Bacon's Rebellion

“Republican candidates for governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general are calling for changes to state laws defining when a government can seize private property,” writes Michelle Washington in this morning’s Virginian-Pilot. Virginia Republicans have jumped on the issue in the wake of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last month that expanded the definition of “public use” to include expansion of the tax base — giving local governments more latitude in seizing private property for economic development.

In a Tuesday news conference, Attorney General candidate Bob McDonnell said that “public use” should be better defined. “Whatever public use means, it will not include the primary purpose of economic development or tax enhancement.”

A word to the Democrats. Don’t let the Republicans dominate this issue. When local governments want to take land for redevelopment purposes, they’re not going after the mansion on the hill. They’re taking run-down property on land that some developer thinks he can make more valuable — in other words, they’re taking land from the poor and the powerless, supposedly a Democratic constituency.

All right, sports fans, Tim Kaine and Jerry Kilgore debate Saturday. Michael Shear of the Washington Post will be online at 11 taking questions and comments about this mildly anticipated West Virginia event. Shear’s story on debate prep is here.

Let’s see if anybody asks about policy, or if it’s all just partisan hackery.

The Washington Post Race to Richmond blog isn’t setting the world on fire. There hasn’t been a legimate comment on the blog since June 28th. Half the comments on the 28th were duplicates from Carol Wolf, a City of Richmond School Board member flacking for Tim Kaine.

The “Question of the Week” in the Post‘s online forum is,

Blogs are playing an increasingly visible role in Washington area politics … What do you think about blogs — are they a good or bad influence?

It’s been up almost a week and has only attracted 37 comments, most of them irrelevant.

The Blue Dog gets that many comments just by signing his name. Heck, NotLarrySabato gets twice as many comments as that from one person.

For the third time, a criminal enterprise of selling drivers’ licenses out of a Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles office has been uncovered. This one occurred in Springfield, with previous cases prosecuted against employees in the Tysons Corner and Richmond offices. There are two contrasting stories on the latest case, one from Jerry Markon of the Washington Post and one from Paul Bradley of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

Bradley concentrates on how the DMV employees operated the sale. Markon casts a critical eye on DMV:

DMV spokeswoman Pam Goheen called the arrests “unfortunate and disappointing” and said the “vast majority of DMV employees are honest and hardworking.”

Goheen could not explain how two similar scams might have been carried out so close together in two Northern Virginia DMV offices. But she said the agency has stepped up its enforcement and auditing efforts. Since 2002, she said, DMV “document verifiers” have double-checked every application processed by customer service staffers.

“It’s two sets of eyes on every transaction,” Goheen said. “There is a heightened awareness of the importance of a driver’s license.”

Most reporters might have stopped there, but Markon has researched this case:

Yet court documents said the latest alleged scam was uncovered not by DMV but by the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security. After a six-month investigation that included the FBI and the DMV, officials are alleging that Francisco Martinez issued the licenses and falsified DMV records to make it appear that applicants had surrendered valid licenses from other states.

The DMV might still have some work to do on that “two sets of eyes” process.

Journalists focus on problems they understand. As a result, they address trivial matters while overlooking systemic ones. Nowhere is this truism more evident than the realm of transportation policy. Take the latest mini-scandal at the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel Commission.

It turns out that board members racked up a $900 restaurant tab at topless cabaret in Paris two years ago, putatively while learning how other toll roads operate. When the (Newport News) Daily Press disclosed this abuse of public funds, people were understandably outraged. The press flogged the story and now the Commission has changed its travel policy: No more than $45 per day food allowance while on travel.

I have no problem with changing the policy. Here’s my concern. At the bottom of today’s Daily Press’ wrap-up on the policy changes, we read: “Lawmakers also criticized the commission for a plan to spend an estimated $900 million for two additional tunnels. … Commissioners say the tunnels are needed to handle increased traffic in 20 years. Lawmakers said traffic projections do not justify the expenditure.”

Whoah, Nelly! I’d say the $900 million construction is a lot more important than the $900 bill for food and champagne in a Paris strip club. But what gets the attention — the strip club, or the new tunnels and higher tolls directly impacting the lives of thousands of Virginians? The strip club, of course. Where are the headlines about the $900 million boondoggle?

