Before deciding this is a great place to live or retire there are downsides to know. For example, Virginia laws rank us last in the nation for friendliness to consumers, wage earners, and people outside the mainstream. It doesn't matter who controls the legislature: Democrats for 100+ years or Republicans now, both are anti-consumer, anti worker, bigots. It's our worst tradition.

For example, we are one of only two states that approved the grossly anti-consumer UCITA - the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act that's so awful even a business-dominated Republican Congress turned it down. It's UCITA that has allowed software licenses to get wildly, wickedly one-sided. Other states are passing laws to specifically exempt their citizens from unfair Virginia laws.

The Virginia State Bar is so anti-consumer that our lawyers go right on practicing law despite - in this 2004 record that came to light - a member reprimanded for mishandling a real estate transaction in 1986, mingling personal funds with a client's in 1990, abandoning a client on the day of trial in 1992, and repeatedly violating the state's rules against legal harassment and intimidation in 1996.

That was not enough for the Bar to take his license but now that he's in jail for beating someone with a baseball bat, he won't be allowed to practice law until he's released.

Virginia has the oldest continuous legislature in the new world and acts like it. American legislative traditions like "You will treat your committee chairman as a deity - or be ignored" began here and are revered. This puts an interesting spin on the state's 1776 motto, Sic Semper Tyrannis - Thus Always to Tyrants. In the legislature, "Sic" means "Reverence."

Perhaps that's why Virginia has executed more people than any other state. The Death Penalty Information Center in DC counted 1,389 executions here between 1608 and July 22, 2004.

There is an unofficial state motto Virginia taught other states. "No man's life or property are safe so long as the legislature is in session." Our law makers are amateurs. We elect "citizen legislators" who sit in session only a couple of months a year. In 2004, lobbyists spent $13.6 million to influence the 140 members. According to filings, the state's largest consumer group spent nothing on lobbying.

It shows.

* Virginia has done away entirely with usury limits on business and investment loans. Consumer loans have outrageous interest caps. For example, the interest rate is around 25% for routine consumer credit from lenders like HFC or Beneficial. A "Payday Loan" costs 15% for two weeks. That's 390% a year and perfectly legal.

* Virginia lets service providers like hospitals require patients to waive the homestead exemption as a condition of admission. Sickness or injury can mean you lose your home to an exorbitant hospital bill, and exorbitant they are.

* If an individual declares personal bankruptcy, Virginia's limit on net worth is $5,000, one of the lowest amounts in the country. If his possessions and the equity in his home total more than that, he loses his home. $5,000? In Florida and Texas it's multi- millions, but that's even worse.

Be aware that Virginia's citizen legislators tend to be affluent people who can afford part-time public service. They come from the provider side of the economy. They have no problem passing laws that kick you when you're down. Those not affluent rely heavily on large contributors. They can least afford to be seen as populist heroes. Populist heroes have no friends in the room where the controlling party leadership gerrymanders district lines every ten years.

It must not be overlooked that Virginia is in the bible belt. Christianity for dummies dominates much of our culture. In 2004 Virginia passed by overwhelming vote (without the governor's signature) the most anti-gay union bill in the country.

In 2006 the State Senate refused to allow localities to voluntarily supplement the salaries of public defenders, if they so chose. Localities have long been allowed to supplement the salaries of prosecutors, however. The Senate doesn't want an even playing field in criminal courts.

How can the Senate tell localities what to do? Because Virginia is under something called the Dillon Rule, which says local government can do nothing without specific permission from the state legislature. Some think of that as government with a slavery mentality. Others see it as protection.

Which brings us to Charlottesville, where the saying "art begins where common sense leaves off" sometimes applies to government.

In 1982 Charlottesville made a startling decision to grow no larger than it was. It land-locked itself forever within its tiny 10.846 mile confines by selling its power of annexation to the surrounding county. The sale was absolute and irreversible so long as the county shares its tax revenue with the city under an easily affordable formula, which it does.

