Bacon's Rebellion

  • The World Falls Apart, and Virginia Gets More Business As Usual

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    James A. Bacon

    I managed to keep my mouth shut for a year or so, but I can no longer. I now feel compelled to return to blogging, at least for a while. Many thanks to Ed Risse and Peter Galuszka for keeping this forum open during my long absence.

    This fall, Virginia will elect one of two men for governor — Bob McDonnell or Creigh Deeds — at a historic inflection point in the U.S. economy and political system. The federal government is careening towards fiscal armageddon, with incalculable consequences for the nation and, of course, the 50 states that will be left to pick up the pieces. Simultaneously, in a trend only temporarily masked by a worldwide recession, global energy supplies grow tighter, threatening to render Virginia’s dysfunctional human settlement patterns even more dysfunctional. Meanwhile, Virginia’s population inexorably grows older, putting pressure on state Medicaid/social service expenditures and tax revenues, straining our health care system, and creating an urgent need to build more senior-friendly communities.

    These three inter-related crises will define the politics and economy of Virginia and America for the next generation. Yet both candidates have framed their campaign issues in utterly conventional terms, as if there were nothing at all urgent about the times in which we find ourselves.

    True, both men offer “energy” plans but both plans fall far short of the deep structural transformation that is needed to preserve Virginia’s living standards and economic competitiveness. True, both candidates talk about improving “government efficiency,” but their ideas, even if enacted in total, would only tinker on the margins of the restructuring that is needed. Neither candidate touches upon the Age Wave in a meaningful way.

    People of Virginia! Our nation, and by extension our state, is in a long-term, multiform crisis, the nature of which most people are only dimly aware. Neither Deeds nor McDonnell show any evidence through their public pronouncements that they comprehend the nature of the challenge facing us.

    As I have time, I hope to address these themes — an energy crisis only temporarily in abeyance, the rapid aging of the population, and the foreseeable fiscal insolvency of the federal government — with the goal of holding both gubernatorial candidates to account. It is time get serious, folks. We are running out of time.

  • THE AMERICAN DREAM AMENDED

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    James A. Bacon

    Professor Sugrue’s “The New American Dream: Renting”(The Wall St Journal 14 August 2009) is a must read for anyone interested in shelter or in solving the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis or shelter in general. The article can be accessed at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204409904574350432677038184.html#mod=article-outset-box

    Sugrue makes it very clear that:

    1. The emergence of,

    2. The overwhelmingly dominate run of, and

    3. The crash of

    What the real estate industry likes to call “The American Dream,” and

    What many others call “The 50 Year American Nightmare,”

    was NOT the result of free market decisions by well informed consumers.

    It was NOT citizens voting with their dollars for what they love and want to experience with respect to human settlement patterns. That is especially true over the last 36 years.

    The so-called “American Dream” is the vehicle that the real estate industry and land speculators have fashioned to make the most money fastest and will have a devastating long term impact on economic prosperity, social stability and environmental sustainability of contemporary society.

    Sugrue argues that The American Dream / Nightmare has been made possible by the misunderstood and largely hidden role of Federal Agencies. Further, the Federal role did not start with the New Deal and did not end with The Fair Deal or The Great Society. It was a major component of The Ownership Society.

    In Sugrue’s view Single Household Detached Dwellings would not be “The American Dream” but for Federal Agency intervention in the shelter and land markets. In addition, there would not have been repeated housing / land development bubbles without Federal Agency initiative and resources.

    “Land Development Bubble?” Yes! You may recall the REIT Crash and the Savings and Loan Crisis. They cost investors and tax payers billions.

    The most recent of these recurring housing / land development bubbles has caused the current Global Financial Meltdown. The Meltdown was caused by the fabrication of fraudulent securities based on bad mortgages. But the underlying factors – loans to poor credit risks, crooked appraisals, illegal lending practices, out of control compensation schemes, faulty regulation and Wrong Size House, Wrong Location dwellings – that fueled the BOOM and the BUST were all part of a grand scheme to drive Mass OverConsumption and speculation in shelter.

    As EMR noted in the comments to the “Ignoring the Real Issues” post, Sugrue has put together great quotes, interesting data and a narrow perspective to come to a faulty conclusion. (As also noted in that string, Larry Gross gets a hardy vote of thanks for providing the link to the Journal coverage.)

    Sugrue comes to the wrong conclusion because of three major discontinuities in his shelter-centric Conceptual Framework:

    1. Without massive Federal (and state) Agency subsidies of the Autonomobile, most of the disastrous cumulative consequences of The American Dream / Nightmare would never have occurred.

    In other words Federal Agencies can be blamed for dysfunctional human settlement patterns due to TWO mutually reinforcing Agency strategies. Sugrue blames dysfunctional a human settlement pattern on shelter strategies but that is only half the story. We will return to this point below.

    2. It is NOT citizens owning a DWELLING that is the ROOT cause of the problems Sugrue cites but the configurations of the lots upon which the vast majority of the dwellings were built. We will return to the ownership issue, but first the third discontinuity.

    3. Widespread use of rental housing is NOT a ‘solution’ to the shelter problem or to the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis.

    Most shelter professionals agree there is great economic, social and physical value in ‘ownership.’ However, as RH points out in the earlier string, a nation-state of landlords would be no ‘dream.’ He also notes that landlords could write off the cost of money as an expense of doing business and so they would have an advantage when the mortgage tax deduction goes away as it must. (Even if Federal Agencies had more money than they knew what to do with it, the mortgage tax deduction should be limited to those at the bottom of the Ziggurat as noted in Chapter 22 – Without Shelter: The Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis of TRILO-G.)

    Absentee ownership is an ancient and universal generator of shelter dysfunction especially in Regions with market economies. Renting dwelling units ONLY in owner occupied buildings is a solution applied in some Cluster-scale and Neighborhood-scale Institutions posing as quasi-Agencies.

    Now back to the larger ownership issue raised as point two above.

    The central issue is not the ‘ownership’ of the DWELLING, it is the location of the dwelling in the middle of a lot and the resulting cumulative disaggregation of human settlement patterns that raises the cost and causes most of the dysfunctions that Sugrue correctly decries.

    Lewenz does a nice job of spelling out the benefits of settlement patterns that do NOT contain individual lots – and do not provide space to drive and park Autonomobiles within the Urban fabric – in How to Build a Village. The cumulative economic, social an physical impact of ANY homogeneous configuration of single Household detached dwelling is a major focus of Part Two, Chapters 5 through 14 of The Shape of the Future.

    In addition, many who live on a separate lot also live with the delusion that can do what ever they want on their ‘land.’ The cumulative result is dysfunctional scatteration and disaggregation of Urban society – and 95 percent of the population is Urban.

    Over the past 200 years Industrialization and application of complex technology has resulted in the collective impact human habitation to intensify exponentially. Humans now have the ability to warp and destroy Regional, Continental and Global natural systems. One needs to go no farther than the Chesapeake Bay to understand this reality. The dysfunctional scatteration caused by extensive monocultures of individual lots exacerbates the problem. On-site mitigation of some impacts – sanitation and storm water for example – only make the problem of cumulative dispersion worse.

    In other words the central issue is not “home ownership” but rather human settlement pattern.

