Bacon's Rebellion

I’ll be taking a break from blogging during spring vacation. The Bacon family embarks tomorrow upon a cruise through the western Caribbean. The locale is almost incidental: Once you’ve seen one palm tree you’ve seen them all. (That’s just a joke, for the humorless among you. In point of fact, palm trees are endlessly fascinating if studied in their ecological context.)

I’m looking forward to a week dedicated to getting in shape — yoga, pilates, treadmills and elipticals — reading, and perhaps gathering a little insight for the blog. I hope to return with a jolly good read for all those interested in human settlement patterns.

While I’m gone, I have no doubt that Ed, Phil, JAB and Norm (and, who knows, maybe Claire will make a reappearance) will keep the pot boiling. I just hope the Bacon’s Rebellion server doesn’t melt down in my absence!

Gov. Mark R. Warner succeeded in getting his 2004 tax increase passed largely on the basis of the promise to taxpayers that he had done everything humanly possible to streamline state government, cut the state workforce and make the state administration run leaner and more efficiently than ever. As evidence for his claims, he could point to the fact that the number of state employees, which stood at 111,993 on Jan. 31, 2001, was down to 105,748 by Jan. 31, 2004.

A five or six percent reduction in head count wasn’t an especially formidable accomplishment by private sector standards, but it was pretty impressive by state government standards. It was certainly enough to give luster to Warner’s reputation as a tight-fisted governor at a time that he was insisting that higher taxes were needed.

Then, along came Timothy M. Kaine, who ran for governor as part of the “Warner/Kaine team,” proclaiming that a Kaine administration would maintain the Warner legacy. Shaking off Jerry Kilgore’s campaign charge that he was just another tax-and-spend liberal, Kaine won the election.

With more than a year in office and two sessions of the General Assembly under his belt, Kaine is looking less and less like Mark Warner. Well, to be more accurate, he looks less like the agressive cost-cutting Mark Warner of popular renown.

According to Department of Human Resource Management figures, the number of employees in state government on Jan. 31, 2007, had climbed to within 97 of what it had been before Warner started hacking down the size of state government. Here are the numbers:

1/31/2001 …… 111,994
1/31/2002 …… 108,039
1/31/2003 …… 104,291
1/31/2004 …… 105,749
1/31/2005 …… 108,796
1/31/2006 …… 110,642
1/31/2007 …… 111,897

(To dig deeper into the numbers by government agency, click here.)

I can’t think of any major programs created since 2004 that could account for such an increase. Apparently, there was less than meets the eye to the Warner-era cost cutting — please note the run-up in employment during the last two years of the Warner administration after the tax increases went into effect. Furthermore, there is no sign in these numbers that the Kaine administration ever adopted the parsimonious attitude that prevailed in the Warner administration at least during the recession years.

Bottom line: When Kaine attacks the GOP transportation compromise on the grounds that it would divert precious General Fund revenues from school children, old people in nursing homes and first responders (ritual disclaimer: I don’t support the GOP bill but I hate seeing it criticized for unjustifiable reasons), he can’t claim the same moral high ground that Warner enjoyed in 2004 when he was campaigning for a tax increase. Today, state spending is soaring and head count is surging.

Not only is the state running a chronic surplus — a point that the low-tax wing of the General Assembly has made frequently — Kaine can make no plausible claim that he’s trying to hold state spending in check. If the Governor wants to convince taxpayers that another tax hike is necessary, he’s going to have to do better.

Charlottesville Tomorrow has posted a podcast of a speech I delivered Tuesday to the Free Enterprise Forum in Charlottesville. It’s a variant of the stump speech I’ve delivered on several occasions in the past two months, laying out in concise form my view of (a) what’s wrong with transportation in Virgina today, (b) why the current proposals being considered by lawmakers in Richmond won’t cure it, and (c) the deep-rooted institutional changes we need to make.

