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Urban CEO Alfred Liggins addresses supporters at a block party organized by his company and Churchill Downs, Richmond, Va., Sept. 30, 2023. The two companies are urging voters to approve a $562 million resort casino in Virginia's state capital. Photo by Jimmy Cloutier/VCIJ
Results of the Nov. 7 referendum may shape the future of gambling resorts in the commonwealth
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Illustration by Christopher Tyree // VCIJ
A provision in state law exempts college presidents’ “working papers and correspondence” from disclosure even after they step down — as we found out when we asked about one ex-president’s role in campus expansions that uprooted a Black neighborhood.
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Illustration by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO.
Out-of-state developers have poured a record $8.1 million into a referendum campaign to allow the construction of a resort casino in Richmond, far-and-away the highest sum for a local election in Virginia.
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“Dark money” organizations have spent more than $1.7 million on Virginia candidates. More than $1.4 Million going to Republican candidates. Photo by Jimmy Cloutier // VCIJ
Independent political groups backed largely by “dark money” organizations and wealthy donors have spent nearly $1.7 million on Virginia candidates this election cycle, raising concerns about transparency and the influence of outside money in the tightly contested battle for control of the General Assembly.
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Deborah Taylor Mapp, 75, along Elkhorn Avenue near 38th St. in the Lambert's Point neighborhood in Norfolk Friday, Sept.8, 2023 as she talked about a childhood friend who lived in the house behind her in photo. Mapp said when she was a child the house was painted red and she spent many hours sitting on the porch with her friend. Photo by Bill Tiernan // VCIJ at WHRO
Schools including Old Dominion and the flagship University of Virginia have expanded by dislodging Black families, sometimes by the threat or use of eminent domain.
Read moreSixty-plus years ago, the white leaders of Newport News, Virginia, seized the core of a thriving Black community to build a college. The school has been gobbling up the remaining houses ever since.
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Home from the hospital, Amoni Thompson-Jones; her husband, Casey Jones; and their newborn baby, Amara Thompson, meet with midwife Ebony Simpson in their Alexandria, Virginia, apartment. Thompson-Jones told Simpson how unhappy she was with the hospital care she received. She said she felt as if the doctors had a “birth playlist” they followed whenever a woman came in and didn’t really listen to her concerns. Even if, like Thompson-Jones, the mother ultimately gives birth in a hospital, the midwives do follow-up postpartum checks with mother and baby for up to a year after the birth.
In Virginia, Black women in recent years have been more than twice as likely as other mothers to have a death attributed to childbirth.
Photographer Karen Kasmauski followed the work of Black midwives between January and April this year in Virginia. Her series of photographs traces the relationships formed between midwives and their clients — from initial consultations and prenatal meetings to the birth and support in the months following pregnancy.
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The sign outside of the Richmond Registrar's Office, Richmond, Virginia, on Aug. 1, 2023. The city electoral board voted on July 25 to limit in-person early voting to this location in northern Richmond, near the city limit. Photo by Jimmy Cloutier
The Richmond Electoral Board’s decision last week to limit early voting locations could force voters in majority Black precincts to travel more than two hours by public transit to cast their ballots ahead of election day, an analysis by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO has found.
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Virginia legislative candidates across Greater Richmond and Hampton Roads raised nearly $3.8 million in the last three weeks of June — mostly from big donors giving more than $10,000 to their campaigns.
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Original proposal for the Pamunkey casino on the left and the revised first phase version on the right. Renderings of the HeadWaters Resort & Casino. (Courtesy of HeadWaters Resort & Casino provided to the City of Norfolk)
A scaled-down Norfolk waterfront casino proposal is facing choppy waters from city leaders who have lost patience with the much-delayed project.
Norfolk City Council members in a recent closed session discussed options for scuttling the city’s agreement with the Pamunkey tribe, which submitted an application for a phased development with a $150 million initial investment, far shy of the upscale $500 million resort hotel, marina, entertainment space, and casino showcased to voters during a 2020 referendum.
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Dominion Energy headquarters, as seen in Richmond, Va., on June 22, 2023. (Jimmy Cloutier/OpenSecrets)
The overwhelming share of campaign funding in the low-turnout, yet expensive, primaries in Greater Richmond and the Hampton Roads came from political organizations, business interests and corporate-aligned political action committees, according to an OpenSecrets analysis of campaign finance reports. Most candidates who raised big-donor money won.
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Sen. Louise Lucas is photographed with members of the Moms Demand Action booth at Pride in the ‘Peake in Chesapeake, Va., on Sunday, June 11, 2023. Photo by Kristen Zeis
It’s been decades since two Hampton Roads Democratic state senators, Louise Lucas and Lionell Spruill, were out of the public eye.
Lucas launched her political career in Virginia by winning a Portsmouth City Council seat in 1984. Spruill, a Chesapeake native, first won a seat in the Virginia General Assembly in 1994.
Both legislative stalwarts rose from poor backgrounds to become ambitious, long-standing powerbrokers in southeastern Virginia. On June 20, one will be out of a job.
