Category Archives: Land use

The Tab for Tysons Transportation: $3 Billion and Counting

Posted on January 26, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 59 Comments

by James A. Bacon

How much will it cost to build the transportation improvements needed to accommodate the increased density of the new-and-improved Tysons Corner? The Fairfax Department of Transportation issued updated estimates last week at a meeting of the Tysons committee of the Fairfax County Planning Commission (PCTC) — and the estimate increased 20% from the previous best guess to more than $3 billion.

Here are the numbers:


There is a considerable fudge factor in the numbers given the inherent uncertainty of projecting so far out — and the forecast does not include an estimated $850 million to build a street car circulator within Tysons — but no matter how you add up the numbers, we are talking serious money.

The effort to morph Tysons from a monument to helter skelter, auto-centric sprawl into a model urban community is one of the most ambitious suburban retrofits ever attempted… anywhere. The centerpiece is the Rail-to-Dulles heavy rail commuter line that will connect Virginia’s largest business center to Dulles airport and to the rest of the METRO rail system. METRO will have four stations in Tysons. Fairfax County planners are playing by the smart growth handbook. They are increasing densities around METRO stops. They are planning for grid streets and pedestrian-friendly streetscapes. They are incorporating mixed uses, including thousands of units of residential. And they are requiring developers to institute Transportation Demand Management plans. Yet the question remains, can Tysons successfully make the transformation? Or was the original design, such as it was, such an abomination that business center cannot make the transition without billions of dollars of outside subsidies?

Roughly half the cost of Rail-to-Dulles will come from commuters on the Dulles Toll Road, a multi-billion dollar transfer of wealth. Now Fairfax planners are saying the county will need another $3 billion (and a lot more if inflation is taken into account) — without any idea of where the money will come from. The feds and the state might cough up some, but most of it will have to come from local sources.

In an ideal world, property owners who will make a killing from added density and proximity to the METRO should share some of the massive increase in value that they did not create. One option would be a special tax district along the lines of the existing tax district that is contributing a modest share of the heavy rail construction cost. Writes one observer:

The problem, and it’s very big problem, is that many landowners are steadfastly refusing to pay for these transportation improvements.  Why, they reason, should they pay this tax when many of them do not plan to redevelop [sic] for a very long time (10-15 years or more) and when their land lies outside of the TOD areas and does not qualify for the much higher densities being given to landowners near the Metro stations. Also, Lerner and Macerich, who are inside the [Transit Oriented Development] area, have already obtained county approval for their significant redevelopments and see no benefit in paying this tax.

The reality is the landowners outside the 1/2-mile TOD areas WILL benefit from the transportation improvements, but they don’t want to pay as they feel the TOD area landowners lopsidedly benefit.   These problems associated with establishing a Tysons tax district are well-known within the Tysons landowner community, but this was the first time  [the Tysons Partnership] has discussed them in public testimony at a PCTC meeting.

Another problem is that, by state law, any money raised from a tax district must be spent within the district. Yet many of the needed transportation improvements are located outside of Tysons.

The improvements are so expensive, there are so many special interests jostling for position and the legal issues are such a thicket that it’s hard to see how the funding issues will ever be resolved. But there is one very important point to keep in mind. If commercial and residential growth doesn’t go into Tysons, where else will it go? And how much will it cost to provide the transportation infrastructure needed to serve it? Fairfax County is in so deep that it has no choice but to bull ahead and figure out how to make it work. Let’s hope they can do it without sucking in too many innocent bystanders.

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Posted in 2012, Land use, Transportation

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A Misdirected Attack on UDAs

Posted on January 24, 2012 by James A. Bacon| 46 Comments

The paranoid style of American politics

by James A. Bacon

With Virginia Tea Party activists egging them on, Republican legislators have submitted at least six bills that would repeal the Urban Development Area (UDA) requirement for Virginia localities. Overturning the law would eliminate an important tool for local governments to contain growth-related costs and hold down taxes — presumably a high priority for the Tea Party.

“The bipartisan UDA statute of 2007 is designed to reduce the costs of infrastructure and the burden on taxpayers. That’s why we are astounded that Tea Party members would campaign so hard to repeal this fiscally conservative planning tool,” said Stewart Schwartz, Executive Director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth in a Tuesday joint statement of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, the Piedmont Environmental Council, the Southern Environmental Law Center and the League of Conservation Voters.

The opposition of the Tea Party — and I say this as a Tea Party sympathiser — arises from naive acceptance of misinformation supplied by a small group of Anti-Agenda 21 zealots led here in Virginia by Donna Holt, president of the Virginia Campaign for Liberty. Holt has energetically proselytized Tea Party organizations and other conservative groups across Virginia, and her message has taken root because no one has offered an opposing viewpoint.

