Bacon's Rebellion

For all of our problems — and God knows, we dwell on them here at Bacon’s Rebellion — it gives us great cheer to see that Forbes magazine, in its first-ever ranking of the business climates of the 50 states, ranked Virginia number one.

The Old Dominion has the best regulatory environment in the country. Business costs are very low, particularly taxes and energy costs. Also noteworthy, according to Forbes, are Virginia’s AAA bond rating, low workers compensation costs and excellent system of higher education. Encouraging, too, is the fact that the state scored in the bottom half of only three of Forbes’ 30 metrics. As a Forbes writer reportedly told Gov. Timothy M. Kaine: “Not only are you guys first, there’s not even a close second.”

Read Forbes’ profile of Virginia here. And see the state rankings here. Texas ranked second, North Carolina third and Maryland 11th. (For what it’s worth, Delaware ranked 8th, Florida 9th and Georgia 10th. Can the southern Atlantic seaboard claim to be the most dynamic region in the country?)

As a Richmond resident, I was delighted to see the attention that Forbes gave to MeadWestvaco’s decision to relocate its corporate headquarters from Connecticut to my home town. Richmond is indeed a great place to do business and richly deserves the recognition. But I found it curious that Forbes could write about Virginia’s business climate without once alluding to the technology-driven economy in Northern Virginia, which has been out-performing its high-tech peers in job creation for several years now. If Forbes editors pay attention to their own survey, perhaps they will dedicate more resources to covering Northern Virginia’s increasingly dynamic business community.

Road to Ruin is taking a closer look at Prince William County. In a previous article, writer Peter Galuszka profiled the county’s aggressive road-building program. This time, he came back to see how well Prince William is coordinating its $1.5 billion, 15-year transportation plan with its land use policies. (See “Will the Real Prince William County Please Stand Up?”)

It wasn’t easy sorting through the conflicting claims. Sean Connaughton, chairman of the board of supervisors, made a vigorous case that the county has been proactive and forward thinking. But Stewart Schwartz with the Coalition for Smarter Growth, showed Peter some examples of awful slash-and-clear development. My sense as an outsider who occasionally drives through the county is that Prince William is doing a pretty good job connecting land use and transportation in the east, especially in the revitalization of the U.S. 1 corridor. The situation is harder to untangle in the western end of the county around Manassas.

Under Connaughton, the board has been steering the county towards more compact, higher-density, pedestrian-friendly and transit-friendly development than the county had seen before. The problem is that a huge backlog of traditional, sprawl-style development is in the pipeline. The result to date has been a mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly. As the backlog gets worked down, I would expect to see a more transportation-efficient mix of projects. It may not meet the standards of smart growth advocates, but it’s better than what came before.

Does that mean Prince William County has turned the corner to a sustainable pattern of development — or that it’s just sliding downhill at a slower speed? We probably won’t know for years. As Connaughton says, you don’t bring about meaningful change with a snap of the fingers. It’s too bad that Connaughton won’t be around long enough — he’s taking that maritime administration job with the Bush administration — to bask in the praise or catch the blame.

Joel Garreau, of “Edge Cities” fame, has penned another penetrating analysis for the Washington Post, this time of Virginia’s piedmont. He describes what he calls the “Santa-Feing” of the Piedmont, in hommage to an earlier transformation of the area around Santa Fe, N.M. Urbane refugees from the big city are settling in the towns and hamlets of the Piedmont — and bringing their upscale, yuppified culture with them. Says Garreau:

This Santa Fe-ing is marked by a profusion of high-end and inventive food, wineries, shops, restaurants, theater, moviemaking, film festivals, bookstores, music and the arts in landscapes that don’t look too different from the way they did a century ago, albeit better kept up. Think of it as Monticello with broadband. It’s a combination of the 21st century and the 18th century, the Information Age and the Agrarian Age.

Garreau is an acute observer of cultural details, and he does a marvelous job of contrasting the white wine-and-laptops crowd with the rustic, shotguns-and-moonpies locals whose families have lived there for decades, even centuries. To understand what’s happening in this corner of the state — and its intense opposition to the wave of dysfunctional “suburban” growth lapping over from Northern Virginia — the article is must reading.

