A Primary in a Week, Google Changes Course, and a Street for Two Sisters

Full Transcript

Intro

Alex: Welcome to The Roanoke Weekly. I’m Alex.

Morgan: And I’m Morgan. This is your locally curated, AI-narrated rundown of what happened around the Roanoke Valley this past week, and what’s coming up in the week ahead. Everything we cover comes from local reporting: the Roanoke Times, Cardinal News, WSLS 10, and WDBJ7.

Alex: This was a week about decisions. Who gets to make them, where they get made, and who’s in the room when they do.

Morgan: And one of those decisions is ours, about a week from now. Plus a weekend out there with actual range to it. Drum corps, a county fair, and a foam party.

Alex: Let’s get into it.

The Lead: One Week to the Primary

Alex: A week from tomorrow, Tuesday, August fourth, Roanoke votes in a Democratic primary for city council. Five candidates, three nominations.

Morgan: And this is the one that matters this cycle.

Alex: It is, and that’s worth explaining. There’s only one Republican running in November, so the Democratic primary is the contested race. And Virginia doesn’t register voters by party, so any registered voter in the city can vote in it.

Morgan: Regardless of how you usually vote.

Alex: Right. On the ballot: incumbents Vivian Sanchez-Jones and Peter Volosin, and three newcomers, Harvey Brookins, Danny Clawson, and Raekwon Moore. The third incumbent whose seat is up, Evelyn Powers, chose not to run.

Morgan: So what happens to the three who win?

Alex: They go to the November ballot alongside three independents, former mayor David Bowers, former council member Stephanie Moon Reynolds, and retired rabbi Kathy Cohen, plus Republican Amanda Marko. Roanoke votes about sixty percent Democratic, so the nomination has historically been most of the way to a seat. Though as Cardinal News notes, Nick Hagen won as a Republican in twenty twenty-four, the first in over two decades.

Morgan: And normally this would have been in June.

Alex: It would. April’s redistricting referendum pushed it to August. The candidates met twice this past week, at a neighborhood forum Tuesday and a debate Thursday hosted by the city Democratic Committee. School funding came up, with Clawson saying they’d work toward getting schools back to forty percent of the city budget and, quote, “keep it stable so that it doesn’t continue being a political football.” So did transparency, in the context of the nondisclosure agreements city officials signed with a prospective casino developer. Plus housing, the tree canopy, and Flock cameras.

Morgan: There was also some late news about two of them.

Alex: There was, and all three outlets reported it, so we’ll state it plainly and move on. Brookins spoke publicly about a two thousand seventeen misdemeanor domestic assault charge involving his then-wife. A judge found sufficient evidence but sent him to a counseling program, and the charge was dismissed in twenty nineteen. He says he takes full responsibility. Separately, Volosin apologized at the July twentieth council meeting after telling Councilman Phazhon Nash, the only Black member of council, that another member “owns” him. Volosin said the comment landed differently than he intended.

Morgan: And both of those broke after a lot of people had already voted.

Alex: That’s what Cardinal News dug into. Both landed after more than eleven hundred people had voted early. Turnout in these primaries runs three to four thousand, so a quarter to a third of the votes were already cast.

Morgan: If you haven’t voted yet, early voting is at three seventeen Kimball Avenue Northwest, and Election Day is Tuesday, August fourth.

The Rundown

Alex: Google is changing how it cools its Botetourt data center. All four outlets reported this week that the first of three planned buildings at the Botetourt Center at Greenfield will use air cooling instead of water cooling. Google says that lowers the site’s overall water use, but it hasn’t released new numbers, and buildings two and three are still undecided.

Morgan: And the agreement itself hasn’t changed.

Alex: It hasn’t. Two million gallons a day, with the option to request up to eight, which the water authority can refuse. County administrator Gary Larrowe called the switch a positive development. Opponents were unmoved. Audrey Ward, with a citizens group called EAST, told WSLS the announcement “clarifies nothing.”

Morgan: There’s a trade-off buried in it, too. Air cooling uses less water and more electricity. So what opponents are asking now is where that power comes from.

Alex: Nobody’s answered that yet.

