Bacon's Rebellion

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.

Want to know more about the future of public-private transportation partnerships in Virginia? Then you need to attend the Public-Private Partnership Forum, Dec. 16-17 at the Virginia Crossings Resort in Glen Allen, Va.

With the Commonwealth relying increasingly upon toll roads and private sector cash to build its transportation system, this timely conference will explore issues related to transparency, risk and accountability in public-private partnerships — as applied to both community development and transportation.

Confirmed speakers include:

– House Speaker William J. Howell
– Pierce Homer, Virginia Secretary of Transportation
– Jim Regimbal, Fiscal Analytics, Ltd
– Edd Hauser, UNC Charlotte Center for Transportation Studies
– Alan Pisarski, Independent Consultant
– Ken Klinge, Former Chairman, Commonwealth Transportation Board

Plus many more….

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

In its final days, the Warner administration appears to have developed its own, unique approach to the transportation crisis: Solicit public-private partnerships on an unprecedented scale to upgrade major traffic corridors, using tolls and private capital to pay for improvements that the state cannot. We are living through what may be the greatest boom in public-private transportation partnership solicitations and proposals in the history of Virginia.

In theory, PPTAs inspire the private sector to inject fresh thinking and outside capital into Virginia’s transportation system. But critics worry that the PPTAs elevate lower-priority projects to the top of the list for state funding at the expense of the general welfare. Bob Burke highlights the issues in his latest Road to Ruin reporting, “Show Me the Money.”

We have tracked the fortunes of the Virginia Information Technology Agency on this blog with some regularity. Clearly, the Warner administration has ambitious plans to transform the delivery of IT services in state government: The 10-year, $2 billion contract assigned to Northrop Grumman may be the biggest chunk of state IT business entrusted with the private sector anywhere in the country.

At the same time, this blog has received input from state employees wondering, Where’s the Beef? If VITA’s such a hot idea, where are all the efficiencies and savings that were promised? Back in 2003, then-Secretary of Technology George Newstrom forecast that the state would have reaped $100 million in cumulative savings by 2005. Well, 2005 has come and darn near gone. Show me the money!

Eugene Huang, Newstrom’s successor, answers those questions in my latest column, “Mission Creep.” Bottom line: Savings so far amount to about $50 million total, about half of what was expected. Huang blames the General Assembly: Legislators wouldn’t pony up the modest up-front capital to invest in money-saving improvements the administration was counting on. Meanwhile, in its contract with Northrop Grumman, the state is getting an IT system with greater security and redundancy than exists now. Huang maintains that the state will save $240 million compared to the cost of undertaking the upgrade itself.

Is Huang dishing out the straight poop, or he is blowing smoke? I’d welcome comments from informed observers.

The Nov. 28, 2005 edition of Bacon’s Rebellion has been published. We have set a new record for content — 17 columns, plus our regular “Nice & Curious Questions” feature, a new Road to Ruin feature, and sponsored content. People had a lot to say!

You can read the latest edition here.