Bacon's Rebellion

  • Virginia as a “Low Tax” State

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    James A. Bacon

    It’s time to put to rest the notion that Virginia is a low-tax state, or even a moderate/low tax state. On page R8 of its June 11, 2007, “Economic Round Up,” the Wall Street Journal published a chart, “Feeding the Government”, that ranked “total local, state and federal tax burdens as a percentage of each state’s income.”

    Virginia ranked 18th from the top — as in, 18th highest, not lowest. Virginia’s tax burden was a hair above the national average but higher than 32 other states. Our tax burden: 32.9 percent of total income. Connecticut had the highest with 38.3 percent, Oklahoma the lowest, with 27.8 percent.

    We’re accustomed to seeing Virginia rank better in state rankings. That’s because most rankings compare total state and local government spending only. But here’s the problem: The federal tax code doesn’t adjust for cost of living. When states and regions have a high cost of living (as Northern Virginia does), its nominal wage levels tend to be higher. Given the highly progressive structure of the federal tax code, nominally affluent regions wind up paying higher taxes.

    Insofar as state/local government policies create dysfunctional human settlement patterns, as they do in Northern Virginia, Virginia’s political economy is directly responsible for high living costs, and indirectly responsible for high tax rates. So, let’s stop the drivel about Virginia being a “low tax” state, and get on with the business of cutting the cost of government, reforming dysfunctional human settlement patterns, and making out tax burden less onerous.

  • Where Dysfunctional Zoning Policy Meets Dysfunctional Immigration Policy

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    James A. Bacon

    I can understand why homeowners get upset when someone buys a house in the neighborhood and then leases out rooms to unskilled, semi-literate immigrants, who proceed to trash the place. Responding to the proliferation of illegal boarding houses, Fairfax County officials have begun cracking down by strictly enforcing zoning codes. (See the Fairfax County Times story.)

    But it appears that part of the problem is of the county’s own making. The mortgage on a modest, middle-class rambler can cost $4,000 to $5,000 per month. Very few households can afford that on their own. That is one of the motivations for leasing out individuals rooms for up to $600 or $700 per month. (See the companion story in the Fairfax County Times.)

    Marta Reyes … lives with her husband and two young children in a small, beige rambler with a perfectly manicured lawn on Frederick Avenue in Springfield.

    Rooms rent for $400 month. She said that 11 people live in the house and that she would rent to six more. Her mortgage is $4,000 a month and, like many who rent out their homes, she said, “I can’t pay for the house myself.”

    Clearly, there is a shortage of affordable housing. It doesn’t cost $4,000 a month to mortgage middle-class houses in fast-growth cities like Atlanta or Houston. That price reflects scarcity of supply — a scarcity induced by zoning policies that discourage construction of low/moderate-income housing.

    The underlying cause of illegal boarding is clouded by the immigration issue. Most of the inhabitants of the illegal boarding houses are of Hispanic origin (Honduran in the case of the woman profiled by the Times), so there is a presumption that they are here illegally. Maybe the are, maybe they aren’t, I don’t know. If they are illegal, they shouldn’t be here — which means that we need to repair our dysfunctional immigration policy, too.

    Update: The City of Winchester, population 25,000, has received 94 overcrowding complaints since July 2006, according to the Winchester Star.

  • Five Bikers, Two Miles, $16 Million

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    James A. Bacon

    I’m a big fan of bike lanes, as Bacon’s Rebellion readers know — but there are limits to how much money we should spend on them. Apparently, the Chesapeake City Council agrees. Yesterday the council voted to reverse a previous decision to build a two-mile, $16 million bike path paralleling a road that currently has only five bikers per day. (See today’s article in the Virginian-Pilot.)

    As Virginian-Pilot columnist Kerry Dougherty railed last week:

    Despite the price, all but one council member at the meeting merrily voted “yes.” And why not? The cash wasn’t coming out of Chesapeake’s coffers. This would be mostly federal and state transportation dollars.

    Defending his affirmative vote, Vice Mayor Dwight Parker explained that Chesapeake couldn’t use the $16 million for anything but the bike path. “If we don’t use it,” he told me. “We lose it.” Sheesh.