    It turns out that too many well intended and thoughtful citizens have been frightened by Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons.” There can be tragedy in commons but that is a problem of management, not of ownership patterns. Solving the over-use of the commons is just one aspect of need for Fundamental Transformation in the way land the planets resource is managed and maintained. This is the topic of PART FOUR of TRILO-G – THE USE AND MANAGEMENT OF LAND.

    As pointed out in this PART, ownership, control and management are separate functions impacting land.

    Some have used the existence of bad public or shared land ownership, control and management as an excuse to over sell “the miracle of private ownership.” There is an important role for private ownership. However, there is also and important role for joint ownership – for example by a husband and wife – and for a whole range of shared-ownership options.

    Intelligently applying a full range of ownership options is key to evolving functional land use patterns made up of Balanced organic components of human settlement. The issue is NOT private ownership vs public ownership, it is finding the appropriate role for individual ownership within the wide array of joint ownership options and paring that option with the appropriate land management strategy.

    There are many ownership options for ‘non-free-standing’ dwellings. One is attached dwellings. In Planned New Communities (Balanced components of Urban fabric at Alpha Community-scale) built between 1967 and 2000 in the US of A, the majority of dwellings are ATTACHED, not DETACHED dwellings.

    Condominiums, cooperatives and other arrangements come to mind as a way to “own” a home and not have a free-standing dwelling on an individual lot. Condominiums in particular have become poster children of ineffective Cluster-scale governance and management. That is because states have failed to use their ‘reserved powers’ to evolve functional governance structures below the municipal level. Current governance structures fail to reflect the evolution from an agrarian society to an Urban society. Condominium and Homeowners Associations are notorious examples of bad governance in large part because they have no role the formal governance structure. There are, of course at this time no functional Regional / SubRegional governance structures that reflects economic, social and physical reality in the US of A.

    Agencies have also – especially Federal Agencies in the West – given ‘public’ ownership of land a bad name due to bad management. This gross failure has been intentionally use to wrongly condemn all shared-ownership arrangements.

    It is axiomatic that the scale of the land bay and the proximity of the Urban enclaves should determine the level of ownership, control and management of Openland. See Adirondack land use control system and PART FOUR – THE USE AND MANAGEMENT OF LAND in TRILO-G.

    The importance of shared land ownership in functional human settlement patterns and in solving the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis is mirrored in the importance of shared-vehicle systems in solving the Mobility and Access Crisis.

    Finally lets us turn to the last of Sugrue’s oversights with respect to the causes of settlement pattern dysfunction (aka, The American Dream / Nightmare):

    By focusing on just the Federal role in the subsidy of scattered dwellings, Sugrue masks the problems with Federal subsidy of Mobility and Access.

    The fact is that, but for Large, Private Vehicles with which to access the dispersed dwellings on individual lots, most of the problems Sugrue sites would never have arisen.

    It is not just the government subsidy of the dwelling – the process of building and financing shelter – that is at the root of the problem but the Federal Agencies’s role in subsidizing the dominance of the Autonomobile as the primary option for Mobility and Access – what is good for GM is good for America.

    There is a long history of Federal dominance in transport infrastructure. It started with post roads, stage routes and canals during the Confederacy and expanded after the adoption of the Constitution to railroads and then to Roadways (aka, Motorways) and finally to Air travel facilities.

    A place to get a good summary of the Federal role in Autonomobile is Weyrich and Lind’s 2009 book Moving Minds: Conservatives and Public Transportation. Weyrich and Lind have taken on what they calls “the anti-transit troubadours” (including Winston and Shirley profiled in the earlier post METRO FINGER POINTING 24 June 2009, and the subject of QUACK, QUACK, QUACK 18 August 2009.)

    In order to establish a base from which to attack myths about ‘transit’ (aka, shared-vehicle), Weyrich and Lind needed to destroy the illusion that “Automobiles pay their own way but public transit is ‘subsidized.’

    They document that from the 1890s on, Federal Agencies were spending more to support Roadways than railways. There had been – past tense – huge subsidies, especially in the form of land grants from before the Civil War to the completion of the transcontinental railways but by the end of The Long Depression in 1896 the focus was on Roadways.

    Federal Agencies never did aid Urban rail transport. In fact, as Weyrich and Lind point, out the Federal role was to hobble the privately owned Urban rail systems (subways, trolley lines, streetcars, interurban lines and commuter rail) by turning a blind eye to the municipal and state regulation and rate control.

    As the Urban fabric morphed from Agrarian society ‘cities’ to Industrial Centers and then to New Urban Regions the municipal and state regulatory regimes did not allow the private suppliers of shared-vehicle services to evolve new rate structures, equipment and infrastructure to meet the changing shape of travel demand.

    On the other hand, there is a Federal revenue source for support of Roadways that only recently has been extended to Agency owned shared-vehicle systems. This came long after a settlement pattern that favored Autonomobiles was dominate over the majority of every New Urban Region in the US of A.

    There was also the well documented role of the Autonomobile Industrial Complex – not just the car companies but all those who benefitted from use of internal combustion engines on Roadways – petroleum, rubber, insurance and of course land speculators – to buy up and then tear up the Urban rail systems in order to promote the use of Autonomobiles and buses on the subsidized Roadways.

    The bottom line is that Sugrue provides an import part of the picture, but not the whole picture. One would hope he fills in these gaps in his forthcoming book on “the history of real estate in modern America.”

    EMR

  • QUACK, QUACK, QUACK

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    James A. Bacon

    “Quack, n., An untrained person who dispenses advice and expert opinions.”

    First Rule of Quack Identification:

    If a known Quack consistently cites a third party as a source of support for their strain of Quackery, then the third party is also a Quack.

    Exception to the First Rule of Quack Identification:

    If the third party suffers from an affliction that limits their ability to articulate reality, the third party may or may not be a Quack.

    Case in point:

    In METRO FINGER POINTING (posted 24 June 2009) Dr. Clifford Winston was cited as being an “anti-rail quack.” Upon further review Winston may just suffer from one of the common symptoms of Geographic Illiteracy:

    The inability to identify the impact of dysfunctional human settlement patterns.

    In the book he co-authored with Chad Shirley (“Alternative Route: Toward Efficient Urban Transportation” 1998) or in the 2007 item published in Urban Economics cited in METRO FINGER POINTING, had Dr. Winston just noted in Bold Face that:

    “It is impossible to provide efficient (or functional) transport service to dysfunctional human settlement patterns.”

    Then Dr. Winston could have been deemed intelligent, perceptive and not a quack – or a Quack. He would also have saved himself a lot of wasted effort and would not be widely cited by Quacks.

    This does not excuse Dr. Winston from coming to conclusions about transport efficiency in the Alternative Route based on data that is unrelated to settlement patterns nor does it excuse him for transgressions in cost benefit analysis alleged by Dr. Goddard in the review of his work noted in METRO FINGER POINTING.

    EMR apologies for any embarrassment, discomfort or confusion that the attribution of Quack may have caused but there is now supporting evidence for the use of the appellation “Quack.”

    There is a book now available which is written to identify and discredit “anti-transit troubadours” which is in the context of the book is not far from “anti-rial quack.” The book is Paul M. Weyrich and William S. Lind’s 2009 book Moving Minds: Conservatives and Public Transportation.