(Hat tip to Tobias Jodter for bringing the article to the blog’s attention. Readers can pick up on some of the commentary on Garreau’s article in the thread originating in Ed Risse’s “Where the Jobs Are Not” post.)

The phenomenon that Garreau describes is not limited to the Piedmont, however. Similar trends can be seen in the Shenandoah Valley as far south as Staunton and Lexington, and it can be seen in Nelson County, where the Wintergreen ski/golf resort has created an enormous colony of alien, urban culture in a traditional rural community.

Garreau does not emphasize it, but these cultures are coming into conflict. Most instructive is an article today published by the News Virginian over the future of Nellysford, a blue-collar hamlet at the base of the mountain from Wintergreen. The Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission presented a draft development plan for the community right out of the Bacon’s Rebellion play book: “traffic roundabout, nature trails, a townhouse subdivision and commercial/office complex, and a sector reserved for community resources like a ball field, community center and library.”

As writer Alicia Petska wrote of a public hearing, in which 50 attendees blistered county officials:

It’s a picturesque, bustling little village the planners have laid out. And the residents hate it.

“Can I make a suggestion?” asked Bonnie Hughes, who’s lived on 9 acres in Nellysford since 1954. “That we let Nellysford alone. Leave it like it is and let it develop itself.”

Residents are stubbornly attached to their rural way of life: detached houses and stores strung along a winding valley road… no core, no nucleus, no defining boundary between settlement and countryside… an auto-dependent community in a world of rising gasoline prices.

Personally, as a bona fide member of the wine-and-laptop crowd, I’ll take Wintergreen over Nellysford any day. But, as long as they are willing to pay the location-variable costs associated with their lifestyle choices, people should be left alone to live as they want.

The newspaper industry will experience a cumulative $20 billion revenue shortfall by 2010, only four years away, concludes Outsell, Inc., a research and advisory firm for the information industry, in its report, “Deadline with Destiny.” (See the press release.)

The estimated shortfall is even larger than newspaper executives have acknowledged,” says Outsell lead analyst Ken Doctor, who headed the research. “The perfect storm of print circulation decline, accompanying pressures on print advertising, and the rapid growth of lower-revenue-producing online news media is eroding the industry. The business of news faces an unprecedented transformation as these trends likely accelerate over the next five years.”

Key points:

• The decline of paid circulation revenues for print newspapers will speed up as key 18-39-year-olds continue their online migration, undermining newspapers’ traditional mass market claims.
• Newspapers’ online ad revenue growth rate of about 30 percent masks the larger problem that online revenues aren’t replacing lost print revenues fast enough.
• Workforce cuts, already underway, are insufficient to meet the accelerating financial challenges.
• News companies must consider lowering their operating margins from an average of 21 percent to levels more commonly seen.

The year 2010 is four years away. There’s a good chance of hitting a recession before then. Print media have been increasingly vulnerable to advertising recessions. That will be truth-or-consequences time for the newspaper industry.

The Virginia Department of Transportation has issued a contract to Video Convergence, of Springfield, to design, test, and install surveillance camera systems on arterial roadways in the Northern Operations Region. The system will transmit real-time video, via an IP-based network, directly to VDOT’s Smart Traffic Center in Arlington. Virginia currently operates camera surveillance systems on freeways, but not on arterial roadways.

By monitoring live video streams and communicating and sharing information, VDOT hopes to more effectively manage traffic incidents. Video Convergence describes the project as part of a “proactive effort” to manage congestion in Tysons Corner before construction of the Dulles Metro rail begins in early 2007.

It takes a lot of audacity to buy a house near an airport and then complain when changing airport operations start generating more noise. But Americans have become a nation of inveterate whiners, so nothing surprises me anymore.

The latest case in point is the Pleasant Valley community three miles from Washington Dulles International Airport. The airport, according to The Connection Newspapers, is adding a north-south runway that will cause airplanes to fly directly over Pleasant Valley. The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority says the airplane noise shouldn’t exceed the permissible 65-decibel level. Residents aren’t so sure, and they want a monitor installed. And what are they going to do if airplanes go over that level? Shut down the runway?