    That’s the quality of decision making you get when the federal government doles out money with all sorts of strings attached. The feds ought to get out of the local transportation funding business and stick to projects of national significance. It’s not clear what the state’s role was in this narrowly averted fiasco, but whatever it was, it suggests that someone is not doing a very good job of prioritizing the investment of scarce state tax dollars. Let’s hope that the NoVa and Hampton Roads regional transportation authorities are more careful. (See the previous blog entry.)

  • NoVa’s Transportation Money Geyser: Sidewalks, Signs and Bike Lanes

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    James A. Bacon

    As the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority prepares to approve a slew of taxes and fees expected to yield $300 million a year, the first new projects in the pipeline are coming into view. According to the Fairfax County Times, a $102 million list of projects for Fairfax County include:

    • $10 million for pedestrian upgrades to the Route 1 corridor
    • $6.1 million for upgraded signs at Virginia’s 20 Metrorail stations
    • $2.5 million for gutter, sidewalk and bike lane improvements at Chain Bridge Road and Eaton Place
    • $29 million for the Fair Lakes interchange with the Fairfax County Parkway.

    Pedestrian upgrades? Metrorail signage? Bike lanes? Wow. It’s nice to know that something other than mega road projects are getting funding. What I’d like to see in addition to the list of projects, though, is some kind of return on investment analysis. Inquiring minds want to know.

  • Who the Real Ideologues Are

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    James A. Bacon

    The Roanoke Times has joined a justifiably long list of observers appalled by the prospect of imposing punitive fines for driving offenses — fines that will (a) encourage more people to contest their tickets, (b) clog the courts, and eventually (c) start jamming local jails with working-class stiffs who, unable to pay the fines, will lose their licenses and then get arrested for driving without a license. It won’t take long before these flaws are manifest to all.

    I take no issue with the Times’ criticism of the punitive fines, or even its endorsement of gasoline taxes as a preferred source of transportation revenue. But I do take issue with its kneejerk characterization of the General Assembly. Writes the Times editorialist: “Motorists can thank the General Assembly’s anti-tax ideologues in the House of Delegates who refused even to consider tax increases to pay for the state’s needed highway improvements.”

    Got that? Anyone who opposes tax increases is an “ideologue.”

    As opposed to pro-tax advocates who are… what, exactly?

    By my recollection, the Axis of Taxes has been agitating just as long and hard for higher taxes as their anti-tax foes have been resisting them. But more successfully. Taxes are going up in Virginia this year, not down — a fact that apparently has escaped the notice of the Campbell Ave. crew. Likewise, if the anti-taxers “refused even to consider” tax increases, what can be said of the Axis of Taxes? The pro-tax crowd has just as steadfastly “refused even to consider” any transportation strategy that doesn’t entail higher taxes: strategies such as congestion pricing, an end to government mass-transit monopolies and, most important, reform of human settlement patterns to encourage fewer and shorter automobile trips.

    At least the “anti-tax ideologues” passed legislation that restructures the way in which state and local governments build and maintain roads. The changes, though shamefully under-reported by the press, are comprehensive and far reaching. By contrast, the Axis of Taxes never relinquished its monomaniacal advocacy of tax-build, tax-build as the solution for all transportation ills. With the exception of Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, tax advocates never offered one solution that didn’t require mo’ money. Not one.

    Yes, the punitive fines are an abomination, and I’m betting that they will be repealed eventually. But they might never have been necessary if the Axis of Taxes and its enablers in the punditry hadn’t taken such a hard line and had thought more creatively about how to improve mobility and accessibility.

  • Eeeeee! We’re Not Growing Fast Enough!

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    James A. Bacon

    Here’s a novel predicament: Virginia Beach city council members are worried because they’re experiencing too little residential growth.

    Reports Dierdre Fernandes with the Virginian-Pilot: “When City Council members approved increased development in the Princess Anne area, they assumed that hundreds of high-cost homes would quickly replace the woods and soybean fields and help pay for much-needed road improvements.”

    That hasn’t happened.

    In 2003, the City Council approved up to 3,000 homes for the transition area, 9,600 acres between the suburban north and rural south.

