Category: Efficiency in Government
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Is Virginia a Low Tax State? It Depends on What You Measure.
by James A. Bacon The Joint Legislative Audit & Review Commission has updated its scoreboard comparing Virginia on key metrics to other states — a project championed by Sen. Tim Kaine when he was governor. The idea was to allow Virginians to track the progress of the commonwealth in comparison to peer states on the…
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A Horse Built by a Committee
by James C. Sherlock Updated Jan 31 at 8:46 AM Virginia’s Attorney General has offered a bill to create a new state bureaucracy to handle the opioid settlement money about to flow into the Commonwealth to support prevention, treatment, and recovery. It is going to be a lot of money. The state opioid settlements will…
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Fix the Structurally Broken Virginia Government
by James C. Sherlock When offered a choice of reasons for failures of large scale government actions, your first choice should always be incompetence, not bad intentions. Big government requires competent legislatures, competent management and control of executive departments, apolitical oversight by attorneys general and objective studies of its failures if it has any hope…
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Virginia’s Mass Vaccination Effort and Health Facilities Inspections — Troubling Evidence
by James C. Sherlock Updated Jan 19 at 2:55 PM If you’ve been wondering why Virginia has fumbled its rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, consider this: The Virginia Department of Health. As of one week ago, the Virginia Department of Health had not yet developed a vaccination plan. From a presentation, “Virginia Department of Health…
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Let’s Get Our Money’s Worth from Those 2,000 Contact Tracers
by James A. Bacon The Virginia Department of Health has hired 2,000 COVID-19 contact tracers and investigators since May, but the virus has spread so rapidly that public health officials are conducting triage: focusing scarce resources on household members of people diagnosed within the past six days, people living in prisons and nursing homes, and…
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Governor Northam, You’ve Got the Money for Eviction Relief — Do Something!
by James A. Bacon Virginia is in the midst of a housing eviction crisis arising from the economic disruption caused by the COVID-19 epidemic. Here in Virginia, governments have responded through three major initiatives: The federal government distributed one-time $1,200 stimulus checks to American households and funded a $600-per-week supplement to state unemployment benefits through…
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Northam Administration Information Technology Failures Continue
Help! WJLA is reporting that the State of Virginia is using a 35-year-old computer system to process unemployment checks. The system has buckled, leaving 70,000 Virginians without their unemployment benefits. In a stunning admission, Bill Walker, Director of Unemployment Insurance with the Virginia Employment Commission says, “We are right at the first of July now”…
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Virginia’s Government – a Critique
by James C. Sherlock At the age of 75 with a life of experience in and with government, I will offer here my assessment of the current structural problems in our state government that make that government significantly less efficient and effective than it should be. You will note that these comments generally do…
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Incompetent, Dangerously Incompetent, and the Virginia Department of Health
By James C. Sherlock It is very hard to recommend a career in politics these days. Elected officials are at the mercy of the competence of bureaucracies they did not create and over which, under civil service protections, they have little control. Yet never have we needed dedicated, smart and effective political leaders more than…
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Our Gutsy Governor
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in Bacon and Pigs, Blogs and Blog Administration, Business and Economy, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Culture wars, Defense, National Security, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Efficiency in Government, Elections, General Assembly, Governance, Government Transparency, Government workers and pensions, Gun rights, Media, Politics, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t OversightBy Peter Galuszka On June 24, 2015, Nikki Haley, a Republican who was South Carolina’s first non-white governor, called for the removal of a Confederate flag that had been flying over the state’s capitol grounds for years. “This flag, while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state,”…
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“The Dog Ate My Homework” Does Not Work for VEC
By Dick Hall-Sizemore The Virginia Employment Commission has been inundated with unemployment insurance claims. Virginians seeking to file claims have been frustrated at not being able to get through to the agency with their questions and by delays in receiving payments. All of this was the subject of a meeting and presentation to a Senate…
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What, Exactly, Is VDEM Doing In the COVID-19 Emergency?
by Carol J. Bova The Virginia Department of Emergency Management (VDEM) is responsible for writing the Commonwealth of Virginia Emergency Operations Plan (COVEP) which “provides the framework for how the state will support impacted local governments, individuals and businesses.” A Virginia Municipal League (VML) web page provides Virginia localities a Continuity of Operation Plan (COOP)…
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It’s a Crisis! Let’s Scam the Government!
By Dick Hall-Sizemore In a post yesterday, Jim Sherlock cited a report by NPR that the Virginia Department of Emergency Management (VDEM) is in the process of finalizing contracts with private labs to expand COVID-19 testing. I hope that Jeff Stern, director of the agency, is not being pushed to conclude these contracts too hurriedly.…
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WTJU Podcast: COVID-19 and the Economy
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in Agriculture & forestry, Bacon and Pigs, Blogs and Blog Administration, Business and Economy, Charity, Philanthropy, Nonprofits, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Consumer Protection, Corruption and Scandals, Culture wars, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Efficiency in Government, Elections, Electoral process, Energy, Entrepreneurs and Innovation, Environment, Federal issues, General Assembly, Governance, Government Finance, Government Transparency, Gun rights, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Taxes, Telecommunications, TransportationBy Peter Galuszka Here’s is the twice-monthly podcast produced by WTJU, the official radio station of the University of Virginia. With me on this podcast are Nathan Moore, the station general manager, and Sarah Vogelsong, who covers, labor, energy and environmental issues across the state for the Virginia Mercury, a fairly new and highly regarded…
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A Look at Richmond and COVID-19
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in Agriculture & forestry, Business and Economy, Children and Families, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Consumer Protection, Culture wars, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Efficiency in Government, Entrepreneurs and Innovation, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Housing, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Money in politics, Planning, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Resilience, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Telecommunications, UncategorizedBy Peter Galuszka Here is a roundup story I wrote for Style Weekly that was published today that explains the effects of COVID-19 on the Richmond area. Hopefully, BR readers will find it of interest. It was a tough piece to report. The impacts of the deadly virus are very complicated and multi-faceted. An especially…