Category Archives: Regulation

“Jac” Cales’ PPTA Monkey-Wrench

Posted on June 18, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 14 Comments
calesBy Peter Galuszka

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Good and Bad of Exporting LNG

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

cove point 046By Peter Galuszka

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Cuccinelli, Penguins and Natural Gas

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 6 Comments

pittsburgh-penguins-j-black016By Peter Galuszka

Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli’s strange episode involving a natural gas lawsuit involving one of his largest political contributors for his gubernatorial campaign raises yet another issue about his ethics.

First, whatever was a Cuccinelli staffer doing advising a subsidiary of coal and gas giant CONSOL Energy, which has given Cuccinelli more than $110,000 in political contributions? The case involved a dispute over compensation that energy firms apparently do not pay to landowners but are supposed to for natural gas they extract from their land.

One would think that the state’s top law officer would either be neutral or would be representing the smaller players who don’t have the legal deep pockets of large corporations.

In any event, a U.S. Magistrate blew the whistle on Cuccinelli’s office’s behavior, saying it was shocking. Now there is a call by State Sen. Phillip Puckett, a Democrat from the Southwest, asking  that the state Inspector General review Cuccinelli’s behavior.

This is just a long line of odd doings that have come up regarding the attorney general since he started running in earnest for governor without resigning. He is out of legal action regarding the Star Scientific scandal because he owned stock in the firm and took gifts that he did not readily report as required. Ditto the ChefGate scandal involving theft charges against Todd Schneider, Gov. Robert McDonnell’s former executive chef.

No question there’s a pattern. It’s odd that it didn’t seem to show up earlier in Cuccinelli’s political career since he had been a state senator for about a decade. I don’t know if there was a pattern of accepting gifts in exchange for apparent favors then, but there certainly has been in the past several years.

The Virginian-Pilot has reported that Cuccinelli has been feted by Pittsburgh energy firm CONSOL which operates coal mines and gas wells in Southwestern Virginia. Virginia isn’t exactly a major coal producer, but CONSOL saw fit to fete treat the attorney general to a fund-raiser at a Pittsburgh Penguin hockey game this spring. Cuccinelli’s parents live in Pittsburgh. CONSOL also has donated thousands of dollars to his campaign.

The peculiar interference by a Cuccinelli staffer “advising” CONSOL and another firm smacks of shenanigans more common in West Virginia where the interplay between energy firms and politicians is a lot more obvious.

Don Blankenship, the notorious former CEO of Richmond-based Massey Energy, got plenty of bad headlines when he went on a French Riviera vacation with the state’s top appeals judge who was in a position to influence Massey’s many lawsuits. West Virginia elects its judges so Blankenship let his donations flow.

That story ended badly, with 29 miners dead in a horrible coal mine disaster in 2010. Blankenship was cashiered with an $86 million parachute and Massey was sold to Bristol-based Alpha Natural Resources.

The sad thing is that Puckett’s calls for a probe will likely go nowhere. Virginia has never been known for cracking down on political donations. Its policy is hands-off. There is no State Ethics Commission to investigate. The best the state can do is rely on a non-profit, the Virginia Public Access Project, to collect and massage data on who gets what from whom, but as the McDonnell and Cuccinelli cases have shown, that information is useless if the data in is incorrect or misleading.

True, in any campaign there are plenty of accusations. Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe is a master of fund-raising and far beats Cuccinelli in terms of dollars raised.

It might be oddly reassuring if Cuccinelli’s guile was all part of some cynical ploy. But it doesn’t seem that way. It just seems stupid.

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Posted in Consumer protection, Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Energy, Infrastructure, Land use & development, Media, Money in politics, Public safety & health, Regulation, The Economy

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“You Want Maggots With That, Hon?”

Posted on June 4, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 8 Comments

Paula DeenBy Peter Galuszka

Free trade capitalists may cheer the proposed $4.7 billion takeover of Virginia icon Smithfield Foods by a Chinese firm, but there is plenty to give pause and the blowback is creating some strange bedfellows.

The major issues are whether one should want Chinese-style management in charge of American corporations given their record on safety and market ethics.

Even arch-conservative Del. Bob Marshall is sounding alarm bells. He wrote in letter to Smithfield’s brass that: “China’s widespread food safety problems are known to American consumers and will engulf Smithfield Foods regardless of the names under which they are sold.”

Among Marshall’s points is that Shuanghui International Holdings Inc., which wants Smithfield, has a record of unsafe practices in its current food operations. He cites press accounts that the firm bought pigs 2011 that contained clenbuterol that was banned in 2002 and that ribs the firm sold last year had maggots and sausage had too much bacteria.

The takeover, which still needs approval from U.S. regulators, took a hit when a few days after its announcement, at least 119 people were killed in a poultry slaughterhouse in Northern China. The Chinese media says that many workers had been locked in the factory, which is a common workplace practice in that country.

In the past two years, some 70,000 Chinese have lost their lives in industrial accidents – a record that make any reasonable person think twice.

