By Bob Gibson
Charlottesville political blogger
A few decades ago, Virginia law forbade the sale of a mule after dark.
That may have been good law a few centuries ago, before the dawn of electricity when fast talking mule salesmen might take advantage of a needy buyer on a moonless night.
The mule-seller lobby may have been slack or lacked pull in those days of a more agrarian Old Dominion.
Government also worked at a slower pace and was closer to the people. It kept up with mule hucksters and tricksters.
Why the law grew musty on the books into the last decades of the 20th Century—long after the state’s dreaded mule tax was eliminated—tells a tale on state government.
Richmond still reacts slowly to crisis and even more slowly when change has left in place a skeleton of law designed to handle problems that have moved on.
Virginia’s tax structure, and even its unique system of entirely separate and distinct cities and counties, may have fit the needs and the state’s modernity of the 1920s.
Its application to the needs of the 2010s leaves the state burdened with baggy skeletons of outdated tax structures that weigh Virginia down.
The state’s adherence to fiscal conservatism is not enhanced by a bag of old law bones that never seem to die, be buried, reconnected to modern needs or reborn.
We just carry them around, as if weightier books of law carry the magic of relevance to when they were born.
They don’t.
Do cities and counties need a personal property car tax or a business, professional and occupational license tax in 2010?
Yes and no. No if they are given more modern and fair means of raising revenue, and yes if they aren’t.
Instead, the state chooses to venerate the antiquated and celebrate only the least efficient and partial fixes, such as a Rube Goldberg contraption that funnels state taxpayer money to every local government in Virginia to pay a portion of car owners’ local tax bills. We Virginians double-dip pay part of our car tax out of one pocket as local taxpayers and part out of another as state taxpayers. It must hurt less that way.
Who said inefficiency lacks rewards? No one had to raise a tax to create a system in which every taxpayer paid himself tax relief and the ability to pay car taxes out of two pockets instead of just one.
Is the gross receipts business, professional and occupational license tax, or BPOL, tax fair? No.
How fair is it to tax gross receipts even if there is no profit? What kind of business incentive is that when creation of jobs is a major goal?
Is it antiquated? Yes.
People waiting in traffic on Virginia’s highways can rest assured that governors come and governors go but some laws, like old taxes, will hang around until people forget why they were passed.
At least it is now legal to buy a mule at midnight.
By Bob Gibson
The year that ends in just 13 days has brought newspapers to their knees with many praying for new business models that can sustain and revive American journalism.
A crashing business model once based upon booming retail and classified ads and monopolistic rates of revenue isn’t coming back. Ad revenue and readership dipped and dived at papers whose profitability plummeted and whose size, staff and stories shrank.
Newsrooms at major papers in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, Cleveland, San Francisco, Sacramento and Los Angeles are pale shadows of their former selves. Coverage of state and local governments throughout the country is diminished or disappearing.
Yet, some of journalism’s leading lights are voicing optimism that the days of newsrooms producing the quality of journalism vital to the functioning of democracy and to informed electorates are far from over.
Journalism is changing more than it is dying. Dominant newspapers and their broadcasting cousins, major television network news operations, are losing ground to upstarts and far more diverse collections of news gatherers as people design their own sets of free media.
Collections of non-profits, public radio operations and collaborations among traditional news gatherers and newer journalistic enterprises are creatively stepping up to supplement or replace the dying monopolistic media.
Len Downie, former executive editor of the Washington Post, and Michael Schudson, a professor of communication at Columbia University, have produced an upbeat report on how newer media can continue the traditions of what they call “accountability journalism” in this new age of .advocacy journalism.
Their report, The Reconstruction of American Journalism, discusses new collaborations starting up in the public interest around the country and recommends six steps to support diverse sources of independent news reporting.
The report is available online through the Journalism School at Columbia University: http://www.columbiajournalismreport.org.
