Category: Efficiency in Government
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Public Education and the Management of Change
by James C. Sherlock Peter Drucker’s famous five questions should always be asked by and of government. What is the mission? Who is the customer? What does the customer consider valuable? What are the results sought and how are they to be measured? What is the plan, to include both abandonment and innovation? So, in…
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RVA 5X5: A Five-Part Series of Stories
by Jon Baliles STORY #1 — The Pot Overfloweth There have been a lot of stories this week about the $21 million surplus announced by Mayor Levar Stoney and what he is asking City Council to endorse and how to disburse it in a budget amendment vote scheduled for a Monday evening vote. “The growth…
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What Do We Do When Teachers Quit En Masse?
by James C. Sherlock What makes teachers want to teach? The satisfaction that comes from helping children and adolescents learn and grow into productive, mature adults. It is amazingly powerful. What is required for them to choose to teach? Enough money to live comfortably and a safe, supportive working environment. So that is three: teaching…
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RVA 5X5: Enrichmond and the City’s Radio Silence
by Jon Baliles I won’t do a “Top Stories of 2022” list for this newsletter, but if I did, one of them would surely be the collapse of the Enrichmond Foundation and the radio silence on all fronts concerning its finances, the groups that depended on it, their assets, and the two historic Black cemeteries…
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Map of the Day: Disability Processing Times
There’s a new crisis in the welfare state: longer waiting times for the processing of Social Security Administration disability claims. More than a million Americans wait in limbo, says The Washington Post. Though far from the worst, the slowdown in processing claims in Virginia — a state responsibility — has increased 129% between fiscal year…
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Suggestions to Ease Virginia’s Housing Crisis without Additional State Money
by James C. Sherlock The Richmond Times-Dispatch, on cue, wrote in an editorial the other day that more state money was needed to fund local housing. Maybe. But that is not the first place to look. The governor wants to condition development aid to local communities on their reforming land-use policies to permit more construction.…
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Virginia Should Enforce Threat Assessment Laws. Noting Lack of Compliance Not Enough.
by James C. Sherlock I have written about the Threat Assessment Teams (TAT’s) of two state universities, the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech. I assessed Tech to be compliant with state law. I reported that UVa is not. That of course raises the issue of the rest of Virginia’s colleges and universities. The Virginia…
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Richmond Slashes Permit Backlog and Delays
by Dick Hall-Sizemore The city government of Richmond has often taken a beating on these pages, usually deservedly so. Now, there is some good news to report. David Ress of the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the city has significantly improved its permit processing times. For example, the time to process a building permit application dropped…
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Will Fredericksburg Revert to Being a Town?
by James C. Sherlock There are two major reasons that Virginians organize themselves into local governments: public safety; and public schools for their children. Fredericksburg has proven unable to provide either competently. It’s record is unapproachably bad given its assets. We have documented its deplorable schools. When I wrote in that piece that they need…
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A Tale Of Two Bridge Projects
by Kerry Dougherty Some would say it’s not fair to compare the rapid repairs to a hurricane-damaged bridge in Florida to the desultory progress of the Laskin Road bridge project in Virginia Beach. I don’t care. For those of us getting our cars realigned every few months and learning to zigzag as we attempt to…
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Progressive Initiatives in Virginia to be Blocked by Environmental Laws?
by James C. Sherlock Sometimes we are too clever for our own good. American environmentalists have been hugely successful and have done a great deal of good. We have them to thank for cleaner water and air. But traditional environmentalists, supported by legal interests, incorporated two features in America’s environmental laws that may prove as…
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Complete and Total Incompetence & Negligence
by Jon Baliles There can be no more fitting title for this post than this jaw-dropping, migraine-inducing story from Tyler Lane at CBS6 about the repeated warning signs about fire safety that were not only missed — but flat out ignored — by Richmond Public Schools (RPS) officials in 2020 and 2021, which culminated in…
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Last Passenger on the Titanic
by James A. Bacon The good news regarding the Silver Line extension of the Washington Metro rail system to Washington Dulles International Airport is that the service is fiiinnaally scheduled to commence in October after four years of construction delays. The bad news is that Metro might not have enough rail cars in service to…
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Transformation to Achieve Effectiveness and Efficiency–Again
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Amid great fanfare as one of his Day One actions, Governor Glenn Youngkin issued Executive Order No. 5, establishing the position Commonwealth Chief Transformation Officer within the Office of the Governor. The Governor identified the responsibilities of the position to be “to help build a culture of transparency, accountability, and constructive challenge…
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City of Norfolk Allowed Its Animal Shelter Manager to Work Remotely. From Florida.
by Kerry Dougherty To those who argue that remote work is lovely and only Luddites believe people should actually show up in their workplace every day, I offer THIS as an extreme example of what can happen. The Virginian-Pilot reports that earlier this year some bonehead in the city of Norfolk gave the manager of…