The writer, then living in the county, was hired to sell this Revenue Sharing plan to skeptical county voters who had to approve it. Facing an approval rating of 23% in January, we formed SAFE (Stop Annexation Forever) and asked local artist Charles Peale to create

the Annexation Monster

By voting day he was a familiar face and the voters understood what was at state. Revenue sharing won by a landslide. As a result, between 1982-83 and 2006-07 the county will have given the city $115.9 million. (In 2006 it surpassed $10 million for the first time.)

The truism that expenses rise to exceed income happened almost immediately. But more importantly, the city discovered the perils as well as the joys of no growth.

On the plus side, the city postponed the rendezvous with destiny that uncontrolled reproduction will eventually exact on us all. Its population growth ended. Charlottesville had approx. 40,100 inhabitants in 1990 and 40,099 inhabitants in 2000. (Since then it officially lost population through census finagling.)

All the area growth, and it was substantial, was in surrounding urban and rural areas outside the city limit. Albemarle County's population surged ahead of the city to 84,186.

Cities in Virginia (and only Virginia) are totally independent of counties. They stand or fall on their own. The only way now for Charlottesville to expand rather than stand still or shrink is to crunch what is already here.

We are already here.

This creates shortcomings that are powerful, deeply rooted, and will outlast you.

Because it can no longer expand, Charlottesville no longer has an economically balanced population. With no power to annex middle class suburbs, the percentage of children in Charlottesville public schools eligible for free or reduced-price lunches has soared and is currently between 47% and 52% depending on who's counting. Albemarle County is under 20%. (By comparison, Washington DC, America's entry into the 3d world, has a 75% rate.)

The economic curve here is skewed. Families familiar with the area who can afford a choice of city or county generally choose the county, for good cause: city real estate taxes are 38% higher than those in Albemarle county. For my house, being on the city side of the line costs an extra $1500.

The overall tax burden in the city is slightly above average for the US. The "average" local family will pay close to $8,000 annually in taxes. This compares with $2,106 for low areas like Casper, WY, and $12,627 for places like Bridgeport. CT, according to the Kiplinger web site and adjusted for Virginia's 2006 tax increases.

Thanks to growing property values, taxes are growing much faster than inflation. In the last six years inflation has averaged 2.5% a year. In those same years the city's effective property tax rate rose 4.42%, 5.51%, 6.98%, 8.6%, 11.6%, and 10.7%. For 2006 the increase is around 11%. That's an effective property tax rate increase of 58.81% in seven years. Wages have risen approximately 4% in that period, Social Security much less. Fixed income retirees without ample pensions feel threatened here.

For good cause. In 2006 my realty appraisal went up 25% for a house that had nothing change. The taxes rose dramatically despite a six cent cut in the tax rate.

This will continue, as the Virginia legislature is transferring ever-more unfunded obligations from state government to local government. The city needs to grab and spend every dime it can tax, and find new taxes, we're constantly told. "Charlottesville faces a projected $7 million shortfall a few years down the road," we are promised.

So they tax garbage. You need to buy a sticker for each can. Stickers recently jumped from $52 a year to $94.50.

In order to grow our tax base the city is selling its last remaining downtown parking lots to builders. Would a shopping mall do that? The short-sightedness of it is strangling our downtown mall. There are currently plans afoot to enlarge the mall and eliminate about 500 on-street parking spaces. (That would leave about 7.)

On the other hand, we shrink the available building space with a policy of heritage extremism. This means old buildings must remain essentially as is, at least in appearance, and maintained. As practiced here this goes far beyond architectural and historic heritage. Charlottesville seeks to preserve obsolescence.

The policy as defined in law makes sense. As we do it, it shows what can happen when government embraces cultural elitism. We get the tyranny of the majority.

What happens is this. Any structure built before the birth of the person discussing it is a historic landmark which must be preserved, and may not be torn down and replaced with a useful structure. No definable architectural value or historic importance need be shown for it. The code requirement for justification is ignored. Protection is automatic.

This applies to houses including houses condemned and boarded up as life-threatening, stores and storefronts, even accessory sheds. We once required the preservation of a rotting hen house of no importance because it was old, and someone with power thought it was quaint. And hey, Georgia O'Keefe lived nearby once.