    Weyrich and Lind have taken on what they call “the anti-transit troubadours.” In Chapter 3 they consider anti-transit myths (aka anti-shared-vehicle system myths). They cite the work of 22 anti-transit troubadours including both Drs Clifford Winston and Chad Shirley. While Dr. Winston does not rank with Wendell Cox (13 citations) or John Semmens (8 citations) he garners a respectful three citations which ties him with luminaries in the field such as Peter Gordon and Randal O’Tool.

    The Weyrich / Lind book is well worth reading for any who doubt the importance of shared-vehicles in addressing the Mobility and Access Crisis in New Urban Regions.

    EMR

  • Ignoring the Real Issues

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    James A. Bacon

    As the gubernatorial race heats up, one might think that the candidates will go a step further with some real issues facing Virginia.
    Former Atty. Gen. Bob McDonnell, for instance, seems so fixated on sex crime that he has some kind of plan to fit sex offenders with global positioning devices. His Democratic opponent, Creigh Deeds hasn’t seized the initiative on too many issues or even over-the-top ones such as the GPS-around-the-ankle idea.
    Yet there are real issues out there. Here’s one. Check out this recent study by the Lumina Foundation for Education. It ranks states according to an “Education Needs Index.” Some states with the greatest needs are North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and the San Fernando Valley of California and western New Mexico. No surprise there, really. These are areas with lots of poor minorities and tight-wad state legislatures although Texas and North Carolina do have outstanding public college systems.
    How does Virginia score? Not all that well, thank you, despite some better-than-U.S.-average rates in high school diplomas, median income, and college degrees.
    A county-by-county review shows that Virginia’s most critical needs for education are in some of its most remote and most impoverished areas. On the “most critical list” are coalfield counties such as Lee, Wise, Dickenson and Russell. Also on the list is the lint-head belt where textile manufacturing was taking body blows long before this recession. They include Pittsylvania and Mecklenburg. Rounding out the most critical are Southside and/or Tidewater peanut and tobacco lands including Greensville, Southampton and Sussex Counties.
    There’s also a “critical” list and these counties tend to border the most critical, including all of the Eastern Shore. The only truly OK places are Northern Virginia, Charlottesville and (surprisingly) a good chunk of the Peninsula and Middle Neck. Big cities such as Hampton Roads and Richmond are somewhere in the middle.
    Besides education needs, there are always health issues. A year or two ago, the Washington Post magazine ran an intriguing story about how folks in the coalfield counties of Appalachia came out in force for a weekend of free medical and dental insurance. Why? They can’t afford health insurance.
    Some of the Lumina Foundation’s data is a bit old, going back to 2005. But it is still relevant.
    And the candidates would both do well to take a look at this material. Tracking sex offenders may get votes, but is it really as pressing a need as making sure that Virginians are well educated and healthy?
    Peter Galuszka

  • Woodstock Nation

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    James A. Bacon


    Far, farking out, man!

    Okay, I’m entitled. It’s almost the 40th anniversary of Woodstock. I went. I am going to tell you about it. What this has to do with public policy in Virginia, I have no idea.
    I was 16 and almost in 12th grade at a high school in suburban DC. Some guys at school (I went to a Catholic boys school) knew about Woodstock up in New York somewhere and wanted to get people to go. Back then, high school kids were divided into two groups: the “jocks” and the “heads.” I was a head. Only heads went to Woodstock.
    I told my skeptical parents that it was some kind of arts and crafts thing. Hey, it was the 60s and things were a whole lot looser then. Only dorks like Jim Bacon were in some straight-jacket society like the Young Americans for Freedom. Eight of us climbed into Eric’s three-row station wagon with Maryland plates and set off.
    Closest parking was seven miles away. (“The New York State Thruway’s closed, man!,” shouted Arlo Guthrie). The eight guys in our group hiked it through the throngs moving, Pied Piper-like) to the concert. There were girls in doeskin halters. One barely-clad man in a purple top hat led a goat. Lots and lots of freaks.
    We got to the gates. The cyclone fences had been torn down and despite the concert now being free, I naively paid $20 anyway for a ticket. There was a gigantic bowl of mud covered with people. We picked a spot not far from the stage and lay down, eight in a row, like sardines in oil.
    Oil it was since rain turned the mud to glop. The crowd grew to 500,000. Our biggest fear was getting separated from our group which we did several times. Believe it or not, I didn’t do anything illegal. But I saw lots of things both illegal and interesting. Water sold for five dollars. We got very thirsty. And we were very tired.
    The performers grew into a blur. I remember Country Joe McDonald’s rousing and profane rant against Vietnam War. CCR jammed on “Green River.” “Freedom” was belted out by the toothless Ritchie Havens (I think he was one of the first the play). After a while, we didn’t pay much attention to the music. The crowd was too interesting. The loudspeaker guy warned us about bad trips from brown acid. Despite the profound anti-war nature of the crowd, forest green Army Hueys choppered out kids who were either sick or having bad trips. We got thirsty. And hungry. And tired. Pretty soon we were asleep again. After a couple of days in the rain and mud, you can sleep anywhere.
    Later, when the movie came out, we learned about all kinds of things that we didn’t see or know about, notably the scores of kids skinny dipping in a lake. We didn’t know there was a lake.
    Interesting time, 1969. As Rob Kirkpatrick’s recent book remembers, it was the year of big advances. The Boeing 747 revolutionized long-range air travel. Nixon was enjoying a brief honeymoon in office and was seen as a positive since he said he was going to end the war. The guys in my group were lucky since we missed the draft and Vietnam by at least a couple of years. “Vietnamization” was on the way.
    Also, Nixon actually cleaned up the environment (he was a true “green” president, something people don’t remember). After all, that was the year the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. The lunar landing happened. Great movies such as “Midnight Cowboy” were in theaters.
    Indeed, 1969 seemed a relief after 1968 which brought us Tet, the deaths of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and Miami and the Siege of Chicago.
    I can’t remember when we decided to go home. The performers were still on. We hiked back to the car and set off around two in the morning. At four a.m. we were still in New York driving through some darkened small town. A cop pulled us over. We didn’t know it but you had to be 18 to drive at night in New York. We were all 16 or 17.
    The cop saw some Sweet Tarts in the front seat. He thought they were acid or uppers. He pulled his gun. We shouted: “No officer, they’re candy, they really are!”
    Peter Galuszka

  • A Response on “High Speed” Rail

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    James A. Bacon

    A few weeks back, I posted a column on the fervor over “High Speed” Rail in Richmond and attempts to improve rail service between here and Washington. My opinion is that any improvement is a good idea, but I raised questions about what is “high speed” rail, really, and how much it might cost.

    Daniel L. Plaugher, executive director of the non-profit group, Virginians for High Speed Rail, has written a response to a similar piece I wrote in Richmond’s Style Weekly. I think Mr. Plaugher raises some good points, so I am posting what he wrote in this week’s Style as a response to my piece:

    Style Weekly’s July 15 cover story, “The Magic Bullet,” suggests that high-speed rail connecting Richmond to Washington and destinations on the Northeast Corridor is simply a dream, and that if it is not superfast high-speed rail, 150 miles per hour and faster, it’s not worth the effort.

    I disagree.

