Monthly Archives: September 2006

The Fredericksburg Economic Development Authority hosted its first-ever developers’ forum under the banner of JumpStart! Fredericksburg. Speakers from around the state told of their successes in redeveloping historic properties into mixed use properties that add to the vitality of their urban communities. Some examples:

• In a $5 million project, Fairfax Hall, a former girls’ school in Waynesboro, was converted into 50 apartments with a large space for commercial use for social functions, weddings and the like.
• The 1907 Railway Express Building in downtown Fredericksburg was refurbished into offices and a restaurant.
• The old John Marshall Hotel in Richmond was converted into 175 residential units, with conference space in the lower level.

JumpStart has hired an Annapolis consultant to develop drawings of 14 areas of Fredericksburg to visualize what smart development could look like. According to the Free Lance-Star: “About 50 local developers turned out for sessions on historic rehabilitation tax credits, mixed-use development, and incentives that have fueled dozens of projects around the state.”

(Photo credit for Fairfax Hall photo: Waynesboro Redevelopment & Housing Authority)

The editorial writers at the Daily Press are sputtering mad about their precious tax increases going down to defeat:

You can talk about land use. You can talk about innovation. You can talk about privatization, creativity and reform. But at the end of the day, road improvements require money. Hard money. Unambiguous legal tender. Cash.

I’ve been tracking the DP transportation editorials for a long time and this is the first time I’ve seen the Peninsula pundits acknowledge that there were alternatives to raising taxes. Land use… Innovation… Privatization… Creativity… Reform… Those words have not been part of the pundits’ vocabulary throughout this debate.

It’s pretty clear that the DP scribblers don’t give much weight to those ideas, but at least they’ve been bludgeoned into conceding that those “anti-tax ideologues” in the House Republican caucus actually have ideas. No longer is it possible to portray the critics of Business As Usual — which include, by the way, the conservationist/ environmentalist wing of the Democratic Party — as drooling idiots bereft of thought.

That’s progress of a sort. Call me a dreamer, but I can always hope: Maybe the next step will be for the DP to engage those ideas rather than dismiss them out of hand, and to explain why they are not sufficient to address Virginia’s transportation challenges.

(For those of you with warped minds, that’s an Economic Development plan!)

Pat Gottschalk works fast. The Secretary of Commerce and Trade had a year to update Virginia’s strategic plan for economic development, but he cranked it out in eight months. (You can read the plan here.) There are no dramatic departures from the Warner administration’s plan, which is no surprise considering that Gottschalk thinks the Warner team did a commendable job with economic development.

The differences are mainly thematic. The Kaine plan takes a more wholistic approach to economic development, giving particular emphasis to the development of human capital.

The plan is built around nine broad goals, each of which has distinct measurable strategies for tracking progress. Highlights include:

• Increasing the total amount of Defense Department related contracts for Virginia firms by 5 percent, or $1.15 billion.
• Increasing the economic impact of tourism in Virginia from $16.5 billion to $18.5 billion annually.
• Increasing exports of goods from the Commonwealth by 7 percent ($855 million).
• Increasing foreign direct investment in Virginia from an annual average of 2,300 jobs and $270 million to 3,000 jobs and $300 million.
• Ensuring broadband access for every Virginia business.
• Increasing procurement for small businesses to 40 percent of state purchases.
• Increasing the proportion of 18-24 year-olds with a high school diploma or equivalent from 87 percent to 92 percent (an additional 34,000 students).
• Increasing the proportion of 18-24 year olds enrolled in college from 34 percent to 39 percent (an additional 34,000 students).
• Increasing the percentage of Virginia’s population (25-65) with a college degree from 35 percent to 37 percent (an additional 78,500 persons).
• Decreasing government administration transaction time for businesses by 30 percent.
• And by January 2008, formulating specific regional economic growth goals based on the Council on Virginia’s Future’s regional data.

The plan also puts in a plug for “a long-term transportation finance plan that includes a reliable, long-term funding stream.” Hmmm. Where have I heard that before?

The real meat of the plan is in the strategies for accomplishing the goals. To gauge where the Kaine administration is heading, it’s worth reading the whole plan.

While transportation and land use reform crashed and burned in the General Assembly this week, the traveling train wreck called Rail to Dulles lumbers ahead unchecked. As part of a long-term effort to get our arms around the most expensive public works project in Virginia history, I assigned writer Peter Galuszka to describe the major interest groups at work and what their stakes are in the $4 billion (before cost overruns) Metro extension.

