Bacon's Rebellion

Maybe we’d know who the next governor will be by the color of the smoke at the Shad Planking conclave tomorrow ….

Instead, we’ll count signs.

From the Washington Post comes this story of budget cutting and lay-offs at the Northern Virginia Regional Park Authority. They operate 19 parks and rely heavily on user fees.

Unfortunately for the Park Authority, there is heavy competition from a growing number of golf courses in the Washington, DC area. There are too many courses to sustain the stagnant number of golfers.

Other reasons cited for budget woes included the 2001 sniper panic and that traditonal bugaboo of outdoor activities–bad weather.

Lloyd Ross of Middleburg and Kentbridge Farm has given $300,000 to the Russ Potts campaign. I was curious to learn more about this bastion of “Independent Republican” support. My friend J. Chadwick Worthington, who runs the off-line HorseCountryBS blog, offered to give me a report. To read Chadwick’s post, click satire.

“Open government” is one of those things that only journalists and policy wonks seem to get exercised about, but I consider myself a bit of both, so I find the latest news from the Kilgore camp eminently praiseworthy. “The people of Virginia are the owners of Virginia’s government, and they deserve a government that is open, honest and accountable,” stated the Kilgore campaign in its latest e-mail salvo.

Kilgore offers some solid ideas. His nine-plank program includes the following:

• Provide on-line access to Statement of Economic Interests forms filed by executive branch officers and employees, members of the General Assembly and candidates for state office;
• Revise the Statement of Economic Interests form to more accurately reflect assets and interests held by public officials;
• Require each executive branch agency to designate an Ethics Compliance Officer;
• Enhance disclosure of compensation received by legislators from a publicly regulated business regulated by the State Corporation Commission.

Bravo!

There’s more, although the Kilgore campaign does not appear to have posted its summary of the plan on its website yet. Full disclosure is the antidote to conflicts of interest and questionable ethics in government, not more restrictions on contributions or the movement of people in and out of government. Kilgore got this one right.

Looks like the down-ticket GOP candidates are falling into line behind the Kilgore campaign team on the weighty issue of the display of signage during the Shad planking. “The sign war is considered a demonstration of grassroots strength and organization,” noted Kilgore campaign manager Ken Hutcheson in an April 7 memo that has just come to my attention. But all down-ticket campaigns “would come together as a whole to assist in the Kilgore effort to win the sign war against Tim Kaine.”

The candidates for lieutenant governor (Bill Bolling, Sean Connaughton and Gil Davis) and for attorney general (Steve Baril and Bob McDonnell) all agreed to display only those signs authorized by the Kilgore for Governor campaign. Each down-ticket campaign will be responsible for providing up to volunteers and/or staff to assist with Kilgore signage. Said the Hutcheson memo: “There will be no down-ticket sign war within the Republican Party.”

Memo to the George Fitch for Governor campaign: Better send a busload of volunteers to the shad planking. No signs = no visibility with the political establishment and punditocracy = no campaign.

According to the Washington Post, six of the 17 House Republican delegates who supported state tax increases last year will be challenged in the primaries. Challengers have until Wednesday to submit a petition with 125 or more valid signatures, so one or two more candidates may surface, but the hope of some in the anti-tax movement that all 17 would face opposition is likely to go unfulfilled.

Revolutionary upheaval in the Republican Party does not seem in the cards. This election is shaping up as more of a bush war–a nuisance to the forces of Business As Usual, but hardly a threat. Given the immense advantages of incumbency, the anti-tax insurgents will be lucky to bump off any of the 17.

As one who believes that the 2004 tax increases were unjustified, I’m amazed at the lack of discontent. I suppose you can attribute the quietude to the political genius of Mark Warner, who jiggered his tax “restructuring” so that a significant majority of Virginians would come out ahead, even if only marginally. Meanwhile, homeowners may be distressed about rising property taxes, but they can’t blame their General Assembly delegates for the sins of their local boards of supervisors.

