rawdog

A Roanoke real estate firm says that the Internal Revenue Service’s office lease in the Star City will not be canceled despite the Department of Government Efficiency saying otherwise.

DOGE’s website lists more than 700 federal government lease cancellations that it says will save taxpayers money. Among them is the IRS’s Roanoke lease at 210 First St. S.W., and DOGE says canceling it would save $289,115 a year for a total of $698,694.

The address is in the First Campbell Square building at the corner of Campbell Avenue and First Street downtown. Other tenants there include the Virginia Department of Social Services, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of the U.S. Trustee, and federal and state public defenders.

“We did receive a notice from the General Services Administration (GSA) that the IRS lease at First Campbell Square was being terminated,” Matt Huff, president of Poe & Cronk Real Estate Group, which handles property management and leasing for the building, said in an email.

“However, two days later the GSA withdrew their termination notice and confirmed that the IRS lease is in full force and effect through its lease term. We believe the DOGE website has not kept up to accurately reflect this recission notice,” Huff said.

The GSA supports basic functions of federal government agencies, including by owning and leasing properties nationwide.

The IRS’s Roanoke office provides services to taxpayers, including assistance with basic tax law, forms and payments, according to the IRS website. The next closest office is in Lynchburg.

The website says the IRS’s Roanoke office accounts for 16,693 square feet. Huff declined to provide details on the office’s use of space or how much the IRS pays under the lease. 

The termination notice came on Feb. 25, while the withdrawal notice came on Feb. 27, Huff said.

DOGE says its website is updated weekly and was last updated on Wednesday.

DOGE, the GSA and the IRS did not respond to requests for confirmation on Wednesday. 

DOGE is overseen by the billionaire Elon Musk and is part of President Donald Trump’s plan to shrink the federal government. Trump established it on his first day in office with an executive order that reorganized another agency, the U.S. Digital Service.

In all, DOGE claims more than $100 billion in savings from canceling government contracts, leases and grants, but scrutiny has revealed typos and other errors that appear to overstate those savings.

On Tuesday, the Associated Press, citing anonymous sources, reported that the IRS is drafting plans to cut up to half of its 90,000-person workforce.

The agency in February laid off about 7,000 probationary employees with a year or less of service, according to the AP.

WDBJ reported last month that 14 IRS employees in Roanoke were laid off. 

DOGE also lists an IRS office lease in Fredericksburg as slated for cancellation.

Other leases in Virginia that the DOGE website lists for cancellation are for the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service in Richmond; the Bureau of Industry and Security in Herndon; the GSA in Arlington, Charlottesville and Lorton; the Department of Homeland Security in Arlington; the U.S. Geological Survey in Richmond; the Government Accountability Office in Virginia Beach; the Mine Safety Health Administration in Arlington; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration office in Hampton; and the Office of U.S. Attorneys in Richmond.

None are in Southside or Southwest Virginia.

Besides canceling leases, the GSA also says it will sell more than 440 “non-core” government-owned buildings totaling nearly 80 million square feet of office space that would otherwise cost $8.3 billion to renovate.

“Decades of funding deficiencies have resulted in many of these buildings becoming functionally obsolete and unsuitable for use by our federal workforce. We can no longer hope that funding will emerge to resolve these longstanding issues,” the GSA said Tuesday.

The agency on Tuesday published a list of these assets that in Virginia included addresses in Arlington, Charlottesville, Norfolk, Reston, Richmond, Springfield and Sterling. None are in Southside or Southwest Virginia. As of Wednesday morning, the list had been replaced by a short message that said the list would be “coming soon.”

The post IRS office lease in Roanoke still in place, property manager says, despite claim on DOGE website appeared first on Cardinal News.

Del. David Bulova, D-Fairfax County, was in Las Vegas for a funeral last summer when he noticed the parking lot he was in suddenly got cooler.

The state legislator from Fairfax County looked up, and that’s when he got the glimmer of an idea that led to a bill that now sits on the governor’s desk, at least metaphorically, waiting for action. 

* * * 

Across rural Virginia, but especially in Southside, rural localities are pushing back against solar projects on the grounds that they are an ugly industrial blight that ruins the landscape. Their resistance raises serious questions about whether Virginia can ever meet the goals of the Clean Economy Act, which mandates a carbon-free power grid by 2050. Right now, Virginia gets about 7.22% of its power from solar energy. If that much (or that little) solar prompts that much resistance, how are we ever going to ramp that percentage up many times higher?

That was the backdrop to a debate during the recent General Assembly session over a bill that proponents said would help rural localities manage solar development and opponents warned was the first step toward a state mandate. 

State Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, asked state Sen. Barbara Favola, D-Arlington County: “Can you tell me how many significant, large-scale solar farms there are in Arlington and Alexandria?” 

His point: Rural Virginia is being expected to sacrifice its land to produce energy for Northern Virginia. 

Favola acknowledged that her district has no solar farms but held out hope that maybe someday the region could produce more solar energy through rooftop arrays. 

I devoted a previous column to rooftop solar — how Virginia could produce a lot more of it but how even that is nowhere near what we need. Rooftops covered with solar panels simply don’t add up to the utility-scale power demands that solar farms produce, especially if the growth of data centers really does triple power demand by 2040 as one state report forecasts.

There is, though, another way, one that could indeed turn parts of Northern Virginia (and other developed areas) into utility-scale solar projects without giving up farmland or rural viewsheds. That way was what was over Bulova’s head that summer day in Las Vegas: solar panels over top of parking lots.

* * * 

There’s a reason cities are sometimes called “asphalt jungles.” They have a lot of parking lots. A group called the Parking Reform Network studied more than 100 cities across the country and found that about 22% of their land was devoted to parking. In Austin, Texas, the figure is 42%. In San Bernardino, California, the percentage topped out at 45%. Those figures, by the way, don’t count street parking; these are parking lots. 

Three Virginia cities made it into that study: Norfolk came in at 24%, Richmond 25%, Virginia Beach 36%. 

What if some of those parking lots were covered with solar canopies? This is not a new idea.

Back in 2012, Washington & Lee University in Lexington put a solar array over one of its parking lots, as well as a separate one on its law school building. At the time, this was heralded as the largest solar energy project in the state, which gives some sense of how quickly solar energy has expanded in Virginia. Some 13 years later, the parking lot canopy is still there. It’s difficult to break out the energy generation, but W&L reports that its on-campus arrays (the parking lot, Lewis Hall and the Outing Club Pavilion) generate about 6% of the university’s power. (The rest comes from an off-campus solar project, meaning that W&L is now 100% solar.)

Since then, the prospect of turning acre upon acre of urban parking lots into solar farms has sparkled like some solar El Dorado. In 2022, France started mandating solar panels on parking lots with 80 or more spaces (which some have pointed out are about the size of 50 American cars). The Washington Post reported that this had the potential to add enough energy to equal 10 new nuclear plants. We also have a lot more parking lots than France. Time magazine reported in 2022 that, theoretically, the United States could supply all its power needs, and then some, if it put solar panels over parking lots. That skips over a lot of technical details, such as transmission issues and the fact that solar panels only generate power about 20% to 25% of the time. Still, the point is, there’s a lot of untapped potential in parking lot solar. 

Some are trying to tap that potential. The Washington Commanders football team has a solar canopy over 841 parking spaces in its Platinum A1 lot. This, along with other solar arrays, supplies all the power the stadium needs on non-game days — and 20% of its energy needs on game days.

You can find other parking lot solar projects from JFK Airport in New York to the Cincinnati Zoo to certain Walmart and Target stores in Arizona and California. 

Now Bulova wants to bring that to Virginia. 

His HB 2037 would give localities permission to require developers of non-residential lots of 100 or more spaces to install parking lot solar. Notice two seemingly contradictory words in close proximity there — permission to require. Local governments in Virginia only have the powers granted to them by the state; this is the famous (or some would say infamous) Dillon Rule. But the word that may get this bill in trouble is not permission but “require.”

Bulova’s bill passed the General Assembly — 64-32 in the House, where it picked up some Republican support, but just 21-18 in the Senate, where it did not.

The bill saw left-of-center environmental groups and the often right-of-center Farm Bureau on the same side, but it drew the opposition of real estate developers. “This is really expensive,” lobbyist Sarah Thomas told legislators as she represented the Virginia Association of Commercial Real Estate. She also warned that the power generated by parking lot solar is more expensive than regular, ground-mounted solar farms, simply because it costs more to mount solar panels on a structure than to stick them in the ground. Obviously I’m simplifying, but you get the idea. 

That argument clearly wasn’t persuasive with enough legislators, although I suspect it might be more so with Gov. Glenn Youngkin when it comes time to act on this bill. This might seem the classic case of what Republicans often like to call “burdensome regulations.”

Parking lot solar also doesn’t generate as much power as a comparable amount of ground-mounted solar. In other words, an acre of parking lot solar doesn’t equal an acre of solar panels out in the countryside. “Utility-scale solar facilities that are built on raw land are situated to maximize the use of the land, such as being oriented towards the sun. That might not be possible with a carport, depending on the layout of the parking lot,” says Tim Eberly, a Dominion Energy spokesman for solar issues. “Another key detail is that carports might have shade from nearby trees or buildings. A third issue is that carports are restricted to fixed-tilt solar panels — not the tracker solar panels that move and follow the path of the sun. But let’s say that the parking lot didn’t have shade and was already ideally oriented with the path of the sun. In that case, then you could expect the output to be comparable, minus the difference from fixed-tilt versus tracker solar panels.”

(Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.)

Tony Smith, CEO of Secure Solar Futures in Staunton, the company that worked with Washington & Lee on its parking lot array, also cautions against expecting too much out of parking lot solar. “While this is certainly a move in the right direction for displacing some of the pressure on utility scale solar in rural areas, it’s no panacea, and more of a goodwill gesture,” he said via email. “For example, most solar developers would probably not refer to anything less than 3 MW as a solar farm, which in a practical sense would mean a parking canopy covering at least 3 X 7 = 21 acres, which would be a very large parking lot. Also, the cost of building a solar canopy structure makes it an uneconomic proposition to do at large scale to meet the energy demand (think of building a steel infrastructure to support the panels, and the rising cost of steel, especially in light of [President Donald] Trump’s tariffs).”

Bulova, though, hopes Youngkin will give his bill a chance. He sees this as a way to save at least some farm and forest land from development. “Agriculture and forestry is still Virginia’s largest industry, and we don’t want to do anything to disrupt that,” he told me during an interview. He also hopes this bill could go a ways toward mitigating the feeling that rural Virginia is expected to do all the heavy lifting on energy. “I’ve got a lot of constituents up in Northern Virginia who would like to be part of that solution.”

Yes, the parking lot solar requirement would run up the initial cost of development, but it also would make the property being developed more valuable in the long term, he said, because the property owner would be saving power costs. 

There’s no doubt a lot of math involved to figure out the exact costs and the exact savings — and, of course, the exact power generation possible at each site. Ultimately, Bulova said, this is a question of whether we really do believe in an “all of the above” energy strategy. “We have seas and seas of large parking lots associated with office buildings, big box stores and strip malls that have potential to generate lots of energy,” he said. Whether it’s a mandate or something voluntary, why aren’t we making use of that space? I suspect the next time a controversial solar project is proposed somewhere in rural Virginia, some people might be wondering why the solar panels have to be there and not over top a parking lot in Northern Virginia.

The post Fairfax County legislator wants to redirect solar projects from farmland to parking lots. But there’s a catch. appeared first on Cardinal News.

Del. David Bulova, D-Fairfax County, was in Las Vegas for a funeral last summer when he noticed the parking lot he was in suddenly got cooler.

The state legislator from Fairfax County looked up, and that’s when he got the glimmer of an idea that led to a bill that now sits on the governor’s desk, at least metaphorically, waiting for action. 

* * * 

Across rural Virginia, but especially in Southside, rural localities are pushing back against solar projects on the grounds that they are an ugly industrial blight that ruins the landscape. Their resistance raises serious questions about whether Virginia can ever meet the goals of the Clean Economy Act, which mandates a carbon-free power grid by 2050. Right now, Virginia gets about 7.22% of its power from solar energy. If that much (or that little) solar prompts that much resistance, how are we ever going to ramp that percentage up many times higher?

That was the backdrop to a debate during the recent General Assembly session over a bill that proponents said would help rural localities manage solar development and opponents warned was the first step toward a state mandate. 

State Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, asked state Sen. Barbara Favola, D-Arlington County: “Can you tell me how many significant, large-scale solar farms there are in Arlington and Alexandria?” 

His point: Rural Virginia is being expected to sacrifice its land to produce energy for Northern Virginia. 

Favola acknowledged that her district has no solar farms but held out hope that maybe someday the region could produce more solar energy through rooftop arrays. 

I devoted a previous column to rooftop solar — how Virginia could produce a lot more of it but how even that is nowhere near what we need. Rooftops covered with solar panels simply don’t add up to the utility-scale power demands that solar farms produce, especially if the growth of data centers really does triple power demand by 2040 as one state report forecasts.

There is, though, another way, one that could indeed turn parts of Northern Virginia (and other developed areas) into utility-scale solar projects without giving up farmland or rural viewsheds. That way was what was over Bulova’s head that summer day in Las Vegas: solar panels over top of parking lots.

* * * 

There’s a reason cities are sometimes called “asphalt jungles.” They have a lot of parking lots. A group called the Parking Reform Network studied more than 100 cities across the country and found that about 22% of their land was devoted to parking. In Austin, Texas, the figure is 42%. In San Bernardino, California, the percentage topped out at 45%. Those figures, by the way, don’t count street parking; these are parking lots. 

Three Virginia cities made it into that study: Norfolk came in at 24%, Richmond 25%, Virginia Beach 36%. 

What if some of those parking lots were covered with solar canopies? This is not a new idea.

Back in 2012, Washington & Lee University in Lexington put a solar array over one of its parking lots, as well as a separate one on its law school building. At the time, this was heralded as the largest solar energy project in the state, which gives some sense of how quickly solar energy has expanded in Virginia. Some 13 years later, the parking lot canopy is still there. It’s difficult to break out the energy generation, but W&L reports that its on-campus arrays (the parking lot, Lewis Hall and the Outing Club Pavilion) generate about 6% of the university’s power. (The rest comes from an off-campus solar project, meaning that W&L is now 100% solar.)

Since then, the prospect of turning acre upon acre of urban parking lots into solar farms has sparkled like some solar El Dorado. In 2022, France started mandating solar panels on parking lots with 80 or more spaces (which some have pointed out are about the size of 50 American cars). The Washington Post reported that this had the potential to add enough energy to equal 10 new nuclear plants. We also have a lot more parking lots than France. Time magazine reported in 2022 that, theoretically, the United States could supply all its power needs, and then some, if it put solar panels over parking lots. That skips over a lot of technical details, such as transmission issues and the fact that solar panels only generate power about 20% to 25% of the time. Still, the point is, there’s a lot of untapped potential in parking lot solar. 

Some are trying to tap that potential. The Washington Commanders football team has a solar canopy over 841 parking spaces in its Platinum A1 lot. This, along with other solar arrays, supplies all the power the stadium needs on non-game days — and 20% of its energy needs on game days.

You can find other parking lot solar projects from JFK Airport in New York to the Cincinnati Zoo to certain Walmart and Target stores in Arizona and California. 

Now Bulova wants to bring that to Virginia. 

His HB 2037 would give localities permission to require developers of non-residential lots of 100 or more spaces to install parking lot solar. Notice two seemingly contradictory words in close proximity there — permission to require. Local governments in Virginia only have the powers granted to them by the state; this is the famous (or some would say infamous) Dillon Rule. But the word that may get this bill in trouble is not permission but “require.”

Bulova’s bill passed the General Assembly — 64-32 in the House, where it picked up some Republican support, but just 21-18 in the Senate, where it did not.

The bill saw left-of-center environmental groups and the often right-of-center Farm Bureau on the same side, but it drew the opposition of real estate developers. “This is really expensive,” lobbyist Sarah Thomas told legislators as she represented the Virginia Association of Commercial Real Estate. She also warned that the power generated by parking lot solar is more expensive than regular, ground-mounted solar farms, simply because it costs more to mount solar panels on a structure than to stick them in the ground. Obviously I’m simplifying, but you get the idea. 

That argument clearly wasn’t persuasive with enough legislators, although I suspect it might be more so with Gov. Glenn Youngkin when it comes time to act on this bill. This might seem the classic case of what Republicans often like to call “burdensome regulations.”

Parking lot solar also doesn’t generate as much power as a comparable amount of ground-mounted solar. In other words, an acre of parking lot solar doesn’t equal an acre of solar panels out in the countryside. “Utility-scale solar facilities that are built on raw land are situated to maximize the use of the land, such as being oriented towards the sun. That might not be possible with a carport, depending on the layout of the parking lot,” says Tim Eberly, a Dominion Energy spokesman for solar issues. “Another key detail is that carports might have shade from nearby trees or buildings. A third issue is that carports are restricted to fixed-tilt solar panels — not the tracker solar panels that move and follow the path of the sun. But let’s say that the parking lot didn’t have shade and was already ideally oriented with the path of the sun. In that case, then you could expect the output to be comparable, minus the difference from fixed-tilt versus tracker solar panels.”

(Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.)

Tony Smith, CEO of Secure Solar Futures in Staunton, the company that worked with Washington & Lee on its parking lot array, also cautions against expecting too much out of parking lot solar. “While this is certainly a move in the right direction for displacing some of the pressure on utility scale solar in rural areas, it’s no panacea, and more of a goodwill gesture,” he said via email. “For example, most solar developers would probably not refer to anything less than 3 MW as a solar farm, which in a practical sense would mean a parking canopy covering at least 3 X 7 = 21 acres, which would be a very large parking lot. Also, the cost of building a solar canopy structure makes it an uneconomic proposition to do at large scale to meet the energy demand (think of building a steel infrastructure to support the panels, and the rising cost of steel, especially in light of [President Donald] Trump’s tariffs).”

Bulova, though, hopes Youngkin will give his bill a chance. He sees this as a way to save at least some farm and forest land from development. “Agriculture and forestry is still Virginia’s largest industry, and we don’t want to do anything to disrupt that,” he told me during an interview. He also hopes this bill could go a ways toward mitigating the feeling that rural Virginia is expected to do all the heavy lifting on energy. “I’ve got a lot of constituents up in Northern Virginia who would like to be part of that solution.”

Yes, the parking lot solar requirement would run up the initial cost of development, but it also would make the property being developed more valuable in the long term, he said, because the property owner would be saving power costs. 

There’s no doubt a lot of math involved to figure out the exact costs and the exact savings — and, of course, the exact power generation possible at each site. Ultimately, Bulova said, this is a question of whether we really do believe in an “all of the above” energy strategy. “We have seas and seas of large parking lots associated with office buildings, big box stores and strip malls that have potential to generate lots of energy,” he said. Whether it’s a mandate or something voluntary, why aren’t we making use of that space? I suspect the next time a controversial solar project is proposed somewhere in rural Virginia, some people might be wondering why the solar panels have to be there and not over top a parking lot in Northern Virginia.

Want more politics and analysis? Sign up for our weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital, that goes out every Friday afternoon:

The post Fairfax County legislator wants to redirect solar projects from farmland to parking lots. But there’s a catch. appeared first on Cardinal News.

Del. David Bulova, D-Fairfax County, was in Las Vegas for a funeral last summer when he noticed the parking lot he was in suddenly got cooler.

The state legislator from Fairfax County looked up, and that’s when he got the glimmer of an idea that led to a bill that now sits on the governor’s desk, at least metaphorically, waiting for action. 

* * * 

Across rural Virginia, but especially in Southside, rural localities are pushing back against solar projects on the grounds that they are an ugly industrial blight that ruins the landscape. Their resistance raises serious questions about whether Virginia can ever meet the goals of the Clean Economy Act, which mandates a carbon-free power grid by 2050. Right now, Virginia gets about 7.22% of its power from solar energy. If that much (or that little) solar prompts that much resistance, how are we ever going to ramp that percentage up many times higher?

That was the backdrop to a debate during the recent General Assembly session over a bill that proponents said would help rural localities manage solar development and opponents warned was the first step toward a state mandate. 

State Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, asked state Sen. Barbara Favola, D-Arlington County: “Can you tell me how many significant, large-scale solar farms there are in Arlington and Alexandria?” 

His point: Rural Virginia is being expected to sacrifice its land to produce energy for Northern Virginia. 

Favola acknowledged that her district has no solar farms but held out hope that maybe someday the region could produce more solar energy through rooftop arrays. 

I devoted a previous column to rooftop solar — how Virginia could produce a lot more of it but how even that is nowhere near what we need. Rooftops covered with solar panels simply don’t add up to the utility-scale power demands that solar farms produce, especially if the growth of data centers really does triple power demand by 2040 as one state report forecasts.

There is, though, another way, one that could indeed turn parts of Northern Virginia (and other developed areas) into utility-scale solar projects without giving up farmland or rural viewsheds. That way was what was over Bulova’s head that summer day in Las Vegas: solar panels over top of parking lots.

* * * 

There’s a reason cities are sometimes called “asphalt jungles.” They have a lot of parking lots. A group called the Parking Reform Network studied more than 100 cities across the country and found that about 22% of their land was devoted to parking. In Austin, Texas, the figure is 42%. In San Bernardino, California, the percentage topped out at 45%. Those figures, by the way, don’t count street parking; these are parking lots. 

Three Virginia cities made it into that study: Norfolk came in at 24%, Richmond 25%, Virginia Beach 36%. 

What if some of those parking lots were covered with solar canopies? This is not a new idea.

Back in 2012, Washington & Lee University in Lexington put a solar array over one of its parking lots, as well as a separate one on its law school building. At the time, this was heralded as the largest solar energy project in the state, which gives some sense of how quickly solar energy has expanded in Virginia. Some 13 years later, the parking lot canopy is still there. It’s difficult to break out the energy generation, but W&L reports that its on-campus arrays (the parking lot, Lewis Hall and the Outing Club Pavilion) generate about 6% of the university’s power. (The rest comes from an off-campus solar project, meaning that W&L is now 100% solar.)

Since then, the prospect of turning acre upon acre of urban parking lots into solar farms has sparkled like some solar El Dorado. In 2022, France started mandating solar panels on parking lots with 80 or more spaces (which some have pointed out are about the size of 50 American cars). The Washington Post reported that this had the potential to add enough energy to equal 10 new nuclear plants. We also have a lot more parking lots than France. Time magazine reported in 2022 that, theoretically, the United States could supply all its power needs, and then some, if it put solar panels over parking lots. That skips over a lot of technical details, such as transmission issues and the fact that solar panels only generate power about 20% to 25% of the time. Still, the point is, there’s a lot of untapped potential in parking lot solar. 

Some are trying to tap that potential. The Washington Commanders football team has a solar canopy over 841 parking spaces in its Platinum A1 lot. This, along with other solar arrays, supplies all the power the stadium needs on non-game days — and 20% of its energy needs on game days.

You can find other parking lot solar projects from JFK Airport in New York to the Cincinnati Zoo to certain Walmart and Target stores in Arizona and California. 

Now Bulova wants to bring that to Virginia. 

His HB 2037 would give localities permission to require developers of non-residential lots of 100 or more spaces to install parking lot solar. Notice two seemingly contradictory words in close proximity there — permission to require. Local governments in Virginia only have the powers granted to them by the state; this is the famous (or some would say infamous) Dillon Rule. But the word that may get this bill in trouble is not permission but “require.”

Bulova’s bill passed the General Assembly — 64-32 in the House, where it picked up some Republican support, but just 21-18 in the Senate, where it did not.

The bill saw left-of-center environmental groups and the often right-of-center Farm Bureau on the same side, but it drew the opposition of real estate developers. “This is really expensive,” lobbyist Sarah Thomas told legislators as she represented the Virginia Association of Commercial Real Estate. She also warned that the power generated by parking lot solar is more expensive than regular, ground-mounted solar farms, simply because it costs more to mount solar panels on a structure than to stick them in the ground. Obviously I’m simplifying, but you get the idea. 

That argument clearly wasn’t persuasive with enough legislators, although I suspect it might be more so with Gov. Glenn Youngkin when it comes time to act on this bill. This might seem the classic case of what Republicans often like to call “burdensome regulations.”

Parking lot solar also doesn’t generate as much power as a comparable amount of ground-mounted solar. In other words, an acre of parking lot solar doesn’t equal an acre of solar panels out in the countryside. “Utility-scale solar facilities that are built on raw land are situated to maximize the use of the land, such as being oriented towards the sun. That might not be possible with a carport, depending on the layout of the parking lot,” says Tim Eberly, a Dominion Energy spokesman for solar issues. “Another key detail is that carports might have shade from nearby trees or buildings. A third issue is that carports are restricted to fixed-tilt solar panels — not the tracker solar panels that move and follow the path of the sun. But let’s say that the parking lot didn’t have shade and was already ideally oriented with the path of the sun. In that case, then you could expect the output to be comparable, minus the difference from fixed-tilt versus tracker solar panels.”

(Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.)

Tony Smith, CEO of Secure Solar Futures in Staunton, the company that worked with Washington & Lee on its parking lot array, also cautions against expecting too much out of parking lot solar. “While this is certainly a move in the right direction for displacing some of the pressure on utility scale solar in rural areas, it’s no panacea, and more of a goodwill gesture,” he said via email. “For example, most solar developers would probably not refer to anything less than 3 MW as a solar farm, which in a practical sense would mean a parking canopy covering at least 3 X 7 = 21 acres, which would be a very large parking lot. Also, the cost of building a solar canopy structure makes it an uneconomic proposition to do at large scale to meet the energy demand (think of building a steel infrastructure to support the panels, and the rising cost of steel, especially in light of [President Donald] Trump’s tariffs).”

Bulova, though, hopes Youngkin will give his bill a chance. He sees this as a way to save at least some farm and forest land from development. “Agriculture and forestry is still Virginia’s largest industry, and we don’t want to do anything to disrupt that,” he told me during an interview. He also hopes this bill could go a ways toward mitigating the feeling that rural Virginia is expected to do all the heavy lifting on energy. “I’ve got a lot of constituents up in Northern Virginia who would like to be part of that solution.”

Yes, the parking lot solar requirement would run up the initial cost of development, but it also would make the property being developed more valuable in the long term, he said, because the property owner would be saving power costs. 

There’s no doubt a lot of math involved to figure out the exact costs and the exact savings — and, of course, the exact power generation possible at each site. Ultimately, Bulova said, this is a question of whether we really do believe in an “all of the above” energy strategy. “We have seas and seas of large parking lots associated with office buildings, big box stores and strip malls that have potential to generate lots of energy,” he said. Whether it’s a mandate or something voluntary, why aren’t we making use of that space? I suspect the next time a controversial solar project is proposed somewhere in rural Virginia, some people might be wondering why the solar panels have to be there and not over top a parking lot in Northern Virginia.

Want more politics and analysis? Sign up for our weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital, that goes out every Friday afternoon:

The post Fairfax County legislator wants to redirect solar projects from farmland to parking lots. But there’s a catch. appeared first on Cardinal News.

Del. David Bulova, D-Fairfax County, was in Las Vegas for a funeral last summer when he noticed the parking lot he was in suddenly got cooler.

The state legislator from Fairfax County looked up, and that’s when he got the glimmer of an idea that led to a bill that now sits on the governor’s desk, at least metaphorically, waiting for action. 

* * * 

Across rural Virginia, but especially in Southside, rural localities are pushing back against solar projects on the grounds that they are an ugly industrial blight that ruins the landscape. Their resistance raises serious questions about whether Virginia can ever meet the goals of the Clean Economy Act, which mandates a carbon-free power grid by 2050. Right now, Virginia gets about 7.22% of its power from solar energy. If that much (or that little) solar prompts that much resistance, how are we ever going to ramp that percentage up many times higher?

That was the backdrop to a debate during the recent General Assembly session over a bill that proponents said would help rural localities manage solar development and opponents warned was the first step toward a state mandate. 

State Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Franklin County, asked state Sen. Barbara Favola, D-Arlington County: “Can you tell me how many significant, large-scale solar farms there are in Arlington and Alexandria?” 

His point: Rural Virginia is being expected to sacrifice its land to produce energy for Northern Virginia. 

Favola acknowledged that her district has no solar farms but held out hope that maybe someday the region could produce more solar energy through rooftop arrays. 

I devoted a previous column to rooftop solar — how Virginia could produce a lot more of it but how even that is nowhere near what we need. Rooftops covered with solar panels simply don’t add up to the utility-scale power demands that solar farms produce, especially if the growth of data centers really does triple power demand by 2040 as one state report forecasts.

There is, though, another way, one that could indeed turn parts of Northern Virginia (and other developed areas) into utility-scale solar projects without giving up farmland or rural viewsheds. That way was what was over Bulova’s head that summer day in Las Vegas: solar panels over top of parking lots.

* * * 

There’s a reason cities are sometimes called “asphalt jungles.” They have a lot of parking lots. A group called the Parking Reform Network studied more than 100 cities across the country and found that about 22% of their land was devoted to parking. In Austin, Texas, the figure is 42%. In San Bernardino, California, the percentage topped out at 45%. Those figures, by the way, don’t count street parking; these are parking lots. 

Three Virginia cities made it into that study: Norfolk came in at 24%, Richmond 25%, Virginia Beach 36%. 

What if some of those parking lots were covered with solar canopies? This is not a new idea.

Back in 2012, Washington & Lee University in Lexington put a solar array over one of its parking lots, as well as a separate one on its law school building. At the time, this was heralded as the largest solar energy project in the state, which gives some sense of how quickly solar energy has expanded in Virginia. Some 13 years later, the parking lot canopy is still there. It’s difficult to break out the energy generation, but W&L reports that its on-campus arrays (the parking lot, Lewis Hall and the Outing Club Pavilion) generate about 6% of the university’s power. (The rest comes from an off-campus solar project, meaning that W&L is now 100% solar.)

Since then, the prospect of turning acre upon acre of urban parking lots into solar farms has sparkled like some solar El Dorado. In 2022, France started mandating solar panels on parking lots with 80 or more spaces (which some have pointed out are about the size of 50 American cars). The Washington Post reported that this had the potential to add enough energy to equal 10 new nuclear plants. We also have a lot more parking lots than France. Time magazine reported in 2022 that, theoretically, the United States could supply all its power needs, and then some, if it put solar panels over parking lots. That skips over a lot of technical details, such as transmission issues and the fact that solar panels only generate power about 20% to 25% of the time. Still, the point is, there’s a lot of untapped potential in parking lot solar. 

Some are trying to tap that potential. The Washington Commanders football team has a solar canopy over 841 parking spaces in its Platinum A1 lot. This, along with other solar arrays, supplies all the power the stadium needs on non-game days — and 20% of its energy needs on game days.

You can find other parking lot solar projects from JFK Airport in New York to the Cincinnati Zoo to certain Walmart and Target stores in Arizona and California. 

Now Bulova wants to bring that to Virginia. 

His HB 2037 would give localities permission to require developers of non-residential lots of 100 or more spaces to install parking lot solar. Notice two seemingly contradictory words in close proximity there — permission to require. Local governments in Virginia only have the powers granted to them by the state; this is the famous (or some would say infamous) Dillon Rule. But the word that may get this bill in trouble is not permission but “require.”

Bulova’s bill passed the General Assembly — 64-32 in the House, where it picked up some Republican support, but just 21-18 in the Senate, where it did not.

The bill saw left-of-center environmental groups and the often right-of-center Farm Bureau on the same side, but it drew the opposition of real estate developers. “This is really expensive,” lobbyist Sarah Thomas told legislators as she represented the Virginia Association of Commercial Real Estate. She also warned that the power generated by parking lot solar is more expensive than regular, ground-mounted solar farms, simply because it costs more to mount solar panels on a structure than to stick them in the ground. Obviously I’m simplifying, but you get the idea. 

That argument clearly wasn’t persuasive with enough legislators, although I suspect it might be more so with Gov. Glenn Youngkin when it comes time to act on this bill. This might seem the classic case of what Republicans often like to call “burdensome regulations.”

Parking lot solar also doesn’t generate as much power as a comparable amount of ground-mounted solar. In other words, an acre of parking lot solar doesn’t equal an acre of solar panels out in the countryside. “Utility-scale solar facilities that are built on raw land are situated to maximize the use of the land, such as being oriented towards the sun. That might not be possible with a carport, depending on the layout of the parking lot,” says Tim Eberly, a Dominion Energy spokesman for solar issues. “Another key detail is that carports might have shade from nearby trees or buildings. A third issue is that carports are restricted to fixed-tilt solar panels — not the tracker solar panels that move and follow the path of the sun. But let’s say that the parking lot didn’t have shade and was already ideally oriented with the path of the sun. In that case, then you could expect the output to be comparable, minus the difference from fixed-tilt versus tracker solar panels.”

(Disclosure: Dominion is one of our donors, but donors have no say in news decisions; see our policy.)

Tony Smith, CEO of Secure Solar Futures in Staunton, the company that worked with Washington & Lee on its parking lot array, also cautions against expecting too much out of parking lot solar. “While this is certainly a move in the right direction for displacing some of the pressure on utility scale solar in rural areas, it’s no panacea, and more of a goodwill gesture,” he said via email. “For example, most solar developers would probably not refer to anything less than 3 MW as a solar farm, which in a practical sense would mean a parking canopy covering at least 3 X 7 = 21 acres, which would be a very large parking lot. Also, the cost of building a solar canopy structure makes it an uneconomic proposition to do at large scale to meet the energy demand (think of building a steel infrastructure to support the panels, and the rising cost of steel, especially in light of [President Donald] Trump’s tariffs).”

Bulova, though, hopes Youngkin will give his bill a chance. He sees this as a way to save at least some farm and forest land from development. “Agriculture and forestry is still Virginia’s largest industry, and we don’t want to do anything to disrupt that,” he told me during an interview. He also hopes this bill could go a ways toward mitigating the feeling that rural Virginia is expected to do all the heavy lifting on energy. “I’ve got a lot of constituents up in Northern Virginia who would like to be part of that solution.”

