Monthly Archives: September 2012

Questions Surround Bizarre Telephone Call on Uranium Mining Resolution

Posted on September 15, 2012 by | Leave a comment

By Peter Galuszka

Many questions surround the bizarre situation in which a Pittsylvania County supervisor taped and caught in an apparent lie prominent Republican State Sen. Bill Stanley who made a late night call to urge that a resolution involving uranium mining be shelved.

It raises questions about the integrity of Stanley, who is one of the state Republican party’s fastest-rising young stars. It tends to implicate the McDonnell Administration in influence peddling. It shows how the democratic process can be throttled in intrigues involving a proposal to mine a 119 million pound uranium deposit near Chatham that could make billions for its owners.

Supervisor Jerry A. Hagerman’s taped conversation which I heard from the Aug. 31 phone call from Stanley also shows how politics is really played at the granular and perhaps most important level in Virginia. The phone call sounds like something from a movie, with a smooth, hot shot politician coming off patronizingly as he tries to pump up an older, rural official to get what he wants.

In the call, Stanley can be heard saying that he had been called and asked to “reach out” by McDonnell to persuade the board to shelve the uranium resolution.  He tells Hagerman, who has come out openly against ended the state-wide moratorium against uranium mining, that going along with dumping the resolution could be good for him “personally and politically.”

Stanley has not responded to requests for comment about the taped telephone call. He did tell me before I learned of the taped call that McDonnell had not called him to ask him to lobby the board.  A McDonnell spokesman has emphatically denied twice that the governor had anything to do with calling Stanley to ask him for help in shelving the resolution. Among questions:

  • Why would the McDonnell Administration be so interested in this particular resolution? It is not strongly-worded and says that the decision about ending the moratorium on uranium mining is up to the General Assembly. It states that if mining proceeds, it must be regulated and there should be a public fund set up to help pay local residents hurt by an accident. Both requests are no-brainers. Virginia does not presently have any regulations on uranium mining although the federal government does.
  • Why can’t the legally-elected local officials in a particular county vote on a matter of obvious local concern without interference from state officials?
  • Why would Stanley be calling Pittsylvania County supervisors at 10:30 on a Friday night on the kick-off to the Labor Day long weekend? The supervisors meeting where the resolution was on the agenda was the following Tuesday, Sept. 4. If Stanley were so concerned about shelving the resolution, why didn’t he go to the meeting and ask to address the board in public?
  • Why would Stanley tell Hagerman about a proposal by “Virginia Beach” to develop an “inland port” that could employ thousands in his county? The City of Virginia Beach has no commercial port facilities capable of handling containerized cargo although the Virginia Port Authority has a large operation in Hampton Roads and an inland port in the Shenandoah Valley. Asked about this, a McDonnell spokesman referred me to the City of Virginia Beach.
  • Lying hasn’t really been the style of McDonnell or his people. It could be that the governor did not call anyone specifically about the uranium resolution but somehow his name was being used to get attention.

Stanley has close ties to McDonnell. He won a key political battle last year in elections for the 20th senate district that runs from Smith Mountain Lake to Danville. It was a recent creation formed after redistricting reshaped borders. McDonnell’s political action committee gave Stanley $83,000 – the most to any Republican politician last year – to beat Democrat Roscoe Reynolds.

The vote was critical because the majority in the state Senate by either party hung in the balance. With Stanley, 45, winning, McDonnell also got an energetic new ally with a bright political future. Stanley is in synch with McDonnell on just about every issue, especially social ones. Stanley is a newcomer in elected politics. In 2010, he entered office as a state senator by winning a special election to replace Robert Hurt, the Republican who beat Democrat Tom Perriello for his Congressional seat.

Before running for office, Stanley had been a high-flyer. The son of a Navy officer who had settled in Franklin County in 1983, Stanley graduated from Hampden-Sydney, one of the few all-male private colleges left. He then went to D.C. School of Law and worked for a Northern Virginia law firm that handled the high profile, a sexual harassment lawsuit by Paula Jones against former President Bill Clinton. Stanley moved back to Franklin County in 1999 and became active in Republican politics.

But if Stanley thought he was going to snow Jerry Hagerman, as it sounds on the taped phone call, he miscalculated badly. Soft-spoken Hagerman, 67, is a West Virginia native and former coal miner. He has an extensive background in law enforcement, having served as a sheriff’s deputy in McDowell County, W.Va., a Rocky Mount police officer and a deputy and investigator for the Pittsylvania Sheriff’s Office before retiring in 2006. Today, he runs a gunsmithing shop.

“I felt very uncomfortable talking with Stanley,” says Hagerman who says he routinely tapes his calls so he can remember facts.

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Posted in Business and Economy, Crime, Corrections and Law Enforcement, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Infrastructure, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Regulations and Government Oversight, Science & Technology

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Taped Senator’s Call Links McDonnell to Uranium Mining Controversy

Posted on September 14, 2012 by | Leave a comment

 By Peter Galuszka

Jerry A. Hagerman, a supervisor in Pittsylvania County which is at the center of a battle over proposed uranium mining, says that State Sen. Bill Stanley (pictured) told him that Gov. Robert F. McDonnell asked Stanley to lobby the county Board of Supervisors to shelve a resolution regarding uranium at its Sept. 4 meeting. Hagerman says he has a taped telephone call from Stanley to prove it.

Both Stanley and Jeff Caldwell, McDonnell’s press secretary, told me emphatically on Sept. 13 that no one in the governor’s office had spoken with Stanley about asking the board to drop the resolution from their agenda.

Among other things, the resolution would have asked the state to set up a fund to reimburse local residents impacted by any future uranium mining accident and that appropriate state or federal mining regulations be in place.

