by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Here are some notable signs from my travel through parts of Southside Virginia last week.
No, I was not in California. This is advertising a Martinsville movie theater at the top of a hill, known locally as “Hollywood Mountain.”
I passed up getting lunch here. (Outside Martinsville)
Yard sign in Mecklenburg County.
by Kerry Dougherty
On Friday some happy-but-not-unexpected news broke: The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is about to go kaput.
It’s on life support for two more months.
That’s because Congress defunded the body that awards public funds to National Public Radio and the Pubic Broadcasting Service. The left-wing non-profit expected to be showered with $1.1 billion in tax dollars, but the Big Beautiful Bill passed by Congress last month zeroed it out.
Unsurprisingly, PBS itself misreported the news.
No, PBS, Trump didn’t claw back the funds. Congress did.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul made a similarly misleading announcement. Continue reading.
By Steve Haner
The State Corporation Commission Friday approved two separate increases in Dominion Energy Virginia’s rates; one caused by the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA) and the other related to regional transmission services. Combined they add more than $5 to a 1,000-kilowatt hour residential bill effective September 1.
The VCEA driven increase is an additional $2.99 on what is called Rider RPS, for “renewable portfolio standard.” The case ended with Dominion approved to collect the $609 million over one year that was pending earlier this year. The money is not for electricity or power lines or operating cost, but for intangible “renewable energy certificates” Dominion must buy because it missed the VCEA’s goals for its own renewable production.
The transmission increase is another $2.10 which is passed through to pay the regional PJM Interconnection energy marketplace, in this case for transmission and for the demand reduction programs it operates. The SCC doesn’t set transmission rates but accepts those imposed by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC.) That is imposed on bills through Rider T1. (You can find a list of all Dominion riders, costs in addition to base rates, here.)
The two rider increases come in addition to an increase in the portion of the monthly bill dedicated to collecting fuel costs, which is Rider A. Effective July 1, the basic fuel charge for Dominion customers – in this case all types of customers pay the same per kWh – rose from $20.74 to $29.68 per 1,000 kWh, a healthy 43% jump. That should just be hitting bills now.
See more memes at The Bull Elephant.
by James A. Bacon
Virginia lost a net of 120,000 residents through domestic migration (excluding foreign immigration and emigration) over the decade between tax years 2011-12 and 2021-22, according to the Unleash Prosperity “Vote with your feet” database. That was the 9th worst performance among the 50 states.
That out-migration translated into a loss of $14 billion in adjusted gross income, or an average of $117,000 per person — not per household, but per person. On average, the households leaving Virginia were affluent. The loss of prime taxpayers translates into roughly $800 million in lost state income-tax revenue.
No surprise to anyone paying attention: Florida, Texas and North Carolina were the big winners. New York, California and Illinois were the big losers. Sadly, Virginia was the only loser on the South Atlantic Coast, one of the fastest growing regions of the country.
“The single most important thing that is going on in this country, economically and demographically, is the massive shift in migration that’s happened over the last 10 to 20 years, and it is accelerating,” economist Steve Moore told attendees at the launch of the Unleash Prosperity website.
Interestingly, Gov. Glenn Youngkin took time out of his schedule to speak at the unveiling. According to The Daily Signal, he attributed the population shift to what the news outlet described as “a virtuous cycle in red states of cutting or eliminating state income taxes, which led to a greater influx of people and jobs, which created a larger tax base and more revenue for state budgets.”
(more…)Twenty-five years of student housing generating students
by Joe Fitzgerald
History, arithmetic, evidence. Those are just some of the things that suggest a student housing glut is a major factor driving enrollment growth in Harrisonburg City Public Schools. They’re also some of the things City Council members can legally and politically ignore in making decisions about the city’s future.
Since Sunchase opened in 1999, every three bedrooms of housing targeting JMU students has generated one new K-12 HCPS student.
But JMU student housing doesn’t have people in that age range, and some of that housing is in the county, you say. Bear with me.
Start with this graph.
New off-campus JMU housing and growth in K-12 are roughly parallel except for the one blip. That blip came when a previous City Council changed zoning rules to make it harder to build new apartment complexes. But the change didn’t kick in for three years, and developers built while the building was good, adding more than 3,000 beds of student housing.
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(Haha! Not so crazy. For those who missed it, check out my post from earlier this year, “Attack of the Killer Swine.”)
Wait, there’s more news about pigs and bacon! The Wall Street Journal profiled Virginia’s very own Smithfield Foods, which has genetically engineered a super pig that produces more bacon!
(more…)Against the backdrop of hysterical warnings that the George Mason University Board of Visitors might fire President Gregory Washington, GMU’s first Black president, at its meeting today, the Board gave him a raise. It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement — only 1.5 percent — but it was a raise. Apparently, that means he still has a job.
