Category Archives: Economic development

The Drones in our Future

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 7 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

The backyard of my house in the piney woods of southern Chesterfield County is shaped like a half moon surrounded by very tall and skinny loblollies and gum trees. It faces north and can be a good place for aircraft watching.

I live maybe 20 miles as the crow flies from Ft. Pickett, a Virginia National Guard base that is used by military and law enforcement agencies such as Navy SEALs, the Marines, Air Force and Army Special Forces, Canadians, Secret Service, the FBI and Virginia State Police. It’s fairly common to hear the distinctive sounds of military aircraft flying about, such as the muffled roar of Blackhawks, the vibrating thunder of Sea Stallions and, the less frequent “whup, whup” of the old, Vietnam-era Hueys.

So imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when I heard a chopper noise I couldn’t identify. I looked up and maybe 150 feet off the ground was a light grey helicopter that seemed to hover over my property. It was clearly marked “NAVY” and was the size of a ubiquitous civilian Sky Ranger but with one big difference: this aircraft had no cockpit and no pilot.

Weirded out, I went to Wikipedia and noted it was a Northrop Grumman MQ-8 Fire Scout, a drone helicopter that has been in naval service since 2002. Drone aircraft like this one have been the coming thing in aerial weaponry for some time. In the South Asia terrorism wars, they have been responsible for something like 1,700 or so deaths from 2004 to 2010. Of these, 87 were Taliban dead from drone strikes and 32 Al-Qaeda. The Military Channel is chockfull of drone missions from big jets to little model aircraft that a combat unit can toss into the air by hand to find out how many yards ahead their enemy is.

The drone could do much to reshape Virginia’s economy. The state has two major combat airbases, Langley Air Force Base in Hampton and Oceana Naval Air Station in Virginia Beach. For years, they have based the hottest combat aircraft from F-15 Eagles and F-14 Tomcats and more recently F-18 Hornets and F-22 Raptors.

Oceana is responsible for 11,000 jobs in Tidewater and is slated to receive the new F-35C Joint Strike Fighters starting around 2018. Yet there have been clouds forming over Oceana for some time now. Sprawl has grown up around the air base that was rural farmland back in World War II. Pilots have to get past apartment blocks and rows of high-rise tourist hotels to reach the Atlantic a few miles away.

On April 6, an F-18 crashed into some apartments and miraculously killed no one. In 1977, as a newspaper reporter, I saw the aftermath of an F-14 that wasn’t so lucky. It burst into flame as it took off and the pilot and radar officer, fearing they’d slam into a beachfront hotel, sacrificed their lives by turning their hurtling jet onto the tarmac. There wasn’t much left after the fire.

Oceana survived the latest BRAC review although there were attempts to move its instruction operations to more remote Eglin AFB in Florida. Most F-18 pilots get their basic instruction at a California airbase far away in the farmland valley of the central part of that state. Attempts by the Navy department to locate an Outlying Landing Field (OLF) for simulated carrier landings near Oceana in Northeastern North Carolina were shot down by local opposition which is being replicated at other proposed spots near Franklin.

One trend seems certain. Unmanned drones will continue to replace manned aircraft. As they do, the demands upon land-based crews and bases will be much less in terms of cost and local support. That’s good news for the defense budget but bad news for localities that have depended on air bases for jobs for decades. To be sure, Hampton Roads is less dependent upon the military economically than it has been. Drones, however, may not have the glamor of Tom Cruise in “Top Gun” but they hold many advantages.

There is plenty of debate about drones for other reasons. Left wing commentator Rachel Maddow, who is not exactly a military expert, has said that using drones rather than piloted aircraft raises ethical questions because it de-humanizes the effects U.S.-orchestrated combat has on others. Perhaps, but I am old enough to remember when equally pilotless ICBMs aimed at the Soviet Union replaced many piloted B-52s. They couldn’t be recalled once launched, but they would get the job done faster and more cheaply. Luckily they weren’t used.