“Bill Stanley called me at 10:30 p.m. on Friday, Aug. 31 to ask me to go along with shelving the resolution. I was surprised and upset by his call,” Hagerman told me. The resolution had been placed on the county’s Website on that day as part of the upcoming meeting agenda.

Hagerman tape recorded the Stanley call and played it for me. In the call, Stanley is heard to say distinctly that he did speak with McDonnell regarding the county uranium resolution.

At one point, Stanley can be heard saying, “I just got a call from the Governor.” At another time, he can be heard saying, “The Governor called and said it is very important to reach out.”

Asked about the taped call, press secretary Caldwell emailed me on Sept. 14 that “neither the governor not any member of his administration has made any calls, directly or indirectly, in an effort to influence the actions of the board of supervisors. Any claims to the contrary are simply untrue.” Stanley did not respond to a request for comment about the taped call with Hagerman.

During the telephone conversation which lasted about 20 minutes, Stanley told Hagerman that it was important that the county not come out at this time with any opinion about ending the uranium mining ban. It would be better to wait until after a study commission had come up with recommendations on ending a 30-year-old ban on uranium mining and the General Assembly voted on the matter at its upcoming winter session, he said.

“You guys don’t need to vote now. It can save you big personally and politically and you have control of your conscience,” Stanley can be heard saying. “You guys are the super stars right now,” he added. During the tape-recorded conversation, Hagerman tried to beg off, asking Stanley to call him the next day. Stanley did not know he was being taped and Hagerman often tapes calls from constituents to help him remember facts.

In the talk, Stanley told Hagerman, who is an independent and new in office, “I think you are doing a great job and this is not a battle a politician needs to put his stake in the ground about right now.”

Stanley also spoke about the need to revitalize the county which has been hard hit by massive layoffs over the past decade as textile and furniture makers either shut down or moved their factories overseas.

Stanley mentioned an upcoming deal that involves Gov. McDonnell and Virginia Beach, which has opposed lifting the mining ban because it gets its drinking water from nearby lakes.

In his comments, Stanley can be heard saying that Virginia Beach could help create thousands of jobs in Pittsylvania County by creating an inland port in his area. An inland port is a facility where container cargo taken from ships is hauled inland and then reloaded on trucks or rail cars.

What could not be learned is why Stanley repeatedly mentioned “Virginia Beach,” which has no commercial port facilities although surrounding cities in Hampton Roads, including Norfolk, Newport News and Portsmouth, have large ones. What’s more, the Virginia Port Authority, a quasi-state entity, usually proposes and builds inland ports, not individual cities.

Asked about the discrepancy, Hagerman said he didn’t know anything about it. “I just go to Virginia Beach sometimes for vacation,” he said.

Stanley is a close political ally of McDonnell, who helped raise $83,000 for a recent Stanley political campaign. He is a lawyer who lives in Franklin County and represents the 20th senatorial district. Hagerman lives in Gretna and opposes the uranium mining project.

Marshall Ecker, another Pittsylvania County supervisor, told me Sept. 13 that he understood that either McDonnell or his staff had asked Stanley to lobby the board to shelve the resolution.

In a previous interview, Stanley told me that he did call some supervisors to delay the resolution vote, that McDonnell had no involvement and that Stanley did so because he believed the current resolution was flawed and it was not the time to consider it. Stanley says he agrees that effective mining regulation need not be in place but says that taxpayers should not be stuck with the bill for any mining accident.

Virginia Uranium plans to develop a 119 million-pound deposit of uranium near Chatham. The controversial proposal has attracted national media attention.

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Posted in Business and Economy, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations and Government Oversight, Science & Technology, Uncategorized

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Decline of White Patriarchal Privilege at UVa?

Posted on September 14, 2012 by | Leave a comment

by James A. Bacon

The privilege enjoyed by middle-aged white males in American society is a source of great consternation to liberals and progressives everywhere. Ironically, the places where middle-aged white male privilege runs the deepest is in the very set of institutions that decries middle-aged white privilege the loudest, those centers of liberal and progressive thought, colleges and universities.

Now we learn from a presentation of the Special Committee on Diversity to the University of Virginia Board of Trustees that in the fall of 2o11 men held 76% of TTT (tenure and tenure track) positions while women held only 24%. For fully tenured positions, men outnumbered women by a five-to-one margin. It goes without saying that tenured faculty members receive the highest pay and enjoy the greatest perks and job protection.

The racial imbalance was even worse. In the fall of 2011, “under-represented minorities,” which include African-Americans, Asians, Hispanics, Native Americans and “Two or Mores” — constitute only 15% of the tenure and tenure-track faculty.

Thus, by the conventional measures used to criticize American society at large, the University of Virginia is a bastion of sexism and racism. If the sexism and racism is not overt, one can only conclude (assuming one is a liberal or progressive) that it is afflicted by the kind of “institutional” sexism and racism that is said to be so prevalent elsewhere.

Apologists of academia might argue that the tenure and tenure-track professors are significantly older on average than other faculty members, and that they rose to esteemed status by virtue of their seniority. Thirty or forty years ago, society was not as diverse as it is today, and white males were far more likely to earn advanced degrees and become faculty members, therefore today’s disparity simply reflects the disparities of a past era. But, then, very few professions enjoy the protections of tenure. That practice, justified on the grounds of “academic freedom,” has ossified and perpetuated the racial disparity.

Still, it appears that the old white guys are finally retiring and opening up slots for newcomers. And it does appear that gender inequity is being addressed. Of all offers of TTT faculty positions in 2011-2012, 51% went to men and 48% to women. (One individual declined to identify his/her gender!)

But are racial injustices being corrected? We don’t know. Forty-three percent of the offers went to professors who self-identified as white, 3% to African-Americans, 15% to Asian-Americans, 1% to Hispanics/Latinos and none to American Indians. That doesn’t sound like much of an improvement, except for  Asian-Americans. But 38% went to individuals who did not report their race/ethnicity. Who are those 38%? Are they minorities who fear being discriminated against? Are they whites who fear being discriminated against? Or is something else going on?

