• Battle for the Battlefield

    Battle for the Battlefield

    The Manassas Battlefield has become the scene of yet another irreconcilable conflict: this one involving VDOT, the park service and local residents.

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  • A Bump in the Road

    A Bump in the Road

    Under withering criticism for a lack of transparency, the Commonwealth Transportation Board has agreed to a one-month delay before formally endorsing the McDonnell administration's vision for the North-South Corridor.

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  • From Tiny Seeds, Mighty Collard Greens Grow

    From Tiny Seeds, Mighty Collard Greens Grow

    The Healthy Corners project is putting fresh produce into two inner-city Richmond markets. If the idea takes root, one of the nations' worst food deserts could blossom with outlets for healthy food.

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  • A North-South Highway for Northern Virginia

    A North-South Highway for Northern Virginia

    The McDonnell administration has unveiled its vision for a north-south highway and other improvements to Virginia's newest Corridor of Statewide Significance.

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  • The North-South Divide

    The North-South Divide

    Battle lines are forming over the north-south transportation corridor in Northern Virginia. Backers say it would serve a growing population and stimulate economic development. Foes say the state has more urgent priorities for spending $1 billion or more.

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“Jac” Cales’ PPTA Monkey-Wrench

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 11 Comments
calesBy Peter Galuszka

For four decades, James A. “Jac” Cales Jr. was a fixture on the judicial halls of Hampton Roads, albeit not one to take himself too seriously.

As Portsmouth commonwealth’s attorney for a decade in the 1970s, he would lean back in his chair, his hands folded over his stomach and nod vigorously when a defendant in a drug case admitted something incriminating. He later served for three decades as a General District and Circuit Court judge, retiring officially in December.

So, it may be fitting that on May 1, while filling in temporarily, Cales issued what could be the most important decision of his long legal career. It is a decision that is turning Virginia’s transportation funding on its head.

Cales decided that a plan to have a private developer toll users for $2.1 billion in tunnel upgrades in crowded Hampton Roads is unconstitutional. Only the state has the power to tax and that’s what tolls really are, Cales ruled.

If his ruling holds, a number of critically important highways that involve privately operated facilities, such as parts of Interstate 495 in Northern Virginia, Route 895 near Richmond and a proposed $1.3 billion toll road from Petersburg to Suffolk, could be affected. State contracts for all of them could be voided.

If so, it would be a huge defeat for Gov. Robert F. McDonnell and earlier governors who have made good use of the Public-Private Transportation Act of 1995 to push ahead with highways that the tax-averse state otherwise was too short of money to build.

Cales’s case involved legal challenges to using the private toll road concept to pay for upgrades at the Downtown and Midtown Tunnels underneath the Elizabeth River connecting Norfolk and Portsmouth.

The key issues are electronic tolls that are supposed to kick in next February. Off-hour tolls for cars are $1.59 and go up to $1.84 during rush hour. Trucks would have to pay $7.36 during peak times. Business officials and commuters, many working in blue-collar jobs, are angry about the new expense. The tunnels used to be toll affairs years ago and the fees were much lower.

The pressure is on to void Cales’s ruling, lest it result in massive scrambling of road plans. Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton, a big fan of the PPTA, warned of serious possible repercussions when he met with lawmakers Monday. “This is not consistent with almost 240 years of building toll facilities in the commonwealth of Virginia, Connaughton told the House Appropriations Committee, according to the Richmond Times Dispatch.

Cales’s ruling is due to be appealed to the State Supreme Court, but in the interim, he has refused to stay his decision. One possible outcome is that the state would be stuck with a lot of expenses that have already been paid, such as $706 million for the Elizabeth River tunnels. In all, the state could be on the hook for $3.5 billion.

The General Assembly would also be forced to perform a heavy-duty rethink of how it funds roads.

But that may be a good thing. The PPTA, heralded as a rare pioneering effort for Virginia, has been used far beyond its intended purpose. It was supposed to be a way to supplement traditional road funding. Instead, skin-flint legislators who hate “taxes” have used the PPTA as a way to fund roads through tolls instead with private companies assuming much of the risk. Democrats and Republicans alike liked this scheme of having your cake and eating it too.

The outcomes have not always been good. A relatively short toll road southeast of Richmond, the Route 895 Pocahontas Parkway, has been so underused and underfunded that it was sold off to Australia’s Transurban firm, which recently announced it was selling it to a consortium of European banks because it wasn’t making money.

