rawdog

Sunday brought on another summer afternoon in March.

High temperatures included 88 degrees at Danville, 87 at Lynchburg, 87 at Martinsville, 86 at Roanoke, and darn near the second 90-degree reading of March at South Boston, reaching 89.

These are close to normal high temperatures for mid- to late July, and similar to another heat surge 11 days earlier that was followed the next day by fairly widespread snowfall.

This past Sunday’s heat wasn’t followed by snow, but some locations did drop below the freezing mark by Tuesday morning.

We’ll be back to 70s and 80s highs on Thursday, and after some Friday showers and perhaps a few thunderstorms, it could well be below freezing again by Sunday morning, before next week warms up.

Edge of the heat dome

Virginia has been on the eastern fringe of an extreme “heat dome” high pressure system that is rewriting March heat records in much of the western, central and southern U.S., such an intense and expansive area of heat that this March appears almost certain to be the warmest on record in the contiguous 48 states.

Occasionally, this heat dome has expanded eastward far enough to pull Virginia into the heat wave, but we are also just far enough east that cold fronts have been pulled around the high from the north to bring short but sharp shots of cold and a few cooler days.

Overall, however, the hot spells are overwhelming the cold snaps, and this March is poised to be one of the warmest on record for much of our region.

If the month had ended Tuesday, it would rank as tied for fourth warmest March on record at Danville, fifth warmest on record at Roanoke, seventh warmest at Lynchburg, and tied for ninth warmest at Blacksburg, each 7 to 9 degrees above normal.

Even with some up-and-down rolling between cool days and warm ones, the last week of the month will likely not have enough chill to pull this March below being in the top 10 for warmth at these sites with over a century of official weather records.

And April looks like it will begin with more of the western heat dome starting to get shoved eastward toward us, as the pattern begins to shift to one with a western trough of low pressure that may ramp up the spring storms in the central U.S.

Historic 80s and 90s

There have been a lot of 90s and even 100-plus temperatures unusually early west of the Mississippi, with at least one instance of 90 degrees in our region.

South Boston poked 90 degrees on March 11 — officially recorded as March 12 because of the 8 a.m. to 8 a.m. EDT cycle of the co-op weather station, which is different than the midnight to midnight cycle of major climate stations. (A somewhat frustrating subject for another day.)

Either way, recorded either as March 11 or March 12, South Boston’s 90-degree high this month appears to be earliest on the calendar any official weather station in all of Cardinal News’ Southwest and Southside Virginia coverage area has reached the 90-degree mark, edging out Danville hitting 91 on March 13, 1990.

In fact, that appears to be only the 12^th time any official weather station in our region has recorded 90 degrees or higher on any date in March.

Danville has hit 90 in March on two other occasions, 91 on March 17, 1945, and 90 on March 31, 1985.

Lynchburg has hit 90 in March three times — all of them in 1907, before the start of data at any of the other stations that have had 90s in March. Those happened on March 22, March 23 and March 29, the latter being 92 degrees, apparently the hottest March day in official data for any location in our region.

The John H. Kerr Dam in Mecklenburg County has hit 90 four times in March, never earlier than March 17, in 1985, 2007, 2016, and 2023.

Roanoke’s hottest March day was a 90-degree high on March 19, 1945. The Star City’s high hit 87 on March 11 this year, the day before a tenth of an inch of snow, apparently the only time a temperature in the 80s and measurable snow have occurred on consecutive days at least as far back as 1912.

Cut 10 degrees off the bar and consider 80-plus temperatures, and this has still been a remarkable month of warmth.

Danville has already had six days at or above 80 degrees, which is the most in March since 2007 and tied for third most in over a century of record. Lynchburg, Roanoke and Martinsville have gone above 80 five times, among the top five for 80-degree days in March.

Even Abingdon has had three days above 80, the most in March since 1998 and third most since its records began in 1969.

After another cooldown this weekend, it appears there may be more premature sizzle on the way as March shifts to April.

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.  

To submit a photo, send it to weather@cardinalnews.org or tweet it to @CardinalNewsVa or @KevinMyattWx. Please identify the location and date of the photo with each submission.

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The post Summer beating out winter to make March one of warmest on record appeared first on Cardinal News.

Roanoke City Manager Valmarie Turner and city finance staff this week proposed a budget to the city council that included major cuts to staff, programming and maintenance.

Turner on Monday proposed a balanced budget of $421.5 million, which is a little over a 3% increase from the year before. 

Fiscal year 2027 is expected to be the first year in recent history where expenditures outpace revenues, according to Turner’s presentation. 

The proposed budget is a preliminary spending plan. The council did not take a vote on Monday, and the budget could change before final approval in May, as the General Assembly has not settled on its final budget yet. The state’s spending plan could affect local budgets depending on how it allocates money for programs.

A city spokesperson said Tuesday evening that city officials were not yet able to answer a list of questions about the budget proposal emailed by Cardinal News on Monday evening. 

The following are a few of the many things to keep an eye on this budget season, as Turner and the finance staff balance an $18.9 million gap.

1. Revenue growth, while still positive, has slowed down significantly when compared to the past six years.

While the city’s revenue is still growing year over year, the rate at which it’s growing is expected to significantly slow down this year.

Roanoke showed strong revenue growth post-pandemic, with an increase of $62 million across in all tax categories between fiscal year 2021 and fiscal year 2025, said Trinity Kaseke, the city’s budget manager.

In the upcoming fiscal year, the city expects its smallest revenue increase in the last six years, at $6.9 million.

Roanoke has seen its real estate valuations rise over the last four years, with real estate tax assessed growth averaging 8.85% between 2022 and 2025.

This year, the assessed value percentage change was 6.55%. 

The current tax rate is $1.22 per $100 of valuation, which has not changed since 2015. 

Councilman Peter Volosin asked finance staff during Monday’s meeting why the city is still having to make cuts after seeing such high tax revenues in recent years. In fiscal year 2026, the city collected over $130 million in real estate taxes. In fiscal year 2027, the city expects that to increase by a little less than $10 million.

Turner said this is because each budget season, she starts with the base budget from the year before. Anything new needs to come out of increased revenue, she said.

2. The city expects to issue three years’ worth of debt in one year.

The city will issue about three years’ worth of debt — $79 million — in one year, Tanya Catron, the city’s capital improvement finance manager, said during Monday’s meeting.

In a statement emailed to Cardinal News, the city said the debt is higher than usual because $57.5 million in short-term financing needs to be converted into long-term financing. This debt was secured in 2024 to “fast-track” capital projects, the city said.

Catron said the debt was supposed to be issued previously, but due to staff turnover, that never happened. City officials did not answer emailed questions about the staff turnover or the debt.

“The projects needed to start, right, they had been approved. So fast forward, we have to basically have a larger-than-normal bond issuance to cover all those projects,” she said. 

Catron said the city should have set aside more money for future debt service in anticipation of having to permanently finance its bond anticipation notes. That didn’t happen, Turner said at the meeting.

The city council must approve the debt issuances through a public hearing, which the city expects to happen over the summer. 

3. Park maintenance funding is zeroed out in the budget after fiscal year 2027.

The city set aside $1.2 million in the budget for parks maintenance in the upcoming fiscal year. But according to the recommended capital improvement program, after the upcoming fiscal year, no money will be allocated to park maintenance through FY2031.

“It feels to me like we disproportionately cut parks and recreation, and we’ve done that again and again and again over the years, we chronically underfund it,” Councilman Terry McGuire said during the meeting. “It’s really problematic that so many of our parks and rec projects are being zeroed out.”

The council also learned Monday that the grass mowing schedule might also be cut in half, and multiple parks and recreation projects, including renovations to the Fishburn Mansion, were removed from the capital improvement plan. Councilwoman Evelyn Powers suggested that residents of the city’s adult detention center could cut the grass.

“I’m going to have a really hard time supporting some of this,” McGuire said of the cuts.

4. The city plans to cut about 30 positions, and freeze at least 80 more.

The city will cut 29 positions altogether, and freeze another 80 to 95 positions. It’s unclear how many of those positions are currently vacant at this point, as the city did not answer that emailed question.

Turner said because the city already has a high level of vacancies, layoffs aren’t being considered yet. “But we’re going to have to manage this budget … every single month, which may require us to shift every single month.”

The city plans to cut more than $600,000 from fleet management, which would cover rising fleet management and fuel costs.

Volosin asked what happens if fuel prices continue to rise as they have in recent weeks.

Turner said in that case, and in other cases of unexpected rises in expenditures, she would have to look at additional staffing cuts.

5. More than $50 million in projects have been removed from the capital improvement plan.

The proposed budget removes more than $50 million in projects from the city’s capital improvement plan.

These projects include upgrading Fire Station #2; expanding the Belmont Library; renovating the Fallon Park Pool, the downtown pedestrian bridge and the Martin Luther King Jr. pedestrian bridge; rehabilitating the Mill Mountain Star; and other projects.

The city also removed more than $5 million in items from its base budget, or the budget from the previous year that finance staff begins with each budget season.

These include cutting almost $300,000 from the Greater Roanoke Transit Company subsidy, cutting library program activities such as the summer reading program, and closing the Grandin location for the Youth Development team, which provides afterschool programming at three of the city’s recreation centers.

6. Public safety sees about $1.6 million in unfunded items in the new budget.

Public safety will not go untouched in this budget, even as Turner has said that it’s a top priority for the city. 

Police, fire-EMS and the sheriff’s office would be among those agencies affected by the 29 proposed job cuts. Public safety departments also are expected to lose funding for overtime and temporary wages.

The sheriff’s office will lose more than $300,000 that would have increased its Virginia Retirement System multiplier, which determines an employee’s retirement benefits, to match surrounding localities.

7. The school division, like most other corners of the city, is facing cuts.

Funding for the public school division represents 26% of the city’s total operating budget, or about $108 million in the coming fiscal year, according to Monday’s presentation.

Over the past few years, changes to how the city funds its schools have led to the school division approving a preliminary budget that includes about $16 million in cuts to staff, programming, transportation and maintenance.

In January, the city council voted to change its school funding policy. While the division is still likely to receive more money this upcoming year than it did the last year, it anticipates getting less than what was expected with the earlier formula that had been in place since 2011.

The city also changed the way the school division handles its fund balance. In the past, the division held onto that money, with the understanding that it could use it as a “rainy day fund.”

At the end of the fiscal year 2024, the school division had a general fund balance, or surplus funding, of almost $23 million.

The city council approved for RCPS to use a little over $10 million of that surplus to balance the current fiscal year budget.

Tensions are high between the school board and the city council, and Mayor Joe Cobb addressed these tensions during a joint school board and city council meeting on March 16.

“I don’t always get it right, I get frustrated, we all get frustrated, and we sometimes say things that we wish we hadn’t said. So for that I apologize,” Cobb said. “But I also want to thank you all for our willingness to be here together, to work through this, and to map out some steps we can take toward reconciliation.”

The post 7 things to watch as Roanoke begins discussions of its proposed budget appeared first on Cardinal News.

Roanoke City Manager Valmarie Turner and city finance staff this week proposed a budget to the city council that included major cuts to staff, programming and maintenance.

Turner on Monday proposed a balanced budget of $421.5 million, which is a little over a 3% increase from the year before. 

Fiscal year 2027 is expected to be the first year in recent history where expenditures outpace revenues, according to Turner’s presentation. 

The proposed budget is a preliminary spending plan. The council did not take a vote on Monday, and the budget could change before final approval in May, as the General Assembly has not settled on its final budget yet. The state’s spending plan could affect local budgets depending on how it allocates money for programs.

A city spokesperson said Tuesday evening that city officials were not yet able to answer a list of questions about the budget proposal emailed by Cardinal News on Monday evening. 

The following are a few of the many things to keep an eye on this budget season, as Turner and the finance staff balance an $18.9 million gap.

1. Revenue growth, while still positive, has slowed down significantly when compared to the past six years.

While the city’s revenue is still growing year over year, the rate at which it’s growing is expected to significantly slow down this year.

Roanoke showed strong revenue growth post-pandemic, with an increase of $62 million across in all tax categories between fiscal year 2021 and fiscal year 2025, said Trinity Kaseke, the city’s budget manager.

In the upcoming fiscal year, the city expects its smallest revenue increase in the last six years, at $6.9 million.