Holt portrays the Smart Growth movement in Virginia as inspired by United Nation’s Agenda 21 project, which seeks to harness the power of government to implement sustainable environmental principles in communities across the globe. Her critique of Agenda 21 itself does have a basis in reality. Agenda 21 reflects a liberal-leftist worldview that entwines environmental sustainability with equity, social justice and the redistribution of wealth. Where Holt goes off the rails is in painting Virginia’s Smart Growth groups as similarly inclined, and even attacking such mainstream figures as House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Fredericksburg, for his leadership in passing the UDA law.

A year ago, Holt blasted out an email to Virginia Tea Parties employing characteristic rhetoric: ”Speaker Howell is siding with big corporate developers and eco-extremists to rob you of the right to own and control the use of your private property. … If he has his way, you’ll be forced to forfeit your land in the suburbs for the development of high-density ‘urban development areas’ also called ‘smart growth’. … If they have their way, single family homes will be a thing of the past. We’d become mere lease holders of the homes we live in.”

There is no delicate way to put this: Such remarks are deluded. Virtually nothing in that quote is factually accurate.

I have seen no indication in the Virginia Campaign for Liberty website or in the public remarks I have heard her make that Holt understands the long, complex history of zoning, land use, transportation and growth-management policy in Virginia, much less the pro growth/no growth debates that long pre-dated the articulation of Agenda 21. I doubt she has had any interaction with Smart Growth advocates here in Virginia or has any acquaintance with their thinking. Perhaps most damning, I have seen her advance no alternative ideas for how fiscally stressed state and local governments can provide core services without raising taxes.

The anti-Agenda 21 movement is a case study in the “paranoid style” in American politics, and responsible Tea Party leaders would be well advised to entertain opposing perspectives. The Heritage Foundation, hardly an advocate of leftist social engineering, has distanced itself from the anti-Agenda 21 movement on the grounds that it is crowding out an intelligent critique of Smart Growth. (For details, see this blog post.)

As for Urban Development Areas, they are an admittedly imperfect solution to Virginia’s growth-management challenges. But it is hard to see how anyone would construe them as a gross violation of Virginians’ property rights.  Time for a reality check:

All localities with a population of at least 20,000 or a growth rate of 15% are required to designate an Urban Development Area in their comprehensive plan. These areas should be designed to accommodate 10 to 20 years of population growth by incorporating such New Urbanism or Traditional Neighborhood Design elements as:

  • Connectivity of road networks
  • Connectivity of pedestrian networks
  • Pedestrian-friendly road design
  • Reduction of front- and side-yard setback requirements
  • Mixed-use neighborhoods
  • Reduction of subdivision street widths
  • Satisfaction of requirements for storm water management

The law also provides for minimum densities of four residential units per acre and a floor-to-area ratio of 0.4 for commercial development.

None of that sounds terribly Marxist to me.

The law does not diminish anyone’s property rights: “Localities that establish Urban Development Areas may not limit or prohibit development in compliance with existing zoning nor refuse to consider a rezoning application for property outside of the Urban Development Area.”

The logic of the law is to encourage (not coerce) developers into concentrating development within a compact geographical area that state/local government can more cost effectively serve with utilities, roads and public services. It recognizes that the scattered, low-density and disconnected pattern of development that has prevailed in Virginia since the 1950s has driven up the cost of providing core services and has put relentless pressure on local governments to increase taxes.

The UDA law is fiscally conservative in its inspiration — something that Smart Growth advocates understand.

“The wish list for transportation projects has become simply unaffordable. Experience has shown that it is more costly to taxpayers and more damaging to farmland and forests to provide roads and other infrastructure for scattered development than for more compact, traditional neighborhoods,” said Trip Pollard of the Southern Environmental Law Center in the joint Smart Growth statement. “UDAs reduce transportation costs to the state and also save on water and sewer, police and fire, school busing and other costs.”

“The traditional neighborhood development envisioned by UDAs is reflective of the beloved, historic towns of Virginia and our best older suburbs that engender a sense of community that we have lost as development has become more scattered,” said Dan Holmes of the Piedmont Environmental Council. “This should be something that the Tea Party supports.”

Virginia is not California, where environmental zealots do run roughshod over property rights. Smart Growth in Virginia is not about marching to the tune of the U.N. It is not about social engineering, sweeping away single-family dwellings or taking away peoples’ automobiles. It is about subsidizing mass transit, an issue where I part company. But the Smart Growth movement does recognize a profound truth: that the cost of government services varies in proportion to which land development is compact or sprawling. Smart Growthers offer a coherent set of principles for reducing the cost of government and holding down taxes.

Republican representatives to the General Assembly should take heed.