Yes, the parking lot solar requirement would run up the initial cost of development, but it also would make the property being developed more valuable in the long term, he said, because the property owner would be saving power costs. 

There’s no doubt a lot of math involved to figure out the exact costs and the exact savings — and, of course, the exact power generation possible at each site. Ultimately, Bulova said, this is a question of whether we really do believe in an “all of the above” energy strategy. “We have seas and seas of large parking lots associated with office buildings, big box stores and strip malls that have potential to generate lots of energy,” he said. Whether it’s a mandate or something voluntary, why aren’t we making use of that space? I suspect the next time a controversial solar project is proposed somewhere in rural Virginia, some people might be wondering why the solar panels have to be there and not over top a parking lot in Northern Virginia.

Want more politics and analysis? Sign up for our weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital, that goes out every Friday afternoon:

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Six months after the record flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Helene, the Radford Army Ammunition Plant is still searching for four totes carrying toxic chemicals that were released into the New River.

Floodwaters ripped open the doors of a warehouse at the plant and swept 13 containers filled with dibutyl phthalate into the New River, which crested at 31 feet on Sept. 28, 17 feet above flood stage and the second highest crest on record. Arsenal officials said at a Feb. 26 virtual community meeting that the river was flowing at 34 times its usual flow rate.

“To reiterate, this was the worst event noted in the history of the facility and the worst flood event on record since 1940, which was a year before the facility was constructed,” said Nelson Hernandez, environmental manager with BAE Systems, the company that runs the arsenal.

Each tank contained 275 gallons of dibutyl phthalate, and at least three of the containers are known to have been damaged and released their contents — one of which is believed to have been emptied intentionally by a resident who found it, according to a DEQ official. 

The cumulative volume of the release was 1,575 gallons, Hernandez said. Officials shared with residents a description of the totes, which are plastic containers surrounded by metal cages. 

Dibutyl phthalate has been connected to decreased fertility as well as liver and kidney toxicity. But because of the volume and the speed at which the water was moving, officials at the recent community meeting compared the concentration of the chemical in the river to “a sugar cube in a medium-sized residential pool.”

There were three other reported discharges related to the flooding, according to Julia Raimondi, communications coordinator with the Department of Environmental Quality: a calcium sulfate sludge discharge, a treated-wastewater overflow, and diesel fuel spills from multiple sources.

“Due to the historic volume of water flow of the New River, any discharges of calcium sulfate or diesel fuel would have quickly diffused and no cleanup possible,” Justine Barati, director of public and congressional affairs at the Joint Munitions Command, said after the meeting.

Officials maintained at the virtual community meeting that “public health was not jeopardized, and there were no observed impacts to the environment.” 

During a Nov. 7 in-person community meeting, residents were frustrated that they had not learned of the chemical release until six weeks after it had happened — “I’m furious,” resident Georgia Doremus said at that meeting. 

In the recent community meeting, officials stated that notifications were sent from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to state offices. Raimondi said that the Virginia Department of Health had issued a special advisory to avoid flood waters. 

A graphic shared during the meeting showed what the four months of “continuous search” for the remaining missing totes has looked like. There was a brief pause in the search at the end of last year while the arsenal contracted for search services, Raimondi said. 

This process included scouring 67 miles of river by boat and helicopter, 13 square miles by foot and 60 square miles by drone. Twenty-two local and state first responders and agencies were contracted to help.

The arsenal is still searching for the four missing containers. Beth Lohman, environmental emergency manager with the DEQ, said the arsenal will continue the search “for the next year if not longer.” Barati did not answer when asked how much the search had cost thus far.

Hernandez said the arsenal will continue to work with the Army to “modernize” the facility to avoid similar incidents in the future. Funding for these improvements is included in the $125 million emergency relief funding approved by Congress in December. 

Barati said the Army has also requested to move several “planned modernization projects” forward, most of which are included in the modernization plan submitted to Congress. These projects include relocating several buildings outside the flood zone and “construction of new technologies and equipment in higher locations,” Barati said.

This is not the first time the arsenal has been flagged by DEQ for environmental violations.

The facility was fined multiple times between 2012 and 2024 for releasing toxins at levels exceeding the regulated amounts. Raimondi said the DEQ issued the facility a warning letter on Jan. 30, 2024, regarding issues from a July 2024 routine hazardous waste permit inspection. DEQ received a response from the facility over a year later, and the department will be conducting a follow-up inspection this week. 

Last week, an explosion occurred at the facility. The blast was confined to one building, and nobody was injured. The incident is being investigated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Some residents are still expressing concerns with how the post-Helene search is being handled.

During the recent virtual meeting, frustration flooded the comment section on the Facebook livestream, some calling for the creation of a citizen board. 

“Can you please explain the statu[t]es or laws in place for not informing the public? And now you’re asking us for help finding it?” one resident asked in the chat. 

Members of a private Facebook group called Citizens for Arsenal Accountability often post about the arsenal’s community meetings and discuss concerns about hazardous waste. 

The day after the February community meeting, Alyssa Carpenter, an administrator of the Facebook page, posted that “the facility continued to use the flow rate of the river as a means to dismiss the problem of losing 13 toxic chemical totes.”

“And all this facility wants to do is fail to take accountability that these measures should have (and are required to) be in place prior to such an event,” her post reads. “In real life, our community members are draining totes because they had no idea what it was or what to do about it.”

The post Search continues for 4 missing chemical totes from post-Helene flooding at Radford arsenal appeared first on Cardinal News.

Six months after the record flooding from the remnants of Hurricane Helene, the Radford Army Ammunition Plant is still searching for four totes carrying toxic chemicals that were released into the New River.

Floodwaters ripped open the doors of a warehouse at the plant and swept 13 containers filled with dibutyl phthalate into the New River, which crested at 31 feet on Sept. 28, 17 feet above flood stage and the second highest crest on record. Arsenal officials said at a Feb. 26 virtual community meeting that the river was flowing at 34 times its usual flow rate.

“To reiterate, this was the worst event noted in the history of the facility and the worst flood event on record since 1940, which was a year before the facility was constructed,” said Nelson Hernandez, environmental manager with BAE Systems, the company that runs the arsenal.

Each tank contained 275 gallons of dibutyl phthalate, and at least three of the containers are known to have been damaged and released their contents — one of which is believed to have been emptied intentionally by a resident who found it, according to a DEQ official. 

The cumulative volume of the release was 1,575 gallons, Hernandez said. Officials shared with residents a description of the totes, which are plastic containers surrounded by metal cages. 

Dibutyl phthalate has been connected to decreased fertility as well as liver and kidney toxicity. But because of the volume and the speed at which the water was moving, officials at the recent community meeting compared the concentration of the chemical in the river to “a sugar cube in a medium-sized residential pool.”

There were three other reported discharges related to the flooding, according to Julia Raimondi, communications coordinator with the Department of Environmental Quality: a calcium sulfate sludge discharge, a treated-wastewater overflow, and diesel fuel spills from multiple sources.

“Due to the historic volume of water flow of the New River, any discharges of calcium sulfate or diesel fuel would have quickly diffused and no cleanup possible,” Justine Barati, director of public and congressional affairs at the Joint Munitions Command, said after the meeting.

Officials maintained at the virtual community meeting that “public health was not jeopardized, and there were no observed impacts to the environment.” 

During a Nov. 7 in-person community meeting, residents were frustrated that they had not learned of the chemical release until six weeks after it had happened — “I’m furious,” resident Georgia Doremus said at that meeting. 

In the recent community meeting, officials stated that notifications were sent from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality to state offices. Raimondi said that the Virginia Department of Health had issued a special advisory to avoid flood waters. 

A graphic shared during the meeting showed what the four months of “continuous search” for the remaining missing totes has looked like. There was a brief pause in the search at the end of last year while the arsenal contracted for search services, Raimondi said. 

This process included scouring 67 miles of river by boat and helicopter, 13 square miles by foot and 60 square miles by drone. Twenty-two local and state first responders and agencies were contracted to help.

The arsenal is still searching for the four missing containers. Beth Lohman, environmental emergency manager with the DEQ, said the arsenal will continue the search “for the next year if not longer.” Barati did not answer when asked how much the search had cost thus far.

Hernandez said the arsenal will continue to work with the Army to “modernize” the facility to avoid similar incidents in the future. Funding for these improvements is included in the $125 million emergency relief funding approved by Congress in December. 

Barati said the Army has also requested to move several “planned modernization projects” forward, most of which are included in the modernization plan submitted to Congress. These projects include relocating several buildings outside the flood zone and “construction of new technologies and equipment in higher locations,” Barati said.

This is not the first time the arsenal has been flagged by DEQ for environmental violations.

The facility was fined multiple times between 2012 and 2024 for releasing toxins at levels exceeding the regulated amounts. Raimondi said the DEQ issued the facility a warning letter on Jan. 30, 2025, regarding issues from a July 2024 routine hazardous waste permit inspection. DEQ received a response from the facility over a year later, and the department will be conducting a follow-up inspection this week. 

Last week, an explosion occurred at the facility. The blast was confined to one building, and nobody was injured. The incident is being investigated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Some residents are still expressing concerns with how the post-Helene search is being handled.

During the recent virtual meeting, frustration flooded the comment section on the Facebook livestream, some calling for the creation of a citizen board. 

“Can you please explain the statu[t]es or laws in place for not informing the public? And now you’re asking us for help finding it?” one resident asked in the chat. 

Members of a private Facebook group called Citizens for Arsenal Accountability often post about the arsenal’s community meetings and discuss concerns about hazardous waste. 

The day after the February community meeting, Alyssa Carpenter, an administrator of the Facebook page, posted that “the facility continued to use the flow rate of the river as a means to dismiss the problem of losing 13 toxic chemical totes.”

“And all this facility wants to do is fail to take accountability that these measures should have (and are required to) be in place prior to such an event,” her post reads. “In real life, our community members are draining totes because they had no idea what it was or what to do about it.”

_________________

Correction, 12 p.m. March 6: The Department of Environmental Quality issued the Radford Army Ammunition Plant a warning letter on Jan. 30, 2025, regarding issues from a July 2024 routine hazardous waste permit inspection. The date of the letter was incorrect in an earlier version of this story.

The post Search continues for 4 missing chemical totes from post-Helene flooding at Radford arsenal appeared first on Cardinal News.

The Virginia Department of Historic Resources is soliciting proposals for the rehabilitation of historic buildings and sites in Southwest Virginia.

The department has received a $750,000 grant from the National Park Service, which it says is likely enough to support three projects.

Public entities and nonprofit organizations in 25 Virginia localities that are served by the Appalachian Regional Commission are eligible. Those localities are the counties of Alleghany, Bath, Bland, Botetourt, Buchanan, Carroll, Craig, Dickenson, Floyd, Giles, Grayson, Henry, Highland, Lee, Montgomery, Patrick, Pulaski, Rockbridge, Russell, Scott, Smyth, Tazewell, Washington, Wise and Wythe and the cities of Bristol, Buena Vista, Covington, Galax, Lexington, Martinsville, Norton and Radford.

To be eligible, a property must “involve rehabilitation of buildings with a public function, including but not limited to, museums, theaters, and historic sites, that contribute, or will contribute to tourism and economic activity in their community,” the department said in a news release. Each project should have a budget around $225,000.

The initial “pre-application” phase closes April 4. For more details on how to apply, and what’s eligible or ineligible, see the department’s website.

The post Department of Historic Resources opens applications for rehabilitation grants in Southwest Virginia appeared first on Cardinal News.

As Governor Glenn Youngkin once again faces a bipartisan bill that would establish a regulated cannabis distribution platform in Virginia, it is widely anticipated that he will act against the public’s interest just as he did in March 2024. In the twelve months since his last veto, the only certainty is that Mexican cartels and Chinese gangs have benefited from $3.5 billion in untaxed, unregulated cannabis sales while the proliferation of hemp-based THC products has skyrocketed. We anticipate that Youngkin will once again roll out his prohibitionist arguments but will fail to point to any tangible decrease in illegal cannabis sales the over the last 12-month— further proving that gifting Mexican cartels and Chinese drug dealers $3.5 billion and allowing the proliferation of illegal stores from Arlington to the Tennessee state line has only benefited organized crime at the expense of Virginians.

Youngkin’s argument hinges on a fundamental contradiction. He acknowledges that Virginia’s current system is “pervasive and dangerous,” yet refuses to implement the one policy proven to reduce illegal markets — regulation. Instead, he clings to outdated scare tactics, misrepresenting data from other states while ignoring the realities of his own.

Prohibitionists once used the same flawed logic to keep whiskey illegal, relying on bootleggers to supply demand while enriching organized crime. The parallels to cannabis today are undeniable. By refusing to regulate cannabis, Youngkin is ensuring that the only suppliers are Mexican cartels and Chinese gangs, just as Prohibition once empowered the Mafia. This policy failure is not just historical irony — it is a $3.5 billion mistake.

Youngkin claims that legal markets have failed, pointing to illicit sales in states like California and Colorado. But what he fails to mention is that these challenges persist precisely because those states allow local governments to ban legal sales — a policy Virginia could avoid. Illinois has shown how a properly implemented legal market can displace the illicit trade, generate billions in tax revenue, and create thousands of jobs. In 2024, Illinois’ cannabis industry surpassed $2 billion in annual sales, and Governor J.B. Pritzker has praised the program’s success.

If Youngkin were truly concerned about crime, he would recognize that his policy actively strengthens it. Right now, Virginia’s illicit cannabis market is worth an estimated $3.5 billion —all untaxed, unregulated, and flowing directly to Mexican cartels and Chinese gangs. This is not theoretical. This money funds fentanyl trafficking, firearms smuggling, human trafficking, and organized crime. Refusing to legalize and regulate cannabis is not neutral policy — it is a direct subsidy to these dangerous criminal enterprises.

The governor also invokes the well-worn but misleading argument that cannabis legalization endangers children. The reality is the opposite. Licensed dispensaries require +21 ID verification, camera monitoring, and strict safety protocols. Violent Mexican cartels and Chinese gangs require only proof of cash funds. Youngkin’s veto ensures that minors have unlimited access to unregulated, high-potency cannabis from dealers who don’t care about age restrictions or consumer safety. If he genuinely wanted to prevent youth cannabis use, he would implement the same regulations that apply to alcohol and tobacco — two substances that, unlike cannabis, actually cause tens of thousands of deaths annually.

Youngkin warns of increased DUIs and road fatalities yet again ignores reality. Impaired driving has existed for decades, regardless of cannabis laws. What a legal market allows is enforcement — tracking purchases, implementing testing policies, and using cannabis tax revenue to study patterns and make roads safer, not more dangerous. His veto doesn’t stop anyone from driving under the influence; it just ensures that law enforcement remains unequipped to regulate it effectively.

One of the most misguided arguments of prohibitionists is that cannabis consumption, particularly public smoking, is disruptive to a way of life. We agree that public consumption should be regulated, but the solution is common-sense regulation — not prohibition. Just as public drinking is restricted to designated areas, cannabis can and should be subject to similar controls. A regulated framework empowers law enforcement to clearly enforce public consumption rules, ensuring that cannabis use does not interfere with daily life. The notion that the only solution to public nuisance concerns is prohibition ignores the reality that other substances — alcohol, tobacco, and even noise ordinances — are effectively managed through law enforcement, not blanket bans.

Finally, Youngkin argues that the tax revenue from cannabis won’t outweigh its societal costs. But even if we accept his claim that states must spend money addressing cannabis-related health issues, the fact remains that Virginia is currently spending money without collecting any tax revenue in return. That is the real fiscal failure. Instead of funding law enforcement, public health, and education with cannabis taxes, he is letting all that revenue flow to nefarious cartels, gangs, and dangerous criminal enterprises.

Virginia now faces a clear choice: continue enriching Mexican cartels and Chinese gangs or take control of the market and ensure that cannabis is sold safely, legally, and responsibly. Youngkin’s expected veto is a decision to protect Mexican cartels, Chinese gangs, and organized crime syndicates over Virginia’s citizens. It is a policy rooted in ideology, not facts. And it is a policy that must be reversed.

Erich Griffin-Mauff is with the financial services company FiSai, based in Los Angeles.

The post Governor Youngkin’s expected cannabis veto: A $3.5 billion gift to Mexican cartels and Chinese gangs appeared first on Cardinal News.

Here are some of the top headlines from other news outlets around Virginia. Some content may be behind a metered paywall:

Politics:

Parents’ group accuses councilman of intimidation in Lynchburg school funding debate. — The (Lynchburg) News & Advance (paywall).

Feds to Virginia schools: End race-based policies or risk losing funds. — Virginia Mercury.

Economy:

Virginia SCC orders two big health insurers to reimburse hundreds. — Richmond Times-Dispatch (paywall).

City’s economic woes will take years to fix, Radford officials say. — Radford News Journal.

Culture:

Abingdon food scene nominated for USA TODAY’s 10Best. — WJHL-TV.

Weather:

For more weather news, follow weather journalist Kevin Myatt on Twitter / X at @kevinmyattwx and sign up for his free weather email newsletter. His weekly column appears in Cardinal News each Wednesday afternoon.

The post Parents’ group accuses councilman of intimidation in Lynchburg school funding debate; more … appeared first on Cardinal News.

