abandoned the project. To put that in perspective, Savannah Sicurella, one of the ACJ reporters who wrote this story, was in third grade when Minor broke ground on the hotel.

I reached out to Atlanta and Charlottesville city officials in a group email recently, hoping they might communicate and brainstorm with each other about their shared problem.

“I am sorry this issue has connected our two cities,” Charlottesville Mayor Juandiego Wa…

Read more

As two great local investigative stories have now shown, there’s a dirty little secret about building affordable housing — building them is one thing, and should be celebrated, but caring for and maintaining those properties is another thing.

“I think it (C-Ville’s article) points to one of the shortcomings in our affordable housing finance system, in that there’s relatively little money provided for long-term maintenance and upkeep of properties,” says former Charlottesville Mayor Dave Norris, who spearheaded the effort to create the Crossings, our area’s first supportive housing project at Fourth Street and Preston Avenue. “Unlike Charlottesville Tomorrow’s excellent recent reporting on Park’s Edge, here’s a case where the landlord is responsive and trying to do right by their tenants despite a shortage of resources.”

Read more

I rented a room in a house on Holkham Drive in Ivy when I first moved to Charlottesville in the 1990s and on my first walk around the neighborhood I stumbled on an old rectangular, creek-fed swimming pool in the middle of the woods that was as long as a football field. At the time, I learned, the extraordinary pool had been there for nearly 80 years and was home to the member-owned Blue Ridge Swim Club. In 2011, Todd Barnett bought the historic property, where he hosts his Blue Ridge Field Camp, and continues to offer pool memberships to the public. Here’s something Barnett recently wrote about his experience caretaking the pool. Enjoy! — David McNair

Read more

Journalists and media professionals across the state of Virginia were honored at the Virginia Press Association’s annual gala on April 11 in Lynchburg, an occasion that shines a light on the fine work that is still getting produced despite considerable challenges. Publications tend to tout only their own awards, and the various categories and competing divisions are so confusing that it’s hard to get a good view of how our local media performed collectively. So I created a list of local winners below. It’s also a chance to review all the important stories that were covered over the last year.

For the third year in a row, The Daily Progress was selected as the best daily newspaper of its size in Virginia, taking home 33 awards at the Virginia Press Association’s annual gala on April 11, including 14 first-place awards, eight second-place prizes and 11 third-place honors…

Read more

A recent story in the New Yorker by journalist Charles Bethea [“The Camps Promising to Turn You—or Your Son—Into an Alpha Male”] caught our attention because of the setting.

“On a hot morning last August, I tailed a van speeding through the countryside of central Virginia. The vehicle contained nine blindfolded men wearing black, as they had been instructed to do. Each had paid three thousand dollars to take part in a three-day program called RISE, which stands for Ruthless Integrity and Simple Execution. It offers men an opportunity to crawl through mud, carry heavy objects, and, as its website puts it, “change your story & unf**k your life.” The van’s speakers played a high-volume mashup of construction sounds, Jordan Peterson lectures, Marine Corps drills, and mumbling voices. “All designed to keep them in the present moment and separate them from the life they were coming from,” Brendan King, rise’s founder, told me.

Then it got more spec…

Read more

It’s an odd name for a restaurant. But the owners of Cumbre Bakery, who are planning to open The Enemy in April in York Place on the Downtown Mall, say it stems from a simple idea.

“Often, our greatest enemy isn’t outside, but within ourselves,” says Augusto Rodriguez Araoz, who, with his partner Juan Brandan, transformed a barber shop on East Jefferson Street into an Argentine bakery and cafe in 2023, then opened a second location in the Dairy Market. “Fear, doubt, and the limits we sometimes set for ourselves. We wanted the restaurant to have a strong identity and a name with meaning.”

Cumbre, too, served as a metaphor, meaning in Spanish the highest point of something, like the summit of a mountain, or the greatness of something.

“The idea is to create a place that feels special, warm, and memorable from start to finish,” says Araoz.

As for the food, Araoz…

Read more

The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center has announced that three design firms competing to recast the two tons of bronze ingots that remain after Charlottesville’s monument of Robert E. Lee was melted down will present their proposal to the public on Saturday, March 14, at the center.

The three finalists were selected among 32 entries in the “Swords into Plowshares” project, launched after the 2021 removal of Charlottesville’s Confederate statues, which is “devoted to creating new public art in the city of Charlottesville to advance multiracial democracy in relation to global sites of memory.”

Read more

The Charlottesville Police Department released a report Monday congratulating itself on “reducing gun-related incidents” in 2025, saying they decreased by 51% from 2024 to 2025, “marking one of the most substantial public safety improvements in recent years,” the report said.