    In the past four years, the council has allowed for 1,376 potential homes. But by the month’s end, 50 are expected to have been sold. That’s far less than the 700 homes Beach officials projected would be generating tax money by this point. …

    The transition area funding plan had called for a portion of real estate revenue from projects … to be set aside for road projects in Princess Anne. A city analysis showed that the overall development in the transition area could pay for itself and create a $187 million surplus in tax revenue.

    Residential development a good thing? Virginia Beach must be using a different econometric model from the localities in Northern Virginia. Somebody needs to revisit some core assumptions guiding their growth-management policies.

    (Hat tip to reader Steve Horton for this story.)

  • Whatever Else You Do, Do NOT Think about Elephants!

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    James A. Bacon

    Edith White, president of the Hampton Roads branch of the Urban League, says apology resolutions and expressions of regret for slavery, in Virginia and in other states, are a step in the right direction. According to the Associated Press, White hopes that the resolutions will “get more people talking about race.”

    Yeah, that’s a big problem in our society today, isn’t it? Not enough talking about race.

    Supposedly, it’s conservatives like me who are obsessed with race. In truth, people like Edith White — and, it appears, Associated Press reporter Kim O’Brien Root — are far more fixated on peoples’ racial identity than I’ll ever be.

    In raising our son, now nine, my wife and I never used racial classifications. We never described our African-American neighbors as “black” as a way to distinguish between us and them. We never referred to athletes or entertainers on television as “black.” We never alluded to our fellow citizens as “black” or “negro” or “African American.” Race may be a political reality in our society, but we wanted to raise Jamie to be color blind.

    I think we succeeded. By the time he was six or seven, Jamie did begin to observe and comment upon the fact that some people had darker skin tones than we did. It was a matter of curiosity, though, not one of substance. Lacking a vocabulary to describe “blacks,” he invented his own phrase, one we never used: “dark-skinned people.” To this day, I am proud to say, race has never been a factor in his interaction with friends, peers and teachers.

    As old as I am, I find that it takes an act of will to ignore race. Our society is so obsessed with the issue that I’m reminded of the old joke, “Whatever else you do, don’t… repeat, do NOT… think about elephants!” The harder you try not to think about elephants (or race), the more you will think about them. My son is learning about the history of slavery and the mistreatment of African Americans in his school. As he gets older he, too, will get caught up in the U.S. obsession with race. But I am hopeful that as an adult, he will find all the fuss about skin color to be baffling. I hope that he not only will judge people by the content of their character but find the hue of a man’s skin to be as incidental as the color of his hair or his eyes.

    So, I totally disagree with Edith White. I think we need to talk less about race. We need to talk more about the kind of personal values and public policies that will enable everyone, regardless of race, to participate fully in our society. The drum-beat of race, race, race around the clock only reinforces the invidious distinction that the Edith Whites of the world supposedly deplore.

    Of course, that is not entirely accidental. The people who gain the most from the obsession with race are not the old-timey southern racists who want to “keep blacks in their place,” but those who gain politically from maintaining a sense of black grievance and alienation, and those who nurture a sense of moral superiority over those omni-present racists lurking in the shadows. I have no sympathy for those people whatsoever. They are leechers of blood and peddlers of snake oil, prolonging the very illness they seek to heal.

  • Mixed Grades for the New Mixing Bowl

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    James A. Bacon

    After eight years of work and $676 million, the Springfield mixing bowl connecting Interstate 95 with the Washington Beltway is complete. But there is growing concern, reports the Washington Post’s Eric Weiss, that the interchange’s 50 ramps and 24 lanes are so confusing that they could be creating safety problems.

    Intuitively, people think that using the right-hand lane will take them to the right. Often, however, fly-over ramps cross the Interstate and take them in the opposite direction.

    Weiss quotes commuter John Ulaszek of Arlington County: “It’s like putting the hot and cold knobs on the opposite side of the sink, and people can’t understand why they just got scalded.”

    Dangerous driving occurs as drivers figure out their mistake at the last moment and cross several lanes of traffic.

    The Virginia Department of Transportation contends that the number of accidents has declined, and that traffic should move more smoothly as locals get accustomed to the mixing bowl’s eccentricities. VDOT is watching the situation carefully and adjusting signage as appropriate.