Do you have your tickets ready to jump on board the March weather roller-coaster? Whether you do or not, you’re about to take a ride.

A strong cold front pushing into mild, moist air has triggered a risk of thunderstorms, some severe, on this Wednesday. I am typing this hours before that is set to occur, so we’ll leave the results of it to your observations and local news reports. Tornadoes are a possibility — should any be confirmed in the Southwest or Southside Virginia coverage area of Cardinal News, we will post a follow-up article on that.

But whether storms are all that bad or not, we’ll see 60s temperatures on Wednesday collapse into 20s and 30s by Thursday morning, with snow showers blowing over the mountains. By next week, we’ll be warm again, and maybe colder again sometime later in the month, though this is uncertain, and some long-range forecasts have the springlike trend rolling right into April.

This is the weather that makes people sick, I’ve often heard in my almost 55 years. I’m not sure that statement has any real medical heft behind it, but I’m not in much of a position to argue, given that my being “under the weather” to start March is the reason for the relative brevity of today’s Cardinal Weather column.

But this is March in a nutshell, probably the month that more than any of the other 11 has the greatest propensity to emulate all four seasons at some point during its 31 days.

For instance, at Roanoke, March is the only month of the 12 that has had a high temperature of 90 degrees (1945) and snowstorms of a foot or more (1960, 1993).  

But you don’t have to go deep in the record book to find high contrast between March weather, year to year. 

At Blacksburg, three of the 12 warmest Marches on record have occurred since 2012.  But so did the second snowiest, in 2018, with nearly 23 inches in three March winter storms a month after experiencing the first 80-degree February day.

March is often chaotic at the cusp of winter and spring as the jet stream begins to lift northward, but in the process, both pushes of warm air northward and lobes of cold air sinking southward cause it to get, quite literally, loopy at times.

The storm system bringing us rain and storms on Wednesday will also carry a hefty blizzard behind it across the Upper Midwest, including some areas that had remarkably little snow compared to normal this winter.

We’ve lost a lot of the blocking high-pressure features in the Northern Hemisphere that forced and held cold air southward much of this chilly, icy winter season. That pattern has simply played itself out, but there is still enough of a remnant of it to drive another cold air mass down this weekend.

A system moving across the South by around Sunday or Monday could pose a hint of a chance of showers — rain or snow — but this looks unlikely to be much as of this writing.

If this passes as expected without depositing noticeable slush, it may well be that all but the highest elevations and some of the western border areas are done with snow for the 2024-25 cold season. Long-range trends suggest a strong eastern U.S. ridge and western U.S. low-pressure trough, which would take the cold and stormy weather out there while leaving us warm and relatively dry.

But we never quite know that — 2013 and 2018 both brought not one but two bouts of snow across much of our region after the start of calendar spring on March 20.

Be ready for a few spills and chills on the way to spring.

Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley. Sign up for his weekly newsletter:

The post Up and down we go: March is taking us for a bumpy ride appeared first on Cardinal News.

Do you have your tickets ready to jump on board the March weather roller-coaster? Whether you do or not, you’re about to take a ride.

A strong cold front pushing into mild, moist air has triggered a risk of thunderstorms, some severe, on this Wednesday. I am typing this hours before that is set to occur, so we’ll leave the results of it to your observations and local news reports. Tornadoes are a possibility — should any be confirmed in the Southwest or Southside Virginia coverage area of Cardinal News, we will post a follow-up article on that.

But whether storms are all that bad or not, we’ll see 60s temperatures on Wednesday collapse into 20s and 30s by Thursday morning, with snow showers blowing over the mountains. By next week, we’ll be warm again, and maybe colder again sometime later in the month, though this is uncertain, and some long-range forecasts have the springlike trend rolling right into April.

This is the weather that makes people sick, I’ve often heard in my almost 55 years. I’m not sure that statement has any real medical heft behind it, but I’m not in much of a position to argue, given that my being “under the weather” to start March is the reason for the relative brevity of today’s Cardinal Weather column.

But this is March in a nutshell, probably the month that more than any of the other 11 has the greatest propensity to emulate all four seasons at some point during its 31 days.

For instance, at Roanoke, March is the only month of the 12 that has had a high temperature of 90 degrees (1945) and snowstorms of a foot or more (1960, 1993).  

But you don’t have to go deep in the record book to find high contrast between March weather, year to year. 

At Blacksburg, three of the 12 warmest Marches on record have occurred since 2012.  But so did the second snowiest, in 2018, with nearly 23 inches in three March winter storms a month after experiencing the first 80-degree February day.

March is often chaotic at the cusp of winter and spring as the jet stream begins to lift northward, but in the process, both pushes of warm air northward and lobes of cold air sinking southward cause it to get, quite literally, loopy at times.

The storm system bringing us rain and storms on Wednesday will also carry a hefty blizzard behind it across the Upper Midwest, including some areas that had remarkably little snow compared to normal this winter.

We’ve lost a lot of the blocking high-pressure features in the Northern Hemisphere that forced and held cold air southward much of this chilly, icy winter season. That pattern has simply played itself out, but there is still enough of a remnant of it to drive another cold air mass down this weekend.

A system moving across the South by around Sunday or Monday could pose a hint of a chance of showers — rain or snow — but this looks unlikely to be much as of this writing.

If this passes as expected without depositing noticeable slush, it may well be that all but the highest elevations and some of the western border areas are done with snow for the 2024-25 cold season. Long-range trends suggest a strong eastern U.S. ridge and western U.S. low-pressure trough, which would take the cold and stormy weather out there while leaving us warm and relatively dry.

But we never quite know that — 2013 and 2018 both brought not one but two bouts of snow across much of our region after the start of calendar spring on March 20.

Be ready for a few spills and chills on the way to spring.

Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley. Sign up for his weekly newsletter:

The post Up and down we go: March is taking us for a bumpy ride appeared first on Cardinal News.

Do you have your tickets ready to jump on board the March weather roller-coaster? Whether you do or not, you’re about to take a ride.

A strong cold front pushing into mild, moist air has triggered a risk of thunderstorms, some severe, on this Wednesday. I am typing this hours before that is set to occur, so we’ll leave the results of it to your observations and local news reports. Tornadoes are a possibility — should any be confirmed in the Southwest or Southside Virginia coverage area of Cardinal News, we will post a follow-up article on that.

But whether storms are all that bad or not, we’ll see 60s temperatures on Wednesday collapse into 20s and 30s by Thursday morning, with snow showers blowing over the mountains. By next week, we’ll be warm again, and maybe colder again sometime later in the month, though this is uncertain, and some long-range forecasts have the springlike trend rolling right into April.

This is the weather that makes people sick, I’ve often heard in my almost 55 years. I’m not sure that statement has any real medical heft behind it, but I’m not in much of a position to argue, given that my being “under the weather” to start March is the reason for the relative brevity of today’s Cardinal Weather column.

But this is March in a nutshell, probably the month that more than any of the other 11 has the greatest propensity to emulate all four seasons at some point during its 31 days.

For instance, at Roanoke, March is the only month of the 12 that has had a high temperature of 90 degrees (1945) and snowstorms of a foot or more (1960, 1993).  

But you don’t have to go deep in the record book to find high contrast between March weather, year to year. 

At Blacksburg, three of the 12 warmest Marches on record have occurred since 2012.  But so did the second snowiest, in 2018, with nearly 23 inches in three March winter storms a month after experiencing the first 80-degree February day.

March is often chaotic at the cusp of winter and spring as the jet stream begins to lift northward, but in the process, both pushes of warm air northward and lobes of cold air sinking southward cause it to get, quite literally, loopy at times.

The storm system bringing us rain and storms on Wednesday will also carry a hefty blizzard behind it across the Upper Midwest, including some areas that had remarkably little snow compared to normal this winter.

We’ve lost a lot of the blocking high-pressure features in the Northern Hemisphere that forced and held cold air southward much of this chilly, icy winter season. That pattern has simply played itself out, but there is still enough of a remnant of it to drive another cold air mass down this weekend.

A system moving across the South by around Sunday or Monday could pose a hint of a chance of showers — rain or snow — but this looks unlikely to be much as of this writing.

If this passes as expected without depositing noticeable slush, it may well be that all but the highest elevations and some of the western border areas are done with snow for the 2024-25 cold season. Long-range trends suggest a strong eastern U.S. ridge and western U.S. low-pressure trough, which would take the cold and stormy weather out there while leaving us warm and relatively dry.

But we never quite know that — 2013 and 2018 both brought not one but two bouts of snow across much of our region after the start of calendar spring on March 20.

Be ready for a few spills and chills on the way to spring.

Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley. Sign up for his weekly newsletter:

The post Up and down we go: March is taking us for a bumpy ride appeared first on Cardinal News.

Do you have your tickets ready to jump on board the March weather roller-coaster? Whether you do or not, you’re about to take a ride.

A strong cold front pushing into mild, moist air has triggered a risk of thunderstorms, some severe, on this Wednesday. I am typing this hours before that is set to occur, so we’ll leave the results of it to your observations and local news reports. Tornadoes are a possibility — should any be confirmed in the Southwest or Southside Virginia coverage area of Cardinal News, we will post a follow-up article on that.

But whether storms are all that bad or not, we’ll see 60s temperatures on Wednesday collapse into 20s and 30s by Thursday morning, with snow showers blowing over the mountains. By next week, we’ll be warm again, and maybe colder again sometime later in the month, though this is uncertain, and some long-range forecasts have the springlike trend rolling right into April.

This is the weather that makes people sick, I’ve often heard in my almost 55 years. I’m not sure that statement has any real medical heft behind it, but I’m not in much of a position to argue, given that my being “under the weather” to start March is the reason for the relative brevity of today’s Cardinal Weather column.

But this is March in a nutshell, probably the month that more than any of the other 11 has the greatest propensity to emulate all four seasons at some point during its 31 days.

For instance, at Roanoke, March is the only month of the 12 that has had a high temperature of 90 degrees (1945) and snowstorms of a foot or more (1960, 1993).  

But you don’t have to go deep in the record book to find high contrast between March weather, year to year. 

At Blacksburg, three of the 12 warmest Marches on record have occurred since 2012.  But so did the second snowiest, in 2018, with nearly 23 inches in three March winter storms a month after experiencing the first 80-degree February day.

March is often chaotic at the cusp of winter and spring as the jet stream begins to lift northward, but in the process, both pushes of warm air northward and lobes of cold air sinking southward cause it to get, quite literally, loopy at times.

The storm system bringing us rain and storms on Wednesday will also carry a hefty blizzard behind it across the Upper Midwest, including some areas that had remarkably little snow compared to normal this winter.

We’ve lost a lot of the blocking high-pressure features in the Northern Hemisphere that forced and held cold air southward much of this chilly, icy winter season. That pattern has simply played itself out, but there is still enough of a remnant of it to drive another cold air mass down this weekend.

A system moving across the South by around Sunday or Monday could pose a hint of a chance of showers — rain or snow — but this looks unlikely to be much as of this writing.

If this passes as expected without depositing noticeable slush, it may well be that all but the highest elevations and some of the western border areas are done with snow for the 2024-25 cold season. Long-range trends suggest a strong eastern U.S. ridge and western U.S. low-pressure trough, which would take the cold and stormy weather out there while leaving us warm and relatively dry.

But we never quite know that — 2013 and 2018 both brought not one but two bouts of snow across much of our region after the start of calendar spring on March 20.

Be ready for a few spills and chills on the way to spring.

Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley. Sign up for his weekly newsletter:

The post Up and down we go: March is taking us for a bumpy ride appeared first on Cardinal News.

Do you have your tickets ready to jump on board the March weather roller-coaster? Whether you do or not, you’re about to take a ride.

A strong cold front pushing into mild, moist air has triggered a risk of thunderstorms, some severe, on this Wednesday. I am typing this hours before that is set to occur, so we’ll leave the results of it to your observations and local news reports. Tornadoes are a possibility — should any be confirmed in the Southwest or Southside Virginia coverage area of Cardinal News, we will post a follow-up article on that.

But whether storms are all that bad or not, we’ll see 60s temperatures on Wednesday collapse into 20s and 30s by Thursday morning, with snow showers blowing over the mountains. By next week, we’ll be warm again, and maybe colder again sometime later in the month, though this is uncertain, and some long-range forecasts have the springlike trend rolling right into April.

This is the weather that makes people sick, I’ve often heard in my almost 55 years. I’m not sure that statement has any real medical heft behind it, but I’m not in much of a position to argue, given that my being “under the weather” to start March is the reason for the relative brevity of today’s Cardinal Weather column.

But this is March in a nutshell, probably the month that more than any of the other 11 has the greatest propensity to emulate all four seasons at some point during its 31 days.

For instance, at Roanoke, March is the only month of the 12 that has had a high temperature of 90 degrees (1945) and snowstorms of a foot or more (1960, 1993).  

But you don’t have to go deep in the record book to find high contrast between March weather, year to year. 

At Blacksburg, three of the 12 warmest Marches on record have occurred since 2012.  But so did the second snowiest, in 2018, with nearly 23 inches in three March winter storms a month after experiencing the first 80-degree February day.

March is often chaotic at the cusp of winter and spring as the jet stream begins to lift northward, but in the process, both pushes of warm air northward and lobes of cold air sinking southward cause it to get, quite literally, loopy at times.

The storm system bringing us rain and storms on Wednesday will also carry a hefty blizzard behind it across the Upper Midwest, including some areas that had remarkably little snow compared to normal this winter.

We’ve lost a lot of the blocking high-pressure features in the Northern Hemisphere that forced and held cold air southward much of this chilly, icy winter season. That pattern has simply played itself out, but there is still enough of a remnant of it to drive another cold air mass down this weekend.

A system moving across the South by around Sunday or Monday could pose a hint of a chance of showers — rain or snow — but this looks unlikely to be much as of this writing.

If this passes as expected without depositing noticeable slush, it may well be that all but the highest elevations and some of the western border areas are done with snow for the 2024-25 cold season. Long-range trends suggest a strong eastern U.S. ridge and western U.S. low-pressure trough, which would take the cold and stormy weather out there while leaving us warm and relatively dry.

But we never quite know that — 2013 and 2018 both brought not one but two bouts of snow across much of our region after the start of calendar spring on March 20.

Be ready for a few spills and chills on the way to spring.

Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley. Sign up for his weekly newsletter:

The post Up and down we go: March is taking us for a bumpy ride appeared first on Cardinal News.

Annie Mosby has a rich family history in Pittsylvania County, and many of her relatives were both born and buried there. Throughout the 1900s, they were laid to rest in a 2.5-acre family cemetery in a community called Callahan Hill. 

Her father died in 2001, followed by her uncle in 2006. They both wanted to be buried in this cemetery alongside their siblings, in-laws and parents, who were some of the first Black landowners in the county, Mosby said. 

But by the time the Wilson brothers died, the land was no longer an active cemetery. Instead, it was the site of a 199-foot-tall cell tower, which still stands today. 

“That communication tower is sitting in the middle of the graveyard,” Mosby said.

By the time Mosby, who left Danville at 17 years old and has lived in California since, found out about the cell tower construction through the family grapevine, it was too late. The steel lattice tower, operated by telecommunications company Crown Castle, had already been built. 

She wrote to everyone she could think of between 2002 and 2006 — local newspapers, county officials, Virginia’s attorney general, the cellphone tower company and then-Gov. Tim Kaine. 

Not one of them was able to help her, she said. “They sent me back excuses,” or didn’t respond at all.

There was no formal record of Mosby’s family owning the cemetery land. When her grandfather bought the land in 1912, the transaction involved no more than a handshake and a cash payment, leaving no paper record.

These kinds of informal transactions were common, especially in communities of color, said Joanna Green, a cemetery archaeologist with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. 

“The unfortunate downstream effect is a gradual loss of knowledge,” Green said.

There are things that localities and family members can do to protect the cemeteries they know about, and to be mindful of the ones they don’t, said Green. DHR can help with this process, she said, as can a locality’s geographic information system and circuit court.

But for Mosby, two decades later, any restitution for her family feels like “a lost cause,” she said. 

In a county like Pittsylvania, where families have lived in the same community for generations, it can be hard to know where cemeteries exist. 

Outside of preserving cemeteries for posterity and sentimentality, locating these sites is also important because of the county’s increasing development and economic growth. 

If nothing is done on a county level, those graves could belong to whichever company might buy that land, like Crown Castle purchasing Mosby’s family cemetery. 

The preservation of historic cemeteries has been handled in a few different ways by Pittsylvania County. At least one cemetery is being relocated in the face of development at the Berry Hill industrial park. Another is being worked around by developers building on nearby land. 

These two cemeteries are some of the “lucky” ones, because they will be preserved in one form or another, said Jane Massey, who also lost a family cemetery in Pittsylvania. 

The graves of Massey’s ancestors were never properly marked or mapped, so family members have forgotten the exact location of the cemeteries over time.

“With so much land being developed, I have often wondered if it is still there,” said Massey, who grew up in Pittsylvania but now lives in South Carolina. 

Another family, the Powell siblings, have also lost track of a family cemetery in Pittsylvania that was located on their family farm before it was sold in the early 1990s. 

