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 fairness 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 labor. It's the Virginia curse.

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 decried it. It's UCITA that has allowed software licenses to get wildly, wickedly one-sided. It's so bad that 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 getting a slap on the wrist for: (a) mishandling a real estate transaction in 1986, (b) mingling personal funds with a client's in 1990, (c) abandoning a client on the day of trial in 1992, and (d) repeatedly violating the state's rules against legal harassment and intimidation in 1996.

That was not enough for the Bar to revoke or even suspend 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 in this state and are revered. This puts an interesting spin on the state's 1776 motto, Sic Semper Tyrannis - Thus Always to Tyrants. In our 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 140 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 those 140 people. That's almost $100,000 head turning dollars per member.

According to filings, the state's largest consumer group spent zero on lobbying.

It shows.

* Virginia has done away entirely with usury limits on business and investment loans. Consumer loans have outrageously high interest caps that are out-lawed as loansharking elsewhere.

* 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 $5,000, he loses his home. In Florida and Texas you're allowed to keep several million in net worth. The sane states have something in between that makes sense. Virginians prefer cruelty to humanity.

That could be because Virginia's part-time legislators tend to be affluent people who can afford part-time public service. They come from the provider side of the economy, or are lawyers. They have no problem passing laws to make the affluent feel morally superior. The few not affluent are totally dependent on large contributors. No one can afford to be a populist though some make a pretense of it. Populists have no friends in the room when the controlling party gerrymanders district lines every ten years.

It must not be overlooked that Virginia is in the bible belt. Christianity for dummies dominates our rural culture. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson were local boys. In 2004 Virginia passed by overwhelming vote (without the governor's signature) the most anti-gay marriage bill in the country.

Kick people who are down? In 2006 the State Senate refused to allow local governments to voluntarily supplement the salaries of underpaid public defenders. Localities can only supplement the salaries of prosecutors. Do you understand that? The Senate majority opposes an even playing field in our criminal courts.

How can the Senate tell localities what to do? Because Virginia is under the "Dillon Rule" which says local government can do nothing without specific permission from the state legislature. That's repression from the Jim Crow era. The only Jim Crow laws that changed here were changed by the US Congress, the US Department of Justice, and the courts, not the Virginia legislature.

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 modest 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 only 23% in a poll a few months before the vote, 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 and immunity from annexation won by a landslide. As a result, between 1982-83 and 2006-07 the county has given the city $115.9 million. The year 2006 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 exact on us all someday. The city's 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's been substantial, was in urban and rural areas outside the city. Albemarle County's population surged ahead of the city to 84,186, more than double Charlottesville's.

Cities in Virginia are totally independent of counties. Virginia is unique that way. Cities 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 attitudes 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 foot in 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 in tax.

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 were 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 are in jeopardy here.

In 2006 my realty appraisal went up 25% for a property where nothing changed in a neighborhood where nothing changed. 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. "Charlottesville faces a projected $7 million shortfall a few years down the road," we were 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 those who would enlarge the mall and eliminate about 500 on-street parking spaces. (That would leave about 7, all for handicapped.)

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 in appearance, and be maintained. As practiced here preservation goes beyond architectural and historic heritage. Charlottesville seeks to preserve obsolescence.

The policy as defined in law makes sense. But as we do it, it shows what happens when government is in the grip of cultural elitism. We get the tyranny of the dilettante.

What happens is this. Any structure built before the birth of the person discussing it is a priori a historic landmark which must be preserved. It may not be torn down and replaced with a useful structure. No definable architectural value or historic importance need be shown. The code requirement to justify preservation is a sham. Protection is inevitable.

This applies to nondescript condemned houses boarded up, rotting, and infested with termites; repellent old stores and storefronts, even accessory sheds.

We once actually demanded the preservation of a rotting hen house of no importance simply because it had some age and someone in power thought it was "quaint." That was his word in preventing the creation of student housing in the heart of the area zoned for that. And hey, Georgia O'Keefe once lived nearby, so her name was brought in to muddy the water.

Any plans for repair, maintenance, and modernization must be approved down to the smallest detail 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 Fellini's Restaurant door may or may not be painted, and what color, and which brand of paint.

All aspects - except co$t to the owner or owner's rights - are discussed at length but the outcome is pre-determined. Since the inception of the BAR, its appointments went to historic extremists at the urging of cultural elitists. (Not without cause, BAR is said to mean "Building Architects' Revenue.")

If the owner of a vacant, decrepit, useless, hulk fails to weatherize 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 owners are bound by powerful controls.

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

Albemarle County declines all 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 tax base, Albemarle has been 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.

Builders overcome with common sense have been known to bulldoze worthless structures in the night, accepting fines and the wrath of city hall in order to erect vitally needed new buildings over the obstinacy of preservation Luddites.

Pernicious preservation obstructs realty transactions. Still, despite a high commercial vacancy rate there is general economic vitality downtown. Bonds and other public money assisting the private sector accounts for much of it.