Anyway, the MQ-8 Fire Scout over my backyard was something of a wake-up call. I guess I’ll be seeing a bit more of them.

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Posted in 2012, Budget, Economic development, Economy, Insurance, Science & Technology, The Economy, Transportation

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ALEC, the Tea Party and the Feral GOP

Posted on April 19, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 5 Comments

House Speaker William J. Howell

By Peter Galuszka

Virginia’s conservatives have gone through a spasm of controversy as they struggle to find their message. They desperately need to balance their ideas of fiscal discipline and limited government with a wide spectrum of unrelated hard-right social issues.

The clearest evidence yet of the quandary for their soul involves the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which has just backed away from pushing “Stand Your Ground” laws that were involved in the shooting of a young African-American from Florida, Trayvon Martin.

ALEC had been a cozy, four-decades-old group of deep-pocketed corporations and lobbyists that ghostwrote template-style laws for state legislatures around the country to boost the conservative agenda of cutting taxes and government spending and cater to the business community’s desire for few regulations. For a long while, it seemed like a gigantic Chamber of Commerce funded by big corporate names such as Coca-Cola, Wal-Mart and Johnson & Johnson to push business-friendly laws.

But as the Tea Party movement gained steam in 2010, its disparate elements pushed right-wing social issues that ended up alienating many and polarized legislatures, including Virginia’s General Assembly. That spilled over into ALEC, which ended up pushing voter ID laws designed to take voting power away from minorities when there was no real issue over identity fraud and suck up to the gun lobby by pushing the idea that if one feels under attack, he or she may whip out a firearm and blow away an assailant without much legal consequence.

Incredibly, Virginia taxpayers have shelled out $231,000 over the past decade so legislators, mostly Republicans, can go to ALEC confabs and learn what the latest is in conservative designer legislation. A big player is House Speaker William J. Howell (R-Stafford), who, according to The Washington Post, made 60 percent of his publicly funded trips to ALEC meetings.

The unexpected fury over the  Trayvon Martin shooting involving a Stand Your Ground law blew everyone’s cover. It had the entire cossetted ALEC world tossed on its head. Firms such as Coca-Cola, Mars, Wendy’s and Kraft, all of which are consumer products firms whose billions debate on a positive public image bailed on ALEC. The constant deluge of the Trayvon shooting was very bad for their business. Now ALEC says it is dumping social issues and sticking to economic ones.

Howell didn’t seem to know what to do. He attacked left-leaning critics such as “ProgressVa” and had the bad taste and judgment to personally insult Anna Scholl, the head of ProgressVA at a press conference, demeaning her intelligence by saying he needed to speak to her only in monosyllables. Howell, usually more stately than that, soon issued a public apology to Scholl.

What’s revealing about Howell’s tantrum, however, is how it shows that mainstream conservatives really don’t know what to do with the social radicals in their movement. For years, they’ve enjoyed the upscale, closed-door demeanor of ALEC meetings until the Tea Party types shook everything up. It was fine, everyday work bashing unions and trying to cut taxes for companies and the rich. Yet they became spooked by what ended up being a weak, ephemeral and loosely organized group that they went freak-out if not totally feral.

Big business interests figured it out faster and with the exceptions of firms such as Wal-Mart, they bailed on ALEC. This shows that a lot of the GOP stalwarts in Virginia and nationally have feet of clay. They are not sure of their agenda, as their unimpressive primary run so far has shown. Locally, they have let social right-wingers hijack this year’s General Assembly with issues that had been decided decades ago, such as women’s right to abortions and gay rights. Real work important to the Commonwealth didn’t get done. Because of the distractions, it took four tries to get a (bad) $85 billion budget passed.

It is time to put the Tea Party in its place and get past it. The Republicans are paying a huge price and will probably lose the presidential election if they continue. Meanwhile, the Democrats, who have stood on the sidelines snickering at the GOP melee, need to get engaged and shut down this social nonsense once and for all.