These stories are not uncommon — they are the flipside of the historic cemetery preservation projects in Pittsylvania. These are the graves that don’t get saved. 

Losing cemeteries to development 

Mosby’s grandfather, James Wilson, paid cash for a 15-acre parcel of land off of U.S. 58, going west from Danville toward Martinsville. About 2.5 acres of this land became the family cemetery, Mosby said. 

“They didn’t do documentation or records of it,” Mosby said. “They just shook hands on it.”

By 2000, the owners of a parcel including the cemetery sold the land without an exclusion for that 2.5-acre portion where Mosby’s ancestors were buried. 

The new owner agreed to a cell tower project, working with the communications company and the county to get the proper permitting and notifying all nearby residents, including Mosby’s father.

“When the letter arrived at my father’s home, he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease,” Mosby wrote in a letter to Crown Castle in 2002. “The family member who was caring for my father did not understand the importance of the letter.”

Mosby’s family missed the public hearing about the cell tower project in 2000, and she did not find out about it until it had already been built.

Mosby returned to Pittsylvania to search for a deed or record of the sale for the land. She had no luck, she said.

Another part of the problem was that the cemetery was not easily visible. Few of the graves were marked by headstones, Mosby said, though all of the burials in this cemetery can be researched through the Watkins and Cunningham Funeral Home. 

A lack of markers makes it difficult to preserve cemeteries in the face of development, Green said. “We can’t protect what we don’t know about,” she said.

This is not Mosby’s only family cemetery in Danville. Some of her ancestors were enslaved at Berry Hill and are likely buried on that former plantation.

“The issue of ‘lost’ cemeteries is one that disproportionately affects communities of color, whether urban or rural, with the marginalization of these communities reflected in the marginal locations of their sacred spaces,” Green said. 

After hearing nothing back from local and state officials, all that was left to do was to make sure her buried family was remembered, Mosby said. 

In 2008, she erected a memorial to her deceased ancestors on a plot adjacent to the cell tower, which still belonged to one of her family members. 

A wrought iron fence marks off a rectangle of space, containing a stone statue of Jesus, a pot for flowers and engraved markers naming some of her buried family members.

The land around the memorial, right off the highway, is cleared. And on the wooded hill behind it, shooting out above the trees, is the steel cell tower. 

Losing cemeteries to time and memory 

Jane Massey’s last memory of visiting her family cemetery was in the 1960s, when she, then a newly licensed driver, took her aunt to visit the family farm in Pittsylvania where the cemetery was located.

The farm has since been sold to a lumber company, and Massey, now 80 years old, can’t exactly recall where the cemetery is.

“All I have for directions is that it is located on Henry’s Mill Road about 2 miles from the county line … and if you pass Zion Baptist Chapel you have gone too far,” Massey said. “At one time it was visible from the road but not anymore.”

She remembers mostly rocks marking the graves, although there were a few headstones, she said. The oldest of the graves was probably from around 1890, though she’s not certain. 

It’s been about six years since Massey last visited Pittsylvania from her home in South Carolina to try to locate the cemetery, she said. 

“The last time I was there, I just saw woods, real thick woods,” she said, saying that she doesn’t have any plans to look again in the near future. “That’s a long trip for me.”

Most of her descendants aren’t interested in locating the cemetery, Massey said. 

“My grandkids couldn’t care less,” she said. 

When she was young, though, Massey was a regular visitor to her ancestors’ graves. 

“It used to be that we would go in the spring and we would clean the graves and put flowers on them,” she said. “I just feel bad I can’t find it again, and I know it’s there.”

The Powell siblings have a similar story, and they often reminisce with family members about their “missing” cemetery, though they’ve gotten no closer to locating it. 

Stewart, Terri Anne and Ken Powell descend from the Wyatt family in Pittsylvania, which once owned a lot of farmland in the county. 

“As kids, we used to go to the farm I’d say once a month,” said Ken, the oldest of the three siblings, who recalled placing flowers on the graves on holidays, especially on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

This was in the late 1950s through the ’70s, Terri Anne said. Today, the siblings have only vague memories of where the farm was. 

“You get on [Franklin Turnpike] for what felt like forever when I was a little kid, but it was probably only 40 or 50 miles, if that,” said Stewart. “And I remember passing a general store.”

The siblings have looked into family history and property records, but they haven’t unearthed much more about the location, they said, though they know the farm was sold in the early 1990s. 

“One of the issues is that when you say the Wyatt farm, I think there were a lot of Wyatt farms, or one big one that got subdivided,” Ken said. “The best I can remember, it’s between Swansonville and Callands.”

The Powell siblings remember the Wyatt cemetery being visible, but not easy to get to. 

“There was an iron, fenced-off area that was the graveyard,” Ken Powell said. “It was a walk through a pasture to get there. There was no way to drive there.”

None of the siblings live in Pittsylvania anymore, with Terri Anne in Atlanta, Stewart in Dallas and Ken in Richmond. 

There’s no way to know for sure if this cemetery has remained undisturbed. 

“We aren’t aware of any development, but there’s also no reason we would be,” Terri Anne said. 

The Virginia law outlines multiple avenues for the lawful relocation of buried human remains, Green said. 

“Short of placing some form of legally protective covenant or preservation easement over the property, however, there is absolutely nothing in Virginia law that guarantees a cemetery’s right to remain where it is,” she said. 

Younger generations should take an interest in their family history, Green said, especially if family property or cemeteries haven’t been properly marked or preserved. 

“Like all family lore, information becomes increasingly murky over time and may eventually disappear,” she said. “Families and communities should speak with their elders now, before memory is lost.”

How to protect historic cemeteries

Mosby’s family land is hardly the only example of historic cemeteries being developed over. 

One anecdote comes from the Danville Historical Society, which has a plot map from Dan River Mills, the former textile giant and the city’s main industry until it shuttered in 2006. 

“You can see the old road near the river, which is now Memorial Drive, and you can see two graves,” said archivist Cody Foster. “All it says is ‘old graves,’ and we think they were at least from the 18th century. … It looks like they’re under Memorial Drive now.”

This is unsurprising in places like Danville and Pittsylvania, which have such rich histories, said Matt Rowe, Pittsylvania’s economic development director, who is working on the cemetery relocation project to move graves at the Berry Hill industrial park.

“Not to sound ugly, but we’re walking and driving on top of graves all the time and we don’t even know it,” he said. “That’s just the reality. People have lived on the land that we’re living on today for generations before us.”

If families know the exact locations of these cemeteries, there are channels to protect them from development. 

Every Virginia locality has some sort of mapping system, usually GIS-based, to refer to for land-use decisions. People who want to protect a cemetery should contact their local planning office to ask about how to have the cemetery properly mapped, Green said. 

Localities may have zoning ordinances in place to further protect cemeteries, beyond what the state requires, she said. 

Cemeteries should also be documented with DHR, Green said. Many localities use the department’s records to check if historic resources exist on developable land. 

Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act “requires federal agencies that permit, license or fund land-use activities to consider the effects on their decisions on historic properties, in consultation with our office and the interested public,” Green said. 

“We can and will bring the presence of known cemeteries to the attention of these agencies,” she said. 

DHR has a survey form for citizens who want to document a cemetery and create a permanent record within the organization’s GIS-based archive, she said. 

Green encouraged Virginians to contact the department if they have questions about whether a cemetery has been recorded.

“Most of the forms I receive do not come from descendants, but rather from property owners, historical society members, and generally interested folks with no family connection but a need to see these places acknowledged,” Green said.

This is something Massey or the Powell siblings could do, if they ever find their lost cemeteries. 

None of the Powells has been back to Pittsylvania to search for the cemetery, though Stewart has plans to visit this spring, he said. 

“It’s a great example of would’ve, should’ve, could’ve,” said Terry Anne. “We would give anything to have more memories. … It really is an amazing history and of course it’s very special to us, but we don’t know enough about it.”

The post In Pittsylvania County, descendants mourn family cemeteries lost to development, or to memory appeared first on Cardinal News.

See our FAQs: Virginia’s marijuana laws explained.

Many years ago, the old “Grin and Bear It” newspaper cartoon showed a group of scientists, with lab coats and clipboards, gathered by the side of the road at a traffic light. A passerby had asked them what they were doing. One of the scientists replied: “We’re trying to determine the shortest period of time possible — the time between when the light changes and the driver behind honks.”

Virginia is about to conduct that same experiment, with the shortest period of time possible being the time between when the General Assembly’s bill legalizing retail sales of cannabis arrives on Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s desk and when he reaches for his veto pen. Cannabis is the preferred name today for what people old enough to remember the “Grin and Bear It” cartoon once called marijuana. Or pot. Or weed. Or the devil’s lettuce. Or, my personal favorite, jazz cabbage. 

Whatever we call the plant, Youngkin last year vetoed the bill legalizing retail sales of it. He signaled in his State of the Commonwealth Address that he had no interest in signing a retail bill this year. Even the legislators sponsoring the bill understand that it won’t become law, but they believe strongly in it anyway, so here we are. The legislature’s passage of the bill, and Youngkin’s veto of it, will make cannabis one of many issues in this fall’s governor’s race and House of Delegates races.

Maybe, depending on the outcome of those elections, Virginia will continue to be the only state in the country where personal possession of small amounts of cannabis is legal but retail sales of a legal product are not. 

Someday, though, Virginia probably will legalize retail sales. Democrats want this — and so do many Republicans. They just didn’t vote for this particular bill because a) they know the governor will veto it so see no reason to do so, and b) they disagree with the details of how Democrats want to award retail licenses. The current situation seems untenable over the long term, and there seems no interest in recriminalizing the hippie lettuce — there’s another name — so the only way forward seems to be legalization.

This isn’t about that, though. This is about what happens once Virginia does someday legalize retail sales. Namely, what happens to all the stores that have popped up that are already distributing marijuana — sorry, old habit — in some way? Many of these are set up as “membership clubs,” but that “membership” often consists simply of being handed a membership card when you walk in the door. Others claim to be “adult share” stores, where the store will generously “share” some free weed if you buy an overpriced sticker. Attorney General Jason Miyares has issued a formal opinion that these “adult share” stores are breaking the law, but that hasn’t stopped them.

For some reason, Southwest Virginia has become the epicenter for these operations. You can now drive from Montgomery County to the Tennessee state line and find a cannabis outlet in every locality, often out on Main Street. Similar stores are popping up elsewhere. I was recently in the Higher Education store at Zion Crossroads in Louisa County, which was selling a green leafy material described as “White Truffle,” which the AllBud cannabis review site describes as a strain that “produces a quick-hitting head high that will clear your mind of worry.”

Under every bill introduced in Virginia to legalize retail sales of cannabis — indeed, in every state that has already legalized retail sales — retailers need licenses. The bill passed by the General Assembly this session capped that number at 350 across the state. If you need a mental comparison, that’s somewhat fewer than the number of state-owned liquor stores in Virginia. The bill doesn’t specify the costs of these licenses, something a state regulatory board would determine, but we know what they cost in other states. The application fees and license fees vary wildly from state to state, but in Maryland, our nearest example, the application for a basic retail store is $5,000 and if you’re successful, then be prepared to pony up another $80,000 for the actual license (which is good for six years). The Cure8 cannabis consulting firm estimates the costs of starting a cannabis dispensary that complies with all the details of Maryland law at about $500,000. 

Let’s assume Virginia is someday roughly the same. What are legal, licensed retailers, who just shelled out north of half a million dollars, going to think of these unlicensed retailers who didn’t pay any of that — and, as a result, can charge less for an unregulated product? They’re not going to like that, are they? Of course not. So what are they going to do? They’re going to demand that law enforcement shut down these unlicensed retailers, something that law enforcement is generally avoiding now because a) few people are complaining and b) police have more pressing priorities about more dangerous things.

This is not a fantasy. This is exactly what other states have encountered. New York legalized retail sales in 2021; the first ones began in December 2022. New York, though, has been slow to issue licenses. By September 2024, it had awarded just 182 retail licenses in a state of 20 million people. The marketplace moves faster than government. Unlicensed retailers popped up like, well, weeds to serve the demand, and state officials seemed powerless to stop them. Politico reports that at one point there were an estimated 4,000 unlicensed retail cannabis outlets in New York City alone. The state had to set up an Illicit Cannabis Enforcement Task Force that has shut down “approximately 350” storefronts, according to its annual report, while city officials closed down 1,000 more. You don’t have to be a math genius to realize those numbers don’t add up. 

California has had the same problem. The KayaPush accounting website reports that California has about 800 licensed retailers but an estimated 2,800 stores — meaning 75% of the state’s cannabis stores are operating outside the law. “Avoiding taxes and regulatory costs, unlicensed sellers can offer products at significantly lower prices,” the website warns. “Legal dispensaries, on the other hand, must contend with state and local taxes that can increase costs by up to 40%. As a result, licensed operators often operate on razor-thin margins — or even at a loss — to attract customers.” The bottom line: In California, weed is legal, but it’s hard to make money at it if you follow the law because the black market is still there, and a lot cheaper. 

Like New York, California also created a Unified Cannabis Enforcement Task Force that in its first two years seized weed from “over 350 operations,” according to the governor’s office. However, 350 remains a lot less than the estimated 2,800 illicit retailers in the state.

The irony here is that two states that wanted to get out of the business of criminalizing cannabis by legalizing retail sales had to set up special government operations to deal with illegal retail sales. 

Not every state with retail cannabis has had that problem. In Washington, the first state to legalize retail weed, there was just one instance of an illegal retail operation last year and only three in 2023, according to the state’s Liquor and Cannabis Board. 

One difference might be that California and New York are widely regarded to have been slow in their rollout of licenses, and unlicensed retailers simply opened up and nobody stopped them. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has called her state’s retail launch “a disaster” because it inadvertently led to all these illicit retailers selling marijuana.

“It’s not every street corner,” she said last year. “It is every other storefront. It is insane.” 

Just across the Potomac from us, the District of Columbia legalized recreational weed a decade ago and is still dealing with unlicensed stores. Since last summer, authorities have “padlocked” 28 businesses distributing cannabis without a license, according to the city’s Alcoholic Beverage and Cannabis Administration. 

Virginia has essentially become like two states (and one city) it usually doesn’t want to be like. The only difference is that California and New York took their sweet time between legalizing retail sales and actually starting them. D.C. apparently did a better job getting a market set up, but some retailers are still finding ways to evade the law. Virginia hasn’t even legalized retail sales yet, but already the marketplace is racing to meet the demand as it always has, no matter what the law says.

Want more politics and analysis? Sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out Friday afternoons.

The post How Virginia is becoming more like California and New York: All have unlicensed cannabis stores appeared first on Cardinal News.

See our FAQs: Virginia’s marijuana laws explained.

Many years ago, the old “Grin and Bear It” newspaper cartoon showed a group of scientists, with lab coats and clipboards, gathered by the side of the road at a traffic light. A passerby had asked them what they were doing. One of the scientists replied: “We’re trying to determine the shortest period of time possible — the time between when the light changes and the driver behind honks.”

Virginia is about to conduct that same experiment, with the shortest period of time possible being the time between when the General Assembly’s bill legalizing retail sales of cannabis arrives on Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s desk and when he reaches for his veto pen. Cannabis is the preferred name today for what people old enough to remember the “Grin and Bear It” cartoon once called marijuana. Or pot. Or weed. Or the devil’s lettuce. Or, my personal favorite, jazz cabbage. 

Whatever we call the plant, Youngkin last year vetoed the bill legalizing retail sales of it. He signaled in his State of the Commonwealth Address that he had no interest in signing a retail bill this year. Even the legislators sponsoring the bill understand that it won’t become law, but they believe strongly in it anyway, so here we are. The legislature’s passage of the bill, and Youngkin’s veto of it, will make cannabis one of many issues in this fall’s governor’s race and House of Delegates races.

Maybe, depending on the outcome of those elections, Virginia will continue to be the only state in the country where personal possession of small amounts of cannabis is legal but retail sales of a legal product are not. 

Someday, though, Virginia probably will legalize retail sales. Democrats want this — and so do many Republicans. They just didn’t vote for this particular bill because a) they know the governor will veto it so see no reason to do so, and b) they disagree with the details of how Democrats want to award retail licenses. The current situation seems untenable over the long term, and there seems no interest in recriminalizing the hippie lettuce — there’s another name — so the only way forward seems to be legalization.

This isn’t about that, though. This is about what happens once Virginia does someday legalize retail sales. Namely, what happens to all the stores that have popped up that are already distributing marijuana — sorry, old habit — in some way? Many of these are set up as “membership clubs,” but that “membership” often consists simply of being handed a membership card when you walk in the door. Others claim to be “adult share” stores, where the store will generously “share” some free weed if you buy an overpriced sticker. Attorney General Jason Miyares has issued a formal opinion that these “adult share” stores are breaking the law, but that hasn’t stopped them.

For some reason, Southwest Virginia has become the epicenter for these operations. You can now drive from Montgomery County to the Tennessee state line and find a cannabis outlet in every locality, often out on Main Street. Similar stores are popping up elsewhere. I was recently in the Higher Education store at Zion Crossroads in Louisa County, which was selling a green leafy material described as “White Truffle,” which the AllBud cannabis review site describes as a strain that “produces a quick-hitting head high that will clear your mind of worry.”

