Category: General Assembly
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Virginia’s Progressive Assembly Turns to Taxes
by Steve Haner First published this morning by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. The COVID-19 recession barely dented Virginia’s state budget. The massive spending growth adopted in the pre-COVID budget a year ago is largely back on track. Yet some legislators think the time is ripe to hunt for more revenue by re-writing…
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Dominion EV School Bus Crash #3 Ends Session
by Steve Haner Dominion Energy Virginia’s effort to force its ratepayers to finance a fleet of electric school buses has finally crashed, defeated by the House of Delegates for a third time in the final roll call of the 2021 General Assembly Saturday night.
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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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First They Come for the Gas Pipelines, Then the Nukes, and Then… Your Gas Grill?
by James A. Bacon As Virginia hurtles towards its brave new future of a net zero-carbon economy, the political class needs more data so it can figure out who else to regulate and what else to shut down. Our overlords have a good handle on CO2 emissions in the electric grid and the transportation sector,…
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WaPo Nabs Polk Award, Is Pulitzer Next?
By Peter Galuszka How ironical. Our esteemed Jim Bacon has been on a tear in recent months writing about media coverage of the problem of systemic racism at the Virginia Military Institute. Of special interest to Jim is the reporting of Ian Shapira, a Washington Post reporter who has been digging into the VMI. After…
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Certificate of Public Need’s Hall of Mirrors
by James C. Sherlock In Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, everything is reflected hundreds of times. The mirrors were also a commercial. They represented an effort of Louis XIV to establish for France monopolies on the production of luxury goods. Virginia’s Certificate of Public Need (COPN) law and regulations represent a similar structure. Everything in the…
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Sentara and the Judge
by James C. Sherlock Updated Feb. 23 at 2:15 pm In an ongoing series of reports, Ray Locker, enterprise and investigative editor of the Checks and Balances Project, has exposed a story with far-reaching implications. Norfolk Circuit Court Chief Judge Mary Jane Hall sat in judgment on a case, Chesapeake Hosp. Auth. v. State Health Comm’r, in…
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More Money, Same Level of Service
By Dick Hall-Sizemore There are often cries of anguish or outrage on this blog and elsewhere over the increases in spending proposed in budget proposals and then authorized by the General Assembly. Some of this criticism of increased spending is justified, but, sometimes, the increase is the result of circumstances beyond an agency’s control. Sometimes,…
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Updates: PPP, PIPP, Dominion’s School Buses
by Steve Haner Tax on Paycheck Protection Program Grants The General Assembly session deadlines require final decisions on various revenue bills before the final budget bill is adopted, in theory keeping the two issues separate. What is good tax policy should not be driven by the need or greed of the appropriators.
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Certificate of Public Need – This Seems Promising
by James C. Sherlock Democrats, the primary bulwarks for the Certificate of Public Need (COPN) law in Virginia, took the opportunity last year to create as part of a major revision to COPN law a new 19-member State Health Services Plan Task Force. That group is to advise the Board of Health on the content…
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Five Dem Senators Defy Party Orthodoxy on Governors Schools
by James A. Bacon A Senate committee voted Thursday to spike a bill aimed at “expanding diversity” in Virginia’s governor’s schools, reports The Virginia Mercury. While it is encouraging to know that admittance into the governor’s schools will continue to be based on merit-based tests, the vote has a broader significance, which is even more…
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A Really Sweet Valentine
By Dick Hall-Sizemore Governor Northam recently gave the budget conferees a $730 million Valentine. Based on January’s revenue report and year-to-date collections, the Governor has revised the general fund forecast to include an additional $410 million in FY 2021 and $320 million in FY 2022. The main factor leading to the increase was the unanticipated…
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Enviros Help Kill Dominion EV School Bus Bill
by Steve Haner When the Senate bill that allowed Dominion Energy Virginia to buy a fleet of electric school buses with ratepayer dollars was up for discussion last week, three environmentalist lobbyists spoke against it. They focused on the excessive cost and questioned whether it was a reasonable way to develop useful battery storage. The…
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Baby Steps Toward Campaign Finance Reform
By Dick Hall-Sizemore Virginia law prohibits a candidate for public office from converting “excess” campaign funds to her personal use when closing out her campaign finance account. However, there is nothing to prevent a candidate from using campaign funds for personal, non-campaign related, purposes during a campaign. Ever since his first General Assembly session (2014),…
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The Democratic Coalition’s Conflicts of Interest Cause Much Political Scrambling
by James C. Sherlock It is tough to be a Democratic politician in Richmond or Washington. Now that they govern, they find it one big game of coalition whack-a-mole. I have written today of the conflicts between the interests of teachers unions and those of parents playing out in the Virginia General Assembly. That vital…