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Posted in 2012, Abortion, Budget, Children and families, Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Demographics, Economic development, Economy, Education (higher ed), Energy, Entitlements, Environment, Finance, Gay rights, Gun rights, Immigration, Insurance, Labor & workforce, Media, Money in politics, Politics, Public safety & health, Race and race relations, Taxes, Transportation

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Richmond’s Creative Class and the Indie Music Scene

Posted on April 19, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 12 Comments

Source: Wonkblog, Washington Post

Richmond is no one’s idea of a cultural trend setter. I often joke that the last cultural innovation that originated in my fair city and spread beyond its borders was the festival flag (an adornment whose allure has long since peaked and faded). Perhaps I could add the Geico Gecko and Cave Man commercials that emanate from the creative geniuses at the Martin Agency.

But it turns out that Richmond registers on the map of independent music, a sign of its emergence as a regional center of artistic creativity. (See “Art as Richmond’s Future.“) A new paper, “The Geographic Flow of Music,” tracks which cities around the world have the most influence over musical trends by analyzing listening habits on Last.fm, a musical website that pinpoints users by geography. By this measure, as shown in the graphic above, Richmond ranks fifth — right below L.A. and Boston — in influencing the indie music world.

Carbon Leaf, one of Richmond's best known indie bands.

Sums up Brad Plumer at the Washington Post: ” The largest cities aren’t always the most influential adopters of new music (or snubbers of stale music). New York and Los Angeles don’t appear to have nearly as much influence over listening trends as, say, Montreal, even though those areas are presumably home to many more local bands and musical groups.”

Too bad the Post didn’t take note of the awesomeness of Washington’s smaller, neighbor to the south. That’s OK, the people who live in Richmond know what we’ve got. And many welcome the transformation of this old southern town focused on the past into a vibrant creative center with an eye to the future.

Meanwhile, notes the Times-Dispatch, the Chamber of Commerce is leading a delegation of 150 business, government and civic leaders to Boston to learn what they can from that city’s success. The message from Boston’s Mayor Thomas Menino:  It’s all about public-private partnerships.

Dudes, it’s the 21st century. Top-down doesn’t work any more. Bottom-up does work. Forget copying other cities and see how you can stimulate the creativity that’s already here. There’s lots of it, if you know where to look.

Hat tip to “FreeDem.”

– JAB

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“Young Gun” Cantor Gets Tiresome

Posted on April 17, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 3 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

What a difference nine months makes. Last summer, Boy Wonder Eric Cantor, the U.S. house majority leader from Henrico County, was riding high politically.

If he wasn’t snubbing President Barack Obama in meetings over the need to raise the debt ceiling, he was racing to get ahead of the Tea Party parade despite his thoroughly Main Street credentials. With another even more luminous Boy Wonder, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, was giving himself into a makeover as a youthful leading light of the New Conservatism.

To underscore that dynamism, cantering Cantor co-wrote, with Ryan and another young Republican congressman, the book “Young Guns,” an ego-saturated tome that draws on 1960s cowboy shows to set him up as a brave gunslinger defending budget discipline righteousness in a saloonful of drunken hacks and slutty Miss Kittys.

But today Boy Wonder has trouble on several fronts. According to Jeff Shapiro, the Times Dispatch columnist, Cantor is pissing off his fellow Republicans with his overweening self-centered nature and shameless attempts to replace Speaker of the House John Boehner.

Cantor dipped into his own Super PAC (curiously named the Every Republican is Crucial Political Action Committee or ERIC-PAC) to buck up an unknown Illinois congressman against a GOP elder in a primary race. Trying, once again, to posture as a budget hawk, he’s gone against the popular U.S. Export-Import Bank which helps fund exports of small and large corporations alike. And, his local allure has backfired so much that his guy lost in a Henrico County commonwealth’s attorney race.

If this weren’t enough, the editorial page of The New York Times has taken apart one of Young Eric’s pet legislative efforts – one that lets “small business” owners deduct up to 20 percent of their business income.

That sounds all well and good since small business is every pols’ flavor of the month. But the Times points out a few little discrepancies – namely, what is a “small business” exactly?