Let’s review the tape of what the media were saying about the GMU president, who has been on the defensive as the Department of Justice, the Youngkin administration, and the Board of Visitors pushes back against anti-Semitism and racial preferences at the Northern Virginia university.
The New York Times a couple of days ago:
Faculty members said they were concerned that a pileup of investigations would be used to justify toppling him, as happened with Dr. Ryan. [at the University of Virginia].
“We’re worried it’s going to be high noon on Friday,” said Tim Gibson, an associate professor at George Mason and the president of the Virginia state conference of the American Association of University Professors, a faculty rights group.
VPM News yesterday:
A growing number of George Mason University faculty are concerned about the fate of President Gregory Washington, whose annual performance review is set for the upcoming Board of Visitors meeting Friday morning — amid an onslaught of federal investigations.
(more…)
by James A. Bacon
The “no confidence” campaign against the University of Virginia Board of Visitors is gaining momentum with the United Campus Workers of Virginia (UCWV) joining the effort. Strikes and lawsuits are among the options available to protesters, although, as one panelist put it in a “teach-in” yesterday, strikes by state employees are illegal in Virginia and hard to pull off. “There’s probably a lot of steps in between [a strike] and where we are now.”
The union representing graduate students and other employees at UVA, Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University, and the College of William & Mary also is keeping close tabs on the GMU Board of Visitors, which was meeting today amidst widespread fears that it might oust President Gregory Washington in disputes over anti-Semitism and Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. The UVA Board is scheduled to meet in a special session Monday to discuss the search for a new president.
In a zoom meeting open to public participation yesterday, the UCWV provided insight into what leftist elements in Virginia’s public universities are thinking and doing. From the remarks made in the meeting, it was evident that UCWV members sympathized with the UVA Faculty Senate’s recent 46-to-6 “no confidence” vote against the UVA board but faced a steep learning curve to understand the governance of public universities.
The meeting took place against a backdrop of a battle royale between Governor Glenn Youngkin and state Senate Democrats over control over the governing boards of Virginia’s public universities.
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By Steve Haner
Should the 2026 Virginia General Assembly choose to conform state tax laws to the full set of new tax rules at the federal level, Virginia families and businesses might save as much at $1.4 billion annually. That is a fresh estimate from the Tax Foundation, which looked at the impact of full conformity in all 50 states.
Jared Walczak is vice president of state projects at the Tax Foundation and is well known and respected in Richmond, where he worked as a legislative aide with a keen interest in tax matters. His team’s estimates are just that, and the Virginia Department of Taxation may be coming up with different numbers, but the Tax Foundation report can start the debate.
They might prefer we didn’t, but the time to press candidates for governor and for the General Assembly about these issues is now, before the November election. The recent good news about the state finishing yet another budget cycle with a healthy surplus should be part of the conversation. In his introduced budget in December, outgoing Governor Glenn Youngkin could propose which of these provisions he would adopt.
Virginia’s default position on the income tax for years has been to conform to federal tax rules and definitions. Generally, conformity should be the goal because of how it simplifies tax compliance. But it has been more than a decade since Virginia was an automatic or “rolling” conformity state. The list of variances has gotten very long and may now grow again.
Anticipating big changes under new President Donald Trump, the 2025 General Assembly inserted a firm commandment in the final budget making it clear that no federal changes adopted by Congress would be automatically adopted in Virginia, even those with minimal fiscal implications.
The Tax Foundation labels our current position as “static conformity” and also reviews the other states’ postures. That will leave the next governor and the 2026 legislators with a long list of decisions to make, some of them on highly popular federal provisions such as the new individual deductions for tip income and overtime income.
by James A. Bacon
Federal immigration agents would be forbidden from wearing masks when making arrests under a bill that Virginia Senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine plan to introduce to Congress, reports Axios Richmond. The proposal represents in part a response to incidents in Chesterfield County and Charlottesville courthouses where plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials wore masks when detaining illegal immigrants.
Democratic lawmakers oppose ICE agents wearing masks because…. Well, it’s not entirely clear from the Axios article what the thinking is behind the proposed bill. Axios notes that raids by ICE agents in plain clothes have fed fears that people were being kidnaped and that ICE impersonators have been harassing people, “creating … chaos and uncertainty in some communities.”
None of that warrants a ban on face masks. If the problem is ICE officials wearing plain clothes, then require them to wear uniforms. If the problem is impersonating ICE officials, then make such subterfuges illegal. The problem isn’t the wearing of masks in the abstract, or the proposed bill would say something about anti-Israel protesters who conceal their identities with masks. Critics (not necessarily Warner and Kaine) have likened the use of masks to secret police tactics.
ICE agents wear masks for a reason. Here’s an AI-generated summary:
“Increased Threats: ICE officials have reported a significant rise in threats and assaults against their agents, with claims of a 500% increase in assaults during operations. This alarming trend has led to concerns for the safety of agents and their families, prompting the use of masks to conceal their identities.
