Category: Economic development
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COVID and the Workforce
by James A. Bacon Virginians with college degrees were far less likely to be laid off during the COVID-19 epidemic, and their occupations are in highest demand during the economic upturn, concludes an analysis written by the Virginia Economic Development Partnership and distributed by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV). “In order…
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Hey, Mount Trashmore, Top This!
by Bill Tracy According to WJLA-TV7, The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors has approved the next phase in the evolution of the former Lorton landfill off of Interstate 95: It will become a 1,700-foot ski slope. That’s right, a ski resort. In Northern Virginia. Only 10 minutes from my home. The project, Fairfax Peak, will…
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Port Development a Double-Edged Sword
by James A. Bacon An enduring question on this blog is what accounts for the lagging economic performance of the Hampton Roads metropolitan statistical area. Growth in Gross Domestic Product since 2001 has been roughly half that of Virginia’s, while growth in real personal income since 2010 has lagged by 30%. We have explored various…
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Coal Counties Make Bid for Data Centers
by James A. Bacon Six localities in far Southwest Virginia have agreed to offer big tax breaks in a bid to recruit more data centers to the economically depressed region. The Project Oasis initiative will dangle the lower taxes as well as geothermal cooling from old coal mines as enticements that no other region can…
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The Virginia War On Fossil Fuels
by Steve Haner First published in the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star Feb. 26 then distributed by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. The lesson of the Texas grid collapse is not just about electricity. Imagine the week Texans would have had if once the power went out and stayed out, they had no gasoline, diesel,…
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What Texas’s Crisis Means for Virginia
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in Blogs and Blog Administration, Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Corruption and Scandals, Culture wars, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Government Finance, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Money in politics, Political Influence, Politics, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technologyby Peter Galuszka The Texas freeze and ensuing energy disaster has clear lessons for Virginia as it sorts out its energy future. Yet much of the media coverage in Virginia and certainly on Bacon’s Rebellion conveniently leaves out pertinent observations. The statewide freeze in Texas completely fouled up the entire energy infrastructure as natural gas…
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Reinventing Roanoke as Virginia’s Outdoor Capital
by James A. Bacon The Roanoke Valley doesn’t have any natural amenities more special than those of other communities along Virginia’s magnificent Blue Ridge Mountains. What it does have, at a very propitious time when the COVID-19 epidemic is scrambling the traditional calculus of where businesses and individuals decide where to locate, is an organizational…
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The Logic for Rural Broadband Subsidies
by James A. Bacon Reputable estimates of the cost of making high-capacity Internet service universal across the United States run in the $80-billion to $85-billion range, but the society-wide benefits may be worth the outlay, argues Alexander Marré, a Baltimore-based regional economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond in a recent paper. There are…
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And They SWaM and They SWaM
By Dick Hall-Sizemore Governor Northam is moving to increase the amount of business that goes to companies owned by women or minorities. A little background would help put the pending legislation into perspective. There have long been programs at the federal, state, and local levels that serve to give some preferences to small businesses, as…
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The Political Economy of Solar Farms
by James A. Bacon I have consistently supported the expansion of solar energy in Virginia, at least up to a point where it doesn’t compromise the reliability of the electric grid. When up-front capital costs and fuel costs are taken into account, solar is the lowest cost source of electricity in Virginia. Furthermore, as a…
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DePaul Hospital’s Closing Presents a Unique Opportunity for Hampton Roads
by James C. Sherlock Not too long ago, before the decline of the malls and COVID, the healthcare community coined what they called the Nordstrom Rule. The meaning was that if you wished to optimize profits in your healthcare business, build it close to a Nordstrom. The theory was that Nordstrom had already done the…
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The Virginia City Boondoggle
By Peter Galuszka Back in 2007, Dominion Energy was touting its new hybrid generating plant near St. Paul in Southwest Virginia as the wave of the future because it would burn coal and wood using advanced fluidized bed technologies. But for eight months this year, the 624-megawatt Virginia City Hybrid Energy Center operated at only…
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WTJU Podcast on State’s Economy
By Peter Galuszka This may be familiar turf for some readers, but here is a podcast I worked on with WTJU, the radio station of the University of Virginia. It gives a larger overview of the changes that data centers are making in the state’s economy and what that might mean in the future. This…
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Bacon Bits: Good News for a Change
More wind turbines off the Mid-Atlantic coast. Electricity from the Kitty Hawk Offshore Wind project 27 miles off the coast of Corolla, N.C., construction of which could begin as soon as 2024, will be funneled into the electric grid via a substation in Virginia Beach’s Sandbridge community. Roughly 600 jobs will be generated within the…
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Vacation Homes as Virginia Rural Resource
by James A. Bacon Virginia has more than 88,000 vacation homes, about 2.5% of all homes in the Commonwealth, according to the University of Virginia’s Demographics Research Group. These “seasonally vacant homes” intended mainly for recreational use are overwhelmingly located in amenity-rich rural locales along the Chesapeake Bay, the Blue Ridge and Allegheny Mountains, or…