To be sure, U.S. firms have had their troubles including some in Virginia. In 2008 and 2009, a salmonella outbreak that killed nine and sickened 666 was traced to filthy operations at a Georgia plant owned by Lynchburg-based Peanut Corporation of America. And, according to the Journal, U.S. firms operating in China may tend to adopt to local practices. In 2011, dust explosions killed four and injured 59 at factories owned by suppliers for Apple Inc.

Shuanhui officials say they want to “learn” about safer practices from Smithfield. And, there could be a case that Western involvement may help the Chinese modernize. Coal mine deaths in 2012 dropped to 1,384, a decrease of nearly 30 percent. Last year, 19 American coal miners died. Of course, China mines nearly three times the amount of coal as China does and a number of U.S. deep mines were slowed or shuttered by market conditions. Not that long ago, however, China was losing up to 5,000 miners every year.

The problem with the Smithfield takeover – if the Chinese executives are to be believed – is that it puts the cart before the horse. If the Chinese own Smithfield their practices and cultural will prevail, no matter how bright a picture they want to paint.

That is something the free traders might want to think about before they follow a Paula Deen recipe calling for Smithfield brand sausage or bacon.

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Posted in Agriculture & forestry, Children and families, Consumer protection, Crime and corrections, Disaster planning, Economic development, Economy, Environment, Federal, Governance reform, Labor & workforce, Regulation, Science & Technology

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My Moment of VPAP Clarity

Posted on June 1, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 15 Comments

star scientific By Peter Galuszka

Last week, the Virginia Public Access Project held its annual luncheon and invited gubernatorial candidates Kenneth Cuccinelli and Terry McAuliffe to speak. No debate. No questions. Just a few minutes of remarks.

The ballroom of the downtown Richmond Marriott was filled with the usual suspects, including lobbyists, lawyers, corporate officials and politicians. Some reporters were there, but they had been informed that their lunch was not included.

I attended and managed to sneak in a glass of iced tea when I came upon a moment of clarity. VPAP performs a useful service by detailing with sophisticated software and data bases who gives what to whom. I use the services of the non-partisan system all the time and over time, it has become the go-to source in Virginia. There are other services such as the Center for Responsive Politics, but this is the one that drills down in Old Dominion affairs.

Therein lies the problem. VPAP is part of an institution that backs inadvertently benefits from the lax and permissive Virginia-style rules of gift giving to politicians. Gov. Robert McDonnell and Cuccinelli are both caught for not readily disclosing the apparently legal gifts they got from the executive of a suspect company, Star Scientific that is under investigating by the FBI and a local prosecutor.

At the luncheon table sipping my purloined iced tea, I noticed the VPAP program. Its biggest contributors ($10,000 each) are Alpha Natural Resources and Dominion. The former is a Bristol-based coal firm that bought out Massey Energy whose officials are the target of a federal probe that they spent a decade conspiring against mine safety officials and the result was the death of 29 in a blast at Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, W.Va., on April 5, 2010, the worst in 40 years.

Alpha says it is trying to correct the defects in the Massey organization in bought but it, too, is a huge player on the political front and has its own agenda, such as keeping alive a destructive type of mining called mountaintop removal. Dominion has a highly sophisticated advocacy operation since its survival depends on regulation. Other big-time VPAP contributors are car dealers, tobacco giant Altria, Comcast, lobbying law firm McGuireWoods, health groups, a few other utilities, and so on. Even NOVA real estate John “Til” Hazel is on the list, but much farther down.

I really didn’t see any citizen groups or anyone that wasn’t bound to benefit by giving legal gifts of jumbo shrimp, lakeside vacations or money to someone in a position of power in the state.

The problem, therefore, isn’t the fact that anything is illegal, but just about everything is and it is peculiar to Virginia. I was amused to read New York Times columnist Gail Collins write this morning about Virginia’s anything-goes gift policies:

“Under Virginia’s ethics laws the governor can accept anything – house, car private jet, former Soviet republic – as long as he puts it in the proper form.”

Ms. Collins details the familiar Giftgate issues, stating:

“Looks like an investigation for Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli. Except — whoops – it turned out that Cuccinelli had also taken gifts from the same business man, some of which he, too, had failed to report.”

She adds: “ Perhaps unreported freebies will be a big campaign issue. Although in a more perfect world, voters might focus on the attorney general’s two-year investigation of a University of Virginia scientist for the crime of believing in global warming.”

All good points from someone far enough from Virginia and its entrenched gift-giving structure that is designed precisely to enhance the influence of the rich and elite while pretending to let all Virginians now what is going on.

It is time for a basic rethink and restructure.

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Posted in Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Finance, Governance reform, Money in politics, Politics, Regulation

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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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What the Clams Know: Warming Waters

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 31 Comments

atlantic surf clamBy Peter Galuszka

Are warming seas forcing fish to migrate to cooler waters?

That’s the thrust of an intriguing report in Nature magazine as covered in this morning’s Post. The impacts on the seafood industry are already playing out. New England fishermen after cod and haddock report having to move farther north to catch them.

