WMRA Daily 8/13/26

For WMRA News, I'm Calvin Penn. We'll examine the fight over the future of flock cameras in Rockingham County. A woman's death at a Fisher'sville assisted living facility is being investigated as a homicide. The Virginia Department of Health is sticking with the state's vaccine schedule following an executive order from President Trump. Northern Virginia will add more jobs later this year, and we follow some researchers with the Smithsonian, studying birds providing pest control for farms. This is the WMRA Daily for Thursday, August 13th. Flock cameras, photograph, and store license plate data that police can use to investigate criminal activity. They've become the center of growing debate across the valley. Critics argue that the cameras violate privacy rights and their efforts to remove them have paid off in several communities. In this two-part series, we examine the fight over the future of the cameras. WMRA's Bridget Manley reports. Anna Cubbage has lived in Bridgewater off and on for much of her life. Like many in town, she saw the cameras by the side of the road, but had no idea what they were until she read a now viral story from the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHO that highlighted how data from automatic license plate reader cameras, or ALPR cameras in Bridgewater, were being accessed by law enforcement agencies across the U.S. I mean, I noticed them when they went up. but I just assumed that it was just another, like a speed camera, essentially. When I saw the article, I was shocked. Cubbage is part of a growing group of local activists called Deflock the Valley, and their efforts have achieved several wins in recent months. Last month, both the Harrisonburg City Council and the Elkton Town Council voted to end their contracts with flock, joining Charlottesville and Stanton, which did so in late 2025. The group is now focusing their efforts on towns such as Bridgewater and Grottoes. But even as many communities take their cameras down, other law enforcement agencies are putting theirs online. The Rockingham County Sheriff's Office recently installed four-flock cameras, hoping they would supplement Harrisonburg's camera coverage. They put them online at the beginning of August, just as Harrisonburg shut its cameras down. Rockingham County Sheriff Brian Hutchison says the cameras are not part of a grand conspiracy, but rather a tool to aid law enforcement and public safety. He said the cameras have helped solve several high-profile crimes in the Valley. We had an individual who abducted his ex-girlfriend at knife point in her car and off they went. Once we got the information, well, I typed up the conventional style press release. We're looking for this vehicle, this license plate right now for an abduction, a violent armed abduction.

of a pregnant female. Within like less than 10 minutes, I think it was eight minutes, if a flock came or someone had entered it, well it hits. But activists are questioning the lack of transparency about how the cameras ended up across the valley, what information they collect, and who can access it. According to documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests by Deflock the Valley, local law enforcement agencies work directly with Flock to purchase and install the cameras, rather than city or town councils voting to install them. As a result, there was little to no public input or discussion before the cameras were installed. I call it basically the administrative back room. Zach Cottle is a member of Deflock the Valley. His efforts to obtain documents revealed the process by which Elkton Law Enforcement installed the cameras. It was done totally through the police department. They had basically set up the entire contract with Flock, had discussed placement, installation, where they were going to be placed. Many local agencies use the Help Eliminate Auto Th theft grant to fund the initial purchase of the cameras. According to a Cardinal News investigation, those state grants are funded through assessments on motor vehicle insurers operating in Virginia. In other words, through car insurance premiums, paid by Virginia drivers. Harrisonburg, Bridgewater, and Elkton were among the surrounding jurisdictions that received heat grants for the initial camera purchases. But even after those grants are used up, there's still a cost to operating the cameras. According to Harrisonburg City spokesman Michael Parks, the most recent annual cost of the cameras was over $79,000. Another point of contention for those who oppose the cameras is Flock's new con... which is a live and recorded surveillance camera that provides quote real-time situational awareness and allows users to quote look at recorded video to observe crime happening according to the flock website Elkden had a condor camera in operation and Deflock obtained video footage showing the camera zooming in on vehicles at a gas station late at night So they were basically using it as like a CCTV camera to basically watch over the area. And you can see where one of the Elkton police officers had actually zoomed in on it, I think it was three or four people at the gas station across the street from the 7-Eleven and was just watching what they were doing in the parking lot at like 1230 in the morning. Each city is... town in the valley provides a flock transparency portal that shows how many cameras they have, how many license plate images have been captured, and their success stories with the technology. However, each of those transparency portals is operated by flock, and readers are redirected to the flock website to view the information. And according to emails obtained by WMRA through a FOIA request of the town of Bridgewater, flock representatives told town officials they could, quote, adjust or hide.