The city is bounded by two small rivers and ignores them. They are all but invisible and there's no waterfront, aside from a footpath. City voices occasionally rise to lecture the county on what to do on its side of the water.

That footpath was a graveled greenbelt nature trail until the city paved it. No joke. They squandered taxes (despite the threatened $7 million shortfall) to paint a white line down the middle of the footpath.

Why? 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 tells dogs which side to stay on.

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

One of the steps seriously contemplated in recent years was revoking city status, giving up the charter, and reverting to a town. Given our provincialism it wasn't a bad idea. We elect down home folks to city council chosen by their attitude. Management or business background usually results in a failure to win party nomination. 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. "Replace the pro with Bozo." That's actually a plank in the 2009 GOP platform. It's no surprise they can't field a candidate for local office.

Aside from transportation the pros do ok. Transportation is in a class by itself. This is a hard city to move cars through, and anti-vehicle Luddites in and out of government want it even worse.

Charlottesville is one of the few small cities to make getting around difficult intentionally. The government doesn't cotton to private vehicles and goes out of its way to inconvenience drivers. They treat the city's arteries like a resort island reached only by bridges.

Alas, other than having a couple of nifty jitneys running bus routes, we're not an island. But witness these gambits:

* "The name without a road." A vitally-needed commuter road, the Meadowcreek Parkway, has been on the drawing board for 38 YEARS with money to build it. It's been stalled all this time by an obstructionist city council that imposes new requirements when the old ones are met.

While the county is now finally constructing it's portion of the parkway, citizen Luddites are smothering the city with obstructionism.

Without that parkway, a highway linking the populous part of the county to downtown is a 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 abutments reaching into the street. Motorists strike them constantly. It was widely predicted this would cause accidents, and it 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 scraped 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 taxpayers to costly liability.

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

* Throughout the city there are random 4-way stop signs every few blocks. The stated purpose is "traffic calming." The result: hundreds of gallons of gasoline needlessly wasted every day.

* 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 after a spring rain.

* If the car count at commuter time justifies a traffic light under federal uniform traffic control guidelines, the light works 24 hours a day. Blinking caution during low traffic hours, the sensible option, is rejected.

* A short 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. The city is installing cameras to impose fines on people who think lights are there to improve traffic flow.

* A downtown side street serving a few businesses requires tripping an underground detector to change the light to green. The light remains red otherwise. A brick pedestrian crosswalk was installed over the detector. Cars must stop before the crosswalk, five feet short of the detector, Ergo they can't trip the switch. There are no signs posted. After being ignored long enough, drivers run the red light.

[Revisited. The light now cycles without requiring the trip switch.]

* There were, and in some minds still are, plans to convert the busiest downtown intersection, and one that actually works ok, into a traffic roundabout, a move estimated that at rush hour would triple the congestion and delays.

We did put traffic circles in some residential areas, only to prove that bad policy creates bad examples. We have a classic how-not-to-do-it. It's an over-size traffic circle in the middle of an intersection, occupying so much of the road that a moving van can't negotiate the turn. No bus can go there. What was called for was a circle half the size. And they allow parking. Of course a transportation Luddite leaves a car in the narrowest place all day and night despite better parking close by.

Elsewhere in town parts of intersections are blocked off to allow barely enough room for 2 cars to pass. Trucks? Buses? Fire engines? What for?

After suffering five decades of this insult to good management, Charlottesville is now involved in 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? By holding it green a few extra seconds to allow a bus to get through, keeping traffic flowing and the bus on schedule.

If it's set-up properly and if it's allowed to work, and if people in the control room pay attention, this impressive program could correct many of our transportation deficiencies.

Maybe.

Recently I spent 18 minutes waiting for a green light while one EMS vehicle after another reset traffic control back to step one, preventing a 4 phase light from completing a cycle. These devices do not HAVE to default to total reset. Seems Charlottesville's destiny is to make one bad choice after another.

* 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's supposed to work through layer upon layer of red tape involving Neighborhood Associations ("Step One: Create a Neighborhood Association") before the problem can be heard.

The red tape came to us in 2000 after hundreds of years of small town government accessibility. "Cities are doing this now," we're told when staff and councillors come back from collegial city management conventions where the mantra is "Don't listen. Tell."

* At a high traffic exit from a bypass, a two-lane ramp is limited to one lane. The other lane serves a private residence as a second driveway access. At 4 PM on a weekday it can take 20 minutes to travel 200 yards up that ramp. A traffic light and use of both lanes would eliminate the problem. They know.

Every government has its quirks. Ours is transportation Luddites and a game plan from hell.

Bicycle lanes abound. Why? Luddites tell us, "Roads cause cars. If you build roads, cars come. If you build bicycle lanes, bicycles come." So they built bike lanes, but bicycles did not come. They didn't build roads but cars came just the same.

Bike lanes are 100% unused at night, 100% unused in the snow, 99% unused in the rain, and 98% unused in the sunshine. Luddite response: escalate the war on cars.

