Bacon's Rebellion

Ken Vigil, York County Citizens for Historical Holidays, had this open letter in the Yorktown Crier/Poquoson Post (Oct. 18, 2006):

Dear York County Citizen, Please contact your York County School Board District representative and ask for a ‘No’ vote and a simple, fair fix to the change to the policy on Religious Instruction and Released Time – on October 23rd. This change in policy may make the problem worse.

The Problem. Last December several York County schools were culturally cleansed of every mention of Christmas – both traditional religious and secular content – as effectively as the Communists did in the old Soviet Union. Concerned parents spoke up at the March 20-06 School Board meeting. They asked the Board to adopt the Virginia Department of Education guidelines on holidays to educate children about the official Federal and Virginia holiday of “Christmas.” The School Superintendent made an effort to fix the problem.

Unfortunately, the new policy presented in September is worse than the problem. Students and staff can be forced to participate in activities contrary to their religious belief if there are “clear issues of compelling public interest.” This is against the Virginia Department of Education guidelines (paragraph 25).

York County assumes a new role to advance the politically correct and undefined “students’ knowledge and appreciation of religious diversity.” These loaded words poorly replaced an earlier draft that spoke instead of “the role that religion has played in the social, cultural, and historical development of civilization.” A lawyer from Newport News told the School Board to take out the word “traditional” in the phrase “traditional use of prayers, religious music, or religious objects or symbols in any secular program.” The proposed changes ruin a perfectly good policy on Religious Instruction and Released Time, and they seed controversy for the future.

The problem isn’t religion in schools. No parent asked for religion to be taught in public schools. No one asked for religious observances in school. No one asked for special treatment of Christianity. The problem is not educating the children about one official holiday – Christmas.

There is a K-3 Standard of Learning for school counselors that requires Virginia’s students to “Understand that Americans are one people of many diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and national origins who are united as Americans by common customs and traditions.” Teaching about our heritage and traditions is educationally crucial!

A Solution. Please ask the School Board to NOT change the policy on Religious Instruction. Please ask for the simple addition, “York Schools will follow the Virginia Department of Education guidelines for all official Virginia holidays.”

I have deleted the contact info for the School Board. The School Board meeting is on October 23rd. We’ll see what they decide.

The WaPo profiles author Karrie Jacobs, a New York freelance writer who drove her VW convertible around the country in search of a dwelling she could afford — and wanted to live in. Jacobs, a founding editor of Dwell magazine, has just published a book based on her journeys, “The Perfect $100,000 House: A Trip Across America and Back in Pursuit of a Place to Call Home.”

Jacobs found that the vast majority of home builders are building big houses, not affordable ones, and most stick with traditional designs — nothing she’d be interested in buying. But she did find a few examples she found inspiring. One New Urbanist community outside Denver features a profusion of modernistic designs and colors. The houses were affordable when built, although the project has proven so successful that prices have soared past $500,000.

In Houston, Jacobs found an update of the old shotgun shanty, built on a quarter-acre lot for $150,000. The architect, Brett Zamore, is trying to turn his “Shot-Trot” design into a kit, which Jacobs figures will turn him into “the Starbucks of housing.”

The WaPo writer, Linda Hales, gives the impression that the creation of affordable housing is primarily an architectural issue — it’s not clear whether that’s her bias or Karrie Jacobs’. In reality, affordability is more a land use issue than an architectural one. Even so, the article is worth a quick read.

(Hat tip to Bob Burke for pointing me to the article.)

What do Virginians think about taxes and transportation? It depends on who you ask — and who’s doing the asking.

The Washington Post thinks Northern Virginians want to raise taxes: “A large majority of Northern Virginia residents want the state to spend more money to fix the region’s roads and rails, and more than three-quarters say they wanted the opportunity to raise local taxes to do it, a new Washington Post poll shows.” Michael Shear reports:

The survey finds deep resentment among the region’s voters toward their government in Richmond, particularly the General Assembly. Only 9 percent of likely Northern Virginia voters polled said they were “very satisfied” that the government is working for the best interests of their part of the commonwealth. Forty-eight percent of those voters said they were dissatisfied, compared with 37 percent in other parts of the state.

