Injunction to Stop Wind Project Denied

Posted on May 30, 2024 by | 20 comments

A federal judge in Washington has declined to prevent Dominion Energy Virginia from constructing its offshore wind turbines, but presumably the underlying legal challenge to the federal permitting process will grind on through the court process. Virginia Mercury reports the basics this morning.

Installation of the first monopiles actually started while the judge was still pondering the petition for an injunction, but getting such an injunction before the actual trial process requires clearing a very high legal hurdle. The plaintiffs claim the project will cause irreversible harm to marine life in the area, including whales, but the truth is evidence either way is lacking.

You cannot tell from the carcass if a dead whale ended up on the beach because of noise from sonar mapping of this construction site, or construction work on previous projects elsewhere. Likewise those who claim the work won’t harm whales cannot prove that negative. The federal regulators actually are of the opinion there is risk but claim the mitigations they have imposed will prove sufficient.

Time will tell on that. What remains is the project’s inordinate cost for the likely energy output, especially if the claimed 25- to 30-year lifespan proves too optimistic, or the project suffers major damage in some future (and long overdue) mid-Atlantic monster hurricane. And Dominion’s project is pretty much the only one which still claims it will be built for the advertised cost, thanks to contracts locked in long ago. Costs are exploding for many other developers. Continue reading →

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Posted in Energy, Environment, Utilities

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Footloose Aaron Spence. Having Fun On Loudoun County’s Dime

Posted on May 30, 2024 by | 11 comments

Republished with permission from Kerry: Unemployed and Unedited.

by Kerry Dougherty 

Let’s just admit it. Those of us who thought Aaron Spence was a disaster as Virginia Beach School Superintendent are experiencing a shameless bout of schadenfreude.

Yep, we’re enjoying the misfortune of others.

Those “others” would be Loudoun County parents and taxpayers. Aaron Spence is their problem now. He left Virginia Beach last year for the greener pastures of Loudoun County, the richest in the U.S.

According to excellent news reporting by tenacious ABC News7 reporter, Nick Minock, Spence has only been on the job for just nine months but has spent 30 days out of the district at a variety of boondoggles, er conferences.

Spence who makes a whopping $375,000 a year, ducked out of Loudoun County 10 times this school year for destinations such as Miami, West Palm Beach, San Diego and Puerto Rico, as well as several closer to home. According to records obtained by the reporter, it appears taxpayers picked up the tab for his conference registrations, hotels and travel, while at least in one instance he slurped up $15,000 for teaching two seminars at the conference seminars.

This would be just another example of a greedy public official living large off the generosity of unsuspecting taxpayers, but this case is much, much worse. Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (K-12), Efficiency in Government

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Yes, You Can Fight City Hall

Posted on May 29, 2024 by | 27 comments

Ken Davis

by James A. Bacon

Sometimes it takes grumpy old men to get things done.

Ken Davis, retired from a career in the Attorney General’s Office, lived with his wife in the Willow Lawn area of Richmond for more than 40 years. They paid their property tax bills on time and without complaint. But in July 2023, thanks to late delivery by the U.S. Post Office, they missed their first payment.

Davis went down to City Hall and dutifully paid the tax plus an $800 fine. But then he learned he wasn’t alone. More than 20 of his neighbors were late in receiving their bills, too. So, he filed an appeal.

The city finance director turned him down. “The city complied with all applicable billing and advertising requirements and non-receipt of a tax bill does not relieve a taxpayer of fault for failure to pay taxes on time,” she wrote, as the Richmond Times-Dispatch tells the story. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Taxes

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Education and Remembrance on the Banks of the James

Posted on May 29, 2024 by | Leave a comment

by Jon Baliles

The Virginia War Memorial sits solemnly upon the edge of Oregon Hill overlooking the city and the James River and honors the 12,000+ Virginia names of those who have fallen in service of our country since 1956. But in recent decades, it has become a place of education as well as of remembrance.