Hopefully, the Daily Press will continue its coverage of Bridge-Tunnel governance by digging into the proposed Bridge-Tunnel expansion. Which lawmakers are opposed? Why are they opposed? Who developed the idea for the project? What are the numbers in the traffic projections? Are those projections, in fact, flawed? Those are the kinds of questions we need to be asking. And we need to ask them not just about the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, we need to ask them about the other $108 billion (that’s billion with a “b”) worth of transportation projects that the Warner administration asserts in VTrans2025 that Virginia needs but cannot pay for.

I thought the boys at Road to Ruin might jump on this, but since they haven’t, I’ll take a crack at an Augusta Free Press report that Gov. Warner wants to fill the VDOT Commissioner job quickly–and involve the gubernatorial candidates in the selection process:

Warner proposed getting the three candidates for governor – Democrat Tim Kaine, Republican Jerry Kilgore and independent Russ Potts – to be part of a selection process that he would like to see get going “sooner rather than later.”

“I’d love to have all the candidates for governor be a part of a selection process. But that would require the consent of all three candidates for governor,” Warner said.

To date, the governor has but one taker – Potts.

On the surface, this seems like a terrific idea to fix a problem that was ironically caused by the guy who fixed a lot of problems–Shucet. It’s hard to fathom why he couldn’t have hung on until November, at least.

Looking more closely, suspicions abound. Why would Warner make this public? Why wouldn’t he quietly contact each candidate, get their answer, promise confidentiality, and then just go ahead with the recruiting and selection process if all agreed? Why would Potts, the least likely to be elected, get to make public his answer first? Potts has nothing to lose and plenty of credibility to gain by cozying up to Warner on this–why is Warner giving him this free statesman makeover? Why does the Kilgore spokesperson say they are “going to wait until we hear from the governor before we address that issue?” Did Warner contact Kilgore or not? Why does the Kaine campaign give some mumbo-jumbo about being committed to a “process?”

Further, what’s wrong with the interim guy at VDOT, supposedly carrying out Shucet’s policies? I can’t imagine a candidate for the job taking it, not knowing if his boss would be Kaine, Kilgore, or Russ Potts, and not knowing if one of the three could torpedo him during the “process?”

These are some strange machinations and I’d like to hear any theories.

Jeff Schapiro of the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the latest example of an outrageous payment to a public servant: the 2x salary severance payment to the former head of the Virginia Retirement System (VRS). On the editorial page, a VRS board member who represents teachers bemoans justifying this action to the low-paid beneficiaries of the retirement fund.

Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like every week we’re seeing state or local officials receiving huge payments or spending large sums of money on questionable activities. School superintendents are hired then summarily fired (with severance) with alarming frequency. High officials travel around the globe to learn about the latest thing, but rarely implement anything new.

Something’s wrong. Hiring practices and/or expectations are out of whack. We ought to stop a lot of this “national search” balderdash and start focusing on developing talent that can move up within organizations. We ought to select promising candidates from a diversity of backgrounds, not insist that hires have held the same job somewhere else (and somewhere else before that). We hire high-priced retreads who are represented by agents that negotiate lavish (by government standards) perks and severance packages upfront. We don’t check backgrounds as well as we should. We frequently don’t give new hires enough time to establish their leadership and we don’t start overseeing financial matters until they reach scandalous proportions.

I don’t want to hear this “you have to pay for talent” line, either. Sure you do, but there’s a price break point. We all know that the new outsider comes in and leans on the existing staff for everything. Surely there’s someone in every organization that could run the place as well as the high-priced resume. It’s tough to check out the high-priced resume; it’s a lot easier to know what someone who’s been in the organziation many years can do.

How anyone can claim the mantle of “public servant” while simultaneously grabbing outlandish cash and perks is beyond my comprehension.

One specific issue regarding VRS was interesting: Del. Leo Wardrup, Jr., R-VA Beach, criticized the Attorney General’s office for not monitoring the VRS more closely. Is that the AG’s job? Here’s a real live issue for the two AG candidates to debate, as opposed to “top-cop” peripherals.

Yesterday morning someone emailed me a chart showing that Virginia workers ranked 7th among states in the amount of time wasted. Today, the Richmond Times-Dispatch has the story on the front page. So much for my nose for news.

According to a survey by AOL and Salary.com, Virginians waste an average of 2.7 hours per day, most of it surfing the internet or socializing.