Roanoke has seen its real estate valuations rise over the last four years, with real estate tax assessed growth averaging 8.85% between 2022 and 2025.

This year, the assessed value percentage change was 6.55%. 

The current tax rate is $1.22 per $100 of valuation, which has not changed since 2015. 

Councilman Peter Volosin asked finance staff during Monday’s meeting why the city is still having to make cuts after seeing such high tax revenues in recent years. In fiscal year 2026, the city collected over $130 million in real estate taxes. In fiscal year 2027, the city expects that to increase by a little less than $10 million.

Turner said this is because each budget season, she starts with the base budget from the year before. Anything new needs to come out of increased revenue, she said.

2. The city expects to issue three years’ worth of debt in one year.

The city will issue about three years’ worth of debt — $79 million — in one year, Tanya Catron, the city’s capital improvement finance manager, said during Monday’s meeting.

In a statement emailed to Cardinal News, the city said the debt is higher than usual because $57.5 million in short-term financing needs to be converted into long-term financing. This debt was secured in 2024 to “fast-track” capital projects, the city said.

Catron said the debt was supposed to be issued previously, but due to staff turnover, that never happened. City officials did not answer emailed questions about the staff turnover or the debt.

“The projects needed to start, right, they had been approved. So fast forward, we have to basically have a larger-than-normal bond issuance to cover all those projects,” she said. 

Catron said the city should have set aside more money for future debt service in anticipation of having to permanently finance its bond anticipation notes. That didn’t happen, Turner said at the meeting.

The city council must approve the debt issuances through a public hearing, which the city expects to happen over the summer. 

3. Park maintenance funding is zeroed out in the budget after fiscal year 2027.

The city set aside $1.2 million in the budget for parks maintenance in the upcoming fiscal year. But according to the recommended capital improvement program, after the upcoming fiscal year, no money will be allocated to park maintenance through FY2031.

“It feels to me like we disproportionately cut parks and recreation, and we’ve done that again and again and again over the years, we chronically underfund it,” Councilman Terry McGuire said during the meeting. “It’s really problematic that so many of our parks and rec projects are being zeroed out.”

The council also learned Monday that the grass mowing schedule might also be cut in half, and multiple parks and recreation projects, including renovations to the Fishburn Mansion, were removed from the capital improvement plan. Councilwoman Evelyn Powers suggested that residents of the city’s adult detention center could cut the grass.

“I’m going to have a really hard time supporting some of this,” McGuire said of the cuts.

4. The city plans to cut about 30 positions, and freeze at least 80 more.

The city will cut 29 positions altogether, and freeze another 80 to 95 positions. It’s unclear how many of those positions are currently vacant at this point, as the city did not answer that emailed question.

Turner said because the city already has a high level of vacancies, layoffs aren’t being considered yet. “But we’re going to have to manage this budget … every single month, which may require us to shift every single month.”

The city plans to cut more than $600,000 from fleet management, which would cover rising fleet management and fuel costs.

Volosin asked what happens if fuel prices continue to rise as they have in recent weeks.

Turner said in that case, and in other cases of unexpected rises in expenditures, she would have to look at additional staffing cuts.

5. More than $50 million in projects have been removed from the capital improvement plan.

The proposed budget removes more than $50 million in projects from the city’s capital improvement plan.

These projects include upgrading Fire Station #2; expanding the Belmont Library; renovating the Fallon Park Pool, the downtown pedestrian bridge and the Martin Luther King Jr. pedestrian bridge; rehabilitating the Mill Mountain Star; and other projects.

The city also removed more than $5 million in items from its base budget, or the budget from the previous year that finance staff begins with each budget season.

These include cutting almost $300,000 from the Greater Roanoke Transit Company subsidy, cutting library program activities such as the summer reading program, and closing the Grandin location for the Youth Development team, which provides afterschool programming at three of the city’s recreation centers.

6. Public safety sees about $1.6 million in unfunded items in the new budget.

Public safety will not go untouched in this budget, even as Turner has said that it’s a top priority for the city. 

Police, fire-EMS and the sheriff’s office would be among those agencies affected by the 29 proposed job cuts. Public safety departments also are expected to lose funding for overtime and temporary wages.

The sheriff’s office will lose more than $300,000 that would have increased its Virginia Retirement System multiplier, which determines an employee’s retirement benefits, to match surrounding localities.

7. The school division, like most other corners of the city, is facing cuts.

Funding for the public school division represents 26% of the city’s total operating budget, or about $108 million in the coming fiscal year, according to Monday’s presentation.

Over the past few years, changes to how the city funds its schools have led to the school division approving a preliminary budget that includes about $16 million in cuts to staff, programming, transportation and maintenance.

In January, the city council voted to change its school funding policy. While the division is still likely to receive more money this upcoming year than it did the last year, it anticipates getting less than what was expected with the earlier formula that had been in place since 2011.

The city also changed the way the school division handles its fund balance. In the past, the division held onto that money, with the understanding that it could use it as a “rainy day fund.”

At the end of the fiscal year 2024, the school division had a general fund balance, or surplus funding, of almost $23 million.

The city council approved for RCPS to use a little over $10 million of that surplus to balance the current fiscal year budget.

Tensions are high between the school board and the city council, and Mayor Joe Cobb addressed these tensions during a joint school board and city council meeting on March 16.

“I don’t always get it right, I get frustrated, we all get frustrated, and we sometimes say things that we wish we hadn’t said. So for that I apologize,” Cobb said. “But I also want to thank you all for our willingness to be here together, to work through this, and to map out some steps we can take toward reconciliation.”

The post 7 things to watch as Roanoke begins discussions of its proposed budget appeared first on Cardinal News.

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble — well, actually, I don’t mind, because some bubbles do need bursting. 

Some on the right are celebrating, and some on the left are groaning, after the U.S. Supreme Court this week seemed to take a dim view of states — such as Virginia — that allow mail ballots to be counted even if they arrive after Election Day.

This may be a great principle to those on both sides, just in different ways, but here’s some inconvenient math: There aren’t really enough of these ballots to matter. 

In theory, they could in a very close election, of course, and those on each side can hold to their principles that either a) counting these post-election ballots feels very sketchy (the conservative view) or b) disallowing them feels like disenfranchising some voters (the liberal view).

Then there’s this numerical view:

In last year’s governor’s race, Virginia saw 3,433,340 votes cast in the governor’s race, more than ever before.

Of those, 29,794 were mail ballots that were mailed before the deadline on Election Day but didn’t arrive until after the election. That’s 0.8% of the total. 

Those who find this practice offensive would prefer the number to be 0.00%, but in practical terms, that 0.8% did not come anywhere close to making a difference. That small number ought to be reassuring to both sides: For conservatives who don’t like post-election ballots, they don’t matter in the big scheme of things; for liberals who worry that the Supreme Court is about to outlaw this practice, well, these votes don’t seem to matter in the big scheme of things. This legal fight is more about principle than practice, but the impact either way seems pretty negligible.

The closest House of Delegates race in Virginia last fall was in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County, where Republican incumbent Tony Wilt held off a stiff challenge by Democrat Andrew Payton in House District 34.

That race saw 28,927 votes cast. Of those, 90 were post-election ballots — 0.3%, lower than the statewide percentage.

Here’s where some politics do come in: Those who cast mail ballots are overwhelmingly Democratic, so these late-arriving ballots (which aren’t really late-arriving, they’re still on time) do skew quite blue. In that Wilt-Payton race, those 90 post-election ballots broke 69 for Payton, 21 for Wilt. That was a pickup for Payton of 48 votes — but it didn’t make a difference even in the closest race in the state. Wilt still won by 257 votes. 

I can’t rule out that there’s some local race in Virginia where post-election mail ballots have made the difference, but they haven’t in any statewide or legislative election. If someone knows of a local election where they’d have, please let me know.

Allowing mail ballots to be counted as long as they’re postmarked in time, even if they arrive after Election Day, isn’t necessarily a liberal idea: The state at the center of the Supreme Court argument is Mississippi, which probably hasn’t done anything liberal in quite some time. Texas is another.

Virginia law allows for properly postmarked mail ballots if they arrive by noon on the Friday after Election Day, although a bill pending before Gov. Abigail Spanberger would extend that to 5 p.m. California allows a week. Alaska and Maryland allow up to 10 days. (Plus Guam and the Virgin Islands. How slow is the mail on Guam and the Virgin Islands?) Illinois allows up to 14 days. (You can find a full list here.)

The philosophical reason for allowing these ballots is the same as your tax return: The law doesn’t require the Internal Revenue Service to have your tax return in hand by April 15, just that you have to mail it by then. Why should we treat elections differently?

That’s balanced against history and some of the darker impulses of human nature to cheat: the 1948 Democratic Senate primary in Texas, where at first Lyndon Johnson appeared to have lost narrowly but then won when 202 votes were mysteriously “discovered” in one county. Those votes were in a box, not a mailbox, but the fear remains the same. We’re accustomed to election nights providing finality to an election, and so having a question mark remain for several days makes some people queasy — and suspicious.

This legal battle of counting deadlines on mail ballots is really just a byproduct of the expansion of voting by mail. In Virginia, we’ve now had mail voting for five years, starting in 2021. Over those five years, the percentage of Virginians who vote by mail has been remarkably consistent — from a low of 9.9% in the 2022 midterms to a high of 11.1% in both the 2023 legislative and local elections and the 2024 presidential and congressional elections. 

When 1 in 10 voters prefer to mail in their ballots, that’s not an insignificant number. Now, remember what I said about how Democrats prefer mail voting? Here are the numbers.

Last fall, 14.2% of the voters in bright blue Fairfax County voted by mail. In Alexandria, 13.5% did. In Arlington County, 12.9%. 

However, in the strongest Republican localities in the state — in Southwest Virginia — mail voting barely registered. In Scott County, 3.9% of the ballots were cast by mail. In Lee County, just 4.1%. In Buchanan and Russell counties, 4.5%.

Perhaps some Republicans think that if they could restrict or even abolish mail voting (as President Donald Trump would like to do, even though he votes by mail), they could depress the Democratic vote somewhat. Maybe so, but that’s actually not in the party’s best interests. The party that needs mail voting most is the Republican Party.

The counties with the lowest turnout are traditionally Republican counties — and not just any Republican counties, but the strongest ones in the state. These are also the counties with the lowest percentage of voters voting by mail. If Republicans want to be competitive in Virginia, they may need better candidates and better campaign messages — but they definitely need better turnout from their strongest counties. One easy way to do that (well, easy in theory) is to persuade more people to vote by mail.

Let’s look at some numbers. (Yes, I love numbers.) 

Last year in Scott County, 83% of the voters cast ballots for the Republican candidate for governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, and that was actually on the low side. In the lieutenant governor’s race, the Republican percentage rose to 84.14% and hit 85.77% in the attorney general’s race. 

However, only 45.8% of the county’s voters bothered to take part in the election. That was below the state average of 54.9%, which was pulled up by some Democratic-voting places such as Albemarle County, where 66.2% voted.

Scott County, as we’ve seen, also had the state’s lowest figures on mail-in ballots. 

Scott County didn’t even have the lowest overall turnout in the state. That was in Buchanan County, where voter turnout was just 37.8% in a county that voted 81.91% to 83.98% for candidates on the Republican ticket. If a party has a locality where they know they can run up a score of 80% or more, they need to maximize their vote there, and Republicans aren’t. Here’s one way to look at how inefficient Republicans are with their base in Southwest Virginia. Bright red Buchanan County is slightly bigger than bright blue Falls Church. In Falls Church last fall, though, the voter turnout was 64.5% to Buchanan’s 37.8%. In practical terms, 7,600 people cast ballots in Falls Church while only 5,413 did in Buchanan. Put another way, Falls Church delivered 6,407 votes for Abigail Spanberger while Buchanan contributed 4,434 to to Winsome Earle-Sears’ tally. If people in Buchanan County voted at the same rate as those in Falls Church, Buchanan could have delivered about 2,000 more votes to the Republican cause. That wouldn’t have been enough to change the outcome, but the point is that Republicans are leaving a lot of votes uncast in Southwest Virginia.