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Posted in Courts and law, Demographics, Economic development, Economy, Finance, Infrastructure, Land use & development, Planning, Property rights, Regulation, Taxes

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A Conservative Case for Mass Transit

Posted on June 18, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 12 Comments
portland_transit

No reason that conservatives can’t learn to love transit, too…

by James A. Bacon

A new paper published by the conservative Free Congress Foundation makes the connection between mass transit and the economic vitality of American regions. Author Michael S. Bronzini, with George Mason University, argues that mass transit is needed to support a population shift back to walkable urban communities, which is being driven by the economics of the knowledge economy and the spread of popular urban design concepts such as planned communities and New Urbanism.

For the first time since World War II, Bronzini notes, Americans are driving less. The shift reflects the rising cost of automobile ownership and long-term demographic trends and preferences. “Metropolitan transportation investment is needed to support urban revitalization,” he writes in, “Transportation and the Economic Health and Attractiveness of Metropolitan Regions.”

Shifting urban housing and travel choice patterns, the increasing difficulty of building new major urban highways, and increasing urban population density mean that  much new transportation investment will be in public transportation systems.

Investments in public transportation will have a broad array of social and economic benefit, including direct cost savings by riders, congestion cost savings for those driving on urban roadways, and improved business productivity and growth. Transit also helps to sustain and increase property values, and there is some evidence to suggest that cities with good public transportation fare better during economic downturns.

Bronzini does a fine job of summarizing a wide range of thinking and literature on the connection between transportation and regional vitality, and for the most part I found his reasoning impeccable. My quibble with his paper is that not the topics he addresses but those that he leaves out.

I agree entirely that mass transit is desirable infrastructure for U.S. regions of a certain size and density (roughly speaking, the 50 largest regions in the country), and that the benefits Bronzini describes are real. I even agree with his broad conclusion that greater investment in mass transit is a necessity. What Bronzini does not tell us in this paper is how to separate the wheat from the chaff. Which mass transit projects should we invest in? And how do we pay for them?

Without further elaboration, Bronzini’s point of view differs little from that of liberals, progressives and pragmatists who are happy to lavish money indiscriminately upon transit on the grounds that transit, generically speaking, is socially and economically beneficial. The problem is that mass transit, as currently structured in the United States, is not financially self-supporting and represents an ongoing drain on the public treasury. The same can be said of roads and highways, of course. But fiscal malpractice in one does not justify fiscal malpractice in the other.

Any cry for more spending on mass transit must be accompanied by an insistence that all transportation projects — roads, rail, transit — compete on a level playing field, which means implementing a user/beneficiary-pays financing system for both that that covers capital construction, operations and maintenance. In effect, we would build only projects for which there is a demonstrated market demand. Conservative embrace of mass transit also should acknowledge that the current mass-transit model is broken and its successful implementation requires reform of land use policies, urban design, labor featherbedding practices, political interference on route structures, counterproductive federal regulation and other ills.

Hopefully, those are themes that Mr. Bronzini and/or the Free Congress Foundation intend to develop in future studies.

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Posted in 2013, Transportation

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The Good and Bad of Exporting LNG

Posted on June 17, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 10 Comments

cove point 046By Peter Galuszka

Riding a chunky, balloon-tire bicycle may seem awkward enough, but imagine pedaling in a six-feet-wide concrete tunnel for one mile on the bottom of the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland.

It’s amazing what we Bacon’s Rebellion bloggers do to keep you readers informed, but it’s all in a day’s work — just like sucking in your gut when we read your nasty comments.

I’m here in a plastic white hardhat  and safety gases trying to get used to the sense of confinement as we cycle to the terminal one mile off Dominion Transmission’s Cove Point facility to handle Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG).  Richmond-based Dominion bought the facility in 2002 to import LNG from various global points such as Trinidad and Norway.

The last time a commercial LNG tanker actually showed up to unload, it was October 2011. The fracking revolution and the resulting flood of gas negated the logic of importing. Now Dominion wants to export LNG and has invited me along to see the facility. I wrote about it this Sunday in the Washington Post.

I found this one a hard call. The environmental lobby is against exporting gas, saying it will increase domestic prices and better time should be spent on developing renewables.

I say no to the first and yes to the second. Gas is now about $4 per million BTUs, far down from the $12 or so level of a few years ago. When the fracked flood hit, prices went way down to $2 mmBTU, but my logic is that they’d have to export a lot of gas to make a real difference in pricing.

