Bacon's Rebellion

“Although some [Republican Party leaders] feel the GOP has veered too far to the right, leading to two straight losses for the governor’s race, most … here urged the part to stay the course,” reported Tyler Whitley, a reporter, summing up prevailing sentiment at the Advance, the GOP’s annual retreat at the Homestead.

“When we allow our differences with the Democrats to become blurred in the eyes of the voters, we risk losing,” stated Sen. Bill Bolling, R-Hanover, and lieutenant governor-elect.

“We must stand up for conservative principles,” echoed Del. Robert F. McDonnell, R-Virginia Beach, and attorney general-elect.

Ignore the counsel of “the elite demanding that we abandon our positions, thinking that is the way to electoral sucess,” stated Kate Obenshain Griffin, GOP chairwoman.

That’s all fine and good. Conservative Republican principles of limited government, fiscal conservatism and free markets are wonderful. Those are the principles that animate my writing. But abstract principles are not enough. Abstract principles, by themselves, do not solve problems. Opposing tax increases — a meritorious goal — doesn’t solve traffic congestion, educate our children or build a better health care system.

Republicans need to show how their principles translate into bettering peoples’ lives in tangible ways that voters can understand. I have seen a number of good ideas emanate from the ranks of Republican legislators, but they haven’t gotten much attention. Most of them are technical and wonkish, not designed to capture the imagination of voters. And I realize that the job is difficult when (a) the other party controls the executive branch of government, and (b) a significant wing of the GOP is so brain dead that it can conceive of no alternative to raising taxes and pouring more revenue into Business As Usual programs and policies.

Democrats in Virginia have established themselves as the party of technocrats, the party of good government. They don’t challenge the system — they try to make it run better. To a majority of Virginians voting for governor, that’s preferable to the airing spouting of airy nostrums and the politics of symbolism. Until Republicans can effectively translate their principles into programs for action on the issues that Virginians repeatedly say that matter, they will continue to be denied the governorship.

Old soldiers know to discount the first report from the field. So, here is a first report from the Huffman Advance.

The mood is sober, pragmatic and committed. Like a farmer who lost his crop, faces a tough winter, but has enough seed for next spring. I look forward to seeing what our local Daily Press reporter puts in the paper. Saw him and Richmond Times fellow, new guy, forget his name there.

Interesting to see who wants to position for statewide office. Cong. Tom Davis is the most prominent. Sean connection is there.

Bill Bolling gave a great speech, Gilmoresque, this morning. I missed Bob McDonnell’s speech. Love his nickname, if the votes hold up through recount, as ‘Landslide’ Bob. Hope it all goes well honestly.

State Central Committee meeting was a true diversion from the cheerleading exercises and occasional debates on very focused issues. No resolutions to be ignored by some Republican officials this year.

The fundamental problem of the Party, lack of political power, was clearly demonstrated in discussions that I heard. If the Party is to have power, it must truly deliver votes in its own right, independent of the candidate, national mood, etc (I understand those all matter, but think ‘Democrats in super majority Black precincts’ where the Democrat candidate has to be going to jail, literally, for a Republican – like Winsome Sears – to win) (Haven’t seen how new Sheriff Gabe Morgan did in the East End of Newport News – need to check SBE site). Or the Party must control the money.

Right now, a great Party organization can mean up to five or so percentage points, which means a win in close races, but the Party can’t just guarantee cranking out the voters. Then, there is the money. If the Jerry Kilgore raises $23m by himself for himself, then the money the Party controls is chump change.

Until the Party makes votes or money happen, the Party, the Republican Party, is a marginal force for The Good People of Virginia. Yet, still, I think, worth the effort to make it better, more effective and more powerful.

Love him or hate him, you’ve got to credit former Gov. Jim Gilmore with being a fighter. He relishes the rough and tumble of politics, and doesn’t shy away from controversy. Speaking to the press at the annual gathering of GOP luminaries at the Homestead, Gilmore faulted the party for not being critical enough of Gov. Mark R. Warner’s tax and budgetary policies, according to Tyler Whitley, a reporter.

Gilmore questioned the validity of polls that showed Warner with a favorable rating of more than 70 percent. Poll questions were not directed, he noted, to Warner’s broken promise to raise taxes, nor, as Whitley paraphrased it, his “lack of attention” to transportation and education. Also, Gilmore accused Warner of creating a “false crisis” in 2004 to justify a $1.4 billion tax increase.

Some one needs to counter the Warner administration spin on the 2004 tax hike. Thanks in part to a compliant press corps, Warner successfully blamed all of the earlier state’s budget woes on Gilmore, his predecessor. Gilmore deserves much of the criticism, particularly for the shambles his administration made of transportation spending. But the budgetary crisis brought on by the recession had passed by 2004. Despite warnings from bond-rating service Moodys that Virginia’s AAA bond rating was on “watch” status, revenues were pouring into the state Treasury appreciably faster than forecast in Warner’s budget — and the surpluses have been ballooning in size ever since.

