It was not the most reported part of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s State of the Commonwealth Address on January 13, but for the first time in four years the Republican took direct aim at the renewable energy mandates his predecessor adopted. He labeled them a “quagmire.” “The Virginia Clean Economy Act,...
Virginia’s General Assembly is being asked again to protect the use of natural gas and prohibit local government efforts to restrict or ban it in homes and businesses. A Senate bill pending at the 2025 session is backed by a large coalition which includes the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy...
Senator Ghazala Hashmi, chair of the Virginia Senate Education and Health Committee, is introducing a bill that has no chance of becoming law — apparently trying to carry water on behalf of the Virginia Education Association (VEA) in hopes of gaining support for her campaign for Lieutenant Governor. Hashmi’s bill would require...
In Virginia, a Democratic Delegate, Phil Hernandez, has introduced legislation to raise state income taxes on people making over $1 million per year. Their marginal tax rate would rise from 5.75% to 10%, under HB 2333. This tax increase won’t become law this year, but it might become law...
The 2025 General Assembly is expected to consider another proposal to create a state-level approval process for certain large renewable energy projects, overriding local zoning authority. Based on recent public debates about the proposal, it is facing severe headwinds. Similar bills were proposed and failed in 2024. The legislative Commission on Electric...
While Democrats in the Virginia General Assembly appear unanimous in their opposition to the Governor’s new School Performance and Support Framework, there is near unanimous support among registered voters for enhanced educational standards that measure both growth and accountability by student subgroups according to a new poll. In a survey...
Virginia registered voters are strongly in favor of allowing utilities to build new natural gas generation plants, a key issue facing Virginia because current state law mandates the complete elimination of that fuel source for electricity generation in 15 years. On another key energy issue likely to face the 2025...
Governor Youngkin presented his budget amendments to the Joint Money Committees yesterday. The speech was filled with budget amendments to reduce taxes and fund new or existing programs. These tax cuts and additional spending proposals were made possible by Secretary of Finance Stephen E. Cummings’ report that the Commonwealth was again sitting on massive surpluses. Specifically, Secretary Cummings reported...
Yet another analysis of the energy dilemma facing Virginia, this one commissioned by a Democrat-controlled legislative panel, has concluded that the use of natural gas to make electricity is going to have to grow over coming decades, not shrink. Virginia’s anti-hydrocarbon energy laws are doomed to fail because of the data...
More than 70 years ago, black and white students in Virginia received separate and very unequal educations. In They Closed Their Schools, author Bob Smith writes that in Farmville, a city not unlike the rest of Virginia, the white public school built after a 1939 fire “had a gymnasium, cafeteria,...