On the second point, the greens are right. Maryland has a renewable portfolio standard of having 20 percent of electricity generation come from renewables like wind or solar by 2020. It is now about 7 percent. Granted, the gas that Dominion wants to export will go to Japan and India which are outside of the standards (Virginia’s, true to form, are voluntary, of course!), but their $3.8 billion or plan to allow Cove Point to export does absorb resources that could go to developing renewables.

If the project gets approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy as Dominion expects by 2014, it is in a position to tap two pipelines carrying Gulf Coast gas in Northern Virginia, which is also the terminus from another pipeline running from the north and Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale formation where fracking really has taken off in the past few years.

To be sure, the verdict’s still out on fracking, which involves tough chemicals and lots of high pressure water to shatter geologic formation and get gas and oil unavailable before. It still hasn’t been proven that the chemicals won’t end up in the groundwater somewhere and wells can give off methane which can be flammable and a global warming ingredient. New York State still has a moratorium on fracking. Out West, energy firms are slurping up precious water for fracking while leaving farmers and herders dry.

On the plus side, gas released half of  the CO2 as coal does, doesn’t kill miners and doesn’t result in highly destructive mountaintop removal. Only one person has been killed in a gas-related accident in more than 30 years of operation.

Cove Point has had a checkered history. It was built in the late 1970s during the energy crisis years and the suddenly went dormant when a pricing dispute with Algeria ended imports for a while. It’s been up and down since, with other owners. Dominion has agreements to lock in export shipping prices for 20 years and won’t own the gas which should make it immune from global gas price fluctuations. But before one thinks that exporting from Cove Point is some kind of Brave New World, consider that Dominion has all the contracts with two Asian utilities it needs. It isn’t looking for more customers.

There are 15 other export proposals in the U.S. and old field Senators are urging expediting permit processing. Dominion says that only six or so of the LNG export facilities will actually go through. That has more to do with economics than regulations.

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Posted in Blogs and blog administration, Economic development, Economy, Energy, Environment, Federal, Finance, Infrastructure, Land use & development, Media, Regulation, Science & Technology

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Where’re My Cars, Dude?

Posted on June 17, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 8 Comments

Washington state HOT lane revenues — actual collections versus forecast.

by James A. Bacon

In 2008 the Washington Department of Transportation converted 10 miles of HOV lanes in the Seattle metro region to tolled HOT lanes. If the experiment was successful, the state  planned to expand the HOT lane concept around the state. After four years of experience, the verdict is in: People aren’t willing to pay nearly as much to avoid congestion as assumed.

According to Washington DOT data (see chart), toll revenues are coming in at less than half of the worst case forecast. Two factors seems to be at work, sums up Angie Schmitt with D.C. Streets Blog: “People are driving less, and they aren’t as willing to pay their way out of congestion as was assumed.”

Less congestion means less incentive to pay for [Route] 167′s HOT lanes. But there’s more going on than that: Not only are fewer people choosing to use the priced lanes than expected, those who do are paying lower prices than expected. The lanes are dynamically priced, with the costs rising — and falling — based on demand. …

The prevailing theory about HOT pricing is that people would be willing to pay half their hourly wage rate to avoid sitting in traffic. But based on income data from WSDOT, far more commuters earn more than $24 per hour than are opting for the priced lanes.”

HOT lanes represent a real-world test for how much value drivers place on cutting their commuting time. Virginians should pay heed. While everybody complains about congestion, when push comes to shove, they may not be willing to pay much to avoid it.

What it means to Virginia. Virginia and its private-sector partners have made a huge commitment to HOT lanes — both for the recently opened Capital Beltway and the I-95 project under construction. The Downtown-Midtown Tunnel in Norfolk also varies toll prices by time of day.

No one has officially acknowledged it yet but I’m willing to bet that toll revenues on the Capital Beltway express lanes are running below expectations. According to a Public Works Financing newsletter article published in 2007, the project was expected to generate $335,000 daily in toll revenue by 2015. That’s roughly $10 million monthly or $30 million quarterly. While the 495 expressways are still in their ramp-up stage, they have a long way to go.