Unwilling to offend Warner’s Republican allies in the state Senate, Jerry Kilgore did not make a major issue of the 2004 tax hike in his gubernatorial race. Gilmore, who told reporters that he is interested in seeking elected office again, would be well advised to keep the issue alive. But if he wants to have credibility when he speaks about the budget, he needs to acknowledge the mistakes that were made, particularly in transportation, on his watch.

Momentum, conventional wisdom, or whatever you want to call it seems to be coalescing around a special session of the General Assembly to deal with transportation and presumably new taxes to “fix” the problem. Former Governor Baliles and Chamber of Commerce heavyweights are the latest to jump on this plan, according to Peter Bacque of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Of course, less than one month ago, Russ Potts, the candidate who forthrightly advocated a special session and more taxes, garnered 2% of the vote.

Now, a special session and new taxes may be the best alternative. Governor-elect Tim Kaine may or may not end up advocating this and/or using his political capital to make it happen. I know that he is a serious man who wants to make a positive difference. But whatever the merits, the fact remains that Virginia voters did not endorse the special session/tax course of action when they were asked on November 8th.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like to vote for both a candidate and his/her plan. If my candidate is elected, I expect him/her to try and implement his/her plan. If the candidate I didn’t vote for is elected, I expect him/her to try and implement his/her plan and I will respect the mandate the voters gave. It appears that in Virginia, elections aren’t about anything but personalities and image. Whoever wins is free to pursue whatever post-election plan is cooked up with the powerful interests that favor it. Unaffiliated citizens with just one vote apparently aren’t the majority of speakers at the transportation town halls where this “momentum” for a special session and new taxes is being carefully nurtured.

It’s easy to see now why the newspaper editorial boards of Virginia embraced Russ Potts until it came time for their endorsements. He was a convenient stalking horse for the positions they probably believed their endorsed candidate would end up favoring, but they knew he couldn’t express them with the vigor of Potts and win.

In Virginia, win first, then feel free to do what you want.

I’m getting pumped about the Public-Private Partnership Forum, scheduled for Dec. 16-17. We’ve nailed down an incredible roster of participants. I’ll be moderating a really cool panel, “Alternatives for Financing Transportation and Community Development.” The panel will explore the potential for public-private partnerships to help build infrastructure by raising private capital that cash-strapped state and local governments cannot provide through traditional revenue sources.

Starting with the names you’re most likely familiar with, the panel will include:

Whitt Clement, former Secretary of Transportation, now a partner at Hunton & Williams.
Sean Connaughton, chairman, Prince William County Board of Supervisors, one of the fastest-growing and most infrastructurally challenged counties in the Commonwealth.
Steve Haner, a Bacon’s Rebellion contributor, who will be representing Virginia Citizens for Better Transportation, an industry-sponsored group lobbying for transportation solutions.

And then some really interesting voices you may never have heard of…

Thomas Pelnik (or designee), with the Virginia Department of Transportation’s Innovative Project Delivery Team, the group charged with soliciting and analyzing public-private transportation partnership proposals.
Gabriel Roth, a transportation economist with the Independent Institute and outspoken advocate of highway privatization.
Chris Walker, a Northern Virginia real estate developer with extensive holdings in the Dulles corridor, and a proponent of user-financed infrastructure and competitive markets.
Rich Herlich, CEO of VMS, Inc., the company that privatized highway asset management here in Virginia, and a partner in two public-private partnership proposals to build HOT lanes in Northern Virginia.

What a phenomenal line-up of speakers. It’s a shame we get only two hours! And that’s just one session! For anyone interested in how Virginia is going to pay for its growing infrastructure needs, this will be one of the most stimulating conferences of the year.

Click here to see an updated version of the program. Click here to visit the conference home page and access registration information.

Jim, over at Road to Ruin you have a post on Speaker Howell’s recent comments regarding transportation. The Speaker agrees that we can’t pave our way out of the transportation mess and any response must include mass transit and “initiatives such as telecommuting.”

I’m not sure what a telecommuting initiative would look like. One would think that if it were such a great idea, lots more people would be working from home and businesses would be encouraging it. Of course, maybe they are, but if so, a lot of them are working from cell phones in their car instead of from the comforts of home with their vehicle off the road. “Non-rush hour traffic” is an oxymoron.

If I was asked to design a telecommuting initative, I would start with state government. If state officials think telecommuting is a solution, they ought to lead the way.