In 2010, the memorial opened the E. Bruce Heilman Amphitheater overlooking the city and hosts annual Memorial Day and Veterans Day ceremonies plus other events. That same year the memorial also opened Paul and Phyllis Galanti Education Center, named after the retired U.S. Navy Commander Paul Galanti, a Richmonder who was a prisoner of war from 1966 to 1973, and his late wife, Phyllis Eason Galanti, who never ceased in her efforts to bring him and other POW’s home. The center includes classrooms, a theater, and space for exhibits. The memorial’s five acres of green space has also grown with the planting of 87 trees, 375 shrubs, 553 perennials and hundreds of groundcover specimens that earned the Common Wealth Award by the Garden Club of Virginia.

Clay Mountcastle, memorial’s director, told Richmond Magazine, “One of the best ideas Virginia ever had was to add a museum and education center to make it a living memorial.”

In early 2020, the memorial added the C. Kenneth Wright Pavilion, which includes a new Shrine of Memory listing the names of 175 Virginians who have died in the global war on terrorism on the outside and the inside space includes a lecture hall, a Medal of Honor Gallery and the Veterans’ Changing Art Gallery, which showcases the art from Virginia veterans. Continue reading →

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Posted in Virginia history

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Shown the Door, Petersen Calls Out COVID Fascists

Posted on May 29, 2024 by | 32 comments

By Steve Haner

Reading Chap Petersen’s biographical “Rebel,” it is pretty easy to understand why a year ago his fellow Democrats threw him out of office in a primary. In fact, the mystery is that he survived as long as he did.

The book tells a history that many would like to ignore or actively suppress. That the Democratic Party in Virginia no longer has a place for Petersen should depress us all. He is not shy in returning like for like, so reward his efforts and buy his book. Then dog ear the good parts for later reference, because that crowd now in charge is just getting started.

Petersen was always hard to pigeonhole, and like all the legislators who have made it to my personal MVP list, delighted in doing the unexpected and doing it with panache. He came to the House of Delegates in 2002 and then the Senate in 2008, defeating Republican incumbents in both elections. Many of the best known struggles of those years are detailed from his point of view in the 300 plus pages. I also engaged in some of them, not always on the same side.

But his biggest fight of all, and the one that finally did him in, is one we are all engaged in. Petersen was one the fiercest opponents of the absolute and needless destruction of commercial and personal freedoms during the panic over COVID-19. He was a patron of successful 2021 legislation supposed to reopen Virginia’s public schools. In reality, the oppression of school kids continued for another year or longer, intensifying the educational losses. Continue reading →

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Posted in Business and Economy, Education (K-12), General Assembly, Public safety & health

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Oppression of the Drinking Class

Posted on May 28, 2024 by | 22 comments

Source: The Tax Foundation

It’s time to proclaim a new class of the “oppressed” in the pantheon of society’s victims — bourbon drinkers and other imbibers of liquors. Virginia’s tax system engages in systemic bias in favor of the teetotalers.

It’s not just that drinkers in Virginia must purchase their spirits at government-owned ABC stores or that they must pay excise taxes for the privilege of acquiring their sustenance. As the Tax Foundation points out, state governments utilize many other means to extract wealth from the drinking class. These include case and bottle fees, special sales taxes on spirits, wholesale taxes, and retail and distributor license fees. 

When you measure the impact of all these add-ons, the Old Dominion imposes the third-highest implied tax of any state in the country, says the Tax Foundation.

The states of Washington and Oregon are the two highest. The lowest? Wyoming, state motto: “the equality state.” Continue reading →

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Posted in Taxes

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Factors Impacting Teacher Vacancies

Posted on May 28, 2024 by | 31 comments

by Matt Hurt

Last week Jim Bacon published an article about the fact that our teacher vacancy rate problem is not all about salary, and I agree that other factors also contribute to this problem.  Jim also posited that “It’s caused by teachers dropping out of the profession because they think their jobs suck,” and recent data seem to support an approximation of this idea.

