Category Archives: Scandals

Is Charlottesville governable? Charlottesville City Manager Chip Boyles has announced his resignation, making him the fifth interim or full-time city manager to leave the city since 2018, reports the Daily Progress. “The public disparagement shown by several community members and Mayor [Nikuyah] Walker has begun to negatively effect [sic] my personal health and well-being,” he wrote to City Council. Walker responded by saying Boyles should have been fired. “You shouldn’t have been able to sleep at night because you are a liar,” she said in a Facebook video. Walker, who gained notoriety for penning a poem likening Charlottesville to rape, has herself said she will not run for re-election. Boyle and Walker butted heads over many issues, including his firing of the city’s female, African-American police chief. One councilman told the Daily Progress that in the opinion of an executive search firm contacted last year, “we were not likely to be able to hire anybody with council as dysfunctional as it is.”

It was an innocent mistake, yer honor. Chesapeake Board Chair Victoria Proffitt, who had been laid off from her adjunct math teaching job at Tidewater Community College, has returned $984 in unemployment benefits she was overpaid by the Virginia Employment Commission. She attributed the error to a VEC oversight, but a special prosecutor had contended she was “either being intentionally dishonest or was just exceedingly careless,” says the Virginian-Pilot. Meanwhile… Continue reading →

The good guy: Virginia Inspector General Michael C. Wesfall

by James A. Bacon

Bacon’s Rebellion has not given the biggest scandal of the Northam administration (since Blackface) the attention it deserves. In fact, we have given the matter little attention at all. Sorry, folks, we don’t have the resources to do it all. And there’s no need when the mainstream media is doing a perfectly good job. But at some point, we have to acknowledge that the scandal is ongoing.

I’m talking about the parole board scandal, in which Adrianne Bennett, chairwoman of the Virginia Parole Board, allegedly violated state law and the board’s own victim-notification procedures for releasing murderers from prison. After receiving complaints on the state’s waste-fraud-and-abuse hotline, the State Inspector General conducted an investigation and documented the allegations. Senior members of the Northam administration got wind of the report and heavily redacted it for release to the public. Republicans got wind and raised a stink. Team Northam berated IG Michael Westfall and his staff, one of the staff resigned in protest, and Governor Ralph Northam called for an investigation of the investigators.

The heavy: Northam Chief of Staff Clark Mercer

For once, the mainstream media has been doing its job and covering the scandal, which shows how the Northam administration does business. (If you think this is the only time Team Northam has thrown its weight around, you’re deluding yourself.)

One outlet I give credit to is the Virginia Mercury. I have taken the independent online publication to task for some of its environmental and social-justice reporting, but it has been in the forefront of covering the parole-board scandal.  Continue reading →