Year: 2009

Gary Wilson is an outright, pathological liar; and I have proof.

Here’s what Gary Wilson had to say about the National Boy Scout Jamboree leaving Caroline County in today’s edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

Meanwhile, Caroline County Economic Development Director Gary Wilson said yesterday that the county wasn’t particularly stung by the loss, because the jamboree was self-contained and didn’t add that much to the local economy.

[…]

The jamborees routinely attract 30,000 to 40,000 Boy Scouts and their leaders, along with hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Despite those numbers, Wilson said the jamborees typically have not left a massive economic footprint on the locality, primarily because the participants tend to arrive in buses, go directly to the military post and stay there.

“We did a study after the last jamboree that indicated the actual increase in sales for a two or three-week period every year was about $815,000,” Wilson said. “Caroline County is not particularly feeling any sting from the loss of the Boy Scouts, frankly. A.P. Hill is hermetically sealed, practically, and we just didn’t get very much out of it.”

First, it’s absolutely amazing that the Economic Development Director considers $815,000 to be chump change. Especially as the county is forcing the Sheriff’s Office to give unpaid furloughs to sheriff’s deputies due to budget cuts.

And here’s what Gary Wilson had to say about the National Boy Scout Jamboree after the ACLU successfully sued the Department of Defense on the grounds that the DOD couldn’t constitutionally provide support to the Boy Scouts of America and thus the jamboree couldn’t be held at Fort A.P. Hill (the case has since been successfully appealed and the Boy Scouts could legally hold the jamboree there):

Losing the jamboree would be a serious blow for Caroline, which gets about $1 million in revenue during the event, said Gary Wilson, the county’s economic development director. Events such as model train shows and book fairs are timed to coincide with the jamboree, and local businesses print up promotional material to hand out to Scouts’ families.

Residents work at the event and sell the Scouts raw materials, and guests fill hotels and restaurants.

“Our hotels are booked four years in advance,” Wilson said.

That’s from the July 17, 2005 edition of The Washington Post.

From the May 23, 2004 edition of The Free Lance–Star:

Caroline County, a popular stopover for people visiting Paramount’s Kings Dominion, isn’t expecting a significant increase in visitation this summer. But the numbers should climb next year, said Gary Wilson, the county’s economic development director.

[…]

“We’ll also have the 2005 Boy Scout Jamboree,” Wilson said. “That’s always a plus.”

And then there’s this story from WFLS from September 10, 2003:

Having your name on a Boy Scout logo…Priceless.

Soon Boy Scouts everywhere will be recognizing Caroline County.

The organization is changing its international jamboree logo to include a prominent reference to the county. Economic Development Director, Gary Wilson, says by the year 2005, just in time for the next event, every item related to the Boy Scout Jamboree will say Caroline County, Virginia.

Wilson says this is a thank you from the Boy Scout organization

The recognition is expected to be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars of free marketing for the county.

And going way back to the October 15, 2001 edition of The Free Lance–Star:

Caroline County made more than $1.25 million in food and hotel-room sales during last summer’s National Scout Jamboree, a new report shows.

The total regional economic impact of the jamboree was expected to be in the tens of millions of dollars, officials from Fort A.P. Hill, which hosts the event, said earlier this summer.

[…]

Caroline’s gross food sales this July were nearly $1.16 million more than for the same month last year, when no jamboree was held, according to the report.

County hotels earned about $128,000 more than last year.

The report also said that gasoline sales were far above typical for July, and that many local contractors and suppliers of building materials were used to prepare A.P. Hill for the jamboree. Exact figures for these two sectors were not available for the report, Wilson said.

Great one, Gary: National Boy Scout Jamboree moving to Goshen, Virginia.

I wonder how much sales and gasoline taxes the country is going to lose from buses that used to stop at Carmel Church (Richmond Times-Dispatch):

The Boy Scouts of America may be doing a good deed for Virginia and West Virginia.

The organization announced yesterday it has settled on Goshen, Va., as the permanent home for its national jamboree. The community is in Rockbridge County near the George Washington National Forest.