At the same time, those likely voters living in the Washington suburbs gave extremely high marks to Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D), despite his having so far failed to make good on his campaign promise to help solve the region’s transportation problems. Almost 80 percent of Northern Virginians approve of the job he is doing as governor, the poll found.

In the poll, 55 percent of the region’s likely voters blamed lawmakers, especially Republicans, for the failed special session last month. Only 11 percent blamed Kaine.

According to Garren Shipley with the Northern Virginia Daily, another recent poll by SurveyUSA found that 87 percent of voters think it is “very” or “somewhat” important to spend more money on the state’s road system. But 65 percent opposed raising license fees for cars, 83 percent opposed raising the gas tax, and 70 percent opposed raising the sales tax on cars and trucks. On the other hand, 58 percent supported taking money from the general fund — just as House Republicans proposed. Does someone smell a disconnect?

Why the huge disparity? Part of the reason is that the Washington Post surveyed Northern Virginia voters, while SurveyUSA polled Virginia voters generally. Northern Virginia voters appear to be more receptive to tax increases than downstaters.

But there may well have been a difference in the questions asked. People tend to be receptive to the idea of tax increases in the abstract, thinking that someone else will pay them. The more specific you get, the more likely people are to oppose them. The Post apparently did not ask citizens what they thought of specific taxes; SurveyUSA did. Additionally, SurveyUSA asked about an alternative funding mechanism for roads — tapping the General Fund surplus. People liked that idea. The Washington Post apparently did not remind Northern Virginians that the state has been running chronic budget surpluses nor that the General Fund alternative was even on the table.

Then, of course, there were the questions that neither poll asked:

– “Should VDOT be reformed before taxes are raised — to ensure that new revenues are not wasted?”

– “Should land use reform be part of any funding package — to ensure that new revenues are not wasted?”

– “Should new revenues for transportation be based on the principle that that those who drive the most should pay the most?”

– “Should any revenue-raising scheme, besides paying for new roads, be structured to encourage drivers to adopt alternative modes of transportation?”

– “Should new construction be paid for with tolls?”

Questions devoid of context or alternatives can lead people to any conclusion you want. If the pollster has unconscious biases, he will skew the findings. If the pollster has overt biases, the results are worthless. I could construct a poll showing that Virginians think the King of Siam would make a better governor than Tim Kaine. But it would be an artificial construct, not a reflection of reality.

Because the Washington Post and SurveyUSA polls reflect the mental constructs of those who fashioned the questions, they aren’t terribly meaningful in plumbing public sentiment.

My wife and I took our annual tour last weekend through the beautiful Virginia countryside to partake of fall foliage, lovely vistas, wine tasting, fine dining and the Commonwealth’s rich historical heritage. It just so happens that the area we love the most — the rolling hills between Charlottesville and the Potomac River — overlaps with the Virginia portion of the Journey Through Hallowed Ground.

Among the friends we visited was Cate Magennis Wyatt, who, as coincidence would have it, is the driving force behind Journey Through Hallowed Ground. Her immediate goal is to win federal designation as a National Heritage Area for the historical swath between Charlottesville and Gettysburg, Pa. Longer term, she wants to preserve historical sites as well as the unique landscapes and lifestyles of the region by building tourism and agriculture.

Wyatt, a former real estate portfolio manager and developer, is a capitalist. She is building a preservation program based on respect for property rights and market principles. The National Heritage Area designation, she says, will prohibit the acquisition of land through condemnation. Further, no federal funds from the NHA legislation will be used to purchase land. The proper way to preserve the region’s history and character, Wyatt insists, is (a) to build awareness of the region’s rich heritage, (b) to raise private funds to buy irreplaceable properties, and (c) to find economic models for agriculture and tourism that will make the property more valuable in its current uses than it would be if carved up for subdivisions and shopping centers.

Wyatt outlines some of her views in an op-ed piece in the Loudoun Times-Mirror. But that column barely scratches the surface of her fertile thinking. Some of her ideas are still in the formulation stage, so it is premature to discuss them. Suffice it to say that if a mere fraction of them come to fruition, Journey Through Hallowed Ground will become a textbook study in historical conservation.

By the way, if you’re looking for a fun weekend retreat, consider Virginia’s northern piedmont. You can order the Journey Through Hallowed Ground travel guide here.

