If You Read the Paper | Tuesday, November 9

New City Manager for Norfolk

That was quick.

Marcus Jones, who used to be the Assistant City Manager and Budget Director until he left two years ago to serve as Richmond’s Finance and Budget Director, has been tapped as the new city manager, according to the Pilot.

Regina V.K. Williams (why do we always include the initials? I don’t know.) has been out for only three weeks, and Jones is the only man they interviewed to replace her, the Pilot reports. That demonstrates a high level of confidence in this man. Apparently many on the city council were sorry to see him go to Richmond. So maybe the plan was to bring him back all along. His first job, of course, is going to be cutting enough spending from the city budget to eliminate the $44 million shortfall expected this Spring. That’ll be interesting.

McDonnell won’t let go of the bottle

After the first round of peddling his plan to privatize liquor dealers in Virginia met with broad skepticism and scorn, McDonnell has decided he’ll try to bolster his case with a little professional analysis. The last time people ran the numbers, it seemed clear that any plan to shut down the state run liquor stores and sell franchises to private owners was likely to generate about $450 million in cash in the short term (which McDonnell pledged to use for transportation, oddly), but would lose about $47 million a year after that. This probably surprised a lot of people–it surprised me–who had suspected that the reason we had state run liquor stores was due to prudery and antiquated post-prohibition fears. It turns out, however, that having the Commonwealth run the whole thing directly is both efficient and lucrative. So now, if McDonnell wants to keep this apparently bad idea alive, he needs a different set of facts. Perhaps the PFM Group can provide for him.

New Pilot posting policy — announced by Kerry Dougherty!

Apparently our Virginian-Pilot has had just about enough of the hate-filled bile spewed by anonymous commentors on the Opinion channel of the online edition of their product. Kerry points to this section as a place where “readers insult each other – and us – and spew vitriol, lies, and libel.”

At first I thought she was talking about the Pilot‘s comments sections in general, the area below each story where the public is welcome to chime in with their thoughts and feedback, while giving themselves whatever name they like (“OVMAMA”, “myopinion2″, etc.).

I am constantly appalled by the tenor of the conversations down there, which tend to be dominated by a group of people who would prefer to dissolve government, expel all non-white citizens, and walk around wearing guns at all times. But the comments sections are not slated for change. It’s the “OPINION CHANNEL.” I’m not even sure exactly what this is. I looked at the section of the site called “Opinion” but I didn’t see a place for free-form discussion. Apparently in order to post in this section the Pilot will require some form of registration that includes entering your credit card information. That’ll definitely cut down on the submissions on that page.

Letters from CBF

Yesterday, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation was all set to deliver a crab-pot full of citizen letters to our Governor, demanding that the Commonwealth get serious about crafting an environmental plan for the Bay. Luckily, before they found him, they were told that he was attending the funeral of his father, who had died at the age of 94 a few days before. So, media disaster averted, the CBF delegation delivered the letters to the Virginia Department of Conservation instead, which is where they needed to go to make the deadline for public comment on the proposed watershed plan. I hope the 7,000 letters will make a difference. The initial plan that Virginia submitted was alarmingly light on details, a deliberate attempt by McDonnell to sound tough on pollution while allowing businesses and commercial farms to to as they like.

iComment

For an example of comment-spawned vitriol, look no further than this story about giving iPads to the Virginia Beach City Council. The plan is that, although each iPad costs about $500, overall the city would save money by not having to print as many documents. They are also cheaper than laptop computers, which the city would probably supply instead. So, this is a reasonable-seeming proposal. Now, a sampling of the comments:

MAKES SENSE TO ME
Submitted by hwatkins on Tue, 11/09/2010 at 5:30 am.
I would imagine most of them already have their own personal computers or laptops at home.
So if the city could cut the cost of a $1200.00 laptop and replace it with a $600.00 iPad, where is the harm? Also, I am a big fan of cutting the printing costs. I bet 95% of the stuff they get goes into the recycle bin after the meeting (or worse yet, the trash).
Easy decision for me: saves money, saves trees.

IPADS ARE NOT COMPUTERS.
Submitted by SamD on Tue, 11/09/2010 at 7:41 am.
They’ll still need a computer to work on and load the IPad with.

SO THE COUNCIL MEMBERS GET
Submitted by Ethan on Tue, 11/09/2010 at 2:42 am.
So the council members get ipads but they don’t have laptops? You can’t really input information into ipads very well.

Well, would you look at that. The crazies may have taken the day off. Here’s the wonderful thing about comments: You never know what you’re going to see.