Morgan: FloydFest wrapped up Sunday, and it turned twenty-five. Third year at its permanent home, FestivalPark in Check. Over a hundred acts, ten thousand capacity, and the COO told WSLS they draw from forty-seven states and three countries in an average year.

Alex: Forty-seven states. For Floyd County.

Morgan: For Floyd County. Enough of them have bought houses down there that the permanent site was partly about giving them a reason to keep coming back. There’s a Roanoke angle, too. Tay Whiteside of LiftArc Studios built a custom sign out of reclaimed metal they already had on the property, and the grounds manager, Danielle Ward, is from Roanoke. Cardinal News spent a day with her. Her job is erosion control, native plantings, and a herd of goats she’s got on poison ivy duty.

Alex: Goats. That’s the detail.

Morgan: That’s the detail. One late change, too: Tedeschi Trucks Band pulled out after Susan Tedeschi had emergency appendix surgery, and Greensky Bluegrass took the Friday headline slot.

Alex: Roanoke police say crime is down nineteen percent. Chief Scott Booth gave the department’s second-quarter briefing Wednesday, and WSLS and Cardinal News both covered it. Through June thirtieth, against the same stretch last year: overall crime down nineteen percent, violent crime down thirteen, property crime down twenty. Homicides down forty. Vehicle thefts down forty-four. The one category up was arson, by two incidents. Downtown had the biggest drop of any zone, violent crime down sixty percent. That’s three straight years of decline.

Morgan: And most of the questions afterward weren’t about any of that.

Alex: No. They were about Flock cameras. Which is worth pausing on, because when council killed the gunshot detection program earlier this month, the cameras were never part of that vote. The detectors are physically gone now. Seventy-five were approved, forty-one actually got installed, and all forty-one have been pulled back out.

Morgan: But the cameras stayed up.

Alex: Twenty-four of them, still running around the city. So the program ended and the argument didn’t. It moved over to the license plate readers. Booth defended those as an investigative tool, and said officers need a legitimate reason, a criminal case or a missing person, to search the system at all.

Morgan: He also said he’d hold officers accountable for misusing it, and that’s a response to something real. Officers in other parts of the country have been arrested for exactly that. Meanwhile a Roanoke resident, Casey Meadows, went to council this week and asked them to take the cameras out entirely.

Morgan: Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture just got the largest gift in its history. Twenty million dollars, from Salahuddin Choudhury and his wife May. He joined the faculty in nineteen seventy-four and taught there until he took emeritus status in twenty nineteen. The Roanoke Times reported the money endows resources for the dean and the school director.

Alex: And he framed it as a tribute.

Morgan: He did. To his grandfather, a Rumi scholar back in his ancestral village, to his father, and to every student and colleague he had over forty-seven years. He said, “I learned from all.”

Alex: In Franklin County, a formal complaint against three county leaders is now with a special prosecutor. Per the Roanoke Times and WSLS, three residents who’ve stayed anonymous filed a seventy-one page complaint July first against the board of supervisors chair, the vice chair, and the county administrator. It’s built from public records requests and meeting minutes, and alleges budget decisions were made by email, outside of public meetings.

Morgan: And the county disputes it.

Alex: The county attorney does. To be clear, these are allegations, and nothing has been decided. Lynchburg’s commonwealth’s attorney is reviewing it, after Franklin County’s own prosecutor stepped aside. The backdrop: more than two hundred people packed a supervisors meeting a week ago Tuesday over a data center project the county’s documents call “Project Flash.”

Morgan: There’s a race still a long way out that’s worth a look. Beth Macy outraised Congressman Ben Cline again, third quarter in a row. The Roanoke Times went through the federal filings: Macy pulled in four hundred ninety-one thousand dollars in the second quarter to Cline’s three hundred eighty-eight, and she’s got more in the bank, roughly eight hundred twenty-nine thousand to his seven hundred sixty-nine. Across the whole cycle she’s raised more and spent less. Macy’s a Roanoke author, she wrote Dopesick, and before that she reported for the Roanoke Times for twenty-five years. Cline’s a Botetourt Republican, first elected in twenty eighteen.