There are impacts in the Mid-Atlantic as well. According to The Post, warmer waters from Delaware to Virginia are pushing Atlantic surf clams to move farther north, and this has resulted in the closure of a clam processing plant in Virginia. Atlantic surf clams are a popular variety used for fried dishes or in chowders

I tried and failed to find out what plant it was. I did find one that was shut down in recent years near Mappsville on Virginia’s Eastern Shore but could not confirm the reason. The firm, Eastern Shore Seafood, was bought by Maryland-based Seawatch International which later shut the plant down.

I spoke with Mike Hutt, executive director of the Virginia Marine Products Board who had seen The Post story but couldn’t confirm details of any related plant closings or the impact of warming waters regionally

It would seem that warmer waters will add further stress to the region’s troubled seafood industry, especially for certain species. I’m not certain how it would affect favorites such as blue crabs that seem to thrive in tepid waters much farther south or oysters, which are struggling make a comeback in Chesapeake Bay. My guess, and I am no expert, is that other prized species such as bluefish and rockfish (striped bass to Northerners) might change their migration patterns because of climate change.

If the Nature research is correct, the fish may be sending us a powerful message that many haven’t figured out yet.

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Posted in Disaster planning, Economic development, Economy, Energy, Environment, Regulation, Science & Technology

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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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Corruption? This is Virginia!

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Peter Galuszka| 11 Comments

 By Peter Galuszka

An old adage in journalism has it that good stories just keep getting better.

And so it is with the saga of Jonnie Williams Sr. and the family of Robert F. McDonnell, the governor. First we learn, courtesy of The Washington Post, that the head of Star Scientific gave McDonnell’s daughter $15,000 worth of food for her Executive Mansion wedding in 2011 along with $100,000 worth of corporate jet rides for McDonnell and his staff.

Now we also learn that Williams paid for McDonnell to vacation at Smith Mountain Lake and loaned him a Land Cruiser and a $190,000 Ferrari.

There’s nothing illegal about any of this given Virginia’s toothless government accountability laws. Gifts have to be disclosed annually and the only problem seems to have been that McDonnell did not disclose the wedding meal because the gift was for his daughter even though he signed papers for the wedding celebration.

One reason why Virginia is so incredibly weak in regulating donations and gifts to public figures is another one of its conceits. There is an old saw that if one is elected to office he or she must be a gentleman or lady, after all they are Virginians. Presumably, this also means they are appropriately of English or Anglo Saxon ancestry.

There’s another reason as well, according to Gordon Witkin of the State Integrity Investigation Project that flunks Virginia for acountability.

In an interview I did with him for Style Weekly, he says that Virginia’s preference for loose regulation is based on its limited government, libertarian mind set that is more in keeping with attitudes in the Plains or Western states than the Northeast or Midwest. “It’s like in Wyoming where a state senator was asked why it was OK to make a right or left turn in a car without signaling. His response: “If you want to make a turn, it’s no one else’s damned business.”

That’s about the size of it among some of the most influence conservatives in the state, including gubernatorial hopeful Kenneth Cuccinelli, unless, of course the matter involves abortion in which case the state will add on all sorts of regulations.

Witkin’s group gave Virginia an “F” its recent survey. The Old Dominion was one of eight states to get the rating and was ranked 47th out of 50 stats. The ranking was based on awful scores in public access to information, executive and judicial accountability and budgetary, lobbying and ethics enforcement. “The systems and procedures in Virginia for accountability and procedure are weak,” says Witkin.

Denise Roth Barber, managing director of the National Institute on Money and State Politics, based in Helena MT, says that “Virginia is one of four states that have no limits on contributions. It is one of seven states with no limits on corporate giving.”

Virginia also allows unlimited gifts as long as they are disclosed annually. Florida, by contrast, forbids any gifts at all, including a free cup of coffee.

Virginia is also one of nine states that have no ethics commissions. The State Corporation Commission, which oversees business and sets electricity rates, is  immune from the Freedom of Information Act.

Why so lax? One explanation is that years ago, the idea took somehow shape that Virginia’s politicians are gentlemen and ladies above the tackiness of graft. That would be in marked contrast to such sleazepots such as Illinois and New Jersey, which, curiously, received a “C” and a “B+” ranking for accountability the State Integrity survey. Witkin says that states such as these erect tighter rules after significant scandals.

This leads to a chicken or egg kind of problem. “I don’t think the level of public corruption in Virginia is high at all,” says political analyst Bob Holsworth, noting that the survey rated the toughness of laws not how crooked a state is. However, in light of the McDonnell wedding meal, ‘the gift issue is clearly a loophole that should be closed,” Holsworth adds. For starters, he says, gift disclosures should include immediate family members of the public official.

Sounds like a great place to start.

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Posted in Courts and law, Crime and corrections, Electoral process, Finance, Money in politics, Politics, Regulation, Uncategorized

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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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Posted in Economic development, Economy, Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Entitlements, Environment, Federal, Finance, Gay rights, Governance reform, Government workers and pensions, Gun rights, Health care, Housing, Immigration, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor & workforce, Land use & development, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and race relations, Regulation, Science & Technology, Social services, Taxes, The Economy, Transportation

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