Podcast for December 5, 2025: Albemarle Supervisors seek additional funding for Smart Scale while City Council moves a streetscape project slightly forward

What does it mean that there is a Friday podcast edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement? In case anyone asks, an explanation: This newsletter began in July 2020 as a podcast as a next phase of work I began at the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. In the spring of 2024, I began producing a radio program for WTJU and decided to separate that production into a separate process.Now it is December 5, 2025 and there is enough information to get out a podcast before the next radio show. See below for some introspection about why I hope to increase the amount of audio in the future.In this edition:* Virginia’s elections are certified; Catalano holds on to Stanardsville seat on Greene Board (read the story)* Charlottesville PC takes first look at draft Capital Improvement Program (read the story)* Albemarle Supervisors ask local legislators for help on transportation funding (read the story)* Charlottesville moves step closer to construction of Barracks-Emmet Streetscape (read the story)* Charlottesville City Council fixes an underpayment to the area ’s tourism agency (read the story)Charlottesville Community Engagement is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Today’s shout-out: Town Crier Productions!This newsletter as well as Information Charlottesville are the two main platforms for Town Crier Productions. That’s the name for the business entity I created in 2020 when I decided to launch a new chapter in journalism.I’ve been able to sustain this work and cover many stories over the past five years because of the many ways people can support the business. One way is to go for a paid subscription here on Substack which goes a long way to support all of the research and reporting.Other ways? Well, you can always consider taking out a sponsorship or advertisement or whatever it is called when you want to get a message out to draw attention to your business, organization, event, or anything that might fit in with this particular audience. Drop me a line if you want to see the fledgling media kit and help me experiment.But also, thanks to all of you who read this each time it is published. A publication like this may not be for everyone, but it has found an audience. We’re all in this together, and I’m grateful for any support so I can keep paying attention and sharing what I find.So the real shout-out here - is to all of you! After all, isn’t that what a Town Crier does?Thoughts about why this edition:Before I launched this newsletter in July 2020, I had created a website that I was going to call This is Charlottesville. If you look closely, that’s the first domain I registered sometime after I left my last journalism job.This particular edition is going to be reposted to the Charlottesville Podcasting Network, a moribund website that a longtime steward fixed this week for me. I created the website in the spring of 2005 when I realized I could post longer versions of my freelance stories to a place on the Internet I could control.Twenty years ago was an epoch ago. Social media was in its infancy but in Charlottesville, we had cvillenews.com which was an early gathering point for those who were online early when you needed a computer to get to all of it.I had no idea how to make money off of the podcast site, and a first version of my business ended up being about taking whatever revenue I could with not a lot of thought about what it was I was doing. There were some really big failures and I was grateful when I had the opportunity to join Charlottesville Tomorrow.I spent eleven years there and took a break from journalism. But from the beginning of the interregnum, I wanted to have a place to experiment with getting information out to people. When the pandemic hit, I took a leap of faith to start what was intended to be a simple newscast. But that grew and grew until I’m at this point where I’ve got to fix a lot of things if I’m going to stay in the air.There are many flaws with aspects of my current way of producing things. There are so many dumb errors that go out to thousands of people because I don’t have a second set of eyes.Until the spring of 2024, all of the newsletter were podcasts but I broke the production into separate processes when I began doing the radio version for WTJU.Doing so lost an editorial check. It’s very hard to read copy from a script with errors in it. I’m prone to silly errors and I can be hasty trying to get information out to people.But when I read the copy, I have to fix it. One solution would be to at least produce the narration for every version before I hit send.Next week there is no radio show as WTJU holds their Classical Marathon from December 8 to December 14. That may mean I take a fresh approach to audio production.In any case, this is the introspection about audio. I hope you enjoy the day. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit communityengagement.substack.com/subscribe