This spring some of my colleagues and I were able to obtain and investigate the annual School Climate and Working Conditions Survey results from 2023. We specifically focused on the teacher results and were able to confirm a major tenet in the educational world: climate matters!

The survey questions were categorized as indicated in this spreadsheet. There were significant, positive correlations among all of the categories and SOL performance both at the school and the division levels of analysis. Conversely, these correlations were significant and negative with teacher vacancy rates. One singular question — overall, my school is a good place to work and learn — had the greatest overall correlation with both SOL outcomes and teacher vacancy rates. In other words, teachers were less likely to leave divisions in which they wanted to work, and those divisions produced better student outcomes.

Table 1 below attempts to better illustrate these relationships. Most of the questions were presented in a Likert scale with a range of answer options from one to six (six being the most favorable response). These results were aggregated by region, and the statistics below indicate the percentage of possible points for each category of questions. All values are color coded as follows: green most desirable, red least desirable, and yellow most central.

Table 1: Aggregate teacher survey results, teacher vacancy rates, and SOL pass rates by region in 2023.


Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (K-12)

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A Curmudgeon Counts His Blessings on Memorial Day

Posted on May 27, 2024 by | 73 comments

by James A. Bacon

It’s Memorial Day, and I should be choosing an uplifting and patriotic image like an American flag to accompany this post. But I’m feeling more than ordinarily cranky this morning, so I’m using this image of an old man shouting at birds and the rain. That’s me, alright.

Set aside my irritability for a moment. I am profoundly grateful to the thousands of Americans who gave their lives or lost their limbs in wars to win independence, end secession, conquer fascism, contain communism, fight tyrants and terrorists, and make the world a better place. Their sacrifices have given me the gift of freedom, comfort and prosperity.

I think of my mother’s cousin Mark, long deceased, whom I remember as a taciturn man who never got married and lived with his mother and uncle until his dying day. He was severely wounded at Iwo Jima when a Japanese artillery shell destroyed the halftrack he was riding in. He was the only soldier to survive. He never cared to talk about his experience. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars

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Remember and Honor

Posted on May 27, 2024 by | 4 comments

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EVs More Likely to Kill Pedestrians, Damage Roads and Bridges

Posted on May 26, 2024 by | 90 comments

by Hans Bader

“A recent study published by the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health found that drivers of electric vehicles (EVs) and hybrids are twice as likely to hit pedestrians compared to those driving traditional gas-powered cars, potentially leading to more fatal accidents. This conclusion came from a review of British road accidents. The study examined 32 billion miles of EV travel and 3 trillion miles of combustion-engine car trips,” reports Straight Arrow News:

The findings align with earlier studies conducted by U.S. federal agencies. In 2017, the Department of Transportation reported that EVs and hybrids pose a 20% greater risk to pedestrians. This risk increases to 50% during low-speed maneuvers such as turning, reversing and coming to a stop.

Researchers partly attributed these elevated dangers posed by EVs and hybrids to the relative quietness of these vehicles. Unlike traditional combustion-engine cars, battery-powered automobiles produce little to no noise, sometimes leaving pedestrians unaware of an approaching vehicle….The heavier weight of EVs makes the problem worse. Electric cars often weigh 30% more than their gas-powered counterparts. This is because of their large batteries, which can add upwards of 2,000 pounds in some models. This added weight increases the likelihood of fatal outcomes in pedestrian accidents.…Being hit by a car with an additional 1,000 pounds of weight increases the chance of a fatality by nearly 50%.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Energy, Environment

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Civil Disobedience Without Consequences

Posted on May 26, 2024 by | 61 comments

by James A. Bacon

The anarchists who organized the UVA Encampment for Gaza are clamoring for the University of Virginia to reverse its No Trespass Order (NTO) against nursing student Mustafa Abdelhamid. The circumstances behind the sanction are absent from the brief Instagram post by the anarchist collective, but the restriction was imposed for actions relating to the Virginia State Police crackdown on the pro-Palestinian tent “encampment” on May 4.

