Category: General Assembly
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Exploding Requirements and Workforce Shortages – An Existential Threat to the Public Schools
by James C. Sherlock The hottest buzz around many of the public schools, including my home area of Virginia Beach, is around the very real hardships posed by unprecedented staff shortages. On return from COVID, it seems that our schools faced record shortages of personnel to deal with students that were traumatized and afflicted with…
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Updates: Missing Wind, Lazy Assembly, Gas Wars
by Steve Haner The German Energy Mix in March When you dig in, the amount of data available on energy usage is stunning, and the presentations are often quite clear and informative. Case in point is the illustration above of Germany’s energy mix during March, in the news now as Europe seeks to wean itself…
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Virginia Budget Deal Stalled as Democrats Demand $3B in Increased Spending
by Shaun Kenney Just to illustrate how fanatically out of touch Senate Democrats are as they frantically try to spend $3 billion on more government, check out State Senator Scott Surovell (D-Fairfax) on Twitter as he blasts Governor Glenn Youngkin’s proposal for gasoline tax relief: Remember — we are sitting on a $3bn surplus fueled…
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Keep Virginia’s Part-Time Citizen Legislature
by Kerry Dougherty Mark Rozell, a political scientist and Dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, has a terrible idea. It’s not original. It surfaces from time to time. Let’s hope it goes nowhere. In an opinion piece published recently in The Washington Post, “Virginia’s Legislature Was Built for…
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Youngkin’s Legislative Scorecard
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Almost all recently-elected Virginia governors confront their first General Assembly session at a disadvantage. The legislative session has begun before the inauguration; their personal staffs, Cabinet members, and agency heads are either not yet all in place or are just getting oriented. Finally, they have not had the time to establish the…
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AG Expert: Wind Project Unneeded, Accounting Off
by Steve Haner There is no justification for Dominion’s $10 billion offshore wind project other than that the General Assembly has ordered it, a witness for Virginia’s Attorney General has testified. The utility doesn’t need its electricity, doesn’t need its renewable energy attributes, and is ignoring lower cost alternatives if it does need generation in…
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A SW Virginia View of the Budget Impasse
by Scott Dreyer Virginia’s headline-grabbing elections last fall put Republicans back in the top three statewide offices for the first time in about a decade and a Republican majority back in the House of Delegates. However, since state senators enjoy four-year terms and none were up for election last November, senate Democrats still hold a…
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Richmond’s Reaganesque Time for Choosing
by Chris Braunlich Richmond, like Washington, has always been a place where an “insider’s game” is played – not in a pejorative sense, but simply as the way things are done. Relationships are paramount, people speak in the arcane language of lawmaking, agendas are confusing for outsiders, and the activities of a subcommittee for an…
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Moran’s Green Energy Ties Ignored by Media
by Steve Haner If the Commonwealth of Virginia was not paying Matthew Moran to serve as Governor Glenn Youngkin’s deputy chief of staff and point person with the General Assembly, as recently revealed, who was? Based on the websites for his employers, mainly the renewable energy industry. For example, Moran is identified as on the…
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Not the Normal Governor Means Not the Normal Ethics
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Glenn Youngkin recently declared, “I guess I’m maybe not the normal governor. I think one of the differences is that I am an outsider and I come in with ideas on how we communicate.” We are beginning to find out how true that is. The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that one of the…
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Wind Case Spinning Up; Your Comments Sought
by Steve Haner In the coming weeks, Virginia’s State Corporation Commission takes up one of the largest utility investments ever undertaken in the Commonwealth, where the cost and the risk will rest squarely on Virginia’s citizens: Dominion Energy Virginia’s $10 billion Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project. In applications and appendices filed late last year, probably…
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AG Sought Rejection of Some Solar Over Cost
by Steve Haner On behalf of Dominion Energy Virginia’s customers, Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) asked the State Corporation Commission to reject five of the solar projects included in the statewide renewable energy development package the Commission approved last week. The Commission, however, did not take them off the approved list and thus did not…
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The General Assembly Punts
by Dick Hall-Sizemore The 2022 General Assembly left town on March 12 with a great deal of public business still pending. Most importantly, it adjourned without adopting a budget. That is not uncommon, however. Since 2000, the legislature has adjourned six times without adopting a budget, having to come back in special session to deal…
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Secrecy Also Hides Key Solar Energy Data
by Steve Haner Perhaps issuing its ruling on the Ides of March by design, Virginia’s State Corporation Commission last week approved another major wave of requests from Dominion Energy Virginia for solar plants it will own, solar plants it will contract with, and a smattering of battery storage facilities added to provide some public relations…
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A Low Solar Minimum Bill Ups Yours, By Design
by Steve Haner Virtue signaling can be fun. It can also be profitable if you can shift the overall cost onto somebody else. That is what is going on in the battle over a proposed “minimum bill” for Dominion Energy Virginia customers who seek to partially escape the utility by signing on with a separate…