by James C. Sherlock
Governor Glenn Youngkin took action today with an Executive Directive to “Combat Antisemitism and Anti-Religious Bigotry in the Commonwealth and on Campuses.”
It is excellent, and we look forward to immediate steps by other actors in the Commonwealth. Continue reading
Cluster development in western Loudoun Co. Photo credit: Washington Post
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Today’s Washington Post has an article about efforts to preserve farmland in Loudoun County.
That headline instantly took me back to the late 1970s and early 1980s when there was a flurry of activity regarding the need to preserve farmland and provide landowners incentives to keep their farmland from being developed.
Loudoun County was in the center of that activity. At that time, the population of the county was about 57,000. Development in the area near Dulles Airport and the Rt. 7 corridor was in the early stages. A large part of the county was open land, consisting of large estates, as well as medium and small farms. The tools for preserving that land that were being discussed, sometimes heatedly, were conservation easements and transfer of development rights. A sample report of some of those studies is here. Continue reading
Posted in Agriculture & forestry, Land use & development, Planning, Property rights
Tagged Dick Hall-Sizemore
by Joe Fitzgerald
I have previously written much about the Bluestone Town Center from a logistical and political standpoint, much of which can be summed up by saying the people planning and approving the project do not understand logistics or politics. The planners and approvers show an understanding of and ability to manipulate governmental processes, which is a skill on the level of getting a stubborn toddler to give up a favorite toy if you could pick and choose your toddlers through low-turnout elections and rampant cronyism.
Today, however, I am writing about design, marketing, and labeling. First, some background.
The Harrisonburg Redevelopment and Housing Authority (HRHA), has formed a partnership with EquityPlus (EP) to build Bluestone Town Center. That partnership is an LLC, a limited liability corporation, a legal entity designed to protect the owners of a project from responsibility. The entity is owned 51 percent by HRHA and 49 percent by EP. A wild guess about the split is that having a government entity as the (barely) majority owner adds the shield of sovereign immunity as well as the exemptions to government rules that government entities give to themselves.
Continue reading
Letitia “Tish” Long
by James C. Sherlock
From The Roanoke Times
Faced with inflationary pressures and state budget uncertainty, the school’s Board of Visitors voted unanimously to markup overall student costs by about 7%, increasing tuition and fees, plus room and board.
It was not an easy decision, said Rector Tish Long.
”This is one of the most important and most difficult decisions that this board has had to make,’ Long said. ‘This is a very difficult decision, and we did and continue to take everyone’s comments into account.’
Rector Long did not mention how easy it was to not cut administrative overhead:
Tech’s Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, who would be the one to recommend cuts, is enthusiastic about that school’s “Administrative Transformation” project.
He notes that he has an Administrative and Professional (A/P) Faculty job architecture project underway. Alas, the obstacles include:
Currently there are over 2,400 A/P faculty positions with over 1,800 unique titles. This lack of structure creates inconsistent pay and titling practices — which can unintentionally create pay equity issues — as well as makes it difficult to benchmark salaries to the external market.
It makes it quite difficult to make cuts when the University COO has no idea what all those people do. Continue reading
by Jon Baliles
There was a lot of talk and coverage this week about the City of Richmond’s Planning Commission unanimously approving the removal of parking minimums citywide with the full City Council expected to take the matter up at its meeting Monday night.
The ordinance as written would allow developers to decide how much parking to include in new developments anywhere in the city — or if they need to include any parking at all to serve the development. For decades, the city-required developments to also provide a certain number of off-street parking spaces based on the size of development, the number of dwelling units, type of use, or total floor area.
The end goal is to allow developers to determine how much parking to provide in their developments and if they don’t have to provide expensive parking, they will then increase the supply of needed housing units. The city recently declared a “housing crisis,” and the need for more housing across the entire region is urgent. The proposal is one of the recommendations from the Richmond 300 master plan, which is in favor of less “auto-centric” zoning and more in favor of denser and more walkable mixed-use neighborhoods.
Continue reading
by Jeanine Martin
The deal for Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder to sell the team to Josh Harris hasn’t even been inked and yet speculation begins again that the team may move to eastern Loudoun County.
Supervisor Tony Buffington (R-Blue Ridge), is opposed to the stadium moving to Loudoun. He said today that he and his constituents do not want a stadium in Loudoun. However, Chairman of the Board Phyllis Randall is entertaining the idea.