The job is so big — it requires a major investigative project beyond our resources — that we can provide no more than a pencil sketch of the various constituencies. But Peter has done a better job of pulling together the strands of this complex story than anyone else I have seen. You can read his work here:

Follow the Money
Rail-to-Dulles is the most expensive public works project in Virginia history. To understand the maneuvering over what gets built and who pays for it, start by untangling the web of special interests.
by Peter Galuszka

In the course of his reporting, Peter surfaced a key issue that has not, to my mind, received sufficient attention from the Mainstream Media (although a number of bloggers have touched upon it). The issue is peripheral to his article, so I raise it here: What will the project ultimately cost?

This question is crucial because Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s justification for overturning the tunnel option through Tysons Corner is that the extra $200 million threatened to torpedo federal funding. Rail to Dulles was already marginal as determined by the federal government’s cost-benefit methodology. The state could not afford to load any more costs into the project.

But consider: The $4 billion estimate, calculated in an an environmental impact study, is now four years old. Furthermore, while we have reasonably good estimates for Phase One of the project, the Phase Two estimates are very sketchy. Assuming that construction costs have been increasing at the rate of five percent annually, it may be more realistic to assume that the project could cost around $4.8 billion — and that’s not accounting for any mission creep, change orders, miscalculations or other surprises. We won’t know for sure until more definitive engineering/design work is completed.

If that back-of-the-envelope calculation is even in the ballpark, where is that $800 million going to come from? What would a $4.8 billion price tag do to the federal cost-benefit analysis? Could Rail to Dulles still could lose its federal funding? Would that scuttle the entire project? Perhaps Bacon’s Rebellion readers could shed some insight.

While the state Senate blocks meaningful reform on transportation and land use at a state level, the Lynchburg region is taking matters into its own hands. Reports the News & Advance:

Region 2000’s Local Government Council called a meeting of public officials … to talk about how the area’s growth plans and transportation plans must be united across the region to adequately prepare for growth. “Transit and land use – these two have to fit together,” said Kenneth Mobley, planning practice leader for Parsons Transportation Group. …

“Most communities go with the path of least resistance,” [one local leader] said. “The successful path is to bring it up to community consensus. … It requires a community-visioning process so people understand what you are trying to do.” …

Region 2000 is also looking to create a “tool kit” that includes the creation of overlay districts, establishing the spacing of traffic centers, signage, encouraging public and private partnerships and creating a private land use and transportation advocacy group.

Members of the state Senate: Pay attention! The train is leaving the station without you.

The General Assembly special session on transportation drove off the cliff yesterday when the state Senate killed the legislative package submitted by the House. Acrimony was widespread as Gov. Timothy M. Kaine joined lawmakers in both houses in pointing fingers of blame. Said Kaine in a press release issued yesterday:

After months of delay and inaction, the House leadership repeatedly promised to come back for this Special Session to engage in a serious, thoughtful discussion about a long-term transportation solution. The House leadership chose instead to offer bills that were politically expedient – relying on double-counting money, running up the state’s credit card, and diverting existing revenue designated for education, public safety, and health care.

Del. Franklin P. Hall, D-Richmond, voiced a familiar theme: The obstructionist House Republicans refused to compromise. “Clearly there was a failure by the House Republican leadership to try to reach out to the Senate and try to find some common ground,” said Hall as quoted in the Times-Dispatch.

The obstructionist-House meme was replicated by the Daily Press. As John Bull and Hugh Lessig stated outright: “Republicans who control the House of Delegates refused to budge from their no-tax, no-fee, limited-toll position.” If past is prelude, editoral writers around the state will join the chorus in blaming the entire fiasco on the House Republicans.

It’s human nature to think that the other guy is the one who needs to do the compromising. But “compromise” is by definition a two-way street. Permit me a few observations:

• Fact: The $1 billion-a-year tax proposals advanced by the Axis of Taxes were defeated last spring. Yet Kaine and the Senate re-submitted the very same proposals without meaningful modification of any kind for consideration in the special section. It takes a lot of gall for AoT (Axis of Taxes) partisans to accuse the House of failing to compromise when they made no compromise themselves!
• Fact: The House of Delegates passed a package that would have injected $2.4 billion into the transportation system. (I’m not endorsing this package, merely noting that the House passed it.) That’s a lot more money than the House had proposed back in the spring. It wasn’t exactly what the AoT wanted, which was permanently higher taxes, but it was a compromise. The Senate deep-sixed it into oblivion.
• Fact: Recognizing that there is more to solving the transportation crisis than flooding the system with money, the House, backed by many Democrats, passed a package of VDOT and land-use reforms (some of which were tabled until next year) that attempted to address root causes of congestion. These reforms were independent of the tax issue. Gov. Kaine, who has made land-use reforms one of his big talking points, made no visible effort to support or even improve upon these proposals. The Senate shot down all but a handful of the least significant items.