    A couple of months ago, I had my first encounter with the Springfield interchange. I was driving from Richmond to Washington D.C., planning to take Interstate 395 as I had for many, many years. I stuck to the left-hand land, as I had for many, many years. This time, however, I was whisked off to the Beltway, heading towards Maryland. By the time I figured out what was going on — I often zone out while driving, so it may have taken me longer than someone who was more alert — the Woodrow Wilson Bridge was looming ahead and there was no way to turn around!

    The second time I ventured through the Mixing Bowl I paid more careful attention and negotiated the spaghetti works without incident. I suspect VDOT is right: After taking a wrong turn and ending up in the wrong state, most people will approach the interchange more gingerly the second time around. Eventually, traffic flows should improve. My elderly mother, who has experienced difficulties of her own, is less sanguine, however. She regards the interchange as just another example of the general incompetence and malaise overtaking our society.

  • INSIGHTS AND SILLINESS

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    James A. Bacon

    Deep in the comments on the post “THOSE LIVING IN OLD GLASS HOUSES…, Jim Bacon makes an important point – as he frequently does.

    “As I see it, localities (or Regions and the organic components of Regions , if we had governance reform) would not have any more power to create Balanced Communities than they do today. Indeed, they might well have less. But they would apply a different conceptual framework to their planning of where and how to invest public resources. And they would be more proactive in creating Communities that provided for a Balance of activities within close proximity rather than a landscape of residential and commercial monocultures.” [Capitalization and italics added for clarity.]

    It is not the scope or array of governance powers that is lacking, the problem is the level at which they are exercised – or the level they are now allocated but not intelligently exercised.

    The evolution of functional and sustainable settlement patterns does not require more “powers.” The U.S. and state constitutions grant plenty of powers to governments – and reserve appropriate rights to individuals.

    The problem is establishing a Balance between community (public) responsibilities and private rights (privileges).

    With respect to land use controls, the issue is the level of application: The Level of Control must be at the Level of Impact.

    “Well.” you say, “most important actions have many levels of impact.” Very true, so citizens need a sophisticated system that shares key decisions with appropriate weight for each level of impact.

    At this point there is no governance structure at most of the levels of impact. The organic structure of human settlement pattern, and thus of contemporary society, is not reflected by the governance structure.

    “Oh!” you say, “that would be too cumbersome.”

    Give me a break! If the existing system worked, then for starters, citizens would not face the:

    Mobility and Access Crisis

    Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis

    Helter Skelter Crisis

    Wealth Gap Crisis

    Energy Crisis

    Balance of Payments Crisis

    Retirement and Health Benefits Crisis

    Food Security Crisis

    Communicable Disease Crisis

    Species Diversity Crisis

    Personal and Community Security Crisis requiring a War on Terrorism

    And the slide toward entropy.

    Did we leave any out?

    The three levels of governance was not enough for an agrarian society in 1789 and it is surely not enough now.

    Existing land use controls are based on a 1926 conception of reality that included a cloudy understanding of the impact of the Industrial Revolution as well as a Roaring 20s conception of the evolution from an agrarian society and the emergence of the Autonomobile in a process overseen by Herbert Hoover.

    The 1926 land use control concept is based on an ideal of separation, not Balance. The locus of overt land use controls is at the municipal level but many other laws, regulations, policies and programs are scattered at all three levels. (Four levels with counties, and five with scattered special district authorities that vary from state to state.)

    In the 1960s when we drafted an alternative conception of the state enabling legislation [See 21 Syracuse Law Review 375 (1969)] we did not add new powers. We just reallocated them and established systems to share responsibility and move the level of decision to the level of impact.

    The one tangible product that grew from this work was our Adirondack land use control system. This system is still working today. It is not perfect by a long shot, but the Adirondacks do not look like West Virginia or the Ozarks or even most of the Rockies. It was a step in the right direction but few further steps have been taken.

    The simple guideline is: Level of Control at the Level of Impact

    In his comment, Jim Bacon was responding to a comment by a regular commentor on Bacon’s Rebellion Blog. In a later comment on the post “GRAPHIC PROOF” this same individual demonstrates why it is so difficult to achieve fundamental change when there are so many smart folks that live in human settlement patterns and who believe themselves to be experts.

    In framing a hypothetical, he states: “Now the land is sub-divided into 20 one acre lots. The reason that these lots are one acre is because THAT’S WHAT THE MARKET IS BUYING.” (Emphasis in the original post.)