Their concept, and they are serious about this, holds that everyone young and old is capable of biking at all times, day and night, in any climate and weather, and bike transport is all that's needed. They believe biking to work or to shop is an all-weather choice for locals and visitors. They believe mother can take her kiddies on a bike and come back from the supermarket with 5 bags of groceries in the snow in perfect safety.

Blow that smoke aside and discover we have old-fashioned cronyism with new age cronies: bike-riding counselors with ties to the Luddite bike population.

And guess what. It turns out that new age cronyism is no better than traditional cronyism. Their hand is in our wallet to fund their special interest, bicycle theft. Bike theft around town is a leading crime and a huge annoyance they hoped to control with taxpayer bikes.

The concept was simple enough: thieves will stop stealing expensive bikes from private owners if they can legally take a worthless cheapie funded by taxpayers. 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 bike disappeared or was vandalized. Wonky 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.

Could it be the drugs?

* To begin the new millennium city council proposed doubling the fee for overtime parking, citing an outsider's study recommending it. (Always hire outsiders. No one who lives here would suggest that.) 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 developer. The local daily called it "an empty lot" ignoring as not worthy of mention, though the point was raised, that it was one of the last remaining flat 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 fee and instead tripled it. 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 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 in this instance was to deflate housing values in a middle income subdivision by removing the major amenity that made it desirable. "Connectivity" was the tool to be used.

Change a one-entrance subdivision to multiple entrances, converting quiet, low traffic, streets into shortcuts for through traffic.

"Calmed" traffic, to be sure, with obstructions to plague drivers and block service vehicles.

The plan called for access to the local interstate highway through one of the city's quietest one entrance subdivisions, bringing down property values to create "affordable housing." The subdivision included a city councilor's home so the proposal died a quick death.

Hizzoner The Mayor helped the idea along. That particular mayor is well-retired now but he was a sketch.

When in office, he led groups 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 and only the edifice matters. Unintended consequences are beyond his notice. But ah! the public money he sent to out-of-town planners for projects we could never build. Was he trolling for a personal career move? Seemed that way.

The council shelved Project Bottleneck. Without Hizzoner's hand on the money tap this should remain dead.

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

Republican Party leadership here is embarrassing. Two of their recent losing council candidates were a convicted felon and a newcomer to the city. Nice people, but unorthodox backgrounds are not the same thing as qualifications.

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

For as long as anyone remembers, Charlottesville and Albemarle have been gerrymandered into redneck rural congressional districts to make sure our influence is nil. We rule Charlottesville but we lose every congressional election by a landslide. Then finally in 2008 Republican mis-management was too much for even this district, and a Democratic challenger pulled a handful more votes than the GOP incumbent. So we have a Democrat in Congress. For now. In a couple of years we have another redistricting, and the Republicans will take Charlottesville away from him.

If the swing voters in the city tire again of one-party rule, as happened in the 1960s, and should Republicans manage to field 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 my party lose, there are reasons why we could.

* Despite this being home to the state university, 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. Some think that's one of the effects of mainstreaming because it keeps teachers occupied with low achievers.

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 mainstreaming may do, it quiets one special interest group while arousing another.

Supposedly fed up with the school board, which in Virginia (alone among the 50 states) has been appointed rather than elected, Charlottesville revolted in November, 2005, and voted overwhelmingly, despite opposition by the 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 people 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 24-hour-a-day dog stop lights 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 serious money, 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 city's Revenue Sharing agreement with Albemarle County? The complex 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 this year, next year the city will be able to hit Albemarle for a whopping $13.6 million.

Revenue Sharing's temptation - almost a requirement - for city council to over-tax us is our city's deepest, darkest secret. Now you know.

* And so much is wasted. Whether due to empire building or whatever, taxes fund two separate planning staffs, yet every potential action requires costly outside consultants with usually less expertise than is found on staff or at the local university.

That's about courage. No local official will put his name on a proposal that might prove unpopular.

* Frugality? The word is met with derision. It bruises local pride. We spend with the big boys. An obligation to over-tax carries an obligation to over-spend.

The constitutional offices - Treasurer, Commissioner of Revenue, etc. - 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?

More civic secrets:

Due to monopolies and greed, we are charged inflated prices for concrete products and petroleum. For example, the basic cinderblock used in construction costs 18% more in Charlottesville than in Richmond. Year after year, gasoline runs 7 to 20 cents per gallon more in Charlottesville than elsewhere in the state.

Living costs rank among the highest in Virginia, yet local wages are low. The place is wall-to-wall with people selling their services on the cheap because they have to.

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 local writer 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. Many good technicians commute two hours away to 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 actually crossed-connected the community water and sewer systems.

Aside from some common electronics and a Best Buy "Geek Squad," 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. (Charlottesville 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 continues to rise. But the worst is still to come. Mistrust of water officials accused of bad planning amid questions of competency promises to embroil the area for years. Meanwhile, we pay four times as much for water as they pay in Northern Virginia.