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Today is Flag Day and the 246th birthday of the United States Army. Happy Birthday, U.S. Army.
Alonzo Jones, a Black mayor in Southern Virginia, was used to the playbook of a white politician facing allegations of racism. So when Gov. Ralph Northam visited his town after a racist photograph was discovered on the governor’s medical school yearbook page, Mr. Jones expected more of the same: a requisite visit to a Black church, a news conference with Black allies, and promises of growth moving forward.
This fall's elections for all 100 seats in the Virginia House of Delegates will look unlike any the state has ever seen, with women leading the way in unprecedented fashion for Democrats and contests playing out in parts of the state that haven't seen competitive races in years. While both major parties are fielding a record number of female candidates, Democrats have crossed a historic threshold: for the first time, women account for more than half of the party's House nominees, 50 out of a total of 97.
After more than a year of navigating the COVID-19 pandemic, Rosalind Cutchins is braced for a busy June as she prepares to reopen two Head Start programs at her child care centers across the Hampton Roads region. But she’s been confronted by a staffing shortfall — 22 unfilled positions across eight different locations. It’s a challenge providers are facing across the commonwealth as businesses reopen and Virginia moves into the recovery phase of its post-pandemic economy.
Marijuana will be legal in Virginia in less than three weeks, but it’ll still be banned on Virginia Tech’s campus. The university recently updated the section in its student code of conduct dealing with drugs and alcohol and made it clear that students can’t possess or use marijuana on campus. Virginia Tech’s conservative approach with its policy is similar to what other colleges have done in states that have legalized marijuana even while it remains illegal under federal law.
Deep inside the bowels of Highland View Elementary lies the 84-year-old school’s original boiler, a wall filled with electrical panels served by an aging nest of wires that carry power throughout the building and a sign on a vent warning “Danger: asbestos.” When former Gov. Terry McAuliffe recently toured the space, he was admonished “not to touch anything.”
Anti-bias lessons piloted this spring at Henley Middle School have prompted a range of comments to Albemarle County School Board members and dueling petitions from parents for and against the lessons. A group of parents’ concerns, comments and criticisms come as the division’s anti-racism policy, which was approved in February 2019 and drafted by students, is starting to make its way into classrooms. That policy calls for an anti-racist curriculum, and Henley’s pilot program was the middle school team’s answer to that charge, Principal Beth Costa said.
As land erosion and sea level rise continue to take a toll on America’s first settlements, underwater archaeologists have worked diligently in the past two decades to preserve artifacts left at the bottom of the James River — and it isn’t getting any easier. With climate change at the forefront of discussions, climate scientists warned nearly a decade ago that Historic Jamestowne will be completely underwater by the end of the century if not addressed.
Our Virginia COVID-19 dashboard features VDH vaccination data, including what percentage of the state's population has received at least one shot and the number of vaccinations per 100,000 residents in each city and county. Our dashboard also makes it easy to track the latest available data for tests performed, infections, deaths and hospital capacity. There's also a filter for each city and county, plus an exclusive per-capita ZIP Code map. Updated each morning around 10:30 a.m.
Robert Tata was a two-sport star athlete at the University of Virginia and a successful high school football coach who won more than 100 games in stops at Norview and Granby in Norfolk. As it turned out, Tata was just warming up. He retired as a coach in 1980 and embarked on a political career during which he again drew the limelight. The quick-witted Tata became a popular and outspoken Republican legislator, representing Virginia Beach’s 85th district in the House of Delegates for 30 years until 2014.
Amid the backdrop of gray skies at the Appomattox Court House Historic National Park, Virginia native Kimberly Lowe officially kicked off her campaign Saturday to challenge Rep. Bob Good, R-5th, and secure the Republican nomination in the 2022 primary. "I'm a well-rounded candidate working on lots of issues, and I think that politics should be about making your life better and bringing people together," said Lowe, a resident of Brunswick County.
Marijuana legalization in Virginia begins July 1. To help Virginians understand what this means, the state launched a new cannabis website on Thursday with information, updates and answers to questions about the law, tweeted Governor Ralph Northam. On April 7, Virginia became the first state in the South to begin the process of legalizing adult-use cannabis, the site states. What exactly does begin the process mean?
A medical marijuana dispensary is possible in Danville, but don’t expect groups of recreational users to be hanging out trying to score weed there. Such facilities, and the use, dispensing and purchase of their products, come with rules and regulations imposed by the state.