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Good Move on Uranium

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| 2 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell has punted on the uranium controversy and that’s a good thing, assuming the General Assembly doesn’t lift the mining ban anyway.

There are simply too many unknowns about mining the tract owned by Virginia Uranium near Chatham and the state has no knowledge or regulations about mining the highly toxic and radioactive substance.

What’s more, there are big questions about whether it is needed. Market prices are stable and while developing countries such as China and India plan many new nuclear power stations, advanced economies such as Germany are scaling them back after the Fukushima disaster in Japan last year.

McDonnell’s decision comes despite an onslaught of expensive and extensive flackery by the local people who own the farms where the uranium deposit is located and the Canadians who actually control the company. The Virginia Public Access Project reports that Virginia Uranium has paid out more than $150,000 to political candidates and has hired five powerhouse Richmond-based PR firms. It paid all expenses for a dozen legislators who unwisely made a trip to France to see an abandoned uranium mine and who were treated to the delights of Paris on the way.

Virginia Uranium says it’s just dandy that McDonnell recommends delaying lifting the moratorium and continues its campaign, including a full page ad in the Richmond newspaper with drawings showing just how safely the tailings from the mine project would be stored.

The problem is that the issue isn’t just going away. If it doesn’t, the state will have to cough up money as schools go without to come up with regs. Virginia Uranium shouldn’t pay for them — they’d be tainted. But why should the state be burdened when it has so many other things on its “to pay” list?

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Posted in Agriculture & forestry, Disaster planning, Economic development, Economy, Environment, Finance, Land use, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Regulation, Uncategorized

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Thumbsucking, Richmond-style

Posted on January 15, 2012 by Peter Galuszka| Comments Off

By Peter Galuszka

The incredible, shrinking Richmond Times-Dispatch offers a lot less to read these days. Under  the leadership of Publisher Thomas A. Silvestri, many staffers have been fired to boost parent firm Media General’s top line. The effort hasn’t been entirely successful since its stock, once around $65 a share, is now a little better than $4 a share, admittedly better than the near buck a share low of a couple of years back that brought MEG close to delisting on the Big Board.

So, the TD tries to get around its dearth of real reporting by getting Richmond’s pooh-bahs to write tomes in the “Commentary” section about what a great job they are doing. These, coupled with Silvestri’s unfailingly sunny and typically mindless columns boosting the Confederate Capital, make for a more amusing section on Sunday mornings than the funny pages.

This Sunday’s section was kicked off by Eugene Trani, the fireball, former president of Virginia Commonwealth University. Trani is famous for growing VCU from a Tier Two commuter college to something aspiring to greatness. He bulldozed block after block of Richmond’s downtown to expand the university and make it more of an economic driver.

Now retired, Trani heads Richmond’s Future, which the TD describes as a “forward looking regional think tank.” That, in itself is an interesting choice of words. If it were “backward looking,” we’d be in more of a heap of trouble than we already are.

After a couple of years of heading Richmond’s Future, Trani has used the group’s mostly corporate funding to finance studies by a Federal Reserve economist and a VCU assistant professor. Together, these reports try to rate the Richmond SMSA, which Trani meticulously explains to the dullards among us, against 10 other SMSA around the country to see where it stands. Good and bad, it turns out. Second in per capita income and sixth in annual employment growth  compared to places such as Jacksonville, Fla. and Salt Lake City.

Writing in the TD, Trani claims  that it is important to know where Richmond  stands against other similarly-sized city. I looked thoroughly through his article to find more of a “so what” but couldn’t find it.

And that is the problem. Richmond’s business elite has been staring at its navel for a long time. There has been study after study trying to “benchmark” the city. Consultant James A. Crupi, who does a lot of thumbsuckers for the Fortune 100, did a study in 1993 that found that Richmond is a “glass half-empty.” He returned in 2007, funded by Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce money, to find that Richmond had somehow transformed itself into a “glass half full.”  What that means, I have no idea.

There are other groups trying to get a real bullseye on Richmond. There’s something called the Capital Region Collaborative that promotes navel-gazing on a regional basis. Its ranks are fed from something called “Leadership Metro Richmond” which trains “leaders” to be big shots among the corporate salons and, of course, participate in and cheerlead Crupi and Trani style reports.

OK, fine. But so what? Trani says Richmond should boost its base in logistics. No brainer, there. Greatly expanded Ft. Lee is a dominant defense supply area and Richmond has a great central-location on the Mid-Atlantic coat. Too bad its tiny seaport was so badly managed that it has all but shut down. Richmond also should boost science and math studies, like every other burg in the U.S.

And, there’s something called the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing, which is a multi-university and community college effort to take advantage of a new Rolls Royce plant east of Petersburg.