More than 117 million people visited Virginia in 2025, according to a new report from the Virginia Tourism Corporation. Those visitors spent a record $32.6 billion last year. That's a roughly 3% increase over 2024, and it generated nearly $3.5 billion in state and local tax revenue. The VTC told WRIC that 2026 is on track for even more visitor activity. Governor Abigail Spanberger is reshaping two advisory panels that help determine how much money goes into Virginia's budget. On Monday, Abigail Spanberger announced more than two dozen appointees to the Joint Advisory Board of Economists and Governor's Advisory Council on revenue estimates, including Tom Barkin, President and CEO of the Richmond Branch of the Federal Reserve. The Richmond Times Dispatch reports the governor will meet with the General Assembly's money committees next week. Northern Virginia will start adding jobs this fall, according to a new report from the Stephen Fuller Institute at George Mason University. Radio IQ's Michael Pope has the details. Like the rest of the DMV, Northern Virginia got slammed during Trump 2.0, and the unemployment numbers are still growing with people who took the fork in the road during Doge and left the workforce. Now, there might be light at the end of the tunnel. It's outperforming by... underperforming less. That's Keith Waters at the Stephen Fuller Institute at George Mason University. Doge did not hit Northern Virginia as hard as it did the rest of the region, which you can kind of expect. The district is most heavily reliant on federal government. Suburban Maryland is reliant on life services, which are not particularly popular with this administration. He says the institute's forecast now calls for employment to grow by October. That's two months earlier than the previous forecast. It's still too early to say that that's turned a corner, but the fact that that's kind of taken a pause in its decline is potentially one of the reasons why the region's economy is looking a little brighter than it otherwise would have. He says the Northern Virginia economy sustained the twin economic shocks of losing jobs and grants since Trump took office. Now, he says the region is acclimating and set to grow later this year and into 2027. I'm Michael Pope. People in Virginia's eastern shore are pushing back against a federal proposal for offshore seabed mining. Catherine Hafner from our partner station, WHRO, has more. Shinkatik resident Jim Dawson has been fishing these waters for more than 40 years. He worries digging up the seafloor would disturb the complex microscopic world that dwells there and helps feed his livelihood. It's just a very diverse. phenomenal amount of species that are all together out there. And when you mess with one thing, you know, it all sets the other. Jill Bieri with the Nature Conservancy says mining could threaten 60 years of conservation work in the area, like restoring seagrass. Not only has there been millions and millions of dollars invested in protecting this place, but it is a huge driver in our culture here on the eastern shore. It's just too important a place to embark on something that might have a negative impact.

The counties of Acomac and Northampton formally opposed the proposal. That was Catherine Hafner for WHRO. How effective are native cavity nesting birds at providing pest control on farms? Well, researchers with the Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute aim to find out. WMRA's Randy B. Hage reports. Through an open meadow near rows of candelopes and flowers, research fellow Alison Heisman leads a team of interns to check on baby birds. This produce farm in the eastern foothills of the Blue Ridge in Rabahannock County is one of nine properties in a study run by Virginia working landscapes, a Smithsonian program that promotes native biodiversity and sustainable land management. We come upon a nest box with four eastern bluebird babies, about 11 days old. So what we'll do is we have fresh paper bags, kind of like craft paper bags. So we take them one at a time and they will poop in there. And then we collect that sample and I will use that in a genomics lab. And I'll use a technique called DNA metabarcoding to see what they're eating. Heisman, a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, is conducting a multi-year study to see what bugs, eastern bluebirds, and tree swallows eat on farms, and thus how useful they are as natural pest control. Her team installed nest boxes on the farms to encourage these species to procreate here. In turn, James Rodriguez takes two babies out of the nest and plops them in paper bags. You grab them, you've got to take aim. So if they poop, we get it right in the bag. Does it happen pretty quickly? Usually, yeah, especially when they're bigger like this. Yeah. But sometimes the baby birds wait until they're taken out of the bags to be weighed. Aw. We lost it. After returning all the chicks to the nest, the team conducts a point count, watching and listening for the different bird species present within a 100 meter radius. How many yellow throat have been 100?

I think the yellow-breasted chat heard within a hundred or two? Two black vultures seen within a hundred? Is it challenging at all for you guys to like pick out the individual birdsongs? Because I mean to me it just sounds like a tapestry, but I'm not. It's definitely hard. Yeah, it can be a little overwhelming. I find that just having the full 10 minutes allows you to just focus on each individual thing, but you definitely have to train your ear to it. At a beef, lamb and pork farm up the road, nest boxes dot the livestock pastures. In turn, our zoo Paul opens one box and pulls out a bald, newly hatched little bluebird. How old? Like... Two minutes. Heisman sets up a cardboard flap to trap the Bluebird mom inside so they can examine her. But it takes a few tries to get her. Yeah, they're dive bombing her. They're not happy. She's there. This female has colored bands on her legs, so they know she's been caught before. They measure her weight and wing length, and look at her feather condition to determine age, and again, collect a poop sample for genomics testing. Wow. Heisman's takeaways so far? The eastern bluebirds, they're eating a lot of different things. A lot of it is Lepidoptera, which is butterflies and moths. And so that's kind of what we see is caterpillars. They're bringing them back all the time to their nests. Also spiders and crickets and, you know, just kind of like anything that you can imagine, like hopping around in the grasses. And then the tree swallows are... eating probably like three quarters of the diets that we've analyzed have been flies. And that is surprising. So tree swallows are known to really rely on aquatic insects. And so we have gotten a little bit of that in there, but the amount of flies we've gotten. is much more than we expected. But that's really great for the farmers. We're hoping that they're going to help reduce the pest populations and that, like, pest pressure on the animals. She hopes the data will support the use of bluebirds and tree swallows as natural pest control to reduce the need for chemical pesticides. The farms that we work on, they're all really interested in helping the larger ecosystem. They want to have that healthy environment. They all recognize the importance of regenerative agriculture and taking care of their soils and plants and insects. The nest boxes are crucial for these species that have to find cavities to nest in. They don't make their own. In the wild, that might be an old woodpecker hole in a tree. If they can't find a cavity, they won't breed that season. So it's really amazing. I mean, the farms that we added nest boxes to.

At some of them, we put a nest box out and in the time it took us to get back to our car, we would see birds checking out that nest box already. Yeah, it's kind of like that field of dreams, but if you build it, they will come. Heisman is wrapping up the project's fieldwork this year before flying into deeper analysis in the lab. For WMRA News, I'm Randy B. Hakey. You can find photos from this story at WMRA.org and on the WMRA app. For WMRA News, I'm Calvin Penn. Thanks for listening and enjoy your Thursday.