Podcast for August 8, 2026: Charlottesville City Council agrees to spend an additional $4 million to prepare office building for temporary shelter

Today’s sponsor: Panorama Natural Burial is reimagining death care through natural burial, land conservation, and community

The opening of the Beijing Olympics, a president announces a resignation, and a certain incident took place on a Chicago bridge. These are just some of the things that have happened on other editions of August 8 throughout recent time. There has only been one regular edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement in the six years since publication began so when you’re done here go back and time travel.

• Charlottesville to hire outside groups to manage emergency shelter and encampment clearance (read the story)

• Voices speak out against upcoming ending of Rivanna River encampments (read the story)

• Charlottesville City Manager Sam Sanders explains how 2000 Holiday Drive is just part of the city’s response to homelessness (read the story)

• Albemarle EDA to support classes to assist wine industry learn new techniques after difficult spring (read the story)

• More people using Ivy Solid Waste and Recycling Center (read the story)

Once again, the time it takes to put together the audio podcast ends up being much longer than it should be. Throughout the week as I am writing stories, I keep track of them in a spreadsheet. One of the columns indicates whether the story has a sound element to it. Not all stories come from meetings, but those that do are fodder for both the WTJU radio show as well as this podcast version.

For 650 editions or so, the newsletter and the podcast for one and the same. The reason there’s an anecdote at the moment is to serve as something the listener would hear to get used to my voice. It’s a way I personalize the newsletter and try to offer something more than just the information.

I learn so much in the course of doing that research and I’ve kept writing them because doing so wakes up my brain and gets me ready for the work of finishing the newsletter.

There are currently no plans to reunify the newsletter and the podcast because the audience interested in the sonic product is much smaller. I can imagine a time when there’s a partnership with a radio station or other production company to produce this work. Right now I’m very to be working with WTJU and glad the radio version was named Best News Program this year by the Alliance for Community Media.

If you’ve never heard one of these before, this is a good place to start. The segments are much longer than you’re going to hear anywhere else, and I think that’s incredibly important to have an alternative. This particular edition is a 30 minute summary of one of the most difficult issues of our time. It hits differently when you hear people’s voices.

Now, time to produce it so I can get on with the rest of the week. Thank you for reading or listening.

And now the cut-and-paste bit intended to get your help in getting more eyes on the stories:

• I post stories over at BlueSky but don’t really do much else than that at this point. Here’s the account for Information Charlottesville.

• You can also subscribe to get Information Charlottesville postings via email Wordpress. This is where I confess I don’t entirely know the link for this. Might be a pop-up?

• Town Crier Productions has a Facebook page but I’m really not sure if it’s worth keeping as the site doesn’t really seem to like Substack material. Or Wordpress material. In six years of doing this, I’ve never had a post “go viral” and I think it’s all throttled. I don’t pay them any money anymore

• And then there’s Instagram which gets a couple of likes every now and then though I am really bad at images!