Bacon's Rebellion

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.

The Governor did a formal signing ceremony today for HB 122 and SB 662, which passed the General Assembly in 2006, and became law on July 1, 2006.

While the bills were important to the 98% of Virginia businesses that are small businesses, the most interesting thing about today’s event may have been the bi-partisan (some would say wildly divergent) group that constituted the bills’ chief patrons.

What could unite Republican Caucus Chair Delegate Steve Landes (R Augusta), House Minority Leader Delegate Frank Hall (D Richmond), Legislative Black Caucus Chair Delegate Dwight Jones (D Richmond), Senator Yvonne Miller (D Norfolk) and Delegate Bob Marshall (R Manassas)? The answer is: legislation that serves the twin purposes of: 1) improving the operations of the state’s department of minority business enterprises and its SWAM procurement programs; and 2) streamlining/deregulating the paperwork burdens of the state’s current small, women and minority business certification programs.

The new legislation reflected a priority goal of the National association of Women Business Owners to reduce the paperwork burden of and duplication in the various state, local, national and private certification programs regularly imposed on minority, women and small business owners seeking state, federal and private contracts.

As recommended by NAWBO’s Procurement Task Force, this legislation requires the department of minority business enterprises to issue regulations governing the certification of the certifiers. The idea is that once the state has reviewed and approved a certification program, a vendor that obtains certification from that source would not have to get any other certification from any state or local certifier in order to qualify to do business with any state or local agency.

If implemented as expected, this will mean that any small, woman or minority owned business that is certified 8(a), SDB or DBE by the federal Small Business Administration or the any agency recognized by the federal Department of Transportation, any woman owned business certified by WBENC or NWBOC and any minority business certified by the VMSDC will not have to have any additional certification to do business with Virginia or any of its counties, cities and towns.

As Martha Stewart would say, that is a “good thing” for all of us Virginia taxpayers. If the small businesses that are the engine of our economy can spend less time on paperwork and more on making money, the business wins, the economy wins and the state wins two ways — more revenues and a competitive business environment in which to seek to procure goods and services at the lowest possible price.

Would that the strange assemblage of patrons on this legislation could come together more often to seek a common goal and serve a common purpose that benefits us all.

The Kaine administration has made another raft of appointments, filling board positions from the State Council on Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV) to the Frontier Culture Museum of Virginia. But there’s still no word on the five empty slots at the Commonwealth Transportation Board, the website of which still lists the names, addresses and photos of the expired board members.

It’s been more than a year since Philip Shucet resigned as commissioner of the Virginia Department of Transportation, and a search is still underway for his replacement — a fact that the Virginian-Pilot noted a few days ago and attributed in part to intense competition for qualified candidates due to a surfeit of major construction projects around the world, from Iraq to China to Las Vegas.

I can buy that argument, but I haven’t come across an explanation yet that explains the delay in filling the CTB positions.

Why don’t developers build housing for poor people? How come they focus only on middle-class housing and McMansions? Is this a failure of the free market? Or is it another case of local governments using zoning laws to create distortions in the marketplace?

I’ve argued the latter: Local governments don’t let developers build housing for poor people! (Increasingly, local governments are even making it difficult to build housing for working-class and middle-class people.) That’s because homeowners don’t want poor people living anywhere near them. The latest case in point comes from Lynchburg. As reported by the News & Advance:

Lynchburg officials took the first steps Wednesday toward closing a zoning “loophole” that allows a controversial low-income development to come in whether the city likes it or not….

Wednesday’s action was triggered by Pedcor Investments, a company hoping to build low-income apartments off Timberlake Road near Richland Hills. News of the development has angered the subdivision’s residents and prompted calls for legal reform.

The wealth of most Americans is tied up in the value of their houses. Let poor people move in nearby, and the next thing you know, the rate of petty crime begins to rise, property values start to fall, people start moving out, and a vicious cycle begins. It’s hard to blame homeowners from wanting to protect the value of their property. But that can’t come at the expense of ghettoizing the poor or, worse, providing them nowhere to live at all.

This is the tip of the iceberg, a particularly egregious case, of how zoning codes are used to protect the interest of existing homeowners. By creating artificial scarcities of housing except at the highest levels, zoning codes are responsible for inflating the cost of housing across much of Virginia and the United States.

You want to know the real class divide in America? It’s between the class of people whose wealth has increased by hundreds of thousands of dollars while they’ve ridden the real estate boom and those who either cannot afford to buy homes at all, or those who are so strapped financially by paying their mortgages that they are “house poor.”

If there’s a market for housing, at any level, there will be an entrepreneur who seeks to meet the demand. It’s the abusive exercise of local government power that stops them.

In another major indication of new thinking about transportation, we now hear that Sen. Marty Williams, R-Newport News, is no longer so steadfast in his support for a proposed Third Crossing that would link Norfolk with Newport News. Reports the Daily Press:

The proposed third crossing is so large and expensive that it is hamstringing all other efforts to fix the region’s overworked transportation network and is unlikely to ever be built, the chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee said Tuesday.