According to Cantor, a small business is one with less than 500 employees. That can include “multi-million-dollar partnerships and corporations.” Businesses this size, the Times says,  aren’t really the big job creators politicians claim they are.

If you really want to get to jobs creation, you have to go down to businesses that have 50 employees or less. Endeavors this size have created one third of all new jobs in the past 20 years. So what does Cantor’s bill mean? According to the Times, it is a thinly-veiled attempt to give the rich, whom Cantor loves to represent, yet another tax break.

Many politicians might get away with such slick actions. The trouble with Cantor is that his persona comes off as that of Eddie Haskell, the cloying jerk of 1950s TV fame, according to New York magazine. Given the way his district runs through red zones, however, it’s likely Eddie (or Eric) will be with us a while longer.

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Posted in 2012, Budget, Economic development, Economy, Electoral process, Money in politics, Politics, Taxes

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Art as Richmond’s Future

Posted on April 15, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 13 Comments


by James A. Bacon

Art in Richmond is busting out of the museums, universities and galleries and into the streets. The latest efflorescence occurred Saturday when a dozen nationally known street artists gathered to create an outdoor gallery along the James River Power Plant Building and Floodwall along the canal walk. Hundreds of people came on down to see the artists in action.

Jon Baliles... with beer cup in hand

The event was organized by Jon Baliles, who was inspired by seeing something similar in Venice, and Ed Trask, a musician and mural painter who recruited the other artists. Although Baliles works for the City of Richmond, he and Trask pulled off this event on their own initiative. It took about one year from conception to execution.

Craft booth.

Once upon at time, it’s fair to say, Richmond was a pretty stodgy place. It had some beautiful neighborhoods, most notably Church Hill and the Fan, and a fairly vibrant downtown. It had more than its share of Fortune 500 and other corporate headquarters, along with a good number of law firms, financiers and marketing/advertising professionals and a smatter of manufacturing. But the city was nobody’s idea of a center for innovation.

Chilling out at the art festival on a Saturday afternoon.

Richmond may never make it as a leading center of technological innovation. But it could become a respectable center for creative arts and the businesses that intersect with the arts. The Virginia Commonwealth University art program, rated the best of any public university in the country, lures a lot of artistic talent to the city. And many of those artists, like Trask, wind up staying.

Artists don’t tend to launch the kind of fast-growth companies that turn metropolitan areas into growth dynamos. But they do create an ambiance that other educated and creative people like to share. They create the conditions for entrepreneurial vitality by making Richmond the kind of place where executives from Capital One, Philip Morris or other corporate behemoths like to live when they get tired of working for the Man and want to start their own businesses.

Economically, Richmond is going through a difficult time right now. But it is reinventing itself from the ground up. Between the James River, the canal walk and the artistic community, the old Capital of the Confederacy is morphing into something very 21st century, something very exciting.

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Corey Stewart’s Racist Baggage

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 8 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

Corey A. Stewart, the scourge of “illegal” immigrants and standard-holder of good old fashioned American values, is now running for lieutenant governor on the Republican ticket in 2013.

News reports of his recent announcement were predictably bland – comments in the right-wing blogosphere even more so – despite the fact that Stewart is one of the most divisive, if not downright racist, politicians in recent Virginia history.

As a member of the Board of Supervisors of Prince William County since 2003, Stewart is famous for his movement to require county police to profile anyone they suspected of being illegal immigrants if they were stopped. This law was obviously aimed at brown-skinned Latinos. Similar legal requirements were later adopted statewide in Arizona and Alabama, bringing the U.S. global derision.

One immediate effect of Stewart’s 2007 initiative was that Hispanic immigrants started fleeing the county in droves regardless of whether their papers were entirely in order or not. Stewart claims that his move caused violent crime to drop 37 percent in the largely white and wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C. chock-a-block with federal jobs and cul-de-sac homes. More informed individuals, such as Steven Camarota, research director of Center for Immigration Studies, says the link between violent crime and illegal immigration is a lot more tenuous.