Any plans for repair, maintenance, and modernization must be approved down to the smallest minutiae by a Board of Architectural Review (BAR) who will determine what will be done, and how, and [an example from Feb. 2002] whether the wood you have chosen for your restaurant door may or may not be painted, and what color.

All aspects (aside from cost to the owner) are duly considered but the outcome is pre-determined. Since its inception, committee appointments have gone to historic extremists at the urging of cultural elitists. (BAR has been said to stand for "building architects' revenue.")

If a vacant old hulk is in need of maintenance or repair and the owner fails to do it, the city can have it done and place a lien on the property.

Most of the city that was built prior to 1930 was declared "historic" in this way and suffers powerful controls.

When one buys property here he does not get the bundle of rights that property ownership means elsewhere, including what it means just beyond the city line.

Albemarle County has repeatedly declined such controls, preferring to encourage historic preservation through the incentive of real estate tax breaks. Outside of the ubiquitous urban commercial sprawl that provides its essential tax base, Albemarle has been enormously successful at preservation in the opinion of all but extremists.

Draconian city controls are not for the purpose of making things more attractive. Often they have the opposite result, preserving ugly, inconsequential buildings or city blocks.

Owners wracked with common sense have been known to bulldoze worthless structures in the dead of night, choosing fines and the wrath of city hall in order to erect vitally needed hotels over the opposition of preservation Luddites.

Enforced preservation weighs on realty transactions. Still, despite a high commercial vacancy rate there is general economic vitality downtown. The use of bonds and other public money to assist private development accounts for much of it.

The city is bounded by two rivers and ignores them. They are all but invisible and there's zero use of the waterfront, aside from a footpath. City voices are occasionally heard lecturing the county on what to do on its side of the rivers.

That footpath is a graveled greenbelt nature trail, or was until last year when the city paved it. This year they again used our taxes (remember the $7 million shortfall they promised?) to paint a white line down the middle.

Why? As the newspaper quoted the public servant responsible, "It became apparent with bikes, walkers, and dogs off leash that we need to provide people with some direction to stay to the right." He cited "several incidents in which loose dogs toppled bikers."

The white line is loose dog control!

You read it earlier: government begins where common sense leaves off.

One of the steps seriously contemplated in recent years was revoking city status and reverting to a town. Given our provincialism many thought it was a good idea. We elect down home folks to city council chosen by attitude. Management or business background usually results in a failure to be nominated. The city runs well only because we use the city manager form, hiring professionals to run the place.

So of course some are talking of dumping that and going to the strong mayor system. There's a slogan for that: "Replace the pro with Bozo."

Aside from transportation the pros do ok. Transportation is in a class by itself. In its best days 30 years ago it was the least professional department. Since then it's gone downhill.

Charlottesville is one of the few small cities to make getting around difficult intentionally. The government, elected and professional, doesn't cotton to self-propelled vehicles and goes out of its way to inconvenience them. In some ways it's like life on a resort island reachable by bridges.

Alas, other than having a couple of nifty jitneys running bus routes, we're not an island. We just act like one, with gambits like this:

* "The name without a road." A vitally-needed commuter road, the Meadowcreek Parkway, has been on the drawing board for 36 YEARS! with money to build it. It's remains dead in the water, stalled by an obstructionist city council imposing new requirements when old ones are met. The city plays Lucy to the county's Charlie Brown. "Come kick the football, Charlie Brown."

Without that parkway, a commuter highway linking the populous part of the county to downtown is a modern 4-lane road in the county dwindling to a narrow 2-lane city residential street intentionally encroached by city-installed obstacles.

Obstacles? The city built a matrix of random concrete obstructions reaching into the street. Motorists striking them have turned the road into a dangerous hazard. It was widely predicted this would cause accidents, and does.

At night the concrete obstructions come up as a sudden surprise. On a rainy night they are invisible even when you know they're there. Within months the concrete was covered with rubber scrapings from tires.

The official response to complaints: "People will learn" by striking the curbs. One councilor was open about his mindset, explaining to the press: "The obstructions are designed to disturb drivers and be an inconvenience."

Concrete obstructions are located at intersections, requiring fire engines and school buses to use the entire oncoming lane to make a turn. The same is true of buses when they try to re-enter traffic after a stop. A preposterous debacle.

