Bob Rayner

last week about Bailey Sheetz, a 13-year old Chester resident who is now on a first-name basis with Jerry Seinfeld and Melissa McCarthy in Hollywood. Sheetz made his movie debut in Seinfeld’s new Netflix movie “ Unfrosted,” the satirical comedy about the launch of what we now know and love as the Pop-Tart.

Moss could be counted on to make city budgeteers squirm as he peppered them with intelligent questions about why they continually funded vacant city jobs and then used the surplus as a slush fund for the pet projects of city cronies. Plus he ALWAYS pressured his colleagues – fruitlessly, as it turned out – to lower the annual real estate tax rate to give homeowners relief from soaring assessments.

by Kerry Dougherty I don’t normally link to Virginian-Pilot stories. Today is an exception. Find the fiction in this one: “Virginia Beach Adopts $2.6 Billion Budget, Cutting Taxes and Increasing C…

City Hall has spent the last few months trying to fix the meals tax fiasco where they were charging restaurants thousands and tens of thousands of dollars in penalties and interest that accrued that the restaurants never knew about and the city never made any attempt to contact them that the bills were ballooning. At first it was just a handful of complainers, according to Richmond’s Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) but then it was acknowledged it was 500 and then finally the Auditor discovered there were 673 affected accounts.

by Kerry Dougherty If not for a feisty online news organization, Potomac Local News, we wouldn’t know that earlier this month two Jordanian nationals attempted to bring a truck onto Quantico Marin…

Virginia Beach politicians are doing their happy dance. Earlier this week state officials gave them good news: They’re “near the finish line” on the Laskin Road project.

Last week Jim Bacon published an article about the fact that our teacher vacancy rate problem is not all about salary, and I agree that other factors also contribute to this problem. Jim also posited that “It’s caused by teachers dropping out of the profession because they think their jobs suck”, and recent data seems to support an approximation of this idea.

by Jon Baliles The Virginia War Memorial sits solemnly upon the edge of Oregon Hill overlooking the city and the James River and honors the 12,000+ Virginia names of those who have fallen in servic…

Let’s just admit it. Those of us who thought Aaron Spence was a disaster as Virginia Beach School Superintendent are experiencing a shameless bout of schadenfreude.

In 2021, Republican Glenn Youngkin was able to flip the education issue on Democrats to pull off a victory. In 2025, Democrats need to reclaim the education issue to flip the Governor’s mansion back. One way of doing that is by supporting the new statewide public school accountability system, which furthers core Democratic values. If Democrats don’t get out ahead of this issue, Republicans will use it as a political issue.