Among the negative fallout from Stewart’s xenophobic grandstanding was that it pit white-skinned against dark-skinned and haves against have nots. The lead-in to the law and the aftermath brought on some very ugly scenes that drew to the soul and conscience of what had been a rather quiet, growing county.

For an idea of just how rancid Stewart’s ideas were, check out the short, award-winning film 9500Liberty by Annabel Park and Eric Byler. The 2010 documentary runs less than five minutes or so, but shows Americana at its worst. In one famous scene, an elderly white man screams at Park and Byler to “speak English” and get legal. In response, Park, who was born in South Korea, is a naturalized American citizen and studied at Boston University and Oxford, produces her U.S. passport and flashes it in his face.

Even the chief of the county police has big trouble with Stewart’s law, which Stewart later tried to expand to the rest of Virginia in his “Rule of Law” campaign. My memory of Stewart is in October 2010 at the “Virginia TeaParty Patriots Convention” in Richmond manning a little booth trying to dish out anti-immigrant ideas. He seemed to be ignored amidst the hubbub of deficit hawks, Patrick Henry re-enactors in Colonial garb and gun fanatics packing Glocks and Colt 45s in Velcro holsters.

In any event, bashing immigrants has gone out of style at least for now. The reason is the economy. Fewer undocumented foreigners are coming here because jobs are nil. Ironically, Hispanic construction workers had been flocking to Prince William about 10 years ago to help serve the demand for badly-planned cookie cutter houses, including McMansions.

When the housing market tanked, some stayed, weren’t quite legal and their brown skins became more evident to the white folks when they were shopping at the county’s many strip malls. In an odd way, it’s a bit like Arizona which had been run by dark-skinned Native Americans and Spanish for centuries and was not even a state until 1912. Then, around the 1960s, flocks of retirees of more northern European ancestry showed up. Suddenly, Arizona became “American” and had to be protected.

For his lieutenant governor’s campaign, Stewart seems to have dropped the immigrant bashing because it has gone out of style. Instead, he says, he weathered the recession by not raising taxes in Prince William but investing in roads and “public safety’ (code word for immigrant bashing?) and cutting $143 million from the county budget.

He says:  “Prince William County is a model for how to implement good conservative principles. Taxes are down, crime is down, and growth is up. I am going to bring to the Office of Lieutenant Governor the same conservative principles that I have led Prince William County with over the past 6 years.”

Naturally, he fails to mention that many of those new jobs come out of the federal budget, but no matter. The bigger point is that Stewart is going to have to come to terms sooner or later with the impact of immigration on economic growth now that recovery seems in the air. That will raise the immigration issue yet again.

Even the Wall Street Journal notes on its editorial pages today that too much visa protectionism is hurting the U.S. India is about to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization against a 2010 U.S. law that hikes fees for visas for highly skilled workers from India. Meanwhile, rejections of  H-1B and L-IB visa applications for well-qualified foreign workers are considerably up.

One wonders what Stewart, who is casting himself as  yet another “jobs” Republican, thinks about this. One thing he might be sure of. Some darker-skinned foreigners with PhD.s in highly technical fields that many Americans lack may think twice about moving to Prince William County, or maybe even the Old Dominion if he wins his state race.

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Posted in 2012, Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Demographics, Economic development, Economy, Federal, Finance, Housing, Immigration, Infrastructure, Politics, Race and race relations, Regulation, Taxes, Uncategorized

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Dulles Rail: “Good Night, John Boy”

Posted on April 12, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 23 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

The convoluted schemes of Virginia state politicians to avoid paying for rail service to Dulles International Airport are as frustrating as they are self-defeating and unfair.

Just a few days ago, it seemed that the General Assembly would consider adding $300 million to extend Metrorail to Dulles on the Silver Line when the legislature meets to approve an $85 billion budget April 18.

Thanks in part to last minute opposition by Democratic deal-maker State Senator Charles J. Colgan of Prince William County, the $300 million went “puff.” No deal. No money.