[…]

Scout officials told the Charleston Daily Mail the decisions come after an 18-month review of possible locations to create a national scouting center. The center would focus on creating a permanent home for the jamboree, establishing a new high-adventure base and creating new training opportunities.

Now, can someone explain to me why the county is paying $200,000+ to the Economic Development Office for Gary Wilson’s expert leadership? Can someone show me a single thing he has done to get any economic development in the county?

Why is Bobby Orrock supporting legislation that has been declared unconstitutional in Ohio?

As “theRadical” pointed out in a comment on my post about Bobby Orrock’s proposed voted registration legislation, the portion of Bobby Orrock’s legislation which makes it illegal to pay someone to collect signatures or distribute voter registration forms on a per-signature rate has been ruled unconstitutional in Ohio (specifically by the Southern District of Ohio and the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals).

The state of Ohio appealed the Sixth Circuit’s opinion and the Supreme Court refused to hear the case on November 17, 2008.

Unfortunately, cases from the Sixth Circuit don’t directly affect Virginia since Virginia is part of the Fourth Circuit, but the Supreme Court obviously didn’t disagree with the Sixth Circuit’s opinion in the matter since they refused to hear Ohio’s request for an appeal.

Thank you! Delegates Chris Peace and Albert Pollard vote against smoking ban!

Chief Local Idiot Politician Bobby Orrock voted for it.

It’s kinda of sad to see Bob Marshall support the ban, especially given his conservative credentials.

And former Attorney General and current candidate for Governor, Bob McDonnell, released a press statement a couple days stating that he did not support the ban (WTOP). Hey, he might actually get my support this year. Wonders will never cease. :)

The House of Delegates Elections Subcommittee shows Bobby Orrock the door.

Thank God.

As I pointed out a couple days ago, Bobby Orrock’s original version of HB 2642 was a monstrosity which required that anyone, who distributed a voter registration form to a citizen, register with the State Board of Elections (SBE) and provide quarterly reports to the SBE about who conducted voter registration activities and where such activities were conducted at.

Thankfully, the Elections Subcommittee of the of the Privileges and Elections Committee in the House of Delegates unanimously voted to remove that provision, along with a lot more of the bill, leaving only the requirement that registrars check the people currently on the voter rolls with those that are listed as being dead with the Social Security Administration. The subcommittee version of the bill also retains the prohibition on paying people on a per signature basis to solicit signatures on candidate forms or for voter registration forms, which was also part of Orrock’s original bill.

Nice to see that some folks in the General Assembly have some sense.

More on that un-freakin’-believable $694,701,315 request from Caroline County: It just goes to show that this country has absolutely no priorities.

Can someone explain to me why it cost $30,000,000 to upgrade the county’s current wastewater treatment plant — which can process 0.5 million gallons of wastewater per day — to a facility that can process 1.5 million gallons per day (MGD) (Potential Economic Stimulus Package Projects, p. 1), but only cost $11,000,000 to upgrade the facility to a 3 mgd design (Id., p. 12)? Is that $11,000,000 in addition to the $30,000,000 needed for the 1.5 mgd upgrade?

Hell, they even included a request for $39,000,000 to upgrade the facility to a 6 mgd design (Id., p. 39). Again, is that in addition to the money necessary to upgrade to the 1.5 mgd and 3 mgd designs? Does the county really think that they are going to need the ability to process 12 times the amount of the waste they can process now?

Then you have the county’s request for $12,600,000 to construct a Public Safety Building (Id., p. 5). They note that “[d]ue to limited space the County’s Public Safety Departments, Caroline County Sheriff and Fire & Rescue are located in multiple facilities that greatly impact their operational efficiency. The low crime rate and emergency response capabilities in Caroline County are of paramount importance to the ability of the County to recruit economic development opportunities for the County.”

Note that they seem to think that “economic development opportunities” are more important than us lowly citizens in this country.

