Category: Infrastructure
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When Balanced Budgets Aren’t Really Balanced
by James A. Bacon The politics of fiscal implosion are ugly. Just look at what’s going on in Petersburg and Richmond. Confronted with a massive budget deficit last year in contravention of the state constitution and the prospect of a deficit in the year ahead, Petersburg City Council bravely agreed to cut the compensation of…
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Rocky Mountain High Real Estate Values
by James A. Bacon According to a 2011 Wall Street Journal article, Aspen, Colo., could boast of having the most expensive real estate in the country. I don’t know if that’s still true, but I wouldn’t be surprised. As I sit here blogging at Ink! Coffee, looking upon a patio filled with Pellegrino umbrellas and…
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Virginia’s New Road Funding Process — Less Political but Still Opaque
by James A. Bacon In a rare bipartisan achievement, Virginia is doing something that no other state in the union is doing: basing its transportation investments on an objective scoring system. Earlier this month, the Commonwealth Transportation Board (CTB) approved $1.7 billion to be spent on 163 projects selected through the System for the Management and Allocation…
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Bikes, Bees, Beauty
by James A. Bacon New York City has its High Line park built upon an abandoned, elevated freight rail line. The City of Richmond has its Low Line park, built underneath CSX Corp. railroad trestles. In the seven years since opening to great fanfare, Manhattan’s High Line has attracted millions of visitors and inspired the construction of nearly…
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The Tradeoffs of Burying Electric Power Lines
by James A. Bacon Anyone who regards the State Corporation Commission as a wholly owned subsidiary of Dominion Virginia Power really isn’t paying attention. SCC commissioners have their own priorities, and they aren’t necessarily those of Dominion. An example was on display yesterday when the commission held hearings on a Dominion request to spend $140…
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Virginia Procurement Process Needs Reform
by James A. Bacon The Commonwealth of Virginia needs to reform its procedures for contracting and administering billions of dollars of contracts, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) has found in a new study. In 2015 Virginia spent more than $6 billion through contracts, including for transportation projects, information technology, and building construction,…
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Haymarket Project More than Amazon’s “Extension Cord,” Dominion Says
Dominion Virginia Power would have to upgrade its electricity distribution system to the Haymarket area of Prince William County sooner or later, even without the development of a data-center campus, testified Mark R. Gill, an electric transmission planning engineer with Dominion, in State Corporation Commission testimony filed yesterday. “Without the request for service to the Haymarket…
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Could Virginia Beach Become the Next Mecca for Data Centers?
by James A. Bacon Virginia Beach is finally getting its Tide — not the Tide light rail system, but MAREA, the Spanish word for tide, which happens to be the name of a transatlantic cable project recently announced by Facebook, Microsoft and Telefonica, the Spanish telecommunications giant, according to the Virginian-Pilot. The 4,000-mile cable will…
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Swapping Easements
by James A. Bacon Dominion Transmission, managing partner of the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline, has proposed to donate two parcels totaling nearly 1,200 acres to offset the intrusion of its proposed 600-mile pipeline onto lands protected by conservation easements. In a proposal made to the Virginia Outdoor Foundation (VOF), which holds the conservation easements, Dominion would…
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Justifiable Jitters or Unwarranted Worry?
Virginians living in the path of the proposed Atlantic Coast Pipeline fret about the threat of explosions. Dominion Transmission says their fears are overblown. by James A. Bacon Irene Leech, a consumer studies professor at Virginia Tech, grew up on a farm in Buckingham County where her family has raised beef for more than a hundred years.…
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Virginia in No Rush to Address Impending Metro Meltdown
by James A. Bacon The McAuliffe administration seems to be in no hurry to bail out the ailing Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) commuter rail system crippled by declining ridership and an $18 billion capital spending shorttfall over the next ten years. Bolstering state support for the transit authority, which has been plagued for decades by union featherbedding and short-sighted, politically driven…
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Tech’s “Smart Infrastructure” Initiative Progresses
by James A. Bacon Virginia Tech has been re-thinking for a several years now how to invigorate traditional engineering disciplines by integrating civil engineering and computer engineering to create “smart infrastructure.” The $100 million initiative received a $5 million boost yesterday from the Hitt family, owners of Falls Church-based Hitt Contraction, a company that typically recruits eight to ten Virginia…
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Surry-Skiffes Transmission Line Inches Closer to Approval
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has not yet granted Dominion Virginia Power a permit to build a transmission line across a historic stretch of the James River, but it has rejected the argument advanced by foes who argued that electricity demand in the Virginia Peninsula could be met by other means. “Additional analysis further demonstrates…
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SCC Approves Greensville Gas Plant
by James A. Bacon The State Corporation Commission (SCC) approved yesterday Dominion Virginia Power’s filing to build a $1.3 billion natural gas-powered power station in Greensville County. The power station will generate 1,588 megawatts of electricity, upping Dominion’s reliance on natural gas to 39% of its energy mix by 2020. Construction, expected to begin later this…
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Turning Sea Level Rise into a Competitive Economic Advantage
by James A. Bacon To hear Henry R. “Speaker” Pollard describe all the economic risks associated with rising sea levels in Hampton Roads — soaring insurance rates, higher financing costs, declining property values, disruption to business — one might be forgiven for wondering why any business would ever want to consider investing there. “It’s easy…