    The emphasis in the post is intended to dispute the view that, if given a choice, buyers (“the market”) favor by a wide margin Balanced, diverse dwelling options.

    I am sure a lot of developers and builders got a chuckle from the “WHAT THE MARKET IS BUYING” declaration. Those who I heard from did.

    Developers supply sites and builders build houses because of the outcome of running a complex (but often informal) calculation. The base equation balances of greatest return in the shortest time frame with lowest risk.

    This calculation includes, sometimes fuzzy and sometimes incorrect understandings of:

    Complex land use control environments noted above

    Complex municipal governance and political dynamics

    Land assembly and transfer practices skewed by amateur and professional speculators

    Loan conditions established by badly informed capital markets

    Complex labor, subcontractor, supplier and material availability relationships

    Uninformed and misled buyers

    Other factors too numerous to mention

    To cover their mistakes and minimize their risk developers and builders spend billions on advertising to reinforce myths and misconceptions of buyers.

    What is the reality of the market?

    For 40 years Same Builder / Same House / Different Location (SB / SH / DL) studies have shown a strong market preference for dwellings in locations with balance, diversity and close proximity to jobs, services, recreation and amenity, as provided by the best of the Planned New Communities.

    The failure of Planned New Community developers has had almost nothing to do with the market acceptance of the product except where the project location is very bad – in other words, locations where there was no near term prospect of achieving a J / H / S / R /A Balance.

    The SB / SH / DL reality is why many builders are shifting to “New Urbanist” projects and to “Traditional Neighborhood Developments” or at least advertising them as such. The primary problems with these developments is not the ideals, it is the location, scale and mix of uses that preclude achieving Balance. (Reminder for Larry: “New Urbanist” has almost nothing to do with New Urban Region.)

    For 25 year S/PI has been using SB / SH / DL studies in the context of Regional Metrics and radial analysis to show the market reality of location, scale and mix imperatives.

    One last point:

    The supposed “American Dream” of scattered monocultures of the single family detached dwellings on large lots makes up a small percentage of total dwellings but is a major contributor to settlement pattern dysfunction.

    As we recall, a study in Maryland found that 12 percent of the new houses over a 20-year period caused 80 percent of “sprawl.” At S/PI, we do not use that word and thus developed the 87 ½ Percent Rule, the fifth of the Five Natural Laws of Human Settlement Patterns.

    EMR

  • Rail to Dulles: Focusing on the Bechtel Connection

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    James A. Bacon

    Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher has picked up on concerns that Bechtel Corporation, the lead contractor in Boston’s Big Dig fiasco, is the company in charge of extending Metro rail to Tysons Corner and beyond. He adds a few tidbits to the general knowledge base, quoting Sam Carnaggio, the state’s project director for the Metro extension.

    Cargaggio understands the widespread concern about Bechtel but defends the company, contending that the state of Massachusetts was mainly to blame for most of the cost overruns. The project, originally slated to cost $4 billion, wound up costing $14 billion. Carnaggio is undoubtedly correct: Governments are tempted to meddle in projects of Big Dig magnitude — and that’s exactly what worries me. What reason do we have to think that Virginia’s politicians will be any different?

    Writes Fisher:

    The real test, Smyth says, is how closely the government will supervise Bechtel’s work. Carnaggio agrees and says Virginia will examine every invoice Bechtel submits and conduct inspections to make sure the reported work is really done. …

    Carnaggio concedes that the price of rail to Dulles, now estimated at $5.1 billon, has jumped several times and could go higher. “The price is as fixed as any construction project can be,” he says. “Some choices won’t be made until 2010; for example, we don’t want to fix prices for the stations before then because costs for materials could change, up or down.”

    Cost estimates for the Rail to Dulles project have ballooned, even though the state has removed key elements such as stairs and pedestrian bridges to keep the price tag within limits that the federal government will help fund. Do you feel reassured? I don’t. Either (a) someone will decide to add those elements back in, inflating the cost later, or (b) the lack of improvements will deter ridership, aggravating operating deficits and undermining the logic for building the heavy rail extension in the first place. Take your pick.