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Erashea Bellany holds her daughter, Amenjah. Bellany, from Richmond, gave birth at her mother’s home in Hampton. After delivery, Erashea hemorrhaged and her midwife, Nicole Wardlaw, rushed her to the Sentara CarePlex hospital in Hampton. Both mother and daughter are doing fine. Photo by Karen Kasmauski // Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO
Virginia’s maternal mortality rate leaped by 130% during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to an analysis by the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO. In 2021, women in Virginia died of pregnancy-related complications at a rate of 50.1 per 100,000 births, more than double the pre-pandemic rate in 2019, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Virginia mothers died of pregnancy-related complications at a rate of 21.6 per 100,000 births in 2019.
The state also fared poorly compared to the U.S. average of 33 deaths per 100,000 births in 2021. Only Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana and Alabama had higher death rates of the 22 states with publicly available data.
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On Thanksgiving 2022, Barb Baxter shared a moment with her son, Pete, in the family’s kitchen. Pete, 24, is autistic and has an intellectual disability. He recently moved into a Charlottesville apartment with the steady support and supervision of family and community.
The road to adulthood begins for most when they graduate from high school and move on to a first job or college, to paying bills and living on their own. But for people with cognitive disabilities or autism, leaving high school is a more monumental step, one that will transform their relation to their families and the community that supports them.
That monumental step has been on the minds of Andrew and Barb Baxter, both 57, of Charlottesville, Va. for years. Their 24-year-old son, Peter, is on the autism spectrum and has an intellectual disability.
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Wallops Flight Facility public affairs chief Jeremy Eggers, left, and NASA restoration program manager David Liu examine the granular activated carbon filtration system designed to filter toxic PFAS chemicals from the town of Chincoteague’s drinking water on November 16, 2022.
Toxic chemicals used to fight fires and found in a wide range of household and industrial goods for decades have ended up in drinking water across the state. Virginia health and environmental agencies have only begun to measure the scope of the problem. How worried should we be?
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Students on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, VA, mourn the more than 30 people killed on campus during a candle light vigil on the campus. Burruss Hall is in the background. Photo taken April 17, 2007. Photo by Christopher Tyree/file for The Virginian-Pilot.
In the wake of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre, elected leaders vowed to prioritize campus safety.
Then-Gov. Tim Kaine appointed a blue-ribbon panel and within a year signed more than 30 mental health, school security and gun purchase bills aimed at preventing future mass shootings. Several appeals for stricter gun policies, however, were voted down.
More than 15 years later, in the aftermath of another school shooting — this time at the University of Virginia, where three students were shot and killed in November — state lawmakers considered a range of gun policy proposals: a ban on new assault-style weapons, new punishments for those who fail to secure their guns, an expansion of the state’s “red flag” law and restrictions on possessing firearms in school buildings.
But just one major safety measure survived: a $300 tax credit for firearms owners to purchase gun safes. A second bill requiring public universities to more quickly and comprehensively respond to a potential threat passed the House and Senate but still awaits Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s signature.
Read moreIn 2019, prospects for Ridley Place and its immediate surroundings seemed more promising after the area was selected for $30 million in redevelopment funds under the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative (CNI), a program funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The initiative, which has grown to more than 40 programs nationwide, aims to rebuild communities by revitalizing public housing and assisted living.
The city planned to relocate more than 600 residents from Ridley Place, tear down the complex and replace it with mixed-income housing and offer residents the opportunity to come back when construction was completed. But a key part of the HUD program was supposed to address what happens to residents during the interim period while new housing is built, a phased process that in some cases could take up to seven years or more. Funding and local resources were set aside to help residents like Echanerry obtain services from organizations around the community to ease their transition, including transportation, childcare, food, health care, legal counseling, workforce preparation and job placement.
Correspondence between the city and HUD, however, revealed that although the grant was awarded to Newport News in May 2019, Ridley Place residents continued to struggle, even though the development program was supposed to provide support for them.
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A hemp plant is shown under colored lights in a grow house at the testing greenhouse operated by Veg Out Organics in Virginia Beach. photo by John-Henry Doucette
Virginia legalized limited growing and possession of marijuana by private individuals in 2021, but sale of recreational marijuana remains illegal. Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, has not signaled support for legalizing retail sales, and measures to set up a legal market failed this year in the General Assembly.
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Following the murder of three University of Virginia football players by a fellow student, UVA students hoist a banner over the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity in November. Photo by Christopher Tyree
Following the back-to-back mass shootings at the University of Virginia and a Chesapeake Walmart, Republicans and Democrats are touting proposals to help prevent future tragedies – again.
Virginia state Sen. Creigh Deeds, D-Bath, said he intends to file legislation to ban new assault weapons and launch a gun buy-back program.
Read moreA University of Virginia student has been caught and charged with murder in the Sunday night shooting that left three university football players dead and wounded two other students.
Christopher Darnell Jones Jr., 22, was apprehended by Virginia State Police Monday, hours after the mass shooting put the campus on lockdown, stranding students and members of the university community across the grounds in libraries, campus buildings and dorms.
The shootings took the lives of three members of the Cavalier football team: D’Sean Perry, a 4th year linebacker from Miami; Lavel Davis Jr., a 3rd year wide receiver from Dorchester, S.C., and Devin Chandler, a 2nd year wide receiver from Huntersville, N.C.
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