I’m sorry, but I have zero sympathy. What were these people thinking when they bought their houses? There they were, three miles from a major international airport — an airport that had ample room for growth and made no secret of its intention to expand in the future. Did they think that buying a house gave them veto rights over where the Airport located its runways and what kind of planes flew in and out?

The MWAA should make reasonable efforts to keep noise levels down. But I don’t see that the Airport is under any obligation to knock itself out. Buying a house near an airport is like buying a house next to the railroad track and complaining if the railroad company figures out a way to run its trains a little faster. Or buying a house backed up to the Interstate and complaining when the traffic increases. That’s the risk you took when you bought the house, you damn dummy!

(Hat tip to Tobias Jodter for pointing out this story. I don’t know if he’ll agree with my spin or not, but you can blame him for bringing it to my attention.)

From time to time WaPo publishes data that debunks the Subregional Job Dispersal Myth. Those who benefit from belief in this myth claim the core jobs in the Virginia portion of the National Capital Subregion – as opposed to houses and services – are scattering across the Countryside. See “Where the Jobs Are,” 24 May 2004 at https://www.baconsrebellion.com/ and subsequent collums that deal with job location.

Today is another of those times. The “Commercial Real Estate Report – What’s New in Northern Virginia” is a regular and useful – al be it misleadingly titled – service of WaPo. The map and table presenting the survey of office buildings completed or under construction “since 2003” is takes up a full page in today’s Business Section.

A quick application of Regional Metrics indicates that there are over four times the square footage of new and under construction office buildings in the Radius = 10 Miles to Radius = 20 Miles Radius Band as there are beyond Radius = 20 Miles.

There are twice as many square feet in new and under construction office buildings inside Radius = 10 Miles as there are in the band between Radius = 10 Miles and Radius = 20 Miles and eight times the number outside R = 20.

This is fully consistent with the data published over the past two decades:

The Subregion’s core Jobs are in the Core, Period.

The value of the buildings and the rents paid by the tenants document that this is where the jobs that are most important to the Subregion’s economy are located.

Several notes:

There are buildings under construction in the R = 10 to 20 Radius Band than in the R = < 10 area. On the other hand the buildings are larger closer to the core. R = 10 to 20 average building size is 175,000 sq ft vs 317,000 sq ft average building size inside R = 10. There are new office buildings in the Over R = 20 area outside the survey area. There is a small building going up along I-66 east of VA Route 234 Bus in Greater Manassas and another in “downtown” Gainesville. It can be assumed that if there were a lot buildings going up, the area of coverage would have been expanded. The buildings such as this are often occupied by residential service activities, not core (economic base) jobs. The survey does not include owner occupied buildings for good reason. The location of owner occupied buildings is often the result of an employers wanting to create a new profit center as a speculative office developer using their own employees as captive tenants. It has been suggested that this strategy contributed to the downfall of both AOL and WorldCom. The AOL complex is soon to be less occupied – and if our Internet connection speed is any indication, soon to be empty – and WorldCom washed through bankruptcy and is now MCI. In both cases by attempting to double dip and be real estate speculators these companies created work environments that were not attractive – among other things they were and are inaccessible to most potential employees in the Subregion. To attract the sort of employee that a company needs to compete and survive in the global marketplace the job location must be intelligently located. Finding cheap land as both of these companies did is not enough. The Creative Class is not attracted to locations like ones near Wal*Mart in the Weeds. The most important point driven home again by this survey is that most of the new offices are in Greater Alexandria, Greater South Arlington, Greater North Arlington, Greater Tysons Corner, and Greater Reston with several others located in places such as Fairfax Center and Greater Chantilly. The vast majority are in the first five and all five of those Beta Communities have a large imbalance of jobs over housing. There are jobs needed to balance the existing (and planned) excess of housing over jobs in Greater Ashburn, Greater Cascades / Sterling, Greater Chantilly and Greater Centreville. That is why “South Dulles” – about which ones reads with increasing frequency – makes no sense as will be explored in upcoming columns. EMR

The Patrick Michaels story continues to heat up. The Virginian-Pilot has weighed in with an editorial noting that the University of Virginia professor and state climatologist has taken money from fossil fuel companies, but notes that it’s an old story — first reported in 1990 — and he doesn’t seem to be violating any conflict-of-interest guidelines.

