Category Archives: Public safety & health

The Cooch’s Freak Show Dream Team

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 6 Comments

cooch dream teamBy Peter Galuszka

Ken Cuccinelli just can’t keep away from the bizarre, but perhaps that’s what makes him what he is.

He stages a convention instead of a primary to neuter Bill Bolling. And since a convention is smaller, it draws more GOP hard-righters than  June bugs on a humid night and they succeed in getting Bishop E.W. Jackson and Mark Obenshain selected. They underline the social conservatism that turns millions off and makes Virginia the butt of jokes on late night talk shows.

The Bishop is an even bigger gay basher than Cuccinelli and says that Planned Parenthood is responsible for more fatalities among African-Americans than the Ku Klux Klan. This may be new to a Harvard Law graduate, but women of any color have a legal right to an abortion within limits. The U.S. Supreme Court said so. Look under Roe vs. Wade.

Then there is the attorney general candidate Mark Obenshain of the legacy Republican family. He proposed and withdrew legislation to require any woman in Virginia who miscarries a pregnancy to report it to the police. The idea is so repulsive it is beyond words. A woman may have miscarried to her great sorrow due to medical reasons and then would have to go through the added horror of having to report to the police? Yes, this comes from a cabal that otherwise wants to keep the government out of your lives. Even Josef Stalin wouldn’t think of this.

What does the dream team have to say on the many policy issues facing a troubled state? We have a bunch of lame and poorly thought out tax cuts and Cooch playing hardware store populist. Cuccinelli was against McDonnnell’s mammoth road building tax plan and has since backed away from his opposition.

Is this good news for Terry McAuliffe, who has plenty of issues of his own? Yes, I would think. Cuccinelli doesn’t need the fringe hard right voters. He’s already got them in his pocket. He needs the center and Mark and the Bishop aren’t going to be much help there.

It boggles the mind how Virginia is so schizo. It is attracting hundreds of thousands of newcomers who are running the state’s economy and are dragging it into the 21st century world. Yet the Republicans put up people like this who aren’t dragging us to Virginia’s recent dark past but to medieval times.

Global investors might think twice or three times before investing in this freak show.

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The Tea Party and IRS Abuse

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 5 Comments

richmond-tea-partyBy Peter Galuszka

News that the U.S. Internal Revenue Service has targeted Tea party groups, including one in Virginia, along with other right wing organizations is deeply disturbing and conjures up ghosts of other government witchhunts.

President Barack Obama has chastized the IRS for singling out the Tea Party and other groups that say they want to educate Americans about their constitution. One group that got “dozens and dozens” of questions about its application for a non-profit status was the Richmond Tea Party, according to leader Laurence Nordvig.

A government report traces the IRS activity to its Cincinnati field office that was charged with reviewing applications for non-profit status.

True, there are any number of groups seeking non-profit status for flimsy reasons, but being part of the Tea Party sure isn’t one of them.

And, using taxes as a weapon is hardly new and has been used by all sides of the political spectrum. Richard Nixon was famous for sicking the IRS on his “enemies” list in the 1970s. In Russia, Vladimir Putin used the Russian tax authorities to imprison potential political rival Mikhail Khodorkovsky who remains incarcerated.

Throughout the Civil Rights and Vietnam War era, the FBI had its COUNTELPRO to gather information about and disrupt groups on both left and right, including the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Cuban and Irish nationalist organizations.

Some groups merited watching such as some of the Weathermen and the Ku Klux Klan who practiced violence.

But it is wrong for the federal government to harass peaceful, law-abiding political groups. I may not agree with the Tea Party, but they do meet this description.

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Posted in Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Politics, Public safety & health, Regulation, Taxes

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First They Came for Our Tax-Subsidized Sodas, then They Came for our Tax-Subsidized Snack Foods

Posted on April 25, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 29 Comments

Graphic credit: The Onion (Click for more legible image)

by James A. Bacon

I had occasion the other day to visit an inner city convenience store in Richmond while working on an article I hope to post to the blog shortly.  I am not exactly Mr. Health Food Guy — I won’t touch tofu, cauliflower or fish oil — but even I was appalled by the wares on display.

Entire shelves in this shoebox establishment were given over to beer, soda, candy, pork rinds, potato chips and sugar-drenched cereals. The healthiest (or should I say “least unhealthy”) foods were ordinary starches like rice and potatoes whose sole nutritional virtue is that they were not drenched in sugar, fat and salt. If there is any correlation between the percentage of shelf space stocked with junk food and the nutritional intake of neighborhood residents, there should be no mystery whatsoever why Richmond’s inner-city population is suffering an epidemic of obesity, diabetes and hypertension.