Small problem, there. The Rolls Royce plant was originally intended to build  parts for engines for corporate jets. The 2008 global financial meltdown, and  the bad judgment of big U.S. corporate titans to fly corporate jets to Washington to beg for Congressional bailouts, chilled that market.

Now, the big facility underway is looking for other markets. One hope had been making engines for the new F-35 joint strike fighter for the Air Force, Navy and Marines. That’s something anti-spending hawk U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor, a key player in the Richmond elite, pushed mightily although the Pentagon said it had another supplier and didn’t need more engines from Rolls. In any event, it won’t matter. Reacting to Republican anti-spending fanatics, President Obama is likely to cut back on the F-35 program.

These are small details, however. The reality is that no matter how much the Tranis and Crupis look into their crystal balls, Richmond’s economy is still pretty much dominated by electric utility Dominion, packaging maker MeadWestvaco and cigarette giant Altria, whose primary products are lethal and which moved its headquarters to Richmond after being pretty much thrown out of New York City. The region was badly hurt when mass retailer Circuit City self-destructed from bad management and chip maker Qimonda went under, with thousands of jobs, because of bad local markets.

Yet another firm went under, too, during the 2008-09 recession, mortgage lender LandAmerica. Interestingly, Trani was a director of the firm and, in that capacity, is a defendant in a lawsuit that alleges that he and others failed in their fiduciary duties because they took decisions that resulted in the collapse of the firm and major losses for investors.

The Richmond newspaper, naturally, doesn’t hit that one too hard. Instead, Trani, rather than a professional journalist on staff, will be writing a series of reports about his new think tank and where he thinks Greater Richmond rates and should be going in the Greater World.

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Posted in Budget, Demographics, Economic development, Economy, Education (higher ed), Energy, Land use, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Regulation, Technology, The Economy, Transportation

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The Heritage Foundation Takes on the Anti-Agenda 21 Crowd

Posted on December 2, 2011 by James A. Bacon| 8 Comments

The Agenda 21 logo

by James A. Bacon

Finally, someone has responded to a bizarre sub-current of the conservative movement, the anti-Agenda 21 crowd. Wendell Cox, Ronald D. Utt, and Brett D. Schaefer with the Heritage Foundation have published a paper arguing that the anti-Agenda 21 movement is a distraction from the larger task of opposing “destructive smart growth programs.”

A handful of activists, including here in Virginia, have been raising the alarm in conservative circles about Agenda 21, a plan of action adopted by the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development calling upon governments at all levels to support sustainable development. Conspiratorial-minded anti-Agenda 21 activists have conflated all local “smart growth” movements, regardless of philosophical stripe, with the  social-engineering approach of Agenda 21. They have made it difficult to have an intelligent conversation in some conservative circles about land use issues.

“If opponents focus excessively on Agenda 21,” write the Heritage scholars in a gentle reproach, “it is much more likely that homegrown smart-growth policies that undermine the quality of life, personal choice, and property rights in American communities will be implemented by local, state, and federal authorities at the behest of environmental groups and other vested interests. Preventing American implementation of Agenda 21 should therefore be viewed as only one part of a broader effort to convince U.S. government officials to repeal destructive smart-growth programs and prevent the enactment of new ones.”

It’s good to see conservative scholars try to rein in the anti-Agenda 21 zealots, who only muddy issues relating to transportation, land use and growth management. The zealots have thrived, I believe, because most Tea Partiers are new to politics and public policy, know next to nothing about how transportation and land use decisions are made and find the conspiratorial Agenda 21 narrative to be vaguely plausible, while responsible critics of smart growth have, until now, retained an embarrassed silence for fear of offending conservative constituencies.

So, I applaud the Heritage trio for writing the paper. However, I do have to take issue with the paper’s underlying assumption that everyone within the broader smart growth movement, from Greenpeace to New Urbanists, favors the mobilization of government power to impose a vision of squeezing Americans into compact communities and taking away their cars. Without question, more radical elements of the smart growth movement would happily trample on property rights and individual liberties in pursuit of their utopian ideal. But many do not. The fact is, “smart growth” encompasses a wide spectrum of views.

More to the point for this blog, the organizations promoting “smart growth” in Virginia are not big-government liberals who seek to bludgeon Virginians into being environmentally virtuous. Over the years, I’ve spent a lot of time hob-nobbing with the Coalition for Smarter Growth, the Southern Environmental Law Center, the Piedmont Environmental Council (a Bacon’s Rebellion sponsor), the Virginia Conservation League and others, and I can say with total confidence that (1) they are not taking their marching orders from the United Nations and (2) many would disagree with Agenda 21 on many of the particulars.

Indeed, I would classify myself a member of the smart growth parade, though I’m certainly not representative of the mainstream. I have devoted this blog to showing how the application of the principles of free markets, fiscal conservatism and respect for property rights can be reconciled with smart growth ideas. I find considerable overlap in my thinking and that of many smart growth activists in Virginia.