The police chief reported the obstructions have not reduced speeding, only forced speeders into the oncoming lane. Constant radar patrols are little help. The obstructions make a head-on collision more likely, and expose us to costly liability.

There is talk of adding obstructions to other vital arteries. The official justification: "Pedestrians like it."

* Almost everywhere there are 4-way stop signs at random every few blocks. The stated purpose is "traffic calming."

* Traffic lights may be timed to disrupt rather than smooth the flow. And there are plenty of them. When federal grant money arrives new lights propagate like bamboo in May.

* If huge surges of cars at rush hour require a traffic light at those hours, the light cycles 24 hours a day. Blinking caution during low traffic hours is rejected as an option even when suggested in federal uniform traffic control guidelines.

* A downtown alley incapable of holding more than three cars has a 28-second green light, while on the edge of town a choked up turning lane at a highly congested intersection has a 6-second green light that inevitably leaves cars stacked up waiting to turn. The folks in charge know about these. They want them that way. [2005 update: the 6-second light is now 12 which does the job.]

* A downtown side street serving a few businesses requires tripping an underground detector before the traffic light knows there are cars waiting to get out. The light remains red otherwise. A brick pedestrian crosswalk was installed over the detector. There are no signs posted. Cars must stop and wait for the light five feet short of the detector, so they never trip the switch. After being ignored for a few 4-minute cycles, drivers run the red light.

[Revisited July 16, 2005. The light now cycles without requiring the trip switch.]

* There were, and in some minds still are, plans to convert the busiest downtown intersection into a traffic circle, a move estimated that at rush hour would more than triple the congestion.

We did put traffic circles in some light traffic residential areas, perhaps to prove that good policy in the hands of hicks creates bad examples. We have a classic how-not-to-do-it. It's a traffic circle in the middle of the road usurping so much of the intersection that not even a small moving van can negotiate the turn. A circle half the size would have worked. It's become a role model. Sections of streets at intersections are now blocked off, allowing just enough room for 2 cars to pass. Trucks? Buses? Fire engines? Nope. That requires common sense.

Some of which may have arrived. After suffering for decades through this insult to city management, Charlottesville is now in phase one of a 3-phase, $2 million system to coordinate the city's traffic lights. Not only coordinate them, micromanage them. How do you micromanage a traffic light? For one thing, holding it green few extra seconds to allow a bus to get through, keeping the bus on its time schedule.

If it works, this impressive program will correct many of our traffic deficiencies.

Changes from the top down are almost assured to happen. From the bottom up change is another matter. If a resident needs to call attention to a neighborhood problem, he must now work through layer upon layer of red tape involving Neighborhood Associations ("Step One: Create a Neighborhood Association") before the problem will be heard.

The red tape came to us in 2000 after hundreds of years of easy government accessibility. "Cities do this now," they say when they come back from city planner conventions where the mantra is "don't listen, lead."

Monkey-see, monkey-do.

* At a high traffic exit from a bypass, a two-lane ramp is limited to one lane, with the other lane serving a private residence. It can take 20 minutes to travel 200 yards at commuter time. A traffic light would eliminate the problem. The city knows.

Every government has its quirks. Ours is a transportation policy from hell.

Bicycle lanes abound. Why? We are told "roads cause cars. If you build roads, cars will come. If you build bicycle lanes, bicycles will come." So there are bicycle lanes, but few bicycles.

They are 100% unused in the snow, 99.999% unused in the rain, and 98% unused in the sunshine. Government response: escalate the war on cars.

Their concept, and they are serious about this, is that everyone is capable of biking at all times, and bikes are sufficient for transport needs. They believe biking to work or to shop is a reasonable all-weather choice for locals and visitors, old and young, people transporting children, grocery shoppers, whatever.

Blow that smoke aside and discover we have old-fashioned cronyism with new age cronies, bike-riding counselors with ties to the miniscule bike population. Bicycle theft from the mall is a leading unpublicized crime and a huge annoyance they hope to control with taxpayer bikes.