I totally subscribe to the doctrine that people should be held accountable for their behavior. We should not make excuses for poor people who blow their slender resources on cigarettes, lottery tickets, a six-pack of beer and a bag of Tom’s Bacon Cheddar Fries. But I also acknowledge that the story is much bigger than the irresponsible lifestyle choices of the poor. Rent-seeking corporations and a spineless federal government bear their share of the blame.

Yesterday, Coca-Cola held its annual meeting. If all went according to schedule, David Almasi, executive director of the National Center for Public Policy Research, was planning to criticize the company for lobbying to keep soft drinks eligible for food stamps. Currently, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) forbids only the purchase of alcohol and tobacco. Through SNAP, American taxpayers subsidize the purchase of about $4 billion worth of soda products yearly.

My thinking on the subject coincides exactly with Almasi’s sentiments:

I’m all for freedom of choice and respecting peoples’ personal decisions, but Coke lobbying for its share of food stamp money is above and beyond altruism. While publicly promoting so-called ‘sustainability’ by hyping good nutrition and active lifestyles, Coca-Cola lobbyists are quietly seeking to ensure that American taxpayers subsidize the company’s high-calorie, sugary beverages. Both political parties carp about cutting the budget and fixing the deficit. How about stopping this virtual river of soda being paid for with our tax dollars?

I also agree with Justin Danhof, director of the National Center Free Enterprise Project:

In a free marketplace, folks should be able to purchase what they want. That is why Coca-Cola was right to fight New York City Mayor Michael Bloombeg’s efforts to ban large beverages, but wrong when it fought his efforts to limit SNAP funds to healthier items. SNAP does not operate in a free market. It is taken from folks’ paychecks. It is reasonable to limit how those benefits are administered and for what items.

Actually, I would go a step further. I would apply the same logic to snack foods as well. If hunger is still a problem in the inner city, as many say is the case, public funds should be limited to products that meet basic nutritional guidelines. Surely, this is an area where do-gooder liberals and skin-flint conservatives can join forces to create better public policy and improve the health of the poor.

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Posted in 2013, Agriculture & forestry, Health care, Money in politics, Poverty & income gap, Public safety & health

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What’s Your Walk Score?

Posted on April 19, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 38 Comments

Charlottesville’s downtown pedestrian mall

If you haven’t checked your home’s walk score, you should. Walkability contributes to higher property values, a more livable neighborhood and a healthier community.

by James A. Bacon

Walk Score, a web-based service that measures walkability, is taking the urban planning profession by storm. Using an algorithm that awards points based on the distance to amenities within a location’s walking distance, Walk Score purports to measure the walkability of a neighborhood, city, county or even an entire region. The algorithm is far from perfect but it gives a pretty good rough cut.

Walkability matters a great deal. This crucial amenity affects property values; houses with higher Walk Scores enjoy higher property values per square foot. “In the typical market, an additional one point increase in Walk Score was associated with between a $500 and $3,000 increase in home values,” writes Joe Cortright in “How Walkability Raises Home Values in U.S. Cities.” Walkability also affects public health — there is a strong correlation between a person’s weight and how much he or she walks.

Walk Score rates places on a 1-100 scale, with 90-100 rated a walker’s paradise, 70-89 as very walkable, 50-69 as somewhat walkable, 0-49 as car-dependent.

Not surprisingly, the most walkable parts of Virginia are close to the urban core of the Washington metropolitan region, with Arlington and Old Town Alexandria racking up very high scores. As seen in the map to the left, high-walkability areas are shown in green, shading off to yellow, orange and red for lower levels of walkability. Northern Virginia has smaller islands of walkability in Reston, McLean, the City of Fairfax and… get this… Tysons.

The Tysons example points out the limits to the Walk Score methodology. Although the business district has a relatively high level of density, which means destinations are relatively close to one another, the ubiquity of parking lots and the paucity of pedestrian-friendly streets makes it one of the more pedestrian-hostile places outside the Daytona Speedway. Additionally, there is a poor balance of residential and retail-commercial; the only reason people working in Tysons have for walking is to traverse the parking lots to get to their cars and drive home! (See the metro-wide heat map here.)