If Republicans want to win more statewide elections, they somehow need to persuade more rural voters — especially in Southwest Virginia — to start voting. The ease of mail voting would seem to be one way to do that.  In Falls Church last year 867 people voted by mail, 800 of them for Spanberger, a share of 92.2%. In Buchanan County, just 244 people voted by mail, 48.7% for Spanberger in a county where overall she could only muster 17.9%. What that tells me is that Republicans are reluctant to vote by mail, which is their right, but that because so few people in Buchanan County vote anyway, Republicans would be wise to invest in a vote-by-mail push to increase turnout.

If the U.S. Supreme Court eventually nixes counting mail ballots that arrive after the deadline, Republicans can claim a victory in principle, but Democrats won’t have lost anything in practice. If Republicans want to claim more victories at the ballot box in Virginia, though, they need more mail voting. Just make sure those ballots get there on time. 

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The post U.S. Supreme Court may nix counting mail ballots after Election Day. The Virginia math says it doesn’t matter. appeared first on Cardinal News.

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble — well, actually, I don’t mind, because some bubbles do need bursting. 

Some on the right are celebrating, and some on the left are groaning, after the U.S. Supreme Court this week seemed to take a dim view of states — such as Virginia — that allow mail ballots to be counted even if they arrive after Election Day.

This may be a great principle to those on both sides, just in different ways, but here’s some inconvenient math: There aren’t really enough of these ballots to matter. 

In theory, they could in a very close election, of course, and those on each side can hold to their principles that either a) counting these post-election ballots feels very sketchy (the conservative view) or b) disallowing them feels like disenfranchising some voters (the liberal view).

Then there’s this numerical view:

In last year’s governor’s race, Virginia saw 3,433,340 votes cast in the governor’s race, more than ever before.

Of those, 29,794 were mail ballots that were mailed before the deadline on Election Day but didn’t arrive until after the election. That’s 0.08% of the total. 

Those who find this practice offensive would prefer the number to be 0.00%, but in practical terms, that 0.08% did not come anywhere close to making a difference. That small number ought to be reassuring to both sides: For conservatives who don’t like post-election ballots, they don’t matter in the big scheme of things; for liberals who worry that the Supreme Court is about to outlaw this practice, well, these votes don’t seem to matter in the big scheme of things. This legal fight is more about principle than practice, but the impact either way seems pretty negligible.

The closest House of Delegates race in Virginia last fall was in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County, where Republican incumbent Tony Wilt held off a stiff challenge by Democrat Andrew Payton in House District 34.

That race saw 28,927 votes cast. Of those, 90 were post-election ballots — 0.03%, lower than the statewide percentage.

Here’s where some politics do come in: Those who cast mail ballots are overwhelmingly Democratic, so these late-arriving ballots (which aren’t really late-arriving, they’re still on time) do skew quite blue. In that Wilt-Payton race, those 90 post-election ballots broke 69 for Payton, 21 for Wilt. That was a pickup for Payton of 48 votes — but it didn’t make a difference even in the closest race in the state. Wilt still won by 257 votes. 

I can’t rule out that there’s some local race in Virginia where post-election mail ballots have made the difference, but they haven’t in any statewide or legislative election. If someone knows of a local election where they’d have, please let me know.

Allowing mail ballots to be counted as long as they’re postmarked in time, even if they arrive after Election Day, isn’t necessarily a liberal idea: The state at the center of the Supreme Court argument is Mississippi, which probably hasn’t done anything liberal in quite some time. Texas is another.

Virginia law allows for properly postmarked mail ballots if they arrive by noon on the Friday after Election Day, although a bill pending before Gov. Abigail Spanberger would extend that to 5 p.m. California allows a week. Alaska and Maryland allow up to 10 days. (Plus Guam and the Virgin Islands. How slow is the mail on Guam and the Virgin Islands?) Illinois allows up to 14 days. (You can find a full list here.)

The philosophical reason for allowing these ballots is the same as your tax return: The law doesn’t require the Internal Revenue Service to have your tax return in hand by April 15, just that you have to mail it by then. Why should we treat elections differently?

That’s balanced against history and some of the darker impulses of human nature to cheat: the 1948 Democratic Senate primary in Texas, where at first Lyndon Johnson appeared to have lost narrowly but then won when 202 votes were mysteriously “discovered” in one county. Those votes were in a box, not a mailbox, but the fear remains the same. We’re accustomed to election nights providing finality to an election, and so having a question mark remain for several days makes some people queasy — and suspicious.

This legal battle of counting deadlines on mail ballots is really just a byproduct of the expansion of voting by mail. In Virginia, we’ve now had mail voting for five years, starting in 2021. Over those five years, the percentage of Virginians who vote by mail has been remarkably consistent — from a low of 9.9% in the 2022 midterms to a high of 11.1% in both the 2023 legislative and local elections and the 2024 presidential and congressional elections. 

When 1 in 10 voters prefer to mail in their ballots, that’s not an insignificant number. Now, remember what I said about how Democrats prefer mail voting? Here are the numbers.

Last fall, 14.2% of the voters in bright blue Fairfax County voted by mail. In Alexandria, 13.5% did. In Arlington County, 12.9%. 

However, in the strongest Republican localities in the state — in Southwest Virginia — mail voting barely registered. In Scott County, 3.9% of the ballots were cast by mail. In Lee County, just 4.1%. In Buchanan and Russell counties, 4.5%.

Perhaps some Republicans think that if they could restrict or even abolish mail voting (as President Donald Trump would like to do, even though he votes by mail), they could depress the Democratic vote somewhat. Maybe so, but that’s actually not in the party’s best interests. The party that needs mail voting most is the Republican Party.

The counties with the lowest turnout are traditionally Republican counties — and not just any Republican counties, but the strongest ones in the state. These are also the counties with the lowest percentage of voters voting by mail. If Republicans want to be competitive in Virginia, they may need better candidates and better campaign messages — but they definitely need better turnout from their strongest counties. One easy way to do that (well, easy in theory) is to persuade more people to vote by mail.

Let’s look at some numbers. (Yes, I love numbers.) 

Last year in Scott County, 83% of the voters cast ballots for the Republican candidate for governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, and that was actually on the low side. In the lieutenant governor’s race, the Republican percentage rose to 84.14% and hit 85.77% in the attorney general’s race. 

However, only 45.8% of the county’s voters bothered to take part in the election. That was below the state average of 54.9%, which was pulled up by some Democratic-voting places such as Albemarle County, where 66.2% voted.

Scott County, as we’ve seen, also had the state’s lowest figures on mail-in ballots. 

Scott County didn’t even have the lowest overall turnout in the state. That was in Buchanan County, where voter turnout was just 37.8% in a county that voted 81.91% to 83.98% for candidates on the Republican ticket. If a party has a locality where they know they can run up a score of 80% or more, they need to maximize their vote there, and Republicans aren’t. Here’s one way to look at how inefficient Republicans are with their base in Southwest Virginia. Bright red Buchanan County is slightly bigger than bright blue Falls Church. In Falls Church last fall, though, the voter turnout was 64.5% to Buchanan’s 37.8%. In practical terms, 7,600 people cast ballots in Falls Church while only 5,413 did in Buchanan. Put another way, Falls Church delivered 6,407 votes for Abigail Spanberger while Buchanan contributed 4,434 to to Winsome Earle-Sears’ tally. It people in Buchanan County voted at the same rate as those in Falls Church, Buchanan could have delivered about 2,000 more votes to the Republican cause. That wouldn’t have been enough to change the outcome, but the point is that Republicans are leaving a lot of votes uncast in Southwest Virginia.

If Republicans want to win more statewide elections, they somehow need to persuade more rural voters — especially in Southwest Virginia — to start voting. The ease of mail voting would seem to be one way to do that.  In Falls Church last year 867 people voted by mail, 800 of them for Spanberger, a share of 92.2%. In Buchanan County, just 244 people voted by mail, 48.7% for Spanberger in a county where overall she could only muster 17.9%. What that tells me is that Republicans are reluctant to vote by mail, which is their right, but that because so few people in Buchanan County vote anyway, Republicans would be wise to invest in a vote-by-mail push to increase turnout.

If the U.S. Supreme Court eventually nixes counting mail ballots that arrive after the deadline, Republicans can claim a victory in principle, but Democrats won’t have lost anything in practice. If Republicans want to claim more victories at the ballot box in Virginia, though, they need more mail voting. Just make sure those ballots get there on time. 

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I hate to burst anyone’s bubble — well, actually, I don’t mind, because some bubbles do need bursting. 

Some on the right are celebrating, and some on the left are groaning, after the U.S. Supreme Court this week seemed to take a dim view of states — such as Virginia — that allow mail ballots to be counted even if they arrive after Election Day.

This may be a great principle to those on both sides, just in different ways, but here’s some inconvenient math: There aren’t really enough of these ballots to matter. 

In theory, they could in a very close election, of course, and those on each side can hold to their principles that either a) counting these post-election ballots feels very sketchy (the conservative view) or b) disallowing them feels like disenfranchising some voters (the liberal view).

Then there’s this numerical view:

In last year’s governor’s race, Virginia saw 3,433,340 votes cast in the governor’s race, more than ever before.

Of those, 29,794 were mail ballots that were mailed before the deadline on Election Day but didn’t arrive until after the election. That’s 0.8% of the total. 

Those who find this practice offensive would prefer the number to be 0.00%, but in practical terms, that 0.8% did not come anywhere close to making a difference. That small number ought to be reassuring to both sides: For conservatives who don’t like post-election ballots, they don’t matter in the big scheme of things; for liberals who worry that the Supreme Court is about to outlaw this practice, well, these votes don’t seem to matter in the big scheme of things. This legal fight is more about principle than practice, but the impact either way seems pretty negligible.

The closest House of Delegates race in Virginia last fall was in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County, where Republican incumbent Tony Wilt held off a stiff challenge by Democrat Andrew Payton in House District 34.

That race saw 28,927 votes cast. Of those, 90 were post-election ballots — 0.3%, lower than the statewide percentage.

Here’s where some politics do come in: Those who cast mail ballots are overwhelmingly Democratic, so these late-arriving ballots (which aren’t really late-arriving, they’re still on time) do skew quite blue. In that Wilt-Payton race, those 90 post-election ballots broke 69 for Payton, 21 for Wilt. That was a pickup for Payton of 48 votes — but it didn’t make a difference even in the closest race in the state. Wilt still won by 257 votes. 

I can’t rule out that there’s some local race in Virginia where post-election mail ballots have made the difference, but they haven’t in any statewide or legislative election. If someone knows of a local election where they’d have, please let me know.

Allowing mail ballots to be counted as long as they’re postmarked in time, even if they arrive after Election Day, isn’t necessarily a liberal idea: The state at the center of the Supreme Court argument is Mississippi, which probably hasn’t done anything liberal in quite some time. Texas is another.

Virginia law allows for properly postmarked mail ballots if they arrive by noon on the Friday after Election Day, although a bill pending before Gov. Abigail Spanberger would extend that to 5 p.m. California allows a week. Alaska and Maryland allow up to 10 days. (Plus Guam and the Virgin Islands. How slow is the mail on Guam and the Virgin Islands?) Illinois allows up to 14 days. (You can find a full list here.)

The philosophical reason for allowing these ballots is the same as your tax return: The law doesn’t require the Internal Revenue Service to have your tax return in hand by April 15, just that you have to mail it by then. Why should we treat elections differently?

That’s balanced against history and some of the darker impulses of human nature to cheat: the 1948 Democratic Senate primary in Texas, where at first Lyndon Johnson appeared to have lost narrowly but then won when 202 votes were mysteriously “discovered” in one county. Those votes were in a box, not a mailbox, but the fear remains the same. We’re accustomed to election nights providing finality to an election, and so having a question mark remain for several days makes some people queasy — and suspicious.

This legal battle of counting deadlines on mail ballots is really just a byproduct of the expansion of voting by mail. In Virginia, we’ve now had mail voting for five years, starting in 2021. Over those five years, the percentage of Virginians who vote by mail has been remarkably consistent — from a low of 9.9% in the 2022 midterms to a high of 11.1% in both the 2023 legislative and local elections and the 2024 presidential and congressional elections. 

When 1 in 10 voters prefer to mail in their ballots, that’s not an insignificant number. Now, remember what I said about how Democrats prefer mail voting? Here are the numbers.

Last fall, 14.2% of the voters in bright blue Fairfax County voted by mail. In Alexandria, 13.5% did. In Arlington County, 12.9%. 

