Year: 2012
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After a Decade of Hardship, State Spending Still Up
As Virginians ponder the amendments to Virginia’s two-year budget proposed this morning by Governor Bob McDonnell, it is worth remembering the extent to which state government spending has increased over the past 10 years despite three years of hardship occasioned by the 2008 recession. Over the last decade, Virginia’s operating budget increased by $15.4 billion…
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Is 2013 the Year of Bill Bolling?
By Peter Galuszka It’s not even 2013 year and the maneuvering in the gubernatorial race is mystifying, showing disarray in both political parties. Mild-mannered, former GOP loyalist Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling is showing new backbone that can only be taken to be mean he may well run as an independent now that he has abandoned…
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Declining Foster Care — a Good Thing or Bad?
by James A. Bacon The departure of a senior social-services administrator in the City of Richmond has prompted an investigation into the city’s foster care program. The number of abuse and neglect petitions filed in the city’s district court has plummeted from 284 two years ago to only 76 by mid-December this year, prompting some…
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McDonnell Makes Good Call on Health Exchanges
by James A. Bacon Governor Bob McDonnell is totally justified in his decision to not set up a state-based health benefits exchange as called for by Obamacare, even if it means relinquishing a modicum of control over health care insurance to the federal government. He laid out his thinking clearly in a press release issued…
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Time for a Talk on Gun Control
By Peter Galuszka Once more time, we have mass death by firearms perpetrated apparently by a man with severe mental illness. In this case, however, some 20 of the victims were schoolchildren roughly between the ages of five and 10. When the gunman entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Ct., they were utterly helpless.…
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Incentives: Being the Best Doesn’t Mean Being the Biggest
There is an interesting juxtaposition of stories today. On the one hand, Forbes Magazine has published its 2012 ranking of the Best States for Business, and Virginia ranks No. 2 for the third year in a row behind Utah. Aside from its general, all-around positive business climate, Forbes singles out the Old Dominion for having…
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In Memory of A Remarkable Bishop
By Peter Galuszka One of Virginia’s most important religious leaders in decades who held firm to his liberal beliefs died Dec. 11 at age 84. Bishop Walter F. Sullivan, former head of the Diocese of Richmond, passed away after being ill with cancer. Bishop from 1970 until 2003, Sullivan was an anomaly in a conservative…
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Why Not a Toll for Tysons?
by James A. Bacon Earlier this week the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors backed off from a proposal to set up a special tax district that would help pay for some $3 billion in public improvements in Tysons. News reports suggest that the reprieve may be only temporary. The board has not backtracked from its…
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Rise of the Machines?
By Peter Galuszka Economic regions go through natural iterations of what makes money and creates jobs. But that “what” can be transitional if not ephemeral. Consider industries for Dutch tulips or New England ice. Ditto Virginia. It’s been through tobacco, apples, battleships, retailing, furniture, textiles and moonshine. A couple of decades ago, with proponents of…
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JLARC Plugs Year-Round Schools… under Certain Circumstances
My first introduction to year-round school calendars was through my sister-in-law’s family in Wake County, N.C. Concluding that it made no sense to let schools sit vacant for three summer months out of the year, school officials in the fast-growing county outside Raleigh eked out extra capacity by dividing the long summer break into shorter…
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Urban Vitality in Lynchburg
It’s a fact, Bacon’s Rebellion doesn’t write enough about Lynchburg. So let me remedy that deficiency by highlighting the following factoid: Lynchburg has been highlighted in a Smart Growth America report as one of Top Ten small metros in the United States in which the core city is growing faster than its outlying jurisdictions. Between…
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Dragas, U.Va. Board Get Wrists Slapped
By Peter Galuszka Knocking down the Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia a tad, a regional college accrediting agency has issued a warning, its lowest level of disciplinary action, because of the way the BOV handled the forced firing and reinstatement of President Teresa Sullivan earlier this year. The Southern Association of Colleges…
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Is It Time to Get Rid of the MWAA?
By Peter Galuszka Many years ago, I started my first journalism job at a daily newspaper in a small town in North Carolina. It was a pleasant, sleepy place where the dominant clans were the Alligoods and the Woolards. If they married, they were known as “Wooligoods.” When you looked at the lists of employees…
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The New Frontier for Economic Development: Community Health
by James A. Bacon When corporations make decisions on where to expand, they consider a long check-list of factors such as availability of labor, workforce skills, transportation access and the cost of real estate, among many others. Add a new one to the list: community health. Says James S. Marks, senior vice president of the…
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Army Corp Wants New Analysis of Cville Bypass
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) isn’t the only federal agency that would like to see a comprehensive environmental reevaluation of the Charlottesville Bypass. The Army Corps of Engineers contends that previous environmental studies, conducted in 1990 and 2002, may be outdated and do not fully explore alternatives to the bypass. The Norfolk District of the…