Tea Party activists in Virginia need to switch their focus from the Agenda 21 boogie man to understanding the way growth and development issues play out in the real world. There is no such thing as a “free market” in real estate development. Land use is more heavily regulated (by zoning codes and comprehensive plans) and subsidized (through transportation policies,  infrastructure funding, housing subsidies) than almost any other sector of the American economy. Only the education and health care sectors, also known for being dysfunctional, are worse. Politics in the statehouse and the courthouse have been dominated for years by business interests seeking to manipulate the system to their advantage, stymied mainly by anti-growth (not smart growth) populists who make things worse by adding layers of heavy-handed and arbitrary restrictions.

Many of the smart growth supporters I talk to in Virginia view themselves as fiscal conservatives. They oppose wasting money on extravagant highway projects that enrich land speculators and developers. (Some, I’ll concede, fail to show the same skepticism regarding extravagant rail projects that also enrich land speculators and developers.) The thinking of the smart growth movement has evolved far beyond that of the old anti-growth populists. Virginia smart growthers (smarties?) do preach a vision of creating more compact, walkable communities with access to mass transit shared by all smart growthers (and Agenda 21) but they are more inclined to convert people through positive examples of successful development than to ram their ideas down the throats of a reluctant populace.

Be that as it may, I am hopeful that the Heritage broadside signals the marginalization of the anti-Agenda 21 conspiracy mongers in conservative circles and a revival of intelligent debate over how to handle complex issues relating to growth and development.

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Posted in 2011, Environment, Land use

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The Era of Foreclosed Possibilities

Posted on November 21, 2011 by James A. Bacon| 47 Comments

The 2007 recession marked the end of the era of Mass OverConsumption. Suburban sprawl is over. It’s time to think about what comes next – and to adapt state and local government policies to new realities.

by James A. Bacon

The United States reached a historic inflection point during the Global Financial Crisis of 2007-2008. Many politicians and pundits anticipated that the economy would quickly right itself, as it had after every other recession since World War II. But it didn’t. From massive deficit spending to “quantitative easing,” federal authorities have tried stimulating the economy through time-tested methods of pumping up aggregate demand and lowering interest rates. But the economy shows no sign of returning to normal – and the future doesn’t look any brighter. The national debt, now surpassing $15 trillion, has grown so enormous that the dead weight of interest payments will constitute an increasing drag on the economy for years to come.

Historians will look back upon the recent recession as a bookend on an epoch in American history, the period beginning after World War II in which politics and the economy were organized around a bipartisan consensus to promote mass consumption or, as E M Risse prefers to call it, Mass OverConsumption. Politicians of both political parties competed on their ability to deliver economic growth, an expanded safety net and material comfort. Every American should own his own home. Everyone should be able to go to college. Everyone should own a car filled with cheap gas. Everyone should have high quality medical care. Everyone should enjoy a long and comfortable retirement.

The problem, simply put, is that we are running out of money. That’s not an easy truth to accept. Since the recession, politics has been marked by political gridlock in the nation’s capital and the search for scape goats in the hinterlands. The populist Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements have fixed their wrath upon ruling elites who plunder the nation by manipulating a corrupt political system. They have ample reason to do so. But in their more reflective moments, most Americans would admit that they have brought some of their troubles upon themselves by living beyond their means, both individually and collectively. Consumers maintained living standards by borrowing more than they could afford. Government maintained spending by borrowing more than it could afford.

Consumers were the first to collide with reality. The debt-fueled, consumer-driven economy came crashing down in 2007 and it cannot be reconstituted. The party is over, the hang-overs are throbbing, and someone has to mop up the puke on the floor. Meanwhile, it is increasingly apparent to all that the debt-fueled, government-driven economy is headed for the same fate, if not worse.

While the fall’s raucous presidential debate has focused the electorate’s attention on the fiscal constraints of the federal government, similar currents are running through state and local governments. States, cities and counties, too, are grappling with a structural budget gap stemming from chronically weak revenues and the public’s unremitting demands for more services. Local governments are more restricted in their ability to borrow to pay for spending, so their financial plight is more immediate and more pressing. To date, the primary fault line has formed over the issue of public-employee pensions and benefits. But other changes taking place at the level of cities, counties and towns are even more profound and unsettling.

Core state-and-local institutions invented or perfected in post-World War II Epoch of Unlimited Possibilities are rusting, rattling and running on fumes. Schools are graduating illiterates. Four-year college tuitions are the size of house mortgages. Health care inflation is pushing citizens, businesses and governments to the brink of insolvency. And the nation’s infrastructure, once the envy of the world, is crumbling all around. Call it the Era of Foreclosed Possibilities.