“Reducing gun violence remains one of our highest priorities,” said Charlottesville Police Chief Michael Kochis. “A 51% reduction in gun-related incidents represents real lives impacted and real harm prevented. This progress is the result of our dedicated staff, strong partnerships with our community, and data-driven strategies that focus on both accountability and prevention.”

Of course, while those are stats to be happy about, they can be an abstraction that really doesn’t allow for reflection on the trauma that gun violence has caused over the last year. And the many ways and places t…

Read more

From the Washington Post: Snow and ice will start on Friday across the Rockies and Plains, push into the South, Midwest and Appalachians on Saturday, then reach the East Coast on Sunday. To make matters worse, the storm will usher in record-breaking cold, with frigid temperatures lingering at least a week…

Impact on Southeast and Mid-Atlantic

Winter storm-impact rating: 9 out of 10.

Cities that will be hit hardest: Athens in Georgia; Columbia in South Carolina; Charlotte, Raleigh and Durham in North Carolina; Richmond, Charlottesville and Fredericksburg in Virginia; D.C. and Baltimore.

Worst of the storm: Saturday night through Sunday.

The Southeast and Mid-Atlantic will be blitzed by heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain from late Saturday through Sunday.

Freezing rain and sleet is forecast to break out across the Carolinas, northeast Georgia and southern Virgini…

Read more

When Shirley Ehrhardt took over her sister’s little thrift store on Preston Avenue in the late 1980s, changing its name from Yesterday’s Clothes to Twice is Nice, she likely never imagined it would one day be generating over $1.5 million in annual revenue or moving into a new $5.5 million building.

But thrifting has changed dramatically.

In 2001, Ehrhardt brought in $122,000 at Twice is Nice, enough to cover her $29,000 salary and $31,000 to her favorite charity, the Jefferson Area Board on Aging, or JABA. At that time, the store was basically operating as a non-profit serving JABA, which serves area seniors, and after several more years of expenses exceeding revenues, JABA took a more active role in its operation. In 2015, Ehrhardt finally retired and handed the store over to JABA, which used revenues to support its affordable senior living facility in Croze…

Read more

As you might recall, an attempt to find out what happened to The Hook newspaper’s online archives was featured in a 2022 Washington Post story, “A newspaper vanished from the internet. Did someone pay to kill it?.” After that story ran, an anonymous benefactor restored the website, but eventually that disappeared as well, along with the anonymous benefactor. Links to Hook stories have always existed on the Internet Archive, though they aren’t searchable and don’t appear in web searches, and so I took the time over the last few months to create a website that links to those archives at hooknewsarhive.com.

Read more

You won’t be hearing much about it — because local media companies are reluctant to report on each other — but there’s been some pretty big news concerning the Daily Progress.

After reporting a net loss of $36 million this year, including $4 million for restoration services after a cyber attack/ransom in February by Russian hackers, which prevented them from printing newspapers for a time and compromised the personal information of approximately 40,000 people, the parent company of the The Daily Progress, Lee Enterpises, finally gave into Florida billionaire David Hoffmann, who inked a deal on Tuesday that will give him a controlling stake in the newspaper chain. As part of the deal, Lee CEO Kevin Mowbray, who has been at the helm for 39 years, will be retiring and collecting a $1.5 million payout.

Read more

Late Friday, Charlottesville announced that its downtown parking garages on Market and Water Street would be switching on Tuesday to a video license plate reading system to collect parking fees.

Wait, what? Didn’t the city just decide not to move forward with the Flock camera system over concerns about data collection?

“There are really two companies, one’s Palantir and the other Peregrine, which is an offshoot of Palantir, that seem to be developing techniques for synthesizing literally millions of data points about millions of people,” Councilor Lloyd Snook told WINA news radio. “We don’t need that kind of centralization of the data.”

However, a company called Metropolis Technology, which uses AI technology to collect da…

Read more

When Christopher Darnell Jones, Jr. was sentenced in the evening on Friday, November 21 for killing three UVA students and wounding two others in 2022, the Washington Post didn’t turn to our 133-year old daily newspaper, our 36-year old local weekly, or our 20-year old non-profit news website — they turned to a news feed that was launched on a local radio station’s website only a year ago.

Perry’s sister said the killing “shattered” their lives. “Accountability matters,” D’Shandra Perry said, according to Cville Right Now. “My brother’s life matters.”

Oh, USAToday, ESPN, and the Virginian-Pilot also used Cville Right Now for coverage of the sentencing.

Cville Right Now editor Mike Barber admits that his experience writing for the Post, ESPN, and the Virginian-Pilot might have helped, a…

Read more