But back in Charlottesville, Kevin Lynch, a Charlottesville city councilor, has been digging into the story. As reported in the Cvillenews.com and aired in Waldo Jaquith’s blog, Lynch can’t find any documentation that Michaels is, in fact, state climatologist — despite the fact that he has been receiving some $90,000 a year in state funds. The legal authority and paperwork appeared to have been lost in the mists of time, and the state appears to be handing over money to Michaels out of habit. Gov. Timothy M. Kaine insists that Michaels is not a gubernatorial appointee. It would be a good idea for someone in state government — perhaps the Attorney General’s office — to get to the bottom of this.

In another piece, Lynch looks into the question: What, exactly, does the state climatologist do for his $90,000 a year? The main thing he does, apparently, is issue periodic “climate advisories” throughout the year. However, Lynch detects an editorializing trend in his advisories “expressing skepticism towards global warming in particular and fellow scientists in general,” a skepticism that he believes is inappropriate. Concludes Lynch:

I cannot see how any impartial observer could avoid the conclusion that using an official publication of the State Climatologist as an editorial vehicle to promote the agenda of Dr. Michaels’ power company funders is anything other than a clear conflict of interest.

Lynch, it seems to me, is asking perfectly legitimate questions, and I applaud him for his initiatve. However, Lynch’s argumentative tone suggests that Michaels’ greatest offense is to question global warming in the first place.

The one thing I have yet to see in any of the editorials and commentaries written about Michaels is a critique of his arguments. Painting him as a paid apologist for the fossil fuel industry is sufficent to dismiss his ideas without ever engaging them. Well, I have just purchased his book, “Meltdown,” and I’m working my way through it. I will comment in detail upon his arguments if this state-climatologist controversy doesn’t die down.

At this point I will say only this: Michaels’ knowledge of climatology, the scientific studies he cites and the arguments he makes cannot be dismissed simply by labeling him a tool of the bad guys. He may be wrong… He may not be offering a complete picture of the state of knowledge in climatology today… but he is not self-evidently wrong. By contrast, the characterizations of his views are laughably inaccurate.

Secondly, Michaels offers a critique of the scientific establishment that the pundits refuse to acknowledge. He examines the political economy of global warming, a multi-billion scientific industry that lives off of government funding. The only way to maintain that funding, he argues, is to keep the public and politicians in a state of alarm and agitation about the cataclysmic fate that awaits us all. The global warming true believers, if we are to believe him, are as motivated by self interest as those who oppose them. That’s the sad state of science in the world today.

Update: Daily Progress columnist Bob Gibson argues that there’s nothing wrong with the intellectual diversity that Michaels, “a little speck of red in a blue ivory tower,” provides UVa. “Politically correct research is fine, but as with science, research that questions prevailing wisdom often produces better wisdom.”

If there’s one thing that everyone in Charlottesville-Albemarle County agrees upon, it’s that the U.S. 29 corridor north of town is a mess. This fall, the County will present the Places29 Master Plan for redeveloping the corridor. Based on the description published in the Daily Progress today, the plan is ambitious, and it will offer some useful ideas. But it may fall short of what’s needed.

On the positive side: The Places29 plan acknowledges that changes in land use must accompany any transportation improvements. Writes reporter Jessica Kitchin:

“When you have an area that’s been developed different times by different people in different ways … after a certain amount of time, the retail is going to want to redevelop,” said Judy Wiegand, a senior county planner who has been heading up the Places29 effort. “We want to encourage it. When the market says that it’s time for redevelopment, we want to have something in place that encourages redevelopment that suits the principles of the ‘Neighborhood Model,’ so it’s walkable and pedestrian-oriented.”

As for specifics, the plan would knit together parallel roads that would enable local traffic to get around without entering U.S. 29. Planners also would guide the creation of a “midtown” area at the Rio Road intersection and an “uptown” near the airport, where, I presume greater densities would be permitted. Additionally, Places29 contemplates a Bus Rapid Transit service running up and down the corridor.

Consultants are hammering out details, and the public will be able to comment this fall.