From the LoudounTimes.com:
‘We look forward to welcoming the Washington Commanders to the Loudoun County Board Room to share their vision of a new stadium as part of a multi-use development in an urban setting,’ Matt Rogers, Randall’s chief of staff, wrote in a statement to the Times-Mirror April 15.
‘Loudoun and the Commanders have enjoyed a long business relationship that has proven financially beneficial to both parties. An expansion of their football operations in Loudoun County is an idea we’re eager to discuss, provided that Loudoun County taxpayers will not experience a single cent of tax increase to finance a stadium,’ Rogers said.
Posted in Business and Economy, Economic development, Land use & development, Planning, Uncategorized
Tagged Jeanine Martin
by Scott Dreyer
On a picture-perfect April 12 with a backdrop of the sparkling Roanoke River and dogwoods and redbuds in bloom, Virginia’s Senator Mark Warner (D) and Senator Tim Kaine (D) visited the Roanoke Greenway at Roanoke City’s Smith Park.
The occasion was for the two senators to present a cardboard poster representing a check to Roanoke City for $2.5 million for the replacement of the low water bridge on the popular Greenway just a few yards downstream from Smith Park. The senators stated the funds came from the roughly $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.
An email invitation from the City to reporters claimed the new, higher bridge will not only allow kayakers to travel under the bridge unimpeded (at low water levels) but also help the endangered Roanoke logperch swim up and downstream more easily.
Continue reading
Posted in Economic development, Efficiency in government, Finance (government), Planning, Taxes, Uncategorized
Tagged Scott Dreyer
by Kerry Dougherty
Sick of politics? Me too. Let’s change it up today.
I don’t like to brag, but I’m pretty much an expert on roadside food joints and truck stops.
No, not that way, you perverts.
I simply love road trips, which means frequent stops for food and fuel. Most truck stops are sort of meh.
A few are memorable.
Kenley 95 in North Carolina, for instance, where I bought my first Bug-A-Salt rifle. The Nordstrom of truck stops. At least that’s what I thought until my son and I were driving through Iowa a couple of years ago and dropped into Sapp Bros. This Midwestern chain is absolutely spa-like with bidets and heated toilet seats. (Hey, don’t knock it, this was December and we’d been driving through an ice storm in an old SUV without seat heaters. Toasty toilet seats? You have no idea!)
When I’m in Mississippi, I always look for Chevron stations where the food is consistently good and unmistakably Southern. Fried chicken, fried okra, and if you’re lucky, fried pickles.
In central Virginia and West Virginia, I stop at Sheetz, where you can concoct your own sandwiches on a computer screen. They even have pesto on occasion. Very fancy.
In Georgia, I keep an eye out for Jim ’N Nick’s Community BBQ joints. There are 37 of them sprinkled throughout the Peach State, Alabama, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina. The food is great and you’ll want to stuff your pockets with the cheese biscuits. Don’t ask if I’ve ever done that.
I probably shouldn’t admit this, but when all else fails, I look for Cracker Barrels. The food is slow but you can get a head start on your Christmas shopping while you wait. Told you I was an expert!
Continue reading
Posted in Economic development, Labor & workforce, Planning, Uncategorized
Tagged Kerry Dougherty
The Academic Affairs Guidelines for Recruiting and Hiring Instructional Faculty manual provides a glaring look into the bureaucratic and deeply troubling hiring procedures for faculty at James Madison University. Highly bureaucratic systems and policies are nothing new in American higher education, but this manual of edicts from the Office of the Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs is highly prescriptive and cumbersome. Effectively, the provost has insisted on the review and approval for every hire on the JMU campus and her office has expanded to take on this new additional responsibility.
Since coming to JMU in 2017, Provost Heather Coltman has massively expanded the staffing in her office, including hiring Dr. Narketta Sparkman-Key, the Associate Provost for Inclusive Strategies and Equity Initiatives (APISEI) in 2022. According to the manual, Sparkman-Key and Coltman are basically the gatekeepers — not just for hiring any new faculty member at JMU, but even determining if a search committee may continue with a search based on the diversity within the applicant pool.
For example, even before a search committee can form, the steps shown below must be taken. Understandably, there must be some top down controls to ensure departments are not hiring without proper approvals, but we note the first of many approvals by the Provost highlighted below.