In it, the authors discuss how larger newspapers battered by the recession are changing. Micropayments to read individual news stories through the Internet using a model of online digital music purchases and business-to-business arrangements to share in ad revenue from other sites that republish stories are two of the various proposals from Internet entrepreneurs playing around the margins of what readers now regard as free media on the web.
They conclude that new digital technology combined with innovations and new reporting models can energize and expand possibilities for good reporting. Online journalists, non-profit entities and new collaborations among groups of newsrooms, such as the eight largest newspapers in Ohio pooling and sharing stories, are giving consumers of news fresh reporting and the ability to participate in journalism through multimedia sites, blogs, social networks, podcasts and videos.
Newsrooms and non-profits alike are finding new partners in a media dance that speeds up the pace of news while allowing for reporting on multiple platforms.
In Charlottesville, The Daily Progress is four months into a partnership with Charlottesville Tomorrow, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that covers land-use, growth and transportation issues in the city and Albemarle County with a full-time staff of two journalists and some University of Virginia interns. The newspaper and the non-profit both appear to benefit from sharing news on important issues. Stories and podcasts are distributed through the CvilleTomorrow.org Web site as well as through e-mail and social media such as Facebook, Twitter and a new Wiki known as Cvillepedia.org.
Critics of the nonprofit could consider it more advocacy journalism than accountability journalism.
Downie and Schudson propose half a dozen ways to further support independent news reporting. They include:
1. The Internal Revenue Service or Congress should explicitly authorize any independent news organization substantially devoted to reporting on public affairs to be created as or converted into a nonprofit entity or a low-profit Limited Liability Corporation serving the public interest, regardless of its mix of financial support, including commercial sponsorship and advertising. The IRS or Congress also should explicitly authorize program-related investments by philanthropic foundations in these hybrid news organizations—and in designated public service news reporting by for-profit news organizations.
2. Philanthropists, foundations, and community foundations should substantially increase their support for news organizations that have demonstrated a substantial commitment to public affairs and accountability reporting.
3. Public radio and television should be substantially reoriented to provide significant local news reporting in every community served by public stations and their Web sites. This requires urgent action by and reform of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, increased congressional funding and support for public media news reporting, and changes in mission and leadership for many public stations across the country.
4. Universities, both public and private, should become ongoing sources of local, state, specialized subject, and accountability news reporting as part of their educational missions. They should operate their own news organizations, host platforms for other nonprofit news and investigative reporting organizations, provide faculty positions for active individual journalists, and be laboratories for digital innovation in the gathering and sharing of news and information.
5. A national Fund for Local News should be created with money the Federal Communications Commission now collects from or could impose on telecom users, television and radio broadcast licensees, or Internet service providers and which would be administered in open competition through state Local News Fund Councils.
6. More should be done—by journalists, nonprofit organizations and governments—to increase the accessibility and usefulness of public information collected by federal, state, and local governments, to facilitate the gathering and dissemination of public information by citizens, and to expand public recognition of the many sources of relevant reporting.
Some of the above may involve more government assistance than is likely, but the emphasis on mixing and matching new forms of collaboration demonstrates ways to enter the new year with a little more optimism about enhancing support for accountability journalism. Many Americans would object to further government subsidies of, or tax breaks for, any kind of media.
Advocacy journalism is alive and flourishing, but the old-fashioned newsroom’s brand of holding individuals and governments accountable through honest, even-handed and diligent reporting of the news is an established value worth holding onto in a new media age. Let’s hope some can make a profit doing it right and others can do it with citizens and non-profits leading the way to new models of informing people about their politics.
As Downie and Schudson sum up their goals, the report states, “Rather than depending primarily on newspapers and their waning reporting resources, each sizeable American community should have a range of diverse sources of news reporting. They should include a variety and mix of commercial and nonprofit news organizations that can both compete and collaborate with one another. They should be adapting traditional journalistic forms to the multimedia, interactive, real-time capabilities of digital communication, sharing the reporting and distribution of news with citizens, bloggers, and aggregators.“
I hope and feel their optimism is justified. There is still a significant demand for news that voters, the owners of their government, can use.