As Congress gears up to battle over how much to spend on infrastructure, Rep. Robert C. “Bobby” Scott, D-Newport News, wants to be sure his Capitol Hill colleagues remember one part of the foundation that keeps an economy growing: Child care. “If we’re going to get all these jobs, people need the things that make it possible to work, and that’s child care,” he told staff at the Downtown Hampton Child Development Center.
To combat Virginia’s tight labor market, the state plans to invest $3 million in a program to provide new employees of qualifying small businesses with up to $1,000 to support their transition back into the workforce, Gov. Ralph Northam announced Friday. The Virginia Return to Earn grant program will match up to $500 from eligible small businesses that are paying new hires at least $15 an hour and employ fewer than 100 people. The program will be funded through Virginia’s federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) funding, and additional COVID-19 pandemic recovery funds may be allocated based on demand, the governor’s office said.
When Den Cralle begins furnishing the Mediterranean-style mansion he recently purchased on Monument Avenue, he’ll be coming at it with an entire furniture business at his disposal. The president and co-owner of Farmville-based Green Front Furniture won a bidding war this spring for 2315 Monument Ave., a nearly century-old house he’s planning to use not only as a residence but also as a virtual showroom of sorts, highlighting the company’s inventory of furniture, rugs and home décor items.
The Virginia Tech Board of Visitors approved the school’s largest ever budget last week at $1.74 billion for the 2021-22 fiscal year. The education and general portion of the budget, which includes the University Division and Virginia Cooperative Extension, totals $974 million, a 3.7 percent increase from a year before, according to a university news release.
Tidewater Community College’s Virginia Beach campus has agreed to improve access for students and faculty with physical disabilities as part of a settlement the school recently reached with the U.S. Department of Justice. The agreement was announced last week in a news release from the department.
As the Washington region’s coronavirus vaccination efforts continue, public health officials are homing in on segments of the population slow to get the shot — such as law enforcement officers. While no comprehensive surveying has been done in the region, Virginia officials say less than half of State Police troopers are vaccinated and about 50 percent of corrections officers in the state have been vaccinated.
Hampton Roads teens are getting vaccinated at a slightly lower rate than the rest of the state, according to data from the Virginia Department of Health. Almost 25% of Hampton Roads adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 have received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine and about 11% are fully vaccinated, according to the data.
There’s one trend that’s clear when examining COVID-19 vaccination data in Danville and Pittsylvania County: younger residents are shying away from getting the shots. As of Friday, 75% of people 70-79 in the city and county have had at least one dose. On the flip side, only a quarter of those in the 20-29 age group have received at least one shot of the vaccine to protect from the illness caused by the novel coronavirus.
After Virginia lifted all restrictions established when the coronavirus pandemic was in full force, daily caseloads are steadily dropping. In fact, it’s possible — on the current course — to reach zero weekly cases by September in the Pittsylvania-Danville Health District, according to the University of Virginia’s Biocomplexity Institute. Even a worst-case situation would only mean 63 weekly cases in early October, a reversal of a once-feared summer surge.
A smoother ride on the Blue Ridge Parkway, a better bridge to the Roaring Run Recreation Area and improvements to the Virginia Creeper Trail are on the list of regional projects to be funded by the federal government. Nearly $1.5 million for projects in the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests is proposed under the Great American Outdoors Act in the coming fiscal year, the U.S. Forest Service said Friday.
A northern Virginia county near the nation’s capital is paving the way to rename a major highway that currently shares a name with Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The Arlington County Board said at its Saturday meeting that it plans to vote next month to rename Lee Highway for abolitionist John Langston, who also was the first Black person to be elected to Congress from Virginia.
After pegging the Richmond Coliseum as the anchor for the redevelopment of the city’s downtown core, city officials are now tentatively planning for its demolition. City planning officials last Monday introduced a draft plan for the downtown corridor that calls for the demolition of the shuttered Coliseum and the creation of new public gathering spaces, apartment complexes, hotels and a new City Hall tower.
Facing a surge in homelessness, Richmond wants to buy a hotel to meet the growing need for emergency shelter in the region. The potential purchase, shared with a council panel last week, is among several options the city is weighing to stand up a year-round inclement weather shelter by this fall, said Sherrill Hampton, Richmond’s new director of housing and community development.
