Author: James A. Bacon
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Fishy Business in Richmond
by James A. Bacon The City of Richmond’s proposal to build a baseball stadium and slavery museum in Shockoe Bottom is fast becoming a case study in the perils of mixing politics and urban development. Suddenly, Mayor Dwight Jones, once widely regarded as squeaky clean, has become embroiled in secretive dealings and potential conflicts of interest. Eight…
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Krumbach’s Creative Bus Shelters
Arlington County is so affluent these days that downsizing million-dollar bus stops to mere half million-dollar bus stops is seen as an act of fiscal contrition. But the county — and every other jurisdiction in Virginia, for that matter — could learn a lesson from tiny Krumbach, Austria. Aiming to put the hamlet on the tourism…
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Mo’ Money for a Broken System?
by James A. Bacon The nation’s roads and bridges have a feevah and Josh Voorhees has a cure: mo’ money for the federal Highway Trust Fund. Writing in Slate, Voorhees highlights Congress’ inability to find new revenue sources to replenish the fund, which faces an $18-billion-a-year shortfall every year over the next decade. “Current tax rates—18.4 cents per gallon…
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Chart of the Day: University Graduation Rates
Broadly speaking, there are two ways to increase the number of students graduating with college degrees in Virginia: enroll more students or improve the completion rates of students already enrolled. The brain-dead way is to enroll more students, regardless of their odds of graduating, with the hope that some will manage to earn their degrees.…
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Where the Parking Is Easy
San Francisco’s smart parking experiment — setting prices for on-street parking based on supply and demand — has brought lower average charges, made it easier to find a space and reduced parking-related anxiety. By James A. Bacon San Francisco has a reputation in many parts of the country as a bastion of left-wing politics. Haight-Ashbury…
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How the Feds Are Detroitifying the Country
by James A. Bacon Richard Ravitch worries that more “Detroits” are in America’s fiscal future. Co-author with former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volker of the “Report of the State Budget Crisis Task Force,” Ravitch argues in the Wall Street Journal today that state and local governments have major fiscal problems, that those problems are structural in…
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U.S. 460: Now We Know What Happened, We Just Don’t Know Who Was Responsible
by James A. Bacon Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne gave yesterday a detailed timeline of the events leading up to the suspension of work on the U.S. 460 Connector after the expenditure of nearly $300 million. “From a taxpayer standpoint, there is no good explanation for why we are here today,” he told the Commonwealth Transportation…
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Bacon Bits
More, more, we want more! Richmond BizSense profiles Richmond entrepreneur Matt Ellington who has built a business around tearing down small, cheap houses and replacing them with bigger, more capacious houses. Rather than remodel existing houses, he tears them down to the foundations and erects much bigger houses in their place. He’s completing a project near Libbie…
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A Worthwhile Experiment in Bringing Nutrition to the Inner City
by James A. Bacon The East End of Richmond is a notorious food desert where thousands of low-income residents don’t have ready access to healthy food. Richmonders have responded in a number of ways, most visibly by encouraging the cultivation of gardens in empty lots and back yards and by working with local convenience markets…
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Oops. Arlington Adds another $100 Million to Streetcar Cost
by James A. Bacon Want to know why Virginians are so suspicious of big-ticket transportation projects? Voters feel like public officials are masters of the ol’ bait-and-switch: The governing class sucks the public into supporting an infrastructure project with a low-ball estimate, builds political support and institutional momentum, and then reveals massively higher cost estimates…
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Putting the “Garden” in Rain Garden
Soon Virginians will start spending billions to meet tough storm-water regs. Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden wants to show how we can save the bay – and look really good doing it.
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Virginia’s Labor Force Might Be Shrinking
by Frank Muraca Last year I responded to a post on Bacon’s Rebellion that raised alarms that Virginia’s economy was “tanking.” I argued that there shouldn’t be concern over the idea that Virginia was on a death spiral while the rest of the nation was facing relative stability. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t concerns with…
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Virginia Air: Less than Pure but Pretty Darn Clean
Ambient air pollution caused an estimated 3.7 million deaths worldwide in 2012, according to a recent report by the World Health Organization (WHO), while household air pollution, typically smoke from the use of coal, wood and dung in home cooking and heating, resulted in 4.3 million more. There are four main categories of air pollution, including…
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Weasel Watch: Eric Cantor
by James A. Bacon Are you kidding me? A couple of days ago I received a four-page mailer from the Cantor for Congress campaign plastered with the headline: “Liberal College Professor David Brat.” The flier showed a picture of Brat, an economics professor at Randolph Macon University, with a graduation hat superimposed on his head and…
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Egads, another Map of the Day! Student Loan Debt
According to this map published by the Washington Post, Virginia ranks among the states where students graduate with the highest student loan debt. — JAB