  • Millions for Transportation, Pennies for Congestion Relief

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    James A. Bacon

    It’s a sad statement about the level of public policy discourse in Hampton Roads when the most pointed newspaper commentary comes from a Northern Virginia. Thank goodness for Stewart Schwartz, executive director of the Coalition for Smarter Growth. (Let us also give credit to the Daily Press editorial page for publishing his column, even if it contradicts a lot of what passes for wisdom from its own pundits.)

    The citizens of Hampton Roads are about to start paying a lot more in taxes to pay for major transportation projects that will do very little to address traffic congestion, says Schwartz:

    Let’s start with Route 460 and the Southeastern Expressway. How did these roads rise to the top of the priority list, when so little is being done to fix existing congestion? Neither highway shows any real benefit in terms of reducing traffic on existing highways like I-64 and I-264.

    Meanwhile, the investment that would make a real difference to one of the worst bottlenecks in the region – additional tunnel and bridge capacity across the James River (with transit) – has been pushed to the bottom of the priority list.

    The Southeastern Expressway doesn’t reduce traffic on existing roads and saves very little time for drivers while sending them right back into some of the worst existing bottlenecks in the region. But it paves over hundreds of acres of critical wetlands and opens up a whole new frontier for real estate speculation.

    Even more egregious is the proposal for a new Route 460 from Suffolk to Petersburg parallel to the existing 460. The current road is predicted to remain at Level of Service A (free-flowing) along most of its length through 2030. Meanwhile, drivers on I-64 and countless other roads throughout Hampton Roads routinely endure Level of Service F, or gridlock.

    Today, Route 460 carries fewer than 10,000 vehicles per day compared to average daily traffic volumes on I-64 of 43,000 to 80,000 vehicles per day in the Williamsburg area alone. Route 460 would also divert few, if any, trips from I-64 according to the environmental study.

    Route 460 is predicted to cost at least $1.5 billion. After pitching the road to the public as a private toll-road construction project, the Virginia Department of Transportation now says that taxpayers would have to pay at least $1 billion of the cost. This would divert revenues from more critical needs which could include both commuter rail and extended carpool lanes on the Peninsula. Worse, one of the private bidders to construct 460 has pushed for tolls on I-64 on the Peninsula and diversion of those tolls to pay for 460.

    Schwartz’ alternative? Redevelop downtowns and older commercial corridors with mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods that support transit and reduce the number and length of automobile trips. In other words (my words, not his): More Virginia Beach Town Center and less Indian River Road.

    I have yet to see either the Virginian-Pilot or the Daily Press dedicate the reportorial resources to compare the costs and benefits of, and alternatives to, the Southeastern Expressway and the U.S. 460 upgrade, much less the behind-the-scenes politicking that moved those two projects to the top of the project list. If those newspapers dedicated one tenth the ink to scrutinizing those critical projects in the news papges instead of cheerleading them on the editorial pages, they might do their readership a real service.

  • Bravely Confronting the Commercial Transport of Companion Animals

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    James A. Bacon

    We’re beginning to see results from Attorney General Bob McDonnell’s “Government & Regulatory Reform Task Force”. The task force has issued 63 recommendations in the realms of agriculture, health care and small business. While the effort is noble in intent, the fruits of the task force’s labor are less than breathtaking. Indeed, most recommendations are so obscure that my reaction is: If that’s all they’ve come up with so far, state regulations really may not be a problem.

    According to a press release, McDonnell directed the Task Force “to move forward with work to codify public participation guidelines for state agencies in an effort to increase the public’s opportunity for input. He also endorsed a proposal to simplify the manner by which small and minority-owned businesses are registered with the state.”

    Nothing objectionable there, but nothing to quicken the pulse either.

    You can access the recommendations on the AG’s website. Here’s the kind of stuff you’ll find:

    • Remove regulations in VDACS, Chapter 150 which governs the commercial transport of companion animals that are redundant with other sections of the Chapter. Recommend deleting Sections 120, 130, 140, 150, 160 and 170.
    • Update citations in the state code. A section pertaining to the Board of Opticians refers to the Department of Labor and Industry, “Division of Apprenticeship Training.” The proper name is “Division of Registered Apprenticeship.”
    • In 12VAC30-100-150, update the referenced methodology of the “Virginia Aid to Families with Dependent Children Program” to “Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF)”.