I would suppose that an institution that was genuinely interested in addressing racial injustice would get to the bottom of it. Until it does, the numbers are meaningless.

Update: How about that? George Martin, a UVa alumnus, was elected last night as the first African-American Vice Rector of the Board of Visitors. “When George Martin attended Virginia, he was one of only 250 African-American students in the entire student body,” stated Governor Bob McDonnell in a press release today. “Today, the University of Virginia is well known for having one of the highest graduation rates for African-American students in the entire country.”

Congratulations!

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Posted in Poverty & income gap, Race and Race Relations

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How Team Obama-Bernanke Oppresses the Poor

Posted on September 14, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Connect the dots, fool!

If you’re truly a defender of the “1%” and indifferent to the plight of the poor in American society, don’t waste your vote on Mitt Romney. Barack Obama is your man. While the president proposes addressing society’s unequal distribution of income by raising tax rates on the wealthy, his administration stealthily enriches the rich and oppresses the poor. Under the Obama administration, the plight of the poor has gone from bad to worse.

In 2010 U.S. household income fell to its lowest level in sixteen years and poverty rose to a 17-year high, reports Bloomberg today. Median household income decline 2.3% and the percentage of people in poverty climbed to 15.1%. Median income is the lowest since 1996!

So, what is the policy response of the United States? More quantitative easing! Yesterday Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke announced that the Fed would purchase $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities every month until the economy improves. The Dow Jones Industrial Average promptly jumped 206 points, padding the pockets of the “1%” who own the lion’s share of the nation’s stock market equities.

While the Romney campaign predictably dissed Bernanke’s latest move as a politically motivated maneuver to prop up the economy before the election, the Obama administration has blessed Fed policy through its silence. Obama has blamed former President George W. Bush, lashed out against Congressional Republicans and denigrated “millionaires and billionaires” for the nation’s woes. But in 2010 he defended quantitative easing as good for the economy. And he has refused since then to join the growing chorus of the Fed’s critics.

So far, the Obama-Bernanke version of “trickle down economics” hasn’t done much to benefit the poor, whose numbers have grown steadily after more than  three years of tepid economic recovery.

Meanwhile, Obama’s fellow anti-poverty warriors are decrying the growth of the payday lender industry. In a recent Richmond Federal Reserve Bank seminar on economic inclusion, various do-gooders assembled to hear Gary Rivlin, author of “Broke, USA,” a book that purports to explain the multi-billion dollar payday lending industry. In case you haven’t been paying attention, liberals and progressives excoriate payday lending because they charge “predatory” fees and interest rates.

Payday lending to the poor has become big business, noted Rivlin. One important reason is that many low-income families do not have access to traditional banking services. Writes John Reid Blackwell who covered the event for the Times-Dispatch:

A survey by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. also showed about 821,000 U.S. households lost access to basic banking services between January 2009 and June 2011. Roughly 10 million U.S. households, or 8.2 percent, have no access to bank accounts, according to the survey.

The survey shows that one-quarter of U.S. households have used at least one alternative financial service, such as non-bank check-cashing or payday lending loans, in the past year.

Why would that be? Could it have something to do with the fact that Bernanke’s zero-interest policy has sucked the profitability out of small bank accounts? Well, let’s see what the Wall Street Journal had to say in a March article, “Big Bank Weights Fee Revamp.”

Banks often lose money on accounts like basic checking that they use in part to lure younger customers. They offer the accounts in part because they hope to retain customers as they grow more affluent and use services such as mortgage and business loans and credit cards.

Many banks have already eliminated the free checking accounts that had been in place since the 1980s and dismantled rewards programs for debit cards. Bank of America currently charges a wide range of monthly fees for checking accounts, unless customers meet certain requirements, but the new plans being tested could change the amounts being charged and the triggers for fees.

Thus, not only is the Obama-Bernanke easy money policy hurting the elderly, whose income is plummeting on CDs, money market funds and other financial instruments, it is oppressing the poor. When short-term interest rates hit zero, banks lose money on small checking accounts. When banks lose money on small checking accounts, they stop marketing them, raise penalties and fees, and add restrictions. When poor people can’t afford basic banking services, they go to payday lenders.

Liberals, progressives and other good-government types, too obtuse to understand Economics 101, try to shut down the last remaining source of legal credit for the poor. What will happen when they run the payday lenders out of Virginia?

Hmmm. The goo-goos are a bit fuzzy. Participants in the Federal Reserve Bank seminar suggested creating alternate services, “which might include institutions such as credit unions.” Of course, starting credit unions is difficult and, in the words of Nancy Pierce, field coach for the National Credit Union Foundation, “they are not located on every street corner and they have to serve a defined field of membership.”

Never fear, when the Obamoids, Bernanke-ites and goo-goos screw up one part of the economy through their misguided government programs and initiatives, they can always concoct another program to fix it, even if that means screwing up something else. In the meantime, the poor will just have to suck it up while the brilliant know-it-alls who “manage” the economy figure out what to do next.

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Laboring in the Garden of the Lord

Posted on September 14, 2012 by | 4 comments

Linda Marshall inspects a red okra plant.

A church in Richmond’s inner city does more than minister to the homeless and hungry. Volunteers tend an urban garden to feed them fresh, healthy food.

by James A. Bacon

When Linda Marshall retired from her job as a taxpayer advocate with the Internal Revenue Service, she enrolled in Henrico County’s Master Gardener program. She was thinking that she would apply her skills to  working on the yard around her house. Little did she reckon on Morris Henderson, the pastor of her church, the 31st Street Baptist Church.

