Bacon's Rebellion

In a post yesterday morning, I questioned whether the Daily Press was engaging in a little revisionist history in the way it portrayed the Moody’s credit watch on Virginia’s AAA bond rating. Perhaps, I suggested, the Moody’s warning to Gov. Warner and senior legislators was more ambiguous than subsequently portrayed in the 2004 tax-hike debate. Now comes Gordon C. Morse, a contributing editor at the Daily Press, with details that I find persuasive.

Morse e-mailed me as follows:

Jim, oddly enough, I actually do know what Moody’s said, because I asked. The Moody’s representative came down for the House Appropriations Committee retreat at Alumni Hall at William & Mary on Tuesday, Nov. 18, 2003. After her presentation, I asked her if she had some time, and we sat in one the conference rooms and discussed the process used by Moody’s at some length, but off the record. There was no ambiguity. None. Virginia was on Moody’s 90-day watch, which was subsequently extended because of the protracted debate of the 2004 legislative session. Moody’s reasons for this were not new. Barents Group, in a privately-financed analysis, had already reported in September, 1999 that “on a current services level, expenditures exceed revenues by about $0.7 billion in FY 2000 and by more than $1 billion by FY2008.” Barents also calculated for anticipated additional or “supplemental” spending for Medicaid and higher education and said that would run the state fiscal gap “to more than $3.5 billion by FY 2008.”

In early 2004, there were repeated meetings with Moody’s, with Warner himself intervening more than once to keep Moody’s from downgrading the state’s credit rating. None of this was reported, but I kept up with it by simply making inquiries. North Carolina went through the same thing and did in fact have its rating reduced to double-A, as I remember.

Bottom line: The Moody’s downgrade threat was real. Given thatGov. Warner was intent upon hiking state spending to bring K-12 schools up to the re-benchmarked Standards of Quality, it’s much easier to understand his decision to raise taxes. I’m not saying that I agree with the decision but it would be unfair to accuse Warner, as some did at the time, of exaggerrating the Moody’s threat.

One of these days, we’ll have to dig into that SOQ re-benchmarking process, but that’s another question for another day.

Here’s the complete Til Hazel passage from the Washington Post story on Tim Kaine’s transportation plan that Barnie posted on below:

John T. “Til” Hazel, a developer and frequent critic of both Kaine and Kilgore, said Kaine’s pledge to veto new transportation taxes is “political baloney.”

“That is such a nothing plan, it’s hard for me to even think or comment,” said Hazel, who is supporting Potts. “That’s as bad as Kilgore saying we are going to have a bunch of regional authorities. What . . . do you need a governor for if you are going to do that?”

Hazel’s comment leads me to ask what kind of governor he thinks Virginia needs.

Here’s how the Post summarizes the plan of his candidate:

Sen. H. Russell Potts (R-Winchester), who is running for governor as an independent, has said he will create a commission to develop solutions and call a special session to implement them.

There’s bold leadership from a governor! A “commission,” packed with Hazel-approved wise men and women, creating a plan not debated during the gubernatorial campaign. It could work! No bunch of pesky regional authorities to mollify, no doubting metropolitan planning organizations that might not buy into the plan handed down from the central “commission.”

Apparently, Til knows best, and it’s time we got a powerful governor who recognizes that.

Updaate: Norm Leahy offers this post with quotes from Til Hazel after the defeat of transportation referenda in 2002. If you can’t trust the people to do the right thing, entrust a commission.

Tim Kaine’s transportation plan represents a revolutionary break from platforms of previous gubernatorial candidates by insisting upon the coordination of transportation and land use planning. To read Jim Bacon’s positive report on a plan advanced by a Democrat (gasp!), view today’s post on the “Road to Ruin” website.

Said Til Hazel, a NOVA developer with political throw-weight, to the Washington Post upon hearing Kaine’s transportation roll-out Thursday: “That is such a nothing plan it’s hard for me to even think or comment.”

“DarkSyde,” a participant in the The Daily Kos blog, has a lot to say about Bristol-area teacher Larry Booher, who has been asked to put a halt to teaching creationism in high school biology class. Booher, a highly popular teacher, apparently, has been giving students the option to read the book, Creation Battles Evolution, a voluntary, extra credit assignment.

The Daily Kos item strikes me two ways. On the one hand, creationism is not science and should not be taught in a biology class, even as voluntary extra credit. If a student inquires about creationism, I suppose, it would be OK for Booher to suggest a book. But the book should not be a formal part of the curriculum.

(A quick aside to fundamentalist readers who are bound to take issue with me: Evolution is not “just a theory” — it’s a body of science that is so well integrated into other scientific disciplines, from geology to astronomy, molecular biology to genetics, that to describe it as “unproven” is to say that the entire edifice of 21st century science is unproven. That’s not to say there aren’t major unsolved questions regarding how evolution works — just as there are major unsolved questions in astrophysics. But those unsolved questions don’t begin to dismantle the larger body of knowledge confirming the reality of evolution.)