Abdelhamid is the only arrestee whose No Trespass Appeal (NTO) appeal was denied, claims UVA Encampment for Gaza.

Even though the protester is identified as a Piedmont Virginia Community College student, Encampment for Gaza asserts that the order prohibiting him from entering UVA Grounds is “preventing him from pursuing his nursing studies. Please join our appeal by endorsing our letter and telling UVA administration to let Mustafa nurse,” says the Instagram post.

Maybe Abdelhamid should have pondered the potential consequences before doing whatever it was that he did that got him in trouble. Continue reading →

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Posted in Uncategorized

Jeanine’s Memes

Posted on May 26, 2024 by | 15 comments

Yup, this is how I look most of the time.

From The Bull Elephant.

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Data Centers Are Good for Virginia. Predictably, Opposition Is Mounting.

Posted on May 25, 2024 by | 18 comments

Location of Virginia data centers. (Three data centers in Southwest Virginia not shown). Source: Piedmont Environmental Council Geohub.

by James A. Bacon

Data centers have become such big business in Virginia that the industry has formed its own trade association, the Data Center Coalition, Unsurprisingly, that group is headquartered in Leesburg, smack dab in the middle of the largest cluster of data centers in the United States if not the world.

You know the industry is really big here in Virginia when a coalition of environmental and conservation groups — the Virginia Data Center Reform Coalition — has mobilized to constrain it.

The Reform Coalition (VDCRC) urges lawmakers to implement “common-sense regulatory and rate-making reforms” addressing the impact of data centers on the electrical grid, water resources, air quality, and land conservation efforts.

“Utilities are legally obligated to serve these data centers, no matter how much energy they require or the impact to the transmission grid. Virginia ratepayers are currently subsidizing this buildout for some of the largest and wealthiest companies in the world – which is patently unfair,” states the VDCRC website. Continue reading →

18 Comments

Posted in Energy

Investor in Dominion Wind Buys $150M Island

Posted on May 25, 2024 by | 5 comments

Experience in Iowa just proved this earlier destruction of an onshore turbine was a harbinger of things to come. See below.

By Steve Haner

One of the leaders of investment firm Stonepeak, which is buying a 50% share in Dominion Energy’s Virginia Virginia Beach wind project, just bought a private island.  The story is reported by the New York Post, which mentions his role in the major investment firm but doesn’t make the connection to the 176 turbines now under construction.

I’d love to share the photos but don’t want to test the copyright limits. Check out the story and luxury home pics on the Post website yourselves.

I’m sorry, aren’t we being told that we have to have that multi-billion dollar boondoggle to protect us from a horrible future destroyed by climate change? That without offshore wind displacing natural gas, the sea will rise faster than a soufflé and hurricanes will be more frequent and far more powerful? This bright guy getting rich off Virginia ratepayer money doesn’t seem to buy that hype.

To be fair, the deal between Dominion and Stonepeak is still under review at the State Corporation Commission. Stonepeak has plenty of other profitable investments that paid for this house. Continue reading →

5 Comments

Posted in Energy, Environment, Utilities

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Apologies (Once Again)

Posted on May 25, 2024 by | 9 comments

You may have seen some garbage posts on the blog and, if you are a subscriber, in your in-boxes. My apologies. I’ve been experimenting with ways to apply Artificial Intelligence to summarize the content of Virginia news and opinion on blogs and websites free from paywalls. Let’s just say that I could use some AI to help me implement the AI. It was a mess. I did not realize that my experiments were being published. Hopefully, I’ve cleared all the junk off the blog, but the possibility of more mis-steps cannot be discounted. Please bear with me. — JAB

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Posted in Blogs and Blog Administration

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