The church had launched an urban garden to grow fruits and vegetables for its nutrition center, which fed dozens of homeless and hungry people in the inner-city Richmond community. The woman who had started the garden was quite elderly. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, Henderson suggested, if Marshall could take over the job?

After earning her certification, the 62-year-old Marshall found herself in charge of the garden. And she’s been volunteering her time almost every day since — Mondays through Fridays and some Saturdays as well — not to mention the time of her husband, her sister and anyone else she can corral into the job. “I feel like it’s a God-ordained appointment,” she says.

You name it, and the 31st Street Baptist Church grows it: strawberries, blueberries and melons, an endless assortment of vegetables, and a wide variety of herbs. The deacon in the nutrition center says what he needs for his menus, and Marshall and other volunteers plant it. When the plants ripen, she takes the bounty over to the church, about one block away.

A month ago I profiled the work of Tricycle Gardens, which, like the 31st Street Baptist Church, is located in Richmond’s Church Hill district. The mission of Tricycle Gardens is to help eradicate the “food desert” — the lack of healthy food, especially fruit and vegetables — in the inner city.  While I enthusiastically applaud the work that Tricycle Gardens was doing, I could not escape the observation that the group consisted primarily of well-meaning white professionals and that the population whose health they hoped to improve was comprised mainly of poor and working-class African-Americans. I wondered, did the message of eating locally grown fruits and vegetables resonate outside the college-educated elite?

31St Street Baptist Church

The answer is, yes it does. The 31st Street Baptist Church has supported a nutrition center for many years as part of its mission of serving the poor, says Pastor Henderson. The center feeds between roughly 50 and 150 people every weekday, the number falling during the school year when children qualify for school lunch programs. The food is donated by parishioners, the Food Bank and other groups. Much of it comes in cans and boxes. Fresh food contributions are unpredictable. And ever since the closure of the old Community Pride neighborhood grocery store on 25th Street, fresh food was unavailable anywhere in Church Hill. Inspired by First Lady Michelle Obama, her White House garden and her campaign against obesity, Henderson says, he had the vision of giving the homeless “a balanced meal with fresh fruits and vegetables that are raised in the community.”

As it happened, the church had acquired three parcels of property nearby with the original goal of building a neighborhood center there. When a downturn in the economy scotched that idea, the church decided to convert the parcels into three gardens: one for food, one for flowers and one for zen-style meditation to provide a haven of peace and tranquility in the gritty urban neighborhood. The vegetable garden was the first to open. Next came the flower garden. For now the church has held off on the meditation garden, which requires significant funds to pay for landscaping.

The church encourages the homeless and hungry who partake of its food to volunteer in the garden. In the first two years, they were active. More recently, the church has forged relationships with community groups that emphasize youth involvement. Marshall rattles off a string of organizations — the Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Youth Empowerment, Camp Diva and the Mayor’s Youth Academy (MYA) — who send a stream of volunteers.

The MYA program is especially ambitious. Inner city youths participate in every step of the gardening: creating the beds, building the soil, planting the seeds, watering and weeding, and the final harvest. They take ownership of their own beds, and they sell the harvest in farmers market. The proceeds help underwrite a small stipend for the participants. Read more.

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Did McDonnell Help Quash Pittsylvania Uranium Mining Resolution?

Posted on September 13, 2012 by | Leave a comment

By Peter Galuszka

For months, Pittsylvania County has been a hotbed of controversy as Virginia Uranium tries to get a decades-old moratorium on uranium mining lifted so it can mine and refine a rich, 119-million pound deposit of the radioactive material near Chatham.

The latest intrigue involves a Board of Supervisors meeting in early September where members were going to consider a resolution asking that mining regulations be in place and that a fund be established to help residents whose properties might be damaged by a uranium accident. Mysteriously, the resolution was removed from the board’s agenda just before the meeting.

Supervisor Marshall Ecker claims that aides to Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, whose public stance has been to not pick sides on the uranium fight, called State Sen. Bill Stanley from the area and asked him to lobby supervisors to sidetrack the resolution.

Ecker also said that Stanley’s gubernatorial message was for the board to delay considering the resolution until next February or March. By that time, a governor-appointed study commission will have recommended whether to keep the uranium mining band or not and the General Assembly will probably have acted. Ecker wants to keep the ban.

“I know the governor’s people called Stanley and he started calling supervisors to tell them to get the item off the agenda,” Ecker told me.

When I called and emailed Jeff Caldwell, McDonnell’s press secretary, Caldwell got back to me very quickly. “This statement is not true,” he emailed. “No call was made to influence the BOS.” To underline the point, Caldwell then telephoned me to make sure I understood and said that the governor’s office had been in touch with Supervisor Ecker to set him straight and that I should call Ecker. I did. Ecker stood by his story.

I also called State Sen. Stanley, a Republican who is a political ally of McDonnell. “The governor did not call me about this at all. Nor did anyone from his office,” Stanley told me.

He added, however, that he had read the proposed resolution that had been drafted by Ecker. Stanley said the resolution was “badly written” and would do little other than annoy people from both the pro and con sides and “hurt economic development in our area.”

Stanley admits that he did telephone some of the supervisors to urge them to squash the resolution before the Board of Supervisors meeting but it had nothing to do with any calls from McDonnell or his people.

The senator said he doesn’t want to get the cart before the horse. He says the county should not take a stand until the study commission has made its recommendations and the General assembly has acted. He opposes the spiked resolution calls to set up “a monetary fund. . . which would be administered by a third party, to compensate County citizens adversely affected by uranium mining.” The fund could be tapped by residents living with five miles of the mine site.

Stanley doesn’t like the fund idea because he says that if there is an accident, the taxpayers should not be stuck paying the bill. “The company should pay,” he said. He did not address the possibility that victims might have to wait years for legal proceedings against Virginia Uranium or other operator which may or may not be in business at the time of any settlement.

