"Before deciding this is a great place to live or retire there is a major downside to know. The saying "art begins where common sense leaves off" could as well be said about government.

In 1982 the city made a mammoth blunder. 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 truism that expenses rise to meet or exceed income happened almost immediately. But more importantly, the city discovered the perils of no growth.

Charlottesville had 40,000 inhabitants in 1990. It has 40,000 inhabitants in 2000. All the area growth, and it was substantial, was in surrounding urban and rural areas beyond the city limit.

In Virginia cities 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.

It must crunch us.

This creates shortcomings that are powerful, deeply rooted, and will outlast you. It also means you will be ruled by a government capable of such blunders, because they continue.

Due to the revenue sharing deal with the county Charlottesville no longer has an economically balanced population. In the last decade the percentage of children in Charlottesville public schools eligible for free or reduced-price lunches rose to 53%.

The economic curve here is skewed. People familiar with the area who can afford a choice between buying in the city or buying in the county generally choose the county, for good cause.

So in order to grow the tax base the city is selling its last remaining downtown parking lots to builders. Would a shopping mall do that? The staggering short-sightedness of it is strangling our downtown. We have parking problems of a city 5 times the size.

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.

The policy as defined in law makes sense. As we do it, it shows what can happen when there is wide support for cultural elitism. Political science terms it the tyranny of the majority.

As practiced here, any building built before the birth of the oldest living citizen 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 to fall under this law despite a written requirement for that. In practice it is automatic.

This applies to houses, stores and store fronts, accessory sheds, rotting hen houses.

Any plans for repair, maintenance, and modernization must be approved by a committee who will determine what will be done, and how, and paint color.

All aspects aside from cost to the owner are duly considered but the outcome is pre-determined. Since its inception committee appointments have been weighted to favor historic extremists.

If a "historic structure" 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.

Even more intrusive, most of the city that was built prior to 1930 was declared "historic" and those areas are under powerful controls, though not the iron control applied to designated buildings.

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

Albemarle County has vigorously refused such controls, preferring to encourage historic preservation through the incentive of real estate tax breaks. Outside of the ubiquitous urban sprawl zones that swell its tax base, it has been enormously successful at preservation in the opinion of all but extremists.

Draconian city controls are not for the purpose of making the city more attractive. They often have the opposite result, preserving an ugly, inconsequential, obsolete building or city block, and preventing essential replacement.

Owners wracked with common sense have been known to bulldoze worthless structures in the dead of night, preferring fines and the wrath of city hall to elitist absolutism.

Government also claims jurisdiction over trees on private property, a laughable over-reach universally ignored.

Enforced preservation of structures not old, not interesting, just economically obsolete is a daily fact of life in Charlottesville weighing on realty transactions. Still, there is general economic vitality downtown. The use of bonds and other public money to assist private development accounts for much of that.

One of the steps seriously contemplated here 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, not experienced management. Government is successful only because we use the city manager form, hiring professionals to run the place.

Aside from transportation the pros do exceedingly well. 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 by car difficult intentionally. The government, elected and professional, doesn't believe in cars and goes out of its way to inconvenience drivers. In some ways it's like life on a resort island, which would be fine if we were that.

Alas, other than having a couple of nifty jitneys running bus routes we're in no way an island.

* A vitally-needed commuter road on the drawing board for three decades with ample money to build it remains dead in the water, stalled by an obstructionist, dissembling city council.

* There are stop signs at random every few blocks for the stated purpose of "traffic calming," the catch-phrase of the day. You can read on the web about Charlottesville's traffic calming.

* Traffic lights are timed to disrupt rather than smooth the flow.

* 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. The folks in charge know. They want them that way.

* There are (or were) inane plans to convert the busiest downtown intersection into a traffic circle, a move estimated to more than triple the congestion.

* One of the busiest downtown commuter arteries was converted last year to a narrow matrix of random concrete obstructions. Motorists striking them have turned the road into a dangerous hazard. Several accidents happen every month; more are assured.

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 city's official response to complaints: "People will learn."

One councilor explained to the public, "The obstructions are designed to disturb drivers and be an inconvenience" and at that they are a success.

The obstructions are located at street corners, 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 plan no one thought through until egos were committed to it.

The police chief reported that 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 so are contrary to universally accepted safety practices. Through intentional obstructions the city has exposed us to potentially costly liability.

Evidently comfortable with this, city council plans to order the same road squeeze on other city arteries. Their explanation: pedestrians like it.