However, in the strongest Republican localities in the state — in Southwest Virginia — mail voting barely registered. In Scott County, 3.9% of the ballots were cast by mail. In Lee County, just 4.1%. In Buchanan and Russell counties, 4.5%.

Perhaps some Republicans think that if they could restrict or even abolish mail voting (as President Donald Trump would like to do, even though he votes by mail), they could depress the Democratic vote somewhat. Maybe so, but that’s actually not in the party’s best interests. The party that needs mail voting most is the Republican Party.

The counties with the lowest turnout are traditionally Republican counties — and not just any Republican counties, but the strongest ones in the state. These are also the counties with the lowest percentage of voters voting by mail. If Republicans want to be competitive in Virginia, they may need better candidates and better campaign messages — but they definitely need better turnout from their strongest counties. One easy way to do that (well, easy in theory) is to persuade more people to vote by mail.

Let’s look at some numbers. (Yes, I love numbers.) 

Last year in Scott County, 83% of the voters cast ballots for the Republican candidate for governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, and that was actually on the low side. In the lieutenant governor’s race, the Republican percentage rose to 84.14% and hit 85.77% in the attorney general’s race. 

However, only 45.8% of the county’s voters bothered to take part in the election. That was below the state average of 54.9%, which was pulled up by some Democratic-voting places such as Albemarle County, where 66.2% voted.

Scott County, as we’ve seen, also had the state’s lowest figures on mail-in ballots. 

Scott County didn’t even have the lowest overall turnout in the state. That was in Buchanan County, where voter turnout was just 37.8% in a county that voted 81.91% to 83.98% for candidates on the Republican ticket. If a party has a locality where they know they can run up a score of 80% or more, they need to maximize their vote there, and Republicans aren’t. Here’s one way to look at how inefficient Republicans are with their base in Southwest Virginia. Bright red Buchanan County is slightly bigger than bright blue Falls Church. In Falls Church last fall, though, the voter turnout was 64.5% to Buchanan’s 37.8%. In practical terms, 7,600 people cast ballots in Falls Church while only 5,413 did in Buchanan. Put another way, Falls Church delivered 6,407 votes for Abigail Spanberger while Buchanan contributed 4,434 to to Winsome Earle-Sears’ tally. If people in Buchanan County voted at the same rate as those in Falls Church, Buchanan could have delivered about 2,000 more votes to the Republican cause. That wouldn’t have been enough to change the outcome, but the point is that Republicans are leaving a lot of votes uncast in Southwest Virginia.

If Republicans want to win more statewide elections, they somehow need to persuade more rural voters — especially in Southwest Virginia — to start voting. The ease of mail voting would seem to be one way to do that.  In Falls Church last year 867 people voted by mail, 800 of them for Spanberger, a share of 92.2%. In Buchanan County, just 244 people voted by mail, 48.7% for Spanberger in a county where overall she could only muster 17.9%. What that tells me is that Republicans are reluctant to vote by mail, which is their right, but that because so few people in Buchanan County vote anyway, Republicans would be wise to invest in a vote-by-mail push to increase turnout.

If the U.S. Supreme Court eventually nixes counting mail ballots that arrive after the deadline, Republicans can claim a victory in principle, but Democrats won’t have lost anything in practice. If Republicans want to claim more victories at the ballot box in Virginia, though, they need more mail voting. Just make sure those ballots get there on time. 

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I hate to burst anyone’s bubble — well, actually, I don’t mind, because some bubbles do need bursting. 

Some on the right are celebrating, and some on the left are groaning, after the U.S. Supreme Court this week seemed to take a dim view of states — such as Virginia — that allow mail ballots to be counted even if they arrive after Election Day.

This may be a great principle to those on both sides, just in different ways, but here’s some inconvenient math: There aren’t really enough of these ballots to matter. 

In theory, they could in a very close election, of course, and those on each side can hold to their principles that either a) counting these post-election ballots feels very sketchy (the conservative view) or b) disallowing them feels like disenfranchising some voters (the liberal view).

Then there’s this numerical view:

In last year’s governor’s race, Virginia saw 3,433,340 votes cast in the governor’s race, more than ever before.

Of those, 29,794 were mail ballots that were mailed before the deadline on Election Day but didn’t arrive until after the election. That’s 0.8% of the total. 

Those who find this practice offensive would prefer the number to be 0.00%, but in practical terms, that 0.8% did not come anywhere close to making a difference. That small number ought to be reassuring to both sides: For conservatives who don’t like post-election ballots, they don’t matter in the big scheme of things; for liberals who worry that the Supreme Court is about to outlaw this practice, well, these votes don’t seem to matter in the big scheme of things. This legal fight is more about principle than practice, but the impact either way seems pretty negligible.

The closest House of Delegates race in Virginia last fall was in Harrisonburg and Rockingham County, where Republican incumbent Tony Wilt held off a stiff challenge by Democrat Andrew Payton in House District 34.

That race saw 28,927 votes cast. Of those, 90 were post-election ballots — 0.3%, lower than the statewide percentage.

Here’s where some politics do come in: Those who cast mail ballots are overwhelmingly Democratic, so these late-arriving ballots (which aren’t really late-arriving, they’re still on time) do skew quite blue. In that Wilt-Payton race, those 90 post-election ballots broke 69 for Payton, 21 for Wilt. That was a pickup for Payton of 48 votes — but it didn’t make a difference even in the closest race in the state. Wilt still won by 257 votes. 

I can’t rule out that there’s some local race in Virginia where post-election mail ballots have made the difference, but they haven’t in any statewide or legislative election. If someone knows of a local election where they’d have, please let me know.

Allowing mail ballots to be counted as long as they’re postmarked in time, even if they arrive after Election Day, isn’t necessarily a liberal idea: The state at the center of the Supreme Court argument is Mississippi, which probably hasn’t done anything liberal in quite some time. Texas is another.

Virginia law allows for properly postmarked mail ballots if they arrive by noon on the Friday after Election Day, although a bill pending before Gov. Abigail Spanberger would extend that to 5 p.m. California allows a week. Alaska and Maryland allow up to 10 days. (Plus Guam and the Virgin Islands. How slow is the mail on Guam and the Virgin Islands?) Illinois allows up to 14 days. (You can find a full list here.)

The philosophical reason for allowing these ballots is the same as your tax return: The law doesn’t require the Internal Revenue Service to have your tax return in hand by April 15, just that you have to mail it by then. Why should we treat elections differently?

That’s balanced against history and some of the darker impulses of human nature to cheat: the 1948 Democratic Senate primary in Texas, where at first Lyndon Johnson appeared to have lost narrowly but then won when 202 votes were mysteriously “discovered” in one county. Those votes were in a box, not a mailbox, but the fear remains the same. We’re accustomed to election nights providing finality to an election, and so having a question mark remain for several days makes some people queasy — and suspicious.

This legal battle of counting deadlines on mail ballots is really just a byproduct of the expansion of voting by mail. In Virginia, we’ve now had mail voting for five years, starting in 2021. Over those five years, the percentage of Virginians who vote by mail has been remarkably consistent — from a low of 9.9% in the 2022 midterms to a high of 11.1% in both the 2023 legislative and local elections and the 2024 presidential and congressional elections. 

When 1 in 10 voters prefer to mail in their ballots, that’s not an insignificant number. Now, remember what I said about how Democrats prefer mail voting? Here are the numbers.

Last fall, 14.2% of the voters in bright blue Fairfax County voted by mail. In Alexandria, 13.5% did. In Arlington County, 12.9%. 

However, in the strongest Republican localities in the state — in Southwest Virginia — mail voting barely registered. In Scott County, 3.9% of the ballots were cast by mail. In Lee County, just 4.1%. In Buchanan and Russell counties, 4.5%.

Perhaps some Republicans think that if they could restrict or even abolish mail voting (as President Donald Trump would like to do, even though he votes by mail), they could depress the Democratic vote somewhat. Maybe so, but that’s actually not in the party’s best interests. The party that needs mail voting most is the Republican Party.

The counties with the lowest turnout are traditionally Republican counties — and not just any Republican counties, but the strongest ones in the state. These are also the counties with the lowest percentage of voters voting by mail. If Republicans want to be competitive in Virginia, they may need better candidates and better campaign messages — but they definitely need better turnout from their strongest counties. One easy way to do that (well, easy in theory) is to persuade more people to vote by mail.

Let’s look at some numbers. (Yes, I love numbers.) 

Last year in Scott County, 83% of the voters cast ballots for the Republican candidate for governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, and that was actually on the low side. In the lieutenant governor’s race, the Republican percentage rose to 84.14% and hit 85.77% in the attorney general’s race. 

However, only 45.8% of the county’s voters bothered to take part in the election. That was below the state average of 54.9%, which was pulled up by some Democratic-voting places such as Albemarle County, where 66.2% voted.

Scott County, as we’ve seen, also had the state’s lowest figures on mail-in ballots. 

Scott County didn’t even have the lowest overall turnout in the state. That was in Buchanan County, where voter turnout was just 37.8% in a county that voted 81.91% to 83.98% for candidates on the Republican ticket. If a party has a locality where they know they can run up a score of 80% or more, they need to maximize their vote there, and Republicans aren’t. Here’s one way to look at how inefficient Republicans are with their base in Southwest Virginia. Bright red Buchanan County is slightly bigger than bright blue Falls Church. In Falls Church last fall, though, the voter turnout was 64.5% to Buchanan’s 37.8%. In practical terms, 7,600 people cast ballots in Falls Church while only 5,413 did in Buchanan. Put another way, Falls Church delivered 6,407 votes for Abigail Spanberger while Buchanan contributed 4,434 to to Winsome Earle-Sears’ tally. If people in Buchanan County voted at the same rate as those in Falls Church, Buchanan could have delivered about 2,000 more votes to the Republican cause. That wouldn’t have been enough to change the outcome, but the point is that Republicans are leaving a lot of votes uncast in Southwest Virginia.

If Republicans want to win more statewide elections, they somehow need to persuade more rural voters — especially in Southwest Virginia — to start voting. The ease of mail voting would seem to be one way to do that.  In Falls Church last year 867 people voted by mail, 800 of them for Spanberger, a share of 92.2%. In Buchanan County, just 244 people voted by mail, 48.7% for Spanberger in a county where overall she could only muster 17.9%. What that tells me is that Republicans are reluctant to vote by mail, which is their right, but that because so few people in Buchanan County vote anyway, Republicans would be wise to invest in a vote-by-mail push to increase turnout.

If the U.S. Supreme Court eventually nixes counting mail ballots that arrive after the deadline, Republicans can claim a victory in principle, but Democrats won’t have lost anything in practice. If Republicans want to claim more victories at the ballot box in Virginia, though, they need more mail voting. Just make sure those ballots get there on time. 

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Virginia’s Board of Historic Resources has added seven sites to the state’s Landmarks Register, including ones in Bedford County, Lynchburg and Roanoke.

Those three are the old Montvale High School, the historic district around Randolph College and the Fishburn Park Keepers Cottage.

Other new additions to the register are in Fauquier County, Hanover County, Newport News and Suffolk.

The state advises: “Listing a property in the state or national registers is honorary and sets no restrictions on what owners may do with their property. The designation is foremost an invitation to learn about and experience authentic and significant places in Virginia’s history. Designating a property to the state or national registers—either individually or as a contributing building in a historic district—provides an owner the opportunity to pursue historic rehabilitation tax credit improvements to the building.”

Here’s a list of the seven sites, with descriptions by the Department of Historic Resources:

Bedford County

From 1870, the year public education was established in Virginia, through the early 20th century, rural schools were small one- or two-room buildings that lacked uniformity. Montvale High School in Bedford County, built in 1930 for White students in grades one through twelve, is representative of the commonwealth’s efforts to improve public education in rural Virginia during the Progressive Era by consolidating and standardizing schools. Designed in the Colonial Revival architectural style with Art Deco influences, the school’s consistent expansion from the 1930s to the 1960s demonstrates its increasing importance as a community educational center as well as a social hub in rural Bedford County during the 20th century.

Fauquier County

The Saunders House in the Fauquier County town of Warrenton was built in 1870 for the mercantile Saunders family during the Reconstruction period as a way to protect family assets from creditors. Designed in the Italianate architectural style, the house features a floor plan that is notably popular in rural parts of Fauquier County.

