This is a commentary by Del. Ken Plum (D), who represents Reston in Virginia’s House of Delegates. It does not reflect the opinion of Reston Now.
At the same time that the nation is moving forward with a major political party nominating a woman as candidate for the presidency of the United States, Virginia institutions are clinging to past traditions that should have been abandoned decades ago.
The Supreme Court of Virginia ruled that Governor Terry McAuliffe exceeded his authority in a blanket restoration of the voting rights of 206,000 felons who have completed their sentences. There are a number of serious concerns about the Court’s 4-3 decision.
While the Chief Justice who wrote the opinion did not dispute the fact that the Governor clearly has the authority to restore voting rights — as Professor A. E. Dick Howard, the chief drafter of the current Virginia Constitution, and other experts testified — he quibbled with the method the Governor chose in restoring the rights.
The majority of the Court found that the restoration of rights needed to be an individual action and not a class action although there is no provision in the Constitution requiring it.
This is an opinion piece by Del. Ken Plum (D), who represents Reston in Virginia’s House of Delegates.
For a short time when I was in college, I sold Fuller brushes and home cleaning products door to door to make money to pay my bills.
I could make several-fold more per hour selling door to door with flexible hours than I could with any other part-time job. I was trained by a mentor salesman who made a good living selling the well-known brushes and cleaners.
One practice of his that I never adopted was to knock on doors that had a “no solicitation” sign. He explained that while he may encounter a grumpy person or two behind those doors he mostly found people with a low resistance to sales pitches who used the signs as their first level of defense to keep from buying something.
More recently, I have been seeing a different sign, “Don’t Tread on Me,” not on homes but on vehicle license plates. The original yellow flag with a coiled snake and the slogan on it was the flag of the early navy in our country. Today it is the flag of the Tea Party.
Each time I see the yellow license plate I wonder what message it is intended to convey. Is it at all like the “no solicitation” signs on homes that proved to be a not-very-effective defense from the salesman and the outside world? Or is it a proclamation of self-importance that one should be able to live in the world without being bothered by others?
Since the flag has been adopted politically by the Tea Party-ites, its meaning no doubt is aimed at laws, regulations, or government actions that are viewed as “treading” on someone.
Government actions do affect us. We have a system of national security that gets in our way especially when we want to board an airplane or enter a government building. We may feel tread upon by the number of traffic rules we have to abide by or by the health and safety regulations affecting our homes and businesses. Certainly there have been cries of protest at any attempts to tread on someone’s ability to buy and carry any size gun whenever or wherever they want.
Living in a civilized society means that we sometimes are inconvenienced by the necessity to compromise some of what we are doing for the greater community’s health and safety. There simply has never been a government devised that allows everyone to live a life unfettered without any thought of the needs of others. There is no constitutional right to live a life trampling on others in order that you are not tread upon.
While certainly not intended by most, the admonition to not tread on me can be interpreted as selfishness. You view your needs as greater than others; your rights trump (sorry for the pun) others’ rights. Certainly there are mixed messages that can be interpreted from such a simple phrase. I prefer the simpler and easier to understand bumper stickers like “live simply so that others can simply live” or “coexist.”
What does “don’t tread on me” mean to you? Positive or negative. Let me know at [email protected].
This is a sponsored post by Del. Ken Plum (D), who represents Reston in Virginia’s House of Delegates.
In a few days, I will be driving about six hours from my home in Reston to Wise County in Southwest Virginia to volunteer at the Remote Area Medical (RAM) Health Clinic at the county fairgrounds.
About 5,000 patients are expected to show up at this three-day health event for their once-a-year opportunity for professional health care. The RAM clinics were founded by television star Stan Brock to provide health care for indigent patients in under-developed nations. He soon learned that the same kind of care and services were needed in the Appalachian region of Virginia and Tennessee.
Organizing the health care days in Wise County is the Health Wagon, a mobile health clinic, that provides services throughout the year for a four-county region that is the poorest in the state. In addition to its clinic on wheels, the Health Wagon also has two stationary health clinics in Wise and Clintwood counties. The typical patient is 38 years old with an annual income of less than $20,000. These people cannot afford regular health care insurance, and since the Virginia General Assembly has refused to close the coverage gap they make too much money to qualify for Medicaid.
Read More
This is a commentary by Del. Ken Plum (D), who represents Reston in Virginia’s House of Delegates. It does not reflect the opinion of Reston Now.