The dead resolution also called that “appropriate regulations be in place either by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and or by the State of Virginia for the most comprehensive protection of out citizens.” Stanley says he will insist on the best regulatory protection for local residents when and if the mine is in operation.

The resolution battle is another in a series of controversies surrounding Virginia Uranium. The firm has taken state legislators on expense-paid trips to France, including stopovers in Paris, to tour shut-down uranium mines that the company claims are no environmental hazard. The firm has also engaged in a well-funded marketing campaign to convince the public that mining is safe despite considerable doubt.

Their first hurdle is to have the General Assembly lift the 23-year-old uranium moratorium. Virginia also  has no regulations on uranium mining or refining. A National Academy of Sciences report recently stated that there is considerable risk in proceeding with the project in Southside Virginia because of the lack of rules and experience. Cities such as Virginia Beach get their drinking water from lakes nearby and have voiced opposition to mining.

McDonnell has organized a study group to give him a recommendation by year end but the group has drawn criticism because it is long on lobbyists and short on scientific experts. It also was hit at first for limiting public input in its hearings.

Local worries about uranium remain unaddressed. A poll released Sept. 12 by the Alliance for Progress in Southern Virginia showed that a majority of people – 53 percent – in the area opposed mining while 29 percent favored it. The research was conducted by Virginia Commonwealth University which polled 551 residents in Danville and Pittsylvania County. The mining controversy seems to have an extra-long half life.

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Posted in Business and Economy, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Government Finance, Politics, Property rights, Regulations and Government Oversight, Science & Technology

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Immigration Fuels Virginia’s Population Growth

Posted on September 13, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Immigration from other states and from abroad continues to boost Virginia’s population growth, and the Demographics & Workforce Group of the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service has the details in a new analysis.

Between 2005 and 2009, an estimated 283,000 people moved into the state from other parts of the U.S. while 253,000 left, for a net gain of 29,300.

Over the same period, 59,000 people immigrated to Virginia from other countries. (There are no statistics on the number who emigrated from the state.) These legal immigrants originated from:

Image credit: Weldon Cooper Center

And here is where the greatest activity took place:


Virginians remained mobile through the period studied. On average, 900,000 changed residences every year. Fewer than half (407,000) moved across city/county lines; of those who did, most moved to neighboring jurisdictions.

— JAB

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Posted in Demographics, Labor and Workforce

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More Proof that K-12 Education Is Broken

Posted on September 13, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Read the title of a new study by State Budget Solutions, “Throwing Money at Education Isn’t Working,” and you’ve read the main conclusion: Higher spending does not guarantee better student performance.

In 2010, the United States spent $809 billion on K-12 education, which represented twice as much per pupil as the nation spent in 1970. We spend more on schools than peer nations yet American students have lower standardized test scores. (Virginia, incidentally spent 34.9% of its General Fund budget on K-12 in 2009, the fourth highest percentage in the nation.)

The report, authored by Kristen de Peña, makes the case that there is little correlation between how much money a state spends on schools and the results those schools deliver. That’s not to say that money isn’t a factor. It’s just that so many other factors affect student performance that it’s easy to spend added funds unproductively. She is also skeptical of other commonly proffered panaceas such as charter schools and performance-based standards. “In the ten years since No Child Left Behind became law,” she writes, “it is clear that one-size-fits-all testing, sanctioning under-performing schools and rewarding high-performing schools, undermines actual education efforts.”

The solution? More decentralization. “Educators and elected officials need to look at what is working in various states with high ACT scores and graduation rates. What they will see is that states taking a more active role in educational outcomes produce better performance results. Taking a more active role in education includes developing flexible, practical education plans tailored to state students or prioritizing school district transparency to minimize waste and fraud.”

Bacon’s bottom line: The social science of education is so complex, so plagued by inadequate data and so polarized by ideology that I question whether anyone can decipher what is needed to turn schools around. My sense is that the system needs to be reinvented from the ground up. I question fundamental assumptions: that students should be organized in age cohorts and herded lockstep through entities called “schools.” No one-size-fits-all solution will work.  Education should be tailored to the needs and aptitudes of individual children. The bureaucratic, government-run structures we have erected are incapable of making the change. It’s time for radical experimentation. For a glimpse of the future, look to home schooling and online education.

— JAB

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The Most Dysfunctional Board in the Country?

Posted on September 12, 2012 by | Leave a comment

by James A. Bacon

Talk about a crazy situation… After months of delay, the Washington, D.C., City Council is scheduled October 2 to approve amendments to a bi-state compact with Virginia that would expand the board of the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA), giving the Old Dominion greater representation. The amendments were based upon legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Obama at the behest of Rep. Frank Wolf, Va-10.

Assuming the council acts as expected, it still will be behind the curve. Frustrated by “appalling decisions” made by the MWAA board, Wolf has submitted a new bill that would shrink the board and give Virginia representatives an outright majority. The board, which worked actively to block implementation of the previous changes is “dysfunctional,” he says.

The current board lacks transparency and accountability, said Wolf in an August  press release, pointing to a series of “appalling” decisions over the past two years, including a $200,000 confidential settlement with an unsuccessful candidate to run the authority and sweetheart deals for former board members and board staff. He also cited lavish travel by board members.

“MWAA used to have a well-functioning and highly successful board,” Wolf said. “Now it has just dissolved into bitter acrimony. Board members are subpoenaing each other. It is internecine warfare. This cannot stand. It is time to give Virginia control.”

Last week the MWAA board did adopt a new travel policy and hiring policies, as the new chairman, Michael A. Curto, sought to re-establish credibility with the authority’s stakeholders.

