Will $50 million be enough? Will that get all the Virginians who have fallen behind due to COVID-19 square on their rent or mortgage payments? Or is that amount, in a new relief program detailed Monday by the Northam Administration, merely a start? There is a hint on the program’s web page. “Financial...
Working from home was already becoming more common, but the COVID-19 crisis forced many employers to quickly alter policies to enable more workers to perform their jobs from home. This forced experimentation with remote work is causing some employers to alter their policies permanently. Shopify, for example, announced in May...
Transit agencies are in crisis mode. The Covid-19 pandemic and shelter-in-place orders across the country led to ridership declines of up to 95%. But even before this crisis, transit agencies were losing ridership. Recently, the Center for Urban Transportation Research (CUTR) at the University of South Florida analyzed the transit...
In my many efforts to unravel and explain the federal government’s sometimes baffling efforts to legally define the things that matter most to property owners, I have started by describing the government’s interpretation of a “ditch” (see here). Now the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) and U.S. EPA (EPA) have...
With the General Assembly taking up policing reform in this summer’s special session, there should be at least one bill stopping a problem before it begins. Provisions commonly found in Collective Bargaining Ageements negotiated between governments and the local police union create obstacles to holding bad cops accountable. Unless the...
The Northam Administration’s Safety and Health Codes Board agreed June 24 that COVID-19 in the state’s workplaces demands an emergency state response, but the nature and exact wording of that response remains undecided. If adopted, formal regulations come with the potential for heavy penalties for employers cited for failures. The vote to...
With the General Assembly taking up policing reform in this summer’s special session, there should be at least one bill stopping a problem before it begins. Most big problems are created by a small number of people. The same is true of police officer transgressions. Derek Chauvin was a bad...
The US Supreme Court recently ruled 7-2 to reverse a lower court ruling invalidating a permit for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline, which will bring West Virginia natural gas to Virginia and North Carolina, for home heating, factory power, electricity generation and manufacturing petrochemical feedstocks. Environmentalists had claimed the US Forest Service...
High school and college students are probably struggling to find summer jobs in this era of COVID-19. Ads for some of the typical summer jobs for students have plummeted compared to a year ago, in large part, because of social distancing and the economic slump, based on Chmura’s Real Time...
Throughout history military commanders have faced a classical dilemma: When confronted with overwhelming odds, do they stand fast and hope for a miracle to deliver victory, while risking total annihilation as a fighting force? Or do they conduct an orderly retreat, regroup and live to fight another day? Robert E....