Across the country, states, cities and counties are ill equipped to deliver their contribution to the American dream. Nowhere is the crunch more evident than in the cluster of issues associated with “growth management” – the ability to accommodate growing populations with affordable housing supported by roads, transit, water, sewer, fire, police, schools and other public services. Just as Americans had come to expect an endless list of benefits from the federal government without fully paying for them, they developed entirely unrealistic expectations about what state and local governments could afford. Middle-class Americans wanted to live in neighborhoods of detached, single-family houses set on big lots. They wanted untrammeled mobility, meaning a car for every, and they wanted “the government” to build a road network that would allow them to drive anywhere, anytime, without undue congestion. And they wanted to keep taxes low.

The paradigm that guided growth and development for six decades has hit a dead end. State and local governments can no longer afford to build infrastructure for and deliver services to a population scattered over hundreds of millions of acres in scattered, low-density, disconnected human settlement patterns – commonly referred to as “suburban sprawl.”

Decades of experience have demonstrated that “sprawl” is fiscally unsustainable. The communities that have arisen from sprawl aren’t even what people prefer. Americans tolerated dysfunctional settlement patterns because they seemed preferable to the high taxes, troubled schools and horrendous crime in the core cities. But urban flight is a spent force. In healthy metropolitan areas, there is ample evidence that household preferences are changing and the flow of people out of the urban core is more than matched by a migration back into it. Jobs, especially the best paying ones, remain clustered within a relatively tight radius of the metropolitan core. Cultural attractions such as the arts, museums and restaurants loom larger as lifestyle magnets for the growing ranks of empty nesters. Frightful crime rates that once repelled middle-class households are showing marked declines.

Meanwhile suburban counties have developed intractable problems of their own: traffic congestion, overcrowded schools and increasing pressure on tax rates. Even before the 2007 recession, few Americans would have described life in “suburbia” as idyllic. Read more.

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Posted in 2011, Budget, Economy, Land use, Transportation

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The Wonk Salon, November 21, 2011

Posted on November 21, 2011 by James A. Bacon| Comments Off

U.S. Industries Need a “Competitiveness Audit”
Progressive Policy Institute
Local, state and federal government need a “competitiveness audit” of American industries to guide the allocation of economic development resources. Target those industries that have a chance of becoming economically competitive and write off the losers.

New Technologies More Effective than Compact Development at Cutting Greenhouse Gases
Reason Foundation
If your goal is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, new technologies such as hydrogen fuel cells and plug-in electric cars paired with electricity from hydro-power would accomplish the goal far more cost effectively than mandating more compact development.

South Carolina Colleges Too Expensive, Graduation Rates Too Low
South Carolina Policy Council
Everybody’s applying a critical eye now to state systems of higher education, even South Carolina. The interests of individual institutions outweigh those of the state.

Time to Focus on Community College Graduation Rates
Center for an Urban Future
Community colleges are a key vehicle for upward social mobility, but New York’s are falling short of the potential. Increasing the graduation rate by 10 percentage points could give a $71 million one-year boost to the state and students.

How to Make College More Affordable: Expand Tax Credits
Third Way
College is increasingly unaffordable. So let’s do more of what caused the problem in the first place — increase tuition subsidies, this time through a consolidation and expansion of tax credits.

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Posted in 2011, Economic development, Economy, Education (higher ed), Environment, Land use, Transportation, Wonk Salon

What’s McDonnell Up To With Transportation?

Posted on November 7, 2011 by Peter Galuszka| 6 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

The McDonnell Administration is  taking a chain saw to policies that promote smarter, more efficient growth by axing  reforms to make neighborhoods connected and pushing design contracts that fast-track road construction and discourage public input.

Such are the conclusions drawn from two blog postings by David Alpert of Greater Greater Washington and Jim Bacon, publisher of this blog.

They detail how Gov. Robert F. McDonnell and Transportation Secretary Sean Connaughton are throttling reform-minded policies that recently put Virginia at the forefront of good planning. They are using the Commonwealth Transportation Board (CTB),  a 17-member panel appointed by the governor, as the spearhead to push their ideas on how subdivisions and roads should be built.

According to the Alpert blog, the CTB recently got rid of policies enacted in 2009 that would encourage to build new subdivisions that connect easily to secondary and primary roads. Up until then, planning in Virginia was of the usual 1950s model that erected countless cul de sacs without only a few roads outside the development.

The result forced people into a lifestyle dominated by automobiles that wasted time and gasoline as residents traveled to shop or work and caused more trouble for emergency workers such as police, fire or ambulance drivers trying to respond to a crisis.