By Paige Winfield on November 25, 2009
(Published Nov. 25, 2009, by Old Dominion Watchdog, see: http://virginia.watchdog.org/2009/11/25/... )
Resignations like the one given by Del. Phil Hamilton last week are rare.
The Newport News Republican is one of only three Virginia legislators over the last three decades to leave the General Assembly due to ethical breaches, according to E.M. Miller, director of the division of legislative services.
Facing investigations by a House Ethics Advisory Panel and a federal grand jury, Hamilton yielded his seat in the face of charges that he negotiated for himself a $40,000 salary from an Old Dominion University teaching institute for which he had state money appropriated.
But when Hamilton resigned on Nov. 15, the House panel was required by state law to drop the investigation. A spokesperson at the U.S. Attorneys office in Alexandria said officials won’t comment on the ongoing federal investigation.
Now state lawmakers, including Governor Tim Kaine and Speaker of the House Bill Howell, say they want to change the law to allow such investigations to continue even after legislators relinquish their seats.
But it’s unlikely that lawmakers will actually toughen up ethics laws, said Bob Gibson, executive director of the Sorenson Institute for Political Leadership at the University of Virginia and former Charlottesville Daily Progress reporter.
‘'I don’t know if there’s a will to do that in Richmond right now,‘’ Gibson said. ‘'I don’t know if there’s any political will to make it stronger.‘’
Whether any changes are made, Virginia has a comparatively good record of ethical behavior by legislators, Gibson said. Especially compared to states like Illinois and New Jersey, the state has a long history of judging legislators on the basis of their integrity.
And Virginia’s ethical laws are no weaker than those governing Congress, Gibson said.
Still, he says there’s a lot of well-deserved skepticism regarding the effectiveness of ethics boards.
‘'A lot of ethics complaints go to this type of commission and sort of disappear into a black hole and aren’t heard about much ever again,‘’ Gibson said. ‘'It’s not like this is an open discussion of ethical problems. It’s largely a quiet, out-of-the-way discussion that may or may not end up in a resolution.‘’
Virginia is one of only 10 states that do not have ethics commissions, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Complaints against delegates and senators are instead handled by E.M. Miller, who passes them along to Judge Willian Sweeny, the panel chairman.
If the two decide the complaint is worth investigating, they convene a meeting of the five-member panel—which includes two former state legislators and two citizens. But considering that members live in Lynchburg, Richmond and Northern Virginia, that’s difficult to do, Miller says.
‘'It’s a fairly unique situation when an ethics complaint is filed’‘ Miller said. ‘'This group very seldom gets together. It causes a tremendous amount of work on my part that I don’t plan for.”
And when the panel does meet, the scope of their investigations is limited. They may only deal with certain conflicts of interest where financial stakes are involved, and investigations may only be prompted by formal complaints. So if a member reads a news story or recieves a tip about an ethical breach, they are not allowed to investigate it if a complaint is not first filed.
In addition, Virginia code gives the attorney general the power to decide what information about the investigation, if any, is made public—meaing that the public never hears about most investigations. When asked how many ethics complaints were filed and investigated this year, Miller declined to answer.
Regardless of how many ethics breaches have gone unchecked, Virginia is still known for an upright political culture, said Isaac Wood, assistant communications director for the University of Virginia Center for Politics.
Wood attributes some of that tradition to the Byrd Organization, which dominated Virginia politics for the middle portion of the 20th century. Led by former Governor and U.S. Senator Harry F. Bryd, Sr., the organization had heavy influence in rural areas.
‘'There hasn’t been a need or really a demand from voters for a particularly robust system of ethical inquiry because the needs haven’t existed, at least in the public mind,” Wood said. “So it will be interesting to see whether the Hamilton case will create pressure.‘’