The obstructionist label is usually applied to the group that doggedly opposes change of any kind. That label, I would argue, rightly belongs to those who would blindly prop up the failed, Business As Usual transportation system with new money without making any meaningful effort to change the system.

The obstructionist label also can be applied to those who advocate policies that fly in the face of popular opinion. As documented in a late July poll, a large majority of the electorate opposed the broad-based tax schemes that the Governor and Senate were calling for. The House positions came closer to reflecting the sentiments of popular opinion. The Axis of Taxes positions reflected the sentiments of the business, civic, governmental and journalistic elites.

Despite the effort of the AoT to define the transportation crisis as a lack of fiscal resources, traffic congestion is not a problem that can be solved simply by throwing more money into the system. The progressive forces are those who would change the system — low-tax Republicans on the right and the conservation/environmental camp on the left. The obstructionists are those who doggedly defend the status quo, block change and would tax an unwilling public to advance their own goals.

The House of Delegates has passed a package of 26 bills related to transportation and land use. Three will be held over for study and re-presented in next year’s session. The rest move to the Senate for consideration. It will be interesting to see which bills survive Senate scrutiny. Despite all the hoo-ha reported by the newspapers, many measures passed by lopsided margins.

There’s some good, bad and indifferent in the package. You won’t get much detail in the press accounts, though, so I have posted the House Speaker’s press release on the Bacon’s Rebellion website here. (I really, really wish he’d get a website and post his press releases so I could just link to them!)

The House leadership is touting the package as a bold leap forward. I would characterize it as a timid step forward — a step in the right direction, but partial and incomplete. Chris Saxman’s congestion-pricing bills (“The Swedish Solution“) aren’t included here. Among the more worthwhile measures:

• Instituting quantifiable congestion goals into the road-approval process
• Soliciting more private investment
• Privatizing more VDOT functions
• Allowing counties to assume control over maintenance of secondary roads
• Bigger penalties for chronic abusive drivers.
• Recategorizing VDOT roadways (primary, secondary, urban) based on functionality
• Limiting the acceptance of new subdivision streets into the state system

I’m intrigued by the concept of Urban Development Districts but want to know more about it. I’m also less than enthralled by the $2.44 billion funding package — for the same reasons I’m less than impressed with the Kaine/Senate proposals for permanent tax increases. The system is broken. Why waste any more money on it until we fix it? These proposals represent no more than a useful start.

What’s significant, to my mind, is not the legislation itself as much as the paradigm shift that’s occurring in the House. The House leadership has broken decisively from the old tax-spend-build mentality and has established good strong themes — change the way VDOT does business, reform land use — in their place. As an institution, the House is now ascending the learning curve. Hopefully, delegates will prove receptive to even more radical departures from Business As Usual in the future.

For all its warts, the House legislative package beats what came out of the Senate and the Governor’s Office — the same warmed over tax hike proposals that were defeated this spring. I had expected as much from the Senate, but I’m disappointed, given his conciliatory rhetoric, that Gov. Kaine has taken such a passive role in embracing change.

“Road-funding debate stalls,” proclaimed the Times-Dispatch headline over the article covering the transportation debate in the General Assembly yesterday. That was as fair and balanced as the story got. It was all down-hill from there.

After noting that the Democrats had successfully stalled Republicans’ $2.4 billion transportation plan, Michael Hardy and Jeff Schapiro weighed in with this third-paragraph “perspective”:

At the heart of the disagreement, now in its ninth month: the resistance of House Republicans to new taxes, which Democrat Kaine and a bipartisan coalition in the Senate say are the only reliable source of additional transportation funds.

Notice that Hardy and Schapiro did not frame the issue this way:

At the heart of the disagreement, now in its ninth month: resistance of House Democrats and their allies in the Senate to overhauling Virginia’s failed transportation system and land use practices, which a bipartisan coalition of environmentalists and fiscal conservatives says is needed before wasting any more money on it.