    High-speed rail is about more than simply going fast; it’s also about more frequent service and, importantly, more reliable service. These are the benefits that Virginia’s application for high-speed rail funds should bring, in effect upgrading the Washington-to-Richmond corridor from conventional rail to emerging high-speed rail that will result in the three 90s: a 90 mph top speed, a 90-minute trip between Washington and Richmond and a 90-percent on-time performance with increased service.

    These improvements may not seem like a lot, but when compared with the current passenger rail service available to central Virginia, they are a large improvement. Present service offers a 79-mph top speed, but the reality is closer to between 40 and 50 mph. Reliability is even worse. Amtrak trains between Washington, Richmond and Newport News average an on-time performance of 56 percent. One of every two times Richmonders take trains they won’t arrive at their destination on time. That is unacceptable. Doesn’t our community deserve a true multimodal transportation system? Our trains should work with our airports, interstates and buses to deliver our citizens from point A to point B quickly and efficiently. Rational transportation and environmental policy must reach beyond pouring more asphalt for highways traveled by more internal combustion engines. That approach has only left us mired in time-wasting — and enormously costly — traffic jams.

    Incremental change that can bring fast, frequent and reliable rail service is the sensible approach. When Amtrak’s president and chief executive, Joe Boardman, came to Richmond in May to speak at an event sponsored by Virginians for High Speed Rail and the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce, he said of the federal government’s investment in high-speed rail: “The best way to go fast is not to go slow.”

    In order to achieve express high-speed rail, we must first fix the bottlenecks and issues that keep our passenger trains from being reliable and therefore an attractive option. That’s the idea behind the Federal Railroad Administration’s approach of having multitiered high-speed rail categories. Level one is emerging high-speed rail, which will achieve 90 mph on a mixed-use corridor (with freights and commuter rail); next is regional high-speed rail, which travels as fast as 110 mph on a partially dedicated corridor (meaning only passenger trains); and finally, express high-speed rail, which can achieve 150 mph and faster on a dedicated corridor. The dream of riding between Richmond, Washington and New York at 150 mph is not a dream, but it will take considerable time to achieve. The best approach is simply to begin by not going slow.

    When the federal stimulus money of $8 billion for high-speed rail was first announced, there were many questions about where the federal government would invest it. Would it go to one 150 mph corridor, or would it go toward advancements on multiple corridors? The answer is the reasonable one: We will begin by building our passenger rail corridors to emerging high-speed rail status on a path toward express high-speed rail where it will prove worthwhile. But this will take years, just as it did for the European and Asian countries that operate express high-speed rail corridors.

    It took decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build America’s interstate highways. The stimulus funding represents the first time the federal government has come forward with the resources necessary to truly invest in high-speed rail. For that $8 billion in federal high-speed rail funds, $102 billion worth of pre-application requests have been submitted. The demand for better, faster and more reliable passenger rail transportation is truly substantial. In Virginia, we’re very excited to have the bipartisan support of Sens. Mark Warner and Jim Webb, Reps. Eric Cantor and Bobby Scott, former Sen. John Warner, Mayor Dwight Jones and our General Assembly members, in addition to the business and environmental communities. There aren’t many things our community agrees on so completely as the need to work together to have a world-class transportation system.

    There’s much to be optimistic about. In addition to the $8 billion in stimulus money, President Obama sought an additional $1 billion per year for the next five years for high-speed rail, and on Thursday, July 23, the House of Representatives increased the president’s request to $4 billion for the first year. Additionally, the outline of the Surface Transportation Reauthorization legislation, which is beginning to move through Congress, suggests $50 billion for high-speed rail. This is a small fraction of the money we’ve invested in our interstate system, but in the spirit of Neil Armstrong, this is one small step for America could ultimately be a giant leap for Richmond and Virginia.

    Daniel L. Plaugher is executive director of Virginians for High Speed Rail.

    Post by: Peter Galuszka

  • FUZZY HOUSING FORECLOSURE PICTURE

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    James A. Bacon

    WaPo IS AGAIN WASTEING OPPORTUNITY AND EFFORT

    As some of you may have noted the ‘A’ section, page 14 on Thursday, 30 July had an impressive looking graphic on house foreclosures titled “Geography of Distress.”

    Lets start with the big problem: The graphic is based on Zip Codes. EMR has pointed out the problems with Zip Code maps on a number of prior discussions.

    This map is worse that usual. WaPo scales the grpahic to number of foreclosures per Zip Code. Almost everyone knows that the number of Households varies greatly from one Zip to another. For this reason a Zip Code with 70,000 dwellings and 1,001 foreclosures would be ‘in greater distress’ than a Zip Code with 11,000 dwellings and 999 foreclosures.

    Second the mapped area does not correspond to any known geography except the advertising focus of WaPo. Howard and Anne Arundel Counties are included but they are not in the Washington DC MSA.

    Howare and Anne Arundel Counties are in the Washington Baltimore CMSA but St. Mary’s county is on the map but it is not even in the CMSA – it is a new Micropolitan Area. What is worse is that Fauquier, Stafford, Spotsylvania and Fredericksburg are in the Washington MSA but are not on the map.

    For this reason the map does not relate to the very good data that Brookings is now distributing in its Metro Monitor. It also does not relate to the Case / Shiller data upon which Richard Florida relies to support his views of the reshaping of America.

    In addition there is no radial scaling so one cannot compare apples with apples without drawing lines themselves.

    In spite of all this the map does show – if one understands and compensates for the errors and omissions – the impact of Wrong Size House in Wrong Location.

    It also supports the observations of Richard Florida in “How the Crash Will Reshape America” in the March Atlantic for those not afflicted with Geographic Illiteracy.

    Speaking of WaPo and the foreclosure impact on the Affordable and Accessible Housing Crisis, the 28 July coverage (“Foreclosures Are Often In Lenders’ Best Interest”) only focuses on Households that cannot pay the mortgage and not on mortgages that have gone underwater and the Households that do not want to pay the mortgage. That is a growing problem because while monthly unit sales are up in some areas from the lows of a few months ago, the prices are still going down.

    Yes, EMR will get to the Elephant Clan Transport ‘plan’ soon.

    EMR

  • Vox Populi Comes to the Gubernatorial Debates

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    James A. Bacon

    Typically, as a gubernatorial or senate race kicks off in the Old Dominion, the launching pad is the Virginia Bar Association which usually holds the initial debate between the campaign candidates at such tony mountain reports as The Homestead or The Greenbrier.
    Although the debates have been open to the public, they have always had a an exclusive air, some might say annoyingly exclusive. For one thing, the debates are at the VBA’s annual meeting where many well-paid lawyers gather. The venue has been at either high-priced resort that for years has offered well-heeled guests golf, mineral baths and haute cuisine. They are the kind of places where one dresses for dinner and doesn’t wear T-shirts and shorts in the lobby.
    Well, this debate — slated for this Saturday at 11 a.m. — is about to get a lot more democratic.
    A new initiative between the VBA and VirginiaTalks.com, which is designed to provide a place for political discussion, twitters, tweets and blogging by anyone, will stream the debates between Republican Bob McDonnell and Democrat Creigh Deeds. The session will be moderated by Rod Smolla, dean of the Washington & Lee School of Law.
    What’s more, farflung observers via the Web will be able to participate, too. They can take part in a simultaneous on-line discussions and ask questions that might be presented to the candidates during the event.
    VirginiaTalks is an initiated by Style Weekly, Inc., the alternative newspaper in Richmond that is owned by Landmark Communications, also owners of the Roanoke Times and The Virginian-Pilot. (Full disclosure: I used on be a staff at the Pilot many moons ago and now free lance for Style). If interested, one can log on at www.Twitter.com/VirginiaTalks.
    Kim Kovac, a spokeswoman for the VBA, told me that while the debates have always been open to the public, not many showed up since either resort hotel is a fair hike from population centers.
    The idea is to democratize the debates. One result is that the new system might take the election process out of the realm of exclusive lawyers and into the public. Old Virginia, especially during the years of the Byrd Machine, was almost always exclusive rather than inclusive.
    The change is welcome. So, twitter away!
    Peter Galuszka

  • So Sorry, So Sorry

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon


    Funny what a difference a half a century makes.