Of course, there’s less here than meets the eye. In many jobs, the main responsibility is just to be there. Surfing the net while waiting for the next call to come in to a help desk isn’t necessarily wasting time–it’s passing time. Many workers spread their time wasting over 10 or more hours at the office. Still, the survey probably can lead us to conclude that many jobs are not well-designed and that management oversight could be improved. I know that is the case in the public sector, the second biggest time-wasting sector after insurance.

Usually Virginia is criticized for a “race to the bottom” with Mississippi. Not in this survey. Our low budget colleagues down there were estimated to be 17th–not enough responses were received. They were too busy.

There always seems to be a battle raging somewhere in Virginia between developers and preservationists. The Roanoke Times has a story on the latest skirmish. In Franklin County, the Board of Supervisors is considering “four special use permits to allow construction of a 30,000-square-foot shopping center, an office park, patio homes and town houses” adjacent to the Booker T. Washington National Monument.

Of course, as the supervisors consider this request,

A group of activists has rallied to spread the word about what they see as a threat to the tranquility and health of the 239 acres of federally owned land. They oppose the rezoning, saying that heavy development next to the national monument, which had 18,477 visitors in fiscal year 2004, will damage views and a creek that runs along the border between the two properties.

Booker T. Washington, controversial today because of his “accommodationist” racial views, would probably be pleased that the developer is trying to accomodate the concerns of opponents by offering a larger than required wooded buffer between the development and the park. The opponents aren’t interested in being accommodated.

One might argue that there is plenty of undeveloped land in Franklin County, so a spritz of development near a national monument isn’t a big deal. One could also point out that Manassas National Battlefield Park used to be miles from the nearest commercial or residential space.

In a smaller battle, a Williamsburg resident has written to the Daily Press to argue against putting lights at William and Mary’s Cary Field/Zable Stadium. Colonial-era light conditions must be preserved!

This morning CNN headlines the “research” that leads to identifying the 10 Best Places to live in the US of A.

Peachtree City, Ga a place I helped design and manage is number 8. I should be happy, right?

The real estate agents in “Vienna, VA” are happy because it came in number 4.

Unfortunately the whole story and the “research” behind it is more evidence of the Fundamental Thesis Number Two: Citizens do not know where they are.

Go to the “Contenders by State” listing and look up the 41 Virginia candidates. The headlines say these are “cities.” At first glance it appears that most are unincorporated places within counties. The ones that have the same names as cities have the populations of the postal zip codes with that name.

See “Where is Northern Virginia,” 11 August at db4.dev.baconsrebellion.com for the reason knowing where one is important.

EMR

The July 11, 2005, edition of Bacon’s Rebellion has been posted to the Web. You can read it here.

As indicators of the mainstream media’s decline continue to accumulate, I have noticed that the Richmond Times-Dispatch has been trying to adapt to new realities.

Those realities include this wry observation by projects editor Gordon Hickey:

Surveys, studies, focus groups, and countless letters to the editor inform us that we are losing circulation in the ages 4-98 demographic.

I’ve become so convinced that people aren’t reading the paper anymore that I feel safe in telling you that you’re not reading this.

Hickey goes on to subtly disparage one of the paper’s competitors, blogging, in a tongue-in-cheek way, but one has to take seriously the idea that blogging by RT-D staff is under consideration.

More substantively, President and Publisher Thomas Silvestri introduced a major change to the Sunday Commentary section that debuted today. He also described a “Public Square” initiative to tie the paper more closely to the local community. Apparently, one public event will be held this year to test the concept before a large number are held next year.

While the RT-D is to be commended for attempting to change, that kind of lumbering pace doesn’t exactly instill confidence.

John M. R. Bull of the Daily Press reports today that Gov. Mark Warner has reversed the trend of placing big campaign contributors on the boards of Virginia’s universities:

The Daily Press identified 248 of Warner’s appointments to higher-education boards of visitors and boards of trustees and cross-indexed them to political contributions made in Virginia since 1997, as compiled by the Virginia Public Access Project.

More than one-third of the appointments went to people who didn’t donate money to any candidate since 1997, the earliest year for which contribution data was available.

Another one-third gave campaign contributions, but not to Warner or to his political action committee, One Virginia PAC.