So long as they come from the top down changes are almost assured to happen. From the bottom up change is another matter. If a resident wants to call city government's attention to a neighborhood road problem, he must work through layer upon layer of red tape involving Neighborhood Associations before the problem will be heard. That's new.

A reversal of hundreds of years of local government accessability was quietly instituted last year with virtually no public notice and no justification whatever.

* At its most important turning junction, an artery leading to a by-pass was narrowed to one lane, causing massive daily back-ups and grid locks that are totally avoidable by removing a few traffic cones. They are never removed.

Every government has its quirks. One of ours is a godawful transportation policy that defies common sense.

Bicycle lanes abound. Why? Niche market dicta: "If you build roads, cars will come. If you build bicycle lanes, bicycles will come." So there are bicycle lanes. They are unused.

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 and place "borrow bikes" around the downtown mall and the university.

Can the concept really be that everyone is capable of biking, bikes fill their needs, and everyone begins his daily transportation at two points? That biking to work or shop is a reasonable all-weather choice for locals and visitors, old and young, people transporting children, grocery shoppers?

One senses old-fashioned cronyism with new age cronies, bike-riding counselors with ties to the small, organized bike population. Bicycle theft from the mall is a leading unpublicized crime and a huge annoyance they hope to control with taxpayer bikes.

That concept gives one pause: thieves will stop stealing expensive bikes if they can legally take a cheapie?

* To begin 2001 city council proposed doubling the fees for overtime parking, citing an outsider's study recommending it. Merchants were unified in pleading with them not to, explaining, as the same study showed, the lack of adequate parking for shoppers or employees.

Councilors cavalierly dismissed them with the suggestion to build more parking garages 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 reported it as selling "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 fee came up, council abandoned plans to double the fees and instead tripled them. The 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.

Currently, at the instigation of a biking councilor who champions affordable housing, and a homebuilder with 41 more city acres to develop, the city recently opened up its mere 10 square miles to the large city concepts of "connectivity" and "new urbanism."

These are designed to open up one-entrance residential sub-divisions to multiple entrances, turning residential neighborhoods into shortcuts for through traffic.

The one under discussion would allow access to the local Interstate highway through one of the city's quietest one entrance sub-divisions, reducing desirability and property values.

Such changes, actual or threatened, impact city real estate sales to the advantage of the county where this isn't an issue. County sub-division buyers have no cause to doubt that what they buy is what they get.

* City real estate taxes run 50% higher than those in Albemarle county yet don't cover trash collection.

* Despite this being a university town our city public schools barely reach state averages in a state where schools barely reach national averages. This has created better public schools outside the city limits, accounting in no small part for which side of the city line to buy a home.

* We have the usual utility taxes every city does, plus a whopping 15% tax on TV cable. These regressive taxes remain inviolate despite six-figure budget surpluses.

* Maintaining a triple-A bond rating means large budget surpluses are "ours to spend" and never returned.

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

* Frugality? The mention of the word in connection with city government is met with derision. The word bruises local pride.

* We have 1-party government and though it's my party utterly, totally, and forever, it's easy to recognize when government operates on unstated, unchecked, unexamined assumptions even when you share them.

Civic secrets:

Vestiges of Reconstruction survive.

Living costs rank among the highest in the state but local wages do not, despite the area having one of the lowest unemployment rates in the entire world, commonly under 2%.

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 the expected uneven workmanship here there are colossal blunders. For example in 2001 workers in a large sub-division crossed connected the community water and sewer systems.

There is virtually no authorized warranty repair facility for any 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 world, exceeded only by Juneau and Fairbanks in Alaska. Our 3rd place tie was with Anchorage, also in Alaska.

A regional mid-scale commercial development has finally been proposed, the first ever here. It's a few feet beyond the city line and remains to be seen if it can survive county planners and still be economically viable.

City council is dreadfully concerned over, of course, traffic. It's at a busy intersection made worse by the intentional 6-second turning light recounted above. They could always fix it.

Fortunately we have financially strong state-of-the-art Internet providers equaling the best in the world. High tech thrives here, with a massive local infra-structure.

The local daily paper is a chain property with a minimal news hole. Those who want the news have home delivery of the Washington Post and NYTimes available, and coffee shops and restaurants have multiple browser copies.

One last note: the area has the country's highest per capita listenership to National Public Radio which is 80% classical music.

Our upper middle school and high school have a higher percentage of students participating in serious music programs than almost anywhere in the land, and they win gold medals.

Maintaining refinement is not a losing battle here.

Music, theatre, art, and a colorful downtown mall temper one's exasperation.