    Here it is, 50 years after Virginia’s racist “Massive Resistance” policy against court-ordered integration came to an end. Commemorating it will be a conference tomorrow at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. A time of reckoning and reconciliation is in the air. What is truly maddening, however, is how some of the same institutions that cheered, if not framed, the horrible policy are making limp-wristed and marketing-minded “apologies” about treating African-Americans so unfairly.
    The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown vs. Topeka decision declared legislated segregation of schools unconstitutional, setting off shock waves throughout much of the South and the Border States. Some states such as North Carolina went ahead and more or less followed the letter of the law. Deep South Alabama and Mississippi saw a huge leap in violence and Ku Klux Klan activity.
    In the genteel Old Dominion, white sheets and bull whips are frowned upon. So, the ruling white elite did the “gentlemanly” thing. Pushed by such political luminaries as Harry F. Byrd and his machine, a cabal of politicians, lawyers, bankers and businessmen decided a formal policy of “massively” resisting federal law and created committees, review commissions and various other bodies to enforce segregation and keep Blacks out of public schools.
    Some school districts such as Prince Edward County simply shut down rather than admit blacks. Blacks students ended up being taught in homes or being sent to places like Sweden, earning Virginia a great reputation as a champion of human rights , you know “Mother of Presidents” and all that malarkey.
    The arguments for Massive Resistance were framed in high brow style by the town’s newspapers, the Richmond News-Leader and the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The likes of James Kilpatrick, later a TV star on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” played bizarre argument games with words such as “interposition” which is a fancy way of saying that states don’t have to follow the U.S. Constitution if they don’t feel like it.
    One of the sorriest histories is that of Virginius Dabney, the esteemed and literate editorial writer of the TD. Dabney was considered progressive on many matters and had a national reputation. But he was under the thumb of the Bryan family that owned the newspapers and was forced to do their evil bidding. According to “The Race Beat” a history of Southern journalism in the civil rights era, authors Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff note that whenever the Bryans wanted to serve up another editorial boosting Massive Resistance, Dabney would recuse himself and let some ad salesman do it.
    One can’t exactly say that is the brave act of a great man. After all, The Virginian-Pilot opposed Massive Resistance editorially and won a Pulitzer for it. Dabney should have told the Bryans to stuff it and quit.
    That is why the TD’s editorial today “apologizing” for its past behavior is downright creepy. “The hour is ignoble” the editorial says. “The Times-Dispatch was complicit. The record fills us with regret, which we have expressed before.”
    So sorry. So sorry. Gee, but it would be insane not to backpedal from the policy especially since the U.S. president is half African-American and Blacks have made tremendous progress despite lingering racism. What’s more, the TD’s editorial has the smell of marketing. Having lost significant circulation, the paper needs African-American readers to sustain it, if not make it survive. So, 50 years after the fact, we get this lame apology.
    Margaret Edds, a former Pilot political correspondent and editorial writer, nails it. Writing in Stlye Weekly, she notes that the entire Virginia leadership structure was complicit, especially the legal community.
    Today, African-American lawyers such as Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson Jr. win all sorts of accolades from mostly white legal societies for pushing civil rights in court. It was an incredibly gutsy thing to do at the time and the threats weren’t just shotgun blasts or burning crosses. The General Assembly passed laws targeting fund raising by the NAACP which paid for the lawsuits that won integration. The Virginia Supreme Court went after the Black lawyers on “ethical” grounds, as if supporting the U.S. Constitution and a Supreme Court ruling was somehow “unethical” by precious “Virginia”standards.
    With this in mind, one can understand why years later some African-American Richmonders opposed putting tennis great Arthur Ashe’s statue on Monument Avenue nearby Stonewall, J.E.B. and Robert E. and the rest of the Glorious Boys in Grey. Why not honor Ashe by keeping his statue in the segregated Northside neighborhood where he grew up and was welcome, and not on Monument Avenue where he was not welcome.
    They may well have a point. Meanwhile, spare us the tepid apologies and the crocodile tears.
    Peter Galuszka

  • The Myth of “High Speed” Rail

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    You have to love how Richmond works.

    There’s a certain elite that tries to make all the decisions and it includes whoever is the mayor, the Chamber of Commerce, a few heads of whatever banks and investment houses are left over, sometimes the Armstrongs and Gottwallds and almost certainly Jim Ukrop. The ruling party Pravda, of course, is the Times-Dispatch, whose publisher and editorial page editor are card carrying members of the ruling elite and typically act in their interests and not necessarily the public’s.
    So it is with “high speed” rail. All of Richmond’s poo-bahs are on board grabbing Obama’s stimulus infrastructure money to get “high speed’ rail to expedite train traffic from Petersburg and Richmond to D.C. Mind you years ago, there really was some form of fast, efficient and reliable rail on the old Richmond Fredericksburg and Potomac. Marquee name streamliners like the Silver Meteor or The Champion zipped through Richmond just about daily and some of them hit speeds of 100 m.p.h. on their way to the Florida palm trees and beaches. In 1936, my late father spent his college summers attending Platoon Leaders Class at the Quantico Marine Base and if the Marines ever gave these budding officers liberty, dad was just as inclined to hop a train for the flesh pots of Richmond as D.C.
    Obama has come up with as much as $13 billion for as many as 11 high speed rail corridors in the U.S., including the Midwest and California and the Southeast, including Richmond. Congress is considering up to $58 billion more and Virginia wants its chunk.
    If the $1.5 billion Virginia is applying for is approved, federal money would be available to bypass the crowded CSX yard at Acca in Richmond, improve signals, straighten curves, add third tracks to bypass slow freights, etc. It could cut the travel time to DC from Richmond by an hour to 90 minutes.
    But is that high speed rail? Not at all. It would only add 11 mph to the 79 mph top speed now. Yet everyone talks about this as high speed rail, especially the editorial page editor of the TD who is touted as a “high speed rail expert” by the leaders of the movement. Funny but Amtrak defines “high speed” as that above 110 mph.
    What would it take to get true “high speed” rail. I just did an article on this for Style Weekly.My best guess is $4 billion. It would include the $1.5 billion improvements aforementioned, another $1.5 billion to electrify the tracks and a brand new $1 billion bridge across the Potomac at DC since the current one is used by slow freights and isn’t electrified. It took $2.5 billion and seven years to improve the Woodrow Wilson bridge so we’re talking years. And, my estimate doesn’t include buying up land rights and fixing all those grade crossings from here to D.C. You can’t have grade crossing at trains going from 110 to 150 mph. Too dangerous.