The Walk Score people freely concede that their system, based on Google Maps, does not take those factors into account. “Walk Score simply measures the straight-line distance to … locations and makes no adjustments for ease of walking or other obstacles to walking,” states the website. “In essence, Walk Score is a measure of the proximity of a range of typical goods, serviecs and activities to a particular household.”

Among metropolitan areas, the highest score outside of the Washington area is Charlottesville, with a walk score of 63. There is high walkability around the University of Virginia, downtown and the area in between. Downtown, with its pedestrian mall, ranks especially high. (See the heat map here.)

Considerably lower down the scale comes another college town, Harrisonburg, which rates a “somewhat walkable” score of 53. (See map.)

Right on its heels is Richmond, with a score of 51. (See map.) The city has a highly walkable core, extending from downtown to Shockoe Bottom in one direction and to the Fan and the Museum District in the other. Other than one small patch — the so-called Libbie & Grove area — the region is a lost cause otherwise. Walk Score bequeaths a walk score of 9 to my suburban Henrico neighborhood, meaning that “almost all” errands require a car. That’s “almost all,” as in 99.9%. Not only are stores and restaurants two or three miles distant, but there is no connectivity between subdivisions, with the result that the only way to reach those destinations is Parham Road, a four-lane, divided road with 45 mile-per-hour speed limit and no sidewalks.You would have to be insane to walk anywhere! Read more.

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Posted in 2013, Land use & development, Public safety & health, Transportation

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McAuliffe: Can a Schmoozer Transform?

Posted on April 17, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 3 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

On Easter Sunday, I was driving in a cold rain to Charlottesville for a family event. My cell phone started beeping with messages from Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Terry McAuliffe.

He said he was on his way to his own family brunch but wanted to tap me for $5. I got similar messages from two other staffers.

Why bother me at Easter? Political analyst Larry Sabato wondered the same thing. In a tweet that day he complained about finding “11 obnoxious messages for $$$. Now I know the answer to the age old Q; Is nothing sacred?”

And that may be McAuliffe’s biggest problem as he faces arch-conservative Ken Cuccinelli in the off-year governor’s race. In my profile of him in Style Weekly, I note that McAuliffe is trying to rein in an expansive personality that has made him a top political schmoozer and fundraiser for Democrats from Jimmy Carter to Bill and Hillary Clinton.

A decades’ long political operative who has never been in elected office, he can be bombastic and smooth, as his recent dealings with GreenTech Automotive shows. He flirted with Virginia for a hybrid  car plant before going to Mississippi. He has been accused of somehow using the car plant to win special visas for foreign workers and maybe misleading the Virginia Economic Development Partnership about his intentions in the Old Dominion.

Meanwhile, he must overcome some of his misunderstandings of traditional Virginia thinking. However, it’s probably a good thing that he’s going to skip the Shad Planking in Wakefield tonight with its Confederate flags where Cuccinelli will be keynote speaker.

While polls are about 50-50 in the race, McAuliffe’s fundraising prowess has shown brightly. In the first quarter, he raised more than $5 million — more than double the take of Cuccinelli, who has hamstrung by not being allowed raise money during the General Assembly session because of his position as Attorney General. Read on…

(Also, here as a Q&A with McAuliffe)

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Hens and Self Sufficiency

Posted on April 9, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 5 Comments

Sheena and Valerie, activists with the Chickunz urban-chicken movement. Photo credit: Chickunz RVa Facebook page.

In a victory for urban chicken lovers everywhere, Richmond City Council adopted yesterday the final set of regulations that will make it permissible to own up to four hens in residential areas. In a setback for gender equality, however, the ban on roosters still applies. (See the Times-Dispatch article.)

Just kidding about the gender-equality thing. Roosters are a nuisance. Nobody wants to be woken at daybreak by a cock crowing next door. In all seriousness, lifting the ban on urban chickens marks a big step forward for the locally grown food movement, which is gaining momentum across Virginia.

There are a couple of layers to the issue worth examining. The first is the matter of individual rights. Why shouldn’t people be allowed to raise chickens in their back yards if it doesn’t pose a nuisance or health hazard to neighbors? What business is it of local government to restrict the practice? The City of Richmond will charge a $60-a-year permit to offset the cost of subjecting chicken coop owners to inspections by the Department of Animal Control and Care. That’s a reasonable concession to ensure that sanitary conditions are maintained.

The second issue is aiding and expediting the growth of the locally grown food movement. If Virginians increasingly have a taste for chicken and/or eggs that aren’t raised under the conditions of industrial agriculture, with all the hormones that are fed to the chickens and all the chicken waste that is produced, then public policy should encourage them to raise their own hens.