Under former Gov. Tim Kaine, the CTB changed the rules in a way that put Virginia ahead of other states in planning concepts by adopting the connectivity policy. The CTB under McDonnell and Connaughton recently dumped the 2009 reforms. Why? My guess is to boost the interests of developers since McDonnell wants to be identified as “pro-business.”

The Bacon post is an investigative look at the controversial bypass of U.S. 29 in Charlottesville. His work was funded in part by the Piedmont Environmental Council but they did not edit the article. Bypass proposals have been contentious because they would tend to exacerbate traffic congestion on what is already the most crowded road in the university city. Business interests, notably manufacturers in cities such as Lynchburg and Danville, want the bypass to improve truck deliveries.

Connaughton’s goal is hastening development of the bypass. So, he pushed a “design-build” contract that is opposed to the way the state usually does construction project. In “design-build,” the contractor is also the designer and designs parts of the project as works goes along. The practice was once considered unethical by professional associations but it is has become widely adopted throughout the country. It can save money and quicken a project’s completion, but it can also lead to overruns and tends to limit public say about how a project looks.

The CTB bought the “design build” idea for the bypass, but according to the Bacon report, Connaughton did not mention that engineers at his own Department of Transportation had serious doubts about the $244 million cost estimates, believing they would run much higher. Their concerns were not reflected in information given to the board which approved the project.

The two excellent blog postings raise serious questions about exactly what McDonnell and Connaughton are doing. The state has just raised billions on the bond market for highway construction and is floating ideas for public-private roads such as a replacement for U.S. 460 in southeastern Virginia.

Connaughton is steamrolling the U.S. 460 highway just as he is on the U.S. 29 bypass. His concept took a hit recently when The Virginian-Pilot reported that a group of Tidewater politicians and business executives lobbied Connaughton to slow down on the road from Suffolk to Petersburg in favor of a third crossing in Hampton Roads, which they believe will do more to alleviate the water-locked region’s notorious congestion. Conaughton responded that the third crossing will cost twice as much as his pet road. There are problems with either plan. A third crossing would only dump traffic on clogged Interstate 64. Replacing U.S. 460 would create more exurban sprawl west of Suffolk, which has been the state’s fastest-growing city.

Playing it both ways as free-spenders and cost cutters, McDonnell and Connaughton are refusing to provide funding for the D.C. Metro Silver Line Phase II project which would help alleviate traffic congestion. And, Connaughton has shown his bare-knuckles management style by firing nearly the entire board of the Virginia Ports Authority in one quick putsch.

McDonnell, however, doesn’t have that much time in office left. What’s behind all of this?

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Posted in 2011, Budget, Economic development, Economy, Energy, Environment, Finance, Infrastructure, Land use, Taxes, Transportation, Uncategorized

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And the Band Played On

Posted on October 15, 2011 by Peter Galuszka| 5 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

(Fourth of a series)

FUKUSHIMA, Japan — About an hour and a half north of Tokyo by bullet train,  the city of Fukushima is enjoying a fall festival. A brass band (see photo) belts out tunes while two young policewomen in sky blue uniforms have their pictures taken with children sitting atop their white Honda motorcycles. Jack-o-lanterns, Japanese-style, dot posters. Doting grandparents shoot pictures of their grandchildren riding a miniature steam train.

There’s little evidence that one of the worst nuclear disasters ever occurred last March 11 not 36 miles away on a rocky stretch of Pacific coastline. The meltdown of three nuclear reactors at the Daiichi power plant was the worst accident since Chernobyl and caused the deaths of more than 45 people, the evacuations of 130,000 and may cause untold future cancer illnesses and fatalities.

The only new information, as a friendly Fukushima resident shows me, is a newspaper article showing the radiation zones in a newspaper article. The most intense zone runs about 20 kilometers from the power station, including parts out to sea.

It is the worst zone. Gamma rays, that can penetrate anything except lead, are prevalent. The zone includes all or part of eight local jurisdictions. Extending another 10 kilometers out in another zone, land and buildings are somewhat less irradiated but still cannot be occupied. There are roadblocks on all roads leading into these zones.

The newspaper articles purports to outline just how many houses and other properties there are in these restricted zones and how  much people can expect to be compensated for them. I haven’t done an exact count but they appear to be between 5,000 and 10,000. People from the houses are living in temporary shelters with with families or friends elsewhere.

One would never know it from the pleasantries in the downtown of Fukushima city, but the nuclear disaster has serious implications on a global, as well as local, basis. Concerns about global warming had been pushing sentiment in favor of nuclear power as opposed to coal, but that’s shifted back again. The United Bank of Switzerland says that the Japanese mess may result in the closing of 30 other nuclear reactors around the world. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Markel said her country would shut down its reactors. German engineering conglomerate Siemens announced it was getting out of the nuclear business. China, on the other hand, intends to expand its nuclear generation capacity to offset its 70 perent reliance on coal.