    Here’s another little irony. Many of the backers of high speed rail,including U.S. Rep and Republican Minority Whip Eric Cantor, can’t stand Obama’s stimulus. It’s tax and spend time, they say. The “liberal” Obama is sticking our children with huge deficits. Relying on the evil federal government is not the way to go. Except when it means they might get to their D.C. meetings a little faster, that is. Plus, the usual neocon suspects such as the Cato Institute question whether you get that much bang for the buck with high speed rail.
    But the word is out. I attended a breakfast meeting at a country club last week when high speed rail was touted. Jim Ukrop happened to sit at my table and when he learned I was a reporter working for Style Weekly that is beyond the control of the movers and shakers he got concerned. He started quizzing me on what sources I was talking to and if I have ever had any experience covering high speed rail. (about 35 years of rail issues although not necessarily “high speed”).
    My, I thought, how patronizing. I would never dare ask Ukrop if he knew how to run a supermarket. But that’s Richmond for you.
    Peter Galuszka

  • GOVERNANCE TRANSFORMATION

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Let us talk of Fundamental Transformation of governace structure.

    (Note: Peter Galuszka’s post on Commonwealth’s information technology “Behind the Northrop Grumman / VITA Scandals” 30 June 2009) spit into two themes as well as a sub-theme dealing with MainStream Media. EMR addressed the sub-theme on MainStream Media in the “Unbelievable Obliviousness” post of 7 July – FYI, there was an Ombudsman CYA in the 12 July WaPo on this topic. Many of the comments on “Northrop…” addressed the Commonwealth IT issue. The other theme that emerged was Governance Reform, examined here.)

    EMR likes Groveton’s goal: The governance structure closest to the citizens governs best. EMR does not, however, think Groveton’s strategy has legs. Giving more power to Fairfax County and then ‘hoping’ they will devolve it further is not realistic. (Some of Groveton’s original comment in the “Northrop…” string is repeated below with EMR comments.)

    Fairfax County has a larger population than seven states. It is hardly a “local” – as in ‘close to those governed’ – Agency. Closer than the Commonwealth, but NOT close enough.

    At the same time Fairfax County does not represent even half the population of the Virginia part of the Nation Capital SubRegion and covers perhaps 10% of the area.

    And that does not address the population or area of the National Capital SubRegion or the Washington-Baltimore NUR. The NUR is the fundamental economic, social and physical building block that impacts every citizen of the NUR not just in Virginia but in the Federal District, and parts of Maryland, West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

    EMR, Groveton and TMT all agreed in the “Northrop …” string that lower is better but what does ‘lower’ mean and how do citizens get there?

    What the simple “closest governs best” mantra does not reflect is that in contemporary society there are many levels of impact and thus the criteria must be “the lowest level is best so long as it represents all those impacted by the policy, program, or regulation” of the Agency.

    In other words: Level of control must be at level of impact.” Since there are often multiple levels of impact, there must be a governance structure that represents EVERY level and a system to share responsibility among levels.

    History documents that it is counter productive to assume the highest level should controls except for overarching “self-evident truths” impacting life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

    This is the nub of the most important element of Fundamental Transformation of governance structure:

    In contemporary society there is no single level that is the obvious nexus of control for all issues that are the responsibility of the First Estate.

    It is possible to redistribute the powers and responsibilities of Agencies. EMR did that 40 years ago with the Adirondack SubRegional land use control, transport and amenity system that is still in effect (Although not optimum, it works better than many other attempts to Balance conservation and economic prosperity.)

    EMR also did the same thing for many functions of governance for NUR and USRs in the draft legislation to restructure governance below the state level in New York state in the late 60s.

    Fundamental Transformation means, FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION.

    The issue is explored in more depth in The Shape of the Future but here is a sketch of how to get started:

    The Cluster-scale is the LARGEST scaled component where direct democracy is a functional governance strategy. Most elementary schools have a room large enough for the Cluster to meet and discuss key issues. A board of seven or nine can keep track of most issue of importance at this scale. This level of democracy works, we prove it every day. It is hard, much harder than just kicking the issue up to higher levels and then complaining, but it works.

    Let Clusters choose what Neighborhood they want to be part of. It will be obvious in some cases but it should not be a foregone conclusion that leads to the Neighborhood having the last word, and then each higher level assuming they are can supercede the lower level and more important or have the last say on issue.

    In the same way, Neighborhoods choose what Village they want to be part of and Villages what Community, etc.

    Let components of settlement pattern and of governance Agencies COMPETE for citizens instead of exercising the ‘right’ to control those of smaller scale. There would be a buy-in for a set period of years and a cost allocation for disengagement but the potential would always be there to choose some better fit for your Cluster, your Neighborhood, your Village, your Community.

    The most important ingredient of the structure would be incentives to create Balance at each scale. For example delegating down taxing powers, level of autonomy and say about what happens in larger components by lower components increases with Balance.

    This would be especially important at the Village, Community and SubRegional scales. This structure would give Clusters and Neighborhoods a direct say in Regional facility and infrastructure decisions without NIMBY protectionism.

    You do not want it there (NIMBY), OK you can help pay for the added cost of putting the facility in a less efficient location, is an example of getting to the root of many settlement pattern dysfunctions.

    It would not be Neighborhood approval of the nation-state defense budget but you get the idea:

    Level of decision at level of impact.

    If there is shared impact then there is shared decision making. The highest level would rule only on issues fundamental to the Federal Constitution. As Groveton has pointed out, that is the theory now but that is not the way it works.

    As EMR pointed out in the “Northrop…” post (with clarification and spell checking):

    If one protects the turf of existing Governance Practitioners, there would be little real change. Also, per Groveton’s view, the GA likes the system the way it is — they have control without responsibility.

    When EMR was involved in Fairfax politics we found anything that the Chamber, the LWV and the Federation all backed went through the GA without a hitch — e.g. the bond authority for building roadways in the 70s.

    In other words, there is no specific difference between ‘city’ status and county status that could not be ‘fixed’ if there was a consensus on the need to change. If there is not consensus, the change is not going to happen regardless of status.

    THE BIG PROBLEM IS THAT WHAT EVER ONE CALLS IT, THE 244,000 + /- ACRES OF FAIRFAX COUNTY IS NOT AN ORGANIC COMPONENT OF HUMAN SETTLEMENT.

    Fairfax County includes all or part of nine Beta Communities. Fairfax does not just rank between Dallas and San Jose in population (and is 200,000 larger than Detroit), it is also more populous than seven of the 50 states including EMR’s home state of Montana.

    After Fundamental Transformation there could be a special fund to erect historic markers for Olde Fairfaxe.

    Since these issue were first raised in the “Northrop…” string, there have been references to, questions about and cross postings to Senator Chap Peterson’s Blog. In this Blog, Sen. Peterson seems to not support Fairfax County morphing to ‘city’ status – the same for the need for Fundamental Transformation.

    Then on Sunday, 5 July, WaPo did two stories on Fairfax County switching to ‘city’ status and a comment that contends that ‘city’ status would guarantee to more money for transportation – as if more money will mitigate the Mobility and Access Crisis without Fundamental Transformation in human settlement patterns….

    Some may have missed a great breath of fresh air in a 3 July WaPo story “New White House Office to Redefine What Urban Policy Encompasses: Agenda May Address Suburbs, Too.”