Under every bill introduced in Virginia to legalize retail sales of cannabis — indeed, in every state that has already legalized retail sales — retailers need licenses. The bill passed by the General Assembly this session capped that number at 350 across the state. If you need a mental comparison, that’s somewhat fewer than the number of state-owned liquor stores in Virginia. The bill doesn’t specify the costs of these licenses, something a state regulatory board would determine, but we know what they cost in other states. The application fees and license fees vary wildly from state to state, but in Maryland, our nearest example, the application for a basic retail store is $5,000 and if you’re successful, then be prepared to pony up another $80,000 for the actual license (which is good for six years). The Cure8 cannabis consulting firm estimates the costs of starting a cannabis dispensary that complies with all the details of Maryland law at about $500,000. 

Let’s assume Virginia is someday roughly the same. What are legal, licensed retailers, who just shelled out north of half a million dollars, going to think of these unlicensed retailers who didn’t pay any of that — and, as a result, can charge less for an unregulated product? They’re not going to like that, are they? Of course not. So what are they going to do? They’re going to demand that law enforcement shut down these unlicensed retailers, something that law enforcement is generally avoiding now because a) few people are complaining and b) police have more pressing priorities about more dangerous things.

This is not a fantasy. This is exactly what other states have encountered. New York legalized retail sales in 2021; the first ones began in December 2022. New York, though, has been slow to issue licenses. By September 2024, it had awarded just 182 retail licenses in a state of 20 million people. The marketplace moves faster than government. Unlicensed retailers popped up like, well, weeds to serve the demand, and state officials seemed powerless to stop them. Politico reports that at one point there were an estimated 4,000 unlicensed retail cannabis outlets in New York City alone. The state had to set up an Illicit Cannabis Enforcement Task Force that has shut down “approximately 350” storefronts, according to its annual report, while city officials closed down 1,000 more. You don’t have to be a math genius to realize those numbers don’t add up. 

California has had the same problem. The KayaPush accounting website reports that California has about 800 licensed retailers but an estimated 2,800 stores — meaning 75% of the state’s cannabis stores are operating outside the law. “Avoiding taxes and regulatory costs, unlicensed sellers can offer products at significantly lower prices,” the website warns. “Legal dispensaries, on the other hand, must contend with state and local taxes that can increase costs by up to 40%. As a result, licensed operators often operate on razor-thin margins — or even at a loss — to attract customers.” The bottom line: In California, weed is legal, but it’s hard to make money at it if you follow the law because the black market is still there, and a lot cheaper. 

Like New York, California also created a Unified Cannabis Enforcement Task Force that in its first two years seized weed from “over 350 operations,” according to the governor’s office. However, 350 remains a lot less than the estimated 2,800 illicit retailers in the state.

The irony here is that two states that wanted to get out of the business of criminalizing cannabis by legalizing retail sales had to set up special government operations to deal with illegal retail sales. 

Not every state with retail cannabis has had that problem. In Washington, the first state to legalize retail weed, there was just one instance of an illegal retail operation last year and only three in 2023, according to the state’s Liquor and Cannabis Board. 

One difference might be that California and New York are widely regarded to have been slow in their rollout of licenses, and unlicensed retailers simply opened up and nobody stopped them. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has called her state’s retail launch “a disaster” because it inadvertently led to all these illicit retailers selling marijuana.

“It’s not every street corner,” she said last year. “It is every other storefront. It is insane.” 

Just across the Potomac from us, the District of Columbia legalized recreational weed a decade ago and is still dealing with unlicensed stores. Since last summer, authorities have “padlocked” 28 businesses distributing cannabis without a license, according to the city’s Alcoholic Beverage and Cannabis Administration. 

Virginia has essentially become like two states (and one city) it usually doesn’t want to be like. The only difference is that California and New York took their sweet time between legalizing retail sales and actually starting them. D.C. apparently did a better job getting a market set up, but some retailers are still finding ways to evade the law. Virginia hasn’t even legalized retail sales yet, but already the marketplace is racing to meet the demand as it always has, no matter what the law says.

Want more politics and analysis? Sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out Friday afternoons.

The post How Virginia is becoming more like California and New York: All have unlicensed cannabis stores appeared first on Cardinal News.

See our FAQs: Virginia’s marijuana laws explained.

Many years ago, the old “Grin and Bear It” newspaper cartoon showed a group of scientists, with lab coats and clipboards, gathered by the side of the road at a traffic light. A passerby had asked them what they were doing. One of the scientists replied: “We’re trying to determine the shortest period of time possible — the time between when the light changes and the driver behind honks.”

Virginia is about to conduct that same experiment, with the shortest period of time possible being the time between when the General Assembly’s bill legalizing retail sales of cannabis arrives on Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s desk and when he reaches for his veto pen. Cannabis is the preferred name today for what people old enough to remember the “Grin and Bear It” cartoon once called marijuana. Or pot. Or weed. Or the devil’s lettuce. Or, my personal favorite, jazz cabbage. 

Whatever we call the plant, Youngkin last year vetoed the bill legalizing retail sales of it. He signaled in his State of the Commonwealth Address that he had no interest in signing a retail bill this year. Even the legislators sponsoring the bill understand that it won’t become law, but they believe strongly in it anyway, so here we are. The legislature’s passage of the bill, and Youngkin’s veto of it, will make cannabis one of many issues in this fall’s governor’s race and House of Delegates races.

Maybe, depending on the outcome of those elections, Virginia will continue to be the only state in the country where personal possession of small amounts of cannabis is legal but retail sales of a legal product are not. 

Someday, though, Virginia probably will legalize retail sales. Democrats want this — and so do many Republicans. They just didn’t vote for this particular bill because a) they know the governor will veto it so see no reason to do so, and b) they disagree with the details of how Democrats want to award retail licenses. The current situation seems untenable over the long term, and there seems no interest in recriminalizing the hippie lettuce — there’s another name — so the only way forward seems to be legalization.

This isn’t about that, though. This is about what happens once Virginia does someday legalize retail sales. Namely, what happens to all the stores that have popped up that are already distributing marijuana — sorry, old habit — in some way? Many of these are set up as “membership clubs,” but that “membership” often consists simply of being handed a membership card when you walk in the door. Others claim to be “adult share” stores, where the store will generously “share” some free weed if you buy an overpriced sticker. Attorney General Jason Miyares has issued a formal opinion that these “adult share” stores are breaking the law, but that hasn’t stopped them.

For some reason, Southwest Virginia has become the epicenter for these operations. You can now drive from Montgomery County to the Tennessee state line and find a cannabis outlet in every locality, often out on Main Street. Similar stores are popping up elsewhere. I was recently in the Higher Education store at Zion Crossroads in Louisa County, which was selling a green leafy material described as “White Truffle,” which the AllBud cannabis review site describes as a strain that “produces a quick-hitting head high that will clear your mind of worry.”

Under every bill introduced in Virginia to legalize retail sales of cannabis — indeed, in every state that has already legalized retail sales — retailers need licenses. The bill passed by the General Assembly this session capped that number at 350 across the state. If you need a mental comparison, that’s somewhat fewer than the number of state-owned liquor stores in Virginia. The bill doesn’t specify the costs of these licenses, something a state regulatory board would determine, but we know what they cost in other states. The application fees and license fees vary wildly from state to state, but in Maryland, our nearest example, the application for a basic retail store is $5,000 and if you’re successful, then be prepared to pony up another $80,000 for the actual license (which is good for six years). The Cure8 cannabis consulting firm estimates the costs of starting a cannabis dispensary that complies with all the details of Maryland law at about $500,000. 

Let’s assume Virginia is someday roughly the same. What are legal, licensed retailers, who just shelled out north of half a million dollars, going to think of these unlicensed retailers who didn’t pay any of that — and, as a result, can charge less for an unregulated product? They’re not going to like that, are they? Of course not. So what are they going to do? They’re going to demand that law enforcement shut down these unlicensed retailers, something that law enforcement is generally avoiding now because a) few people are complaining and b) police have more pressing priorities about more dangerous things.

This is not a fantasy. This is exactly what other states have encountered. New York legalized retail sales in 2021; the first ones began in December 2022. New York, though, has been slow to issue licenses. By September 2024, it had awarded just 182 retail licenses in a state of 20 million people. The marketplace moves faster than government. Unlicensed retailers popped up like, well, weeds to serve the demand, and state officials seemed powerless to stop them. Politico reports that at one point there were an estimated 4,000 unlicensed retail cannabis outlets in New York City alone. The state had to set up an Illicit Cannabis Enforcement Task Force that has shut down “approximately 350” storefronts, according to its annual report, while city officials closed down 1,000 more. You don’t have to be a math genius to realize those numbers don’t add up. 

California has had the same problem. The KayaPush accounting website reports that California has about 800 licensed retailers but an estimated 2,800 stores — meaning 75% of the state’s cannabis stores are operating outside the law. “Avoiding taxes and regulatory costs, unlicensed sellers can offer products at significantly lower prices,” the website warns. “Legal dispensaries, on the other hand, must contend with state and local taxes that can increase costs by up to 40%. As a result, licensed operators often operate on razor-thin margins — or even at a loss — to attract customers.” The bottom line: In California, weed is legal, but it’s hard to make money at it if you follow the law because the black market is still there, and a lot cheaper. 

Like New York, California also created a Unified Cannabis Enforcement Task Force that in its first two years seized weed from “over 350 operations,” according to the governor’s office. However, 350 remains a lot less than the estimated 2,800 illicit retailers in the state.

The irony here is that two states that wanted to get out of the business of criminalizing cannabis by legalizing retail sales had to set up special government operations to deal with illegal retail sales. 

Not every state with retail cannabis has had that problem. In Washington, the first state to legalize retail weed, there was just one instance of an illegal retail operation last year and only three in 2023, according to the state’s Liquor and Cannabis Board. 

One difference might be that California and New York are widely regarded to have been slow in their rollout of licenses, and unlicensed retailers simply opened up and nobody stopped them. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has called her state’s retail launch “a disaster” because it inadvertently led to all these illicit retailers selling marijuana.

“It’s not every street corner,” she said last year. “It is every other storefront. It is insane.” 

Just across the Potomac from us, the District of Columbia legalized recreational weed a decade ago and is still dealing with unlicensed stores. Since last summer, authorities have “padlocked” 28 businesses distributing cannabis without a license, according to the city’s Alcoholic Beverage and Cannabis Administration. 

Virginia has essentially become like two states (and one city) it usually doesn’t want to be like. The only difference is that California and New York took their sweet time between legalizing retail sales and actually starting them. D.C. apparently did a better job getting a market set up, but some retailers are still finding ways to evade the law. Virginia hasn’t even legalized retail sales yet, but already the marketplace is racing to meet the demand as it always has, no matter what the law says.

Want more politics and analysis? Sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out Friday afternoons.

The post How Virginia is becoming more like California and New York: All have unlicensed cannabis stores appeared first on Cardinal News.

See our FAQs: Virginia’s marijuana laws explained.

Many years ago, the old “Grin and Bear It” newspaper cartoon showed a group of scientists, with lab coats and clipboards, gathered by the side of the road at a traffic light. A passerby had asked them what they were doing. One of the scientists replied: “We’re trying to determine the shortest period of time possible — the time between when the light changes and the driver behind honks.”

Virginia is about to conduct that same experiment, with the shortest period of time possible being the time between when the General Assembly’s bill legalizing retail sales of cannabis arrives on Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s desk and when he reaches for his veto pen. Cannabis is the preferred name today for what people old enough to remember the “Grin and Bear It” cartoon once called marijuana. Or pot. Or weed. Or the devil’s lettuce. Or, my personal favorite, jazz cabbage. 

Whatever we call the plant, Youngkin last year vetoed the bill legalizing retail sales of it. He signaled in his State of the Commonwealth Address that he had no interest in signing a retail bill this year. Even the legislators sponsoring the bill understand that it won’t become law, but they believe strongly in it anyway, so here we are. The legislature’s passage of the bill, and Youngkin’s veto of it, will make cannabis one of many issues in this fall’s governor’s race and House of Delegates races.

Maybe, depending on the outcome of those elections, Virginia will continue to be the only state in the country where personal possession of small amounts of cannabis is legal but retail sales of a legal product are not. 

Someday, though, Virginia probably will legalize retail sales. Democrats want this — and so do many Republicans. They just didn’t vote for this particular bill because a) they know the governor will veto it so see no reason to do so, and b) they disagree with the details of how Democrats want to award retail licenses. The current situation seems untenable over the long term, and there seems no interest in recriminalizing the hippie lettuce — there’s another name — so the only way forward seems to be legalization.

This isn’t about that, though. This is about what happens once Virginia does someday legalize retail sales. Namely, what happens to all the stores that have popped up that are already distributing marijuana — sorry, old habit — in some way? Many of these are set up as “membership clubs,” but that “membership” often consists simply of being handed a membership card when you walk in the door. Others claim to be “adult share” stores, where the store will generously “share” some free weed if you buy an overpriced sticker. Attorney General Jason Miyares has issued a formal opinion that these “adult share” stores are breaking the law, but that hasn’t stopped them.

For some reason, Southwest Virginia has become the epicenter for these operations. You can now drive from Montgomery County to the Tennessee state line and find a cannabis outlet in every locality, often out on Main Street. Similar stores are popping up elsewhere. I was recently in the Higher Education store at Zion Crossroads in Louisa County, which was selling a green leafy material described as “White Truffle,” which the AllBud cannabis review site describes as a strain that “produces a quick-hitting head high that will clear your mind of worry.”

Under every bill introduced in Virginia to legalize retail sales of cannabis — indeed, in every state that has already legalized retail sales — retailers need licenses. The bill passed by the General Assembly this session capped that number at 350 across the state. If you need a mental comparison, that’s somewhat fewer than the number of state-owned liquor stores in Virginia. The bill doesn’t specify the costs of these licenses, something a state regulatory board would determine, but we know what they cost in other states. The application fees and license fees vary wildly from state to state, but in Maryland, our nearest example, the application for a basic retail store is $5,000 and if you’re successful, then be prepared to pony up another $80,000 for the actual license (which is good for six years). The Cure8 cannabis consulting firm estimates the costs of starting a cannabis dispensary that complies with all the details of Maryland law at about $500,000. 

Let’s assume Virginia is someday roughly the same. What are legal, licensed retailers, who just shelled out north of half a million dollars, going to think of these unlicensed retailers who didn’t pay any of that — and, as a result, can charge less for an unregulated product? They’re not going to like that, are they? Of course not. So what are they going to do? They’re going to demand that law enforcement shut down these unlicensed retailers, something that law enforcement is generally avoiding now because a) few people are complaining and b) police have more pressing priorities about more dangerous things.

This is not a fantasy. This is exactly what other states have encountered. New York legalized retail sales in 2021; the first ones began in December 2022. New York, though, has been slow to issue licenses. By September 2024, it had awarded just 182 retail licenses in a state of 20 million people. The marketplace moves faster than government. Unlicensed retailers popped up like, well, weeds to serve the demand, and state officials seemed powerless to stop them. Politico reports that at one point there were an estimated 4,000 unlicensed retail cannabis outlets in New York City alone. The state had to set up an Illicit Cannabis Enforcement Task Force that has shut down “approximately 350” storefronts, according to its annual report, while city officials closed down 1,000 more. You don’t have to be a math genius to realize those numbers don’t add up. 

California has had the same problem. The KayaPush accounting website reports that California has about 800 licensed retailers but an estimated 2,800 stores — meaning 75% of the state’s cannabis stores are operating outside the law. “Avoiding taxes and regulatory costs, unlicensed sellers can offer products at significantly lower prices,” the website warns. “Legal dispensaries, on the other hand, must contend with state and local taxes that can increase costs by up to 40%. As a result, licensed operators often operate on razor-thin margins — or even at a loss — to attract customers.” The bottom line: In California, weed is legal, but it’s hard to make money at it if you follow the law because the black market is still there, and a lot cheaper. 

Like New York, California also created a Unified Cannabis Enforcement Task Force that in its first two years seized weed from “over 350 operations,” according to the governor’s office. However, 350 remains a lot less than the estimated 2,800 illicit retailers in the state.

The irony here is that two states that wanted to get out of the business of criminalizing cannabis by legalizing retail sales had to set up special government operations to deal with illegal retail sales. 

Not every state with retail cannabis has had that problem. In Washington, the first state to legalize retail weed, there was just one instance of an illegal retail operation last year and only three in 2023, according to the state’s Liquor and Cannabis Board. 

One difference might be that California and New York are widely regarded to have been slow in their rollout of licenses, and unlicensed retailers simply opened up and nobody stopped them. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has called her state’s retail launch “a disaster” because it inadvertently led to all these illicit retailers selling marijuana.

“It’s not every street corner,” she said last year. “It is every other storefront. It is insane.” 

Just across the Potomac from us, the District of Columbia legalized recreational weed a decade ago and is still dealing with unlicensed stores. Since last summer, authorities have “padlocked” 28 businesses distributing cannabis without a license, according to the city’s Alcoholic Beverage and Cannabis Administration. 