In their first quarter of reported results, Capital Beltway Express LLC reported total revenue of $828,000. As Washington-area drivers became more aware of the expressway option, traffic volume picked up considerably. The quarter ending March 31, 2013 yielded $2,475,000 in revenues. “Consistent with other express lane facilities, the 495 Express Lanes are still within the expected ramp-up period with both usage and pricing expected to increase progressively over time,” the report stated.

Please note what the report did not say: It did not say that traffic volumes and revenue were meeting forecasts. Revenue must quadruple within two years to meet expectations.

In a possible hint that revenues have proven disappointing, Capital Beltway Express made the express lanes open to drivers for free April 6 and 7. The stated justification: “The free weekend is part of an educational campaign to encourage Beltway drivers to try the new travel option on the Virginia side of the Capital Beltway and see how the Express Lanes can work for them.”

I have been a big supporter of the theory of using dynamic pricing to ration scarce highway capacity and the concrete application of that theory with the I-495 and I-95 HOT lanes projects. Further, from everything I’ve seen, Capital Beltway Express is a highly professional and well-run organization. But the situation bears watching as Northern Virginia politicians line up with their pet projects to get a piece of Governor Bob McDonnell’s transportation funding package.

Last year’s debate over transportation funding took place in a reality warp. Even  as the special interests and their toady politicians worked themselves into a frenzy over congestion, statewide congestion costs were dramatically lower than they had been five years previously. (See “Can We Have a Reality Check, Please?“)

But even I, as skeptical as I was, missed a critical part of the picture. I accepted the Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) estimate of how much congestion cost Washington-region motorists, which the McDonnell administration routinely trotted out to justify the need for more transportation spending. But what if it turns out that motorists don’t value congestion relief as much as TTI thought they do? What if it turns out that motorists aren’t willing to pay hard cash just to drive a little faster, and they’re just as content to sit in their air-conditioned cars listening to talk radio, NPR or their iPod play list?

The beauty of the 495 express lanes is that it will provide a reality-based B.S. detector. By tracking what Washingtonians are willing to pay in expressway tolls, we can measure how much monetary value they place on reducing their drive time. That information will prove invaluable as the commonwealth — and Northern Virginia in particular — plans billions of dollars on transportation projects that no one would want if they had to pay for them themselves. As Angie Schmitt put it, “If drivers won’t pay to bypass congestion, why should taxpayers?”

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Posted in 2013, Taxes, Transportation

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Dude! WaPo Columnist Ventures Look at Downstate Road Project!

Posted on June 16, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 19 Comments

Robert McCartney, a Washington Post columnist, has done a remarkable thing: He has taken a look at a transportation project outside the Washington region and decided he didn’t like what he saw. Not only is the Charlottesville Bypass ill conceived, it is part of a pattern in which the McDonnell administration “relentlessly pushes a major highway project despite abundant evidence that the money could be spent more wisely elsewhere.” By way of specifics, he also cites the U.S. 460 upgrade between Suffolk and Petersburg and the Bi-County Parkway.

What makes the column remarkable is that McCartney escapes the usual myopia in which the newspapers serving Virginia markets focus monomaniacally on transportation projects in their readership zones without the slightest interest in anything occurring anywhere else. Thus, the Rail-to-Dulles rail project and the Bi-County Parkway receive heavy coverage from Washington-area media but other newspapers are no more interested than if they occurred in Boston or New York. It amazes me that Rail-to-Dulles, perhaps the biggest infrastructure project in Virginia history, has gotten zero visibility downstate.

Likewise, the Charlottesville Bypass has gotten no attention outside Charlottesville, the Midtown-Downtown Tunnel has garnered none outside Hampton Roads, and U.S. 460, which is outside any major newspaper’s circulation zone, has generated minimal coverage by any major metro daily.

Thus, no one gets the big picture. No one tunes into how mega-projects of questionable value around the state have consumed a disproportionate share of state transportation resources. No one questions the processes that determine how transportation funding priorities are set. And no one wonders if governance of the system needs reform. Instead, everyone goes along — baah, baah, baah — and agrees to raise taxes.

So, thank you Mr. McCartney, for proving to be a rare exception to the rule. Not that the media’s approach to covering transportation will change. But the column was a refreshing departure from the norm.

– JAB

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Posted in 2013, Transportation

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State Revenue Surges, but Growth Not Sustainable

Posted on June 14, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 3 Comments
Woo hoo! Enjoy it while it lasts.