Hanover County

Henry Clay Elementary School in the Hanover County town of Ashland was built in 1934 for White students using funds from the Public Works Administration and the Virginia Literary Fund. Initially completed as a one-story brick Colonial Revival building featuring 13 classrooms, the school was expanded in subsequent decades to include additional classrooms, a library and a covered walkway to connect the school with the Ashland War Memorial Building, which was constructed about 75 yards west of the school in 1951. Henry Clay Elementary closed in the spring of 2024.

Lynchburg

Located in the Rivermont neighborhood in the City of Lynchburg, the Randolph-Macon Woman’s College Historic District includes the 53-acre historic campus of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, one of the earliest and longest-operating women’s colleges in the South. Established in 1891, the college evolved over time in response to rising demand for higher education as women’s roles in society changed following the Civil War. The campus buildings, which date from 1891 to 1975, were designed by prominent local and national architects and encompass a wide variety of architectural styles.

Newport News

Since the 1920s, 2108 Jefferson Avenue — currently the site of Pearlie’s Restaurant — in the East End community of the City of Newport News has been home to a variety of restaurants owned and operated by African Americans, including African American women. In 1962, the present Commercial-style building, constructed ca. 1951, was listed as Grant’s Restaurant in Virginia’s Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide to hotels, restaurants, service stations and other businesses that welcomed Black travelers during Jim Crow. 2108 Jefferson Avenue was listed in the Green Book as The Tavern restaurant from 1939 to 1950. The building is the only documented Green Book resource in Newport News that has remained under the same use as its Green Book listing. 2108 Jefferson Avenue was designated a landmark under The Negro Traveler’s Green Book in Virginia Multiple Property Documentation Form (MPD), which the Board of Historic Resources also approved during its meeting on March 19.

Roanoke

Built in phases between ca. 1820 and ca. 1850, Fishburn Park Keeper’s Cottage is possibly the oldest surviving building within the City of Roanoke. The cottage exemplifies an early 19th-century hewn-log farmhouse that was enlarged to accommodate a growing family with the addition of lateral wings, one built of logs and the other of timber frame. While both types of construction were once common in Southwest Virginia dwellings, the assortment of joinery techniques in Keeper’s Cottage makes it a unique building in the region. 

Suffolk

In the City of Suffolk, the Ames-Old Farm exemplifies the typical home of a yeoman farmer in Virginia’s Tidewater region in the early 19th century. In addition to the farm’s original, two-and-a-half-story main house, which was built in 1815 in the Federal architectural style, the property also encompasses six agricultural outbuildings, all of which were built in the mid- to late 19th century and early 20th century. In around 1875, the house was expanded to include a dining room and kitchen, marking the first phase of modifications, before additional rooms were added in 1965 and a garage in 1985. The property’s evolution reflects its owners’ efforts to accommodate shifting domestic and agricultural needs at the turn of the 20th century. 

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Thanks, Cardinal readers, for checking out the latest tech briefs, covering the digital and life sciences landscapes. The briefs go live every Wednesday in Cardinal News.

Got tips and/or questions? Reach out to me via tad@cardinalnews.org.

The Trump administration last week released what it called a national policy framework for artificial intelligence, which it said would supersede “a patchwork of conflicting state laws” that would “undermine American innovation.”

U.S. Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, and Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said they had not fully reviewed the proposal yet. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., in a Friday news release, said it “takes steps in the right direction but lacks significant substance” and would hamstring states’ ability to address issues important to their constituents.

The White House’s list of legislative recommendations addresses issues that include parental control of children’s access and privacy, plus protection from deepfake images; energy ratepayers’ responsibility for data centers’ power use; large language models’ use of humans’ original works; accelerating AI’s use across industry; workforce training and new job creation; and preempting state AI laws that would interfere with federal objectives.

Congress would have to develop and pass any such legislation.

Griffith said through a spokesman on Friday that he looks forward to reviewing the framework “on how to best continue the United States’ position as the global leader in AI.”

He added: “As a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over significant elements of U.S. policy in the AI race, I will work with other leaders in Congress to solve issues that may be impediments to American industry in this important global field.”

Kaine, in a statement through his office on Monday, said he was still reviewing the proposal.

“AI needs strong legislative and regulatory safeguards to keep minors safe, protect consumer privacy, and gather information on workforce effects, all while promoting innovation,” he said. “Since federal AI standards would preempt state-level standards, including those of states that have stronger protections in place already, any nationwide standard must be carefully considered and bipartisan.”

In his news release, Warner said that he has long supported bipartisan legislation regarding children’s privacy and data, and has advocated for action on nonconsensual deepfake images. Warner said that his recently introduced Economy of the Future Commission Act is intended as a first step to developing laws about education, labor, commerce and economic policy.

For two consecutive years, the Senate Intelligence Committee, of which Warner is vice chair, passed bills requiring national security agencies to address AI-related national security threats, he said. Both years, they died, which Warner blamed on President Donald Trump’s congressional allies.

“The framework is worse than silent on AI-powered mis- and disinformation, a real and growing threat to our elections, our markets, and our country,” he said in the news release. “Instead, it trots out the same old talking points about combatting partisan or ideological bias to cloak its own inaction on — and worse, its encouragement and use of — deepfakes and other AI slop being used for a wide range of harmful activity.”

Roanoke Blacksburg Technology Council schedules annual gala

An event that’s like an Academy Awards or Grammys celebration for Southwest Virginia tech and life sciences is returning on May 7.

The Roanoke Blacksburg Technology Council uses its annual TechNite to present awards, including top entrepreneur, innovator, tech company, leadership, educators, rising stars and the council’s hall of fame, while guests dine and sip cocktails.

TechNite is set for the Hotel Roanoke and Conference Center. Register and get more information at rbtc.tech/events/technite.

The post Tech briefs: After Trump’s AI framework released, members of Virginia’s congressional delegation weigh in appeared first on Cardinal News.

Lynchburg’s city manager will present the city’s proposed 2027 fiscal year budget this week, kicking off a months-long process of work sessions and public engagement opportunities leading up to a scheduled budget adoption in late May.

Residents’ first opportunity to hear about the budget is set for 6 p.m.Thursday, during a city council meeting in city hall. The budget presentation will include proposals for the city’s general operating budget, water and stormwater rates, and capital improvement program for the fiscal year that begins July 1 and runs through June 30, 2027. 

Thursday’s presentation is the first of many budget meetings scheduled for this spring. The city council’s budget retreat is set for April 3, followed by two work sessions on April 14 — one with the school board and one with the Greater Lynchburg Transit Company. 

The first time residents can weigh in on the proposed budget will be during a public hearing scheduled for 6 p.m. April 23. 

From there, the city council is scheduled to hold a budget work session on April 28, a first reading of the budget on May 12 and a second reading of the budget on May 26. The city has historically adopted its budget during the second reading meeting.

Specific meeting information and additional budget resources, including a capital improvement project dashboard, can be found on the city’s budget webpage. As of 6 p.m. Tuesday, budget documents had not yet been posted to the city’s website.

City department heads were asked to submit flat budgets for Lynchburg’s proposed 2027 fiscal year budget, said Chief Financial Officer Donna Witt at a January work session. 

“They couldn’t turn in a budget that exceeded their ’26 budget allocations. … So if anything was contractual or inflationary, they had to be absorbed within that allocation. That’s not happy people,” Witt said, referencing department heads who struggle to keep their budgets flat as prices rise. “And then, if you have a new program or a service that you wanted to do, you had to figure out how to do it within that flat budget. So maybe you stop doing something to do something else.” 

Last year, Lynchburg’s budget season stretched from March 11, when the city manager first presented the proposed budget, to June 30, when the 2026 budget was adopted on the last day of the 2025 fiscal year. It made significant investments in city initiatives, including a cost-of-living adjustment for general city employees, a pay progression plan for sworn police and fire personnel, and a contribution of more than $80 million to the capital improvement program, which includes $60 million to maintain aging school infrastructure, $12.5 million to renovate the library and $10.4 million to improve Miller Park Pool.

Last year’s budget discussions often centered on the city’s real estate tax rate, which was reevaluated as city council members wrestled with the reality of an uncharacteristically high real estate assessment.

The approved 84-cent rate in effect today represents a decrease in the tax rate from 2025 but an increase in tax payments for most residents due to the reassessment that upped the value of real estate. City department heads made cuts last budget season to adjust their spending levels to the lowered city revenue, resulting in the closure of the city’s environmental learning center called the Nature Zone, reduced operating hours for the Lynchburg Visitor Center and Museum and the loss of some staff positions and other services. 

Real estate reassessments happen every other year in Lynchburg, meaning real estate values will hold steady during this budget season. 

The post Agenda Lynchburg: City to get first look at proposed budget on Thursday appeared first on Cardinal News.

It takes six months to turn a cannabis clone into a tested, packaged product on a dispensary shelf. The bill on Gov. Spanberger’s desk sets January 1, 2027, as the first day of adult-use sales. New cultivators will need to get approved, build a facility and complete that entire biological process on a timeline that realistically requires two years. The math does not work, and when states ignore this math, the results are not theoretical. They are documented.

The General Assembly passed a bill that launches retail before Virginia-grown supply exists on dispensary shelves. This does not eliminate the illicit market; it invites it in. Through a phenomenon called inversion, illicit products enter the legal supply chain because legal supply does not exist to meet legal demand.

New Jersey just demonstrated exactly how this works.

What happens when states ignore the supply clock

In March 2026, New Jersey’s Cannabis Regulatory Commission suspended the cultivation and manufacturing licenses of Jersey Strong/Mollitiam after a routine inspection revealed the company was growing cannabis at a secret, unlicensed outdoor site and moving it into its licensed facility. The acting executive director told the commission that “everyone was deceived.” Multiple companies across the state had already purchased Mollitiam’s material and manufactured distillate from it. By the time regulators caught it, illicit products had contaminated finished goods across New Jersey’s legal supply chain.

This was not a rogue actor exploiting a healthy market. This was a predictable outcome of a market that launched retail sales nearly four years ago and still cannot produce enough legal supply to fill its own shelves. New Jersey has issued 552 cultivation licenses since its April 2022 adult-use launch. Forty-six are operational. That is 8.3% — almost four years in.

When legal demand exceeds legal supply, basic economics fills the gap. Licensed businesses facing empty shelves and rent payments do not close their doors. They source products wherever they can find them. New York experienced the same dynamic where licensed businesses were caught with illicit, out-of-state products.

This is not an enforcement failure. It is a sequencing failure. The states built the storefront before they built the supply chain.

The timeline reality

Building a legal cannabis supply chain is not like opening a liquor store. Virginia cannot import cannabis from other states. Every product on a dispensary shelf must be grown, tested and tracked within the commonwealth.

A licensed cultivation facility requires 12 to 18 months to build before a single seed enters the ground. Site design, environmental permits and regulatory approvals consume 3 to 6 months. Construction, specialized HVAC, electrical infrastructure for commercial grow lights and environmental controls can take another 6 to 12 months. Then, systems must be commissioned and calibrated before cultivation begins. All of this assumes compliant real estate has already been secured and no equipment delays materialize, problems that have plagued cannabis buildouts in every state.

Once the building is finished, production timelines are biological. Propagation requires 2 to 3 weeks. Vegetative growth takes 1 to 4 weeks. Flowering spans 8 to 10 weeks. Post-harvest processing, drying, curing, laboratory testing and packaging all add another 4 to 6 weeks before the product can legally reach a dispensary through track-and-trace.

Total timeline from facility completion to first legal sale: approximately six months. And the first harvest from a brand-new facility is essentially a trial run. Consistent production takes at least another cycle to dial in.

On January 1, 2027, only the five existing pharmaceutical processors, who already have flower curing in their vaults, could possibly be ready. Every independent cultivator licensed under the new framework will have barely broken ground.

The arguments for speed do not hold up

“We need tax revenue now.” Tax revenue from a market contaminated by inversion is illusory. New York and New Jersey have collected taxes while simultaneously funding enforcement actions against the retailers generating them and now against the cultivators supplying them. Stable revenue requires a stable market. A stable market requires time to build a diversified grower base.

“Delaying retail helps the illicit market.” The opposite is true. Opening retail without supply creates the conditions that pull the illicit market into licensed stores. That is what inversion is. New Jersey’s 8.4% cultivator activation rate did not keep illicit products out. It guaranteed illegal products got in.

