Category: Land use & Development
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The Craziness Chronicles: Missing Students, Missing News Articles, and ABC Licenses for Teetotalers
Where are the students? Enrollments in many Virginia school districts declined in the 2020-21 school year as parents yanked their children out of schools beset by COVID shutdowns. Now that anyone who wants to can get vaccinated can get a shot and the epidemic has receded somewhat, will enrollment bounce back? The first whiff of…
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What Is a Farming Landowner to Do?
by Jim Kindig My 3rd great grandfather came to Augusta County in the 1820s, cleared land and established crops on land that is still in our family. Several of my neighbors could tell similar stories. We love farming, but it’s a hard life. Incredible increases in productivity have kept agricultural commodity prices depressed for 80…
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How Not to Treat a Conservation Easement
The Commonwealth needs to tighten up its system for granting and overseeing conservation easements, the Virginia Office of the State Inspector General (OSIG) has found. One of three conservation-easement properties visited by OSIG auditors did not meet Conservation Value Review Criteria adopted to provide for quality conservation value. The inspectors saw “trash, old tires, scrap…
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How Hillsboro Reinvented Itself… with Government Grants
by James A. Bacon Hillsboro in western Loudoun County is a rural success story, reports The Washington Post. Over the past couple of years, the town of 120 has transformed its main street, a 0.7-mile stretch of Route 9. The addition of sidewalks made the community’s main drag inviting to pedestrians after having been rendered…
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Chaos In the Streets, er, In the Sidewalks
by James A. Bacon Sidewalks are going to get very crowded, and now is the time to start thinking about what to do about it. We all know that self-driving cars soon will become a common sight, but a white paper, “The Last Block,” by Canadian Bern Grush, an occasional contributor to Bacon’s Rebellion several …
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From Farming Corn to Electrons
By Dick Hall-Sizemore In light of recent denials by local governing bodies, there has been some skepticism expressed on this blog as to whether the Commonwealth could meet its goals on solar energy. Going against recent trends, however, has been the city of Chesapeake. According to the Virginian-Pilot, the city council recently approved an application…
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Bacon Bits: Jerry Reed Tribute Edition
When you’re hot you’re hot. How hot is the data center industry in Northern Virginia? It’s so hot that vacant land in parts of Prince William County is nearing $1 million per acre. “They are just building like crazy,” said Tim Leclerc, Prince William County’s assistant finance director, as reported by the Prince William Times.…
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Cronyism Is Back in Virginia Beach
by Kerry Dougherty You know what they say, it’s easier to say you’re sorry than ask permission. That’s especially true in Virginia Beach. If you’re a well-connected developer, that is. Some of us had such high hopes that city officials would stop acting like poodles for the developers now that elections had given us a…
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Flag Fight
by Deborah Hommer On March 3, 2021, the Fairfax County Planning Commission recommended against adopting proposed regulations governing the number, size and setbacks of flags and flagpoles. “This was a solution, looking for a problem,” said Planning Commission Vice Chairman John Ulfelder. “I suspect, based on a lot of comments we’ve received, a lot of…
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Podcast: How the General Assembly Has Changed
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in Agriculture & forestry, Blogs and Blog Administration, Business and Economy, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Consumer Protection, Courts and law, Demographics, Economic development, Energy, Entrepreneurs and Innovation, Environment, General Assembly, Government Finance, Health Care, Housing, Immigration, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race RelationsBy Peter Galuszka I haven’t contributed much to BR lately since I am slammed with non-Virginia work. I did manage to help out on a Podcast about how the General Assembly has changed the state over the last two years as Democrats have gained power. This Podcast is produced by WTJU, the University of Virginia…
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What Texas’s Crisis Means for Virginia
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in Blogs and Blog Administration, Business and Economy, Consumer Protection, Corruption and Scandals, Culture wars, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Government Finance, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Money in politics, Political Influence, Politics, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technologyby Peter Galuszka The Texas freeze and ensuing energy disaster has clear lessons for Virginia as it sorts out its energy future. Yet much of the media coverage in Virginia and certainly on Bacon’s Rebellion conveniently leaves out pertinent observations. The statewide freeze in Texas completely fouled up the entire energy infrastructure as natural gas…
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What Is That Strange Building? A Tower of Babel? A Wood Screw? A Poop Emoji?
by James A. Bacon Amazon has unveiled the design for one of the buildings on its East Coast headquarters campus in Arlington: a 350-foot-tall structure modeled on a double helix. With trees. Architectural firm NBBJ says it aspires to reflect nature’s fondness for the helix in structures from DNA to the Milky Way Galaxy. But…
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COVID, Urban Flight, and Rural Revival
by James A. Bacon In announcing the creation of three new conservation easements in Henrico County, a recent press release from the Capital Region Land Conservancy made an eye-catching statement. The easements, said the Conservancy, act as a bulwark against rising pressure to develop agricultural land across Virginia “driven most recently by shifts in COVID-era…
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Behind Dominion’s Shift to Renewables
By Peter Galuszka Ever wonder why Dominion Energy found religion and announced a major shift to renewable energy? The answer is that modern, high technology businesses want it and the Richmond-based utility wants to respond to their desires. This one of the themes in this recent cover story I did for Style Weekly that explores…
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COVID, Telecommuting and Urban Renewal
Just a year or two ago, the big momentum in commercial real estate markets was for businesses to relocate facilities from the suburbs to the metropolitan core. Young people wanted to live and work in or near Virginia’s downtowns, and corporations followed the talent. The City of Richmond snagged one prestigious tenant after another. One…