The $300 million cut underscores what seems to be Richmond’s ancient philosophy on expanding Dulles Rail: stick as much of the cost as possible on taxpayers and tollpayers in Northern Virginia.

Days after the $300 million in state funds for Dulles Rail disappeared, the Board of Supervisors of Fairfax County confirmed its buy-in for Phase Two of the Dulles Rail project, whose ultimate costs will top $2.7 billion. The county says that while it is looking for alternate funding sources, it may pay up to $965 million for the project. About $730 million – or 80 percent – will be paid for by “voluntary” special tax districts created by landowners.

Once again, Northern Virginia, which provides more state tax revenue than any other region of the Old Dominion, gets stuck with most of the bill for Dulles Rail. That is the criticism of the Coalition for Smarter Growth which was quick to note the bizarre budget cut. They point out that, at the same time, the administration of Gov. Robert F. McDonnell is proposing at least $750 million in state funding for a new superhighway near U.S. 460 in the rural peanut country of Southeast Virginia and diverting $200 million for a controversial bypass in Charlottesville.

It’s hard to fathom why providing Dulles rail with state money is such anathema. The new U.S. 460 tollroad project, for instance, raises many questions. It is being billed as a necessity for Virginia’s economic future since the port of Hampton Roads needs better transportation access to handle bigger, deeper-draft cargo ships when the Panama Canal is expanded in 2014.

Yet, Norfolk Southern railway which serves the port has already finished a $321 million public-private project to raise mountain tunnels to handle more double-stack rail shipments from Hampton Roads to the Midwest. The chief executive of the Panama Canal Authority says that thanks to rail improvements, Hampton Roads is already prepared to handle the expanded trade the canal project will bring. If he’s right, then why is there urgency for the new road?

There have been other peculiar impediments to the state paying for Dulles rail, such as Knee-jerk anti-unionism. Right-wing Atty. Gen. Kenneth Cuccinelli and others are crying foul at any attempt by the airports authority to use the a similar but somewhat tougher project labor agreement that helped move Phase One forward. A more deep-rooted issue is Virginia’s traditional philosophy, dating back to the one-party system of Harry F. Byrd 100 years ago, that public projects must be funded on a “pay as you go” basis.

That might have worked for building a two-lane bridge in bucolic Virginia when TV’s John Boy Walton, attired in bib overalls, might have been around. Today, the fact remains that Washington is the only capital in the advanced industrialized world not to have public rail service to its leading international airport.

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Posted in 2012, Budget, Demographics, Economic development, Economy, Environment, Finance, Infrastructure, Labor & workforce, Transportation

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Closely Watched Trains

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 4 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

A few weeks ago, I was making another trip to the area near Matewan, W.Va., a small, historic town of red brick buildings a stone’s throw across the Tug Fork River from Kentucky. Matewan is noted for its coalfield labor strife caught dramatically in John Sayles superb 1987 movie of the same name and is the locus for part of a book I’ve been researching for the past 18 months.

There isn’t much hotel space available in the Tug Fork Valley. At times, I’ve had to stay dozens of miles away in Eastern Kentucky.  When available, I prefer a bed and breakfast right in the middle of Matewan and just steps from where Sid Hatfield, the town police chief, shot it out with rent-a-thugs from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency in 1920 (yes, Big Money was into privatization even then).

Aside from seasonal all-terrain vehicle enthusiasts, the only big noise in Matewan is the Norfolk Southern. The original mainline of the old Norfolk & Western runs just behind the bed and breakfast. First you hear an odd whir, then a diesel horn blast and then your world shakes. Trains run anytime, day and night. It was the route of the fancy red and black Powhatan Arrow passenger train from Norfolk to Cincinnati. Now what you see are endless coal trains and hot shot containers racing their East Coast to Midwest route. Most recently, I have seen jumbo-sized, extra-tall coal hoppers whip past.

What’s the point of this travelogue? The extra-sized cars are the point. Nearly two years ago, Norfolk Southern completed a $321 million project using private and public money to raise tunnels in West Virginia and southwestern Virginia. The low ceilings had forced east-west,double-stack trains to spend an extra day going through Pennsylvania or Tennessee. Not anymore.