This issue will bear watching: Sen. Kenneth W. Stolle, R-Virginia Beach has scolded the chief justice of the Virginia Supreme Court for overstepping his authority in seeking to reform the state’s mental-health laws. Covering a Senate subcommittee hearing yesterday, Bill McElway with the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports:

Stolle wondered aloud if the Supreme Court has become an activist body. He warned Lucyk that the high court’s role is one of administering the courts and deciding the law, not legislative priorities and spending recommendations.

“The more you talk, the more concerned I become,” Stolle said when Lucyk gently tried to rebuff any suggestion that the mental-health-reform commission intends to overstep the legislature’s role.

The unusual flare-up came just days after Chief Justice Leroy R. Hassell Sr. told several dozen people involved in mental-health issues to work over the coming year to revamp mental-health laws in Virginia. …

Stolle, chairman of the Senate Courts of Justice Committee, said, “I don’t think it’s appropriate if judges don’t like what we are doing with mental health, to tell us how we should deal with mental health. “I think they ought to inform us on how mental-health issues impact the courts. And not to tell us how to do our job.”

Sen. Janet Howell, D-Fairfax, defended the chief justice. Virginia is in a crisis, she said. Overcrowded jails have become warehouses for the mentally ill, state funds are lacking to properly care for them, and cases are spilling into the courts. If the reform effort comes down to money, Stolle responded, that is the bailiwick of the legislature, not the courts.

For once I find myself agreeing with Stolle. If state mental health policies break the law, the state Supreme Court should say so. But it’s up to the Governor and the General Assembly, not the judges, to figure out how to fix them.

The case seemed so compelling: Dr. Christopher S. Walsh, operator of a cancer-treatment clinic in rural Westmoreland County, pleaded with a legislative/citizen commission to require insurance companies to cover a novel radiation therapy known as solid compensator Intensity Modulated Radiation Treatment. He lined up expert witnesses to testify on his behalf and cancer survivors to tell how the treatment saved them.

But Anthem Blue Cross and Blue Shield, which dropped its coverage of the treatment earlier this year, claims that the advantages of the expensive procedure have not been clinically proven. “If IMRT eventually is not found to be the safest and most effective . . . we would be forced to pay for treatment that may not be safe and effective,” said Dr. Mae Ellen Terrebonne, vice president medical director for Anthem in Virginia.

According to Lawrence Latane with the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a report by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission calculated that a full battery of treatments would cost about $16,500. That one set of procedures would be expensive enough to raise median monthly medical premiums by $1 per month if mandated by the state.

At one time, Virginia had more medical mandates than any almost every other state in the country — and it may still. The result was fantastic coverage for those who could afford the insurance — and no coverage at all for those who couldn’t. Small businesses who can’t afford to self-insure and exempt themselves from the mandates have little flexibility in the kind of insurance policies they offer. Mandates make it impossible, for instance, to offer bare-bones coverage that protects against catastrophic illnesses and allows patients the benefits of negotiated rates on routine expenses — which is certainly preferable to no coverage at all for those one million Virginians who lack it.

The decision of which procedures get covered should be left to the medical experts and the actuaries who design insurance policies for different market segments — not to the political process, where decisions can be manipulated by heart-wrenching anecdotes.

The Washington region is third only to New York and Chicago for the percentage of workers with “extreme commutes,” defined as 60 minutes or more each way, according to “Commuting in America III,” published by the Transportation Research Board. (For a snappy summary of the findings, read the coverage in the Washington Post.)

The study offers an abundance of data about commuting trends. (Read a digest of cool commuter facts here.) Work travel constitutes only 16 percent of total travel. (Ever notice how congested it’s getting on Saturdays?) … Because most immigrants are working age, they’re more like to drive to work. Hispanic immigrants also are more likely to carpool…. Commuting from suburb to suburb now accounts for 46 percent of all commuting…. Driving alone continues to increase, while walking to work is declining precipitously…. Average commute times have increased from 21.7 minutes in 1980 to 25.5 minutes in 2000….

