I couldn’t agree more with what “Inside Charlottesville” host Coy Barefoot has to say here. Dominion Virginia Power represents everything wrong with Virginia’s government, and cries out for strong ethics reform. As it stands now, Dominion gives enormous sums of money (nearly $9 million since 1993) to Virginia lawmakers of both parties (53% to Republicans, 44% to Democrats), to buy them all off. And what does Dominion get in return? All kinds of things, including…well, basically anything and everything they want. Such as no serious, mandatory Renewable Portfolio Standard; no serious net metering; no serious decoupling; no serious efforts to stop Dominion from poisoning our planet; etc, etc.
And now, as Coy Barefoot correctly points out (see the Washington Post story here), the bought-and-paid-for Virginia General Assembly “is allowing Dominion to WRITE OFF investments in infrastructure so as to give them tax credits so that (on paper at least) they can avoid it looking like they’ve made as much profit as they really have- because if they actually did, they’d have to give a refund to their customers and they couldn’t raise raise rates.” Yes, it’s “an unfair advantage.” Yes, it’s “corporatism” at its sordid, slimy worst. And yes, it’s “corruption,” which the utterly lame “ethics reform” package Bill “ALEC” Howell et al. have proposed wouldn’t even come close to stopping.
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