In my agency, I count 19 of 41 employees based in Richmond who could easily work from home. That’s almost half–and more could if a few assumptions were changed. All of these employees have offices/cubicles of significant total size. Get them working from home and my agency could move to much smaller (hence cheaper) office space in addition to the hoped for reduction in traffic miles. I’m sure my agency is not unique. Spread this across the 100 or so state agencies and there could be significant savings. I’m told there are few impediments to switching phone lines to home phone numbers. Many of the staffers in my agency who could work from home already have state issued laptops. Employees could use their home computers or take the one they have in their state office.

What might be added to a telecommuting initiative such as I’m describing might be a voluntary commitment to reducing miles driven and commitments by the agency to hold required meetings at times that would keep employees off major commuting routes during off-peak hours. If the state demonstrated a commitment to telecommuting, maybe private business would follow.

I can anticipate a lot of the objections to my version of a telecommuting initiative. Of course, if someone had the will to make it happen, those objections could be overcome.

Virginia’s October unemployment rate has hit a 52-month low — 3.2 percent — and is tied with Florida’s for the lowest seasonally adjusted rate in the nation. According to the latest Virginia Employment Commission numbers, the number of unemployed persons fell by 12,000 in one month.

This is not just a Northern Virginia phenomenon fed by federal defense/homeland security spending, although NoVa has led the state in job creation. Employment in metropolitan areas is strong across the entire state, excepting only Danville, and even there it’s dropping. Here’s the wrap up:

U.S. – 4.6 percent
Virginia – 3.2 percent
Blacksburg – 3.3 percent
Charlottesville – 2.6 percent
Danville – 7.4 percent
Harrisonburg – 2.6 percent
Lynchburg – 3.5 percent
Northern Virginia – 2.3 percent
Richmond – 3.5 percent
Roanoke – 3.1 percent
Hampton Roads – 3.8 percent
Winchester – 2.5 percent

Other good news from the VEC: Wages for Virginia’s manufacturing employees increased 5.7 percent over the previous 12 months. A surge in factory orders caused the workweek to leap ahead by 1.4 hours to 43.6 hours.

I found this Washington Post story about an open space preservation case in Prince William County to be a fascinating study of what can be behind the “pure” motives of restricting land use. It’s comforting to know that preservationists can be just as self-interested as the rapacious developers they battle. Good work by reporter Nikita Stewart.

Jeffrey Anderson, the new executive director of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP), spoke in Charlottesville yesterday and Bob Gibson filed a report for the Daily Progress.

Those expecting that an economic development “outsider” would offer a new approach or fresh thinking would be disappointed. Anderson brought up the old saw about Virginia not always being competitive with other states in offering incentives, citing the Dell computer plant that went to North Carolina. From Gibson’s article, it’s difficult to determine whether Anderson thought that was a good thing or a bad thing.

Anderson also called for better cooperation among regions. I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard that prescription over the last nine years.

Why Anderson vaulted to the top of applicants for the VEDP job might be explained by this anecdote:

[He] cited his experience as executive vice president for BearingPoint, a Tysons Corner-based consulting firm in the global financial services business.

In Fairfax County, the firm tried to bring in more entry-level employees and found they lost too much time in commuting to and from work in an area where $50,000 salaries did not allow them to live close enough to their workplace.

The firm searched five states, including Virginia, for places to land 500 jobs and chose instead to locate them in Hattiesburg, Miss. His former employer also found it had to move jobs to India and China, he said.

Better to choose someone with a background in not choosing Virginia than someone with a background in marketing Virginia, apparently. If Anderson can convince companies like BearingPoint to put jobs in Southside and Southwest instead of Mississippi, he’ll be a winner.

Today, Washington Post columnist Marc Fisher offers his observations from Governor-elect Kaine’s Manassas transportation meeting:

Virginia’s next governor, Tim Kaine, aims to break open the transportation logjam. In a state that foolishly limits governors to a single term, four years as a lame duck governor isn’t enough to take on such a massive task. But Kaine, flush with the sweet adrenaline of victory and eager to build on Gov. Mark Warner’s success in putting the state’s finances in order, boldly proposes to get it done in his first year.

But what is “it?” As I watched Kaine conduct a town meeting on transportation in Manassas on Tuesday night, that basic question kept pushing aside questions about process. Even if you could get beyond the core dilemma over money — do you raise taxes to build transit and roads, or do you insist, as Northern Virginia voters did in the 2002 transportation referendum, on doing everything with existing resources? — you’d still lack agreement on what it means to fix traffic.

Fisher suggests that Kaine might just use “political will” to force controversial projects into reality, as Maryland Governor Erlich has done with the Inter-County Connector.

As an interesting aside, Fisher thinks Kaine will eschew the caution Governor Warner always exhibited and be more willing to speak out. Fisher will be online today taking questions and comments on this column.

Stephen Pearlstein’s Washington Post column on IT services as
a utility, analagous to the electric company, is good background for perhaps better understanding the mega-forces driving the Virginia-Northrop Grumman IT outsourcing project. His subsequent online chat is useful, too.