Virginia has essentially become like two states (and one city) it usually doesn’t want to be like. The only difference is that California and New York took their sweet time between legalizing retail sales and actually starting them. D.C. apparently did a better job getting a market set up, but some retailers are still finding ways to evade the law. Virginia hasn’t even legalized retail sales yet, but already the marketplace is racing to meet the demand as it always has, no matter what the law says.

Want more politics and analysis? Sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out Friday afternoons.

The post How Virginia is becoming more like California and New York: All have unlicensed cannabis stores appeared first on Cardinal News.

See our FAQs: Virginia’s marijuana laws explained.

Many years ago, the old “Grin and Bear It” newspaper cartoon showed a group of scientists, with lab coats and clipboards, gathered by the side of the road at a traffic light. A passerby had asked them what they were doing. One of the scientists replied: “We’re trying to determine the shortest period of time possible — the time between when the light changes and the driver behind honks.”

Virginia is about to conduct that same experiment, with the shortest period of time possible being the time between when the General Assembly’s bill legalizing retail sales of cannabis arrives on Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s desk and when he reaches for his veto pen. Cannabis is the preferred name today for what people old enough to remember the “Grin and Bear It” cartoon once called marijuana. Or pot. Or weed. Or the devil’s lettuce. Or, my personal favorite, jazz cabbage. 

Whatever we call the plant, Youngkin last year vetoed the bill legalizing retail sales of it. He signaled in his State of the Commonwealth Address that he had no interest in signing a retail bill this year. Even the legislators sponsoring the bill understand that it won’t become law, but they believe strongly in it anyway, so here we are. The legislature’s passage of the bill, and Youngkin’s veto of it, will make cannabis one of many issues in this fall’s governor’s race and House of Delegates races.

Maybe, depending on the outcome of those elections, Virginia will continue to be the only state in the country where personal possession of small amounts of cannabis is legal but retail sales of a legal product are not. 

Someday, though, Virginia probably will legalize retail sales. Democrats want this — and so do many Republicans. They just didn’t vote for this particular bill because a) they know the governor will veto it so see no reason to do so, and b) they disagree with the details of how Democrats want to award retail licenses. The current situation seems untenable over the long term, and there seems no interest in recriminalizing the hippie lettuce — there’s another name — so the only way forward seems to be legalization.

This isn’t about that, though. This is about what happens once Virginia does someday legalize retail sales. Namely, what happens to all the stores that have popped up that are already distributing marijuana — sorry, old habit — in some way? Many of these are set up as “membership clubs,” but that “membership” often consists simply of being handed a membership card when you walk in the door. Others claim to be “adult share” stores, where the store will generously “share” some free weed if you buy an overpriced sticker. Attorney General Jason Miyares has issued a formal opinion that these “adult share” stores are breaking the law, but that hasn’t stopped them.

For some reason, Southwest Virginia has become the epicenter for these operations. You can now drive from Montgomery County to the Tennessee state line and find a cannabis outlet in every locality, often out on Main Street. Similar stores are popping up elsewhere. I was recently in the Higher Education store at Zion Crossroads in Louisa County, which was selling a green leafy material described as “White Truffle,” which the AllBud cannabis review site describes as a strain that “produces a quick-hitting head high that will clear your mind of worry.”

Under every bill introduced in Virginia to legalize retail sales of cannabis — indeed, in every state that has already legalized retail sales — retailers need licenses. The bill passed by the General Assembly this session capped that number at 350 across the state. If you need a mental comparison, that’s somewhat fewer than the number of state-owned liquor stores in Virginia. The bill doesn’t specify the costs of these licenses, something a state regulatory board would determine, but we know what they cost in other states. The application fees and license fees vary wildly from state to state, but in Maryland, our nearest example, the application for a basic retail store is $5,000 and if you’re successful, then be prepared to pony up another $80,000 for the actual license (which is good for six years). The Cure8 cannabis consulting firm estimates the costs of starting a cannabis dispensary that complies with all the details of Maryland law at about $500,000. 

Let’s assume Virginia is someday roughly the same. What are legal, licensed retailers, who just shelled out north of half a million dollars, going to think of these unlicensed retailers who didn’t pay any of that — and, as a result, can charge less for an unregulated product? They’re not going to like that, are they? Of course not. So what are they going to do? They’re going to demand that law enforcement shut down these unlicensed retailers, something that law enforcement is generally avoiding now because a) few people are complaining and b) police have more pressing priorities about more dangerous things.

This is not a fantasy. This is exactly what other states have encountered. New York legalized retail sales in 2021; the first ones began in December 2022. New York, though, has been slow to issue licenses. By September 2024, it had awarded just 182 retail licenses in a state of 20 million people. The marketplace moves faster than government. Unlicensed retailers popped up like, well, weeds to serve the demand, and state officials seemed powerless to stop them. Politico reports that at one point there were an estimated 4,000 unlicensed retail cannabis outlets in New York City alone. The state had to set up an Illicit Cannabis Enforcement Task Force that has shut down “approximately 350” storefronts, according to its annual report, while city officials closed down 1,000 more. You don’t have to be a math genius to realize those numbers don’t add up. 

California has had the same problem. The KayaPush accounting website reports that California has about 800 licensed retailers but an estimated 2,800 stores — meaning 75% of the state’s cannabis stores are operating outside the law. “Avoiding taxes and regulatory costs, unlicensed sellers can offer products at significantly lower prices,” the website warns. “Legal dispensaries, on the other hand, must contend with state and local taxes that can increase costs by up to 40%. As a result, licensed operators often operate on razor-thin margins — or even at a loss — to attract customers.” The bottom line: In California, weed is legal, but it’s hard to make money at it if you follow the law because the black market is still there, and a lot cheaper. 

Like New York, California also created a Unified Cannabis Enforcement Task Force that in its first two years seized weed from “over 350 operations,” according to the governor’s office. However, 350 remains a lot less than the estimated 2,800 illicit retailers in the state.

The irony here is that two states that wanted to get out of the business of criminalizing cannabis by legalizing retail sales had to set up special government operations to deal with illegal retail sales. 

Not every state with retail cannabis has had that problem. In Washington, the first state to legalize retail weed, there was just one instance of an illegal retail operation last year and only three in 2023, according to the state’s Liquor and Cannabis Board. 

One difference might be that California and New York are widely regarded to have been slow in their rollout of licenses, and unlicensed retailers simply opened up and nobody stopped them. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has called her state’s retail launch “a disaster” because it inadvertently led to all these illicit retailers selling marijuana.

“It’s not every street corner,” she said last year. “It is every other storefront. It is insane.” 

Just across the Potomac from us, the District of Columbia legalized recreational weed a decade ago and is still dealing with unlicensed stores. Since last summer, authorities have “padlocked” 28 businesses distributing cannabis without a license, according to the city’s Alcoholic Beverage and Cannabis Administration. 

Virginia has essentially become like two states (and one city) it usually doesn’t want to be like. The only difference is that California and New York took their sweet time between legalizing retail sales and actually starting them. D.C. apparently did a better job getting a market set up, but some retailers are still finding ways to evade the law. Virginia hasn’t even legalized retail sales yet, but already the marketplace is racing to meet the demand as it always has, no matter what the law says.

Want more politics and analysis? Sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out Friday afternoons.

The post How Virginia is becoming more like California and New York: All have unlicensed cannabis stores appeared first on Cardinal News.

Preliminary residential damage assessments conducted jointly by state and federal officials since February storms brought major flooding to Southwest Virginia reveal that 90 homes sustained major damage and the total number of those destroyed was 18 — and 17 of those were in Buchanan County.

Meanwhile, Gov. Glenn Youngkin has expanded the area for which he is requesting an expedited major disaster declaration. On Feb. 16, he asked President Donald Trump for a declaration for Buchanan, Dickenson and Tazewell counties, but on Feb. 26, he requested an “add-on” to include Bland, Giles, Lee, Pulaski, Russell, Scott, Smyth and Wise counties. Both requests are currently in process, a spokesperson for the Federal Emergency Management Agency said Tuesday.

On Tuesday, Virginia’s two senators, Democrats Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, and Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, sent a joint letter to Trump urging him to support Youngkin’s expanded request. “Significant federal assistance is needed in Southwest Virginia to help our constituents who are already recovering from the widespread damage of Hurricane Helene, which was the most significant disaster in the Commonwealth in over a decade,” they wrote. “It is important to note this is the fifth major flood in this area in the past five years.”

Overall, 479 homes were affected by the storm, according to the numbers collected Feb. 18-28 in 11 counties by the Virginia Department of Emergency Management and FEMA.

The flooding came the weekend of Feb. 15-16, following days of torrential rain and ending with several inches of snow in some affected counties. Rivers across the area crested at high levels, roads were closed, mudslides and landslides occurred and bridges, businesses and homes were damaged.

Some areas received as much as 7 inches of rain. Power was out in many areas, for days in some cases, and more than 150 swift-water rescues were conducted.

The hardest-hit areas were the Hurley and Slate Creek communities and the town of Grundy in Buchanan County, and parts of Tazewell, Dickenson, Wise and Russell counties.

The numbers released Tuesday were for individual assistance, which provides funding to individuals and households that have sustained losses as a direct result of a declared disaster. 

Representatives of VDEM and FEMA are still in Southwest Virginia collecting the public assistance joint preliminary damage assessments, which are scheduled to wrap up this week for the 11 counties, according to a VDEM spokesperson. Public assistance can pay for repairing or replacing eligible public or nonprofit facilities and infrastructure.

The neighboring states of Kentucky and West Virginia already have received major disaster declarations as a result of damage from the same storm system; Kentucky’s declaration was approved Feb. 24 and West Virginia’s approval came Feb. 26.

The governor submitted the request for an expedited major disaster declaration for the counties of Buchanan, Tazewell and Dickenson on Feb. 16, which was followed by a joint request for a declaration and individual assistance for the same counties from Griffith, Kaine and Warner.

Youngkin is seeking individual and public assistance for all 11 counties now included in his request for a disaster declaration. As of Tuesday evening, no declaration has been approved for Virginia.

Officials have said the preliminary damage assessment numbers will be used to help determine whether Southwest Virginia receives a disaster declaration.

FEMA, which Trump has said he wants to eliminate, will evaluate the information included in the declaration request and approve all or a portion of the programs requested, according to the agency.

The agency has established four categories for damage to houses. Destroyed means the house is a total loss. Major damage means there is structural or other significant damage that requires extensive repairs. Minor damage indicates repairable, nonstructural damage, and affected means the house has sustained non-structural damage that does not make it unsafe.

The numbers released Tuesday showed that in addition to the 17 homes that were destroyed, Buchanan County had 26 homes that sustained major damage and 60 that had minor damage, and another 103 that were affected. 

Tazewell County had 44 homes with major damage and 52 with minor damage and 76 that were affected, for a total of 172 homes impacted by flooding damage.

Russell County had four homes with major damage and 11 with minor damage, and another nine were affected. In Dickenson County, one house sustained major damage, four had minor damage and 11 were affected, according to the numbers.

Lee County had one destroyed home, one with major damage and four with minor damage, while two were affected. Scott County had three homes with major damage and two with minor damage, and another two that were affected. In Wise County, six houses sustained major damage and eight minor damage, and six were affected.

In Bland County, where the only death from the storm occurred when a man was swept away by floodwaters, three homes sustained major damage and five had minor damage.

The post 90 homes sustained major damage and 18 were destroyed in February flooding in Southwest Virginia, preliminary estimate finds appeared first on Cardinal News.

The Appomattox County Board of Supervisors is weighing a proposal to close at least one of the county’s smallest voting precincts. 

The Virginia NAACP has said that the move would disenfranchise voters in precincts that have the highest percentages of Black and minority voters in the county. The county’s board of elections said the move is needed to save money. 

The NAACP noted in a statement Tuesday that the closure of the county’s smallest voting locations, Chap and Agee, would negatively affect Black voters, many of whom would be forced to travel up to an additional 30 minutes driving or four hours walking to cast their ballot. 

“Throughout our history, various tactics have been employed to limit access to the ballot, including precinct closures, voter ID laws, and other measures that disproportionately affect marginalized communities. The proposed precinct closure plan, if enacted, would perpetuate these historical patterns and result in barriers to participation for Black voters in Appomattox County,” the Rev. Cozy Bailey, president of the Virginia NAACP, said in a statement. 

The organization urged the board of supervisors to instead pursue an alternate solution “that preserves the fundamental rights of all Appomattox County voters without imposing undue burdens on Black and other voters of color.”

The percentages of Black voters in the Chap and Agee voting precincts are 36.7% and 24.4%, respectively, and the total percentages of minority voters are 40.27% and 27.82%, respectively, the Virginia NAACP said. Nearly 18% of the total population in Appomattox County is Black and about 21% of the total population is minority, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. 

The county electoral board decided, in a meeting Tuesday, to recommend the closure of the Agee precinct to the board of supervisors but will recommend a pause on closing the Chap location, Appomattox registrar Patricia Morton said after the meeting had concluded. She cited resident feedback and a desire to find a more central location for the Chap precinct as the reason for that pause. The board of elections will make its recommendation to the county board in two weeks, she said. 

Neither board of supervisors Chair John Hinkle or Vice Chair Alfred Jones III responded to a request for comment on Tuesday. Members of the Appomattox Board of Elections did not respond to a request for comment. 

When did this process start? 

In a presentation to the board of supervisors in January, electoral board secretary Lannis Selz said that it “behooves” the body to make changes in an effort to cut spending. 

“One of those may be reducing the number of Election Day voting precincts from nine to seven,” he told the county board. He argued that it would generate savings each year in operating costs and equipment. 

He suggested incorporating the Chap voting location into Spout Springs and the Agee voting location into Oakville. He noted that Chap and Agee are the county’s two smallest voting precincts, with less than 60 voters turning out to vote in recent special elections at each site. 

In November, Agee had 293 voters and Chap had 265 voters cast ballots. About 1,382 voters could be affected by the closure of the two locations, according to Selz’s presentation to the board. Appomattox County has a population of nearly 17,000. 

There were 1,376 registered voters between the two precincts in the November election. Appomattox County has a population of nearly 17,000, with nearly 13,000 registered voters. Precincts across the county range from the smallest, Agee, with 604 registered voters in November to the largest, Courthouse, with 2,392 registered voters. 

In some counties with similar population size, the number of precincts and the voters they serve vary. Buckingham County, next door to Appomattox, has a population of around 17,000 people and 10 voting precincts. Its smallest precinct is Wrights, which had 576 registered voters in November. Patrick County, which has a population of about 17,500, boasts 12 precincts, with its smallest being Stuart Community, which served 622 registered voters in November. And Giles County, with a population of about 16,500, has nine precincts — its smallest being Glen Lyn with 204 registered voters. 

Back in Appomattox, Selz noted that the Agee Community Center needs upgrades if it were to continue to serve as a polling location. Currently it has no running water, no air conditioning, poor heating and is not in a convenient location. The Chap location does not have those issues, however, as it’s located in a church, he said.

If the precincts were closed by April, that action would save the board roughly $7,000 between fiscal years 2025 and 2026, Selz said. Long-term capital savings would be around $27,000 in equipment costs. 

Jones, vice chair of the county board, issued his support for consolidating the Agee voting location into Oakville to avoid allocating money into facility upgrades, during the January meeting. 

A month later, county residents were able to voice their concerns regarding the possible closure during a board of supervisors meeting. 

One resident noted that the parking lots at Oakville and Spout Springs would need to be expanded or updated to accommodate an increase in voters. Another resident who votes at the Chap location noted that older residents will not want to travel further to cast their ballot. 

Any changes would need to be finalized by April 18, 60 days before the June primary. 

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The Delta Dental of Virginia Foundation announced its largest-ever total grant awards on Tuesday. The foundation distributed $950,000 to 14 organizations across the state focused on improving oral health. 

Delta Dental of Virginia is one of many independent Delta Dental companies operating charitable foundations across the country. The independent companies in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, North Carolina, New Jersey and Virginia each have a charitable foundation.

These grants support safety-net organizations that serve residents who are uninsured or receive Medicaid and other educational initiatives that work to expand access to dental care and address workforce shortages. 

Virginia faces a significant shortage of dentists and hygienists, with 103 of the state’s 133 localities designated as dental health professional shortage areas, according to a report by the Virginia Health Catalyst, a statewide coalition focused on improving oral health access. 

More than 2 million Virginians are affected by the shortages, according to December 2024 data from KFF, a nonprofit health policy research organization. 

Additionally, Virginia doesn’t have enough dentists serving uninsured, underinsured or Medicaid-insured patients. 

Only 9% of Virginia’s dentists and 6% of dental hygienists practice in safety-net settings, such as free and charitable clinics and federally qualified health centers. A small number of nonprofit clinics provide care to uninsured, underinsured or Medicaid-insured patients.

There are 63 free clinics in Virginia and 31 federally qualified health centers with more than 200 locations across the state. 