On the other hand, DarkSyde does hyperventilate about the meaning of the Bristol incident. Says the Kos: “This sort of blatant disregard of the Constitution indicates that we are indeed headed – if not into an overt theocracy right now – into a climate which makes theocratic abuses by government officials (like public high school biology teachers) seem reasonable to the majority of folks in our country.”

Get over it, DarkSyde! Mr. Booher has been teaching creationism for 15 years. Was America a theocracy 15 years ago? And, oh, by the way, he’s been told to stop teaching creationism. Secular humanists are extirpating expressions of religion from the public schools, even in culturally conservative areas like Bristol, a whole lot faster than the fundamentalists can inject it back in. Speaking as a Darwinist, and not a religious person at all, I see no signs of “theocracy” at all. You guys are totally hallucinating.

(Thanks to blogger Jesse Stark for pointing out this story.)

Tim Kaine has issued a detailed analysis of Virginia’s transportation crisis. Two key points emerge: He does not support higher taxes for transportation, although he would use surplus revenues for one-time transportation projects. He would give greater attention than any previous governor to tying transportation and land-use planning.

Read details and analysis on the “Road to Ruin” blog.

The first thing one must understand about the Supreme Court and human settlement pattern cases is that no matter how good or bad the initial press coverage makes the case seem, the facts turn out to be different.

The validity of the City of New London action and the court’s opinion depends on whether the municipality, representing the interests of all the citizens, has a well considered Comprehensive Plan that will result in functional human settlement patterns. If it does, these patterns will benefit the entire community and is a public purpose. If not, this taking will continue the agglomeration of dysfunction as so many urban renewal, highway and waterway projects have done in the past.

The second thing to recognize is that almost none of the outlandish things that are predicted to flow from a case like this ever happen. Read some of the gnashing of teeth and dire predictions that followed Euclid v. Ambler, Grand Central, etc.

Let us spend our energy on issues that will improve the life of all citizens like real property tax reform, improving mobility and access and providing affordable and accessible shelter.

EMR

There goes the neighborhood.

I wonder what our human settlement pattern folks will have to say about this decision.

Writing for the court, Justice John Paul Stevens said local officials, not federal judges, know best in deciding whether a development project will benefit the community.

Update Round-up: James Young and Rick Sincere have posts on their blogs and have commented here; One Man’s Trash and Commonwealth Conservative have also posted on this decision. This 5-4 ruling is, how shall we say it, not being well-received.

Virginia has altered its teacher licensing requirements

by eliminating a basic skills test and replacing it with a more rigorous reading and comprehension exam.

The result is that teachers will have to be more literate and proficient in the subjects they teach, but educators who do not teach math will no longer have to pass a math test.

The State Board of Education also announced that

teachers who have not yet passed the new tests can spend only one year in the classroom on a provisional license. Previously, they were given three years.

Teachers already holding a Virginia license or those with two years’ experience and a license from another state will not be affected by the new requirements.

I’m by and large okay with these changes, although the one year provisional license may negatively impact the teacher shortage. That might be a necessary evil if those individuals can’t pass this test, assuming its a fair exam. I’m a proponent of making it easier for non-traditional professionals to enter the teaching profession and this new testing regimen, more in tune with a person’s base of knowledge, rather than their education class ticket punching, might help.

Still, there’s a subjective component to evaluating a teacher and I’m not sure how to fairly rate potential or performance in that area.

Beneath the story of boom times in Northern Virginia is the story of day laborers, all too often immigrants, being exploited by unscrupulous contractors. From today’s Washington Post, a sample:

Adonay Hernandez, 26, of Arlington said he worked three days this month installing sheetrock at a home in Reston. The contractor gave him a check for only $300, instead of the promised wage of $364, Hernandez said. Then the check bounced, he said.

Fortunately, some day laborers, assisted by community service groups, are fighting back and getting justice:

In Prince William County, five Mexican immigrants won awards totaling more than $5,000 in small claims court from contractors.

In addition to the problem of not getting paid, many day laborers are getting no safety training before being assigned to dangerous work and many are sustaining injuries as a result.

I’m not in favor of setting up some new bureaucracy to police the cretinous contractors, but I think existing state agencies ought to come down like a ton of bricks on those who do not treat day laborers fairly. I think agencies can be more creative in establishing a presence to let contractors know they are being watched. It’s not like the day laborers don’t congregate in one place where someone could explain their rights or give them some safety tips.

Gubernatorial hopeful Tim Kaine spoke to Boys State participants at Liberty University yesterday, the day after Jerry Kilgore. Kaine apparently concentrated on education issues, but it was interesting that he spoke of Linwood Holton’s political career–Holton, the ultimate nominal Republican’s Republican, is his father-in-law.