Who will report the news? That’s the question I keep asking as the Mainstream Media continues losing reader share. If digital media — websites, e-zines and blogs — are to take their place, they need to develop a business model that brings in enough advertising or subscription revenue to support the hiring of journalists to gather and package news for an interactive, online environment.

Market research released by Borrell Associates Inc., of Portsmouth, describes the rise of local websites as a competitive force in local media markets. Hundreds of independent websites are making money, some reporting revenues well into the six figures. Some even have been acquisition targets. Said author Dorian Benkoil: “Six years ago everybody was rushing into the local space with city guides. AOL was pursuing Digital Cities, MSN was launching Sidewalk and CitySearch was everywhere. They all retrenched or abandoned the space. But with tremendous growth in local advertising in the past two years, city guides and local independent city sites are back with a vengeance.”

There’s only one problem: The profitable websites shun local news, focusing almost exclusively on “fun and interesting things to do around town.” There is still no viable business model for an online publication that gathers and packages state/local-level news. But it’s a sign of progress to see that any category of online publication is proving to be financially viable. One step at a time… We’ll get there eventually.

As a supporter of capital punishment, I find no fault with Gov. Mark R. Warner’s decision yesterday to commute the death sentence of Robin Lovett, who stabbed a man to death with scissors during a 1998 pool hall robbery. The odds are overwhelming that Lovett was guilty of the crime he was convicted of and, thus, deserves to die. But Warner rightly notes that there is a higher principle at stake: The destruction of evidence in Lovett’s case by a court official rendered it impossible for Lovett to exonerate himself by a testing of DNA evidence. (See Frank Green’s story in the Times-Dispatch.)

To my mind, there is only one legitimate argument against the death penalty: The possibility that an innocent man (or woman) might be put to death. The criminal justice system is imperfect; people have been wrongfully convicted. Who knows how many innocents have been unjustly executed? It is incumbent upon death penalty supporters to go the extra mile to ensure that such horrors never occur.

While I object to the endless, often frivolous appeals that death penalty foes use to delay the administration of justice, I don’t object to testing DNA samples in instances where such tests had not been conducted before. The delay caused by testing is trivial. In Lovett’s situation, however, a circuit court employee violated a state law that had just gone into effect when he (or she) destroyed the evidence. I agree with Gov. Warner that Virginia’s criminal justice system must adhere rigidly to the protections granted all defendants. Failure to do so would undermine the legitimacy of capital punishment.

For my money, the best article in the most recent Bacon’s Rebellion e-zine was Debbie Kurtz’s “Beware the Blog!” It’s “sponsored content,” a nice euphemism for an advertisement, but that makes it all the more noteworthy. Few ads are provocative op-eds.

As a disclaimer, I know Debbie Kurtz in passing. She’s a top-notch marketer and economic developer.

Anyway, Ms. Kurtz warns that bloggers might eat the lunch of the old-style, buttoned-down, message-controlling economic developer. All a prospect has to do is a google search and all sorts of “dirty laundry” about a community might appear, much of it from cause-espousing and/or truth-telling bloggers. The solution is to hire Ms. Kurtz’s firm to track blog activity.

While that’s probably a good idea and a smarter investment than some of the expensive print media economic developers buy, I would suggest that an additional measure would be for the economic development agency to have its own blog. Blogging is a wonderful way to focus on a community and all the diverse viewpoints it represents, as opposed to the one-dimensional sales approach most economic developers favor.

To a certain extent, Ms. Kurtz sees bloggers as “the enemy.” I would differ. If the rage in economic development now is feeding the “creative class,” what is a more creative force than bloggers? Many bloggers equals vibrant community, in my estimation. Richmond, for example, has a number of bloggers representing a variety of viewpoints on the city and region’s direction. Their creative conflict is a positive sign of interest in the future and a way for innovative ideas to surface.

How many bloggers are in Martinsville, debating that area’s future? There might be a message there.

Virginia’s legal system ranks the 4th best in the nation, according to a survey conducted by the Institute for Legal Reform, an organization founded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to address the country’s litigation explosion. “Best,” in this context means “business friendly.”

Virginia trails only Delaware, Nebraska and North Dakota — and it’s the best in the South by a long shot. The second best Southern state, North Carolina, ranks 20th, while the bottom four slots are reserved for Louisiana, Alabama, West Virginia and, the worst, Mississippi.

The Institute study was based on a survey of over 1,400 practicing corporate attorneys and general counsels who answered a comprehensive battery of questions. The Institute argues that business-unfriendly legal systems discourage investment and hurt local economies. “Companies dont want to do business in states where the courts are perceived to be unfair. People living in low-ranking states are losing out on jobs, tax revenue and other economic development opportunities fueled by business.”

The disappointing news for Virginia: Our No. 4 spot represents a decline from a No. 3 ranking last year.