Each week during the General Assembly session and several times monthly during the remainder of the year, I travel the Dulles Toll Road to the Beltway to I-95 South to Richmond.
Since I travel south early in the mornings and return late in the day, I can generally make the trip in two hours. Mine is a reverse commute, but I witness in the lanes going in the other direction the bumper-to-bumper, slow-moving traffic experienced by commuters daily. Express lanes on the Beltway–I-495–along with its widening have helped relieve congestion with the exception of the American Legion Bridge that is like a parking lot much of the time. I-95 is its own parking lot during commuting times.
Fortunately, relief is on the way, but the size of the transportation projects requires years for completion. Widening with express lanes and using traffic management technology will bring some relief to the I-66 corridor.
The most promising congestion relief for the region was announced recently with Virginia receiving a $165 million federal FASTLANE grant that will be leveraged to fund $1.4 billion in multimodal transportation projects in the congested I-95 corridor. The entire undertaking is being called the Atlantic Gateway Project.
For the highway commuters I see stuck in traffic on my trips to Richmond, the project will fund the extension of Interstate 395 express lanes about 7 miles north to the Potomac River and I-95 express lanes about 10 miles south towards Fredericksburg. A new I-95 bridge will be built across the Rappahannock River. For rail commuters and rail freight the project includes the construction of 14 miles of new track along the CSX rail corridor crossing the Potomac River to enhance freight, commuter and passenger rail routes. Mass transit options will be expanded with 1,000 new parking spaces for commuters along I-95 and I-395.
The federal money coming from the United States Department of Transportation competitive grant program, FASTLANE, is part of a $4.6 billion, 5-year program that was passed in Congress in 2015 after years of delay and inaction.
The project in Virginia has national significance in that it will help unlock the most congested part of I-95 on the East Coast. Not only will Virginia commuters realize relief, but it will be shared by travelers from New York to Florida. Likewise, commerce will be enhanced with the railway and highway improvements.
Added to the $165 million in federal money will be $565 million in private investment by Transurban and CSX Transportation through public-private partnership agreements and $710 million in state transportation funds. Construction on some parts of the project will begin as early as 2017.
The approach being used in this corridor establishes a significant precedent that must be followed to successfully unlock other areas of Northern Virginia from some of the worst traffic congestion in the country.
This is a commentary from Del. Ken Plum (D), who represents Reston in Virginia’s House of Delegates. It does not reflect the opinion of Reston Now.
Last week, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously overturned the public corruption conviction of Virginia’s former governor, Robert F. McDonnell.
The action of the Court was not a surprise to many, if not most, legal experts who had viewed the instruction to the jury in the case as to what constitutes “official acts” as being so broad that they could cover most any action that a public official takes. At the same time, there is concern that the Court’s decision will make it much more difficult to prosecute public officials on corruption charges.
The case is not yet fully resolved. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the Appeals Court to decide if there was sufficient evidence to hold a new trial or if the charges will be dismissed. In light of the Supreme Court’s ruling there is not likely to be a new trial, and the charges will be dropped. Read More
This is a commentary by Del. Ken Plum (D), who represents Reston in Virginia’s House of Delegates. It does not reflect the opinion of Reston Now.
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution is one sentence long:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
Commonly referred to as the “right to bear arms” amendment, it could as easily be called “the state militia” amendment. Clearly the Founding Fathers had something in mind about the state militia, or the National Guard as we now call it, when the amendment was proposed and passed. Otherwise they could have simply provided that “the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed” as some argue today.
For most of our history, the connection between the right to bear arms and the militia was acknowledged and respected. In recent years there has been a rigorous and well-funded political campaign to put the emphasis on individual gun ownership.
This is a commentary from Del, Ken Plum (D), who represents Reston in Virginia’s House of Delegates. It does not represent the opinion of Reston Now.
Technologists have applied their big data and computer-crunching to determine where in the world and where in the United States are the happiest places to live. “The Happiest Places in America-2016 Edition” was released last month by Smart Asset, a firm that uses technology to help consumers understand finances.
Since my constituents reside in Fairfax County, which the study rated the second-happiest place to live in America and next door to the happiest place, Loudoun County, I thought it would be interesting to examine how the counties got those distinctions.
While I am certainly a happy person surrounded by many happy people, I believe the methodologies employed, while useful in understanding the communities in which we live, can also create a false sense of community satisfaction.