The Virginia Beach City Council will vote on a resolution Tuesday to make Juneteenth a permanent city holiday. The resolution follows Mayor Bobby Dyer’s 2020 declaration that city offices would close June 19, 2020, in observance of Juneteenth. The holiday marks the date in 1865 when enslaved people in Galveston, Texas, learned that they had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation — which had been passed nearly 2-½ years earlier.
After years of incremental efforts, the Albemarle County Police Department is on track to launch a body-worn camera program this summer. The long-requested program is the first of its kind in the county and will see the department equip 112 officers with cameras attached to their chests.
Arguments will be heard next month on the second petition challenging the renaming of two Shenandoah County schools. Judge Kevin Black set the hearing for 9 a.m. July 9 in Shenandoah County Circuit Court. The second petition seeks to reverse the School Board’s decision earlier this year to reallocate about $304,000 of this year’s budget to rename Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby Lee Elementary School because they are named after Confederate generals.
Following a June 1 joint meeting between Amherst County government and schools officials that put an equity lesson at the forefront of public debate, the president of the county's NAACP on June 10 publicly asked the Amherst County School Board to press forward with the material. More than two dozen community members, teachers, former teachers and parents June 1 addressed the joint committee, speaking either in favor of or against the lesson recently given to secondary students on topics of social justice, bias, stereotypes, and equal or fair treatment of all groups of people. The lesson is not graded.
The town has entered into an agreement with an Arizona-based company to equip its police officers with a number of devices that include both body and new car cameras. The five-year agreement with the Scottsdale, Arizona-based Axon Enterprise Inc. comes at a cost of $891,781 and was approved by Christiansburg Town Council on a 6-0 vote this past week.
School is not out for summer in Martinsville, Henry and Patrick counties. In fact, after a year of virtual classes because of the pandemic, collectively the three school districts may have one of the most well-attended summer programs on record. “We are offering summer school for elementary, middle and high school Monday through Thursday in June and in July,” Henry County Schools Director of Communication Monica Hatchett said. “We have approximately 900 students registered.”
Today's Sponsor:
Today is Flag Day and the 246th birthday of the United States Army. Happy Birthday, U.S. Army.
Five more historical figures have been hauled into the court of public opinion, found guilty of being either slaveholders, Confederates or segregationists, and sentenced to unnaming. All five have their names affixed to Virginia community colleges, although not for much longer. Three schools are already in the process of changing their names — Lord Fairfax that operates four locations in the northern Shenandoah Valley and Piedmont, John Tyler in Chesterfield County, and Thomas Nelson in Hampton.
Fifty years today a single man died, and with his passing, Virginia politics — and perhaps American politics — shifted its course. That man was J. Sargeant Reynolds. At the time he was the 34-year-old scion of the Reynolds Metal family — and Virginia’s lieutenant governor. He was on a path that, if conventional wisdom at the time held, would have soon taken him to the governorship — and, many believe, the U.S. Senate and perhaps a presidential run beyond that.
Dominion Energy is allowing some customers who have fallen behind on their electric bills during the COVID-19 pandemic to have their debt forgiven, or to gradually pay it off over the course of 24 months. According to Dominion, “customers that have accrued arrears on their account greater than 30 days as of December 31, 2020 may be eligible for arrears forgiveness. The credit will be applied on the June 2021 bill for eligible accounts.” The utility’s “pause” on disconnections in Virginia due to nonpayment will continue.
They’re out-of-the gate, off and running. We have Democrats. We have Republicans. (And Libertarians. And independents. Oh my.) But, before the field hits the first turn, an admittedly self-interested appraisal of the statewide candidates based on geography — along with one note of exceedingly good fortune. All of the Democrats are from Northern Virginia.
There’s a theme as the former governor — who under Virginia law was not able to hold consecutive terms — seeks to win his old job back. The Democratic primary winner says he knows how to build back an economy and turn things around, frequently claiming that he inherited the largest budget deficit in Virginia’s history from his GOP predecessor. There’s a big problem with this claim: It has been fact-checked as false not once but three times by our colleagues at PolitiFact.
The National Traffic Safety Administration (NTSA) recently reported that traffic deaths in the U.S. rose 7% last year, never mind that people drove many fewer miles due to the pandemic. The NTSA blamed the increase on drivers taking more risks on less congested roads. These risks included speeding, failing to wear seat belts, or drinking and driving. I would add drag racing to that list and state that in Richmond, drivers have not given up these risky behaviors now that traffic has returned to normal.
