Author Archives: Steve Haner

Tuition Monster Tamed? Don’t Relax Just Yet.

Posted on April 10, 2019 | 15 comments

Virginia 529’s Tuition Monster

It is premature to declare victory in the effort to restore sanity to tuition decisions at Virginia’s state colleges, but several factors seem to be coming together to give students and their families a break for the coming school term. Repeat:  For the coming school term.

One year’s pause, or “breather” to use a word bandied about during the General Assembly session, in tuition increases will not reverse the trends making Virginia higher education too expensive for many without a crushing level of debt. And this year’s pause, if it happens, took several years in a row of improving state funding to accomplish.  Continue reading →

15 Comments

Posted in Education (higher ed), General Assembly

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2019 Assembly Had No Bark, Bite On Ethics

Posted on April 8, 2019 | 13 comments

VPAP graphic showing a uptick in “things of value” received and reported by Virginia legislators. You can find the full report here.  Much is not reported.

It is always important to listen for the dogs that don’t bark, and the 2019 General Assembly showed neither bark nor bite on issues of money, politics and ethics.  Everything in Virginia is just fine with the legislators themselves, apparently.

So fine that the only significant bill involving the Virginia Conflict of Interests and Ethics Advisory Council eliminated its quarterly meetings and left it to meet only on call. The only significant bill dealing with campaign finances to pass involves reporting requirements for elections in Virginia towns. We head into the decisive 2019 General Assembly races with the same rules that have served so well for so long.  Continue reading →

13 Comments

Posted in Elections, Money in politics

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Another Double Dip? That’s One Issue With Dominion’s Proposed Market-Based Rate

Posted on April 5, 2019 | 18 comments

Dominion Energy Virginia’s proposed market-based pricing structure for large industrial customers has been criticized as a way for the utility to double collect, harking back to a key issue during the 2018 legislative push for its Grid Transformation and Security Act.

The criticism comes in an overall endorsement by Microsoft Corporation of the proposal pending at the State Corporation Commission. Microsoft owns a growing fleet of data centers in Dominion’s territory and is already eligible to seek electricity from a competitive service provider (CSP).   The purpose of this new rate (the full case record is here) is to keep big customers happy, so they lose interest in third-party providers.  One detail of the proposal has Microsoft unhappy. Continue reading →

18 Comments

Posted in Energy, Regulation

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How Government Creates Poverty: Fines and Fees

Posted on April 4, 2019 | 12 comments

Government is much better at creating poverty than at curing it.

Yesterday the General Assembly voted to end the practice of suspending driving licenses for non-payment of fines or restitution or both and ordered Department of Motor Vehicles to restore driving privileges for hundreds of thousands of Virginians. If you need to do business at a DMV office in July, get there early. Restoring 600,000 licenses may take a while.   Continue reading →

12 Comments

Posted in Courts and law, General Assembly, Poverty & income gap

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DEQ Pushes Back on RGGI Costs; Meeting Set

Posted on April 2, 2019 | 13 comments

Current RGGI States

Virginia’s Air Pollution Control Board will meet April 19 to consider the next regulatory step to limit CO2 emissions from Virginia electricity plants through membership in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

The agenda packet for the meeting, on-line here, contains more than 330 pages on the complicated issue, probably the best point counterpoint discussion on that already-voluminous record.  The entire record from the two comment periods is summarized, with DEQ staff politely thanking those who praise the regulation and vigorously disputing those who oppose it.   Continue reading →

13 Comments

Posted in Energy, Environment, Regulation

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Enough. This Partisan Bias Is Just Too Obvious.

Posted on April 1, 2019 | 22 comments

Ain’t This A Kick

Look, we conservatives understand that as far as the media is concerned, we are second-class citizens.  But for giggles let’s just demonstrate the most recent case.  When I write about the new hemp bill on Bacon’s Rebellion last month, it gets good readership for Bacon’s Rebellion but of course there is no reference to it on the widely-circulated daily news summary for the Virginia Public Access Project.

Today Virginia Mercury publishes a very similar story, even using some of the same sources, and of course it makes the VPAP summary.  Oh, give me a break.   Why didn’t mine get used, again?   Continue reading →

22 Comments

Posted in Media, Politics

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Retailers Still Push To Escape Dominion Monopoly

Posted on April 1, 2019 | 13 comments

The large retail establishments seeking to aggregate their electricity demand and take their business away from Dominion Energy Virginia have not been dissuaded by a February ruling that went against them.  One of the petitioners in that case is seeking reconsideration, and the petitioner in another major case has sharpened its argument that the State Corporation Commission erred.

If the policy goal is now to slow demand, to prevent the need to build more utility-owned plants in Virginia, isn’t this the better and more reliable path?  The utility-managed demand response efforts funded by ratepayers aren’t having much impact, as previously reported. Continue reading →

13 Comments

Posted in Energy, Regulation

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A kWh Saved Costs Triple A kWh Used. You Pay.

Posted on March 29, 2019 | 14 comments

Third generation Nest programmable thermostat. You may be asked to buy one for your neighbor, with a sweetener for Dominion.

Buying yourself a kilowatt hour of electricity costs about twelve cents.  Persuading your next-door neighbor or the store at the corner to use less electricity is three times as expensive, costing about 35 cents per kilowatt hour.