The Daily Press in Newport News has leaped to the defense of the Warner administration against Republican charges that the state’s massive budget surplus vitiates the case for the 2004 tax increase. The anonymous editorial responds that Warner was acting to protect Virginia’s AAA bond rating. I suspect that some subtle re-writing of history is occurring, but I’m not certain. Sayeth the Daily Press:

The 2004 revenue hike wasn’t about needs. It wasn’t about spending for the greater joys of liberalism’s causes. It was about preserving the state’s credit rating in the face of a threatened downgrade from one of the most influential bond-rating agencies in the country.

Thanks to five years of combining tax cuts with new spending commitments, Moody’s Investment Services put the state on its watch list in late 2003 and told state officials, in no ambiguous terms (they gave North Carolina officials the same message and made good on the threat), that Virginia needed to shore up its financial house or else.

As a point of fact, the tax increase was about needs, and it was about increasing spending on liberalism’s favorite cause, K-12 education. Gov. Warner made it a top piority in the current biennial budget to increase K-12 spending to meet Standards of Quality guidelines.

But on to the more interesting point. Yes, Virginia was indeed on Moody’s credit watch. However, my (very fallible) memory recalls that only Mark Warner, John Chichester and Vince Callahan met with Moody’s, and none of them were very forthcoming with details in public about exactly what Moody’s told them. I don’t know what Moody’s said, and neither does the Daily Press. Far from speaking in “in no ambiguous terms,” Moody’s adominition that Virginia “needed to shore up its financial house” was highly ambiguous. The only thing we know for certain is that Moody’s never told Virginia directly to increase taxes.

My sense is that Moody’s, like the Oracle of Delphi, spoke with such ambiguity that the listener could hear what he wanted to hear. I don’t get the sense that a Moody’s downgrade was imminent. Judging by Warner’s justification for the 2004 tax increases — he emphasized an intermediate-term mismatch between state revenues and obligations (based on now-discredited assumptions of low rates of revenue growth — Moody’s was worried that the state budget might be heading for a train wreck, not that a train wreck was about to happen. But, then, I never investigated the issue closely, so I don’t pretend to speak with authority on the subject. Perhaps my fellow bloggers can lend some insight.

At the risk of making this blog a 24/7, “All Potts, All Debates, All the Time” instrument, I want to make one more point about this controversy. There’s a slippery slope forming.

The Virginian-Pilot editorial page has joined the seemingly unanimous view that Russ Potts deserves to be in the debates right now:

A four-term state senator from Winchester, Potts has an electoral base, a proven grasp of the issues, and positions on taxes and transportation not being articulated by either of the major-party candidates, Democrat Tim Kaine or Republican Jerry Kilgore.

Suddenly, it occurs to the good folks at the Pilot that maybe they should clarify something:

As a practical matter, not every independent who earns a spot on the ballot has earned the credibility to be included in every debate. For example, fringe candidates with noxious views.

I wonder if all the editorial boards would go to the ramparts if Del. Dick Black or Del. Bob Marshall were the independent, not Russ Potts. They’ve certainly got an electoral base and proven grasp of the issues. What are “noxious views?” Maybe, Potter Stewart-like, they know them when we see them.

Then there’s the private organization argument:

Minus an acid test of who’s legitimate and who’s not, the matter ought to be left up to the sponsors of individual events.

With Russ Potts apparently at under 5% in the polls, how can a private organization be criticized for having their debate between just the two guys with over 40% in the polls?

Finally, the Pilot gets around to where I think the real answer lies:

At a minimum, however, Potts deserves a shot at any televised debate. Political scientist Larry Sabato, who’s trying to arrange such an event, proposes a test similar to one set by the Presidential Debate Commission.

If Potts attains support from 10-15 percent of citizens in two legitimate state polls, then it would be a travesty not to include him.

The 10-15% suggestion seemingly contradicts their earlier assertion that Potts belongs in the debates just because they think he’s legitimate. That’s the beauty of requiring some showing in the polls–real people express their preferences, not just ivory tower editorial writers.

Jerry Kilgore should not have ruled out debating Potts, but he should have at least referenced the “Sabato standard” as the most important consideration. We are setting ourselves up for some real donnybrooks in the future if 5% or less is the standard for getting into a debate among candidates in a state-wide general election. If you want Potts in the debates now, get ready to defend a motley band of candidates who can afford $14,000 to get enough ballot signatures. Get ready to show your free speech bona fides as to what constitutes “noxious views.”

If Jerry Kilgore is feeling any pressure from “Debate-Gate,” it didn’t seem to show at his appearance yesterday at Boys State. From this account, he sounded relaxed and engaging at this annual gathering of young leaders.

Hard to believe, but I attended Boys State 35 years ago.

I missed this yesterday–a Roanoke Times account of a Weekly Standard reporter going hunting with Roanoke’s famous political consultant, David “Mudcat” Sanders. The story, and Sanders’ specialty, can be neatly summarized from this passage:

It’s easier to get someone to believe he [Sanders] ate deer droppings than to get Northeastern Democrats to understand the culture of the South.