Month: February 2014
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Second Map of the Day: Where the Young People Are Going
If the future of Virginia resides with its young people, we can see from the map above that some regions are a lot better off than others. Luke Juday, several of whose maps I have re-published on Bacon’s Rebellion, has moved to the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, where he has begun posting on…
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Map of the Day: Lightning Fatalities
If you’re afraid of lightning, you’re way better off in Virginia than in North Carolina or Maryland! Source: The Atlantic Cities blog. — JAB
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Protests Pick Up Against Bay LNG Exports
By Peter Galuszka Protests are picking up against plans to convert a liquefied natural gas shipping facility on Maryland’s western shore of the Chesapeake Bay at Cove Point so it can both export as well as import the product. The proposed, $3.8 billion project is owned by Richmond-based Dominion Resources. Four protestors were arrested today…
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The Acid Test for Richmond BRT: Will Property Owners Tax Themselves?
by James A. Bacon Momentum is building in the Richmond region to build a 7.4-mile Bus Rapid Transit system along the Broad Street corridor. Transit lovers tout the many blessings that a BRT system would bring, and they discuss the projected costs, but there are two things you never hear them talk about: Risk and…
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Don’t Expect Increased Real Estate Assessments to Bail out Local Government
There’s bad news for local governments in Virginia that rely upon property tax revenues to support schools, public safety and other priorities. Property values for single-family homes, which account for a large majority of most jurisdictions’ total assessed value, will not increase much over the next few years, according to a new study by the…
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A Less Destructive Form of Sprawl
by James A. Bacon A development group is asking for approval to build up to 2,900 homes and 1.8 million square feet of commercial space off Interstate 95 in Stafford County. The proposed “George Washington Village” calls for a 1,100-acre town-center development with a mix of single-family detached houses, town houses and apartments to be…
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Car Sharing Cuts into Automobile Ownership
by James A. Bacon The spread of car sharing could erode automobile sales and automobile ownership in the years ahead, according to a new study by AlixPartners, a business advisory firm. The study, which surveyed 1,000 licensed drivers in 10 developed car-sharing markets and 1,000 drivers nationally as a control group, found that car sharing…
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McAuliffe Peruses Tobacco Commission
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in Business and Economy, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Economic development, Environment, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Planning, Politics, Public safety & health, Science & TechnologyBy Peter Galuszka What’s going on with the Tobacco Commission? Gov. Terry McAuliffe wants to know and is asking for a detailed accounting of its finances over the past five years. The Tobacco Indemnification and Revitalization Commission, created in 1999 with a $1 billion endowment from lawsuit settlements with four major tobacco companies, has been…
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Downtown Richmond Falls in Love with the Mid-Rise
by James A. Bacon Still need proof that the momentum of growth and development is shifting back to traditional downtowns? Consider this: Roughly 3,000 apartment units are under construction in the Richmond metropolitan region — and half of them are located downtown. That gem of a factoid was buried in a Times-Dispatch article about the construction…
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Welcome to the Big Leagues, Staunton-Waynesboro
Important news for data junkies: The Office of Management and Budget has updated its boundaries for America’s metropolitan and micropolitan areas. The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has helpfully provided a map of the newly drawn boundaries. Here is a summary of the changes: Staunton, Waynesboro, and Augusta County was upgraded from a micropolitan…
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“We Don’t Need No Stinking Ethics Reform!”
By Peter Galuszka It’s no surprise but Virginia legislators appear to doing as little as possible to upgrade the state’s lax ethics rules. In fact, they may be backtracking on some of them. In a rational world, one would think that something would be done after the indictment of former Gov. Robert F. McDonnell and…
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America’s Most Egalitarian City… Less of a Distinction than It Appears
Measured by income extremes, Virginia Beach is the most egalitarian large city in the country. Among households in 2012, the average income of the Top 5% was only six times that of the average income for the Bottom 20%. That compares to Atlanta, where the ratio was almost 19 to one, San Francisco, where the…
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Flotsam and Jetsam from the Week Past
Here are some of the stories I couldn’t get to last week: Filmflam. It’s not often that I find myself agreeing with Sara Okos with the Commonwealth Institute, but we see eye-to-eye on the subject of motion picture tax credits. The House of Delegates has passed a bill doubling the tax credit to up to $25…
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Self-Driving Cars to Government: Eat My Dust!
by James A. Bacon It’s amazing how Self-Driving Cars (SDCs) have burst into the consciousness of thinkers about transportation and urban development in the past month or two. Even more remarkable, the thinking hasn’t yet polarized into Republican/ Democratic, left wing/right wing camps. Eric Jaffe, a contributing writer to the center-left Atlantic Cities blog, has…
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The Tragic Lessons of Kiev
By Peter Galuszka The news from Ukraine is frightening and familiar. At least 100 people have been killed in rioting in Kiev. Some were shot by Interior Ministry snipers after demanding that President Viktor Yanukovych allow new elections. The latest is that he may do just that. Like all former Soviet republics, Ukraine has been…