Alex: With the caveat that money isn’t votes. The sixth runs north from here up the Shenandoah to Winchester and the West Virginia line, and it’s gone Republican by the upper fifties to low sixties. Cline’s won three reelections without much trouble.

Morgan: Right, so if you’ve noticed a lot of Macy signs around the valley lately, that’s real. It’s just that the valley is the friendliest stretch of a district that runs a long way north of us.

The Week Ahead

Morgan: Okay, Tuesday through Sunday.

Tuesday, the Freehub Mountain Bike Film Festival comes to Roanoke. Doors at six, screening at seven, about sixteen dollars.

Alex: Which feels right for a town that just hosted mountain bike nationals.

Morgan: It does. Wednesday, Summer Music Games of Southwest Virginia at Salem Stadium. That’s drum corps, so it’s marching brass and percussion, and it is genuinely loud.

Alex: I don’t think people realize how good that is live.

Morgan: Worth seeing once. Also Wednesday, History After Dark with the Botetourt County Historical Society at six.

Thursday, Party in Elmwood is back, five thirty to eight thirty at Elmwood Park. Beach bands and the new Remix nights this season. And at the Hotel Roanoke, a dinner called “Nineteen Eighty-Two” in the Regency Room with James Beard-nominated chef Travis Milton.

Alex: Nice pair. Free concert in the park, or a real dinner four blocks away.

Morgan: Friday, Grandin Chillage, five thirty to nine thirty, with Surrender Dorothy and three food trucks. And the Botetourt County Fair opens.

Saturday, the fair keeps going, and Elmwood has the Budweiser Summer Series with Russell Dickerson, six to ten thirty. Saturday morning, Foam and Fun on the Farm at Layman Family Farms, ten to two. Water slides, zip lines, a foam party, and a suggested twelve-dollar donation that goes to Kids Square downtown.

Alex: Foam party in August. Yeah, that’ll work.

Morgan: Sunday, Music on the Mountain at the Mill Mountain Discovery Center, five to seven. And closing night for “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” at Mill Mountain Theatre.

Alex: No baseball this week, right?

Morgan: None. The RidgeYaks are on the road all week, back at Carilion Clinic Field on the fourth.

Alex: One note on all that outdoor stuff. We’ve had rain, and it’s helped, but Cardinal News ran a good piece on why we’re still in a drought. Their framing: a drought is less like a no-hitter and more like credit card debt. One good payment doesn’t clear the balance. The valley’s still about eight and a half inches behind, and Carvins Cove has dropped another two feet since the first of July.

Morgan: So bring water.

The Closer

Alex: We opened this episode on people running for city council. I want to close it on two people who just went to the meetings.

For years, Helen Davis and Evelyn Bethel showed up at just about every Roanoke City Council meeting. They grew up on Patton Avenue in Gainsboro, and they spent the back half of their lives tracking what the city was doing to their neighborhood, and saying so out loud.

Morgan: And doing something about it.

Alex: They organized the Historic Gainsboro Preservation District. They helped save the Gainsboro Library from demolition and got it a historic designation. Which matters, because much of Gainsboro didn’t survive urban renewal. Hundreds of homes, churches, and businesses were cleared for Interstate 581 and what’s now the Berglund Center. Patton Avenue is one of the few stretches still intact.

Last week, council voted to rename Second Street Northeast after them. It’ll be Bethel Davis Street.

Morgan: And the detail I keep thinking about is that they wore matching outfits, and sat in the same two seats, next to each other, every single time.

Alex: Every time. The Roanoke Times talked to local historian Jordan Bell, who told council, “They are what we consider the mothers of historical preservation in the city of Roanoke.” Davis died in twenty nineteen, Bethel in twenty twenty. The request came from Ricardo Stovall, Davis’s son and Bethel’s nephew, who runs the preservation district now.

Morgan: There’ll be a celebration when the sign goes up. Which seems right for two people whose whole thing was showing up.

Close

Alex: That’s the week. Thanks for listening.

Morgan: If this is useful to you, send it to somebody else who lives here. That’s how people find us.

Alex: And go support the newsrooms we pull from. They did the reporting.

Morgan: See you next Monday.