“Medical operators can handle early demand.” Medical cultivators produce for their existing patient population, not an entire state’s recreational consumers. Illinois proved this in its first week — operators admitted the shortage was structurally unavoidable regardless of how much they stockpiled. Overwhelming medical facilities with adult-use demand does not expand the legal market. It destabilizes the medical one, forcing over 100,000 Virginia patients to compete for supply or seek alternatives elsewhere.

Ready together

Virginia should adopt a Ready Together framework that ties retail authorization to demonstrate supply readiness, not an arbitrary calendar date.

The mechanism is straightforward. In each Health Service Area, pharmaceutical processors convert to adult-use sales only after enough independent cultivators and retailers are operational to establish genuine wholesale and retail competition, a threshold the governor has the authority to set. A cultivator is operational when it has completed a harvest and transferred tested product to a licensed retailer. A retailer is operational when it has completed sales to consumers.

This is not a delay. It is a launch sequence. It prevents the geographic concentration and supply starvation that produced inversion in New Jersey and New York. It protects Virginia’s medical patients from a supply crisis that Illinois documented in its first week and New Jersey documented with $360,000 in fines against operators, two of whom hold Virginia pharmaceutical processor permits, for violating medical patient protections during their own adult-use launch. And it aligns every incentive correctly: processors who want to convert have every reason to support the independent licensing process, not obstruct it.

The compromise bill is on Gov. Spanberger’s desk. She has the final authority to determine when this market opens and how. Legal states have created the lessons and data to inform Virginia in a way that no other state had when starting. Shifting how states legalize regulated sales sets a new standard that’s not just best for Virginia, but models new industry best practices. 

The governor can sign a launch date, or she can sign an innovative, but practical, launch standard.

Chelsea Higgs Wise, MSW, is the co-founder and executive director of Marijuana Justice, which organizes for fair and equitable legalization in Virginia. chelsea@marijuanajustice.org 

Max Jackson is the founder of Cannabis Wise Guys and specializes in translating between cannabis operations, investment and policy. He has provided expert testimony to the Virginia legislature on preventing market consolidation in emerging cannabis markets. He can be reached at Max@cannabiswiseguys.com.

The post Cannabis advocates: Why Virginia cannabis retail must wait for Virginia cannabis supply appeared first on Cardinal News.

Economy:

Dominion produces first power from Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project. — Virginia Mercury.

Barboursville Vineyards sells to private investors. — The (Charlottesville) Daily Progress (paywall).

Politics:

On 16th anniversary of Affordable Care Act, Virginia’s federal lawmakers and health leaders weigh risks. — Virginia Mercury.

Culture:

Taking inspiration from Buddhist brothers, Louisa monks plan their own Walk for Peace. — The (Charlottesville) Daily Progress (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 Headlines from across the state: Dominion produces first power from Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project; more … appeared first on Cardinal News.

So what kind of trip did Joey Arrington and Tommy Hurley have Monday at Kennedy Space Center?

 It was a blast.

 It was a gas.

 It set a new record.

Hurley drove a machine prepared and powered in Martinsville by Arrington to a new land speed record for a stock car as the Ridgeway resident hit 253 mph on the 3-mile concrete strip at the Shuttle Landing Facility at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The speed set by the “Martinsville Missile” broke the old record of 244.9 mph set in 2007 at Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah by Russ Wicks, who also piloted a car with an engine built by Arrington. 

Hurley, a 50-year-old Ridgeway resident with a drag racing background, drove a rebuilt 1969 Dodge Daytona Charger with a 1,000-horsepower, 358-cubic-inch motor to the new record. The vehicle and the record-setting attempt were backed by the VA250 Car Project, part of a national motorsports and engineering initiative commemorating the 250th birthday of the United States.

Arrington, a Franklin County native and the son of former NASCAR driver Buddy Arrington, stood aside the 300-foot-wide tarmac where 78 space shuttle landings took place and watched Hurley roar past on the record run.

“When you’re standing there, the engine’s screaming and it’s talking junk to you,” Arrington said. “The car is moving so fast. You can see it, but when it’s right in front of you, you’ve got to sort of wait for it to get past you and then you pick it up.

“Truly, it is so satisfying. When you accomplish something like that and you can visually see it, it makes noise, it makes your hair stand up.”

Hurley made two passes on the concrete surface. The first was basically a test run, hitting 226 mph.

“We went out and shook the car down, made sure everything worked for Tommy, and it did,” Arrington said. “Everybody just buckled down, got it turned around and went at it again.”

Hurley, who said his top speed on a one-eighth mile drag strip has been 165 mph, went through the gear box cleanly in a ride that took just under 1 minute. Based on in-car video, the Henry County native shifted out of first gear at 55 mph, reached third gear at 80 mph and hit fourth gear at 190 mph.

It took Hurley approximately 34 seconds to achieve the target speed of 250, topping out at 253 before he fired the twin parachutes from the rear of the car that slowed the rolling rocket. “It felt good,” Hurley said. “The car was real stable. I could have stopped on the last pass probably on brakes.”

Arrington believes few attempts have been made in 19 years since he helped Wicks, a West Coast driver known as “SpeedKing,” set the land speed mark in Utah.

“There’s so many different categories,” Arrington said. “You can change one thing and all of a sudden it moves you into a different class. It’s not anything people do as a sport week in, week out, but it is something that people do.”

Arrington expects the record to be certified by the International Hot Rod Association after officials receive data from the GPS tracking device that measured the speed.

The idea to make a run at the record originated from a conversation between Arrington and former Martinsville Mayor Danny Turner.

The pair pitched a proposal to Republican state Del. Terry Austin of Botetourt County, who is the chair of the VA250 Commission. The commission eventually contributed $50,000 to the project, which according to Turner had a $280,000 price tag. (Disclosure: The commission is one of our donors for our Cardinal 250 project, but donors have no say in news decisions. See our policy.)

Austin was on hand in Florida for Monday’s event along with former Chatham Mayor Will Pace, a member of the Virginia’s Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission.

Danville’s Peyton Sellers was the original choice to drive the car, with the attempt scheduled for early January. The run was postponed, and it was later announced that former NASCAR Cup star Kyle Petty would be behind the wheel.

However, that deal never materialized so Arrington chose Hurley, a 1994 Magna Vista High School graduate who works as a mechanic at his father’s Ridgeway business, Hurley’s Auto Sales.

Putting the “Martinsville Missile” into the record was truly a Southside Virginia endeavor.

Arrington, 69, is a 1974 graduate of the old Laurel Park High School. Turner graduated from Martinsville High in 1974, twice organizing school events that earned inclusion into the “Guinness Book of World Records.”

Turner was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer one year ago when the project began to move from an idea to reality in Arrington’s Martinsville shop, which is located in a former Sears store behind Liberty Fair Mall.

Fifty-two years is a long time between records.

“Back in the time when we were kids you’d always say, ‘What’s the next thing we’re going to break?’ And you had the world in front of you,” Turner said. “With the cancer diagnosis right when we started working on this, it was really a goal that I wanted to achieve, too. When you’re talking about how long you’ve got to live, let’s go ahead and do this while I’m still around.”

 Arrington, Hurley and Turner were driving back to Virginia together Monday night.

Hurley planned to be at work Tuesday in his father’s shop after a long trip home.

Arrington is already a contemplating a return to Florida for another record attempt.

Meanwhile, the VA250 car that Arrington transported to Florida in a Virginia-themed hauler was enjoying its own celebrity. It was scheduled to appear at a boat race on the other side of the Sunshine State in St. Petersburg.

“It’s going to go show itself off,” Arrington said.

The post ‘Martinsville Missile’ sets a new land speed record for a stock car appeared first on Cardinal News.

Once upon a time, as all good fairy tales begin, Virginia passed a law to persuade a goose that lays golden eggs to nest in the state. As an incentive, it offered that goose a generous tax break, which seemed easy enough at the time because the state had no geese and a goose that laid golden eggs seemed a pretty good deal. The state would lose nothing from what it had at the time, but it might wind up with a horde of golden eggs.

That’s exactly what happened. Virginia today has an entire flock of geese laying golden eggs, more than anywhere else, but not everybody is happy about that. Geese can be noisy, obnoxious neighbors who foul everything they touch, and how many golden eggs do you really need anyway? They’re piling up everywhere — on farms, next to battlefields, next to residential areas. Now, some in Virginia are thinking that maybe their tax break was too generous and should be revoked — except that some people who don’t have any geese are saying, “Hey, where’s our golden egg? You’ve got more than you want, but we don’t have any! Before you kill those geese, can’t we get at least a few of those golden eggs?”

Ideally, by now you’ve figured out that this column isn’t about surly, bad-tempered waterfowl but about data centers. In 2010, Virginia legislators took a tax break designed only to attract data centers to a very specific group of economically distressed counties and extended it statewide. The result has been spectacularly successful: Virginia is now the data center capital of the world, although we’ll likely soon lose that title to Texas. In the process, that tax abatement whose impact was originally listed as “unknown” is now known: The state forgoes $1.9 billion worth in taxes a year. Some see that as a giveaway, others a bargain, because that has to be balanced against the $9.1 billion in gross domestic product that data centers produce in Virginia each year.

All this has temporarily broken Virginia’s budget-making. Although both chambers of the General Assembly are controlled by the same party, the House and Senate budget writers disagreed so profoundly over data centers that the legislature adjourned without passing a budget. 

The immediate issue is that tax abatement, which is scheduled to run through 2035. Senate Finance Committee Chair Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, wants to end it next year — eight years early. Others have warned that it sets a dangerous precedent for other industries, that Virginia can’t be trusted to keep its word. A Danville-based economic development group, the Future of the Piedmont Foundation, issued a lengthy statement addressing that point.

Toward the end of the session, Gov. Abigail Spanberger floated the notion of a “consumption tax” — taxing data centers on the amount of electricity they use.

This is a fundamental shift in policy and is said to be one that the data center industry supports, although not a single data center representative I contacted was willing to talk about the issue — I suspect because this is all quite sensitive.

Across the country, 37 states have some sort of tax incentives to attract data centers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. While each of these varies, they are all generally about the same, according to a list compiled by Data Center Dynamics, in that they involve some kind of break on sales taxes or other taxes. They’re still paying taxes, just not the full rate — the lower rate being an incentive to locate in that state. No other state appears to have a consumption tax, and no details have been offered on what one in Virginia would look like, which means we don’t know exactly how this would work 

In the midst of this, a Republican legislator from rural Virginia has advanced a detailed version of how a consumption tax might work and how it could be used to spread the digital wealth in Virginia (my phrase, not his).

That legislator is Del. Wren Williams, R-Patrick County, who has put together an extensive fact sheet on how a consumption tax on data centers might work to benefit rural Virginia. To start with, he prefers not to call it a consumption tax, but a severance tax, similar to severance taxes on coal. The theory with the latter is that coal is a finite resource, so the severance tax serves as a license by which coal companies pay back a locality for removing that resource. Conceptually, Williams says Virginia should treat electricity as a resource, even though electricity can be generated anew, unlike coal. He’s not even sure this should be regarded as a tax. “It’s more of a license,” he says, “a business paying a fee to use our grid” — and then getting charged accordingly. If you use more, you pay a higher rate for the license.

All that’s more a matter of semantics and theory; the most interesting part, from a regional perspective, is that Williams says this charge — whether you call it a consumption tax or a severance tax or a license or a fee — should be based on a locality’s economic status.

Simply put, a data center in a prosperous county would pay more than a data center in an economically distressed county. Williams envisions three tiers, using the fiscal stress index developed by the Virginia Commission on Local Government, which is periodically updated as conditions change. He pictures something like this, with some examples given of some of the localities that might qualify for each tier:

• Tier 1 — Distressed (Patrick, Buchanan, Dickenson counties): $0.000/kWh for first 10 years, then $0.001, then $0.002 after 20 years
• Tier 2 — Moderate (Shenandoah Valley, Southside): $0.002/kWh
• Tier 3 — Prosperous (Loudoun, Fairfax, Prince William): $0.006/kWh 

His rationale: This system might prompt data centers to localities where they’re more wanted — and needed, from a fiscal point of view. “I do think they’re not paying enough,” he says, but if Virginia wants data centers to pay their “fair share,” as the phrase goes, those rates should be used to help spur economic development in rural Virginia. “I think it’s a creative solution,” he says.