    Bruce Katz at Brookings has been working to redefine ‘urban policy’ as ‘metropolitan policy’ for years but keeps getting sabotaged by his habit of overusing the word ‘city’ and by his staff substituting ‘city’ for ‘Metropolitan Statistical Area’ (or New Urban Region) in their reports and press releases.

    In SYNERGY’s Vocabulary Urban policy addresses the Urban area of the nation-state where 95 of economic activity occurs in 2009.

    It is time to abandon the idea that “urban” is code for “central city” and for the interests of those citizens with a specific racial or cultural heritage.

    If one is to go to the trouble of making a change, make a change that is worth the effort.

    ………………

    For those who do not want to go back to “Northrop…”, here is the nub of Groveton’s suggestion with notes by EMR:

    “I think Fairfax needs a two part evolution.

    “First, the county needs city status to partly throw off the yoke of GA oppression.

    “Then, the new city/county needs to recognize even more granular decision making areas – the existing supervisory districts are close but would have to be adjusted.

    EMR suggests that there has been nothing stopping the County from doing this in the past. Every time a sub-county interest has appeared, it has been quashed by the County – e.g. the attempts by Reston to change status. Getting rid of the GA yoke would just put the primary focus on a different level with no difference in impact on the ground.

    “Then, there would need to be referenda at the local level. At first, the referenda could be advisory. However, after the process was refined the advisories would become binding.”

    Referenda can be useful tools but they are not a substitute for Fundamental Transformation.

    “To all the hacks in the GA – The government that governs closest to the people governs best. So, why doesn’t this happen in VA? I have begun to see the GA as “Useful Idiots” – …”

    All true, but that does not solve the problem.

    EMR has given a lot of thought and experimented with levels of governance number and effectiveness of below the county level in Fairfax County for 27 years (1975 to 2002)and in Fauquier County since then. We hope this clarifies the context and helps sort out the response to the problems that TMT raised in the “Northrop…” and in “A Quick One for Peter” of 10 July.

    EMR

  • A QUICK ONE FOR PETER

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    EMR is trying to catch up now that TRILO-G is going out for Beta Review and the fourth printing of The Shape of the Future is about to ship to Amazon, et. al. First we will do a post on the other theme raised in Peters ‘Northrop’ post (Governance Transformation) to answer some questions and respond to comment there, then we will do a post on the new TTI report (meeting related to that this PM) since there seems to be some confusion, and finally a note on why it is foolish to expect a “recovery,” but first a quick question for Peter:

    What is it about these Commonwealth-based food processing plants?

    First it is peanut butter, now cookie dough. Three separate E. Coli strains in cookie dough from one plant?!?

    Could it be that Virginia’s “business friendly” regulatory environment spills over and impacts federal inspections?

    What occurs?

    EMR

  • UNBELIEVABLE OBLIVIOUSNESS

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    The comments on Peter’s post on Commonwealth’s information technology “Behind the Northrop Grumman / VITA Scandals”) spit into two themes. In addition there is a sub-theme dealing with MainStream Media. Let us examine the sub-theme:

    TMT called our attention to a 2 July item on POLITICO re WaPo lobbyist ‘sponsored’ dinners.

    EMR printed it out and shared it with several folks. They were OUTRAGED. It seemed to EMR like Business-As-Usual but they were talking about un-subscribing.

    WaPo printed a weak explanation on 3 July to cover their tracks. If one does not understand THE ESTATES MATRIX, it is easy to see WaPo as the villain rather than just an Enterprise playing out their Second Estate Role.

    Today WaPo is back with a ‘we are making sure we are doing NOTHING wrong’ story titled “The Post Begins Reviews of Events to Avoid Ethics Conflicts. The first paragraph reads:

    “The Washington Post yesterday initiated internal review to ensure that its business practices do not compromise it journalistic ethics WHEN THE NEWSPAPER ORGANIZES CONFERENCES OR PRIVATE EVENTS FUNDED BY SPONSORS. (Emphasis added)

    WHAT???

    How can they even DREAM there is not a blatant conflict that arises by just talking about such events?

    Stop the Journalist charade, WaPo is an Enterprise, it is in business to make money. If it makes money from anything except those who buy its news services – including advertising by Agencies, Enterprises or Institutions that it reports on – it is prima facia CONFLICT.

    These actions just document that the Organization has left the Fourth Estate and moved to the Second Estate. There is nothing ‘wrong’ with making money from providing access to speical interests so long as the Enterprise admits what they are doing and that they are in the Second Estate AND they do not try to hide behind a charade of ‘fourth estate journalism.’ It died in the 20th century.

    It helps if one has a Comprehensive Conceptual Framework (THE ESTATES MATRIX or another one of your choosing) otherwise one ends up with impenetrable claptrap such as that by Clay Skirky who is ‘excerpted’ in the July-August 2009 Utne Reader.

    Until there is robust, diverse CitizenMedia in the Fourth Estate, citizens will not have the information they need to make intelligent choices in the marketplace or in the voting booth.

    EMR

  • Behind the Northrop Grumman, VITA Scandals

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    The continuing woes of the Virginia Information Technologies Agency and the state’s $2.4 billion IT contract with Northrop Grumman raise questions about some particularly “Virginian” conceits. One has to do with the state’s self consciousness about being a “tech” state and its propensity for privatizing public operations.

    Northrop Grumman has been accused of cost overruns, delays and sloppy service with the 10-year contract it won in 2005 under Gov. Mark Warner to take the state’s antiquated computer system and turn into something that is “state of the art.”
    VITA was created in 2002 to oversee state IT work and it, too, has been racked by controversy. Its programs were hacked in April and a few weeks ago, its chief, Lemuel Stewart was cashiered for allegedly questioning the high costs of the Northrup Grumman contract. Now it appears that Northrup Grumman is at least six months late in its work upgrading state computers.
    Legislative watchdogs are starting to bark. This is bad news for outgoing Gov,. Tim Kaine, who is doing double duty as head of the Democratic National Committee still basking in the honeymoon glow of the Obama election.
    First, some perspective about the players:
    • Los Angeles-based Northrop Grumann is a major defense contractor with a huge footprint in Virginia. It operates many offices in Northern Virginia that serve the Pentagon and other federal agencies. Northoup Grumman is a specialist in federal IT and defense IT work. What’s more, it owns Newport News Shipbuilding, one of the largest employers in the state and the only shipyard in the nation that can build and service surface nuclear-powered vessels such as Nimitz class aircraft carriers and the next generation.
    • U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, who let the Northrop Grumman contract as governor, is a rising Democtratic star who cut his teeth on IT and related ventures. Back in the 1980s, Warner, not long out of Harvard Law, built a fortune estimated at the time of $400 million by brokering deals among nascent cell phone companies. The Federal Communications Commission had held auctions for band with needed for cellphones but the auctions sold off radio waves haphazardly. Ever the entrepreneur, Warner worked out private swaps among companies wanting to put togther cell networks in specific markets, thus earning himself a rep as a tech savvy guy.
    • Tim Kaine, Warner’s Democratic successor, has also positioned himself as a business-friendly, tech savvy politician.
    • The Republicans, notably former Gov. Jim Gilmore, first rode the tech wave back in the 1990s when the World Wide Web was exploding on the scene and NOVA became home to America Online, other Net-based firms and many telecoms. In 1998, Gilmore introduced the concept of the Secretary of Technology, the first ever in the U.S. Then, and now, half of the U.S. Intenet traffic still passes through NOVA. A lot of the telecoms and Net firms, however, went bust around 2001.