1. The dean, the academic unit head (AUH), and faculty discuss and determine the need for a new faculty hire.
2. The AUH submits a justification for a new hire to the dean.
3. The dean reviews the justification and submits the position request form to the provost’s office by the established deadline.
4. Academic Resources prioritizes faculty hiring requests.
5. The provost confirms approvals and notifies the dean.
6. The dean notifies the AUH to proceed with the search.
7. The AUH completes and submits a “Request to Recruit” to Academic Resources.
There are protocols on who can be on the search committee, which is then approved by Sparkman-Key or another Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) leader. (As an aside, according to this report, JMU boasts 65 administrators and spends more than $5.3M on DEI salaries)
Continue reading
by Jon Baliles
Jack Jacobs at Richmond Biz Sense has an update about the ongoing fallout from the collapse of the Enrichmond Foundation last summer. All of the small organizations that used Enrichmond as a fiduciary lost access to their money (which may be gone for good; stay tuned) and other things like insurance coverage.
While there are efforts underway to transfer two historically Black cemeteries formerly under Enrichmond’s purview to the city, there has not been any statement, hint, clue, concern, or any sign of emotion uttered by the Mayor about when or if the city will help restore the funding of these small groups that do a lot of valuable work to help the City and save staff time.
Since no one at City Hall seems to be interested in helping, Richmonders are doing what they do best — they are doing it themselves (aka DIY).
For example, the group RVA Clean Sweep counts nearly 1,500 people who support it by going around the city picking up trash. They lost their insurance coverage and about $3,000 when Enrichmond folded. Have they quit trying to help clean up the city? Nope.
They held fewer cleanups and told volunteers to be extra careful as they were volunteering without insurance, but they still kept cleaning and sweeping. But no insurance means they were not able to apply for grants or hold as many cleanups as they would like, according to RVA Clean Sweep Director Amy Robins.
But they still held cleanups because they wanted their volunteers to stay engaged. “Robins feared that a prolonged hiatus on activity would cause volunteers to drift away from the cause of cleaning up litter in the city,” wrote Jacobs.
Continue reading
By James C. Sherlock
The National Incident Management System Preparedness Cycle
We could see it wasn’t right as it unfolded.
Virginia’s flawed response to COVID was slow for all Virginians.
Fatal for some.
But the public just saw the broad stroke external effects.
It is important to make sure that doesn’t happen again, whether in another pandemic or in a cyber attack, hurricane, flood, mass shooting, kinetic terrorist attack, nuclear plant emergency, or something else.
In response to my request, a very cooperative Virginia Department of Emergency Management (VDEM) FOIA official has provided a remarkable and profoundly disturbing two-volume series detailing a running history and operations analysis of what happened inside the government.
It is titled “COVID-19 Pandemic History and After Action Report” Vol. 1 (covers 2020) and Vol. 2. (covers 2021) hereafter referred to as the HAAR.
It was compiled and written under contract by CNA, a highly regarded federal contractor, who had people on site in Richmond during the COVID response.
The HAAR describes and assesses a series of widespread and seemingly endless internal and external government breakdowns that compromised the health and lives of Virginia’s citizens.
Management turmoil in the state government during COVID was so extensive as to be almost indescribable by any group with less talent than the CNA team.
The HAAR documents that Virginia’s COVID response was hamstrung by a lack of operations management experience in the leadership.
I understand that with authority comes responsibility.
But the governor, his Secretary of Health and Human Resources, and his Health Commissioner were effectively the chain of decision makers during COVID. All three were physicians.
But that is one reason we have a civil service.
Virginia’s civil service failed to prepare for its roles in emergency response long before Ralph Northam was governor. HAAR documents the complete inability of the bureaucracy to plan, organize and equip, train for, exercise and execute emergency plans.
It is clear to me that without capable civil service support, no administration would have fared well. I hope, by exposing this deadly failure, to prevent the same thing from happening again tomorrow.
I will make strategic recommendations here in this first part of what will be a series on this issue.
by Joe Fitzgerald
Take our word but not our numbers, Bluestone Town Center (BTC) backers seem to say
The moral of this story is: what the City Council doesn’t know won’t hurt the HRHA.
When I first heard about the scope of the BTC, I did some quick arithmetic and came up with an astronomical estimate of how many new K-12 students it would generate. I was wrong; the total was merely stratospheric.