In the closing days of the session, Williams presented his idea to Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax County (a sign of how legislators from different parties and different regions do talk to one another — even different chambers!). 

Surovell told me it’s an “interesting idea.”

Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, and one of the Senate’s budget negotiators, told me via text message: “It’s on the table as are other ideas.” He also cautioned that “costs would get passed on to customers,” as all costs eventually do.

The legislator whose district has more data centers than any other is Del. David Reid, D-Loudoun County, says it’s a concept that needs more research but points out that a few years ago there was a suggestion that, if Northern Virginia localities wanted to slow down data center growth, they should seek a change in the law that would have the full tax on data centers apply in that part of the state. Those localities opposed it vehemently, he says. 

Reid wonders whether it’s legally and technically possible to structure a consumption tax so that it only hits data centers (whose popularity right now is low in some quarters) and doesn’t inadvertently bring in other high-energy users, such as, say, Newport News Shipbuilding. 

He also wonders about legal issues with different tax rates, although there are other things that have different tax rates, based on geography. That’s the whole concept behind “enterprise zones,” having a lower tax rate in some economically distressed areas as a way to attract jobs. 

The idea of a tax break for data centers based on geography is not new at all. Virginia’s very first tax break for data centers, passed in 2008, was intended to apply only to Mecklenburg County but was expanded to allow localities with an unemployment rate of 4.9% or higher. It was only later that the tax breaks were applied statewide, which helped set off the data center boom in Northern Virginia.

A consumption tax for data centers would be new, but a tiered system intended to encourage data centers to locate in economically distressed localities would take Virginia’s data center policies back to first principles.

Want more politics and analysis? Sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out on Fridays. Sign up here:

The post Legislators ponder a different way to tax data centers. Should that new way also be based on a locality’s economic status? appeared first on Cardinal News.

Once upon a time, as all good fairy tales begin, Virginia passed a law to persuade a goose that lays golden eggs to nest in the state. As an incentive, it offered that goose a generous tax break, which seemed easy enough at the time because the state had no geese and a goose that laid golden eggs seemed a pretty good deal. The state would lose nothing from what it had at the time, but it might wind up with a horde of golden eggs.

That’s exactly what happened. Virginia today has an entire flock of geese laying golden eggs, more than anywhere else, but not everybody is happy about that. Geese can be noisy, obnoxious neighbors who foul everything they touch, and how many golden eggs do you really need anyway? They’re piling up everywhere — on farms, next to battlefields, next to residential areas. Now, some in Virginia are thinking that maybe their tax break was too generous and should be revoked — except that some people who don’t have any geese are saying, “Hey, where’s our golden egg? You’ve got more than you want, but we don’t have any! Before you kill those geese, can’t we get at least a few of those golden eggs?”

Ideally, by now you’ve figured out that this column isn’t about surly, bad-tempered waterfowl but about data centers. In 2010, Virginia legislators took a tax break designed only to attract data centers to a very specific group of economically distressed counties and extended it statewide. The result has been spectacularly successful: Virginia is now the data center capital of the world, although we’ll likely soon lose that title to Texas. In the process, that tax abatement whose impact was originally listed as “unknown” is now known: The state forgoes $1.9 billion worth in taxes a year. Some see that as a giveaway, others a bargain, because that has to be balanced against the $9.1 billion in gross domestic product that data centers produce in Virginia each year.

All this has temporarily broken Virginia’s budget-making. Although both chambers of the General Assembly are controlled by the same party, the House and Senate budget writers disagreed so profoundly over data centers that the legislature adjourned without passing a budget. 

The immediate issue is that tax abatement, which is scheduled to run through 2035. Senate Finance Committee Chair Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, wants to end it next year — eight years early. Others have warned that it sets a dangerous precedent for other industries, that Virginia can’t be trusted to keep its word. A Danville-based economic development group, the Future of the Piedmont Foundation, issued a lengthy statement addressing that point.

Toward the end of the session, Gov. Abigail Spanberger floated the notion of a “consumption tax” — taxing data centers on the amount of electricity they use.

This is a fundamental shift in policy and is said to be one that the data center industry supports, although not a single data center representative I contacted was willing to talk about the issue — I suspect because this is all quite sensitive.

Across the country, 37 states have some sort of tax incentives to attract data centers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. While each of these varies, they are all generally about the same, according to a list compiled by Data Center Dynamics, in that they involve some kind of break on sales taxes or other taxes. They’re still paying taxes, just not the full rate — the lower rate being an incentive to locate in that state. No other state appears to have a consumption tax, and no details have been offered on what one in Virginia would look like, which means we don’t know exactly how this would work 

In the midst of this, a Republican legislator from rural Virginia has advanced a detailed version of how a consumption tax might work and how it could be used to spread the digital wealth in Virginia (my phrase, not his).

That legislator is Del. Wren Williams, R-Patrick County, who has put together an extensive fact sheet on how a consumption tax on data centers might work to benefit rural Virginia. To start with, he prefers not to call it a consumption tax, but a severance tax, similar to severance taxes on coal. The theory with the latter is that coal is a finite resource, so the severance tax serves as a license by which coal companies pay back a locality for removing that resource. Conceptually, Williams says Virginia should treat electricity as a resource, even though electricity can be generated anew, unlike coal. He’s not even sure this should be regarded as a tax. “It’s more of a license,” he says, “a business paying a fee to use our grid” — and then getting charged accordingly. If you use more, you pay a higher rate for the license.

All that’s more a matter of semantics and theory; the most interesting part, from a regional perspective, is that Williams says this charge — whether you call it a consumption tax or a severance tax or a license or a fee — should be based on a locality’s economic status.

Simply put, a data center in a prosperous county would pay more than a data center in an economically distressed county. Williams envisions three tiers, using the fiscal stress index developed by the Virginia Commission on Local Government, which is periodically updated as conditions change. He pictures something like this, with some examples given of some of the localities that might qualify for each tier:

• Tier 1 — Distressed (Patrick, Buchanan, Dickenson counties): $0.000/kWh for first 10 years, then $0.001, then $0.002 after 20 years
• Tier 2 — Moderate (Shenandoah Valley, Southside): $0.002/kWh
• Tier 3 — Prosperous (Loudoun, Fairfax, Prince William): $0.006/kWh 

His rationale: This system might prompt data centers to localities where they’re more wanted — and needed, from a fiscal point of view. “I do think they’re not paying enough,” he says, but if Virginia wants data centers to pay their “fair share,” as the phrase goes, those rates should be used to help spur economic development in rural Virginia. “I think it’s a creative solution,” he says.

In the closing days of the session, Williams presented his idea to Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax County (a sign of how legislators from different parties and different regions do talk to one another — even different chambers!). 

Surovell told me it’s an “interesting idea.”

Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, and one of the Senate’s budget negotiators, told me via text message: “It’s on the table as are other ideas.” He also cautioned that “costs would get passed on to customers,” as all costs eventually do.

The legislator whose district has more data centers than any other is Del. David Reid, D-Loudoun County, says it’s a concept that needs more research but points out that a few years ago there was a suggestion that, if Northern Virginia localities wanted to slow down data center growth, they should seek a change in the law that would have the full tax on data centers apply in that part of the state. Those localities opposed it vehemently, he says. 

Reid wonders whether it’s legally and technically possible to structure a consumption tax so that it only hits data centers (whose popularity right now is low in some quarters) and doesn’t inadvertently bring in other high-energy users, such as, say, Newport News Shipbuilding. 

He also wonders about legal issues with different tax rates, although there are other things that have different tax rates, based on geography. That’s the whole concept behind “enterprise zones,” having a lower tax rate in some economically distressed areas as a way to attract jobs. 

The idea of a tax break for data centers based on geography is not new at all. Virginia’s very first tax break for data centers, passed in 2008, was intended to apply only to Mecklenburg County but was expanded to allow localities with an unemployment rate of 4.9% or higher. It was only later that the tax breaks were applied statewide, which helped set off the data center boom in Northern Virginia.

A consumption tax for data centers would be new, but a tiered system intended to encourage data centers to locate in economically distressed localities would take Virginia’s data center policies back to first principles.

Want more politics and analysis? Sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out on Fridays. Sign up here:

The post Legislators ponder a different way to tax data centers. Should that new way also be based on a locality’s economic status? appeared first on Cardinal News.

Once upon a time, as all good fairy tales begin, Virginia passed a law to persuade a goose that lays golden eggs to nest in the state. As an incentive, it offered that goose a generous tax break, which seemed easy enough at the time because the state had no geese and a goose that laid golden eggs seemed a pretty good deal. The state would lose nothing from what it had at the time, but it might wind up with a horde of golden eggs.

That’s exactly what happened. Virginia today has an entire flock of geese laying golden eggs, more than anywhere else, but not everybody is happy about that. Geese can be noisy, obnoxious neighbors who foul everything they touch, and how many golden eggs do you really need anyway? They’re piling up everywhere — on farms, next to battlefields, next to residential areas. Now, some in Virginia are thinking that maybe their tax break was too generous and should be revoked — except that some people who don’t have any geese are saying, “Hey, where’s our golden egg? You’ve got more than you want, but we don’t have any! Before you kill those geese, can’t we get at least a few of those golden eggs?”

Ideally, by now you’ve figured out that this column isn’t about surly, bad-tempered waterfowl but about data centers. In 2010, Virginia legislators took a tax break designed only to attract data centers to a very specific group of economically distressed counties and extended it statewide. The result has been spectacularly successful: Virginia is now the data center capital of the world, although we’ll likely soon lose that title to Texas. In the process, that tax abatement whose impact was originally listed as “unknown” is now known: The state forgoes $1.9 billion worth in taxes a year. Some see that as a giveaway, others a bargain, because that has to be balanced against the $9.1 billion in gross domestic product that data centers produce in Virginia each year.

All this has temporarily broken Virginia’s budget-making. Although both chambers of the General Assembly are controlled by the same party, the House and Senate budget writers disagreed so profoundly over data centers that the legislature adjourned without passing a budget. 

The immediate issue is that tax abatement, which is scheduled to run through 2035. Senate Finance Committee Chair Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, wants to end it next year — eight years early. Others have warned that it sets a dangerous precedent for other industries, that Virginia can’t be trusted to keep its word. A Danville-based economic development group, the Future of the Piedmont Foundation, issued a lengthy statement addressing that point.

Toward the end of the session, Gov. Abigail Spanberger floated the notion of a “consumption tax” — taxing data centers on the amount of electricity they use.

This is a fundamental shift in policy and is said to be one that the data center industry supports, although not a single data center representative I contacted was willing to talk about the issue — I suspect because this is all quite sensitive.

Across the country, 37 states have some sort of tax incentives to attract data centers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. While each of these varies, they are all generally about the same, according to a list compiled by Data Center Dynamics, in that they involve some kind of break on sales taxes or other taxes. They’re still paying taxes, just not the full rate — the lower rate being an incentive to locate in that state. No other state appears to have a consumption tax, and no details have been offered on what one in Virginia would look like, which means we don’t know exactly how this would work 

In the midst of this, a Republican legislator from rural Virginia has advanced a detailed version of how a consumption tax might work and how it could be used to spread the digital wealth in Virginia (my phrase, not his).

That legislator is Del. Wren Williams, R-Patrick County, who has put together an extensive fact sheet on how a consumption tax on data centers might work to benefit rural Virginia. To start with, he prefers not to call it a consumption tax, but a severance tax, similar to severance taxes on coal. The theory with the latter is that coal is a finite resource, so the severance tax serves as a license by which coal companies pay back a locality for removing that resource. Conceptually, Williams says Virginia should treat electricity as a resource, even though electricity can be generated anew, unlike coal. He’s not even sure this should be regarded as a tax. “It’s more of a license,” he says, “a business paying a fee to use our grid” — and then getting charged accordingly. If you use more, you pay a higher rate for the license.

All that’s more a matter of semantics and theory; the most interesting part, from a regional perspective, is that Williams says this charge — whether you call it a consumption tax or a severance tax or a license or a fee — should be based on a locality’s economic status.

