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VPAP Visual 2025 Conflict of Interest Disclosures
Each year, General Assembly members are required to disclose personal financial holdings that could create a potential conflict of interest with their public duties. Reports filed in 2025 cover the 2024 calendar year.
American shad: Once a James River staple, it could soon be an afterthought
Over the past four decades, the American shad population in Virginia — specifically the James River — collapsed. Humans are largely to blame. Dams, pollution, commercial fishing bycatch, water withdrawals and invasive species either impede habitat access, hinder spawning, consume living shad or all of the above. Climate change also complicates things. A once-beloved and cherished species in the James River and Chesapeake Bay watershed, the population has steadily declined since the 1970s. In recent years, scientists who attempt to net American shad for the purpose of estimating the population in the James River haven’t caught any.
New approach to cleaning Chesapeake Bay rewards success
The biggest challenge to cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay is figuring out where the nutrients that fuel summertime dead zones come from — and a new approach to pollution control is stressing better targeting. For the past few years, environmentalists and marine scientists have been talking about such targeting with what they call an outcomes-based approach to cutting nonpoint source flows of nitrogen and phosphorus. These are the pollutants that rain — flowing off farm fields, parking lots, streets and suburban lawns — carries into the hundreds of streams and rivers that eventually feed the bay. Now, some of the first efforts are emerging.