The concept, a curious one, is that thieves will somehow stop stealing expensive bikes if they can legally take a cheapie. So we had the "borrow bike" program which placed yellow public-use bikes downtown and at the university. Alas, the needy fellow steals a yellow and within three weeks every one disappeared or was vandalized. Supporters called the program a great success. "You can't steal borrow bikes because no one owns them," they explained in their appeal for tax funds to buy more bikes. Maybe it's the drugs.

* To begin the new millennium city council proposed doubling the fees for overtime parking, citing an outsider's study recommending it. Merchants were unified in begging them not to, explaining, as the same study showed, they already lacked adequate parking for shoppers.

Councilors cavalierly dismissed them with the suggestion of building a third parking garage someday.

A few minutes later in the same meeting the council agreed to sell yet another parking lot to a builder. The local daily paper called it "an empty lot" ignoring as not worthy of mention, though the point was raised, that it was one of the last remaining parking lots downtown and perhaps the only free lot left.

A month later when a vote to increase the overtime parking fee came up, council abandoned plans to double the fees and instead tripled them. The biking councilman who pushed that through suggested shoppers should park a half mile away from downtown in free spaces in the city's highest crime neighborhood where personal safety is most at risk from teen gangs.

This is a means to create "affordable housing" which the laws of capitalist economics dictate will always be in short supply, and it is here as it is throughout the country. The idea is to deflate housing values by removing the amenities in a middle income subdivision. "Connectivity" is the term for changing one-entrance residential subdivisions to multiple entrances, converting quiet residential neighborhoods into shortcuts for through traffic. "Calmed" traffic, of course, with obstructions to plague cars and block delivery trucks.

The one being considered would allow access to the local Interstate highway through one of the city's quietest one entrance subdivisions, trashing desirability and property values. The subdivision included a city councilor's home so the proposal was on hold while she was in office. She's out now. Would you buy a house there under this threat?

Also in that election Hizzoner The Mayor retired.

When he did, it ended his biking trips leading a contingent of bicycle riders down Main Street at rush hour to block traffic, in what he called a show of civic camaraderie. (I didn't make that up.)

Hizzoner's solution to one of the legendary cross town bottlenecks was to propose a highrise in the middle of it, either dead-ending the streets or pretending they aren't there. The project would have overwhelmed a low key commercial-residential neighborhood.

Hizzoner is an architect. It's the project that matters. Unintended consequences are beyond his sympathy. But ah! the public money he sent to out-of-town planners for projects we could never build. Was he was trolling for a job when his term was through?

The council shelved the bottleneck project to keep it out of the news during the election campaign. Without Hizzoner's hand on the tap we can expect this to remain dead.

The controlling Democratic Party, my party, has dominated local government since the late 1960s, and deserves to. There was a surprise in 2002 when a personable Republican Realtor with a distinctive ponytail pulled more votes than a Democrat in a council race. That seldom happens. The losing Dem was an especially outspoken historic preservation extremist.

Republican Party leadership here is embarrassing. In 2004 their losing council candidates were a convicted felon and a newcomer. Nice people, but unconventional backgrounds are not the same thing as qualifications.

Such antics undermine party unity, and contributed to all five precincts in the city voting overwhelmingly for Kerry over Bush in 2004. Even Albemarle County went for Kerry. The rest of Virginia didn't.

Charlottesville and Albemarle have always been gerrymandered into hopelessly conservative congressional districts where our influence is nil. We may rule Charlottesville but we lose every congressional election by a landslide.

If the swing voters in the city tire of one-party rule, as happened in the 1960s, and should Republicans manage to field two or three credible candidates who promise to get roads built and traffic moving, we could see the city briefly return to GOP control. While I hate to see the party lose, there are reasons why we could.

* Despite this being a university town our city public schools barely reach state averages in a state where most schools don't reach national averages. Virginia ranks 37th in public education. Local performance is not for lack of money. The Democrats tripled per-pupil expenditures since the early 90s with no performance improvement.

According to the local daily, for black students, out of the 132 school divisions in the state Charlottesville ranks third from the bottom in English and math. In science, says the paper, city black students rank last in the state.

The same source says that in 2006 Charlottesville High students taking the SATs scored 51 points better than the national average in reading, 18 points better in math and 76 points better in writing.