After the MWAA board’s session last week, Curto stated:

As I started my tenure as chairman, I laid out three priorities for the organization: increased cooperation with our partners, especially the Commonwealth of Virginia, greater transparency for management and board operations, and the timely and cost-effective completion of the rail project. While it is true that the Authority has made its share of mistakes, and there are a number of issues that have yet to be adequately addressed, I think our harshest critics would also acknowledge that we have made significant progress on those key objectives.

President and CEO Jack Potter reported last week that the Authority was closing out all “sole source” professional services contracts that had been exempted from competitive bidding. In effect, that meant firing former director Mame Reiley, whom he had hired under a multi-year contract for a $180,000-a-year job. Her contract still called for a one-year severance.

The new travel policy would preclude any more junkets, such as one in which then-board member Dennis Martire, a a senior executive with the Laborers International Union of North America (LiUNA) charged MWAA for a nine-day trip to Europe with his girlfriend on the pretext of attending a 36-hour  conference on by the Airports Council International.

At least two other former board members – and a former staff member of the board – have been beneficiaries of sweetheart deals, Wolf said, citing exposes by the Washington Examiner. Last year the board awarded a $100,000 contract to a law firm where a board member’s wife works.

In other questionable activities, the board paid $200,000 to an individual who was “all but promised” – but never offered – the CEO position. The deal was struck to avoid a potential lawsuit.

One issue yet to hit the media involves the confiscation of a board member’s papers left at his seat after a recent meeting, Wolf said. The Congressman stated in the press release that “it was his understanding that” a board member left the July session for a lunch meeting, fully intending to return. The board meeting adjourned, however, before he came back and board staff collected his things. “Instead of just putting the documents in an envelope, the staff read through them and then passed them onto the board secretary, who, I understand, also went through them,” Wolf said. “Believing the documents could be pertinent to litigation involving MWAA, the board secretary turned them over to the authority’s general counsel. This incident has led to series of subpoenas being issued to several board members and others, including me and my chief of staff.”

Another incident revolves around the attempted removal of a Virginia board member — Martire, the labor executive — for cause by Governor McDonnell, Wolf said. The board member has challenged his removal in court and MWAA is paying his legal fees.

“I suspect MWAA will have to start paying the legal fees of other board members who have now been subpoenaed in the case,” Wolf said. “Knowing how fast legal fees can accumulate, I am deeply troubled by these latest turn of events, especially considering taxpayers are footing the bill.”

The problems do not end here, Wolf said.

The terms of all three of the federal appointments have expired and finding replacements continues to drag on and on. The District left an appointee on the board for nearly two years after his term has expired, despite being under house arrest in the Ivory Coast and attending only one meeting between 2009 and 2011. It was going to be that member’s proxy vote to hire the unsuccessful CEO candidate who received a $200,000 settlement. Board members also used to meet with the former chairman the night before meetings to plot strategy for the next day’s meetings, Wolf said.

“All this points to a board that is totally dysfunctional, fiscally irresponsible and tone deaf,” Wolf said.

MWAA’s actions last week come too little and too late for Wolf. “The Congressman’s new bill will “give Virginia complete control” over the MWAA board, Daniel Scandling, Wolf’s chief of staff, told me.

Scandling acknowledged the political difficulties in persuading Maryland and Washington to agree to an arrangement that would further diminish their power on the board, but he noted that the bill enjoyed bipartisan support among Virginia’s congressional delegation and has been backed by leading business lobbies in Northern Virginia. “Never say never.”

McDonnell spokesman Jeff Caldwell did not respond to two phone calls and an email from Bacon’s Rebellion to address the Washington City Council’s action, or lack of it, on the bi-state compact.

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Online Learning on a Roll: Picture a Steamroller that Accelerates like a Ferrari

Posted on September 12, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Sophia Naide. Photo credit: Fast Company.

Sophia Naide, a high school student in Northern Virginia, is studying Computer Science 101 with her mother. Is she taking a high school course? No. Is she enrolled in a community college? George Mason University? The Virginia Tech satellite campus? No, no, no. She signed up for a free, online course with Coursera, the online teaching enterprise that recently forged an agreement with the University of Virginia along with a dozen other prestigious universities. Sophia is one of several learners interviewed by Fast Company writer Anya Kamenetz in an article about Coursera.

The article is worth reading because it sheds light on the growing competitive advantage of online classes in the higher-ed setting.  Traditionalists, reactionaries and others with a vested interest preserving in the status quo insist that nothing can replace the face-to-face interaction between teacher and student in a real-world, campus setting. But the Fast Company article makes it clear that online courses can do things that conventional classroom courses cannot.

For starters, the face-to-face experience isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. “When you’re giving a lecture and you stop to ask a question, 50% of the class are scribbling away and didn’t hear you, another 20% are on Facebook, and one smarty-pants in the front row blurts out the answer and you feel good,” says Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller. “Why not take the 75-minute lecture, break it up into short pieces, and add interactive engagement into the video so that every five minutes there’s a question?”

In a Coursera course, students pause periodically throughout the lecture to answer questions. The program tells them immediately if their answers are right or wrong, thus whether or not they understand the material. Neuroscience research showing that exercises in instant retrieval enhance memory and comprehension more than complicated questions for later study.

As for that coveted  interaction, online students form virtual study groups. If students have questions, they can ask other students. Moreover, course designers can see how students interact with the lecture, tests and one another to continually refine the courses. Says Koller: “We can see every single click: pausing, rewinding, the first and second try on the homework, what they did in between.”

Bacon’s bottom line: Inevitably, the best teachers (“best” in their ability to deliver a quality online experience) will gravitate to online courses where they will be richly compensated for their talents and knowledge. Instead of teaching dozens of students or even a couple hundred, star teachers will reach thousands. What will that mean for the not-so-great instructors and the no-name educational institutions that employ them? Perhaps they will provide supplementary services, as intermediaries or subalterns, to students who crave that face-to-face experience. Perhaps they’ll go out of business. Either way, they will adopt or die.