While the pandemic has presented challenges over the past year, technology allowed us to connect with family, friends, colleagues and businesses from afar, and offered the ability to work from home and keep critical government services operating. Yet, despite all the benefits of technology, eyebrows tend to raise when the idea of meshing technology with transportation is discussed. But, like it or not, technology already is disrupting our lives. So, let’s embrace it.
As Richmonders and bus riders, we are grateful for fare-free transit this past year. It has relieved one pandemic burden and kept us connected to essential services. But at the moment, the fare-free pilot program, which has been a silver lining for many during this stressful time, is set to end on June 30. While there is potentially more funding coming from the state, it’s not set to arrive until 2022. Riders of the GRTC Transit System need help before then.
How can we combat racism in America if many White people see any attempt to remedy it as a threat and an insult? That question was front and center last week in Loudoun County at a rowdy school board meeting featuring outraged complaints from scores of conservative parents and activists. They objected to a racial equity initiative adopted two years ago by the school system in the affluent Northern Virginia suburb. The effort, ordered by the state attorney general, aims to improve treatment of students of color, who are a majority in Loudoun.
Last month, Sena. Mark Warner released “Overhauling International Taxation,” a framework for ensuring huge corporations pay their fair share so that we can invest in jobs, health care and other critical programs and services. The plan, proposed by Warner as well as Sen. Wyden of Oregon and Sen. Brown of Ohio, builds on President Biden’s Made in America Tax Plan, which rewards corporations for keeping jobs in the United States and invests in building a prosperous economy financed by a fairer tax code.
"We write to express our deep concern about the clear and appalling culture of ongoing structural racism at the Virginia Military Institute.” This was the opening sentence of a letter sent to the President of the VMI Board of Visitors on October 19, 2020 by Gov. Northam based on a few individual allegations in the media of racism at VMI. The letter called for an investigation.
It’s hard to believe there was ever a chance it wouldn’t turn out this way. Fourteen years ago, members of Carilion Health System’s board had an existential decision in front of them. The healthcare industry faced an upheaval, and trends for traditional hospital systems were not favorable. One thing was clear: Proceeding with the status quo would not serve the community or the health of its members.
Dominion Energy takes seriously its duty to provide safe and reliable service while meeting our customers’ needs for affordable and clean energy. Our ability to do so is tied to the policy and legislative landscape in Virginia, which has kept rates low and stable while growing renewable resources. However, in his recent column in The Roanoke Times, Sen. David Suetterlein advocated for Virginia to follow Texas and other states down the path toward electricity deregulation — despite the catastrophic electric reliability failures and ensuing price hikes seen there.
Terry McAuliffe wins election as governor again in November and that’s it. The Democrats roll on. Why does this have to be complicated? Dr. Bold blew the doors off the joint in Tuesday’s primary and the immediate reaction was to say, “let the games begin.” It’s game over. Terry has already been out making nice with his former rivals, state Sen. Jennifer McClellan and Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy, waving to the crowds, bragging about the 200,000 jobs he created as Virginia’s 72nd governor, on his way to becoming the 74th.
When the new $224 million mental health hospital and outpatient center for children opens next year on the campus of Children’s Hospital of The King’s Daughters, the region will be taking a major step forward in the availability of critical resources in the treatment of mental health conditions among the region’s children and adolescents. The need for such resources has been well documented. One in three visits to primary care pediatricians is related to mental health concerns, which is also the most common cause that youth ages 10-17 are admitted to the hospital in our region.
In the early 1970s, in the midst of the Cold War, one of the Potomac River farms once owned by George Washington was nearly sold to the Soviet Union for use as a retreat for embassy dignitaries. To prevent the sale, philanthropist Enid Annenberg Haupt donated $1 million to the American Horticultural Society (AHS) to allow the organization to purchase the property for its headquarters. Now, nearly 50 years later, AHS has announced its intent to sell the property, River Farm, for $32.9 million. When it listed the property for sale, the AHS likely had no inkling of the fierce opposition the sale would provoke in its neighbors and every local, state and federal official with even a remote connection to the property.
Our federal government’s most sacred duty is to safeguard the right to life for all Americans. Yet current federal law allows our most vulnerable citizens — newborn babies who are born alive after botched abortions — to be neglected, denied medical care, and left on the abortionist’s table gasping for air until they ultimately succumb to death.