Of the 81 appointees who gave Warner money, some gave him big bucks but most made only token contributions, and 25 percent gave more money to Republican candidates over the years than they gave to him.

Lessig quotes UVA’s Larry Sabato and Mary Washington’s Stephen Farnsworth praising Warner for bucking tradition and taking some of the politics out of appointments to these plum, influential positions.

It certainly is a positive that being a campaign contributor was not a prerequisite to being considered for an educational board appointment by Warner, even granting a certain amount of moderate Republican “cultivation” in his choices. Still, what matters is the overall quality and background of the appointees. Bull should follow up by analyzing the qualifications of those chosen, especially in light of his reporting that universities offered the Warner selection team feedback on the type of candidates they wanted.

Here’s a good question for the gubernatorial candidates: will they follow the Warner example?

Looks like I picked a good week to go on vacation and give the ol’ brain a rest from Virginia politics. So little happened while I was gone that the main preoccupation of Bacon’s Rebellion bloggers was the Valley Blue Dog. Is he a hypocrite, a fool, a closet Republican? C’mon guys, let’s focus on more important things….

Like last week’s unveiling of Jerry Kilgore’s environmental plan. Lisa Guthrie, executive director of the Virginia League of Conservation Voters, which has already declared for Tim Kaine, characterized the plan as “very fuzzy.” And I have to agree. Kilgore declares his support for such worth goals as clean water and clean air without providing a lot of specifics on how he would achieve those goals. It’s as if his campaign staff was checking off another box on the issues list. The environment? Yeah, sure, we’ve got an environmental plan.

The lead plank in Kilgore’s plan calls for “a stewardship based model for governing Virginia’s natural resources and environmental assets.” It’s not clear what exactly Kilgore means by a “stewardship based model,” but his press release implies that it entails consulting with “all involved parties” from government, landowners, corporations and advocacy groups. C’mon, people now… let’s get together and love one another… right now… The press release also alludes to “science-based policies.” Sounds good. But, as a practical matter, what does that mean?

Praising Republican legislators for allocating $50 million this year to modernize sewage treatment plans, Kilgore also says that he “will honor this historic commitment to the Chesapeake Bay.” He will honor the commitment… What does that mean? That he won’t renege on the deal? That he won’t ask for the money back after it’s already been spent? If Kilgore proposes to actually do something, it’s not clear what that is.

Additionally, Kilore says he would extend the nutrient credit trading system for point source pollution (like factories and waste treatment palnts), to non-point sources (like farms and parking lot run-off). The idea of creating market mechanisms for reducing pollution is an interesting one. But, again, let’s see details.

Finally, I would observe that there is one nugget worthy of everyone’s attention. Kilgore would reverse previous funding cuts to the Department of Environmental Quality’s pollution prevention program. By disseminating best management practices across the private sector, DEQ’s pollution prevention programs “help businesses reduce costs by advising them on initiatives like materials substitution, inventory control, preventive maintenance, and office waste reduction.” By appealing to the profit motive, pollution prevention induces companies to conserve water, reduce discharges and cut back on waste — often in excess of state and federal standards. Virginia gets a tremendous bang for the buck with this program. Nothing vague about Kilgore’s recommendation on this issue. Let’s hope he can move it forward.

I’m back after a refreshing week at the Outer Banks. The political landscape looks a little different from the one I left ….

Jerry Kilgore being in trouble for not debating seems to have vaporized in the summer humidity, while everyone is now all a-twitter over perceived problems in the Kaine campaign. “John Behan,” outed by the Washington Post while I was away, has a nice summary of the Kaine situation over at Commonwealth Conservative.

I suspect more is being made of Kaine campaign problems than is really there. The proliferation of blogs and comments on blogs magnify small dust-ups and natural disagreements. Still, being unable to capitalize for more than a day or two on the Kilgore debate story before your own campaign woes become the story is an indicator that something is amiss. National news trends–Supreme Court vacancy and terrorism–seem to favor Republicans right now and that helps Kilgore.

Third party gadfly Russ Potts seems to be flailing around a bit, too. He’s suddenly going to have a transportation plan before he’s elected and, in a bid to peel off some one-issue voters, is now a champion of gays being allowed to adopt. While I agree with his position, where has he been on this? Potts apparently wants to be the eclectic candidate–one who is experiencing all sorts of conversions now that he’s on the ballot statewide.