Back in Virginia,  the region got a taste of Fukushima on Aug. 23 when a 5.8 Richter scale earthquake, much smaller than  the tsunami that touched off Fukushima’s nuke disaster but still unexpectedly strong, jarred the North Anna nuclear plant operated by Dominion Virginia Power. It forced a shutdown of two reactors while heavy casks of spent nuclear where shaken loose. A review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission shows that perhaps 25 other nuclear reactors may need new earthquake safety upgrades.

If you get a map of Virginia and plot the same evacuations zones as at Fukushima, you likely would see the evacuations for weeks, months or years of all or parts of Fredericksburg, Culpeper, Charlottesville and the far western Virginia suburbs of Richmond near Manakin Sabot. These would be roughly a 30 kilometer zone — not the very worst, but still requiring evacuation.

Fukushima and North Anna also raise serious questions about another Old Dominion project realted to nuclear power. A small group of investors and Canadians called Virginia Uranium plans on mining reserves near Chatham. But if the mood is so against nuclear power, one wonders just how demanding the market for yellowcake is.

It is anyone’s guess who would pay for the irradiated property in Japan although Munich Re, the reinsurer in the case of Fukushima, says that covering the disaster can be done successfully.

Costs such as these, whoever, must be kept in mind should nuclear power still proceed. Financial discipline, naturally is the flavor of the times given the current  backlash against government spending. Yet that also dooms nukes. Dominion, for instance, requires federal loan guarantees if it wants to proceed with a third unit at North Anna which is likely to cost more than $10 billion. Fat chance of getting it, at least now.

Meanwhile, on Oct. 15, the New York Times reported that about 20 “hot spots” of radioactivity, some with Chernobyl-level amounts, had been found in Tokyo, 160 miles to the south of Fukushima. Government officials had stubbornly claimed that the contamination was limited to the zone near the stricken plant, but now it seems that the situation is much worse than thought.

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VDOT Revisits Land Use

Posted on October 14, 2011 by James A. Bacon| 106 Comments

Proposed new regulations would reform – or undermine, depending upon your point of view — a keystone 2007 law designed to limit the negative impact of local land use decisions upon state roads.

Subdivision stub outs -- sometimes they work better in theory than in practice.

By James A. Bacon

In 2007 members of the General Assembly were struck by a revelation: There were ways to address the problem of traffic congestion in Virginia that did not entail building expensive new roads and highways. Gridlock arises not only from a growing population and increasing traffic load but from poor planning and design. Accordingly, the legislature enacted a sweeping overhaul of state law regulating the interface of transportation and land use.

Provisions of the law required traffic impact analysis for new development, greater street connectivity between new subdivisions and tighter regulation of public access to state highways. The bipartisan action was widely regarded one of the signature achievements of the Kaine administration.

This year the General Assembly passed a law directing the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) to review the legislation and enact new regulations as needed.  A VDOT advisory committee has recommended several changes, which await approval either by the Virginia Highway Commissioner or the Commonwealth Transportation Board.

The revisions represent a victory for the real estate industry. Two measures – one that would reduce the size of rezoning projects required to conduct a Traffic Impact Analysis, and another that would modify regulations requiring new subdivisions to connect with one another – stand out as particularly important. The two provisions will relieve developers and home builders of significant regulatory costs while still preserving the intent of the original law, maintains Mike Toalson, executive vice president of the Home Builders Association of Virginia.

But smart growth activists say the proposed new regulations will dilute the effectiveness of what had been one of the most progressive efforts in the country to coordinate transportation and land use. Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth, described the 2007 law as an effort to stem the growing and unaffordable list of transportation projects requested by local government and passed up to the General Assembly.

“We will never have enough funds to build the quantity of infrastructure created by patterns of development that have been increasingly used since World War II,” Schwartz wrote to Virginia Highway Commissioner Gregory Whirley. “By preserving the throughput of our highway network through better access management, by measuring traffic impact and applying creative solutions to reduce demand, and by increasing local street connectivity to reduce demand and traffic on our overburdened arterial roadways, we can save the tax payers of Virginia huge sums of money that would otherwise be required for new highways, the widening of dozens of arterials, and the addition of dozens of new interchanges.”

The idea behind the regulations, says Trip Pollard, senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, is to look before you leap. “Yes, there is a cost, but it’s a very reasonable cost.” The proposed revisions “are not the end of the world,” he concedes, and Virginia still will be better off than five years ago. “But we’re losing a lot here. … If you don’t address transportation and land use, you’ll end up with sprawl and congestion.”

The revisions address three broad areas: traffic impact statements, secondary street acceptance requirements and access management regulations. (View VDOT’s video presentation of the regulatory changes here.)

Continue reading.

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