A decade-old Williamsburg estate law firm is changing its name and Web site, effective today. Williamsburg Legal Associates, founded by John Sadler and the late Joseph Abdelmour, will now be known as Williamsburg Estate Planning.
The new site is www.williamsburgestateplanning.com.
Sadler also announced that free quarterly educational planning workshops would continue, and the firm is establishing a speaker's bureau offering education on estate-planning topics.
Columbia Gas is reducing the cost of gas for its customers in March about 7 percent, dropping the average customer bill from $161.77 to $150.66. Natural gas costs in Virginia are passed on with no markup.
The utility gets a regulated profit margin on the cost of delivering gas to homes. Columbia said the price decrease was spurred by a plentiful supply of natural gas industrywide and a winter in Virginia that had been 10 percent warmer than average.
The new price applies to March, April and May.
Natural gas use is measured per hundred cubic feet, or Ccf. The average customer uses about 100 Ccf in March, then drops off to 35 Ccf in May.
The $150.66 estimate of the average bill will deviate higher or lower, depending on whether people use more or less than 100 Ccf of gas.
The peanut industry is poised for an uptick in 2008, in light of higher contracts.
The industry fell on hard times after the 2002 Farm Bill ended a federal peanut program that guaranteed high prices to some farmers.
But this year, contract prices are the highest since 2002, Dell Cotton, executive director of the Virginia Peanut Growers Association, told the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation.
Contract prices might be higher because peanut buyers are competing for acreage with wheat and soybeans, which are selling at 10-year highs.
Prices for the jumbo-sized Virginia peanut have been reported in the range of $555 a ton, compared with last year's $470, the Farm Bureau said.
The state's peanut acreage bottomed out in 2006, when only 16,000 acres were planted. In its heyday, peanuts were harvested from 164,000 acres in 1948. Last year, farmers planted 22,000 acres.
Now is too early to tell how many acres will be planted this year.
