C-Ville and The HooK Investigate Biscuit Run

Thank goodness Charlottesville has two weeklies who consistently produce 5,000+ word investigative reports.* Will Goldsmith at C-Ville reports (archived: 2011): (bolding mine)

But the Biscuit Run acquisition process, from start to finish, was a hasty affair that involved no public input and a network of businessmen and politicians with close ties. No one who negotiated the deal could control how much taxpayers paid—the decision is left to a few unelected bureaucrats in the state tax department. It very well could have bailed out businessmen who had made an ill-timed real estate investment at the height of the bubble.

As far as I can tell, the story of Biscuit Run isn’t a story of illegal corruption. It is about something far more prosaic, and possibly more disturbing—how influential people align their interests and justify their actions by saying they did it for you and me.

For background on Biscuit Run, do as I do and turn to the RealCentralVA.com archives and, better yet, Charlottesville Tomorrow’s Biscuit Run archives.

*It’s not a matter of “print” being dead, but of “journalism” succeeding.

More at the Charlottesville Bubble blog.

Update 27 October 2010: I didn’t realize how prescient I was when I wrote about Charlottesville’s two weeklies. Courteney Stuart at The HooK writes today:

It seems like a simple question: How much will taxpayers pay to make Biscuit Run a Virginia park?

Nearly a year after the state’s under-the-wire purchase of the 1,200-acre tract that had been slated to become Albemarle’s biggest subdivision, the would-be developers and state officials appear to have successfully deflected inquiries about the value of tax credits that made the deal possible— even as the Virginia state senator who penned the legislation establishing such tax credits now calls the secrecy “disturbing.”