Category: Uncategorized
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Improper Parking and Other Unlikely Tales
by Joe Fitzgerald Drunk driving and gerrymandering don’t usually go hand in hand, but there are exceptions. The race-based district-drawing skills of Virginia Democrats half a century ago had areas around majority black Petersburg represented in the state Senate by a rural Democrat from Windsor, 50 miles east. When the state senator got a DUI…
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Correction
by James A. Bacon In two recent stories about administrative bloat and faculty bloat at the University of Virginia, I published inaccurate information. I stated that annualized full-time-equivalent student enrollment between fiscal 2012 and fiscal 2022 increased 1.1%. The correct figure was 8.8%. The result of the error was to exaggerate the degree to which…
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Hard Numbers on Administrative Bloat
by James A. Bacon A number of University of Virginia Board of Visitors members have expressed concern about UVa’s runaway costs. Administrative bloat has swollen the university’s cost structure, they say, and higher costs have been cited in turn to justify tuition increases. So far, the fiscal hawks have been unable to force a discussion…
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JLARC Report: More Than Just “Mo’ Money”
by Dick Hall-Sizemore The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) released a major report last month on the Commonwealth’s K-12 funding formula. The responses were predictable. On Bacon’s Rebellion, Jim Bacon dismissed the report as a cry for “mo’ money.” Democrats in the General Assembly seized upon the report and its findings as more…
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Racial Check Boxes Out at UVa Admissions. Racial Life Experiences In.
by James A. Bacon The University of Virginia will eliminate the race/ethnicity checkbox on admissions applications but will allow students to describe how their “personal experiences” — including but not limited to race or ethnicity — “shaped their ability to contribute,” announced President Jim Ryan in an announcement emailed to the University community Monday.
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Ham Cemetery Stands Strong
by Jon Baliles Over in the woods behind Bandy Field Nature Park in the West End along (and overlapping with) the border of Henrico County near the Village Shopping Center, there is a small African-American cemetery with an enormous history that recently appeared in a feature by Bill Pike in the Henrico Citizen; it is…
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Bettinger v. Ryan, Groves and UVa
The Jefferson Council has obtained a file-stamped copy of a lawsuit filed on behalf of Morgan Bettinger against University of Virginia President Jim Ryan, former Dean of Students Allen Groves, and the University of Virginia. The allegations must be demonstrated in court. If proven true, they paint an unflattering picture of civil rights (for anyone…
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Dominion Hides Huge Offshore Wind Cost-Risk
by David Wojik The offshore wind industry is suffering a runaway cost crisis, but Dominion Energy says the cost of its monster project will not go up. Apparently, there is not even a risk of it going up. This preposterous claim is worth exploring. On the crisis side, I recently wrote about it in general…
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Heat Wave? Here In Southeastern Virginia We Call It July.
by Kerry Dougherty Stop the presses. It’s July 26th. And it’s hot. My trusty iPhone weather app says it will hit 91 today, 94 Thursday and 96 on Friday. Who could have predicted such temperatures? Actually, all of us. It’s called JULY. And yes, much of the country is in a record heat wave with…
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Slush Funding Housing
by Jon Baliles There has been a lot of talk about the affordable housing crisis in the region in recent years, but it has been constant in 2023. The entire region needs 39,000 units as fast as it can get them; but interest rates are high, the market is stalling — every week there is…
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Can Virginia Republicans Find 500,000 Votes?
by Shaun Kenney Back in November 2019, the Commonwealth of Kentucky was well on its way to being a blue state. That is, until the state’s Republican leadership saw the trend and decided to do something about it. Aided by terrible Biden numbers, Kentucky’s GOP reversed the decline in short order: If you’re like myself,…