Simply put, a data center in a prosperous county would pay more than a data center in an economically distressed county. Williams envisions three tiers, using the fiscal stress index developed by the Virginia Commission on Local Government, which is periodically updated as conditions change. He pictures something like this, with some examples given of some of the localities that might qualify for each tier:

• Tier 1 — Distressed (Patrick, Buchanan, Dickenson counties): $0.000/kWh for first 10 years, then $0.001, then $0.002 after 20 years
• Tier 2 — Moderate (Shenandoah Valley, Southside): $0.002/kWh
• Tier 3 — Prosperous (Loudoun, Fairfax, Prince William): $0.006/kWh 

His rationale: This system might prompt data centers to localities where they’re more wanted — and needed, from a fiscal point of view. “I do think they’re not paying enough,” he says, but if Virginia wants data centers to pay their “fair share,” as the phrase goes, those rates should be used to help spur economic development in rural Virginia. “I think it’s a creative solution,” he says.

In the closing days of the session, Williams presented his idea to Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax County (a sign of how legislators from different parties and different regions do talk to one another — even different chambers!). 

Surovell told me it’s an “interesting idea.”

Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, and one of the Senate’s budget negotiators, told me via text message: “It’s on the table as are other ideas.” He also cautioned that “costs would get passed on to customers,” as all costs eventually do.

The legislator whose district has more data centers than any other is Del. David Reid, D-Loudoun County, says it’s a concept that needs more research but points out that a few years ago there was a suggestion that, if Northern Virginia localities wanted to slow down data center growth, they should seek a change in the law that would have the full tax on data centers apply in that part of the state. Those localities opposed it vehemently, he says. 

Reid wonders whether it’s legally and technically possible to structure a consumption tax so that it only hits data centers (whose popularity right now is low in some quarters) and doesn’t inadvertently bring in other high-energy users, such as, say, Newport News Shipbuilding. 

He also wonders about legal issues with different tax rates, although there are other things that have different tax rates, based on geography. That’s the whole concept behind “enterprise zones,” having a lower tax rate in some economically distressed areas as a way to attract jobs. 

The idea of a tax break for data centers based on geography is not new at all. Virginia’s very first tax break for data centers, passed in 2008, was intended to apply only to Mecklenburg County but was expanded to allow localities with an unemployment rate of 4.9% or higher. It was only later that the tax breaks were applied statewide, which helped set off the data center boom in Northern Virginia.

A consumption tax for data centers would be new, but a tiered system intended to encourage data centers to locate in economically distressed localities would take Virginia’s data center policies back to first principles.

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Once upon a time, as all good fairy tales begin, Virginia passed a law to persuade a goose that lays golden eggs to nest in the state. As an incentive, it offered that goose a generous tax break, which seemed easy enough at the time because the state had no geese and a goose that laid golden eggs seemed a pretty good deal. The state would lose nothing from what it had at the time, but it might wind up with a horde of golden eggs.

That’s exactly what happened. Virginia today has an entire flock of geese laying golden eggs, more than anywhere else, but not everybody is happy about that. Geese can be noisy, obnoxious neighbors who foul everything they touch, and how many golden eggs do you really need anyway? They’re piling up everywhere — on farms, next to battlefields, next to residential areas. Now, some in Virginia are thinking that maybe their tax break was too generous and should be revoked — except that some people who don’t have any geese are saying, “Hey, where’s our golden egg? You’ve got more than you want, but we don’t have any! Before you kill those geese, can’t we get at least a few of those golden eggs?”

Ideally, by now you’ve figured out that this column isn’t about surly, bad-tempered waterfowl but about data centers. In 2010, Virginia legislators took a tax break designed only to attract data centers to a very specific group of economically distressed counties and extended it statewide. The result has been spectacularly successful: Virginia is now the data center capital of the world, although we’ll likely soon lose that title to Texas. In the process, that tax abatement whose impact was originally listed as “unknown” is now known: The state forgoes $1.9 billion worth in taxes a year. Some see that as a giveaway, others a bargain, because that has to be balanced against the $9.1 billion in gross domestic product that data centers produce in Virginia each year.

All this has temporarily broken Virginia’s budget-making. Although both chambers of the General Assembly are controlled by the same party, the House and Senate budget writers disagreed so profoundly over data centers that the legislature adjourned without passing a budget. 

The immediate issue is that tax abatement, which is scheduled to run through 2035. Senate Finance Committee Chair Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth, wants to end it next year — eight years early. Others have warned that it sets a dangerous precedent for other industries, that Virginia can’t be trusted to keep its word. A Danville-based economic development group, the Future of the Piedmont Foundation, issued a lengthy statement addressing that point.

Toward the end of the session, Gov. Abigail Spanberger floated the notion of a “consumption tax” — taxing data centers on the amount of electricity they use.

This is a fundamental shift in policy and is said to be one that the data center industry supports, although not a single data center representative I contacted was willing to talk about the issue — I suspect because this is all quite sensitive.

Across the country, 37 states have some sort of tax incentives to attract data centers, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. While each of these varies, they are all generally about the same, according to a list compiled by Data Center Dynamics, in that they involve some kind of break on sales taxes or other taxes. They’re still paying taxes, just not the full rate — the lower rate being an incentive to locate in that state. No other state appears to have a consumption tax, and no details have been offered on what one in Virginia would look like, which means we don’t know exactly how this would work 

In the midst of this, a Republican legislator from rural Virginia has advanced a detailed version of how a consumption tax might work and how it could be used to spread the digital wealth in Virginia (my phrase, not his).

That legislator is Del. Wren Williams, R-Patrick County, who has put together an extensive fact sheet on how a consumption tax on data centers might work to benefit rural Virginia. To start with, he prefers not to call it a consumption tax, but a severance tax, similar to severance taxes on coal. The theory with the latter is that coal is a finite resource, so the severance tax serves as a license by which coal companies pay back a locality for removing that resource. Conceptually, Williams says Virginia should treat electricity as a resource, even though electricity can be generated anew, unlike coal. He’s not even sure this should be regarded as a tax. “It’s more of a license,” he says, “a business paying a fee to use our grid” — and then getting charged accordingly. If you use more, you pay a higher rate for the license.

All that’s more a matter of semantics and theory; the most interesting part, from a regional perspective, is that Williams says this charge — whether you call it a consumption tax or a severance tax or a license or a fee — should be based on a locality’s economic status.

Simply put, a data center in a prosperous county would pay more than a data center in an economically distressed county. Williams envisions three tiers, using the fiscal stress index developed by the Virginia Commission on Local Government, which is periodically updated as conditions change. He pictures something like this, with some examples given of some of the localities that might qualify for each tier:

• Tier 1 — Distressed (Patrick, Buchanan, Dickenson counties): $0.000/kWh for first 10 years, then $0.001, then $0.002 after 20 years
• Tier 2 — Moderate (Shenandoah Valley, Southside): $0.002/kWh
• Tier 3 — Prosperous (Loudoun, Fairfax, Prince William): $0.006/kWh 

His rationale: This system might prompt data centers to localities where they’re more wanted — and needed, from a fiscal point of view. “I do think they’re not paying enough,” he says, but if Virginia wants data centers to pay their “fair share,” as the phrase goes, those rates should be used to help spur economic development in rural Virginia. “I think it’s a creative solution,” he says.

In the closing days of the session, Williams presented his idea to Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax County (a sign of how legislators from different parties and different regions do talk to one another — even different chambers!). 

Surovell told me it’s an “interesting idea.”

Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Charlottesville, and one of the Senate’s budget negotiators, told me via text message: “It’s on the table as are other ideas.” He also cautioned that “costs would get passed on to customers,” as all costs eventually do.

The legislator whose district has more data centers than any other is Del. David Reid, D-Loudoun County, says it’s a concept that needs more research but points out that a few years ago there was a suggestion that, if Northern Virginia localities wanted to slow down data center growth, they should seek a change in the law that would have the full tax on data centers apply in that part of the state. Those localities opposed it vehemently, he says. 

Reid wonders whether it’s legally and technically possible to structure a consumption tax so that it only hits data centers (whose popularity right now is low in some quarters) and doesn’t inadvertently bring in other high-energy users, such as, say, Newport News Shipbuilding. 

He also wonders about legal issues with different tax rates, although there are other things that have different tax rates, based on geography. That’s the whole concept behind “enterprise zones,” having a lower tax rate in some economically distressed areas as a way to attract jobs. 

The idea of a tax break for data centers based on geography is not new at all. Virginia’s very first tax break for data centers, passed in 2008, was intended to apply only to Mecklenburg County but was expanded to allow localities with an unemployment rate of 4.9% or higher. It was only later that the tax breaks were applied statewide, which helped set off the data center boom in Northern Virginia.

A consumption tax for data centers would be new, but a tiered system intended to encourage data centers to locate in economically distressed localities would take Virginia’s data center policies back to first principles.

Want more politics and analysis? Sign up for West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out on Fridays. Sign up here:

The post Legislators ponder a different way to tax data centers. Should that new way also be based on a locality’s economic status? appeared first on Cardinal News.

When Gurkan Akalin set out to find a teaching assistant for his graduate-level course in artificial intelligence and machine learning, he didn’t expect to find a qualified candidate among the incoming freshmen.

Peter Gaublomme had just arrived at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise from Arlington for his first semester when he applied for the teaching assistant position. Akalin found he had the necessary coding skills and an interest in working with AI. He also noted Gaublomme’s interest in the needs of Southwest Virginia.

“That’s just the type of person he is. He cares about people,” Akalin said. 

Within his first few months of college, Gaublomme built Wise Care, an AI navigational tool designed to help residents find health care services, understand insurance and locate nearby providers.

The Lenowisco, Cumberland Plateau and Mount Rogers health districts report some of the highest mortality rates in Virginia. A 2022 report from the Virginia Department of Health found that residents often struggle to access care due to difficulty finding providers, limited transportation and limited options to improve health literacy.

Wise County is also federally designated as a Health Profession Shortage Area for dental, mental health and primary care. Even when services are available, some providers do not accept certain insurance plans.

Gaublomme said he created Wise Care to help residents navigate those barriers. 

“I noticed that one of the most prevalent issues in the region was access to health care,” he said. “Many people in Southwest Virginia face these different challenges regarding navigating health care systems, especially just navigating how to identify specialists, insurance coverage and local services. So my intent behind building Wise Care was, how can I organize reliable regional information regarding health care?”

He built the tool using OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Users can enter questions, and the chatbot generates responses to guide them toward services. 

The program offers step-by-step suggestions. For example, when asked how to reach the Health Wagon, a free clinic in Wise that offers some mobile services, without transportation, it explains how to access Medicaid transportation benefits and suggests calling the facility directly for help.

To ensure accuracy, Gaublomme designed the system to cite its sources with each response. He also programmed it to rely only on existing information rather than generate new content.

“I think creating information is a big cause for concern where AI is concerned, especially as AI improves. I’ve done my best, I’ve done all that I can to make sure this information is accurate,” Gaublomme said.

Through Akalin’s classes, Gaublomme also understands the ethical problems of data collection in an AI-powered tool, especially in health care. 

“You can have good intent, but is it typical to have access [to information] like this, especially in health care? That’s a big item that we are discussing in my class,” Akalin said. “There is no definite answer.”

University leaders also raised questions about data privacy. Gaublomme said Wise Care does not store personal health information, user inputs or responses. The system only retains the sources it uses to generate answers.

This year, Wise Care was selected as a semifinalist in the UVa Entrepreneurship Cup, placing in the top 40 of more than 300 student projects across multiple UVa departments in both Charlottesville and Wise. It was one of two ventures selected from UVA Wise.

Gaublomme said he hopes to continue building tools that benefit the region.

“I’m very proud to be a part of that,” he said. 

The tool is available to the public on the Wise Care website, but Gaublomme said usage has been limited so far. 

Akalin said integrating Wise Care into existing health systems could expand its impact, but doing so would require agreements with individual providers. Ongoing concerns about data privacy could make that process challenging.

Like many early-stage tools, Wise Care will likely evolve through user feedback.

“With this type of product, it’s never the best product at once. So if you can keep improving the product based on feedback, then it’s going to be a really good product,” Akalin said. 

Gaublomme is set to transfer to the main UVa campus in Charlottesville next year, but he said his commitment to Southwest Virginia will continue. 

“Moving from an urban area to a more rural area, this was definitely a shift for me. Now that I’ve become more accustomed to it, I’ve found a deep appreciation for the area. While I’m here I want to do as much as I can and be a positive influence,” Gaublomme said. 

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