It’s old-hat material for long-time Rebellion readers, but newcomers to the blog might find it useful — if you’ve got nothing better to do with a half hour of your time — to hear the conceptual framework I use when approaching transportation issues. Yes, believe it or not, the comments I make on this blog are not random, disconnected observations. They all tie together and, ultimately, support one another.

A side note: I really must commend the Charlottesville region for the sophistication of its civic organizations. The Free Enterprise Forum, which hosted my speech, is putting on a year-long series of speeches exploring different facets of the transportation issue from free-market perspectives. The organization has emerged as an important player in the dissemination of information and ideas related to community improvement.

Additionally, Charlottesville Tomorrow does a fantastic job of compiling information related to transportation, land use and community design in the region, making information from obscure and dusty corners of the governmental process readily available to the public, and taking full advantage of digital technology to incorporate photos, graphics, audio and video into the website.

As newspapers continue to suffer erosion of readership and resources to keep tabs on the local governance process, organizations like these two may well represent the future.

The grassroots email network is buzzing tonight with rumors that Sen. John Chichester, the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, will not be running for re-election. Chichester will reportedly make the official announcement on Monday.

I affectionately referred to Chichester in my columns and postings as “Sir John ‘tax them until they’re dead and then hit them with the death tax’ Chichester. There is little doubt that if it weren’t for Commissar Chichester and his Senate gang of five, Mark Warner would have never been able to enact the 2004 tax increase.

If Chichester does indeed step down, there is little doubt that another chapter to the era of the good ole boys running our Commonwealth has come to an end.

The uproar caused by Texas Governor Rick Perry’s Executive Order mandating the HPV vaccine (Gardasil) for 6th grade girls caused the drug manufacturer Merck to announce it will no longer lobby states to make the vaccine mandatory for school attendance.

In Virginia, the bill to order the mandatory vaccination of young girls passed the State Senate unanimously. One must wonder whether the members of the General assembly who voted for the HPV Vaccine legislation should be willing to have their wives and daughters take this untested drug, first.

Merck has made modest donations to Virginia politicians over the years. In 2006, Merck directly donated only about $13,150. Their donations were split 2:1 in favor of Republicans; for an itemized list of Merck’s 2006 donations, click here. In the last 10 years Merck has made 323 donations totaling $196,859 (click here).

What’s more interesting, however, are the registered lobbyists that represent Merck in Virginia. Merck lists the following registered lobbyists:

Nolen, Christopher R
Finnegan, Kevin M
Pratt, Mark C
Jones, Reginald N
Lombard, Joy M
Bowen, Sandra D

Each one of these individuals, with the exception of Kevin M Finnegan who shows a Bethesda, MD address and may be a direct Merck employee as his email address is given as [email protected], is affiliated with Williams Mullen Strategies, PO Box 1320, Richmond VA 23218.

And this is where it gets interesting, because Williams Mullen is listed in VPAP.org as representing numerous clients before the General Assembly. He is shown having donated $95,186 in 2006 and $781,412 over the last ten years. Unfortunately, there is no itemization of the donations by client, but presumably a significant amount came from Merck. (The individual lobbyists registered as representing Merck have made minor contributions over the years, by comparison.)

In a nutshell one could surmise that Merck created a demand for an unproven–and in all likelihood unneeded–vaccine, lobbied the legislators, and after making some significant contributions to the war-chests of several state politicians, got a bill that pretty much guarantees a market for their drug. Now that’s doing business the American way!

One must also wonder how pro-life legislators will explain this vote to their constituents back home.

Ever inquisitive, Bacon’s Rebellion has been busy investigating the concerns of Del. Brian Moran, D-Alexandria, that the Republican transportation plan would fund road building at the expense of “holding more classes in trailers, having fewer nursing-home beds for our elderly and failing to provide equipment to our first-responders.”

(Ritual disclaimer: I am not defending the financing elements of the GOP plan, which I regard with loathing. I am addressing the flawed logic of those who oppose it for the wrong reasons.)