Of particular interest to me is the “extreme commuting” number. Here are the rankings for major Virginia metro areas:

3. Washington, 12.83 percent of commuters
33. Hampton Roads, 4.89 percent of commuters
38. Richmond, 4.46 percent of commuters

Of the 12 counties with the highest percentage of long commutes in the country, the Washington area has three: Prince William, Va., and Prince George’s and Montgomery in Maryland.

I’ve heard of subdivisions built around golf courses, but not subdivisions built around equestrian centers. But NASCAR driver and Lynchburg-area land developer Stacy Compton is planning just such a thing — a subdivision of 300 luxury, single-family houses on 1,200 acres, according to the News Advance. Lot sizes will range between two and 10 acres.

I believe that developers should be allowed to experiment with new housing concepts — even if it means contributing to a scattered, disconnected, low-density pattern of development. But the Campbell County board of supervisors needs to make sure that the project covers its location-variable costs. What will be the impact on traffic congestion and the need for road improvements and cul de sac maintenance? Will the County have to build a new school and library? Will it cost more to provide faster response times for fire, ambulance and police? Campbell County needs to know the answers.

Whether Campbell supervisors employ proffers, impact fees or special tax districts, they should ensure that the project offsets the strain it places upon local government finances. Ideally, they should consider also the traffic impact on neighboring jurisdictions — although, admittedly, there is no incentive under the current governance structure to do so.

The Kaine administration’s report of September revenue collections is in, and revenues are once again running way ahead of forecasts. The July-August numbers showed the same thing, as reported on this blog, but they weren’t deemed as as significant as September, a major revenue month.

According to Secretary of Finance Jody Wagner, General Fund revenues for the first quarter of fiscal 2007 ran 7.6 percent ahead of the same quarter last year — and nearly double the 4.2 percent forecast for purposes of compiling the budget.

And Gov. Kaine still insists there’s not enough General Fund money to pay for Virginia’s schools, Medicaid program, mental health restructuring and environmental clean-up? With all that money sloshing around, he thinks the public will vent its wrath on House Republicans in 2007 for refusing to raise transportation taxes?

That argument is collapsing like trailer in a Katrina-force hurricane.

Global competition and labor costs are the main reasons that manufacturing employment in Virginia is in decline, concludes a study by the General Assembly’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission. New technology and improved productivity are another important contributor, notes the Associated Press.

“We didn’t find anything that led us to believe that Virginia regulations were the primary factor in the decline,” said Justin Brown, project leader for the study by the General Assembly’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission.

Since 1992, manufacturing employment in Virginia has tumbled 27 percent to about 296,000 workers.

Frankly, the study offers little new — it simply confirms what everyone should know already. Virginia arguably has the general best business climate in the country, as confirmed most recently by Forbes magazine. That’s not to say that we can’t tweak things to improve the climate for manufacturing. One widely cited concern was the machinery and tools tax, which generated $194 million in revenue for local governments in 2005. But even that tax was not regarded as decisive.

“Cutting costs” is largely a dead end. Future growth in Virginia manufacturing will come, if it comes at all, from enhancing the knowledge, productivity and innovation of the companies located in the state. To grow, Virginia-based manufacturers must invent new products, devise process improvements and apply new technologies. We need to move to a new level — embracing a mindset that emphasizes R&D, human capital and the creation of 21st-century institutions for the exchange of ideas.

Christina Nuckols at the Virginian-Pilot has described the role of business lobbies — in particular, groups representing Realtors, insurance companies, gasoline retailers and the auto dealers — in defeating General Assembly efforts to raise taxes for transportation. All of these groups felt threatened by one plan or another to stick them with the tab for higher transportation spending.

As Nuckols sums up the situation: “Every new idea that emerged for financing roads mobilized a new business group that felt it was being targeted.”

Kudos to Nuckols for digging deeper than the Axis of Taxes spin on the special section, parroted by so many in the Mainstream Media, that blamed obstructionist ideologues in the House of Delegates for the failure to reach an agreement. If only she had taken her inquiry one step further to observe that the Axis of Taxes legislative strategy was fundamentally flawed from the beginning.

The problem with the tax-raising schemes is that none of them established a rational nexus between those being taxed and those who would benefit from the construction of new roads and rail projects. Of course, those who were targeted for taxes were going to lobby as if their lives depended upon it.