What’s missing from the article — which doesn’t necessarily will mean it will be missing from the plan — is a mechanism to encourage developers to undertake the expensive task of tearing down, redesigning and rebuilding. The single-most effective thing that government can offer is density. That may be what planners have in mind for the “midtown” and “uptown” areas, but U.S. 29 is so atrocious up and down its entire length that they’ll need to create incentives to redevelop land in between the density nodes as well.

The other concept that I didn’t see mentioned in the article — again, that doesn’t mean it won’t be in the plan — is corridor management. U.S. 29 is riddled with curb-cuts in and out of malls, shopping centers and individual stores; in many cases there is literally no other means of ingress and egress. A corridor management plan would limit those ins and outs, which bogs down the traffic flow along 29.

I look forward to seeing the details this fall.

In an op-ed column published Sunday in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, House Speaker William J. Howell, R-Stafford, provided more hints at the kinds of transportation solutions the tax-eschewing House of Delegates will be considering during the up-coming special section.

• Tapping private equity funds to invest in toll-driven transportation projects.
• Traffic demand management tools.
• Expansion of teleworking opportunities.
• Linking land-use decisions with transportation impacts.

Last week, Shenandoah Valley legislators released details of other strategies to Garren Shipley with the Northern Virginia Daily. These included congestion pricing, ranking transportation projects by traffic congestion mitigated and turning responsibility and funding for secondary road construction and maintenance over to local government.

Quietly and behind the scenes, the House appears to have spent the summer thinking through the most radical transformation of Virginia’s transformation strategy since the Byrd machine created the Virginia Department of Transportation decades ago. It’s going to be one heck of an interesting special session.

Bacon’s Rebellion columnist Doug Koelemay is quoted in the Connection Newspapers as opposing the proposed constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. As he rightfully argues, the proposed amendment is not just a culture-wars issue, it’s a business issue.

Our history in Virginia has been about opening doors, not slamming doors shut,” said J. Douglas Koelemay, managing director of Qorvis Communications, a Tysons Corner public affairs firm. “If this amendment passes, Virginia will be a place where doors are slammed shut. That’s not good for business and that’s not good for anybody else either.”

This amendment would do more than prohibit same-sex marriage. I do believe that civil marriage should be limited to a man and a woman. But the amendment also, as the Connection article points out, would call into question an employer’s right to extend benefits to the domestic partners of gay and lesbian employees. The second paragraph of the amendment bans the recognition of any “legal status for relationships of unmarried individuals that intends to approximate the design, qualities, significance, or effects of marriage.”

In a hyper-competitive global economy, regions compete primarily on their ability to develop, recruit and retain human capital. Any measure that makes Virginia inhospitable to the gay population, five percent or so of the population, creates an unnecessary competitive disadvantage for Virginia businesses.

I recognize that competitive economic advantage must be balanced against other considerations such as upholding the institution of marriage. I’m open to both sides of the argument, indeed I flip-flop worse than John Kerry, but my gut tells me that Virginia’s amendment, as currently worded, goes too far.

According to Leesburg2Day, the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office is looking for volunteers to act as crossing guards for the more than 11,000 children in the county who walk to school.

As Becky Dale asks in this morning’s round-up of Virginia transportation/land use clips — 11,000 walk to school? Do you suppose that’s typo?

My perception of Loudoun, based on occasional drive-throughs, is that the county is dominated by low-density suburban development or extremely low-density rural settlement patterns, with the town of Leesburg and a few hamlets tossed in. Could such development patterns support 11,000 children walking to school? I, like Becky, am astounded.

The fact that 11,000 children would walk to school in the pedesterian-inhospitable environs of Loudoun County suggests to me that there is a strong demand among families to have their children walk to school. County officials, not just in Loudoun but across Virginia, should pay greater heed to locating schools within walking distance of residential areas, plan for sidewalks and other pedestrian-friendly features, and design the schools so that children don’t have to traverse acres of empty fields and parking lots to reach their classrooms.

Communities want schools that are integrated into the fabric of the neighborhood, not built upon some distant, isolated plot of land, donated perhaps by a developer, that is accessible only by car or school bus.

(P.S. I am way overdue in giving Becky a plug for the daily round-up she provides of online newspaper articles about transportation and land use in Virginia. I couldn’t publish this blog without it. If you would like to be added to her e-mail distribution list, contact her at [email protected].)