In particular, I am interested in Del. Moran’s insinuation that increasing K-12 spending by a mere 19 percent during the current biennial budget is insufficient to hold down the number of children schooled in pre-fabricated dwellings, and that only the continued break-neck expansion of state aid to education can prevent Virginia’s schools from evolving into trailer parks, albeit trailer parks with books. (On this last point, actually, one cannot be entirely confident that Republicans don’t have it in mind to deprive the children of books as well.)

One of the legitimate factors driving increased K-12 spending is the increase in number of school children. More children translates into more school buildings (trailers, whatever), more teachers, more local education bureaucrats and more state education bureaucrats. One could hardly begrudge an increase in state aid that kept pace with the increase in the number of loveable little tykes thirsty for knowledge.

It so happens that the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Services projects the number of school children that Virginia will have to educate in the years ahead. Here are the numbers:

School year Enrollment
2006-20007…… 1,202,686
2007-2008……… 1,207,360
2008-2009……… 1,211,140
2010-2011………. 1,217,478
201102012……… 1,224,028

That represents an enrollment growth rate of less than one half of one percent annually. I can’t find any projections for population increase during those same years, but the population of Virginia grew approximately eight percent between 2000 and 2006, or more than one percent a year.

In other words, the increase in school enrollment is slowing to a crawl, and it is greated outpaced by the increase in the general population. (Even if the rate of population increase slows from the torrid pace of the early decade, a significant gap is likely to persist.) More inhabitants means more taxpayers, which means more tax revenue. It would be fully within the state’s means, even if one percent of the General Fund were diverted to transportation, to continue dumping money into Virginia’s public education system at a rate that greatly exceeds the incremental increase in the number of students.

If exercising modest restraint in the metastazing growth in education spending results in relegating more school children to trailers, then Virginia’s education system is even more dysfunctional than it is acknowledged to be. Such a development would signal that priorities are seriously skewed, and that someone needs to ask where the money is going.

Bacon’s Rebellion slammed the Republican Party of Virginia for a recent video ad that twisted the facts in the transportation debate. (See “RPV Propaganda.”) Not to be outdone, Del. Brian Moran, D-Alexandria, has launched a website that treats the truth with even more contempt.

“Protecting Virginia’s Future Starts With You!” proclaims noraid.net. “Stop the Raid on Our Future!” Reports Michael Hardy with the Times-Dispatch:

“We can’t solve our transportation problem by holding more classes in trailers, having fewer nursing-home beds for our elderly and failing to provide equipment to our first-responders,” Moran said in a statement unveiling his Web site yesterday.

The Republicans, you see, “want to pull $200 million away from … important programs [in order] to build roads.” The Republican raid on the General Assembly would “turn investments into debts,” including: “Cuts as much as the entire budget for Norfolk State, Longwood University, JMU, Mary Washington, UVA-Wise and the Roanoke Higher Education Center & new College Institute – combined!”

Cuts? What cuts? There are no cuts –only reductions in funds that might otherwise have gone to these institutions over and above existing budgets, which have increased 22 percent from the previous biennium to the current one.

And what’s this about cuts “as much as the entire budgets” for the seven institutions? The “entire budgets” amount to 687.2 million in Fiscal 2oo7. (See higher ed budget.) Wow, that’s a lot of wampum. Only trouble is, the statement is totally inaccurate. State support for the seven institutions amounts to $198.6 million. Not quite the same thing. Somehow, Hardy didn’t seem to think the distortion worth noting or correcting in his brief article.

This is scare-mongering of the most disgraceful sort. Moran has managed to do something quite remarkable: Make previous Republican distortions look mild If so, politics in Virginia is sliding downhill fast.

A compromise presumes one side has merit. I don’t find that to be the case in the the removal of the Christian cross from a historically Christian chapel because the Cross is offensive to some intolerant, anti-Christian bigots. Yet, in the spirit of comity, not compromise, I support this statement below.