Perhaps unwilling to accept the blog post of an ex-mayor, HCPS created its own model and discovered my revised numbers were pretty close. (For the record, proving me right is not why they created it.) They came up with a model that said 322 new students.
Worth noting, HCPS provided two sets of numbers. One was if they applied their model to 900 new housing units in Harrisonburg, and the second if they applied it to 900 in the southwest corner of town. The difference wasn’t significant. What was significant was the effort to share all relevant information.
In October, HRHA pointed out to HCPS that 60 of its units were for seniors, so HCPS reconfigured the estimate. (Because there’s a hell of a lot of H’s in this history, let me help: HRHA is Harrisonburg Redevelopment Housing Authority, and HCPS is still Harrisonburg City Public Schools. HRHA is partnered with EquityPlus, or EP, to apply for a rezoning to build BTC.)
The new estimate from HCPS was down to 273. A little more than half an elementary school.
Continue reading
Courtesy CBS rendering of two CDC spring of 2021 survey findings about American high school girls reported Monday, Feb 13, 2022
by James C. Sherlock
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is in full self-defense mode.
CDC and the left backed, indeed insisted, upon social isolation during the pandemic.
Now they deflect and deny agency in the consequences. They continue to try to insulate themselves from the catastrophic educational and mental health effects on children and adolescents of that social isolation.
A weakened CDC Director is pledging to overhaul the agency and its culture, a backhanded admission of the unimaginably bad performance of CDC during COVID.
The entrenched bureaucracy that is that agency and its culture is admitting nothing. They are counting the days until she leaves.
So, if experience counts for anything, we pretty much know how the CDC “overhaul” will work out.
Virginia is due for the same sort of review of state actions during COVID.
The Northam administration stumbled badly at nearly every new turn after failing to either exercise or implement Virginia’s own pandemic emergency plan. Which was excellent and predicted nearly exactly the course of events.
Then they tried to cover up the existence of that plan itself.
I am not sure that such a review is forthcoming. If it is, it will be preemptively be declared political. It must be done anyway.
The federal government, under progressive management, is “moving on.”
Or trying to.
I hope Virginia government does not make the same mistake. Continue reading
George Homewood
by James A. Bacon
Norfolk’s planning director, George Homewood, has left his post, and city officials aren’t saying whether he resigned or was fired. But The Virginian-Pilot says the parting of the ways occurred after the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) Ethics Committee suspended him for violating the group’s ethics code.
Reading the headline immediately set off my woke-o-meter. Was Homewood, a city employee since 2011, guilty of truly horrendous behavior, or was his career tarnished because he offended someone with a “micro-aggression?”
We’ll probably never know.
In a letter published on its website, the AICP declared that Homewood had violated Rule of Conduct #6, which states that a certified planner “shall not deliberately commit any wrongful act, whether or not specified in the Rules of Conduct that reflects adversely on our professional fitness or the planning profession.”
The letter goes on to mention “vivid descriptions of inappropriate conversations” during meetings of the Virginia Chapter cited by AICP’s ethics officer. The alleged “wrongful acts” reflected on both the planning profession and Homewood’s “professional fitness,” the AICP statement said, adding that “many” planners withdrew from Virginia chapter activities as a result.
Update: An updated Pilot article states that the charge against Homewood was sexual harassment. Apparently, Homewood had appealed the finding of wrongful acts. The Pilot obtained a letter from AICP to Homewood explaining that three character witnesses who testified on his behalf added now new evidence to refute the charges. Continue reading
by Joe Fitzgerald
The only thing I remember from Howard Fast’s Lavette family saga is from the fourth book, The Legacy. A pragmatic leftist organizer is registering Black voters in Mississippi with two dewy-eyed liberals, and an older couple invites the three into their home. They drink coffee and the two liberals talk about the high-flown principles behind what they’re doing and what great things they hope to do for the Black community in the South.
The pragmatic leftist sees two things wrong. First, the couple is already registered; the organizers should move on to someone who’s not. Second, they’re drinking a week’s worth of coffee from a couple too proud to say anything.
Fast could be heavy-handed in his writing — but he made a good point. The people who thought they were doing the couple a favor just didn’t get it. The dew is in the eyes of proponents of the Bluestone Town Center (BTC) today.
Continue reading