This year’s grant recipients: 

• Appalachian Highlands Community Dental Center (Mission Dental Virginia Inc., Abingdon): Supports a capital expansion that will add 2,500 additional square feet to house a future denture lab.
• Arlington Free Clinic: Supports workforce expansion and access to dental services with funds to help subsidize the addition of one full-time dental hygienist.
• Bland Ministry Center: Supports construction costs for an educational meeting room to provide continuing education and host local dental-field students through community partnerships.
• Bradley Free Clinic (Roanoke): Provides stipends, dental supplies, housing and meals for Virginia Commonwealth University School of Dentistry students, as well as salary support for the dental assistant and preceptor working with students.
• Charlottesville Free Clinic: Subsidizes employment costs for the clinic’s dentist.
• Child Health Investment Partnership (Roanoke): Supports a bilingual care coordinator providing oral health education and dental/medical case management to enrolled children and adults.
• CrossOver Ministry Inc. (Richmond): Supports a new part-time dental hygienist and a full-time bilingual dental assistant.
• The Fauquier Free Clinic (Warrenton): Supports the salary of a new part-time dentist.
• Free Clinic of Powhatan: Subsidizes the salary of a part-time dentist.
• Germanna Community College (Fredericksburg): Supports faculty salaries and provides scholarships to new students enrolled in Germanna Community College and Mountain Empire Community College’s Dental Assisting II program.
• HELP Inc. (Hampton Ecumenical Lodging and Provisions): Supports efforts to integrate 3D printing technology into clinic services to make affordable dentures, night guards and crowns for patients.
• New Horizons Healthcare (Kuumba Community Health and Wellness Center, Roanoke): Helps underwrite the salary of a new dentist.
• Medical College of Virginia Foundation (Richmond): Adds equipment and furnishings to serve patients with special health care needs and train future oral health practitioners on inclusive dentistry best practices.
• Northern Neck Middlesex Free Health Clinic (Kilmarnock): Recruits and provides partial salary support for a full- or part-time dentist.

The post Delta Dental announces largest ever total for statewide grant awards appeared first on Cardinal News.

Lawmakers passed a bill in the most recent session of the General Assembly that would provide more clarity to health insurance coverage for mental health and substance use disorders.

Del. Mark Sickles, D-Fairfax, introduced House Bill 2738. The bill defines the term “generally accepted standards of care” for physical and behavioral health conditions. Insurance providers will have to use evidence-based standards and clinical practices recognized by specialists and health care providers.”

The bill also establishes that services or products which address a patient’s need for screening, diagnosing or treating these conditions will be considered “medically necessary.”

Insurers will be prohibited from applying criteria different from the generally accepted standards definition. The bill’s language also requires coverage and benefits for all ages: children, adolescents and adults, according to the bill.

Sickles cited data from the nonprofit KFF showing that in 2023, insurers using Healthcare.gov denied 19% of in-network claims and 37% of out-of-network claims.

Advocates say the bill is necessary for proper access to essential services within mental health and substance use disorder care.

The Virginia Association of Health Plans worked with the patron and advocates to include the language that was added in the substitute, however the bill language still needs improvement, according to senior vice president Heidi Dix.

“We feel as it’s currently written, it prohibits us from using our standardized guidelines,” Dix said to the House Labor and Commerce subcommittee on Jan. 28.

“We’re trying to create a definition that’s understandable by the wider public and is not dominated by the insurance industry deciding everything,” Sickles said.

There was some debate on where the bill should go after committee, with some lawmakers pushing for the legislative oversight Health Insurance Reform Commission.

The bill is a standard of care bill, therefore not a HIRC eligible bill, Sickles told the panel.

A Senate committee amendment added child, adolescent and adult psychiatry to the list of clinical specialties that are recognized by health care providers. It was a recommendation of the American Academy of Child and Adult Psychiatry, according to Sickles.

The amendment also added service intensity assessment instruments as a nationally recognized clinical practice guideline, a standardized method that helps determine the needed level of care.

Mental Health Virginia is the oldest mental health advocacy organization in Virginia, according to its website. The organization favors the bill and aims to improve mental health services equally across Virginia, according to executive director Bruce Cruser.

“It will definitely mean more people will get the care that they need when they need it,” Cruser said.

The Faison Center brought attention to the issue, due to their services for young people with autism not getting funded, according to Cruser.

The center shut down one of its programs in December due to the amount of insurance denials of services, said president and CEO Brian McCann in public testimony to lawmakers.

The program was provided to school-aged children aged six and older to receive applied behavioral analysis, or ABA, therapy, according to McCann. The insurance companies were using guidelines created in-house, which had no transparency or accountability, he said.

“It applies to people who are dealing with an intellectual or developmental disability as well as mental health, a mental illness and a substance use disorder,” Cruser said about the bill.

The bill is an important first step, according to Cruser.

“What I hope is that next year there will be a look at what really the data shows in Virginia, in terms of how people are accessing care, how much it’s costing and what insurance companies are paying for,” Cruser said.

The General Assembly and state officials have focused in recent years on efforts to improve mental health care in Virginia. The bill passed both houses by wide, bipartisan margins: 79-19 in the House, 40-0 in the Senate. Gov. Glenn Youngkin has until March 24 to make amendments, sign or veto the bill.

Capital News Service is a program of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Robertson School of Media and Culture. Students in the program provide state government coverage for a variety of media outlets in Virginia.

The post Bill aims to limit insurance denials for mental health and substance use disorders by defining care standards appeared first on Cardinal News.

Here’s a roundup of news briefs from around Southwest and Southside. Send yours for possible inclusion to news@cardinalnews.org.

* * *

Claytor Lake fully reopens after flood cleanup

Claytor Lake State Park has reopened after a months-long cleanup of debris left by the remnants of Hurricane Helene.

Massive flooding that followed the late-September storm washed construction materials, hazardous waste and general trash into the lake. Debris was collected using barges, tugboats, excavators and a 40-cubic-yard roll-off container. The work was led by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, in partnership with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation and Friends of Claytor Lake, according to a news release from the state. 

The state park, which served as the operations center for the cleanup, sits on the northern shore of the lake and offers water access, 4 miles of lake frontage and more than 470 acres of fields and woodland.

The Claytor Lake State Park boat ramp and Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources boat ramp located off Bear Drive are now operating as normal seven days a week. Due to damage caused by large equipment, the park’s boat ramps and parking lots will need to be repaired, and DWR’s parking lot will also need to be regraded. Temporary closures of these facilities will be announced.  

For more information about Claytor Lake State Park, please go to virginiastateparks.gov/claytor-lake. 

Telethon will collect funds for flood victims

A three-hour telethon this Saturday will raise money for victims of last months flooding in Southwest Virginia and West Virginia.

The Two Virginias, One Mission Helping Hands, Healing Hearts telethon will broadcast live from the WVVA-TV studios in Bluefield from 6-9 p.m. The fundraiser will also be simulcast on dozens of other television and radio stations throughout the region and will stream online.

The three-hour event will feature entertainment and sports celebrities with ties to the region, including “America’s Got Talent” winner Landau Eugene Murphy Jr., Steve Earle, “American Idol” champion Noah Thompson, Vince Gill, T. Graham Brown, Duane Allen of the Oak Ridge Boys and actress Tia Carrere. The event will be cohosted by WVVA’s Joshua Bolden, Murphy, West Virginia-born actor Kevin Sizemore and Homer Hickam, whose memoir “Rocket Boys” became the hit film “October Sky.”

Contributions can be made at https://give.helpsalvationarmy.org/campaign/gray-media-west-virginia-floods/c667334.

All proceeds will be collected and distributed by local Salvation Army chapters directly serving the flood-stricken areas.

The telethon will be simulcast and streamed across other television stations across the region: WSAZ Huntington/Charleston (streaming live on wsaz.com), WDBJ Roanoke (streaming live on its Facebook page), live on Parkersburg/Marietta’s Me/MY TV and streaming live on wtap.com, live on Clarksburg’s Me TV, streaming live on WDTV Clarksburg/Fairmont and streaming live online at Watch Live through wvva.com as well as WVVA’s Facebook page.

Martinsville’s Uptown Partnership kicks off facade program

Martinsville’s Uptown district could be getting a makeover via the Uptown Partnership’s facade grant program. 

The partnership is a collective of businesses and residents that seeks to enhance Martinsville as a tourist destination. 

Last year, Virginia’s Department of Housing and Community Development identified organizations throughout the state for access to grants to promote preservation and economic development projects. It designated the Uptown Partnership as Martinsville’s administrator for future grant funding. 

“As Martinsville’s Advancing Main Street organization, we are committed to fostering economic growth and enhancing our district’s visual appeal,” said Spencer Koger, executive director of the Uptown Partnership. “This program is a key step in helping business and property owners invest in their storefronts, ultimately making Uptown Martinsville a more vibrant and welcoming destination.”

On Monday evening, the Uptown Partnership announced the Facade Improvement Grant Program, which will provide awards of up to $5,000, with participants expected to provide an equal match. Applicants can be owners of commercial or mixed-use properties within the Uptown area. Tenants may also participate, with permission from property owners. 

Those interested can apply at https://www.uptownpartnership.com/grants. The deadline for applications is March 31. All applications will be reviewed by the Uptown Partnership’s design committee. 

Successful applicants must complete their respective projects within a year. Grant funding will only be released after a project is completed. 

— Dean-Paul Stephens

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Here are some of the top headlines from other news outlets around Virginia. Some content may be behind a metered paywall:

Public safety:

“Dangerously understaffed:” Inmates describe fear and violence behind Red Onion’s walls. — Virginia Mercury.

Education:

Virginia schools still struggling to fill critical teaching positions, new report finds. — Virginia Mercury.

Economy:

Dominion seeks SCC approval for Chesterfield gas-fired units. — Richmond Times-Dispatch (paywall).

Lynchburg debuts interactive dashboard to explore capital improvement projects. — The (Lynchburg) News & Advance (paywall).

Weather:

For more weather news, follow weather journalist Kevin Myatt on Twitter / X at @kevinmyattwx and sign up for his free weather email newsletter. His weekly column appears in Cardinal News each Wednesday afternoon.

The post Inmates describe fear and violence behind Red Onion’s walls; more … appeared first on Cardinal News.

Two-time defending champion Northside stayed on track for a VHSL boys basketball three-peat Tuesday night with a 55-33 homecourt victory over Western Albemarle in a Class 3 quarterfinal.

Northside will play at Spotswood on Friday in a semifinal.

Other boys winners Tuesday included E.C. Glass in Class 4, Floyd County and Graham in Class 2, and George Wythe and Patrick Henry (Emory) in Class 1.

E.C. Glass will go to Atlee in Mechanicsville on Tuesday, Graham will play Floyd County at Radford University’s Dedmon Center, and Patrick Henry will play at George Wythe.

William Fleming, Salem, Lord Botetourt, Central (Wise), Ridgeview, Honaker and George Wythe were among the girls winners.

William Fleming will travel to Chesterfield County to face L.C. Bird in a Class 5 semifinal. Salem will play at home against Manor of Portsmouth in Class 4. Lord Botetourt goes to Spotswood as part of a doubleheader with the boys game in Class 3. Ridgeview will have a rematch with Central (Wise) at UVa-Wise in Class 2. Honaker goes to George Wythe as part of a doubleheader at Pulaski County High School.

 Tickets are digital only and are available online by visiting gofan.co/vhsl.

CLASS 6 BOYS

Tuesday, March 4

Quarterfinals

  South Lakes 56, Hayfield 41

  Landstown 76, Patriot 59

  Oscar Smith 75, Colonial Forge 50

  C.G. Woodson 71, Westfield 58

Friday, March 7

Semifinals

  Landstown at South Lakes, 7 p.m.

  C.G. Woodson at Oscar Smith, 6 p.m.

Saturday, March 15

At Siegel Center Richmond

Championship

  Semifinal winners, 6:30 p.m.

CLASS 5 BOYS

Tuesday, March 4

Quarterfinals

  Green Run 61, Maury 54

  Woodside 76, Indian River 42

  Albemarle 67, Riverbend 46

  Riverside 58, L.C. Bird 56

Friday, March 7

Semifinals

  Woodside vs. Green Run, at Ocean Lakes H.S., 7 p.m.

  Riverside at Albemarle, 7 p.m.

Thursday, March 13

At Siegel Center Richmond

Championship

  Semifinal winners, 2:30 p.m.

CLASS 4 BOYS

Tuesday, March 4

Quarterfinals

  John Handley 68, Heritage (Newport News) 37

  Hampton 64, Varina 51

  E.C. Glass 58, Tuscarora 49

  Atlee 63, Churchland 54

Friday, March 7

Semifinals

  Hampton at John Handley, 7 p.m.

  E.C. Glass at Atlee, 7 p.m.

Friday, March 14

At Siegel Center, Richmond

Championship

  Semifinal winners, 8 p.m.

CLASS 3 BOYS

Tuesday, March 4

Quarterfinals

  Hopewell 68, William Monroe 39

  Meridian 51, New Kent 45

  Spotswood 71, Carroll County 52

  Northside 55, Western Albemarle 33

Friday, March 7

Semifinals

  Meridian at Hopewell, 7 p.m.

  Northside at Spotswood, 7:45 p.m.

Saturday, March 15

At Siegel Center, Richmond

Championship

  Semifinal winners, 1 p.m.

CLASS 2 BOYS

Tuesday, March 4

Quarterfinals

  John Marshall 97, Central (Woodstock) 46

  Luray 69, Greensville 63, OT

  Floyd County 57, Virginia High 52, OT

  Graham 66, Nelson County 51

Friday, March 7

Semifinals

  Luray vs. John Marshall, at Huguenot H.S., 8 p.m.

  Graham at Floyd County, Radford University, 7 p.m.

Thursday, March 13

At Siegel Center, Richmond

Championship

  Semifinal winners, 8 p.m.

CLASS 1 BOYS

Tuesday, March 4

Quarterfinals

  Lancaster 77, Altavista 45

  Franklin 60, Northumberland 54

  George Wythe 64, Chilhowie 32

  Patrick Henry (Emory) 84, Parry McCluer 60

Friday, March 7

Semifinals

  Franklin at Lancaster, 7 p.m.

  Patrick Henry (Emory) at George Wythe, at Pulaski County H.S., 1 p.m.

Friday, March 14

At Siegel Center, Richmond

Championship

  Semifinal winners, 2:30 p.m.

*****

CLASS 6 GIRLS

Tuesday, March 4

Quarterfinals

  West Potomac 48, Langley 37

  Osbourn Park 66, Glen Allen 38

  Manchester 55, Gainesville 35

  James Robinson 44, Oakton 38

Friday, March 7

Semifinals

  West Potomac at Osbourn Park, 6 p.m.

  James Robinson at Manchester, 7 p.m.

Saturday, March 15

At Siegel Center, Richmond

Championship

  Semifinal winners, 4:30 p.m.

CLASS 5 GIRLS

Tuesday, March 4

Quarterfinals

  Princess Anne 84, King’s Fork 37

  Menchville 57, Floyd Kellam 54

  L.C. Bird 53, Lightridge 45

  William Fleming 45 Potomac Falls 25

Friday, March 7

Semifinals

  Menchville vs. Princess Anne, at Ocean Lakes H.S., 5:30 p.m.

  William Fleming at L.C. Bird, 6 p.m.

Thursday, March 13

At Siegel Center, Richmond

Championship

  Semifinal winners, 12:30 p.m.

CLASS 4 GIRLS

Tuesday, March 4

Quarterfinals

  Salem 59, Woodgrove 49

  Manor 67, Monacan 65

  Heritage (Leesburg) 72, Charlottesville 37

  Hampton 64, Henrico 51

Friday, March 7

Semifinals

  Manor at Salem, 7 p.m.

  Hampton at Heritage (Leesburg), 7 p.m.

Friday, March 14

At Siegel Center, Richmond

Championship

  Semifinal winners, 6 p.m.

CLASS 3 GIRLS

Tuesday, March 4

Quarterfinals

  Grafton 41, Brentsville 29

  James Monroe 94, Hopewell 70

  Spotswood 47, Staunton River 44

  Lord Botetourt 55, Western Albemarle 24

Friday, March 7

Semifinals

  James Monroe at Grafton, 7 p.m.

  Lord Botetourt at Spotswood, 6 p.m.

Saturday, March 15

At Siegel Center, Richmond

Championship

  Semifinal winners, 11 a.m.

CLASS 2 GIRLS

Tuesday, March 4

Quarterfinals

  John Marshall 62, Stuarts Draft 51

  Clarke County 81, Prince Edward County 52

  Ridgeview 65, Liberty (Bedford) 47

  Central (Wise) 83, James River (Buchanan) 28

Friday, March 7

Semifinals

  Clarke County vs. John Marshall, at Huguenot H.S., 6 p.m.

  Ridgeview at Central (Wise), at UVa-Wise, 7 p.m.

Thursday, March 13

At Siegel Center, Richmond

Championship

  Semifinal winners, 6 p.m.

CLASS 1 GIRLS

Tuesday, March 4

Quarterfinals

  Brunswick 48, Westmoreland 41

  Buffalo Gap 71, Colonial Beach 19

  George Wythe 54, J.I. Burton 47

  Honaker 43, Fort Chiswell 34

Friday, March 7

Semifinals

  Brunswick at Buffalo Gap, 7 p.m.

  Honaker at George Wythe, at Pulaski County H.S., 6 p.m.

Friday, March 14

At Siegel Center, Richmond

Championship

  Semifinal winners, 12:30 p.m.

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