Idealistic higher-ed officials see online learning as a way to disseminate knowledge to millions of students in developing countries who cannot afford a traditional degree. Perhaps it also will become a way as well to disseminate knowledge to millions of Americans who can’t afford a traditional degree!

— JAB

Note: I have deleted Ms. Naide’s age and grade level from this post at her request.

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A Suburban Boy Can Survive!

Posted on September 12, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Jay Zawatsky. Photo credit: Washington Post.

The definition of what constitutes a “sustainable” community continues to evolve as entrepreneurs introduce innovations into the marketplace. A fascinating, if potentially flawed, example is Foxmont in western Fairfax County, which is being developed by environmentalist and attorney Jay Zawatsky.

In 300 acres west of Centreville, Zawatsky has plotted 14 five-acre lots  for his first community. Each house will have its own water supply, natural septic field, vegetable garden and compressed natural gas outlet so homeowners can run their cars on cheap, clean natural gas.

“It’s not just a green house, but an entire green community,” Zawatsky told  Tom Jackman author of the Washington Post‘s The State of NoVa blog. “I didn’t want to do what other developers are doing, throwing up big boxes of air. Those are just more energy hogs. I wanted to do it in a way that had the least possible impact on the environment.”

The development also will support a communal garden, and residents will be able to fish bass in Hunter’s Pond and hunt deer in the woods. The development links to nearby equestrian trails. As a bonus, a bald eagle lives near the pond. With apologies to Hank Williams, Jr.: A suburban boy can survive!

Ironically, wells, septic tanks and family gardens are a throwback to country houses from a past era, before county governments started providing urban-style municipal services. The real innovation, other than in repackaging what once were hard-scrabble necessities as environmental virtues, is extending compressed natural gas (CNG) to the subdivision. CNG sells for the equivalent of $1.20 per gallon right now. “Using CNG to replace gasoline and diesel will reduce fuel costs for NoVa drivers by more than 50 percent for every mile driven,” Zawatsky said. “That is like a giant tax cut for NoVa families.”

Energy-efficient homes will range in size from 4,200 square feet to nearly 8,000 square feet, with four to six bedrooms and four to six bathrooms. They will be priced in the $1 million to $1.3 million range.

The red dot shows the approximate location of Foxmont.

Bacon’s bottom line: Pardon my skepticism.  The idea of referring to 8,000-square-feet houses, no matter how energy efficient, as “sustainable” seems  ludicrous. So does the notion of putting single-family dwellings on five-acre lots, which disrupt far more land and stress congested roads far more than smaller, urban lots in walkable communities. Burning natural gas is unquestionably more environmentally benign than burning gasoline, but erecting housing in a location where homeowners will have to commute long distances is not.

Sustainability hype aside, the Foxmont project still could represent a step forward by integrating household gardens and CNG into real estate development. Will the current mania for locally grown foods translate into a demand for home-grown foods? Will people pay a premium for access to CNG? Are there enough people eager to live in western Fairfax County willing and able to pay more than $1 million for such amenities? Those are questions we cannot possibly know in advance. Only through real-world experiments like Foxmont can we find out.

— JAB

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Hi-ho, Heyo, It’s Off to Blacksburg We Go!

Posted on September 11, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Heyo's three co-founders. Photo credit: TheBurgs

Yesterday I argued that the economic odds were stacked against Virginia’s smaller metropolitan areas when it came to stimulating the start-up and growth of technology businesses. Economies of scale in the knowledge economy, I suggested, favor large regions with larger, more diverse labor pools. Could I have been wrong? (What, me wrong? Never!)

This morning, Governor Bob McDonnell announced that Heyo, a fast-growing social media company formerly known as Lujure Media Inc., will expand its operation in the Town of Blacksburg. The company, which creates dashboards for managing Facebook fan pages, mobile apps and websites, aims to create 50 jobs over the next two years.

Said Jim Cheng, Secretary for Commerce and Trade: “Heyo’s innovative services and accelerated growth are further evidence that Virginia is an incubator for good ideas. … The company is dedicated to Blacksburg and Montgomery County, and has found a pool of local talent to thrive. ”

Added Heyo CEO Nathan Latka: “The close knit community makes it easy to build culture and hire top tier talent from top ranked local universities like Virginia Tech and Radford University. This has enabled us to create 16 full-time jobs with aggressive hiring plans for the coming months. As we continue to grow rapidly, it’ll be hard for Blacksburg to remain the country’s biggest secret.”

A big high-five to Heyo and Blacksburg! I would love to believe that Blacksburg, Charlottesville and other smaller Virginia metros can buck the mega-trends arrayed against them. I hate the idea of a Virginia defined by a sprawling urban crescent and a withering hinterland. But a few positive anecdotes don’t change the big picture. It will be instructive to see if Heyo can grow a large technology  enterprise in Blacksburg.

— JAB

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Innovation and Business-Establishment Density

Posted on September 11, 2012 by | Leave a comment

by James A. Bacon

In previous posts, I have postulated that some human settlement patterns do more than others to promote creativity and innovation. Following the lead of such thinkers as urbanist Jane Adams, architect Leon Krier and economic geographer Richard Florida, I have suggested that certain urban forms — cul de sac subdivisions, massive skyscrapers — dampen physical mobility and access, thus, the ability of businesses to interact with one another. The ideal urban form would reduce the travel and time cost for people to leave their offices, meet, confer, grab coffee or lunch, meet after hours and have serendipitous encounters. The underlying assumption is that creativity and innovation arise from such interactions.

Drawing upon the work of  Jose Lobo with Arizona State University, Florida has mapped the “establishment density” — the number of business establishments per square mile — of the nation’s metropolitan statistical areas. (Read his blog post here.)

