Category: Government Finance
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Virginia Federal COVID Bucks Still Flowing, With $2B More to Go
By Steve Haner Virginia still has $1.7 billion in federal COVID “free money” to spend and two years in which to spend it, from just one of the multiple grant programs President Joe Biden and Congress authorized and paid for with federal debt. That first and largest program is for general government expenditures (State and…
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Atlantic Park Part 8: Surf Park Muni Bonds Add to Project Risk
By James C. Sherlock The surf park jumps right out at you. It is meant to. It will be the first surf pool in the mid-Atlantic region. The other components of Virginia Beach’s Atlantic Park will depend upon it to create buzz and draw visitors. A developer group led by Venture Realty Group initially planned…
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Atlantic Park Part 7: The Quest for Surf Park Financing
Commentary by James C. Sherlock A last-minute search for surf park financing delayed project construction for a year. Neither bankers nor the City of Virginia Beach wanted any part of it. The developer missed a funding deadline. The city forgave it, but the pressure was on. So, with city backing: The journey was so complex…
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Atlantic Park Part 6: Vote for Change
by James C. Sherlock Updated Sept. 14 at 11:14 AM and September 18 at 4:40 PM If an infrastructure project is assessed to be a potential commercial success, that judgement is based on a business plan. Inevitably, because they are very good at what they do, the developers of Atlantic Park had one that would…
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Atlantic Park Part 5: Economic Risks
by James C. Sherlock In Bloomberg, author Allison Nicole Smith commented on the Atlantic Park bonds. She wrote: Muni deals funding tourist attractions have a checkered past. The list of defaulted bonds is a long one, including a water park in Edinburg, Texas, and an iron and steel manufacturing-themed park in Bessemer, Alabama. Like the development…
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Atlantic Park Part 4: Seven Years of Negotiations
by James C. Sherlock Atlantic Park should prove a first-rate attraction when it opens next May. The design is attractive, quality should be good, and the surf park will be unique in the mid-Atlantic, at least for a while. But it has taken what seems like forever to get the deal done, and taxpayers got…
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Atlantic Park Part 3: The Deal of the Century
By James C. Sherlock Updated September 18, 2024 at 10:07 AM and 3:27 PM Atlantic Park is due to open on nearly 13 acres of city land near the Virginia Beach oceanfront in May of 2025. The new entertainment district is the largest public-private partnership project in the history of the Commonwealth’s biggest city. It…
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Atlantic Park Part 1: Prologue
Updated September 18 at 10 AM and 3:16 PM By James C. Sherlock Atlantic Park is under construction as a massive new entertainment district near the oceanfront in Virginia Beach’s resort area. The centerpiece, a surf park, will be surrounded a 3,500-seat concert hall, shops, restaurants, offices, and apartments. If it succeeds, Atlantic Park will…
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Still Clueless
by Dick Hall-Sizemore In a break from the practices of previous governors, Gov. Glenn Youngkin appointed an outsider totally unfamiliar with state government in general and Virginia in particular to be his Secretary of Finance. Before his appointment, Steve Cummings had held several high-level positions in investment banking. After two and a half years on the job,…
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Good Luck With That, Lame Duck
by James A. Bacon The Joint Tax Subcommittee of the General Assembly is convening in Richmond today to discuss how to make Virginia’s tax code more “fair and equitable,” reports Michael Martz in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. When the Democrat-controlled legislature says it wants to make taxes more “fair and equitable,” it’s time to reach for…
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Fiscal Train Wreck
by James A. Bacon Think of the Washington Metro as a harbinger of the fiscal fate in store for the United States: it’s just a matter of time before the wheels fall off the subway car. Today The Washington Post reminds us that the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) is running out of money.…
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Map of the Day: Fiscal Stress
The Commission on Local Government has released its report ranking the “fiscal stress” of Virginia’s local governments. Fiscal stress measures a locality’s ability to generate additional local revenues from its current tax base. As shown in the map above, the most severely stressed localities in Virginia fall into two buckets: cities and chronically depressed coalfield counties.…
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The New Virginia Way
by James A. Bacon Governor Glenn Youngkin announced Friday that Virginia closed out FY 2024 with $1.2 billion more revenues than forecast. Needless to say, every dollar of surplus is spoken for, and none of it is going to taxpayers. The money will fund a list of “contingent” spending priorities — clean water projects, college…
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Money Burning a Hole in their Pockets
by Dick Hall-Sizemore If anyone needs concrete evidence that the 2024 General Assembly had more money for the 2024-2026 biennial budget that it could responsibly spend, he need only to examine one little-known item in the budget: capital maintenance reserve (MR). In an earlier article, I examined this budget item and identified five agencies that…
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All of the Camel is Almost in the Tent
by Dick Hall-Sizemore For more decades than one can remember, the policy of the Commonwealth, with one exception, has been to pay for road construction with money raised by gasoline and other transportation-related taxes. Money in the state’s general fund, consisting of revenue from income, sales, and other miscellaneous taxes, was not available for road…