Author: James A. Bacon
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Sign of the Times… A Different Kind of “Gas” Station
If you pull up to the City of Richmond’s new gas station on Maury Street, bring your credit card — and a vehicle that runs on compressed natural gas (CNG). Not only does the new CNG station refuel the city’s fleet of CNG-powered garbage trucks, it is open to the public 24 hours per day.…
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Lots of Competition for Phase 2 Rail-to-Dulles Contract
The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) has approved five construction consortia to bid on the estimated $2.8 billion Phase 2 of the Rail-to-Dulles project. According to Leesburg Today, the bidders include Bechtel Transit Partners, which is building Phase 1, and four other groups with lead players ranging from Clark Construction Group and Kiewit Infrastructure to…
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Out: Sustainability. In: Resilience.
by James A. Bacon If you want to move green initiatives forward in the Richmond region, it’s best not to invoke “sustainability,” a word that quickly gets tangled in the controversy over global warming and inflames the anti-Agenda 21 element of the conservative movement. Instead, advises Daniel K. Slone, focus on concepts in which the…
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McDonnell Lays Out Principles for Medicaid Reform
by James A. Bacon Predictably, Governor Bob McDonnell is taking flak for refusing to agree to an expansion of Virginia’s Medicaid program without significant assurances and concessions from the Obama administration. What I haven’t seen yet is a critique of his reasons for doing so. Name calling and disparaging motives doesn’t count. In a letter…
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Calvinists, Libertines and the Medicaid Debate
by James A. Bacon So, we learn from Peter G. in the previous post that conservatives who oppose the willy-nilly expansion of Medicaid in Virginia are either preppies who dress like they just walked off the plantation after giving the darkies a good hard whipping or are hard-right cheapskates with a Calvinist bent. This is…
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Transportation Tax Issue Still Fermenting
Citing his opposition to transportation-funding legislation supported by Governor Bob McDonnell, Richard W. Rahn has resigned from the governor’s Joint Advisory Board of Economists. “I strongly disagree with the new tax/transportation bill that you supported,” wrote Rahn in a letter to McDonnell. “Unfortunately, I was not asked for my advice (which I assume was also…
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Fostering Regional Collaboration Case by Case
by James A. Bacon For reasons rooted in local identity and entrenched political interest, Virginians are unlikely to consolidate their local governments into units aligned with the metropolitan regions they serve. But it is not impossible to imagine governments partnering regionally on specific projects. A new study by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission,…
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EPA Bows to Cuccinelli on Accotink Stink
Chalk up another victory for Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli in his ongoing campaign against federal overreach. It looks like he has won his lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for attempting to regulate storm water flowing into Fairfax County’s Accotink Creek. In January, federal judge Liam O’Grady accepted Cuccinelli’s argument that the EPA had…
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Moody’s Gives Thumbs Up to Guv’s Transportation Package
I’m always preaching the need to bolster the creditworthiness of the commonwealth — and with the fiscal calamities I see coming out of Washington, D.C., Virginia’s AAA rating just isn’t strong enough — so I feel obliged to take note of a statement issued by Moody’s Investor Services last week. The bond-rating agency has found…
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Where Have Virginia’s Education Dollars Been Going?
by James A. Bacon The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice has published data showing that the number of administrators and other non-teaching staff surged in Virginia between 1992 and 2009 by 100%, far outpacing the 22% increase in the number of students over the same period. Had administrative overhead grown no faster than the increase…
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And the Falstaff Award Goes to…
Continuing in the honored tradition of the Bacon’s Rebellion Clownie awards, I award the Falstaff award for buffoonery to Sen. Thomas Norment, R-Williamsburg, for sparking an entirely gratuitous controversy over creating an “official” state Shakespeare festival. The General Assembly passed legislation submitted by Norment that would have recognized his home-town favorite, the Virginia Shakespeare Festival…
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IG of the Day: Disability Prevalence by State
From “Disability Characteristics of Income-Based Government Assistance Recipients in the United States: 2011,” published by the U.S. Census. Nationally, 30.4% of all adult Americans receiving social assistance of one kind of another are classified as having a disability, meaning they have impaired vision, hearing, mobility or cognitive functioning. The numbers for Virginia: Government assistance recipients:…
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Automobility’s AI Revolution
Automobiles have been around for more than years. Styles have changed, safety has improved and the rides are more comfortable, but functionally the vehicles are still the same as they were in Henry Ford’s time — horseless carriages. But automobiles are undergoing a metamorphosis that will make them something quite different — not just a…
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Raising Taxes, Building Roads, Inducing Traffic
by Randy Salzman In fighting the waste of taxpayer dollars on the so-called “Western Bypass” of Charlottesville, I met a woman who favored the bypass because her family owns a beach house in Virginia Beach. As best as I could decipher her logic, she was willing to drive 15 miles out of her way to…
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Bicycles and Economic Development
by James A. Bacon Richmond is gaining traction as a bicycle-friendly region but it is a slow and arduous process. Public and private investment in biking infrastructure remain limited, almost non-existent outside the City of Richmond. It is commonly said among cycling enthusiasts that if you build the biking amenities, the cyclists will come. The…