Virginia’s transportation system clearly needs more revenue. The trouble is, lawmakers steadfastly refuse, for fear of alienating voters, to raise the gasoline tax. I can conclude only that Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and others in the Axis of Taxes made a political calculation that it would be easier to raise $1 billion through a mish-mash of narrowly targeted taxes than through a tax that established a direct connection between miles driven and taxes paid. I have greater faith in the voters: I think they would be willing to raise taxes on themselves as long as they were assured the funds weren’t going to be spent on politically driven projects that benefited mainly road builders, land speculators and politicians.

I believe that voters could be persuaded to support the following:

1. Maintenance. Peg the gasoline tax to the cost of maintaining the state road network. If costs go higher, as many fear it will, the tax goes higher. If efficient VDOT management or devolution to localities can constrain the rise in maintenance costs, then taxes will stay stable. In either case, voters can understand — and accept — the connection between what they’re paying and what they’re getting. (Eventually, the gasoline tax should give way to a Vehicle Miles Driven tax, adjusted for the weight of the vehicle.)
2. Congestion Mitigation. Use congestion pricing to address the issue of road “scarcity” during periods of peak demand. Promise voters that congestion revenues will be plowed back into congestion-mitigation investments in the same transportation corridor/district.
3. Economic development. Use the General Fund to pay for economic development projects like U.S. 460, the Coalfield Expressway, U.S. 58, Interstate 73. Because such projects constitute an inter-regional transfer of wealth, they should compete with other priorities in the political bargaining process — not put on transportation funding auto pilot. Tap the state’s AAA bond rating to issue long-term bonds as necessary.

(Hat tip to Tom McCormick for pointing me to the Nuckols article.)

Update: It’s noteworthy that the Daily Press also has editorialized in favor of the gas tax. But there’s a world of difference between the DP‘s thinking and mine. To the DP, higher gas taxes are the quickest, easiest way to raise large amounts of revenue in order to Build More Stuff. To my way of thinking, a gas tax (to be supplanted eventually by a Vehicle Miles Driven tax) is critical to establishing a rational nexus between payers of the tax and beneficiaries of transportation improvements — a nexus that changes the economic calculation of driving and incentivizes motorists to curtail demand. Additionally, while raising more money (to Build More Stuff) is an end in itself to the Axis of Taxes, it is, to my mind, only one of many fundamental changes we must make.

As the P.R. war heats up in Loudoun County over the future of the Dulles South district, the Piedmont Environmental Council has been a leading voice opposing the granting of greater density. According to the Loudoun Times-Mirror, Supervisor Steve Snow, R-Dulles, considers the PEC a malign influence:

“[PEC members] are insidious. They are everywhere,” said [Snow] at the Oct. 3 Board of Supervisors meeting. “They are trying to take over local and state government to try and get their will done for environmental extremism, and I think we have to fight against it.”

Newspapers ads, paid for by the pro-growth group the Right Growth Policy Institute, detail a complex chain of influence that reaches from the PEC all the way up to the governor’s office in Richmond. Characterizing the PEC as the “hunt-country elite,” the ads claim the organization is using its influence to “stop economic development, job growth and private investment in new infrastructure.”

It is true that the PEC has worked its way into the inner sanctum of power in Richmond for the first time ever. As the Times-Mirror recounts:

Scott Kasprowicz, a former PEC board member who donated more than $140,000 to the Kaine for Governor campaign, was named Deputy Secretary of Transportation. More recently, Peter Schwartz, who was vice-chair of the PEC and gave more than
$31,500 to Kaine, is a new appointment to the Commonwealth Transportation Board. The CTB, which Kasprowicz serves on as well, directs state funding to individual road projects throughout the state.

The PEC also funds Bacon’s Rebellion’s Road to Ruin project, so I may be hopelessly “conflicted” when I say this, but… The charges are hystericallly overblown.

First, the “influence” of the PEC in the Governor’s Office is more than offset by the heft of Business As Usual interests such as developers, home builders, construction firms, engineernig firms and all the rest. As an indicator of who is winning the tug of war, the Governor abandoned his commitment to allow localities to restrict rezonings that would negatively impact the local transportation network — the top legislative priority of the PEC and other conservationists. Instead, Kaine committed his political capital to raising taxes for transportation. Just what the PEC and other conservationists have been longing for: New arterials and bypasses to open up the countryside to development. Yeah, right.