Furthermore, in a time of chronic economic hardship, when thousands of Virginians are short on cash and long on spare time, food self-sufficiency strikes me as a good thing. Poor people, in particular, should be coaxed into supplementing their food stamps with eggs, chicken and garden produce they raise themselves. We all know the old saying, “Give a man a fish and feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime.” Substitute “chicken” for “fish.” Self-sufficiency — now, that’s real social change!

– JAB

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Posted in 2013, Agriculture & forestry, Land use & development, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health

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The Rise of Civic Tech

Posted on April 2, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 7 Comments

Call it digital cities, call it civic tech, call it what you will — information technology is transforming the way local governments deliver services. This brief video by Ben Hecht, CEO of Living Cities, gives a flavor.

My favorite example he cites: The Boston Bump. Instead of dispatching engineers around the city to survey the condition of roads, the city of Boston has created an app that allows citizens to put on their car dashboards to record bumps in the road and their locations. Compiling the data from thousands of these apps allows the city to map road conditions in real time.

With the wealth of IT experience in Northern Virginia, the Old Dominion could be a leader in this field. Why aren’t we? Why are most of the innovations occurring elsewhere?

– JAB

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Posted in 2013, Infrastructure, Planning, Public safety & health, Science & Technology, Transportation

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Fostering Regional Collaboration Case by Case

Posted on March 5, 2013 by James A. Bacon| 4 Comments

by James A. Bacon

For reasons rooted in local identity and entrenched political interest, Virginians are unlikely to consolidate their local governments into units aligned with the metropolitan regions they serve. But it is not impossible to imagine governments partnering regionally on specific projects.

A new study by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission, “Encouraging Local Collaboration through State Incentives,” describes areas where collaboration might make sense and how the state can encourage it.

K-12 education, which accounted for $13.2 billion in state and local spending in FY 2011, is one area rife with opportunity. For instance, special education programs can be administered more efficiently on a regional basis — reducing the cost per student by $6,500 to $13,500.

Public safety, which accounts for $4 billion in state and local spending, offers more low-hanging fruit. Regional radio networks would facilitate the cost-efficient collaboration between local fire, police and rescue. A step toward even greater integration, which could save localities up to $8 million, would be to create of joint emergency dispatch centers. Building joint courthouses can reduce construction costs by 16% 6o 44%. The cost of managing jail populations could be cut by $65 per person per day by allowing individuals awaiting trial to be transferred from jail detention to less expensive community release.

Other functions include regional administration of foster care, regional operation of public utilities and regional procurement.

The state can encourage regional collaboration by identifying savings to the state — the state contributes heavily toward foster care, special education and local jails, for example — and sharing some of the projected gain with the local governments.

There is nothing sexy about these nuts-and-bolts proposals for efficiency in government. In fact, the details can be pretty boring. You won’t find citizens holding demonstrations at the state Capitol grounds to demand more regional collaboration. (Regional foster care now! Regional foster care now!) But taxpayer advocates and good-government types should find common cause in making government work more effectively.

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Posted in 2013, Governance reform, Infrastructure, Public safety & health, Social services, Water-waste water

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The Lessons of the 2013 General Assembly

Posted on February 25, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 21 Comments

By Peter Galuszka

If there’s any good news from the 2013 General Assembly session, it is that the hard right’s strange hold on taxation has been broken. Republicans can start acting like responsible adults once again instead of dogmatic shills or spoiled children.

Gov. Robert F. Donnell and legislators found a way to raise badly needed money for transportation although it came via a very bad law that ties itself up like a contortionist doing this and that when all that needed to be done was to simply raise the gasoline tax for the first time in 26 years.

The Democrats were right to strong-arm McDonnell into going along with expanding Medicaid. It would have been absolutely ridiculous for Virginia to hold its stubborn head high and deny thousands of needy people medical assistance so they can feel good about some ludicrous oath from Grover Norquist they may have recited at one point to get votes. The feds will be paying for the expansion until 2016 and then for 90 percent of it. Imagine a well fed delegate saying, “No, you poor person can’t have health care because it is doctrinally impure!”

The upshot is is that we need to get of the Grover Norquists, the Tea Baggers and all their ilk to get on with the serious business of running the state and country. The sequestration debacle is more than embarrassing for its stupidity. So is Kenneth Cuccinelli with Bob Marshall cheering him to to find any bogus constitutional challenge to anything he finds political impure as far as taxation.