The article then quoted by name three Democratic delegates, two Republican senators and a Kaine administration spokesman in support of their side of the issue, before getting around to quoting a two delegates — starting in the 24th paragraph — in defense of their side.

And photos? You asked about photos? Pictured in the newspaper (not the Web version) were Frank Hall, Kristen Amundson, Russell Potts and John Chichester — all certified members of the Axis of Taxes. On the other side? Nobody.

It was quite a sight: During the transportation debate in the House of Delegates yesterday, Democrats waved personal credit cards over their heads to mock Republican proposals to borrow $1.5 billion in order to pay for new road projects.

Kaine administration spokesman Kevin Hall dissed the legislative package, telling Hardy/Schapiro with the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

I’m not sure that a proposal to simply incur more debt is the way Virginia wants to plan, build and maintain its transportation network. … That’s like using your Visa card to pay your MasterCard bill.

Someone better tell the backers of the $4 billion (before cost overruns) Metro-to-Dulles heavy rail project! Now that Gov. Kaine opposes the use of debt for building Virginia’s transportation network, there is no way the project will ever be built! Oh, wait… You’re telling me that Gov. Kaine favors borrowing money for that transportation project? … I’m confused.

My point here is not to defend the Republican proposal — I haven’t examined the list of projects to be funded under the plan, and might well disagree with the priorities if I did. My point is to query the Democrats: Since when did the old Byrd Machine “pay as you go” philosophy become the guiding philosophy of the party?

A decade ago, as I recall, Democrats were bashing “pay as you go” as a relic of a past age and were touting the idea of borrowing to build roads. Of course, that was when Jim Gilmore was governor and the prospects of passing a tax hike were precisely zero. The only way to spend more money on roads, it was perceived, was to borrow it. I can’t help suspecting that the underlying principle is not an aversion to debt but a fixation on extracting the maximum amount of cash, whatever the source, to build more roads.

The putative aversion to debt comes, incidentally, from the very same people who raised taxes in 2004 in order to preserve Virginia’s AAA bond rating. The reason the bond rating is so important, we were assured, is that a downgrade would make it more expensive to… borrow money. But now that we’ve preserved the AAA, the Commonwealth has yet to approve any new general obligation bond issues.

I draw the reader’s attention to the chart above, which I extracted from a House Appropriations Committee PowerPoint presentation. The red line shows Virginia’s maximum debt capacity. The pink line shows projected debt levels under existing legislation. The gap is large and growing. Looking forward, Virginia has enormous unused debt capacity. The blue line shows what debt levels would be under the House plan that Democrats want to skewer — still loads of debt capacity.

One final point: Roads are exactly the kind of long-term asset that should be funded with long-term bonds. When an asset is to be used and enjoyed by future generations of taxpayers, those future generations should help pay for it.

The House of Delegates is holding firm against unrelenting pressure to raise taxes that would perpetuate Virginia’s antiquated and wasteful transportation system. The House Finance Committee spiked plans to raise taxes locally in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads to fund regional road building projects.

One plan did survive the legislative buzz saw: a $2.4 billion funding package that relied upon a $1.5 billion bond issue that would require voter approval. But journalistic accounts suggested that initiative would be dead on arrival when it moved to the Senate. Read the accounts here:

Richmond Times Dispatch
Washington Post
Virginian Pilot

One’s as good (or bad) as the other. All miss the larger point.

What’s been missing from almost all punditry and political reporting (with rare exceptions) is any sense of the larger issue: Having identified fundamental flaws in Virginia’s traditional transportation policy, the House has laid out a plan for the most sweeping overhaul of Virginia transportation since the Byrd era. These reforms would transform the way VDOT does business: accelerating outsourcing and privatization and delegating responsibility and funding for secondary roads to counties. Grasping the reality that certain patterns of land use generate more traffic congestion than others, the House also has submitted unprecedented proposals to re-shape land use.

Now, it’s one thing to disagree with these proposals and the premises underlying them. Many readers of this blog do that every day. (I don’t even know if I agree with all of the House’s recommendations.) But at least Bacon’s Rebellion readers pay the courtesy of actually engaging the ideas. Virginia’s pundits and political reporters have failed utterly and completely to acknowledge the issues at stake, much less to understand them. Complex pieces of legislation and the thinking behind them warrant one or two throw-away paragraphs buried deep in stories about legislative process. Rather than engage ideas, editorial writers stoop to simple invective and name-calling.