That figure comes from a fresh exhibit filed by Dominion Energy Virginia with the State Corporation Commission, an exhibit only filed because a member of the court asked a simple question from the bench:  What has all the spending on energy efficiency programs cost to date and what has been the result?  If that information was buried in the thousands of pages of data on the case, he hadn’t found it.   Continue reading →

14 Comments

Posted in Energy, Regulation

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On Energy Efficiency, Ratepayers Lose Again

Posted on March 28, 2019 | 12 comments

Fellow electricity ratepayers, we just took it in the neck again.

This morning’s Richmond Times-Dispatch brings the news that Dominion Energy Virginia will not seek to count lost revenue as one of the cost elements in the energy efficiency program it was ordered to undertake by the 2018 Ratepayer Bill Transformation Act.  This follows an earlier story, also by the Associated Press, that Governor Ralph Northam has written the company to insist on that position.

Missing from both stories is a key fact:   Dominion won’t spend a dime.  It is all your money.  When the 2018 General Assembly mandated $870 million of spending on energy efficiency and demand response programs, it was the same as a near-billion dollar tax increase.  One of many in the bill.  Now the $870 million customer cost will get larger.   Continue reading →

12 Comments

Posted in Energy, General Assembly, Regulation

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Sure, Give The Money To Everybody. Why Not?

Posted on March 27, 2019 | 3 comments

The so-called Taxpayer Relief Fund to be created with the residual dollars from the 2019 state tax legislation has not seen the first dollar deposited and Governor Ralph Northam is already proposing to spend some of it, seeking to expand the refunds which were part of that bill to all Virginians.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch story on the proposal, which you can read here, quotes state officials as pegging the cost at a modest $18 million, with 98 percent of the recipients being exactly the people Northam sought to reach with his proposal to make the Earned Income Tax Credit into a grant program.   Continue reading →

3 Comments

Posted in General Assembly, Taxes

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Boomergeddon’s Coal Mine Canary Sings Warning

Posted on March 25, 2019 | 7 comments

Angry consumer complaints are starting to appear on a growing case record at the State Corporation Commission, which opened the case on its own authority to demand insurance company presentations on the long-term care product market and its history of massive rate hikes.

A typical comment so far: “This frankly, appears to be a ploy of the insurance providers to raise rates so high that they will be completely unaffordable, everyone will drop their policies and the insurers will be able to exit the long term care industry. Consumers must be protected from these predatory practices and these rate hikes must be denied by the SCC.”  Others (the record is here) detail years of steady premium increases and benefit reductions.   Continue reading →

7 Comments

Posted in Health Care, Insurance

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Grass No, Hemp Yes! New VA Law Signed

News - Posted on March 21, 2019 | 20 comments

Source: Purdue University

Two years of trade-dispute induced tariffs have decimated Virginia’s tobacco farmers, the president of Virginia’s Board for Agriculture and Consumer Services told his fellow board members Thursday.  As he spoke Governor Ralph Northam was upstairs in the same building preparing to sign legislation the industry hopes provides a path forward for those same farmers.

Hemp.  Industrial Hemp.  Not for smoking but for squeezing out the oil.

Robert J. Mills of Pittsylvania County is already in the business of growing hemp, some of which he says is being grown to meet organic standards for the state of California.   The production schedule for hemp is like tobacco’s, he said, it works well in the same soils, and tobacco curing barns can be used to dry the product.    Continue reading →

20 Comments

Posted in Agriculture & forestry, News, Regulation

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Energy Bacon Bits: VNG Case, LED, APCo’s Grid

Posted on March 20, 2019 | 14 comments

LED Street Lights

The State Corporation Commission has approved a challenged natural gas contract between Virginia Natural Gas and an affiliated asset management firm, but the next request for proposal process will start this coming summer with substantially greater oversight.  The March 15 opinion is here.

As reported on Bacon’s Rebellion a few weeks ago, losing bidders for the contract to serve the Hampton Roads region gas distributor had complained that the RFP process they went through was not fair, a complaint that drew some support from an SCC hearing examiner.  VNG’s existing contract with Sequent Energy Management was about to run out, so the hearing examiner suggested a one-year approval followed by a re-do.    Continue reading →

14 Comments

Posted in Energy

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SCC Details High Customer Cost of RGGI

Posted on March 19, 2019 | 34 comments

RGGI states

The State Corporation Commission staff has “shown its work” on an earlier estimate of electricity rate increases resulting from Virginia’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, despite a Democratic legislator’s complaint in Sunday’s Washington Post it was not being transparent.

“Even if you agree with the SCC, its analyses should be public information designed to inform the public debate. The SCC, however, has chosen a less transparent route, disadvantaging the public and the legislature from having all the necessary information to determine energy policy in the commonwealth,” Delegate David Toscano of Charlottesville wrote.   Continue reading →

34 Comments

Posted in Energy, Environment, General Assembly, Regulation

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Arlington Welcomes Amazon 5-0 As Crowd Screams

Posted on March 17, 2019 | 3 comments

Crowd at Arlington Board meeting Saturday March 16. Source: Arlington Now

The Arlington Board of Supervisors endured six hours of public hearing marked by local hooligans screaming at Amazon company representatives, then voted 5-0 Saturday for the modest local incentive package negotiated to bring the tech giant to a new location near Reagan National Airport and Crystal City.

A review of the final county staff presentation (here) puts the $51 million in identified incentives, spread out over several years, side by side with the $174 million in projected local taxes over the first 12 years, and the $342 million in local taxes over the first 16 years.  Those assume Amazon hits 25,000 employees by around 2030 and 37,850 employees by around 2034, and ultimately occupies 6 million square feet of owned and rented office space.   Continue reading →

3 Comments

Posted in Economic development

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