“If you’ve got an 800-pound gorilla, you’re hesitant to tackle it and everything else goes wanting,” [Williams] said during a legislative strategy session with the Hampton City Council. “In reality, we need to get the third crossing off the table. … It’s probably going to fall off the table under its own weight.”

Williams did not completely write off the project, but his bleak outlook is another swing in the momentum turning against the long-discussed transportation project.

The Third Crossing is the most expensive component of the $4.5 billion package of transportation improvements sought by Hampton Roads legislators. Virginia Port Authority officials regard it as critical to maintaining the competitiveness of Virginia ports. The crossing also would expedite the evacuation of south Hampton Roads residents during a major hurricane.

The GOP in the House of Delegates is promising an “extreme makeover” of Virginia’s transportation system when the General Assembly reconvenes in a month, reports Garren Shipley with the Northern Virginia Daily.

The delegates have absorbed the results of the recent Mason-Dixon poll that showed voters had little appetite for higher taxes. During a recent retreat, they explored a range of new policy options. Shipley quotes Del. Clay Athey, R-Front Royal, as saying, “The people of Virginia believe that we have enough money to have a fine transportation system. The message we’re getting [from voters] is ‘fix it with some innovative ideas.’”

Some of the ideas under consideration:

• Give control of secondary road system in urban areas back to county governments, along with funding from what was the Virginia Department of Transportation’s budget. VDOT would remain responsible for interstate highways and primary routes. The transfer of responsibility, says Athey, “clearly ties those decisions [together], land use and transportation.”
• Experiment with congestion-pricing tolls on gridlocked stretches of Interstate. Raising money would be a secondary goal. The main purpose would be to incentivize drivers to drive less on bottlenecked roads during periods of peak traffic.
• Prioritize transportation projects on a Return on Investment basis. In other words, give funding preference to projects that provide the most congestion relief per dollar spent. Projects that deliver the most “bang for the buck” would get the money, Athey says. Mass transit and rail projects would have to compete on an equal basis with roads.

The delegates are to be applauded for their serious outside-the-box thinking. These ideas would constitute the most significant change in state transportation policy in my memory, surpassing even the introduction of public-private partnerships into the transportation policy mix.

As readers of Bacon’s Rebellion know, these ideas, as significant as they are, represent only a first step down a long path. But at least these proposals would get Virginia moving down the right path. The latter two ideas are ones that we have been calling for, and the first is one we wish we had. The special transportation session next month will be fascinating to watch.

From today’s Wall Street Journal: The New Jersey state Assembly has passed a bill designating a sandy loam called “Downer soil” as the official state dirt of the Garden State. Dirt often gets a bad rap. But according to David Friedman, who runs the Ocean County soil-conservation district, “It connects plants and animals and water and everything.”

While New Jersey gets front-page articles in the Wall Street Journal about its state dirt, Virginia lawmakers stand by and twiddle their thumbs. To my knowledge, Virginia’s General Assembly hasn’t even thought of designating a state dirt, much less come up with a candidate … much less hold hearings or start building a statewide consensus. Heck, we still can’t even agree on a state song.

The Old Dominion does have a state bird (the cardinal), a state dog (the American fox hound), a state insect (the Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly), a state fish (the brook trout), a state shell (the oyster), a state flower (the American Dogwood), and a state flower (also the American Dogwood). We have a state dance (the square dance), a state boat (the Chesapeake Bay deadrise), a state beverage (milk), and even a state fossil — Chesapecten jeffersonius, a shell named for Thomas Jefferson and Chesapeake Bay.

If we can have a state fossil, I say it’s high time that we, too, have a state soil. I’m just not sure what to name it. I’m thinking…. red clay… or maybe… sand. Whatever we choose, we’d better get moving, or you can be darn sure that North Carolina and Maryland will beat us to the better ones. Do Bacon’s Rebellion readers have any other candidates?

Increases in school enrollment over the next five years will cost the Commonwealth of Virginia at least $275 million in additional education costs, assuming that the average annual cost per student remains the same, about $9,200 — which, of course, it won’t. The growth will be fueled by the addition of 30,000 new students, the result of large birth cohorts and in-migration, according to the latest projections by the Demographics & Workforce Section of the Weldon Cooper Center at the University of Virginia.

Weldon Cooper estimated the added costs to be spread as follows:

Virginia state – $120 million
Local school divisions – $136 million
U.S. government – $19 million.

(Photo credit: Southern Virginia University.)

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine has signed an executive order creating a Commission on Health Reform. that will recommend reforms in the Virginia healthcare sector. Said Kaine in a press release today: “With more than one million Virginians lacking healthcare coverage, and growing shortages of health professionals in all disciplines across the Commonwealth and the nation, we must look for creative ways to further improve the delivery of healthcare to Virginians.”

The Commission is tasked with identifying national best practices at the state level with emphasis on “access, quality, and safety of care,” as well as “long-term care and affordability.” Marilyn Tavenner, Secretary of Health and Human Resources and a former hospital executive, will head the commission.