The other failure so far is the inability of the anti-tax forces to spin a compelling anti-tax narrative. The fact is, the Commonwealth is facing real problems. Transportation, education, Medicaid, the environment, the mentally disabled, etc. How do we address those very real problems without raising taxes? The insurrectionists in the GOP just don’t have a good answer.

I should leave this to The Salt Lick, but he’s covering another important story. The Roanoke Times editorial page has come out against Sen. George Allen’s plan to keep internet access from being taxed. The Times compares Allen to George Armstrong Custer and tell us,

The information superhighway is now a maturing, extraordinarily competitive industry, more than economically resilient and strong enough to accept its civic responsibilities and begin contributing to the general welfare, as do other American industries.

Now, maybe I don’t understand all the ins and outs of internet taxation, but won’t I be paying the tax, not the “economically resilient and strong” internet industry?

Update: Commonwealth Conservative is more succinct.

Two Washington Post statehouse reporters got together and compared the political climate of Maryland and Virginia. My favorite quote:

“It’s like Virginia is a very stern daddy and Maryland is a very compassionate mommy,” said Maryland Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert).

The estimable Norm over at One Man’s Trash has some insightful thoughts on radio’s present and future, inspired, of course, by his Jeff “Good Copy” Schapiro reporting.

That knuckle-dragging, right-wing Richmond Times-Dispatch is at it again. They’ve added a new feature to their op-ed page: profiles of letter to the editor writers. Now they can highlight editorial page editor Ross Mackenzie’s most extreme accolytes breathlessly parroting his wing-nut nostrums.

Ah, but Mackenzie is crafty and calculating.

Today’s first profile is of Jerilyn Fay Collier Kelle whose pet peeve about Richmond is “anti-democratic elitism.” You might expect Ms. Fay Collier Kelle (may I call you Jerilyn? I’m not sure where your last name begins)to discuss education in her letter to the editor, for her career is “Teaching teachers.” Indeed, if she were Governor or Mayor, she would “Not attract businesses whose sole imperative was short-term profit, but provide for the education of our people at any cost.” Can’t tax those short-term profits, can we?

But no. Jerilyn’s jeremiad attacks the very foundation of Mackenzie’s belief system: capitalism. Responding to an obviously Mackenzie-inspired editorial cartoon of the Ten Commandments being hauled off in a trash truck, she writes:

Capitalism, when allowed to become “savage,” trashes the esteemed values both of our democratic public and private lives. When left unbridled, capitalism gives rise to greed and the need to gain ever more by any means necessary, at the expense and impoverishment of others and of our own spirits.

Moreover, it corrupts government decision-making, which destroys the people’s faith in our ability to govern ourselves.

Wow. Mackenzie and the conservative cabal have set this profile feature up magnificently for their own nefarious conspiracy purposes.

The Richmond Times-Disgrace. You need to rant about stuff.

Our friend Snoopy at River City Rapids has written an excellent defense of the Greater Richmond Partnership (GRP), inspired mostly by Jim Bacon’s comments to a post I wrote about the organization. Jim and I share a deep interest in economic development, though we come at it from different angles. We both wish economic development had the blog snap, crackle and pop of a Blue Dog post, but we’ll take what we can get, and that’s Snoopy.

Snoopy leaves the impression that he thinks I’m somehow opposed to GRP, possibly because I’m a resident of Chesterfield County. Chesterfield is thinking of withdrawing its support to the GRP, a $390,000 annual contribution. The City of Richmond is also thinking of withdrawing, leaving only Henrico and Hanover in this award-winning regional organization. Half the members leaving would effectively kill the GRP.

I’m not opposed to the GRP and I’m certainly a fan of effective regional cooperation. I am, however, a believer in honest accounting and efficiency. The GRP says it “helped” bring in 71 companies to Chesterfield. Yes, I’m curious about the level of “help” they provided for each project. Did they make a cold call on an executive in Germany or did they receive a phone call from a consultant? I suspect that if you checked, the Virginia Economic Development Partnership also has those 71 companies on its “helped” list, as does Chesterfield County’s own economic development organization. Shouldn’t we rationalize all this “help?” How many layers of help do we really need? How much double and triple counting is going on to justify the layers?