The Roanoke Times has published an upbeat article about the positive impact of the Appalachian School of Law and the University of Appalachia, which trains pharmacists, on the economy of Grundy, a town in the heart of Virginia’s coalfields.

I published a column three yeasr back questioning the wisdom of a poor community like Buchanan County investing its resources in a law school. (See “Law Schools and Baseball Stadiums.”) Did the state of Virginia, home to more than its fair share of law schools, really need another one? Couldn’t the citizens of Southwest Virginia think of a more useful educational discipline to support?

I still think I was asking legitimate questions back then, but I’m coming around. The pharmacy school in particular seems like a good idea for a region — not just Buchanan County but most of central Appalachia — that is underserved by medical professionals, including pharmacists.

The two schools capture economic activity that otherwise would take place outside the region. Ambitious young Southwest Virginians pursuing an education in law or pharmacy would head to Charlottesville, Richmond, Williamsburg, or wherever, taking their expenditures on tuition, room and board with them. With an educational option in Grundy, these students add to the local economic base, supporting not only the salaries of faculty and administrators but local retailers and landlords. Furthermore, unlike the coal industry, which is enjoying a resurgence right now after a 25-year depression, educational institutions aren’t prone to booms and busts.

The Martinsville-Henry County region in Southside Virginia wants to accomplish something similar through the creation of a new college there. Given the experience so far in Grundy, it’s probably a good idea.

If a company needs financial incentives to locate in your jurisdiction, you might want to think twice about who you’re trying to recruit. The City of Martinsville found out the hard way when it enticed MZM Inc. into locating its Foreign Supplier Assessment Center to the city. The scandal-ridden center closed earlier this month.

The episode has garnered headlines mainly because it’s an issue in the re-election race of U.S. Rep. Virgil Goode, who, according to the Roanoke Times, “requested $3.6 million in federal funds for the center that eventually went to MZM, which at the time was headed by Mitchell Wade, one of his key campaign contributors. Wade has since pleaded guilty to bribing a California congressman in exchange for defense contracts and making $46,000 in illegal contributions to Goode’s campaign.”

But there’s a larger issue. Martinsville is on the hook for at least $100,000 in economic development incentives granted the now-defunct MZM, and may also be liable for part of a $500,000 state grant. The Roanoke Times has the details here.

I can’t be too hard on Martinsville, which has seen its textile- and furniture-based economy take a pounding over the past 20 years. Unemployment was running high in 2003 when the decisions were made, and city leaders were desperate to create new jobs. But communities need to exercise due diligence before they pass out financial incentives. Being forced to repay $100,000, $200,000 or more could hobble the city’s economic development programs in the near future.

In an editorial advising Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to stay focused on transportation issues, the Virginian-Pilot couldn’t resist taking this swipe at the GOP-dominated House of Delegates:

A new Mason-Dixon poll delivered fresh political cover to Republicans who want to do nothing about the fact that there are too many cars and too few roads. Kaine’s ill-timed discussion of spending more on education delivers yet another excuse to Republicans in the House of Delegates who’d like to do nothing. You can just hear Republicans thinking, “Why should we consider a compromise on increasing taxes for transportation when Kaine is just going to turn around and ask us for another round of spending increases?”

So, Republicans “want to do nothing“? The V-P editorial writers need to get out of their little bubble in downtown Norfolk. I would suggest they start by reading Garren Shipley’s piece in the Northern Virginia Daily, which we highlighted yesterday on this blog. (See “Coming Up: An Extreme Makeover for Transportation.”)

The Pilot pundits don’t have to agree with the paradigm-shifting proposals under discussion, but they should at least acknowledge the fact that they exist. I can guarantee you, the transportation debate will take a very different tone when the General Assembly reconvenes in September. While House Republicans are talking about totally restructuring the way transportation is funded and administered, the Pilot is stuck in yesterday’s debate defining the problem as a simple lack of tax revenues.

And that’s a shame. The million-or-so residents of the Virginian-Pilot’s circulation area in south Hampton Roads, as well as their elected representatives, need to know the outlines of the debate that’s taking shape, not the debate that the Pilot fought — and lost — two months ago.