In fact, the so-called Heartland Corridor project means that Hampton Roads is uniquely qualified to take advantage of the larger, deeper-drawing container ships that are expected to boost trade when the Panama Canal expansion is completed in a couple of years.

That, at least, is the opinion of Alberto Aleman Zubieta, chief executive officer of the Panama Canal Authority. Zubieta worries, as many do, that U.S.East and Gulf Coast ports just aren’t ready for the new Panama Canal trade, except for Hampton Roads. “Norfolk is ready,” he was quoted as saying. “Rail has been modernized between Norfolk and Chicago; they understand the benefit of getting cargo to its destination.”

So, if Hampton Roads is already the beneficiary of a major rail improvement project that is now ready to handle Panamax cargo, then why all the hullabaloo over a $1.8 billion public-private project to expand U.S. 460? The expansion from Suffolk to Petersburg would relieve clogged Interstate 64 on the other side of the James River and would offer an extra emergency escape route should a major hurricane show up.

But the big reason for the project, enthusiastically backed by Gov. Robert F. McDonnell and his Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton, is that Hampton Roads desperately needs transportation access to handle all the new trade coming with the Panama Canal is expanded.

Yet if you listen to Zubieta, the project is in place. Finito. Even if you wanted to expand distribution and manufacturing centers in Southeastern Virginia, why couldn’t you do it with rail spur lines coming from the NS mainland that neatly parallels the existing U.S. 460? A number of distribution centers already use the rail line, including a Food Lion warehouse near Petersburg.

The road project has lots of problems. Its backers admit that tolls won’t pay for it. Some kind of industrial authority would have to be created with new factory or warehouse owners kicking in payments to make it work.

What about the already existing rail line? Why doesn’t someone bring that up? Doesn’t it make the expensive road project unnecessary? Or is there some under-the-table log-rolling going on that we don’t know about?

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Another “F” for Transparency

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 1 Comment

By Peter Galuszka

Imagine learning that a court date or a city council meeting is to be held in two days. You show up at the door, only to be told by a guard that admittance is by invitation only. You will have to leave.

That, in essence, is how the administration of Virginia Gov. Robert F. McDonnell seems to be handling public access regarding the hottest environmental issue the Old Dominion now faces: uranium mining.

McDonnell initially drew widespread criticism for having closed sessions for a state government group planning to recommend by next year whether to end Virginia’s nearly three decades’ long ban on uranium mining. The governor then promised that some of the meetings will be open.

On April 4, his people held a meeting to discuss must that issue in Richmond. Yet the meeting sounded a very sour note.

Only two days’ notice was given that it would be held. Most of the public was not invited. A handful of select environmentalists, such as the Roanoke River Basin Association, near where the uranium may be mined, were invited.

The meeting should not have been limited to a “pre-selected audience,” Megan Rhyne, executive director of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, a non-profit group, was quoted as saying. She did praise McDonnell for at least having the meeting.

Perhaps, but the entire modus operandi of the McDonnell Administration gravitates towards closed door sessions with lots of lobbyists and big-time political contributors in tow.

And Virginia’s tendency towards closed-door politics is nothing new. The State Integrity Investigation, a collaboration of the Center for Public Integrity, Public Radio International and Global Integrity rated Virginia “F” for transparency, along with seven other states, including North Dakota, Michigan, South Carolina, Maine, Wyoming, South Dakota and Georgia. Five states rated highest, including New Jersey and California.

It seems the concept of government openness is still a new one to the McDonnell Administration.

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Studying the Study Group

Posted on April 5, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 2 Comments

Maureen Matsen, deputy secretary of natural resources, and Martin Kent, governor's chief of staff.

by James A. Bacon

The McDonnell administration hosted a hastily assembled meeting yesterday to address, in the words Deputy Sectretary of Natural Resources Maureen Matsen, the “perceived lack of transparency in the conduct of [the] Uranium Working Group.” The meeting was attended by a couple dozen stakeholders, administration officials and members of the press.