Here is the statement from Leaders of SaveTheWrenCross.org (Full disclosure: I am a member of this group even though my connection is W&M faculty – one term, not alumni)

WILLIAMSBURG , VA — The following is a statement of leaders of SaveTheWrenCross.org in response to yesterday’s press conference at William and Mary announcing the return of the Wren Cross to Wren Chapel:

We are very thankful that the Wren Cross will be returned to permanent display in Wren Chapel.

While there remain very important issues related to the nature of the display of the cross in Wren Chapel to be addressed by the Religion Committee, we express gratitude today to a number of people wh contributed to making yesterday’s return of the cross possible. First, the staffs of the two William and Mary student newspapers deserve a salute: The Flat Hat for first bringing to light the news of the cross’ removal; The Virginia Informer for providing an opportunity for a thoughtful debate of the issues involved; and both for their continued coverage. Second, we are thankful for the thousands of students, alumni, faculty, and friends of the College who signed and supported the SaveTheWrenCross.org petition that helped bring attention to this issue. Many of these signatories helped define the issues and explain the consequences of the cross’ removal in letters to the editors and op-eds across Virginia . Third, we thank the Governor and Attorney General of Virginia, who both made statements in support of returning the cross to Wren Chapel. Fourth, we thank the Religion Committee, which deserves great credit for its leadership and swift action, in particular its two co-chairs Professors Alan Meese and Jim Livingston. Lastly, we thank members of the media who understood the importance of this issue and responsibly covered it.

We believe that the Religion Committee has acted in tremendously good faith and with the best interests of William and Mary uppermost in their minds. We applaud them for taking the initiative to expedite their deliberations with regard to the display of the cross.

We are especially grateful that the unanimous judgment of William and Mary’s Religion Committee to return the cross is an unambiguous repudiation of the destructive idea that William and Mary should ever tolerate intolerance towards religious symbols.

We urge the Committee to follow through on an implementation of a cross display practice that is consistent with those used by other Colonial Colleges with historic Christian chapels.

We also urge the Committee to follow through on its original charge to examine broader questions involving the role of religion at public universities, and to solicit a wide spectrum of student, alumni, and community input. Following through on this mission is all the more important in wake of the Committee’s recommendation adopted yesterday by the Board of Visitors.

Specifically, there is still a significant amount of clarity that the Religion Committee can provide to the issues involving the display of the cross. With the removal of the cross from Wren Chapel last October, there was a theory advanced over the last several months – as late as March 1 — about the inappropriateness of the ongoing display of a Christian cross in an historic Christian chapel. With the Committee’s unanimous recommendation, this theory has clearly been repudiated. Yet, in the 71 word recommendation by the Committee, no explanation has been advanced for why its new approach to the cross display policy has been adopted. We believe it is important to ground in sound reason and logic the rationale for departing from the previous cross display policy that had been in place for nearly 70 years.

This is especially important since we are a university community, and since as the second oldest university in America – and one of her great liberal arts universities — the decisions made on this campus have great significance. They must be thoughtful, made with deliberate consultation, with accountability, and above all, with respect to the traditions and heritage that make William and Mary the Alma Mater of a Nation. G.K. Chesterton wrote, “It is obvious that tradition is only democracy extended through time. It is trusting to a consensus of common human voices rather than to some isolated or arbitrary record….Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” When we proceed to alter traditions, a decent respect for public and College community opinion would suggest that a thorough accounting and explanation for such a departure is warranted.

The leaders of the SaveTheWrenCross.org are W&M students and alumni who had not known one another prior to the start of this effort. We resolve to remain fully engaged in the work of the Religion Committee’s ongoing deliberations about the display of the cross and the more general questions about the role of religion at a public university that it will address. We resolve further to remain engaged in the future life of the College, especially in matters relating to protecting and celebrating its heritage. We also resolve to engage in efforts to ensure that William and Mary continues to be a place that is welcoming to people of all faiths, in the American tradition of religious pluralism.