Second, and more germane, the PEC is asking the tough questions that few others willing to ask: What are the fiscal and transportation impacts of growth? Does it make sense for growth in the metropolitan Washington area to push ever outward — even when it leaves vast tracts of vacant and underutilized land closer to the metropolitan core? Is it not possible to devise human settlement patterns that are more efficient than the scattered, disconnected, low-density development that has characterized most growth for the past 50 years? These are reasonable questions.

If asking those questions makes the PEC environmental extremists, I guess that makes me an environmental extremist…. perhaps the most conservative “environmental extremist” on the planet.

If 2006 was the Kaine administration’s “year of transportation,” 2007 could be shaping up as the “year of health care.” Last week, Gov. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine announced appointments to the Commission on Health Reform. The commission has two top priorities: (1) providing insurance coverage to the more than one million Virginians who lack it, and (2) addressing the growing shortages of health professionals across all disciplines.

According to the Governor’s press release: The Commission is tasked with identifying and implementing national best practices at the state level with emphasis on access, quality, and safety of care.

Talk about a blue-ribbon panel! Marilynn Tavenner, the commission chair, knows a thing or two about health care: She was CEO of HCA’s Richmond-area operations. Other senior health care excecutives representing a broad cross spectrum of the industry will serve with her. Kaine also has taken care to seed the commission with Republican lawmakers as well as his fellow Democrats.

There’s one name missing from the list that would give the commission even more credibility in my book: Ramesh Shukla. A professor of health care administration at Virginia Commonwealth University, Shukla is arguably the state’s leading expert on hospital productivity. If the Governor is looking for “win-win” solutions, as Secretary of Technology Aneesh Chopra indicated he was in an interview a half year ago, there’s no greater win-win than boosting the productivity and efficiency of the system.

Health care, which consitutes nearly one-sixth of the state GDP, is so huge, so cumbersome, regulated at so many levels, and so guarded by vested interests, that I don’t have high hopes that the commission will agree upon anything more than window dressing. But we have to try. As with transportation, we cannot long afford Business As Usual.

Sounds like Virginia’s mental health system is way past due for an overhaul. Reports Bill McKelway with the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Thirty years after a nationwide push to end the warehousing of mentally ill people in state hospitals, Virginia still faces a daunting task. Virginia is spending more money per capita than any other state on institutional care, its jails are teeming with mentally ill criminals, and community-based systems of care are lacking in all regions of the commonwealth.

The problem entails more than money. According to McKelway, Chief Justice Leroy R. Hassell Sr. said “civil commitment procedures, outmoded state laws that require findings of dangerousness, and shortcomings in community-based care are affecting every branch of government.”

The average caseload of a caseworker in Virginia is twice the national average. Patients wait more than a month on average to see a psychiatrist. The state cannot adequately track the care patients receive, much less its sucess or failure rate. And at any given time, about one-sixth of the 25,000 inmates of state jails suffer from mental illness.

In sum, the mentally ill aren’t getting the treatment they require, and Virginians are paying for housing more than necessary in institutions and jails. It strikes me that this is a case where improved services can be paid for, at least in part, through economic efficiencies.

(Photo credit of Eastern State Mental Hospital in Williamsburg, circa 1942: PBS.)

Talk about a theoretical exercise! The Roanoke Times reports:

Plans for Interstate 73 cleared a major hurdle this week when a group of localities, government agencies and an advocacy group agreed to its general path from Roanoke to North Carolina. The controversial road project has been under discussion for 16 years already, and Thursday no one could predict how much longer it will take before construction money can be found and builders can begin work.

In 2001, the Virginia Department of Transportation estimated the cost at $1.3 billion, but that estimate is way outdated. While the federal government would pay for most of the project, Virginia apparently has to pony up only 20 percent of the cost. Just add it to the stack of wished-for projects that would be economically justified only when someone else pays for it.

In theory, an Interstate would boost the economies of Martinsville and Roanoke. But I’d like answers to a couple of questions. (1) What’s the economic Return on Investment analysis? (2) Could the funds generate a higher return on investment if spent in some other way? When all the boosters like up in favor of a big highway project, no one ever seems to ask those questions.