Beginning in 2005 the city schools moved to mainstreaming, distracting the regular classes with special education kids. That follows the time-honored American tradition of providing the greater good for the smaller number. Whatever else it mainstreaming may do, it quieted an insistent special interest group.

Supposedly fed up with the school board, which in Virginia (alone in the US) has been appointed rather than elected, Charlottesville revolted in November, 2005, and voted overwhelmingly, despite opposition by the dominant Democrats, to change to an elected board when the legislature permitted that local option. In its first election (2006) the winning candidates under the new system were the same ones who would have been appointed under the old.

Albemarle county schools have better reputations, which influences which side of the city line young families concerned about education choose to live. Private schools thrive here, with new ones emerging every few years.

* We have the usual utility taxes every city does, plus a whopping 15% tax on TV cable, one-half named Utility Tax and the other half named Franchise Fee. These regressive taxes remain inviolate despite large budget surpluses in good years. On city council's agenda is raising the utility taxes yet again, perhaps to pay for stop lights and dog roundabouts on the nature path.

* Budget surpluses are to spend. City Council once actually appealed for public suggestions how to squander a half-million dollar surplus.

This was their response to the suggestion not to.

The 2006 surplus was a whopping $9.9 million! Then a year later the surplus was $6.7 million. Since 2000 we've been stripped of more than $20 million in surplus taxes not required to fund the budget. What's going on, is Charlottesville the most profligate city in the nation?

While the answer to that might be yes, it's not the right question to ask. There's something else. Remember the earlier description of the city's Revenue Sharing agreement with Albemarle County? The Revenue Sharing formula rests on the how much each government seizes in taxes from its citizens. By expropriating from us $6.7 million too much his year, next year the city will be able to hit Albemarle for a whopping $13.6 million check.

Revenue Sharing's temptation - urge - reward to over-tax is one of our city's deepest, darkest secrets.

* Whether due to empire building or whatever, taxes fund two separate planning staffs, yet every potential action requires costly outside consultants with commonly less expertise than is found on staff or at the local university. No local official will put his name on a potentially unpopular proposal.

* Frugality? The word is met with derision. It bruises local pride. The constitutional offices are well run and professional, however. This is not your grandfather's South.

* Through a series of retreats and charettes, our government crafted a mission statement based on assumptions reflecting one-party rule. There's no question it's a great mission statement for those of us who accept the assumptions. But can any one party balance all the interests?

Civic secrets:

Due to monopolies and friendly arrangements of long standing, we are being cheated on the costs of concrete products and petroleum. For example, the basic cinderblock used to build a house foundation that is priced in Richmond today at $1.39 costs $1.64 in Charlottesville, 18% more. Gasoline runs 7 to 20 cents per gallon more here than elsewhere in the state.

Living costs rank among the highest in the state, yet local wages are low. The place is wall-to-wall with people willing to sell their services on the cheap.

Despite the area having one of the lowest unemployment rates in the entire world, commonly under 2%, you're out of luck if you're over 60. Age discrimination for good jobs here is near-total. No one wants the elder worker, as our Barbara Ehrenreich learned doing research for her 2006 book on employment, "Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream."

If you're over 60 and need income you'll have to start a business or take a menial job.

Low wages mean truly competent builders, electricians, plumbers, etc. are scarce. Most of our best technicians work two hours away in prosperous Northern Virginia for double the income.

In addition to uneven workmanship there are colossal blunders. For example in 2001 workers in a large subdivision crossed-connected the community water and sewer systems.

Aside from some common electronics, there is no authorized warranty repair facility for a consumer product within 40 miles.

The range of retail and wholesale items available locally, never much, has been shrinking for 20 years. Internet and catalog shopping is essential to find anything above the commonplace.

A USA Today report was no surprise when it showed Charlottesville tied for 3rd in having the most catalog-loving shoppers in the entire world. The only cities ahead of us are Juneau and Fairbanks in Alaska. (We tied Anchorage.)

Due to decades of inaction and ignored planning, when a drought hit the area in 2002 the water supply red-lined and water use was restricted. After restrictions were lifted the cost for water was up 100%. And it continues to rise.