Category: Economic development
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Bacon Bits: Rails, Roads, Hurricanes and Rainbows
Still off the tracks. Despite promising efforts by top-level management, the Washington Metro corporate culture is still dysfunctional. An audit of $1.9 million in blanket purchase agreements found missing and incomplete documents, reports the Washington Times. “Auditors found that Metro employees failed to record $845,000 as BPAs in their accounting software, a problem the inspector general attributed…
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Bacon Bits: As Virginia Slowly Unravels
Yes, it’s OK to panic. Norfolk Southern Corp., the beneficiary of local incentives a year or two ago when it moved jobs from Roanoke to Norfolk, now is said to be close to announcing the relocation of its headquarters to Atlanta. “A deal has already been struck,” Norfolk Mayor Kenny Alexander told the Virginian-Pilot. It appears that…
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Rural Virginia Does Not Need A Marshall Plan
In devastated post-war Europe, millions of people were qualified and eager for jobs or desperate for capital to get their farms planted and harvested. In demographically-diminishing rural Virginia, farms are mechanized. If you build a huge factory today qualified workers may not come in sufficient numbers. A scaled-down 21st Century Marshall Plan is a nice…
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BVG Makes Case for Virginia as Offshore Wind Supply-Chain Hub
Virginia is very well positioned to establish a supply-chain hub for an East Coast wind-power industry, says a report written by offshore-wind consulting firm BVG Associates and underwritten by the Virginia chapter of the Sierra Club. Although Virginia will not participate in the “first wave” of East Coast offshore wind projects, which is ramping up…
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Will Virginia Legalize Recreational Marijuana Use?
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68cbjlLFl4U&w=500&h=288] High times today. The marijuana legalization wave is beginning to wash over North America. Nine states (WA, OR, CA, NV, CO, MA, VT, ME and AK) along with the District of Columbia have legalized the recreational use of marijuana. Well over 20% of Americans now live in states which have legalized recreational marijuana…
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Bacon Bits: In with the New, Out with the Old
In with the new… Data Center Alley too hot to handle. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA) has sold 424 acres west of Dulles International Airport to data-center developer Digital Realty Trust for an eye-popping $236.5 million — $558,000 per acre. MWAA will place $207 million in a segregated account used to reduce costs that…
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More Details on the Micron Deal
Yesterday I tallied up the incentives offered Micron Technologies to invest $3 billion in an expansion of its Manassas Semiconductor plant based upon information released by Governor Ralph Northam’s office and the Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP). Today, thanks to reporting by the Washington Business Journal, we have a few details on what the City…
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Let’s See a Proper Accounting of the Micron Incentives, Please
Let’s get down to the bottom line on Governor Ralph Northam’s big Micron Technology Inc. announcement: What does Virginia get out of the deal, and how much will it cost the public? The answer: Not enough information has been made available to tell. Boise, Idaho-based Micron will invest $3 billion to increase memory production at…
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Micron Incentives Were Behind Layne Warnings
One mystery solved: Secretary of Finance Aubrey Layne was probably talking about Micron Technology in Manassas on August 17 when he warned the General Assembly about some very expensive economic development incentive package not yet announced or accounted for in the Commonwealth’s budget. Layne repeated that warning during a discussion of tax policy yesterday with…
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The Logic Behind Northam’s Plan for Spending the Tax-Reform Windfall
The starting point for understanding the Northam administration’s logic behind divvying up the tax windfall from federal income tax reform is the conviction that Virginia cannot count on the personal and corporate tax cuts lasting more than a few years. Democrats may regain power in Washington, D.C., and reverse the tax cuts, or at the…
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Has Momentum Shifted in Pipeline Battles?
The drums and whistles overpowered traffic noise at Eighth and Main this morning as a group of protesters opposing Virginia’s two natural gas pipeline projects moved away from Department of Environmental Quality headquarters, perhaps coming from a State Water Control Board hearing down the street. With both the Atlantic Coast (ACP) and Mountain Valley (MVP)…
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AI – Nirvana or Apocalypse (for Virginia)?
Smells like tech spirit – Artificial Intelligence may be on its way to becoming the buzziest buzz-term in the buzzword laden history of the buzz-o-sphere. No prior trend has engendered the societal debate that AI has sparked. Scientists, billionaires, politicians, poets, priests, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers have all gotten into the game. Ok, the candlestick maker reference was hogwash but give that industry…
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Stay Put, Young Man, Stay Put
The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis has published a useful reminder of how job and wage growth has bifurcated in Virginia — jobs and wages have increased smartly in Virginia’s major metro areas since the recession but have lagged markedly in non-metro Virginia. The trends, which reflect the larger urban-rural divide nationally cannot be reversed,…
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Sport of Kings Needs Peasants Playing Slots
The Sport of Kings apparently cannot survive today unless between races the peasants are pumping their copper into slots. “The new law acknowledges what several other horse racing states already have concluded: that the new economic realities to sustain a viable horse racing industry require an alternative form of gaming to offset the high cost…
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Can’t Get Enough of Them Bacon Bits…
Wages of the teaching scandal. Every 5th-grade student at Richmond’s George W. Carver Elementary School passed the Standards of Learning (SOL) reading test in 2016. Next year, when they took the reading proficiency test at Albert Hill Elementary School, only 37% passed. Math scored plunged nearly as badly. A state investigation has found that a…