Woo hoo! Enjoy it while it lasts.

by James A. Bacon

There’s good news on the state budget front. Governor Bob McDonnell announced yesterday that thanks to a spike in May collections, General Fund revenues have grown 6.0% through May, ahead of the 3.6% forecast growth. The fiscal year ends in June.

While advising caution, McDonnell said, “At this moment, it does appear Virginia is on track to meet, and exceed, budget projections, and to post a fourth-straight revenue surplus.”

McDonnell deserves credit for cautious budgeting. His stewardship of the General Fund may prove to be his greatest accomplishment as governor. But it’s premature to break out the confetti. Virginia’s fiscal challenges are hardly over. Much of this year’s revenue surge resulted from a one-time influx of income tax revenue as  investors shifted income to 2012 in order to beat the higher federal tax rates that went into effect in 2013. Sales tax revenues, by contrast, have increased far more modestly.

That’s why it’s a bit discouraging to hear this kind of self-congratulatory, press-release boilerplate from the governor, which implies that Virginia is on some kind of fiscal roll:

Revenue is up; unemployment is down. This is more good news for Virginia’s economy. Over the past three years we’ve seen our state unemployment rate fall to 5.2 percent; the lowest mark in Virginia in 4 ½ years. During that time over 171,000 net new jobs have been created in the Commonwealth during that period; 151,000 of those jobs are in the private-sector. Put simply: more Virginians are working, and that increase in employment is reflected in the growth in state revenue collections.

True, more Virginians are working. According to a June 13 report by Secretary of Finance Richard D. Brown, payroll employment rose 1.1% year from April 2012 50 April 2013. But that 1.1% increase in employment doesn’t come close to explaining the 7.7% increase in individual income taxes through May. Rising wages may account for another two or three percentage points, but the rest is likely tax-avoidance behavior. Next year will not look as good.

On the other hand, the 6.0% increase in Virginia’s General Fund revenues from all sources so far this year handsomely exceeds the national average for the 50 states, which the National Governors Associations pegs at 4.2%. A modest amount of back-patting may be in order.

But a new report, “The Fiscal Survey of States,” projects general fund revenue growth for all states to slow to 2.8% next fiscal year. Meanwhile, federal funding for state budgets remains problematic — a theme I explored in the previous blog post. States the NGA:

Federal funds flowing to states declined for many programs in accordance with sequestration, the automatic across-the-board federal budget cuts that went into effect on March 1, 2013. Although most major federal grant programs that provide funds to states, such as Medicaid, are exempt from the automatic budget cuts, the lower caps on federal spending in place for federal fiscal year 2014 and beyond could significantly impact a number of state grant programs; in most instances, states will not have the resources to compensate for fewer federal dollars.

It looks like a whole lot of ugly going forward. There is no magic money tree to make life easier on the General Assembly. Let us be thankful for a healthy close to Fiscal 2013 and prepare ourselves for a tougher 2014.

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Posted in 2013, Budget, Taxes

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Don’t Look to Uncle Sam for Help

Posted on June 14, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 1 Comment

aei_reportby James A. Bacon

One of the reasons I’m so pessimistic about the long-term fiscal health of state and local governments is that they rely so much on federal funding to sustain ongoing operations. The perilous state of affairs is highlighted in a new American Enterprise Institute (AEI) report, “State and Local Spending: Do Tax and Expenditure Limits Work?”

The main thesis of the report is that Tax and Expenditure Limits (TELs), a mechanism often favored by conservatives to control the growth of government, do not work. That argument, by the way, is worth a blog post in its own right.  Fiscal conservatives in Virginia often have floated the idea of limiting the growth in state spending to the rate of inflation plus population growth. I’ve always had reservations about the idea — for the very reasons that AEI points out. Such a cap would be a mechanical solution that would not address underlying fiscal pressures. Politicians would be sorely tempted to engage in all manner of accounting skulduggery in order to live within the cap. I’m not the least bit surprised that author Benjamin Zycher concludes, after analyzing 30 states that have tried TELs, that “the ineffectiveness of TELs is unambiguous.”

Capping expenditures does not solve underlying problems like the exploding pension burden, high and rising Medicaid expenditures or the ballooning cost of K-12 or higher education, all of which require micro-level surgery to fix, not a blunt hammer.

