Search results for: “layne”
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RVA 5×5: Redefining 100 Percent Compliance
by Jon Baliles The recent stories from the City Jail have been anything but good — inmates dying far too often, staffing shortages leading to dangerous work conditions, deputies quitting, and the lack of leadership that can’t fill the vacancies while conducting lie detector tests on some of the staff that remain. Tyler Layne at…
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Richmond Cold Weather Shelter Finally Finalized
by Jon Baliles The inability of the City to open warm weather shelters for the homeless during the big freeze on Christmas weekend was enough to draw the ire of most of City Council and many others. The recent thawing of temperatures has made it less of a pressing issue, but the cold is coming…
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RVA 5×5 – New Year’s Nuggets
by Jon Baliles Left In The Cold The Richmond Free Press Editorial Page ends the year batting 1.000 and goes two for two this week. The main editorial covers the disgraceful lack of attention, urgency and concern by the mayor and the administration for those in need of shelter during last week’s arctic blast. It…
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Bad Times at Richmond Jail
by Jon Baliles If anyone knows what the hell is going on at the Richmond City Jail, please raise your hand. Stand up. Write it down. Grab the mic. Something. Anything. In a bizarre series of stories in recent days, people are dying, guards are getting beaten, and strange and awful things are happening at…
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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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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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Still Time to Limit Governor’s Emergency Powers
by Barbara Hollingsworth First published this morning by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy. Should the governor of Virginia have the power to unilaterally declare an open-ended state of emergency that indefinitely restricts Virginians’ civil and constitutional rights without a recorded vote by the General Assembly? The COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns raised this serious question.…
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Youngkin The Deficit Budgeteer
by Dick Hall-Sizemore As reported on this blog earlier by Steve Haner, Governor Youngkin has proposed new tax cuts totaling approximately $3.0 billion for the biennium. But the governor was not content with tax cuts. He also wants to spend more. His proposed amendments to the budget introduced by Governor Northam include more than half…
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Financing Public Education–2–Non-SOQ Programs
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Note: This is the second installment of an overview and discussion of state financing of K-12 education in localities. Part 1 of this series was an overview of financing related to the Standards of Quality. The Standards of Quality is the major category through which the Commonwealth provides financial assistance for public…
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Financing Public Education–Part I, Standards of Quality
by Dick Hall-Sizemore The 2022-2024 budget proposed by Governor Northam includes $8.6 billion in general fund appropriations in the first year and $8.3 billion in the second year for state assistance to local K-12 programs. These amounts are a little more than a quarter of the entire general fund budget. Compared to the appropriation for…
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In Praise of Two Great Public Servants
by James A. Bacon Virginia has been blessed to have had many superb public servants over the years. They may not be remembered in the history books, which have a bias toward elected politicians, but we are reminded of the indispensable contributions of at least two of them in today’s news clippings. One is leaving…
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Of Course Tax Hikes Grew the State Surpluses
by Steve Haner At Tuesday night’s debate Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe dismissed the 2021 $2.6 billion general fund revenue surplus as entirely due to extra federal COVID relief funds, which is absurd on its face. By definition, every dollar is general fund state tax revenue. It came from some form of state tax. Why…
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What Fun! Spending $4.3 Billion in “Free” Money!
by James A. Bacon Before departing for the private sector, former Secretary of Finance Aubrey Layne outlined his thinking for the disposition of $4.3 billion in federal COVID-helicopter money: The funds are a one-time windfall. Spend them on one-time projects. Do not use the money to fund programmatic expansions that will make an ongoing claim…
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Time to Cut Taxes
by Stephen D. Haner If Virginia ended the fiscal year June 30 with a general fund cash surplus of $2 billion, almost 10 percent of its annual budget, that means taxes are too high. Period. The debate for the 2021 political season should be how to cut taxes, and how much. The $2 billion projection…
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State Revenue Up a Full Third in Northam Years
by Steve Haner With one month to go in its fiscal year, Virginia has almost met its General Fund revenue target in the first eleven months, as the revenue bonanza described here before continues. Partly it is due to the strong economic recovery post-COVID, but it is also due to numerous increased tax rates or…