    It’s just dandy that someone is going through the state code with such a fine eye to detail. It can’t hurt (unless someone’s brain explodes from reading all the fine print.) But let’s be honest: This is not shaping up as the kind of “reinventing government” initiative that will significantly reduce spending or relieve the regulatory burden on the private sector.

  • On the Path to Outsourcing: The Biggest Computer Crash in Recent History

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    James A. Bacon

    One of the crowning accomplishments of the Warner administration was creation of the Virginia Information Technologies Agency, which was supposed to rationalize the state’s IT systems. Yesterday, widespread computer crashes across state government disrupted service to at least one-fifth of Virginia government agencies, reports Peter Bacque at the Times-Dispatch.

    The effects: State and local police couldn’t check driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations. More than 14,000 child-support payments could be delayed. Consumers couldn’t examine corporate records. Some agencies were temporarily unable to pay end-of-fiscal-year bills.

    Was this the biggest computer crash in state government history? In my recollection, it is. Perhaps someone with a better memory can set me straight.

    More to the point: What went wrong?

    Bacque quotes VITA spokesperson Marcella Williamson as follows: “We know the state’s IT network needs work and requires money. That’s why the state and VITA partnered with Northrop Grumman. … The construction of the new data center in Chesterfield County and the backup data center in Lebanon in Russell County will help prevent these kinds of problems, or solve them much more quickly.”

    The state is in the midst of a $1.9 billion outsourcing of its aging computer and communication systems to Northrop Grumman Corp. The Chesterfield center should be in use next month and the Lebanon operation by year’s end.

    VITA needs more money? Really? I thought that the new management structure was supposed to achieve major efficiencies, increase security and provide more redundancy and back-up as protection against catastrophic failure. Clearly, it failed — big time — to provide the back-up. There is more to this story than has been reported so far. Let us hope that the Times-Dispatch gives Bacque the time he needs to dig deeper.

  • GRAPHIC PROOF

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    James A. Bacon

    The front page of today’s WaPo Business section has a graphic that should become the screen saver for every politician and every advocate for Fundamental Change.

    The graphic portrays federal spending as a percentage of GNP — history and projections to 2050.

    The article has the “positions” of six of the 37 people who has declared an interest in being the next president.

    Read it and weep.

    Then figure out how much new spending will be needed in Virginia to fix the mental health system to avoid more VaTechs.

    In the Metro section there is an article on how much paying low wages to teachers costs in recruiting and retraining.

    Then there is the Mobility and Access Crisis and the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis and the Energy Crisis and the Food Security Crisis and the….

    If anyone thinks that in 2007 or 2008 the “do not raise taxes” crowd will get a word in edgewise with all these “needs” …

    The only answer is Fundamental Change.

    Sorry, you are going to have to come to understand the meaning, scope and path to implementation of Fundamental Change of human settlement patterns and Fundamental Change in governance structure.

    There is no other exit.

    EMR

  • A New Use for Night Soil

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    James A. Bacon

    From the Guardian comes word of research into new sources of biofuels:

    Britain could meet much of its future energy demand by turning waste products such as wood, plastic bags and even human sewage into transport fuels, scientists said yesterday.

    So-called “second generation” biofuels could also be produced from agricultural wastes such as straw, as well as farmed energy crops such as willow, and would be free of the controversies that surround current green fuels. A network of waste converters across the country could produce a third of the diesel required by UK motorists while slashing greenhouse gas emissions, the scientists said.

    Building the plants that would make such biofuel products doesn’t come cheap. But let’s face it, the supply of raw materials is in abundant. And unlike ethanol, it wouldn’t require an enormous federal subsidy to produce (yet…somewhere the bureaucratic wheels are turning to develop poop price supports…or will be, if the idea catches on here).

    If ever there was an opportunity for Virginia to take the lead in alternative energy production, here it is.

Now Available

Book cover of 'Dust Mites: A Second American Revolution' by James A. Bacon, featuring astronauts planting a flag with a blue and white emblem on a lunar landscape, with Earth visible in the background.
For sale on Amazon.com

The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….

This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.

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Bacon’s Rebellion is Virginia’s leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.

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