Some of the 71 companies on the “helped” list have since left the County or laid workers off. Has that negative impact been subtracted from the investment figures given? Are any incentives the state/county paid been subtracted out?

Jim has written about changes that have swept the economic development field and how the Greater Richmond Partnership has been a leader in reacting to those changes. I agree that the GRP has been a nimble innovator, but at least one little thing bothers me. The internet is now the tool of choice for many company and/or consultant relocation efforts. Go to Google and do this search: “locate a business in Richmond, VA.” The GRP’s website does not come up on the first two pages! Heck, the City of Richmond’s economic development office and the Virginia Economic Development Partnership don’t come up until the second page. Maybe there’s a good explanation for that, but I think I’d buy a sponsored link on Google before I went to a trade show in China.

I’m opposed to any jurisdiction just pulling the plug on its participation in the GRP, but I can’t say that I’m in favor of blindly continuing to fund it without asking some questions.

George Fitch, the Don Quixotian seeker of the Republican Party nomination for governor, has delivered petitions with 14,000 signatures to the State Board of Elections — enough to ensure that he gets on the June ballot for the state primary.

Eighty-two volunteers around the state collected names to get Fitch on the ballot. These volunteers came to him through the George Fitch for Governor website. Fitch, the fiscally conservative mayor of Warrenton best known as the promoter behind the Jamaican bobsled team, gathered more than 2,000 of those signatures himself.

Ignoring Fitch as always, the Kilgore campaign issued a press chortling at the relatively low number of signatures submitted by Democrat Tim Kaine. Noting that the Kaine campaign had set a goal of submitting 30,000 signatures, Kilgore’s press secretary, Tim Murtaugh, noted that Kaine had garnered only 18,776 signatures.

There was no indication in the Kilgore press release, nor on the Kilgore website, how many signatures the former Attorney General submitted. But if Fitch, despite a near black-out in press coverage for his campaign, managed to bring in 76 percent as many signatures as the undisputed Democratic nominee, it may indicate that his anti-tax, anti-spending message has more traction than commonly recognized.

Then again, those 14,000 signatures may mean that if you go to a shopping mall, you can get people to sign almost anything just to get you to leave them alone.

In comments to Jim’s post below, our friend Paul claims that savings from the Virginia Information Technology Agency, VITA, have always been claimed to be future savings.

According to this link, it appears the future is now.

Peter Bacque with the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports this morning that the Virginia Information Technologies Agency wants to increase the rates it charges state agencies “Our agencies are going to experience a hit,” state CIO Lemuel C. Stewart Jr. told the Virginia Information Technology Investment Board yesterday. The higher charge, he conceded, amounted to a “backdoor budget cut.”

Lemuel contended that Virginia’s public computer systems are not adequately protected againt cyber attacks. Upgrading systems to comply with state requirements will cost more $6.5 million over the next two years. Including other mandated projects, VITA needs a total of $20.8 million. Rates must be approved by the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission.

The purpose of creating VITA was to cut costs, not add to them. Charges to state agencies ought to be going down, not up! Where are the savings? VITA is supposed to be one of the great legacies of the Warner administration. What the heck is going on?

Yesterday, the big blog buzz was a Blue Dog dust-up with Scott Hanger that spilled into comment sections throughout the Virginia blogosphere.

Today, I suspect the buzz will be all about the release of state-wide political fundraising numbers.

As usual, Commonwealth Conservative has the big picture, but Addison of Sic Semper Tyrannis, in an apparent bit of screaming baby blogging (2AM time stamp!), has the most fascinating story–the big individual contribution made to the Russ Potts campaign.

Will this huge donation give Potts more credibility, or will it just open him up to more derision? Listen to the buzz ….