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by Jon Baliles
A strange story appeared this week almost out of nowhere and seems to have caught everyone by surprise, including the Mayor, who has spent the last few days fumbling the situation like a rookie running back. Graham Moomaw at The Richmonder broke the news Monday that Governor Youngkin sent the city a letter scolding the government for dragging their feet in adhering to a new state law that requires localities to match state compensation to pay those wrongfully convicted of a crime for time served in prison.
The city owes $5.8 million to Marvin Grimm, who was wrongly convicted at age 20 and sentenced to life in prison for the death of a three-year old boy in 1976 but was exonerated last year. The state approved a $5.8 million allocation to Grimm during the General Assembly earlier this year. The city owes the same amount because the General Assembly passed a new law that took effect July 1 which requires localities where the wrongful conviction took place match the state compensation. It was bipartisan legislation approved 99-0 in the House of Delegates and 40-0 in the Senate.
The Governor’s letter warned the city that the state could withhold state funding if the money is not paid to Grimm by August 15th. Del. Rip Sullivan, D-Fairfax, wrote the law and told Moomaw, “Richmond is obligated to pay it. That is the statute that we passed. The governor is doing what we directed him to do in that statute.”
The Governor is also doing something the city so far has chosen not to do — answer Mr. Grimm’s attempts to receive his due compensation.
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by Jacob Grandstaff
State Sen. Ghazala Hashmi, the Democrats’ pick for Virginia’s Lt. Governor, has cultivated a social policy record more suited to San Francisco and New York City than the commonwealth she seeks to represent. From her attacks on the sanctity of life to her assault on Virginians’ Second Amendment rights, her agenda represents a direct affront to key principles that makes Virginia great—valuing life and the right to defend it.
A champion for abortion extremism
Hashmi is not only pro-choice; she’s pro-abortion. In fact, she voted to limit the information women could access to make an informed choice. Additionally, she enjoys massive support from the abortion lobby. She even brags of Virginia’s abortion tourism industry for women who want to kill their babies but can’t do so legally because of pesky right-to-life laws in other states.
In 2020, Hashmi voted for the Reproductive Health Protection Act. This expanded who could perform abortions to include nurse practitioners. It also eliminated mandatory ultrasounds and 24-hour wait times, which in the 2010s helped reduce abortions by around 32 percent in the commonwealth.
By expanding provider eligibility and removing mandatory in-person counseling, the bill made it easier for abortion providers to mail mifepristone and other abortifacients to women after the FDA approved telehealth abortions the following year.
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by James C. Sherlock
We note that the owners of Medical Facilities of America (MFA) have renamed their entire 51-facility chain “Lifeworks Rehab”.
They can change it weekly if they wish. There are no rules on that front.
We are left to presume it is happenstance that now none of the bad MFA headlines and stories can easily be traced to them. The same coincidence happened in December 2024 when the Colonial Heights Rehabilitation and Nursing Center scandal exploded. At that point the same guys retired their Innovative Healthcare Management flag and moved Innovative Healthcare’s facilities under their MFA label.
Those facilities advertised at that point that they were “under new management”. I wrote about it. They removed that claim from the websites.
Now “Lifeworks Rehab”. All is forgiven.
By Steve Haner
The best defense has always been a good offense. With Virginia Democrats under some political pressure over their wind, solar and electric vehicle addictions (not enough pressure, in my opinion), Virginia’s environmental activists are counterattacking at Republicans who won’t drink their green Kool-Aid.
The Virginia League of Conservation Voters has announced a digital media buy aimed at nine Republican House members who voted against some of LCV’s favorite bills. The claim is that Republican votes caused rate increases which enriched some unnamed big energy company. Dominion Energy is unnamed in the ads, of course, because it gives more money to Democrats than it does Republicans in Virginia. It has spent twice as much so far this cycle buying Democrat loyalty as Clean Virginia has, and that is saying something. So Democrats have to tiptoe around Dominion this year, but that’s another story.
You can see the ads here and here. In this old comms guy’s opinion, I’ve seen better. The longer one in particular is confusing, but they are both worthless unless somehow they get tied to the individual candidates and the election. Instead, the message in the tag line is “clean energy lowers prices.” No, and it isn’t even that clean, but that’s also another story.
In explaining why it did this, LCV’s release on its website cited three specific 2025 bills, two of which passed and one of them vetoed. Let us explore those bills in the order in which they listed them, and why someone might have voted against them. None of them lower any prices at all.
House Bill 2266, which was signed into law, is described by them as cutting “excessive interconnection costs …to make small clean energy projects more affordable and bring projects online faster.” Well, no, but it directs the State Corporation Commission to work with the utilities on improving that process. That is not a bill that this observer targeted as obnoxious. I should have.
The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….
This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.
Bacon’s Rebellion is Virginia’s leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.
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