Loudoun and Fairfax Counties are the two happiest counties in the U.S. when you limit your study to counties over 50,000 in population. The only other nearby counties in the top 10 in happiness are Howard County in Maryland (No. 7), Chester County in Pennsylvania (No. 4), and three counties in New Jersey. The rest are in the Midwest. No county west of Douglas, Colo. (No. 8) made the list.
This is a commentary by State Del. Ken Plum (D-Reston). It does not represent the opinion of Reston Now.
The Commonwealth of Virginia prepares its budget on a biennial schedule. The budget proposed this year by the Governor and adopted by the General Assembly will become effective July 1, 2016, and extend to June 30, 2018.
Although technically the General Assembly does not pass a new budget in odd-numbered years, practically there are many adjustments that are made mid-course in the biennium budgets based on changes that may have occurred in revenues or expenses.
While this system of budgeting over two years may reduce some administrative paperwork, it also presents some challenges. Essentially, the governor and the General Assembly must estimate revenues 30 months into the future. These are not simply planning projections; these are actual numbers upon which budgeted expenditures are based. Economists in government and in business are consulted in coming up with revenue estimates.
The challenge of estimating government revenue has been obvious over the last few years. Two years ago there was a revenue shortfall of $439 million coming almost entirely from a huge drop in estimated payments of income taxes that are not withheld from payroll but paid on stock gains by investors who chose to cash in on their investments.
A projection of that shortfall from the end of fiscal 2014 led to a projected $2.4 billion shortfall through this biennium. Fortunately, revenues recovered last year, and the state ended the year with its biggest surplus ever.
Revenues collected through April of this year were trailing projections by 1.9 percent, or $347 million, after declining 6.7 percent from the previous April. If by the end of the fiscal year revenue collections are one percent under the annual forecast, or $169 million, the state is required by law to reforecast revenues for the new two-year budget. Also, state employees who were promised a raise based on the higher revenues may not get them.
Virginia gets top marks on the handling of its finances by all the outside entities that evaluate these kinds of things. It is one of only about a half- dozen states with the highest AAA bond rating. A volatile economy is challenging to predict; we should take pride in our high rating.
My concern continues to be the selective accounting that the General Assembly follows in ignoring federal monies that are available that would free up several hundred million dollars in state general funds for appropriation while providing health care to as many as 400,000 working Virginians. Gov. McAuliffe’s proposed budget included these funds, but the House Appropriations and Senate Finance Committees took them out.
They refer to these funds as Obamacare as though that term alone should be enough to refuse the money. Virginia turns its back on $4.4 million per day and has refused more than $4 billion in Medicaid funds the last several years.
As careful as the state is in its budgeting and counting its pennies, how can it selectively leave these monies out of its budget? It’s selective accounting, bad economics, and in my view, immoral!
This is a commentary from Del. Ken Plum (D), who represents Reston in Virginia’s House of Delegates. It does not reflect the opinion of Reston Now.
In 1956, the then-appointed Fairfax County School Board appropriated $50 per month to be paid as a supplement to a school administrator to start an adult education program.
Since the schools were still racially segregated, a program for white adults was started at Annandale High School, and a program for black adults was started at Luther Jackson School. The favorite offerings at both locations were classes in sewing including the Bishop Method of Clothing Construction, as well as typing and shorthand.
The inexpensive, evening classes proved popular, and the program grew rapidly. Basic education classes for those adults who could not read and write were added as were night school classes to complete high school and to prepare for the G.E.D.
Recently, I had the pleasure of attending a 60th anniversary celebration of the program at the Plum Center for Lifelong Learning on Edsall Road in the eastern part of the county. I was honored several years ago when the Fairfax County School Board chose to name its first full-time adult education center for my work in adult and community education that spanned half the years of its existence. Read More
This is a commentary by Del. Ken Plum (D), who represents Reston. It does not reflect the opinion of Reston Now.
Attorney General Mark Herring recently issued an official opinion at my request and the requests of others as to the meaning of sex discrimination under Virginia law.
His thoroughly researched, 18-page opinion concluded that, in many instances, discrimination against LGBT individuals is actually illegal sex discrimination that violates both federal and state law.
Attorney General Herring’s opinion is both historic and courageous. It advances the work that many of us have been attempting to do in the legislature to ensure that individuals do not face discrimination in their housing or their workplaces because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. It is courageous in that the Attorney General could have chosen to duck the issues and leave it to the courts.
Simply stated, if an individual faces discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity, that person can seek relief under the Virginia Human Rights Act (VHRA). This act and others in the Virginia Code provide a clear declaration that the Commonwealth of Virginia does not and will not tolerate discrimination or allow someone to be treated unfairly because of their gender. Read More
This is a commentary by Del. Ken Plum (D), who represents Reston in Virginia’s House of Delegates. It does not represent the opinion of Reston Now.