Transportation and land use are not arcane issues — they are all pervasive. They affect every Virginian! Where are the investigative pieces? Where are the in-depth series? Where are the historical backgrounders? What happened to the crusading spirit of Virginia journalism? When did Virginia’s leading newspapers become dogmatic defenders of the status quo? At what point did Virginia journalists become parrots of elite opinion and begin scoffing at the sentiments (as expressed in polls) of ordinary people?

I indict the newspaper profession in Virginia. It has betrayed its journalistic ideals. It has betrayed even its liberal ideals. If the publishers and executive editors of Virginian newspapers are capable of self reflection, this is the time for it.

Lawyers for a black high school student who was rejected by a college journalism program filed a racial discrimination lawsuit Tuesday in federal court. The U.S. District Court lawsuit was filed on behalf of Emily Smith, 15, who said she was accepted last spring to the Suburban Journalism Workshop at the University of Richmond. One week later, she was rejected after program sponsors learned she was black, according to her class-action lawsuit.

Simply amazing. To think that racial discrimination persists in this day and age — perpetuated by an institution of higher education, no less! It’s disgraceful. We need to tear down the walls that separate–

Oh, wait. I didn’t get it quite right. Turns out it was a white student charging discrimination. It was an urban workshop, not a suburban one. And it was VCU, not the University of Richmond.

Well, that’s different. In that case, discrimination is OK. You see, discrimination is not the issue. It’s all about who’s doing the discriminating and who’s being discriminated against. It’s all about power, baby, all about power.

I lifted this chart from an article, “The (Illegal) Immigrant Effect,” in the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank’s “Region Focus” magazine. Surveying economic studies about the econonomic impact of immigration, the article concludes: “Immigrant labor lowers wages for less-skilled native-born Americans, but it also lowers prices for consumers. The biggest economic beneficiaries of immigration are immigrants themselves.”

As an aside, it’s remarkable how Hispanic immigration seems to be transforming the demographics of North Carolina far more than downstate Virginia.

(If you have trouble reading the text in the map, click on the image to enlarge it.)

If you expand the Washington Metro system in Northern Virginia, you expand the number of trains that run. If you expand the number of trains, you hire more transit workers. If you hire more workers, you facilitate the growth of the Amalgamated Transit Union, local 689, and entrust the functioning of the Northern Virginia economy to its ultra-leftist president Mike Golash.

Virginia is headed down the path of spending $4 billion (before cost overruns) to extend Washington Metro rail service to Tysons Corner and Dulles Airport. And just last week, the House of Delegates leadership proposed dedicating $50 million a year in support of Metro’s capital investment plan. (See “Looking Ahead to the Next Metro Expansion.”) It would behoove lawmakers to learn more about the man whose hand is on the Metro throttle.

Go to the ATW website and you’ll see that the union is interested in a lot more than simply improving the wages and working conditions of its members. States Golosh on the president’s page:

Workers’ real leverage against the bosses lies in their ability to shut down production and call their coworkers into the streets. The threat of economic hardship to the bosses and social instability in society causes a real fear in the bosses’ heart. Direct action by workers is the motor that drives us forward to a better standard of living and a more just society, not election results.

If that doesn’t give you pause about selling your SUV and riding the Metro to work, check out the August/September edition of the ATU newsletter. One article writes about New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in the most inflammatory of terms: “It is no coincidence that it is primarily poor black residents that live in the hardest hit areas; slavery and racist laws made sure that the most vulnerable areas of the city are poor black areas.” (Sounds like CNN!) The union also describes the employment of immigrant “guest workers” as “a new kind of slavery.”

Or, how about the article about The Middle East? “People see these fundamentalist groups [like Hezbollah] as taking a stand against U.S. imperialism in the region. … More and more innocent people are dying in these wars for profit and oil. … This is the nature of imperialist war: continuous wars and more innocent people dying. We must fight back against these growing attacks on workers around the world.”

If the rhetoric of class warfare, institutional racism and imperialism sounds almost communist, well that’s because Galosh is, well, a self-avowed communist. Go to the Progressive Labor Party website, where the home page states, “We fight directly for communism.” Check out the July 21, 2004, edition of “The Challenge” newsletter.