If the goal was to appease critics of the governor’s working group, however, the meeting fell flat. The late-afternoon meeting lasted less than an hour, administration officials made few tangible promises, and uranium mining foes said their concerns about openness and transparency remain unresolved.

“They’re trying their best but there’s definitely an arm’s-length [feeling] here,” said Mae Fox, a lobbyist representing the Virginia Coalition, a group of Southside business interests worried by the stigma that uranium mining might give the region.

“It was a very abbreviated meeting,” said Dan Holmes, director of state policy for the Piedmont Environmental Council. “Some of the answers made me feel a little more comfortable [but only] about 30% of the issues got thrown on the table. … How much real discussion can  you have with that many parties at the table for an hour?”

A press release from the Roanoke River Basin Association characterized the meeting as a “damage control PR” session called in response to critical articles and op-eds in the media. The RRBA never received an invitation to the meeting.  “It is apparent that local citizen groups are being excluded from the discussion. We and many other citizen groups in Southside Virginia and North Carolina are at the ground zero,” said Gene Addesso, RRBA vice president.

McDonnell established the Uranium Working Group (UWG) in January after deciding not to pursue legislation in the 2011 General Assembly session to lift the ban on uranium mining in the state. The group is comprised of staff from the Departments Environmental Quality (DEQ), Health (VDH) and Mines Minerals and Energy (DMME) and supported by outside consultants. Its purpose is to address 18 issues regarding uranium mining safety and regulation listed in a governor’s directive.

According to the UWG’s website, the group will make “regular reports of its progress” at meetings of the Uranium Subcommittee of the Coal and Energy Commission. The four meetings, which will be open to public comment, will address mine permitting issues, water quality, tailings storage, workers health and other issues.

The purpose of the group is to find answers to questions left unanswered by a National Academy Sciences study and to develop a “conceptual statutory and regulatory framework” to assist the General Assembly in making “well informed policy decisions in the future.”

“This is not a rule-making process,” stressed Matsen at the meeting. “It’s just the executive branch trying to bring resources to bear on the issue.” She said the group would make its deliberations “as open and transparent as possible.”

Cathie France, head of the Uranium Working Group

Cathie France, deputy director for energy policy at DMME and a key staff member of the UWG, said the group’s first question would be: can uranium be mined safely? The group will examine a wide range of data bearing on the short-range and long-range impact. The group would be receptive “to any data you’d like us to consider,” she said.

Interested parties can suggest “anything you want us to look at” by submitting it on the UWG website, said Matsen. “The intent is to get more [information] rather than less,” added Martin Kent, McDonnell’s chief of staff.

Concrete ideas for making the process more transparent included maintaining a ListServ for the purpose of communicating information to stakeholders and posting transcripts of meetings online. “We’ll try to find ways to make [them] accessible statewide,” Kent said.

While those suggestions would improve the administration’s communications to the public, some attendees wanted to ensure that the public had ample opportunity to communicate to the administration.

“The task is going to be huge,” said Fox with the Virginia Coalition. A large number of people are very riled up, she said. She expects public meetings in the Danville/Pittsylvania area, where the Coles Hill uranium deposit is located, will generate broad participation. People are going to want to have their say, and meeting organizers need to ensure that there will be enough time to hear them.

Fox also wants to ensure that stakeholders receive UWG reports in a timely fashion. “It’s difficult to comment on something you’ve just heard. … Is there any chance of seeing materials in advance?”

Holmes, with the Piedmont Environmental Council, has even more fundamental concerns. Citing the information surfaced by Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests in the Charlottesville Bypass controversy, he said he wants to be assured that the UWG will be subject to FOIA and not exempted as “governor’s working papers.”

The UWG’s final report will be issued December 1, Holmes said. “It’s hard to look at that abbreviated timeline and not be concerned that it’s a set-up for the 2013 legislature.”

This article was made possible by a Piedmont Environmental Council sponsorship.

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