Not surprisingly, New York has the highest number of business establishments per square mile (79) among the country’s 20 largest MSAs, with San Francisco coming in third (47.9) and Boston fourth (34.9). Counter-intuitively — think of all those freeways — Los Angeles has the second highest density (68.7).

In Virginia, the Washington and Hampton Roads MSAs are of medium business density, while Richmond is below average.

This is all well and good, but is business-establishment density truly correlated with creativity and innovation? While I believe there is a link, I would hypothesize that it is a weak one, and I would readily concede that the case is far from proven. Someone should run a regression analysis to see if there is a correlation between business-establishment density and various proxies for business innovation.

Here’s the problem: Metropolitan-wide averages don’t mean much. To what extent are business establishments clustered within an MSA? For example, the Washington MSA is a large one, but IT/systems integration companies in the region are packed into a geographic sliver, the Tysons-Dulles corridor. If you measured the business-establishment density of that particular industry, it would be pretty darn high. To take another example, the advertising/marketing industry in Richmond is heavily concentrated within a couple of square miles in Shockoe Slip and Shockoe Bottom.

Here’s another critical issue: What is the quality of micro-level transportation connections within a region? How easy is it to walk, drive or take mass transit from one location to another? While the Dulles corridor may be compact geographically, how easy is it to travel from Point A to Point B within the corridor? Does anyone ever walk anywhere? Are the roads perennially congested? Will the construction of the Silver Line make a material improvement to interactivity within the corridor?

This is a fascinating line of inquiry, and an important one. There are only a handful of things that state/local governments can do to foster a culture of creativity and innovation. Fostering optimal human settlements (or creating the conditions where market forces achieve the optimal level) may be a neglected tool. The idea is worth pursuing.

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Chart of the Day: Virginia’s Clean Jobs

Posted on September 10, 2012 by | Leave a comment

I’m ambivalent about economic studies on the “clean” economy for at least two  reasons. First, authors of such studies equate “clean” largely with “low-carbon.” Thus, a nuclear power plant is “clean” because it has no carbon dioxide emissions, even if it stockpiles radioactive nuclear waste, while a natural gas pipeline, which delivers non-polluting natural gas to replace dirty coal in power plants, is not. I give clean water equal weight with C02 emissions, just as I do for clean air, preservation of wildlife habitat and reduction of toxic and radioactive waste. Second, these studies often inflate the numbers of “clean” workers. Bus drivers and garbage men? Really?

Such quibbles aside, “Sizing the Clean Economy: A National and Regional Green Jobs Assessment,” published by the Brookings Institution, provides an interesting snapshot on the continuing evolution of the economy. Over time, the economy undoubtedly will grow greener and cleaner, and metropolitan regions that can capitalize on that growth will benefit.

Among the 50 states Virginia ranks 15th by the total number of clean jobs. On a clean intensity scale (clean jobs as a percentage of all jobs), the Old Dominion ranks 36th. See the state profile here.

Within Virginia, the Washington metro area leads the way, with a clean job intensity of 2.3%, 27th out of the nation’s largest 100 metropolitan areas. With a clean job intensity of 1.7%, the Richmond region ranks 54th — although its clean job growth outpaced the national average between 2007 and 2010. Hampton Roads had a clean job intensity of 1.1%, ranking it 89th in the country.

— JAB

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The Blessing and Curse of Charlottesville for High Tech

Posted on September 10, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Four Charlottesville companies were named this year to the Inc. 5,000 list of fastest growing companies: SNL Financial, WillowTree Apps, Search Mojo and Silverchair Holdings. All four firms are located in downtown Charlottesville, which is emerging as a high-tech district of sorts. Proximity to a leading university and its supply of engineering and IT graduates is clearly a bonus, as is the enviable quality of life in the Charlottesville-Albemarle region.

But fast-growth firms are swimming upstream when it comes to growing their companies. Recruiting and retaining workers is not easy, reports the Daily Progress. One reason is that Charlottesville offers little opportunity for lateral moves between companies if someone hits a ceiling. Another is that two-income families can be reluctant to move to a region where it is difficult for the second wage-earner to find a job. Yet another is that young people are drawn to the “glamour of the big city” — singles prefer larger cities with more singles. It’s all about the mating market.

Charlottesville is a wonderful place. When I graduated from the University of Virginia in 1975, my greatest dream in life was to return to Charlottesville. I did so when I was 32. However, I soon discovered that if you weren’t part of the university community or the Farmington Country Club, the area didn’t have that much to offer. I landed in Richmond, where I found it far easier to make friends and where job options were more abundant.

In a knowledge economy, the critical ingredient to economic success is human capital. Economies of scale have shifted decisively to the larger metropolitan regions because they have much larger, more diverse labor pools. Charlottesville may be a superb incubator of small businesses but it will be very difficult for small companies to grow into big ones there. The same logic applies as well to Blacksburg, Harrisonburg, Lynchburg, Danville and other smaller metros (perhaps even to the Roanoke Valley). That’s not to say that it’s impossible to grow large, successful firms, only that it is far more difficult.

Indeed, some economic geographers are touting the rise of the mega-region, which suggests that even million-person metro regions like Richmond may suffer a competitive disadvantage.

I don’t like the trend. To the contrary, I find it incredibly dispiriting. I want to see Virginia’s smaller metros thrive. But facts are facts, and reality is reality. Virginia’s public policy makers should take heed.

As fellow blogger Don Rippert argues, Virginia’s two leading research universities — Virginia Tech and UVa — are located in small metro areas where the possibilities for spinning university knowledge creation into economic growth are far more limited than if they were located in one of the state’s major metro areas. From the perspective of maximizing the investment of state resources, does it make sense to privatize UVa and Tech and to concentrate on building George Mason University, Virginia Commonwealth University and Old Dominion University into higher-ed powerhouses that can support their regional economies? I don’t know the answer, but I think the question is worth debating.

— JAB

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