The bottom line is that if you want fixed roads, good schools and a decent place to live, you have to pay for them through taxes. Simple. You can’t depend on private industry to see you through, especially not when a good chunk of it in the Old Dominion is actually federal government money that’s about to be cut off in a big way. You can’t do it through little shell games with public private partnerships to build roads you often do not need. And you just can’t kick the can to younger generations so you can remain holy.

In other words, the days of the Tea Party, “Boomergeddon” and all the clarion calls to the need for budget cutting are over. They’ve been over for a while. We get it. We’ve been spending too much. But it is idiotic to go cold turkey without some thought given to it because you will crash the economy and die of the DTs. You don’t cure a crash victim by denying him blood. That’s not voodoo economics, that’s vampire economics. You need a balance and that’s exactly what the Boomergeddons and Baconauts want to deny us.

As for McDonnell, well, he’s finally got his legacy. It looks pretty messy. He did manage to get more money for roads, but he did through a Rube Goldberg contraption of taxation. He has a totally wrong-headed tax on alternative vehicles which shows,once again, just how Neanderthal much of the thinking in the General Assembly is.

McDonnell failed to get legacies through privatizing state alcohol stores or erecting offshore oil rigs. Last year, the legislature got so out of control with social conservative nonsense — another Tea Party legacy — that Virginia scored on national Snark TV for its inane war against women. That cost McDonnell a hell of a lot, namely the vice presidential nomination.

Now, he’s reportedly thinking about something bigger and I gather his platform for that will be his tax victory. Good Luck.

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Posted in Blogs and blog administration, Budget, Children and families, Consumer protection, Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Demographics, Disaster planning, Economic development, Economy, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Entitlements, Environment, Federal, Finance, Governance reform, Government workers and pensions, Health care, Housing, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor & workforce, Land use & development, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Public safety & health, Regulation, Social services, Taxes, The Economy, Transportation

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Reports of King Coal’s Death Are Greatly Exaggerated

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 4 Comments

 By Peter Galuszka

It seems such a short time ago.

In the gnarled hills of Southwest Virginia’s coalfields, prominent Republicans Ken Cuccinelli, Robert F. McDonnell and others were on the stump for Mitt Romney. The key theme was how Barack Obama’s environmental rules were putting a stranglehold over the coal industry.

A little farther north in Ohio, Robert Murray, a strident conservative and head of Murray Energy,  was laying off coal miners and allegedly forcing others to attend a pro-Romney rally. It was, he said, a “drastic time” and they were in “survival mode layoffs” thanks to Obama.

Flash forward to now. While natural gas has eaten into King Coal’s share of the U.S. electricity market, the coal industry has managed to increase its exports of thermal product to Europe from 39.5 million short tons in the first months of 2011 to 51.1 million short tons in the same period of last year. The reason: while Americans enjoy cheap natural gas, Europeans are paying three times the normal rate for it.

Meanwhile, Bristol-based Alpha Natural Resources, which, to its credit, did not blame its losses last year on Obama, is expecting a bit of a recovery in the coal industry this year.

The firm lost $2.4 billion in 2012 as it suffered from big utility stockpiles thanks to a warm winter and competition from natural gas, but CEO Kevin Crutchfield expects some recovery in 2013. The firm also managed to double its exports of Eastern thermal coal to six million tons – part of the unexpected  European demand. Alpha took over troubled Massey Energy, based  in Richmond, in 2011.

As for Murray Energy, Obama must be doing a bad job at killing King Coal, because there are reports that Murray Energy is rehiring some miners.

True, there’s renewed interest in carbon dioxide rules that will impact coal and perhaps place it further out of marketability. But there export market is strong in Europe and Asian demand for coking coal may pick up.

Part of the problem, as Crutchfield notes, is that Central Appalachia, which includes Southwest Virginia, southern West Virginia and eastern Kentucky coalfields, is just too expensive for production, compared to Wyoming’s Powder River Basin or Northern Appalachia’s Pittsburgh seam.

All the complaining in the world about the EPA and Obama can’t change that.

Shameless self- promotion: My book, “Thunder on the Mountain: Death at Massey and the Dirty Secrets Behind Big Coal,” was reviewed by the New York Times Book Review on Feb. 10.

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Posted in Economic development, Economy, Energy, Environment, Labor & workforce, Media, Money in politics, Politics, Public safety & health, Regulation, Science & Technology, The Economy

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