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 23 – Progressive Labor Party member Mike Golash has been elected president of the 6,000-member Local 689, Amalgamated Transit Workers Union (ATU). … Amid an imperialist war in Iraq and the rapid rise of a Homeland Security police state, in the face of racist attacks and police terror, and in the shadow of the White House, this local of mainly black workers told the bosses and union hacks, “I’m with Mike!” … Our job is to turn a mass base for a communist into a mass base for communism.

Working at Metro for 28 years, Mike has consistently distributed CHALLENGE to thousands of workers, built a base for PLP, led class struggle and been involved in all union activities, from wildcat strikes to the softball league. … Mike campaigned for ending the racist multi-tier wage progression, militant struggle against management and for international workers’ unity against imperialism.

Who would you rather trust to get Northern Virginians to their jobs every day — Northern Virginians driving their own cars, or members of a left-wing union led by a communist president? Roads don’t go on strike. Transit unions do.

(Hat tip to Ken Reid and Phil Rodokanakis for forwarding the documentation to this story.)

The House Counties, Cities and Towns Committee decided to defer action on land use legislation championed by House Speaker William J. Howell and other Republicans in favor of studying the proposals. “You’re talking about drastic changes,” said Del. Riley Ingram, R-Hopewell, the committee chairman.

According to Chelyen Davis with the Free Lance-Star, Ingram said he’d appoint an ad hoc committee to study the issues, and have the bill patrons reintroduce their legislation for the 2007 session that starts in January.

One of the bills would establish “urban transportation districts” that would allow localities to take over responsibility and funding for maintaining secondary roads. The other would require counties to set up “urban development areas” where they would channel growth.

In one of the main issues that surfaced, according to Davis, Democrats contended that “the state doesn’t provide enough money to maintain the roads anyway, and that localities would find they were saddled with all the responsibility and not enough funding.” Said Del. Kris Amundson, D-Fairfax: “It’s clearly insufficient. What you’re doing is passing on more responsibility than money.”

If the bill would simply fob off responsibility for road maintenance to local government without providing the resources to do the job, then it’s a bad bill. But I’m not certain that the Democratic objections are based in fact. For starters, it’s incorrect to say that “the state doesn’t provide enough money to maintain the roads anyway.” Au contraire, the state prioritizes maintenance spending. Maintenance spending gets first dibs on transportation dollars. That’s why, with escalating maintenance expenses, money for new construction is running out.

A more interesting objection was this: that delegating authority to local governments would lead to a patchwork of maintenance standards across the state. But no one has had a problem with allowing cities and two counties (Henrico and Arlington) to maintain their own roads since… since forever. If the standards are “patchwork,” no one has expressed a problem about them before.

The Family Foundation sent a letter to the No Voters to ask for their definition of marriage. Something I blogged about. If marriage isn’t one man and one woman then say what you want and be honest to the voters. Here is the letter:

September 25, 2006

Dear Claire:

Very soon, Virginians will have to decide on whether to support the marriage amendment at the ballot box. When Virginians cast their ballot on November 7, they deserve to have all the information they need to make an informed decision. As the primary spokesperson and decision maker for Equality Virginia’s ballot committee, The Commonwealth Coalition, I believe that you have a duty to all Virginians to honestly state your organization’s position on the issue of how marriage should be defined in Virginia. Virginians deserve to know how you, the Commonwealth Coalition and Equality Virginia, want marriage to be defined. In addition, they deserve to know the answers to the following questions:

1. What combinations of relationships should be allowed to legally marry? Which should not? Should bisexual groups be allowed to marry? Should polygamy remain illegal?
2. How would you say no to forms of marriage that you oppose?
3. What is the standard for deciding who should be allowed to marry?
4. What plans do your organizations have to bring about changes to marriage laws in the future?

A recent publication stated that, “LGBT organizations have developed a strategic plan to win marriage equality. A 15-year strategy has been agreed to by all the major [gay rights] organizational players. Funding is in place, and new tactics are being developed and tested in this year’s biggest clashes with anti-gay groups.”

Clearly, the goal of organizations such as Equality Virginia and its ballot committee, The Commonwealth Coalition, is to redefine marriage. Virginians deserve to know exactly what you want that definition to be.

It is time that you, as opponents of the marriage amendment, are honest with the people of Virginia and explain to them exactly where you stand on the issue that Virginians will be deciding on November 7th. I look forward to your prompt response.

Sincerely,
Victoria E. Cobb
va4marriage.org