    Add it all up, and you have a state that is eager, maybe too eager, to be known as tech savvy. It’s as if a pale wallflower at a dance suddenly becomes almost as hot as Miss Cool Bay Area or Brainy Miss Boston. That’s a lot better rep than Massive Resistance or trying not to let the Confederate Generals on Monument Avenue in Richmond get soiled by an Arthur Ashe memorial.

    Another factor dates from the Jim Gilmore/George Allen years. Back then, when tech was hot, the economy was expanding and Bill Clinton was slipping from Bimbo to Bimbo, there came a neocon idea that privatizing the public sector was worthy and wonderful. Starting back in the Reagan-Thatcher years, the concept assumed that the free market was the best way to control costs efficiently and unleash creativity. Thus, private firms should be hired to run state functions, such as highways or IT functions.
    Although the ideas were hatched with the GOP, privatization and public-private partnerships were embraced by business-friendly Dems such as Mark Warner and Kaine. So, when Mark W. wanted to show his tech-savviness and pointed to antiquated, underfunded state IT systems, the obvious solution was to turn them over to the private sector, which in this case, was one of the state’s biggest and most politically powerful employers.
    Well, ahem, it hasn’t worked out that well, as the scandals with Northrop Grumman and VITA show. Maybe private business isn’t all that more competent than plodding old government bureaucracies. There’s plenty of evidence against the private sector, given its record leading up to the worst recession since the Great Depression. Arrogance, hubris and aggravating, short-term thinking come to mind.
    Maybe it’s time for Virginia to move on from this style of thinking that is stuck the nineties. The venture capital and IPO days are really so very yesterday. And isn’t the Net just a more advanced telephone system and not a god unto itself? How about some good old-fashioned service and keeping your word and upholding your end of a deal?
    Peter Galuszka

  • Surry’s Huge Coal-Fired Plant

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    Coal-fired electricity generation remains one of the hottest issues in the Old Dominion and the nation. With some form of cap and trade law almost inevitable in Congress and with polls showing that 75 percent of Americans think that carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases need regulation, the issues really does have legs.
    In Virginia, for the past several years, the tip of the spear was in St. Paul’s in Wise County where Dominion plans to build a $1.6 billion, 585-megawatt coal-fired plant. That project has been a rallying cry for environmentalists nationally, some of whom such as the Sierra Club have pledged to fight any big, base-loaded, coal-fired plant anywhere. They have had some successes, notably in the Southwest.
    Now, the focus is shifting farther east, to the flat peanut lands of Surry County about halfway between Richmond and Norfolk. There, Henrico County-based Old Dominion Electric Cooperative plans on building twin 750 megawatt units costing perhaps $6 billion — in other words, a facility maybe three times as big as Dominion’s in Wise County.
    In a story I reported for Richmond’s Style Weekly, I note that the so-called Cypress Creek Power Station would be the second largest of its kind in the state. It would instantly become the state’s sixth biggest air polluter, air pollution officials say. The facility would be fed via a new rail spur from Norfolk Southern’s coal mainline to Norfolk. Water for steam would be pumped 15 miles from the James River and heated water would be pumped back into the estuary. Fly ash from the coal will be buried on the project’s 1,600-acre site, not far from the town’s well water supply, local opponents say.
    The plant would be in the town of Dendron, population 300, which is a flyspeck decorated with black “No Coal Plant” signs. These mimic the “No OLF” sings one sees throughout Tidewater Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina regarding local opposition to the Navy’s efforts to locate a new landing field so their F-18 Super Hornet jet fighters can simulate air craft carrier landings. The problem: Super Hornets are some of the loudest aircraft ever built.
    Old Dominion Electric Cooperative claims that the plant is needed to help them meet a shortfall by 2016 of some 4,000 megawatts Virginia will face in electricity unless new plants are built. ODEC has 11 mostly-rural; members in this state, Maryland and Virginia. It has begun the process of getting the 50 or more permits it needs to start construction.
    The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers needs to approve a plan for ODEC to tap water in the James River and then return heated water back into the estuary not far from the tourist havens of Jamestown and Williamsburg. According to ODEC data, Cypress Creek would annually emit 3,085 tons of nitrogen oxide a year, 3,685 tons of sulfur dioxide, nearly a half a ton of lead, 283 tons of sulfuric mist and 2,155 tons of particulates. The project needs another permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers because construction will alter wetlands.
    Of particular concern to the state Department of Environmental Quality is ODEC’s estimate that the plant will emit 118 pounds per year of highly toxic mercury. By contrast, Dominion Resources’s Wise County plant will emit only 5.5 pounds of mercury a year. Given prevailing wind patterns in Surry, the mercury could fall onto the water of the James River and Chesapeake Bay and be dangerous to wildlife. “This is something we’re absolutely going to be looking at,” says state air pollution analyst Sparky H.L. Lisle Jr.
    Surry County, which has been home to twin nuclear reactors owned by Dominion for 37 years, could use the tens of millions the project would pay. Some 200 permanent jobs would help the rural, sleepy country.
    Yet there are more questions about the project than just its immediate pollution impact. For one thing, ODEC has recently lost its largest member, the Manassas-based Northern Virginia Electric Cooperative with 142,000 customers, terminated its relationship with ODEC Dec. 31 over a contract dispute. “We thought we could do better with a different power supplier,” says Virginia Burginger, a NOVEC spokeswoman. If this is so, why the urgency to build such a big plant?
    Another issue is if much-larger Dominion will fill the shortfall with new plants such as Wise, another nuke at North Anna, windmills and so on. A Dominion spokesman told me that the shortfall is actually larger — about 4,600 megawatts by the last part of next decade. Dominion should be able to add 4,200 megawatts of extra generation capacity by then. If so, this raises questions about why the ODEC project is necessary or if their real aim is to wholesale electricity beyond its members.
    Lastly, there are carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases. ODEC has not provided details about how they plan to capture CO2. A report by Synapse, a Cambridge, Mass. consulting firm funded by environmentalists, claims that depending on what kind of cap and trade law goes into effect, ODEC ratepayers could face extra costs of from $223 million to $1.76 billion to handle carbon dioxide. ODEC publicly dissed the report, calling it “speculative and inaccurate” but did not responded to a Synapse request to provide more information. ODEC claims that the plant will actually save its customers about $14 billion but doesn’t say how.
    A personal note: I tried to interview ODEC but they refused, saying that my blog postings on the site showed I was biased against the plant. I beg to differ. ODEC then went to the publications to whom I had tried to sell the story. Style Weekly, bless their hearts, told ODEC that they had reviewed my postings and didn’t see that I had raised anything to the level of advocacy on my part.
    True enough. I’m just asking questions like any reporter. I guess my questions weren’t too welcome.
    Peter Galuszka

Now Available

Book cover of 'Dust Mites: A Second American Revolution' by James A. Bacon, featuring astronauts planting a flag with a blue and white emblem on a lunar landscape, with Earth visible in the background.
For sale on Amazon.com

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.

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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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