Supposedly this is of “paramount importance” to the County, eh? Then why did the country decide that in 2007 that it was a good idea to spend $4,000,000 to buy the old Union Bankshares building and convert it into an county administration building, instead of using it as a public safety building as was request by several officials? And why is that when County Administrator Percy Ashcraft proposed a $16,000,000 public bond referendum for a public safety building in early 2008, the Board of Supervisors completely ignored the proposal? So, how much of a “paramount importance” is the public safety building?

Care to guess what the single most expensive item on the list? $120,000,000 for “Carmel Church Multimodal Transportation Center” (that’s what politicians call a “train station”) (Id., p. 16). Not only is it the single most expensive item on the list, but it beats the second most expensive item by 100% (The $59,754,000 request for the Rappahannock River Water Treatment Plant). Not only do they want $120,000,000 for a bloody train station but it’s ranked as a higher priority than new and upgraded construction for schools!

And speaking of that Rappahannock River Water Treatment Plant, uh…why does anyone think we need a 12 mgd water treatment facility in northern Caroline County? Is it for that booming development known as Haymount? Oh wait, they were drilling their own wells and they haven’t built a single house despite having the development approved a decade and a half ago.

Then there’s the tens of millions dollars requested to expand the coverage area of their existing water and sewer coverage. The county can’t provide adequate services to the areas that are in their coverage area, and they want to extend it?

And can someone tell me what a “speculative distribution building” is and why it cost $23,000,000 (Id., p. 16)? You would think that with all the speculation that has occurred in the real estate market in the last couple years, the last thing a government would be involved with would be “speculative” building.

Only in Caroline, folks…

That’s it, I’m not voting for any Republicans this year…

I don’t smoke, but anyone that supports this crap shouldn’t be elected:

Governor Tim Kaine and members of the General Assembly announce legislation has passed to ban smoking in nearly all of Virginia’s restaurants and bars. Exceptions will only be made for private clubs and restaurants that have a physically separated and separately ventilated smoking area.

I can’t wait until the tax revenue at restaurants and bars plummets. God, I will absolutely love it…

School Pride, part 2: VCU Police Chief had a degree from a diploma mill.

Jesus Christ, can I apply for this guy’s job? At least all my education is from accredited organizations. Although if VCU keeps this up it won’t be:

Willie B. Fuller became Virginia Commonwealth University’s police chief with a bachelor’s degree of questionable quality.

For VCU, which has endured nearly a year of negative publicity for improperly awarding a degree to Richmond’s former police chief, Fuller’s arrest Wednesday on charges of using a computer to solicit sex from an underage girl is a setback in efforts to repair its reputation.

[…]

Fuller holds a bachelor’s degree in police science from St. John’s University in Springfield, La., according to St. John’s director of permanent records. St. John’s in Louisiana is not affiliated with the prestigious Catholic university with the same name in New York, or with St. John’s College, which has campuses in Annapolis, Md., and Santa Fe, N.M.

Robert D. Holsworth, former dean of the College of Humanities and Sciences at VCU, said yesterday that he discovered St. John’s University was not an officially accredited institution while researching the case of a VCU employee who did not have a legitimate undergraduate degree.

[…]

“In this instance, I personally made the unhappy discovery that the degree not only came from an unaccredited institution, but that the Web site of the institution was now a conduit to pornographic sites,” he wrote June 26 to Richard O. Bunce, VCU’s director of assurance services.

Holsworth made the discovery around 2006, the year VCU awarded an undergraduate degree to Fuller, who had attended VCU in the 1970s. When Holsworth discovered it, “I brought that to the attention of the appropriate individuals at VCU,” he said.

Fuller was awarded a VCU bachelor of interdisciplinary studies degree [the same degree that Rodney Moore was awarded], university spokeswoman Pam Lepley said. He also has a post-graduate certificate in public management from VCU, Lepley said. VCU officials did not say who approved Fuller’s undergraduate degree.

The St. John’s degree apparently raised no red flags until Fuller began work on a master’s degree at VCU.

[…]

However, the university is not accredited in Louisiana, said Cheryl Michelet, director of communications for the state Board of Regents.

Nor is it accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which covers Virginia and Louisiana. Tom E. Benberg, the commission’s chief of staff, said the university is “totally unfamiliar to me.”