One challenge facing state and local governments is their increasing reliance upon the federal government during a time of increasing fiscal austerity. I emphasize this finding in the AEI report because it buttresses my argument to state and local officials in Virginia that things ain’t likely to get any easier. As can be seen in the graph below, federal transfers as a percentage of total state and local outlays have increased pretty steadily since 1986.

federal_dependency

Some of that increase can be attributed to the soaring cost of financing the Medicaid program. State governments depend upon Uncle Sam for more than half their Medicaid expenditures.

It is highly improbable that federal generosity to state and local governments can continue on the same trajectory of the past 16 or 17 years. Indeed, it is far more likely, given the expansion of entitlement spending, crowding out of discretionary spending and challenge of managing a $17 trillion national debt, that the federal government will be forced to curtail non-Medicaid aid to states and localities in future.

Here’s what the feds contributed to states and localities in 2011:

General public service               $2.5 billion
National defense                           4.1 billion
Public order and safety                7.1 billion
Economic affairs                         19.6 billion
Housing and comm. affairs      22.7 billion
Medicaid                                    259.2 billion
Non-Medicaid health                24.6 billion
Recreation and culture                0.5 billion
Education                                     63.5 billion
Income security                        497.8 billion

Take a good look, people. If reason prevails, what you’re getting now from Uncle Sam is about as good as it’s going to get. If reason does not prevail (we’re talking about Congress, after all), the ultimate reckoning will be all the worse.

Maintaining our Business As Usual policies amounts to willful negligence and governmental malpractice.

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Posted in 2013, Budget, Federal, Taxes

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Yet Another Owner for Richmond’s Unwanted Road

Posted on June 14, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 14 Comments

pocahontasBy Peter Galuszka

Richmond’s “Road to Nowhere” is about to get yet another owner, showing again how the public-private partnership craze can result in unneeded transportation projects while denying resources elsewhere.

Australia’s Transurban which owns Route 895, otherwise known as “Pocahontas Parkway” is dumping the tollroad it picked up in an emergency financial deal in 2006. At that time, the highway that connects Interstates 95 and 295 southeast of Richmond was so underused that it was about to take down the state’s stellar credit rating.

But Transurban hasn’t been able to make a go of it despite tolls of up to $3.25 per car for a short drive through the fields of eastern Henrico County. The firm plans on selling it to a consortium of European banks that have $300 million in debt. The project also owes the feds $150 million for a loan.

The Pocahontas Parkway was the pioneer project for the Public-Private Partnership Transportation Act of 1995, which has been heralded as a nation-beater and a way to have your cake and eat it too as far as road financing. The allure was that you could build roads and have the private sector manage them and help pay for them through tolls.

Problem was, nobody seems to need the highway. It was billed as a way to expedite I-95 traffic to I-64 and I-95 around Richmond and perhaps open up relatively untapped areas east of the city for suburban sprawl development which hasn’t really happened.

The Richmond Establishment is loath to admit this, but the Richmond airport which has undergone a big expansion is not getting the flights and traffic it had hoped for. The Parkway was supposed to have helped promote the airport by providing easier access to it.

PPPT funding has been replicated in other areas in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, but a Portsmouth judge seems to have finally put a legal dagger through  the heart of the program by ruling that in the case of a local tunnel project, the state had unconstitutionally given its authority to tax to a private entity.

It isn’t clear what the ruling means for the PPT program, but the gist is clear. Democrats and Republicans alike want to live a fiction that you can transfer the state’s traditional responsibility to raise taxes and build roads and hand it over to private interests. It seems such a sweet arrangement – you get to keep Virginia from having to raise taxes, avoid violating the no-tax dogma  and not piss off voters while getting highways and construction jobs. It sounds too good to be true and it is.

Oh well. I wonder who will inherit the White Elephant when the European banks can’t make it work either.

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Posted in Budget, Demographics, Economic development, Economy, Energy, Environment, Finance, Infrastructure, Land use & development, Planning, Taxes, Transportation

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Food Insecurity: Virginia Must Be Doing Something Right. But What Is It?

Posted on June 13, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 8 Comments
Food insecurity in the United States. Source: Feeding America.

Food insecurity in the United States. Source: Feeding America.

by James A. Bacon

Question: Why does Virginia have the third lowest rate (tied with Massachusetts) of “food insecurity” among the 50 states? Given the Old Dominion’s low rates of unemployment and poverty and relatively high incomes, one would expect Virginians to be less at risk for going hungry. But look at the map above, based on Feeding America’s 2013 “Map the Meal Gap” project. There must be more to the story than the usual socio-economic factors….