Those who were concerned that the 2016 Energy, Sustainability and Resiliency conference sponsored by the Virginia Chamber of Commerce Foundation would be business as usual were in for a surprise.
This recent conference in Richmond was about anything but holding onto the past; it was about seizing opportunities in a dynamic and exciting future whose issues of sustainability and resiliency in our energy future reign supreme. Read More
This is an opinion column by Del. Ken Plum, who represents Reston in Virginia’s House of Delegates. It does not reflect the opinion of Reston Now.
Last week, I attended my first meeting as a member of the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC). I have admired the professional work of JLARC since it was established in 1973 to evaluate the operation and performance of state agencies.
JLARC performs its duties in three major work functions: studies, oversight and fiscal analysis, and support. The Commission is made up of nine delegates and five senators, but the actual work of the oversight arm of the General Assembly is done by a professional staff. Major topics of research are developed and approved by the General Assembly and sometimes by the Commission. There are more topics proposed for study than there are staff or time to pursue.
Our meeting last week followed the Commission’s usual procedure of adopting a work plan for the year. Some of the items on the work plan are continuation of studies started last year as the magnitude of many studies take more than a single year to complete. Read More
This is a commentary by Del. Ken Plum (D), who represents Reston in Virginia’s House of Delegates. It does not reflect the opinion of Reston Now.
Earlier this year, a group of attorneys, the Virginia Coalition for Racial Diversity in the Justice System, brought to the attention of the community and the General Assembly that “there is a glaring, longstanding, and inexcusable lack of racial diversity amongst sitting judges, prosecutors, and public defenders in Virginia’s criminal justice system.”
Their statistics are very revealing: Currently, in Northern Virginia where more than 33 percent of all residents are racial minorities, only 7 out of 74 judges (10 percent) are African American, Hispanic, or Asian American.
They project that if the General Assembly continues to fail to appoint racially diverse judicial candidates that it is likely within two years only 4 out of 74 of those judges (5 percent) will be minorities.
The Coalition also found that racial diversity among virtually all of Northern Virginia’s Commonwealth Attorney and Public Defender Offices is similarly bleak. The bottom line for their study is that “the public’s confidence in the fairness and impartiality of the Virginia justice system is undermined when the system bears so little resemblance to the community it serves.”
This is a commentary by Del. Ken Plum (D), who represents Reston in Virginia’s General Assembly. It does not reflect the opinion of Reston Now.
Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe issued an executive order recently restoring civil rights of voting, serving on a jury, running for office, or being a notary public for persons who had been convicted of any and all felonies in the past but who have completed the terms of incarceration and who have completed any period of supervised release of probation and parole.
The restoration of civil rights after completing a sentence has been automatic in most states and routine in those that have had an application process. Virginia required an application before the Governor’s order, but the waiting list for acting on applications was notoriously long until Gov. McAuliffe came into office. His executive order will cover more than 200,000 people.
Most, including myself, have applauded the Governor’s action. As he described it, “it’s the right thing to do.” Other have accused him of playing politics. Actually, I believe the laws in Virginia that denied the right to vote to people who had served their sentences were political, and what the Governor did was to take some of the politics out of registering to vote. A review of history will explain what I mean.
Denying civil rights to persons who had been convicted and served their sentences was part of an effort during the early part of the 20th Century to limit the electorate in the state to white men who supported the political establishment. Jim Crow laws that were primarily aimed at black people required voters to write on a blank sheet of paper information that was required in the state constitution and to answer any question posed by election officials. Read More
This is a commentary by Del. Ken Plum (D), who represents Reston in Virginia’s House of Delegates. It does not reflect the opinion of Reston Now.
The Library of Virginia has an informative new exhibit called “First Freedom” that includes documents on the passage of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom penned by Thomas Jefferson and passed by the Virginia General Assembly in 1786.
The original manuscript on parchment drafted by Thomas Jefferson is housed at the Library of Virginia. Termed in the exhibit as “one of the most revolutionary pieces of legislation in American history,” I believe it is the most important piece of legislation ever passed by the Virginia legislature and possibly by any legislative body.
It codified freedom of conscience. The meaning of the Virginia Statute as it found its way into the Virginia Constitution’s Declaration of Rights and the U.S. Bill of Rights is still debated today. Read More
