Sunday, February 19, 2012
The NRV's lawmakers have been busy
Christian Trejbal
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From the RoundTable blog
The General Assembly last week passed the halfway point of the session. Each chamber finished work on its own bills and took up the ones the other had passed. It is the perfect time to check in on our local lawmakers and their priorities.
"Local" might be misleading. The districts the assembly adopted last year chopped up the New River Valley, and some of the region's representatives do not even live here as a result.
For today's legislative analysis, I will focus on the core lawmakers: Dels. Joe Yost, Greg Habeeb and Nick Rush, and Sens. John Edwards and Ralph Smith.
Yost, a Blacksburg Republican who grew up in Giles County, is a House freshman. To his credit, he took a modest agenda to Richmond, as befits a new lawmaker.
The 10 bills he sponsored were largely practical measures that addressed the concerns of his constituents. He sought to authorize a drug court in Montgomery County (H.B.854) and to allow Blacksburg to install contraflow bike lanes on one-way streets (H.B.857). Both bills failed.
He had success with H.B.1142, which would allow Glen Lyn to move its local elections to November and eliminate the requirement that voters approve town borrowing. That bill is off to the Senate.
Yost has an odd partner in Edwards, the Democratic senator from Roanoke whose district includes Blacksburg and Giles County.
He sponsored companion bills on the Blacksburg bike lanes (S.B.101) and Glen Lyn (S.B.545).
Edwards has other good ideas. For example, he wants to allow more people to collect signatures on candidate petitions with S.B.613, which passed the Senate.
Meanwhile, Edwards' S.B.104 would give the children of full-time faculty a 50 percent tuition break at Virginia's public colleges and universities. It is a sensible perk for professors and encourages their college-bound kids to stay in the commonwealth. The Senate passed this one, but finding funding is the real challenge.
Yost was not the only freshman delegate from the New River Valley. Rush, a Christiansburg Republican, is new to the Capitol, too. He sponsored only seven bills. With such restraint, surely they were all important pieces of legislation.
One (H.J.276) commends a local union. It passed. Another (H.B.795) would have allowed Floyd County to impose a meals tax. It failed.
Perhaps those bills do not rank high in legislative importance, but there was nothing wrong with them.
The same cannot be said about Rush's H.B.794, which showed he is prone to tea party flights of paranoia. It addressed fears of a United Nations conspiracy to take away Americans' private property rights with locally designated urban development areas. Virginia now mandates UDAs. Rush would make them optional.
His bill died in committee, but only because a similar one (H.B.869) passed the House.
Smith, whose district includes southern Montgomery County, sponsored the anti-UDA companion bill (S.B.274). The Senate passed Smith's version, all but ensuring the rest of the nation will have one more reason to roll its eyes at the commonwealth this year.
Smith also can take credit for introducing a version of the odious bill that requires women seeking an abortion to pay for and receive an ultrasound. It was rolled into the one that passed (S.B.484).
At least he returned with his favorite annual loser. Smith's S.B.272 would require that the state budget be available to the public for at least 72 hours prior to a vote on it. As in past years, his fellow senators had no interest in such commonsense transparency.
That leaves Habeeb, the Republican delegate from Salem whose district stretches a crooked finger down Interstate81 into Christiansburg. He is not technically a freshman because he won a special election last year, so he had a little legislating under his belt when he headed back to Richmond.
He introduced a staggering 42 bills, putting him in the running for most ambitious delegate this year. Nineteen of them were feel-good commendations of sports teams and such. Many of the remaining 23 dealt with legal minutia, the sorts of things that appeal to a lawyer like Habeeb.
Noteworthy among his bills, however, were H.B.15, which would have finally allowed all schools to start before Labor Day if they chose, and H.B.16, which would have restored voting rights to some nonviolent felons. His colleagues rejected both.
Our delegation introduced dozens of other bills. If you want to know what else your lawmakers have been up to, stop by Richmond Sunlight (richmondsunlight.com) or the General Assembly's own Legislative Information System (lis.virginia.gov). There is no excuse in this age of nearly instant legislative updates not to know what sorts of trouble the people we elect are causing.