Food insecurity is lower in Virginia counties than counties across the state line with comparable racial and socio-economic characteristics. Thus, the poor, predominantly white Appalachian counties of western Virginia have lower rates of food security than the Appalachian counties of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina and West Virginia. Likewise, the poor, largely African-American counties in Virginia’s Southside tend to have less food insecurity than their counterparts in North Carolina.

Food security among children.

Food security among children.

The same pattern can be seen in food security for children, who live disproportionately in poor families. Indeed, eastern Virginia (and Maryland’s D.C. suburbs) stand out as one of three pockets nationally — the others are North Dakota and New Hampshire/Massachusetts — where children suffer the least food insecurity.

There appears to be something unique about Virginia, perhaps something arising from its policies and/or institutional arrangements. What that uniqueness might be, I don’t know.

Feeding America’s methodology adjusts for regional variations in the cost of food, so that’s not a factor. The report mentions Virginia only in passing:

Most states have counties where … the majority of food insecure people are likely ineligible for any federal food assistance. For example, there are 21 counties in the Commonwealth of Virginia where a majority (50% or more) of food insecure individuals are estimated to have incomes too high to be eligible for any assistance programs (above 185% of poverty)…

Lower-income households in highly affluent jurisdictions such as Northern Virginia are at greater risk. Because their incomes are high by national standards, they they don’t qualify for federal assistance. But the high cost of living in affluent localities may force difficult trade-offs between rent, transportation, food and other necessities.

“Loudoun, Virginia, has a lower child food insecurity rate (10%) than the national average,” observes the report. “There are an estimated 9,200 food insecure children, 72% of whom live in households with incomes greater than 185% of poverty.”

The implication: Virginia would have an even lower incidence of food insecurity if some counties weren’t so darned prosperous (and expensive) that thousands don’t qualify for food stamps.

That phenomenon makes Virginia’s low food-insecurity rate all the more difficult to explain. Why is the overall rate so low? We must be doing something right. If only we knew what it was!

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Posted in 2013, Children and families, Entitlements, Poverty & income gap

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The Democrats’ Counterforce Troika

Posted on June 13, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 6 Comments

Terry McAuliffe, Mark Herring, Ralph NorthamBy Peter Galuszka

Setting up a nice counterpoint to the Republican Party’s strident assault on women’s issues and other social matters, Ralph S. Northam, one of two good options, was selected as lieutenant governor candidate for the Democratic Party in Tuesday’s primary. Winning the attorney general nomination was Mark R. Herring.

The two should be valuable counterpoints to E.W. Jackson, the Republican’s choice for lieutenant governor, and Mark Obenshain, the GOP attorney general candidate. Those two have been noted for over-the-top positions on birth control and abortion that have proved enormously divisive.

Northam, a Norfolk pediatric neurologist who defeated technology guru Aneesh Chopra, ran a freedom-of-choice campaign on women’s issues, pointing out that his profession has given him a special knowledge of the privacy that needs to cloak health issues. As a state senator, he fought last year to stop the Republicans’ pathetic bill requiring trans-vaginal ultrasounds before a woman could have a legal abortion.

Chopra would have made a decent candidate as well. The former top technology officer for Gov. Tim Kaine and President Obama, he symbolizes the importance of Virginia’s tech sector, where many of the state’s jobs have been created over the past two decades. He would have helped draw attention to Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe’s quest to create jobs.

Voters, however, seemed to say that the Republican troika of hard-liners, led by gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli, required a strong counterattack on social issues.

Jackson only fueled skepticism about his candidacy at a press conference Wednesday when he talked about his past, which includes a bankruptcy and a spotty career in the broadcast media. His statement that he smoked marijuana makes no difference (who hasn’t under the age of 70) but his continued statements that gays and lesbians are “sick” and his claims that Planned Parenthood led a eugenics movement against African-Americans are absurd.

It is rather sad for the state that such wedge issues dominate attention when there are so many other important problems to address. Another disturbing point was that yesterday’s turnout was only a poor 140,000 voters. Either voters don’t care or they are tired of Virginia’s off-year state electoral system.

The lax showing still showed more voter involvement than the convention the Republicans held last month in lieu of a statewide primary. Cuccinelli maneuvered to have the convention to ensure that he would beat out Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling as gubernatorial candidate. At the convention, the hard-right-leaning delegates went for candidates of the same stripe.

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